The Cool Cottontail (7 page)

Inside the door there was a railing that separated the working area from the few square feet set aside for a lobby. Tibbs presented himself to the receptionist-typist-switchboard operator and asked if Mr. Casella was in.

Without replying the girl plugged in a cord and said, “Someone to see Mike.”

A middle-aged and ample woman, who looked as if she might be a bookkeeper, appeared and asked, “Are you the man who phoned last night?”

After Tibbs replied, she opened the railing gate for him and showed him into the single corner office. From behind the desk, a powerful man with a thick tangle of black hair on his head offered a fast handshake and motioned toward a wooden chair. “I didn’t get your name,” he said.

“Tibbs. Virgil Tibbs.”

“Mike Casella, Virgil. What’s your line?”

Tibbs produced his card.

“Cop, heh? O.K., what’s the beef?”

“No beef, just two fast questions. One—do you wear contact lenses?”

“Yep, love ’em to death. If you want some, I can give you the name of a damn good doctor—Nat Shapiro. Really knows his stuff.”

“Thanks. One more—have you lost or misplaced a set of lenses recently?”

Casella pulled two cigars from his pocket and offered one to Tibbs, who declined. “Nope. I only have one set and I’ve got them on now. I know you can’t see ’em—nobody can. Great invention. What’s it all about?”

He was entitled to an answer. “We found a man dead with lenses similar to yours. We wanted to be sure you were O.K., that’s all.”

“Well, fine,” Casella answered. “About those kids that were hanging around the yard. If you catch ’em, give ’em a
good scare and then let them go. They can’t hurt the equipment, but they can hurt themselves and then we’re in trouble.” He stopped. “And thanks for the protection. Stop around before Christmas. We like to keep in touch with our friends.”

Tibbs shook hands and left. Halfway across the yard he saw a golf-ball-sized stone in his path, drew back his right foot, and kicked at it with vicious power. He missed a square-on kick; the stone skidded a few feet to the side and stopped.

He got into his car and sat motionless for a moment, his frustration settling in him like a huge leaden lump. “Damn,” he said between his teeth. He was in no fit mood for anything as he drove toward the civic center and his waiting office.

For the next twenty-four hours Virgil Tibbs lived in a world of hope. He kept a close and continuous vigil over all sources of information concerning missing persons and reviewed crime reports in the hope of finding some faint connection with the body in the pool. He checked with other law-enforcement agencies throughout California, Nevada, and Arizona. At the end of another day of concentrated effort he drew a complete and absolute blank.

Meanwhile in the morgue in San Bernardino the body of an unknown man rested on a slab, unclaimed and yielding no clue that might lead to an identification. The most frustrating thing about the whole stalemate was that no one seemed to care. No anxious wife phoned in anywhere to ask about a missing husband; no business associates made inquiry. The man, whoever he had been, seemed to have lived in a vacuum.

People, Tibbs decided, seldom gave a damn about one another. Landlords weren’t concerned about their tenants so long as the rent was paid. Neighbors were not much inclined to be neighborly any more. Most car drivers had little sympathy for others on the road. And often when a serious crime had been committed, few citizens would come forward to help the police; they were too afraid of getting involved.

Tibbs thrust the image of such cases out of his mind. When things went against him, his brain seemed to delight in torturing him by exhuming every awkward and wretched incident he had ever known in his lifetime. They paraded in front of him, the zombies of things long since dead come back to haunt him. The mistakes be had made, the breaks that had gone against him, and the countless times he had been forced to accept humiliation he did not deserve simply because he was a Negro.

Inaction was killing him; he had to do something. The longer he sat in his office, the more likely it was that Captain Lindholm would drop in to ask how soon he would have the case closed. Finally, with no clear idea of what good would come of it, he got out his car, stopped for gas, and then turned eastward on Highway 66. He cleared the outskirts of Pasadena, passed the Santa Anita race track, and worked his way through Azusa. Then he picked up speed and rolled along the foothills of the mountains. The sun, which had been obscured by a low overcast, broke through when he passed Claremont and his spirits responded to the opening cheerfulness of the sky.

He turned off at the secondary road, drove another ten miles on the hardtop, and turned in at the entrance of Sun Valley Lodge. The chain was not up and he was able to negotiate the S turn through the shrubbery directly to the parking lot. Today several other cars were there; when he shut the engine off, he could hear the unmistakable sounds of children at play coming from the direction of the pool area.

He got out of the car wondering a little why he had come. On the surface he knew the answer; he
had
to find a new lead. But he admitted to himself that he had no idea where to
look. He was convinced that the Nunns were on the level and were not holding out on him. A severe cross-examination, particularly on their premises, was not in order. He would therefore begin by asking if anything new had happened or been discovered. After they had said no to that, he would retrace everything again, looking for something he might have missed the first time.

He was only a few feet down the path that led to the house when Forrest arrived to greet him. Tibbs sensed instantly that his welcome was genuine.

“Hello, Virgil,” the park director said. “Pardon my using your first name, but that is the universal custom in nudist parks.”

“That’s fine,” Tibbs said. He noted that his host was again wearing bleached-out khaki shorts, apparently his standard costume for meeting visitors at the parking lot.

Forrest led the way into the big kitchen, where Emily was preparing an immense bowl of tomato-studded tossed salad. “Why, Virgil,” she greeted him. “How nice you’re back. You’ll have lunch with us, won’t you?”

“Yes, he will,” Forrest supplied before Tibbs could speak. He drew two cups of coffee and set them on the table.

Tibbs wanted to explain that this was an official call, not a social one. He opened his mouth to do so and then had sense enough to close it again. These people knew that, but they were treating him as a guest anyway. He was a person just like them, welcome to go anywhere and do anything that anyone else might do. It was like walking through the gates into Paradise.

He looked down at his ebony hands and hated them.

Carole came into the room, so well browned all over her
smooth little body that apart from her blue eyes she might have been a distand relative of his. She greeted him with childish enthusiasm, and Tibbs, when he looked at her with his own dark-brown eyes, felt his heart stir.

Forrest helped him over a hurdle. “I know you want to talk to us, Virgil, and of course we’re available. If you could wait a few minutes until after lunch, it would help. We have guests on the grounds today.”

Tibbs agreed, realizing that he had unintentionally foisted himself on them for lunch. He should have said something about having already eaten, but at eleven-thirty in the morning it would have been unrealistic and they might have been offended. It was then he considered the fact that these people, being nudists, must have known the sting of prejudice, too. With them it was voluntary, but there must have been times when they had had to bear public ridicule and scorn. That would be the face it would wear, but their real transgression was the same one he was guilty of—being different. In a civilization where people who are different are sometimes richly rewarded, and even have temples built for them on the banks of the Potomac, he knew they are more often hated and despised for their lack of sameness.

Why, Tibbs wondered, is being exactly like everyone else so often taken for a great virtue? The world depended on people being different; otherwise it couldn’t run. There had to be leaders and there had to be workers. There had to be businessmen, artists, engineers, cops, architects, and people willing to work in slaughterhouses and rendering plants. There had to be farmers and possibly also politicians. People to do the imposing, exalted work and people to do the dirty, unpleasant work; and they couldn’t be the same people.

His thinking was interrupted when George came in. For a moment Tibbs felt the young man should have been wearing shorts in the presence of his mother. Virgil rose and greeted George a little awkwardly; his recent mental wandering had him off balance. “For gosh sakes, take off your coat, Virgil,” George urged. “It’s warm today and you don’t need all those clothes on.”

Then Tibbs realized that he felt strange not only because of his color, but also because he was fully dressed in a business suit in this place where attire was functional and no more. “I’d be glad to get rid of the coat,” he admitted. He removed it carefully and hung it across the back of his chair.

“We’ve got thirty-four now,” George informed his apron-clad mother. “Abe and Sarah came in and so did Don and Pam.”

Emily nodded and took it in her stride. “We prepare the food here,” Forrest explained, “and then take it over to the dining hall on weekdays, when it doesn’t pay to open up the big kitchen.”

Tibbs watched as Emily swung open the oven and removed several large dishes, rich with satisfying aroma. George carried them to the doorway and set them on a kind of serving table on wheels that was pulled up outside. When all but one had been loaded, he took off with the cart across the grass. At this point, when many housewives would have stopped to wipe their foreheads, Emily simply smiled and said to her unexpected guest, “We’ll eat right away. George and Linda will take care of the guests and then be right up. We keep all the bread and things like that stored in the dining-hall food lockers. It works out very well that way.”

Tibbs felt that a confession was in order. “When I came,
I didn’t realize the hour—my mind was on other things. Let me come back later this afternoon when you won’t be so rushed.”

“Nonsense,” Emily retorted quickly. “We can all sit around the table and talk. ‘Good food begets good ideas,’ my father used to say.”

Still feeling out of place, but grateful for his reception, Tibbs watched the smooth efficiency with which Emily set the places for lunch and put out the things that would be needed on the table. She seemed to do everything easily; she wasted no motion. She was almost finished when Tibbs glanced out the window and his thoughts stopped dead in their tracks.

George and Linda were coming. Obviously she knew that he was there; George would have told her. Nonetheless she walked easily beside her brother, to all appearances entirely unconcerned and totally nude except for a pair of sandals on her feet.

She was coming toward the kitchen and in a few seconds would be in the room.

Tibbs was engulfed with a reminder of his heritage. The vast canyon that onetime servitude had eroded between his people and the Caucasian race had been so impressed on him during his boyhood in the Deep South that the sight of a naked white woman was a severe shock. For a Negro even speaking to a white woman under some circumstances could be suspect in Mississippi; the Till murder had come from a simple thing like that.

Linda was eighteen years old and, as Tibbs had previously noted, well formed. He had even considered her as a possible motive for murder; such things had happened before. She was
rich with the promise of womanhood and technically over the age of consent.

“Here they come now,” Forrest said.

Tibbs grasped at the thought that she would go in by another door and slip on a dress before appearing for lunch. But instantly he knew it was not so; she would come in just the way she was.

George held the door open for his sister. She entered the room with such easy grace that Tibbs, for a reason he could not explain, was instantly reminded of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony.

It was noon on a bright and beautiful day and the girl who had entered the room was beautiful. It was not the artificiality of a carefully made-up face and an elaborate hair style emerging above the creation of an important couturier; it was the natural beauty of young womanhood of the kind that had stirred Praxiteles and countless other artists in the twenty-four centuries that had followed.

As Tibbs automatically rose to his feet, she came to greet him. “Welcome back, Mr. Tibbs. Do you mind if I call you Virgil?”

He dared to smile at her. “If you like. It’s a little hard to be formal—under the circumstances—isn’t it?”

She smiled back and was radiant. “Good. Have you come to tell us that you’ve caught the murderer?”

Tibbs shook his head. “I’ve come to tell you that I need some more of your help.”

He meant the “your” to be plural; she took it as singular.

“Wonderful. I’d love it. Right after lunch, whatever you want.”

As she turned and went to help her mother, Tibbs could
not help watching her. The symmetry of her body was perfect and the curve at the small of her back made him wish fervently that he was a painter.

Emily Nunn served lunch and they sat down to eat. As he took his seat, Tibbs felt himself badly out of place. He picked up his napkin and put it in his lap with self-conscious motions. He had not often been invited for a meal in a white home, seldom if ever while on an official errand, and positively never under the circumstances that surrounded him now. Also his usual lunch was a sandwich and a milk shake, which made him uncertain that he could do justice to the heartier fare that was being set before him now.

To his surprise he found that he was hungry and the home-cooked food, of a sort he seldom got, whetted his appetite. Linda, who sat opposite him, kept up a more or less running conversation on the general subject of police work. Whether it was intentional or not, it put him a little more at ease to talk about the subject he knew best; he answered her questions frankly and everyone present seemed to be interested.