The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  “What about their cook?” I asked him.

  He grinned. “Bessie! God, what a time I had with that woman! She talked more than all the rest of the people in this case put together. The trouble was, she was up in Hampton till the fifteenth, visiting her cousins. LeNormand gave her the first two weeks in the month for her annual vacation. When she got back, she says, Mrs. LeNormand was already there, and she rambled on and on about how messy the house was. If that means anything.”

  There was a long silence while he looked at me with a smile on his face and waited for me to say something. I looked back at him and tried to imagine some explanation for what he had told me. I couldn’t find any. There seemed to be no proved connection between one set of facts and another.

  “Mr. Parsons,” I said finally, “I never knew that detectives would talk so frankly. I wish I could, but I don’t quite see how I can help you, or what all this proves.”

  “Hell,” he said without losing his smile. “There aren’t any secrets in this case, and you’re doing all you can. I don’t suspect anybody because I can prove that nobody I know of at the present time was anywhere near that observatory when LeNormand was killed. You two were the closest, and I can’t find a reason in the world why either of you should want to do a thing like that. I’m taking President Murray’s word for it that neither of you knew about Mrs. LeNormand before that night.”

  “We didn’t,” I assured him.

  His smile changed a little. “Of course, if I could trace her and prove that you or young Lister knew her before she married LeNormand—”

  “Well,” I said, “I can’t prove we didn’t, of course, but the psychological evidence, at least, is all against it.”

  He nodded. “Yes. I grant you that. Now I want you to think carefully once again: do you remember anything Mrs. LeNormand ever said that would give a clue to her past? Where she came from?”

  “No,” I told him. “I’ve begun to notice that she never talks about anything that happened before . . . before last month.”

  He was disappointed. “Hasn’t she even mentioned any names, people or places, that she knows?”

  “None that I can recall.”

  “Well, be on the lookout for things like that, will you, and let me know if you come on anything?”

  I didn’t like that idea much. “After all,” I started to say, “I can’t very well—”

  “Get this straight,” Parsons said, taking the cigar out of his mouth and looking at me with no smile at all. “I don’t suspect her, personally, for a moment. There’s no evidence of any row between her and LeNormand. She was in the house when it happened, according to Bessie’s own testimony, and nobody on the streets saw her between her house and the observatory. No, she couldn’t possibly have done it. But there’s a mystery about her, and I can’t clear it up. If I could, I’d damn well know who killed Professor LeNormand. And I want to point out to you, my friend, that if she turns out to have a past, and the kind of past that breeds a murder, the quicker Mr. Jeremiah Lister finds out about it the better. If he doesn’t, there’s always the chance he’ll find himself burned to death one of these days. That’s one reason why I want your cooperation.”

  Of course, he was right. I agreed to let him know anything I found out. He thanked me and stood up. I gathered that was my cue to leave, but I had one more question I had to ask him.

  “Mr. Parsons,” I said, “you’ve told me a lot of things bearing on why Professor LeNormand was killed—”

  “Proving,” he said quickly, “that I can’t figure out why he was killed. Or who killed him.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But do you know how he was killed?”

  He scowled. “Yes and no. Half the faculty here has been working on that. The consensus of opinion is that he was burned to death—”

  “No kidding!” I exclaimed.

  “—that the burns were not made by fire or by chemicals, but by some sort of rays.”

  “Rays?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “They tell me they can produce burns like that, only very small ones, down in the physics laboratory. I don’t know. They aren’t going to try it on me. None of them claims he could do it, but they all say maybe the fellows in their field someplace else are ahead of them. Germany, perhaps. They wouldn’t know of it, of course, because it would be a military secret over there.”

  “For God’s sake,” I said, “I pity you. Even an international angle!”

  He shrugged. “Like everything else in this case, there’s no proof one way or another. Whatever the stuff was, it didn’t leave anything to analyze or work with. I’m not smart enough in the scientific field to work down that angle. About all the good it does me is to tell me the sort of person the murderer is likely to be.”

  “Maybe,” I shrugged, “he’s a mad inventor someplace in South Carolina who knew the Jamisons and—”

  He shook me warmly by the hand. “Good-by, Mr. Jones. You were very kind to come down here.” He was pushing me gently but firmly across the room. “I’ll keep in touch with you. Let me know if you find out anything. And for God’s sake”—by this time he’d backed me through the door—“don’t try to think up any theories like the mad inventor”—I was halfway down the front steps— “because you won’t get anywhere with them. I’ve thought of them all myself, already.”

  I shouted back a good-by to him through the swinging door and turned toward the station, chuckling. You couldn’t help liking the man. Thinking back over the discussion, I realized he’d handled me skillfully. But he hadn’t extracted the fact that Jerry and Selena were going to be married in a month. And as I thought of that, I felt a sense of despair.

  A shooting star plummeted down like a tear of light and vanished in the dark above the Sound.

  Dr. Lister’s face was set into lines that were strange to me; he looked cold and watchful, like a man waiting for the sun to rise on his execution day. His gaze was fixed on the yellow shape of the candle flame— odd how much it looked like that Brancusi Grace had in her apartment.

  “You see,” I said, “I am breaking my promise to Parsons. I am telling you something that he told to me in secrecy, but I think he would want me to speak now, if he were here.”

  His lips moved slowly. “Yes. Yes, of course he would. I see what you have been living with. I’m sorry that there were those weeks . . . when we did not understand each other.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me,” he said heavily. “I was not as wise as I should have been.”

  “You didn’t have any way of knowing. Let’s not speak of it again.”

  He nodded his head quietly, and after an instant said, “Have you found out yet whether she was—is—Luella Jamison?”

  The question seemed to echo at me from the night that held us suspended like two motes in a drop of dark water. I wet my lips with my tongue. “Yes, I think I have.”

  Life in New York for the next month was pure and unadulterated hell for Berkeley Jones. I could not work—fortunately the holidays gave us a slack season and I got by on that score—and I could not eat, and I scarcely slept. Most of the time I was more or less drunk, and doubtless I was thoroughly unattractive to those who loved me. Grace, after a bad evening at her apartment in the course of which I cried maudlinly and stupidly about Jerry’s approaching marriage, told me that I was disgusting and ought to see a doctor she knew. She had him call on me and he turned out to be a psychoanalyst. Dr. Lister was more intelligent—after watching me put down three highballs in about fifteen minutes he told me that my enthusiasm was admirable but I’d be having quite a hangover one of these days if I didn’t taper off. He spoke of what happens to the insides of permanent alcoholics and predicted he might be operating on me one of these days. Then he asked me if I was sleeping well, and I told him that I’d given the process up as a waste of time. He wrote me out a prescription, and in a lucid moment I had it filled. I got several nights of real sleep out of those powders, but then t
he prescription ran out, and I was ashamed to ask for another.

  Jerry did his best to keep things from getting too bad. He knew me so well that he understood it wasn’t the fact of my not liking Selena, or the regret that we were breaking up our partnership that was making me act as I was. But he couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to go out with the two of them once in a while—why I refused even to go to dinner at Grace’s when Selena was going to be there. (He didn’t have a mental picture of the face of Luella Jamison, idiotically empty, and sickeningly half familiar, to tempt him into comparisons every time he saw Selena.) He was patient with me, and kind, and put me to bed several times, and swore at me, and kept plenty of liquor in the house so I wouldn’t go out and get boiled where he couldn’t keep his eye on me. But there were times when his patience wore thin, and once he said, “For Christ’s sake, Bark, either tell me what’s eating you and get it over with or quit making a damned exhibition of yourself every night like this!”

  But I didn’t tell him, or anyone else. Liquor doesn’t make me talkative, so I gave nothing away. I told Jerry that even if he didn’t understand what the hell was wrong with me, not to worry about it. I promised to snap out of it sometime soon.

  “God,” he said. “I hope so. I’ve never seen you like this.”

  “Live and learn.”

  He bit his lip, and for an instant I wondered if we were going to have a fight. I should have welcomed it. Instead, he shook his head. “Something’s got into you. I don’t know what it is and I wish you’d tell me. We’d both be happier.”

  “Forget it. I’m all right. It’s nothing to do with you, anyway.”

  “You’re not all right. And since you won’t tell me, I have a good idea it’s something about Selena.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “No, I’m not. Listen, you ape. Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. Go ahead, tell me what it is. I promise not to get mad.”

  I was tempted. It would be so easy to blurt out the whole story. In a way, he had a right to know it, in spite of my promise to Parsons. Jerry was the one who was marrying Selena, and if there was something wrong with her, something dreadful in her past, he was entitled to fair warning. It was on the tip of my tongue to begin telling him about Luella Jamison. But what good would I accomplish? He was in love with her. Nothing I could say would keep him from marrying her. To put that ugly story into his mind would simply poison some of his happiness without altering his course in the slightest. Jerry was not the man to change his mind once it was made up. So I held my tongue, and merely said, “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. The trouble with me is that I’ve been piling up hangovers, one on top of the other.”

  “You don’t like Selena, Bark. I know it and I can’t help it. But you didn’t like her before, and it didn’t take you this way. You were swell the night we went to Barney’s. What’s happened recently that makes so much difference?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You and Selena haven’t had a row, have you?”

  “God, no,” I said. “Listen. Quit worrying about me.”

  “Damn it, she doesn’t feel this way about you. She thinks you’re swell. Did you know that?”

  I thought, oh, she thinks I’m swell, does she? Like hell. She knows what I think about her. If she can turn over the four of clubs out of fifty-two cards without batting an eye she can damn well read my mind and learn what I think of her. All I said was “That’s nice.”

  He turned on his heel and went out of the room. “Sometimes you make me sick.”

  I felt rottener than ever and went out to have a drink. It tasted sour on my tongue, but then so did everything in those weeks. I hated myself and ordered another drink while I reflected on what a louse I was and how much like Luella Jamison Selena looked sometimes.

  That was the day I went out and bought them a wedding present. I must have been no soberer than my average for the month because what I got was a library edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. At the time there seemed to me something ironically humorous about that. ‘Jerry and Selena,’ I thought to myself, ‘two such fine minds, can sit in front of the fire. He can read volume EXTR-GAMB and she can have JERE-LIBE, and it will be a lovely domestic evening.”

  Then I grew ashamed of myself and bought them a watercolor by Marin that I’d always wanted, and was so broke I had to borrow money from Grace. She made me promise not to use it on liquor.

  Jerry was finding this a trying period too. His family were united in their opposition to his marriage and did little to make his life tolerable. They grumbled and pleaded with him in groups and severally. The worst of the lot was his Uncle Horatio Delavan. A little dried-up gospel shouter of a man who walked in on us unannounced one night. Jerry met him at the door.

  “Hello, Uncle Horry.”

  “Good evening, Jeremiah. I should like to have a word with you.” I could see that Jerry didn’t expect it to be a matter of one word, but he swallowed something that was on the tip of his tongue and asked the old boy to sit down. I retired to the bedroom but I didn’t close the door.

  “Jeremiah,” said Uncle Horry’s voice in the tone of a bank vice-president calling up a small depositor to tell him he has overdrawn his account, “I won’t beat about the bush, my boy. I want to talk to you about your—er—abrupt marriage to this woman.”

  “My marriage to Mrs. LeNormand, Uncle Horry. Please remember her name. It’ll help.”

  “Very good. This Mrs. LeNormand. Your aunt Mabel and I are very much distressed, my boy, very distressed indeed.”

  Jerry’s voice was ominously calm. “I’m sorry about that, Uncle Horry. I don’t believe there is anything to be distressed about.”

  “Possibly not. But your aunt Mabel and I feel strongly that you are not acting with proper circumspection.” He cleared his throat and inserted a note of unction into his voice. “After all, there is generally a good reason for most customs. And it is customary to allow more time to elapse between the—er—end of one marriage and the beginning of the next.”

  “There is no good reason I can think of why we should not get married next month.”

  “Convention, Jeremiah. And this murder case. Your are both implicated, innocently, I grant. But people will talk.”

  “Let them talk all they want. I don’t give a damn.”

  Uncle Horatio sounded pained. “Tut, my boy, there is no occasion for strong language. Let us discuss this matter like gentlemen.”

  “There’s nothing to discuss. It seems to me wholly my own affair, uncle. Dad and I understand each other, and that seems to be all that matters.”

  “Of course, if your father—”

  “Dad’s having the wedding in the Long Island house. Is that evidence enough for you of his attitude?”

  Jerry was becoming quieter and lower-voiced with each answer, an invariable sign in him of mounting rage. He answered the next few questions, which had to do with Selena’s religion, in a tone that ought to have warned his uncle. But sensitivity to the moods of others was never Uncle Horry’s chief claim to fame. When he learned that Selena was not a communicant of any church he began opening up the vials of wrath, quoting liberally from Old Testament sources. The gist of what he had to say was that any member of the family who married a heathen would need no blowtorches in his afterlife. How long he might have gone on I don’t know. But after one particularly perfervid sentence, Jerry stopped him.

  “Careful, Uncle Horry. Don’t say anything you’ll be sorry for later.” I heard his chair scrape across the floor as he rose. Nothing came out of Uncle Horry after that but a splutter. In a few seconds Jerry said with cool impersonality, “It is better to marry than to burn.”

  That was the end of this particular episode. Uncle Horry took an indignant leave. When the front door slammed shut I came out of hiding.

  “Well,” I told him, “apparently Uncle Horry is on the side of the angels, anyway.”

  He glared at me and then began to smile. “He’s har
mless, of course. Only he does get under my skin.”

  “Listen, fella,” I told him. “Why don’t you shut him and all the rest of them up? Postpone the marriage. A few months and they’ll come round.”

  “You too?” he said. “Damn it, Bark, I don’t get any peace from the lot of you. Even Grace. Last night she called me her ‘impetuous young Lochinvar’ and a lot more stuff. What do they think I’m going to do? Sit around and let Selena go on living alone in a hotel, with no friends and nothing to do, and be miserable? With that nightmare of his death to haunt her day and night? Even if she never did love him, it’s a horrible thing to have to remember.” He looked at me pleadingly. “Can’t you see how it is? I don’t even know how much money she has. Maybe right now she’s worrying about not having enough. Damn it, Bark, I want to look after her. I love her and she loves me, and why the hell should we wait months and months just because it’s customary?” He began pacing up and down. “Listen, Bark. I think you have the idea that this is all in my mind. Well, it isn’t. I don’t want to wait for her, but I would if she wanted me to.”

  The implication of that took a second to reach me. “So she wants the wedding for next month?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And I see why too. I’ve told you. She’s not the kind of person who makes friends with every Tom, Dick and Harry. She hasn’t any real friends except you and Grace, besides me.”

  That, I considered, was putting down the best possible total for Selena’s friends. Grace had introduced her, I knew, to some of her own crowd, but with Selena such a recent widow, and not speaking the same language that they did, I suspected that she had many lonely hours sitting in her hotel room, waiting for the evening and the time when she could be with Jerry. The thought awakened no sympathy in me because she never impressed me as a person who needed friends.