The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  “My dear man . . .” said Grace.

  “And you?” Selena was apparently startled at the question.

  “Certainly,” she said, reached out one white hand, and turned over the four of clubs.

  For one instant a look of incredulous surprise stamped itself on Galli-Galli’s face. My own jaw must have been sagging. Then the little Egyptian rallied himself.

  “That right?” he said to me.

  “It certainly is,” I told him.

  He bowed very low, more to Selena, I thought, than to the rest of us, scooped up the cards, bowed again, and left the table. The three of us watched him go and then turned with one accord upon Selena.

  She was looking distressed. “Darling,” said Jerry, “would you mind telling us how you did that?”

  “Goodness, Selena,” said Grace, “we ought to form a bridge partnership at once, my dear.”

  She shook her head.

  “Listen,” I said. “You can’t just do a thing like that and leave us all in the dark. How is it done?”

  But she wouldn’t tell. At first she refused to say anything about the trick and then she insisted that it had been simply luck.

  At the time I didn’t wholly believe her, and sitting in the College ville train the next day the thing seemed fantastic. Not once had she touched the cards, and I had told no one which card I had picked. I went over and over the scene at Barney’s in my mind, and the answer eluded me. If it was luck, it was one chance in fifty-two, and there had been nothing uncertain about the way she turned that card over. More than anything else, her calm, almost disinterested manner had impressed me. She seemed to view it as a trick to amuse children.

  Familiar landscapes and towns began to flash past the window. I saw that we were only a few miles out of Collegeville, and my thoughts turned to Parsons and his reason for sending for me. Perhaps he had made some progress on the LeNormand business, though there was nothing in the papers to suggest it. In any case, it must be more or less unofficial, or his summons to me would have been of a different sort. On the whole, I decided, the indications were that he had discovered nothing definite.

  My anxiety about Jerry’s marriage, my instinct that it was in some way wrong and undesirable, had preoccupied my mind. For a week I had hardly thought about the murder of LeNormand except casually. I was convinced that it was insoluble, and my memories of it were so appalling that I had walled it off in a corner of my mind and tried to forget about it. And yet it was a part of the fiber of every day I lived and of most things I did. Only last night I had been sitting in a night club with LeNormand’s widow, almost without realizing how short a time had elapsed since her husband’s death. So much had happened in the intervening weeks, that the night when we had found his burning body seemed a year, instead of a month ago.

  Jerry, I reflected, had not put the thing out of his mind to the same extent that I had. Several times I had come home to find him at the desk, surrounded with crumpled sheets of paper on which were marks that looked to me like the figures and symbols on LeNormand’s observatory table. Once I had found in the wastebasket a floor plan of the observatory, apparently drawn from memory, and he had even used the University Directory for some purpose, for I found it on the table one morning. I wondered why he was so eager to get to the bottom of the thing. The obvious suggestion was that because it concerned Selena it was important to him. But I rejected that idea. Psychologically, I should have said the normal thing for him to do was to think as little of the past as possible, to seek to put as much distance, mentally, between it and his present as possible.

  The sight of Armitage Tower coming up above the trees ahead of the train heightened the feeling of tension that had been growing in me. Whatever was to happen in the next few hours, I was afraid of them. As the train pulled into the station and I started down the car steps I was aware of a dryness in my mouth and an uncertainty in my knees that were symptoms of a nervousness that was first cousin to fear.

  9. INTERROGATION

  I TOOK a taxi to the town hall and went up its steps with my heart hammering at my ribs. Parsons was in the police-station room where he had talked to us before, sitting at the same long table. In front of him was a large black entry book of some sort and a pile of papers. He was chewing on the stub of a cigar and jotting down notes on a block of scratch paper with quick, decisive stabs of his pencil. There was an air of effectiveness about him.

  He looked up for a second as I came in, waved a hand in a gesture of welcome, and remarked, past the cigar, “Sit down. With you in a second.”

  He was genuinely busy, all right. I thought for a moment that he was putting me off to let my nervousness and anxiety come to a head, but as I watched his broad, blunt fingers scrambling through the papers in front of him and the quick way he glanced from them to his notations on the pad I realized that he was tremendously concentrated, perhaps even excited. He had something, or thought he did. I filled a pipe and lit it, trying hard to keep the match from trembling in my fingers, and leaned back in my chair.

  Finally he straightened up, pulled a couple of fresh cigars from his pocket, thrust one of them toward me, and then, seeing my pipe, retracted it. After he had his own smoke going well, he blew two or three rings at the ceiling, shoved his chair back, put his feet on the table, and looked at me.

  “One thing, Mr. Jones,” he said. “There’s nothing to worry over. This is just a talk between the two of us. Nothing official about it.”

  “I’m not worried,” I told him.

  “Good.” He was silent for a moment. “I suppose you and Mr. Lister have done a lot of thinking about this thing the last few weeks.”

  “Well,” I said, “some, of course.”

  “Tell me. Have you got any new ideas since I saw you?”

  I was a little surprised at this question, and wondered what he was trying to get at. “No,” I told him. “At least I haven’t.”

  “You haven’t,” he repeated. “What about Mr. Lister?”

  “I don’t think he has, either.” He was silent, so I added, “We don’t talk about it very much.”

  “I can understand that,” he said, and looked at me thoughtfully. “Mr. Jones,” he said finally, “I’m going to be frank with you. This is just between us two.”

  “I won’t repeat a word of it.”

  “All right.” And then, with emphasis he added, “Not even to Mr. Lister—or Mrs. LeNormand.”

  I nodded.

  “The fact is, I haven’t got to first base with this case. I don’t know any more than I did four weeks ago, except that everybody’s story seems to be straight. I can’t find a single clue or a single fact to go on. I haven’t even been able to find a single person who saw a stranger on the campus that night.” He paused and smiled. “And when the police begin looking for mysterious strangers, it’s a sign the case is not going so well.”

  His manner was certainly disarming. He had me on his side, whatever it was, already.

  “Now,” he went on, “when I get stuck like this on what I’ll call the physical side of a case—what you’d say were clues—I try to figure on the thing from another angle. And that’s the characters of the people in it. Psychology, you’d call it, and motive.” He looked at me pretty sharply, but though I’d likely have given away any thought I had, I didn’t have one. My mind was a blank, so I suppose my face didn’t help him much.

  “Motive,” he continued, “is usually a pretty easy thing to spot. Money first, by a long shot, and then women. There are a couple of others, like hate and revenge, but you hardly ever run into them unless there’s a maniac somewhere.”

  I thought about that. “Well,” I said, “none of those seems very useful in this case.”

  He nodded. “Money, certainly not. He had nothing besides his salary and a five thousand dollar life insurance policy. And apparently he had no professional jealousy to deal with in his work. So I figured out it must be that the motive revolved around some woman.”

  I b
egan to see where he was headed, and the palms of my hands started to sweat.

  “And the only woman,” he went on inexorably, “is Mrs. LeNormand.” I didn’t say anything, so after a time he asked, “What do you think about her?”

  I took a moment to frame an answer to that one. “It’s hard to tell. She’s not like anyone else. She’s intelligent, and quiet, and she knows her own mind . . .” I floundered and stopped.

  Parsons took a long pull at his cigar. “Mr. Jones, you’ve used some funny words for a young man talking about a pretty woman. ‘Intelligent,’ ‘quiet,’ ‘knows her own mind.’ I’d say you didn’t like Mrs. LeNormand much. Right?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  He took his feet off the table and leaned forward earnestly. “What I want to ask you next is something that could be misunderstood. Before I say it I want to tell you that I think you’re okay. I mean, I like you and maybe I understand a little something of the spot you’re in. And you strike me as—well—as regular. So don’t go thinking I mean what I don’t mean.”

  “All right,” I said. “Go ahead and ask.”

  “You don’t like her, and you admit it. Are you sure you aren’t jealous?”

  I got red and then laughed. “That’s a hell of a way to put it,” I said. “I guess it might be fair to say this: Jerry and I grew up together. We’ve been a close corporation for ten years or so. Now the corporation—” I realized that I was saying too much and stopped suddenly.

  He paid no attention. “Now the corporation looks as though it might be dissolved, and by someone you don’t like. That about it?”

  “Just about,” I admitted.

  “Well,” he said, “you’ve been honest with me. And don’t think I wouldn’t have known if you’d been lying.” He tapped the pile of papers in front of him. “I’ve got a complete file here on what all three of you have been doing ever since you left town.” He gave me a sharp glance. “I’m a policeman. I’ve got to know things like that. Don’t get sore.”

  “I’m not sore.” But it did make me angry to realize that we’d been spied on all the weeks since LeNormand had died.

  “That’s good,” he said, and I could see he didn’t believe my denial a bit. “Now then, the point is this: You aren’t jealous of Mrs. LeNormand, but you don’t like her. You resent her. Mr. Lister, on the other hand, is in love with her.”

  I simply stared at him. The man was as calm, as unconcerned, as sure of himself as God Almighty. I began to get really angry. “What the hell business of yours is it—” I began.

  “Don’t be silly, Mr. Jones. You know what business it is of mine. I’m paid by this state to find out who killed Professor LeNormand, and by God I’m going to do it if I have to injure every single one of your delicate feelings.”

  He was right, of course. I began to calm myself down a bit. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It is true that Jerry is in love with her, and I suppose if you know what we’ve been doing you couldn’t help finding it out.”

  Something I said must have amused him, for he grinned to himself an instant and went on. “What I’m after is why you don’t like Mrs. LeNormand. That interests me a lot more, frankly, than why Mr. Lister is in love with her. I’m hoping that you can tell me why you don’t like Mrs. LeNormand.”

  “Well,” I began, “I’m not sure that I can.” I could, of course, have answered instantly, “I don’t like Selena because I am afraid of her,” but that wouldn’t have made sense to him. It didn’t make sense even to me. So I said, “I think, as near as I can put it, I don’t trust her.”

  My answer seemed to excite him. He studied me carefully a moment and said quietly, “You don’t trust her. Can you tell me why, or tell me at what times you don’t trust her, or what she does that gives you the feeling of distrust?”

  That was the question I’d been asking myself for weeks. If I could explain to my own satisfaction what was the basis of my distrust of Selena, life would become a whole lot easier. The very fact that I did not know what it was about her that I hated—or feared—was at the bottom of much of my recent unhappiness. Perhaps Parsons’ questions would clear up some of the confusion in my mind.

  “You’ve asked me a hard question,” I told him. “I’ve been thinking about it for weeks and I can’t decide. It’s no special time and no special thing. She asks the damnedest things, sometimes. And if she has a sense of humor, it’s not like other people’s. She strikes me as cold-blooded.” He was watching me intently and nodding his head at each statement. “I tell you what she’s like,” I went on. “She’s like a foreigner, like some of the Germans over here during the war, I imagine. She doesn’t want to let on that she isn’t an American.” This suddenly struck me as carrying coals to Newcastle. “You must have interviewed her. You know the quality I mean.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I know the quality, but I don’t know how to describe it. I thought maybe you could help me.”

  “That’s as close as I can come to it.”

  He was silent a moment, rolling the dead cigar in the corner of his mouth and looking out the window. “You said she was like a foreigner.” I didn’t add anything to that, so he went on. “Well, Mr. Jones, is she a foreigner?”

  The question took me by surprise. “I don’t know. You must have the answer to that. Don’t you always take down everything about a person in a case like this? Where they came from and how old they are and whether there was any insanity in the family and all the rest of it?”

  He continued to gaze out the window. “Usually. Usually. Not this time.”

  “You mean to say you didn’t ask her all those things? Jerry and I practically had to list the fillings in our teeth.”

  “Of course, we asked her.” He was frowning. “We asked her a dozen times. All she would tell us was that she didn’t have a family or any relatives any place. She wouldn’t even trust us with her maiden name.”

  I made my tone as sarcastic as I could. “And naturally you wouldn’t take advantage of her in her bereavement.”

  “Listen,” he said, and from his hard stare at me I saw my remark had not pleased him, “this case is dynamite. I can go so far, and then the whole University will be down on my neck. What do you want me to do? Take her to the station house and try persuasion? The whole force would be out of a job in a week.”

  “All right. I spoke out of turn.”

  “You did. Anyway, forget it. Maybe you can tell us poor ignorant policemen what we want to know. Who is she and where did she come from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He sighed. “Then I’ll have to ask you another question that’s liable to make you mad. Can you find out?”

  “If she wouldn’t tell you she probably won’t tell me.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You’ve admitted that Mr. Lister is in love with her. If anybody will know, he’s the fella.”

  “For God’s sake,” I asked him, “do you want me to play stool pigeon on my best friend?”

  He grunted. “I thought that’s the way you’d take it. Use your head, Mr. Jones. I’ve got to have that information, and how I get it won’t make any difference if she’s not mixed up in this thing. If she is, do you want your friend going around with her?”

  “No,” I admitted. “But all the same I can’t get it for you. I doubt if Jerry himself knows, as a matter of fact. At least, he’s never said anything to me.”

  “So he doesn’t know either.” Parsons’ tone was not surprised. “Well, well, well!”

  “Surely,” I suggested, “even if she wouldn’t answer your questions you could find out about it in other ways.”

  “Surely.” His voice was deceptively gentle. “I suppose your idea would be to work back from clues, eh? Labels on her lonjeray and so forth?”

  That was more or less what I had been thinking.

  “Well,” he said, “if it’s any comfort to you, we did trace her clothes.”

  “And what did you find?”

  He held up his thumb and fo
refinger in the traditional symbol of zero. “We’re not as dumb as cops are supposed to be, Mr. Jones. We’ve traced a lot of things. Maybe later I’ll have to tell you a little about that. Right now I want to see if we can get at this thing from another angle.”

  “If I can help you—” I said humbly.

  “Right.” His tone was brisker. “About this strangeness of Mrs. LeNormand’s. This feeling you have that she’s a foreigner. Assuming for a minute that she isn’t, would you say that she came from a definite social class?”

  “What have you been doing,” I asked him, “reading Karl Marx?” He smiled. “Well, I have read some of it at that . . . we got a lot of God-damned reds in this country. Some of them right here at the University.” He looked down at one of his notes. “I see here where a fella named Berkeley M. Jones used to belong to the University Socialist Club. That was two years ago, of course. You outgrown it?”

  “Some of it,” I admitted.

  “Takes time, Takes time.” He was relishing the point he had scored. “But this isn’t pitching any hay. What I’m getting at is, do you think Mrs. LeNormand came from a family that was, say, of the proletariat, or—er—the bourgeois, or is she an out-and-out blood-sucking capitalist?”

  “I never thought about it.” The question puzzled me, like everything else connected with Selena. Nothing about her seemed to fit into conventional pigeonholes. “She has a good mind. My guess is that her family was probably professional. Her father might have been a lawyer or a doctor or maybe a professor.” The minute I’d mentioned the professor idea I felt sorry. Suppose it started him off on that whole business of LeNormand’s row with his fellow scientists?

  Jerry would be dragged back into it, and there would be a whole hell of a mess. But Parsons was apparently talking about something else.

  “—and when I told you I was stumped on this case, Mr. Jones, I meant it. I don’t know what the next step is. Everything we find out leads us up a blind alley, and the only light I can see . . . I guess I’ll have to tell you all about that and then ask you some of the same questions over again. Maybe when you understand what’s in the back of my mind you’ll be able to help me more.” He was arranging papers and folders in front of him into precise piles. Then he lit another cigar and leaned across the table in my direction. There was uncertainty in his manner, as if he doubted the wisdom of telling me what was on his mind. And well he might. In the months afterward, when I had to live with his story and its implications, I wished a thousand times that he had thought better of it, kept it to himself. And yet, even if he had never spoken, there would have been no difference in the outcome. Thwarted as he was by the case at every turn, he had no choice, I suppose.