by John Ball
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.�
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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.
Eventually he decided to take the Nunns partly into his confidence. “I have a serious problem in this case,” he explained. “I don’t want it to go beyond this room, but as of now I can’t identify the body.”
“You mean that no one has reported the man missing?” Emily asked.
“Exactly. No inquiry at all has come in from anywhere in this tri-state area, nor anything else that might be helpful. I can tell you now that when he was found he was wearing a set of almost invisible contact lenses. When I traced them down, they led nowhere and I’m right back where I started.”
“Glasses! So that’s what you held out on me,” Linda said.
“One of the things, yes.”
“Was an autopsy performed?” Forrest asked.
“Yes, but it gave us very little we didn’t already have. Nothing significant. I don’t want to discuss it at the table, but in general terms the findings were routine.” That was all he cared to tell them; he wasn’t going to go into the cause of death.
Emily reached for a serving dish and without asking his permission added more baked salmon to his plate. Tibbs politely protested and then was grateful, for it was delicious.
“How can we help you?” Forrest asked.
Tibbs cut off a portion of the fish with his fork and looked up. “Actually I’m not sure that you can,” he said. “I could make a big show of asking a lot of questions, but the truth is I came back to see if I could get another lead—something that was overlooked the first time.” He stopped and ate a mouthful of food. Then he went on, “I can tell you this: it won’t be anything glaring. It will be some minor thing, something that seemed so unimportant it didn’t even come up.”
“I want to ask something,” George put in. “Suppose there just isn’t any such lead and the man remains unidentified. What then?”
Tibbs drank a wonderfully cooling half glass of iced tea without coming up for air. It was such magic in his throat that he did not want to stop. “Because it’s murder,” he said finally, “the case will technically remain open. All murder cases do until they are solved. But if nothing turns up, then I’ll have to go on to something else. There are always new problems in police work. Perhaps in a few weeks something might break, or even at the end of a year.”
“But if not?” George persisted.
“Then the murderer gets away with it and goes scot free. It happens all the time. I don’t like to say that, but it’s true.”
“I want the man who killed the man in our pool to be caught,” Linda said. “I can’t stand the idea that he could do what he did and not have to pay for it.”
“If we’re going to catch him,” Tibbs said, “I’ll need all the help you can give me.”
“Then it’s up to us to go over every detail in our minds and look for every bit of information, no matter how remote,” Forrest said. “Even if we can’t be sure it’s right.”
Virgil finished the iced tea and enjoyed the cool touch of the ice cubes against his lips. Linda got up and refilled his glass. He leaned back as she did so, freshly aware of her nudity.
“It won’t be easy,” he said when Linda had finished and returned to her chair. “But we have to try.”
“Where shall we begin?” Emily asked.
Self-conscious again, Tibbs carefully stirred a spoonful of sugar into his tea and added a slice of lemon. “Let’s begin with the area you know best,” he proposed. “I’ve been going on the assumption that there is no nudist angle in this case, that the body was found in your pool more or less by coincidence.”
He stopped, momentarily at a loss for words. “I accepted that idea because if I could help it I didn’t want to damage your business and its good will. I realize that it must be hard to build up a clientele for this type of operation—to win community acceptance.”
Forrest crossed his long legs under the table and relaxed back in his chair. “In a way, yes,” he acknowledged. “But it’s not as hard as you might think. We get a lot of inquiries. People are beginning to realize, for example, that kids with a nudist background have a wholesome, healthy attitude toward their bodies. They don’t play the wrong kind of games in a corner of the garage.”
He looked up at his wife and smiled. “I could tell you a lot more. For instance, nudist families have a much lower divorce rate than the rest of the population. But that’s not what you are interested in now. If there is a nudist angle to this case, you can count on us for all possible help to try and find it. Having the thing settled and done would be infinitely better than to have the matter permanently hanging over our heads.”
From the tone of his voice, Tibbs believed him. It seemed reasonably certain that none of the family would try to hold out information, unless, of course, it was coupled with guilty knowledge. That was a possibility he was not yet ready to dismiss.
“All right, then,” he said. “Let’s start with the premise that the deceased wasn’t a practicing nudist because of the very marked pattern of his bathing trunks.” He looked toward Linda and relaxed his seriousness for a moment. “Because he was a cottontail.”
Linda nodded her approval. She was resting her chin on her hands, with her elbows on the table. In that position her breasts were partially covered and Tibbs noted, to his embarrassment, that the unconscious partial concealment automatically invited more attention to that part of her body.
He got back rapidly to the logic of the case. “Isn’t it true that everyone who is a nudist had to start sometime?” he asked. “Certainly not everyone who comes here now began as a little child.”
“That’s right,” Emily agreed. “Only a small percentage of today’s nudists grew up in the movement.”
“Then isn’t it possible that our unknown man was about to become a nudist—or had been one for, say, a day or two?”
Linda drew a breath quickly. “I can answer the second part. He hadn’t been a nudist at all—at least not this summer—or it would show. Of course, he could have been at a park somewhere on a dark and gloomy day, but it’s very unlikely. And even one day in the sun would have tanned him a little. He was too white for that.”
“How about an overcast day, but one that was still pleasant?” Tibbs asked. “There are lots of those.” He looked at his dark fingers. “I’m at a slight disadvantage here,” he admitted.
Forrest understood at once and took over. “A person with a very fair skin, such as he had, can be severely sunburned even on a cloudy day. Every experienced nudist knows this. It happens to newcomers all the time, even though we warn them.”
“Dad’s right,” George added, nodding his head.
Tibbs went on, “Then he wasn’t a nudist, at least not recently. But is there any reason why he might not have been planning to become one? He liked the out-of-doors or he wouldn’t have had so deep a suntan.”
“That’s a definite possibility,” George said. “Unfortunately, so far only a small percentage of people have decided
to become nudists, but the number is steadily going up. He was a better class individual, I think, and that increases the possibility since that’s the kind we usually attract.”
Tibbs looked questioningly at Forrest, who nodded his head. “That’s a proven fact,” he added. “Though some people might doubt it.”
“Then he could have been on his way here when he was killed. It’s even possible that he had arrived and was ambushed before he could announce himself.”
“I don’t think so,” Carole answered.
Emily turned toward her younger daughter, smiled, and then placed a finger across her lips to indicate that she should remain quiet.
Tibbs looked down at the little girl, on his left. “Why not, Carole?” he asked.
“Because he didn’t have a reservation. If he was a smart man, wherever he was going he would have a reservation.” She ended on a note of righteous indignation; she did not like to be shushed when she had an idea.
Tibbs pressed his palm against his forehead. “I’m ashamed of myself,” he said. “I never thought of that. Because of his suntan marks and the lack of any fingerprint record in this country, I was pretty sure he had come from abroad, but I couldn’t check the airline records because I didn’t have anything to go on. The reservation angle I completely missed.”
“Did I help?” Carole asked.
“Indeed you did. You are wonderful—what can I do for you?”
Because she had been thinking much about the dark detective since he had first appeared, Carole was ready immediately with her answer. “I want to ride in a police car,” she announced. “With the siren going.”
Tibbs smiled and got quickly to his feet. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Thank heaven there’s work to be done. Thank you for my lunch—I seldom have one so good. Thanks also for the cooperation. You especially, Carole, and I won’t forget what you asked.”
“I’m jealous,” Linda said, smiling to show that she didn’t mean it.