The Cool Cottontail (21 page)

George’s left hand twitched against the ground. Ellen raised his head gently and held it, not knowing quite what to do. Virgil realized that he still had his coat on; he took it off, folded it into a pillow, and slid it under George’s head.

The sound was almost upon them now and the lights of the vehicle were bright against the sky.

“Who is—that terrible man?” Ellen asked. She forced herself to look again toward the still shape on the ground.

Virgil rose unsteadily to his feet. “The only one it could be,” he answered wearily. Suddenly the fierce tension that had been driving him for the past two hours was gone, and he could hardly control his own movements. “Only one man knew enough and thought he had a motive.”

The lights of the sheriff’s car hit him as he stood there in his shirt sleeves, his energy spent.

“You saw him once before, I think, when he came to your place. His name is Brown—Walter Brown. Among other things he’s Walter McCormack’s chauffeur.”

The warm, radiant California sun hung in high glory in the sky and presented the land underneath with a day that not even the native sons could exaggerate. The weather was so splendid that Mrs. Mary Agnew forsook the usual isolation of her rural living room and seated herself on her front lawn, where she could be certain of missing no detail of what went on.

When a conspicuously marked police car drove quietly past, her heart took a quick leap; at long last they were going to raid that nudist colony down the road! She was disconcerted that there was only one car, but it was a beginning. She hoped with a devout passion that they would drag out that blond girl, screaming, and take her away to the city to be a public spectacle.

Mrs. Agnew had a mind shaped like a keyhole. For many years now she had devoted her life almost exclusively to the relentless scrutiny of everything within her range of vision. It was her tightly locked secret that though she had never been married, she had borne a child at eighteen; from that moment she had dedicated herself to learning everything possible about the faults of the rest of mankind. To her the existence of nudists, not only on the same planet but within a mile radius of her chosen home, was almost unbearable. She literally lived
for the glorious day when hordes of official vehicles would descend upon the evil place and the fate of Sodom would be re-enacted. The police car gave her a quickened hope and she leaned forward to listen—to hear, if possible, if it would turn into the driveway of That Place.

To her exquisite delight, it did.

Mrs. Agnew, contrary to her usual form, had missed a detail: she had not seen the person behind the wheel. If she had, her inventive mind would have conjured up incredible possibilities concerning his presence at the nudist resort. Mrs. Agnew coughed, and remembered that she had forgotten to take her digitalis.

Virgil Tibbs drove smoothly through the S turn and parked the police car in a corner of the big lot nearest the house. As he got out and stood for a moment in thought, he heard the bright optimism of the unseen birds in the trees and, from the direction of the pool area, the laughing, splashing sounds of children in the water.

He began to walk toward the converted farmhouse and encountered Carole; he had to look twice to recognize her in clothes.

“Hello, Virgil,” she said, and rushed up to make him welcome.

“Hello, Carole.” He held out his hand. The soft pressure of her fingers did not reopen the pain of his raw knuckles and he suddenly felt peaceful and very much at home.

“I made Linda promise I could meet you,” Carole confided. She walked close beside him to the door of the big kitchen. Forrest Nunn met them at the steps and greeted him warmly.

“Thank you,” he said simply, “for what you did for my
son.” Perhaps it was the intonation of “my son” that made his few words eloquent.

“I’m glad I was there,” Virgil answered. Between the two men there was no need for more explanation.

Emily was just inside the door and to Tibbs’ surprise there were tears in her eyes. She took his scarred hands in her own. “Virgil, what can I say to you?” she asked.

“George did fine,” he said casually. “I came along in time to finish up the job, that’s all.”

Emily shook her head from side to side and pressed her lips together. “Do come in,” she murmured. It was all she could say.

There was quite a group in the kitchen. Ellen Boardman was there, sitting next to George at the table; apart from the bandage on his forehead and the strap of adhesive tape across his nose, he looked quite normal.

William Holt-Rymers sat, clad in sandals and the briefest of swim trunks, before a littered ash tray and a cup of coffee.

Only Linda was missing, but in a sense she was there, too. In the corner of the room, easel-mounted, there was an un-framed canvas that had captured in oils and brush strokes such glowing and brilliant light that it seemed to be radiant. In the painted greens, yellows, and browns of the grove of trees near the pool there was beauty and serene power, but they were eclipsed by the radiant likeness of the head and shoulders of Linda. She seemed to be transformed into some exalted symbol of all young womanhood, from her clear-blue unafraid eyes to her firm, beautifully formed breasts. It was a wonderful picture.

Virgil turned to Holt-Rymers. “It’s magnificent,” he said.

The artist shrugged. “You catch murderers,” he said. “I paint.”

“Linda is down at the pool teaching the junior swim class,” Carole said. “She’ll be up any time now.”

Virgil looked once more at the picture in admiration. He would have given everything he possessed to be able to create a thing of beauty like it. No photograph could do what the portrait did; no film could create the things that Holt-Rymers had put in the painting.

“We’ll be ready as soon as Linda is through and dressed,” Emily said. “It won’t take her long. Please have some coffee.”

Virgil sat down and accepted the hospitality. “How are you feeling, Miss Boardman?” he asked.

Ellen reached out and laid her slim hand on his. She took pride in remembering what the heavier, stronger, now badly bruised hands had done for her.

The door opened and Linda came in, walking briskly and rubbing a towel behind her ears. Virgil glanced at Ellen to see how she would take Linda’s nudity, and read no reaction at all.

“Virgil!” Linda stopped and looked at him, and he was afraid of what she might say. “Why can’t all men be like you?”

In his whole lifetime no one had ever said such a thing to him before. He dropped his head as his throat went tight and dry. He forgot the attractive girl who stood nude before him; he forgot the others who were there, and remembered only that in one fleeting fragment of time he had been judged as a man and had not been found wanting.

He was for those few seconds no longer a Negro: he was
not of any race; he was simply a human being who had managed to do something well.

It was one of the greatest moments of his life. He looked at his sore hands, relaxed, and then came back to earth.

“Thank you,” he said, and hoped she would understand.

Emily did. “Why don’t you get dressed,” she said to her daughter, “so we won’t keep Virgil waiting too long?”

Linda shook her blond head. “I can be ready in two minutes,” she exaggerated. “But if Virgil is going to tell us how he found out, and how he learned what he knew, I don’t want to miss a word.”

“Please,” Ellen said.

Carole arrived at the table with a cup of coffee and one of Emily’s home-baked sweet rolls. “Would you rather have iced tea?” she asked.

Virgil wanted very much to say yes, but remembered that the coffee was already poured and that he was a guest. He hesitated for only a moment, and Carole, with the perception of an adult, ran for the refrigerator. Linda hurried from the room.

“I’m sorry we don’t have any cold beer to offer you,” Forrest apologized. “Unfortunately it’s taboo in nudist parks.”

“Iced tea would be wonderful,” Tibbs answered.

The iced tea was provided. Virgil added lemon and sugar, stirred, and drank deeply. He was content just to sit with these agreeable people and enjoy one of the few periods of true relaxation he had known in many days.

In a short time Linda was back, dressed and with a hairbrush in her hand. “O.K.,” she said, and sat down to listen.

Virgil found that everyone was looking at him.

“I promised you an explanation because you are entitled to one,” he began, “but I’m afraid it won’t be very dramatic.”

Forrest spoke to his younger daughter. “Carole, this won’t be very interesting for you, so you can go down to the playground if you would like.”

“Must I?” Carole asked.

“I think it would be a good idea.”

Clearly disappointed, Carole slid off her chair and exited through the doorway to the big lawn. When she was gone, Forrest looked at Tibbs once more and indicated that he should go on.

“You all know the start,” Virgil said. “The body of the late Dr. Roussel was found in your pool entirely stripped except for a set of contact lenses. That looked like a promising clue, but when I ran the lenses down, they led straight up a blind alley. After Miss Boardman mentioned her uncle’s absence, an alert police officer picked it up and we had our first break.”

“Please call me Ellen.”

“Good, I’d like to. To continue, as soon as the identification was positive, several things became apparent, or appeared to do so. One of them was the fact that the death of Dr. Roussel—if you will forgive me, Ellen—seemed to be directly connected with the affairs of his holding company, as indeed it was. This focused our attention on the four surviving stockholders; normally murder takes a pretty strong motive, and a large sum of money comes under that heading.”

“Not to everyone,” Linda interjected.

“True, but of course everyone doesn’t commit murder. All we had to go on at this point, other than what I’ve already told you, was the fact that the body was placed here in the
pool to attract attention—in other words, so that it would be widely reported in the papers. That was a guess, but it was the only thing we could think of that fitted the facts.”

“Was that actually so?” Forrest asked.

“Only in part. Right from the beginning there was a major problem and it stopped us for a long time. In this section of the country it would have been much safer to get rid of the body down one of the wild canyons in the mountains; putting it into your pool was far more dangerous, so there had to be a reason. And then where were the clothes and other personal effects?”

“I can think of one thing,” Emily contributed. “And Linda has mentioned it, too. As you must know, Virgil, there are still a lot of people who can’t stand the idea of nudist parks because it runs against their own prejudices. Maybe somebody wanted to get at us and took that horrible way of doing it.”

“No,” Tibbs answered. “Your logic is fine, but there are
two
possibilities here and you are only considering one of them.”

“What’s the other?” Linda demanded.

Tibbs paused a moment. “You wanted to be a detective and you started out well,” he replied. “Now, see if you can figure it out. You’ll have a few minutes before we come to that part.”

He took another drink from his iced tea.

“The next important item,” he continued, “came from a well-known source—Shakespeare.”

“William Shakespeare?” George inquired, smiling.

Virgil nodded. “Do you remember in
Macbeth
the moment when the news is brought of the king’s death? Instead of being shocked and grieved by the news, Lady Macbeth said,
‘What, in our house?’—and gave herself away right there.”

Ellen said, “‘Look to the lady:—

“‘And when we have our naked frailties hid,

“‘That suffer in exposure, let us meet,

“‘And question this most bloody piece of work.’”

Tibbs looked at her with admiration.

“I played in it once—in college,” she explained. “Please go on.”

“As part of the routine investigation, I called on Mrs. Pratt—as it happened, at a time when the news of Dr. Roussel’s death was not yet out. That is, the identification of the body found on your premises had not been made public. When I informed Mrs. Pratt that her long-time friend and claimed fiancé was dead, she said, ‘
Not
the body in the nudist colony!’ and Lady Macbeth came into my mind. Not only that, she named the right body in the right place, which was a most unlikely thing to do, especially since Dr. Roussel’s arrival in this country had not been announced.

“Naturally that focused a good deal of my attention on that little lady. She is physically far too small to have committed the crime herself, but I was certain at that point that she had some measure of what we call ‘guilty knowledge’ concerning it. Either she had something to do with it directly or she knew something about it that she had no intention of revealing.”

“So you pegged her on the first visit?” Holt-Rymers asked.

“Somewhat, but of course a suspicion is far from proof. Also, to be truthful with you, I didn’t quite swallow her story that she and Dr. Roussel were to have been married. If she was his intended bride and was therefore in love with him, she wouldn’t have described him as ‘the body in the nudist colony’—the words were simply too cold and hard.”

Ellen shuddered slightly, but said nothing.

“The next break came when I had a short talk with Mr. McCormack’s chauffeur, Walter Brown. It was purely accidental; I didn’t know that Brown existed when I went to see his employer. He was washing the car and we spoke briefly. During the course of that conversation he told me that his employer was terribly upset because a close friend of his had been killed in a nudist camp. That was a dead giveaway, since he would have no way of knowing that unless Mr. McCormack was involved and had told him, and I felt certain that wasn’t so unless they both were guilty. I checked carefully and the identification had not been made public at that time.”

He turned to Holt-Rymers. “Perhaps you remember telling me when I called on you that you’d just heard the news over the radio. I checked on that, and also your statement that it hadn’t appeared in the morning paper. I verified your story and convinced myself that you weren’t putting on an act for my benefit.”