In the Heat of the Night (RosettaBooks into Film)

by John Ball

  “There’s no need to be that modest,” Endicott encouraged him. “I know your reputation on the Coast. A successful investigation is nothing new to you.”

  “It isn’t that,” Tibbs replied, “it’s the fact that I can’t conceal any longer how badly I bungled this one. It was only a stroke of pure luck that saved the day and I can’t take any credit for it.”

  “Suppose you let us judge,” Jennings invited.

  Virgil took a deep breath. “In any murder investigation, one of the first things to do is to establish the motive for the crime if it is at all possible. When you find out who might benefit from the death of the victim, you have at least a point from which to start. This is assuming that there is no clear-cut solution which is relatively easy to track down.

  “When Chief Gillespie arranged for me to stay here and assigned me to this case, I learned certain things from the physical evidence at hand and then went to work to establish the motive. Now I’m afraid I’m going to shock you all and Mr. Kaufmann especially. I doubt if he will ever forgive me. You see, for several days I thought he was guilty and I worked hard to prove it.”

  Tibbs looked up at the young conductor, whose face was a study. Sam Wood looked at him, too, and decided he couldn’t tell what the man was thinking. But Sam was not surprised; he himself had been thinking about Eric Kaufmann, though he couldn’t exactly say why.

  “You see,” Tibbs continued, “Mr. Kaufmann had an immediate and powerful motive: Maestro Mantoli’s tragic passing placed him in direct line to take over the music festival and both the fame and financial rewards that would result. Many men have killed for less than that. I might add that he disproved this motive completely by his energetic and successful work to secure a replacement conductor of established reputation on short notice.

  “At that point Mr. Kaufmann was a suspect and no more. Then, on my first visit here, he happened to remark in my presence that Maestro Mantoli had been ‘struck down.’ The papers were not yet out, and having supposedly come directly here from out of town, he would have had no way to have known that Maestro Mantoli had been literally struck down. He might have been shot, or poisoned, or any number of things. So I interpreted his remark as indicating guilty knowledge and he at once became my number-one candidate for investigation. What I failed to do was to recognize that ‘struck down’ is a fairly common figure of speech and not necessarily a literal one.”

  “Is this too much for you?” Grace Endicott asked Duena, who was beside her. Duena shook her head without taking her eyes off Tibbs.

  “Then came the matter of the cherry pie,” Virgil continued. “When I checked up on Mr. Kaufmann’s whereabouts on the fatal night, I learned that he had arrived in Atlanta at a time that could not be definitely established. And he had remarked to the elevator operator in the hotel where he was stopping that he had eaten a late dinner and questioned the wisdom of cherry pie at that hour. This sounded like a manufactured alibi to me for several reasons. One of them was that there was no proof that he had stopped to eat a full meal, but by claiming to have done so, he automatically added an hour to the time he was presumably in the city. Cherry pie at three in the morning, or something around that hour, is definitely unusual, I didn’t believe he would have done it. Lastly, his mentioning it so obviously to the elevator man suggested to me he was doing so deliberately so that the man would recall the conversation later if asked. Mr. Kaufmann had no way of knowing that the night man at the hotel would not be able to be reasonably exact about the time of his arrival. By now I was convinced I knew my man, and I went after him with a vengeance.”

  “The way you put it, I can’t blame you a bit,” Kaufmann said. “I happen to be inordinately fond of cherry pie, but there is no way you could know that.”

  “You’re extremely generous, sir,” Virgil said to him.

  “Go on, please,” Duena asked.

  “To continue confessing my sins,” Virgil picked up again, “as soon as I was fixed on Mr. Kaufmann, I promptly failed to notice what was going on about me.”

  “The devil you did,” Sam Wood interrupted. “You noticed how much dust there was on my car and made a considerable point of it.”

  Bill Gillespie would not be outdone. “You noticed that Harvey Oberst was left-handed,” he added.

  “Yes, but the important things I missed completely,” Tibbs said. “While I was chasing Mr. Kaufmann, everything that actually concerned the case was taking place in a totally different direction. I kept trying to pin Mr. Kaufmann down and made a fatal mistake. I tried to make the evidence fit the suspect instead of the other way around. That sort of thing is inexcusable.”

  “Go on with the story,” Grace Endicott invited.

  “I’ll finish my confession by saying that I went after the murder weapon and eventually it was delivered to me.” Tibbs took another deep breath and then plunged into the statement he felt he had to make. “It was discovered at the edge of the concert bowl, and while it did not point directly, it suggested Mr. Kaufmann again. I had, I thought, considerable evidence, but none of it would jell enough to hold water for five minutes in a court of law. The more I looked, the less I could find to aid my case because Mr. Kaufmann was, of course, entirely innocent.

  “When Harvey Oberst was brought in on suspicion, I learned from him that there was a girl in Wells of the kind who makes trouble for almost everyone she contacts—Delores Purdy. I stored the fact away, but had no idea that the whole thing actually revolved around her. Then Ralph, the diner man, seriously accused an innocent and responsible missile engineer who simply happened to be driving through the city. It was extremely thin grounds for suggesting an arrest; it looked more like an attempt to muddy the waters, as indeed it was. So for the first time I began to wonder about this young man. But I saw no link between him and Delores Purdy.”

  “Was there one?” Duena asked.

  Tibbs nodded. “Mr. Purdy works nights. Ralph knew about Delores and began to call on her when her father wasn’t there. Mrs. Purdy apparently paid little attention to her children and cared less. Ralph and Delores had much in common. They were both unschooled, prejudiced, and of a low level of intelligence. And they were both in search of what they considered thrills. About six weeks or two months ago they became intimate; within the past few days Delores believed herself to be pregnant and when Ralph came to see her, she told him of her supposed condition and demanded that he help her.

  “Ralph was frightened; he believed Delores to be sixteen and he knew enough to realize that was under the age of consent. And he feared her father. So, like an unlimited number of others like him, he began frantically to look around for a way out. He knew that it would be hard to find a reputable physician to perform an abortion for him, but he thought that he could find one somewhere who would do it for him if he had enough money.

  “I begin to see the light,” Mayor Schubert commented.

  “While Ralph was doing this, Delores had an idea of her own. Ralph was not much of a catch, but she thought she knew a man who would be.”

  Duena Mantoli, whose composure remained unshaken, looked across at Sam Wood. To Sam it was like an electric shock; he took a good hold on the arms of his chair and tried to compose the expression on his face.

  “Almost every night Mr. Wood patrolled past her house, often at about the same time, since it was on his way to the diner, where he customarily stopped for a short break. She arranged, therefore, to allow Mr. Wood to see her naked. She felt confident that he would take notice and probably stop to speak to her, possibly to warn her that she was visible from the street. In either event, she felt that her physical charms, when revealed that way, would be irresistible. Once Mr. Wood had compromised himself with her, she could claim him to be the father of her child and expect thereby to take a considerable step up the social ladder. But Mr. Wood was both intelligent and morally responsible: he obviously realized fully that if he even stepped to the door to caution her, he would place himself in jeopardy, so he very wisely
drove on and her little plan fell flat.”

  Sam Wood discovered that everyone was looking at him. He knew he had not thought it out quite that way, but there was clearly no point in saying so. At least he had behaved himself as he was credited with doing. He kept his breathing even and his mouth firmly shut.

  “Then the thing happened that finally forced me onto the right track; Chief Gillespie, on the basis of some evidence which he himself had uncovered, arrested Mr. Wood on suspicion of murder. Now my prime objective was no longer to track down Mr. Kaufmann, but to prove Mr. Wood’s innocence and get him out of jail. Here Miss Purdy came to my rescue; believing Mr. Wood to be in trouble, she immediately accused him of intimacies with her, feeling that he was in no position to protest.”

  “A nice girl,” Jennings commented.

  “Yes, but there are lots like her,” George Endicott added. His wife nodded her silent agreement.

  Virgil went on. “Mr. Wood provided me with a clue that pointed to the Purdy house and I began to take an awakened interest in that young woman. Thanks to Chief Gillespie’s fast thinking, I listened in on a conversation that he had with her and her father; in the course of that talk she stated flatly that Mr. Wood used to call on her evenings on his way to work. That wasn’t so, of course, but at that point the lights went on; there was one other person who went to work at that hour and a far more likely candidate for the doubtful distinction of being her boyfriend. Then I remembered how Ralph had tried to involve a clearly innocent man in an almost idiotic way.

  “Now the pieces fell together fast. I checked and found six people who had seen Mr. Wood on his rounds on the night of the murder; the four of them who would talk to me in combination gave him a reasonably sound alibi. I found these people, incidentally, by calling at the houses where I had noticed lights on when I had covered the route with Mr. Wood in his patrol car. People who get up in the small hours of the night often do so reasonably regularly and quite a few of them had noticed the police car on its rounds.

  “Then I finally realized two more very important facts: the person who placed Maestro Mantoli’s body in the middle of the main highway had to have an intimate knowledge of the probable traffic at that hour; Ralph met that qualification. And I saw the significance of the fact that it was a blazing hot night.”

  “You mean the weather had something to do with this murder?” Frank Schubert asked.

  “Definitely, in two different ways. Both of them tended to give Ralph a very good alibi which he himself hadn’t in any way planned. As soon as I remembered the heat of the night, a tremendous objection to Ralph disappeared and I knew that this time I had my man. I knew the motive, I had established opportunity, and as an individual he fitted perfectly into the pattern of conduct of the murderer.”

  “Exactly what did he do?” Endicott asked.

  “He left early for work in order to see Delores. She made it clear that he must either ‘take care of her’ or face the consequences. All he thought he needed to escape from his predicament was money, but he had no savings and his salary was totally inadequate. He was cornered, or thought he was.”

  “But the girl really wasn’t pregnant at all,” Duena contributed.

  “That’s right,” Tibbs said. “How did you find out?”

  The girl looked at him. “The day I met her. Her relief was so evident it stuck out all over. She didn’t want anything from anybody, only to be left alone. And she said she couldn’t be examined.”

  “Go on,” Gillespie said to Tibbs.

  “On that night Ralph drove up the highway on his way to work thinking what to do. He decided he would have to rob somebody and the question was who. A few minutes before, Mr. Endicott had dropped Maestro Mantoli at his hotel, which is second rate and not air-conditioned. Excited and enthusiastic about the music project, the Maestro probably realized he couldn’t sleep immediately, and decided to take a short walk. Do you recall my asking if he was likely to make such impulsive decisions? At the same time I inquired if he was able to make friends quickly and easily, and if he would be likely to discount someone because he was of a real or imagined lower social status than himself.”

  “And I told you he was impulsive and met people almost eagerly,” Duena said.

  “You did. Then I saw how it happened. Ralph, coming up the street in his car, saw and recognized the Maestro; his appearance was very distinctive, at least in this city. Here, Ralph thought, was opportunity. He offered the Maestro a ride and Mr. Mantoli accepted.

  “When I was first told the murder weapon had been found at the edge of the music bowl, I assumed that helped to implicate Mr. Kaufmann. I was totally wrong. Ralph said he had not seen the bowl and Maestro Mantoli offered to show it to him. He wanted to see it again himself, for that very evening plans for the festival had been settled.

  “They drove to the bowl—Maestro Mantoli for the reasons I just stated, Ralph to rob him of enough money to solve his crisis. They got out at the edge of the bowl and stood looking over the setting. The spectators—or auditors is probably the word—will have to sit on logs for the first season at least. The last rows had just been put down and trimmings were scattered all about. Ralph picked up a piece of wood, and tried to think of the best way to use it. Then he had the wild idea that he would stun the Maestro and later claim that they had both been jumped from behind by persons unknown. When he delivered the fatal blow, he intended it to be much less.”

  “Then it was … partly an accident?” Duena asked.

  “Yes, assault with a deadly weapon and manslaughter, but not first-degree murder.”

  “I’m almost glad,” the girl said quietly.

  “When the Maestro slumped to the ground, unconscious, Ralph panicked. His first impulse was an honorable one, to get the man he had just injured to a doctor. He was in a cold sweat now, and terribly afraid. He carried the Maestro the few steps to his car, put him inside, and drove back to town. As he neared the center of the city he finally realized what he had done. He stopped on a side street, took out his victim’s wallet, removed enough money to solve his first problem, and then left the body in the middle of the highway, with the wallet nearby. Then he drove quickly to the diner and reported late for work, which he regularly did two or three times a week.”

  “But why in the middle of the highway?” Grace Endicott asked, wide-eyed.

  “He believed a hit-and-run driver would be blamed. That was a major clue, of course, the location of the body, but I didn’t see the point for some time.”

  “And the temperature?” George Endicott added.

  “Oh, yes, that did two things for Ralph: first it kept down the traffic to almost nothing and delayed the discovery of the body.”

  “Wait a minute,” Frank Schubert interrupted. “How about that engineer who drove through?”

  “While he was here no one asked him the exact time he had passed through the city. Ralph said it was forty-five minutes before Sam found the body, a statement Gottschalk didn’t question because he didn’t know when the body was found. He came through while Ralph was robbing his victim. Ralph noticed the unusual car and when the man stopped at the diner on his return trip, Ralph called the police department, hoping that Gottschalk would be arrested for hit-and-run.”

  Grace Endicott shook her head. “What a dreadfully warped mind that boy must have. I can’t conceive of it. He’s like an animal.”

  “The rest about the hot night,” Gillespie prompted.

  “Oh, yes, the unusual temperature gave Ralph a totally unexpected alibi. When the intern who came with the ambulance fixed the time of death, he did so in the usual manner, by estimating how much body heat had been lost. But he failed to allow for the unusual temperature and therefore was considerably off on his estimate. The hot night had literally kept the body warm. It wasn’t until that major objection could be overcome, Ralph’s apparent alibi, that I could be sure he was the man.”

  Tibbs looked suddenly very weary. “That’s about all,” he concluded. �
��I came into his diner and asked for a glass of milk. If I had said ‘carton’ he might have given it to me. The idea of my using a glass disturbed him and when I made a scene about being allowed to eat there, he was aroused to the point where he put hands on me. Then I was able to grab him; I shouldn’t have done it that way, but I wanted the satisfaction. He so clearly despised me because of my ancestry, and considered himself so totally superior, I wanted to teach him a very important lesson. It was childish, I admit.”

  Bill Gillespie drove Virgil Tibbs to the railroad station. After he parked the car in front of the platform, he got out and picked up Virgil’s suitcase. Tibbs understood and let him do it.

  Gillespie led the way onto the train side of the platform and put the case down before the single bench that offered limited comfort to those who had to wait.

  “Virgil, I’d like to stay with you, but frankly I’m dead for sleep,” Gillespie said. “Do you mind if I go on?”

  “Of course not, Chief Gillespie.” Tibbs waited a moment before he spoke again. “Do you think it would be all right if I sat out here? It’s a very nice night.”