The Cool Cottontail

by John Ball

  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.”

  “Heaven help us sinners.” The artist uncrossed his legs and crossed them the other way. “Couldn’t the chauffeur have heard an earlier broadcast? I mean, aren’t you cutting the time a little fine here?”

  Tibbs shook his head. “Actually the news broke for the first time publicly while I was at lunch. But there is another consideration entirely that drew my serious attention to him: if he had just found out, he wouldn’t have put the information so casually. There is a way we speak of things we have just learned and a very different one when we refer to things that are no longer new. He spoke in the manner of someone who has known a certain fact for some while. That was what impressed me at the time.”

  “In other words, he didn’t tell it as fresh news,” Forrest suggested.

  “Exactly. In this business you have to look for things like that. Essentially there are two steps in resolving any case. First you have to find out what happened; then, after that, you have to assemble enough proof to secure a conviction in court. It isn’t always the same thing. I couldn’t expect to convince a jury by describing Brown’s manner of speech, but for finding out what happened it was very useful.”

  Emily shook her head. “I don’t think I would want your job, Virgil,” she said.

  “‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one,’” Tibbs quoted. “Now let me fit some pieces together for you. Of the four surviving stockholders in the Roussel Rights Company, two were well established financially and the other two were in desperate, or near-desperate, circumstances. Walter McCormack was clearly secure, but I checked his rating just the same. I also checked up on your statement, Bill, concerning the number of pictures you sold and the price they netted to you.”

  “I don’t think I want to know you any more,” Holt-Rymers said. “You’re too dangerous to have around.”

  Tibbs smiled a little grimly. “Not if you’re telling the truth,” he said. “And you were. In a murder case you can’t afford to take anything for granted. Which brings us to Mr. Peterson, the broker. Unfortunately for him, he was in a jam all the way around. He had lost most of his clients through giving them bad advice and his business was in serious trouble. In addition, he’d had an affair with his secretary, and when she told him that she was pregnant, he panicked. He gave her a partial settlement out of what he had left and then hurried off to Europe to see Dr. Roussel.”

  “Why do people get so mixed up?” Emily asked.

  “They do, all the time,” Virgil said. “At least they keep policemen from being unemployed.”

  “He went to Europe, then, to try and dispose of his stock?” Ellen asked.

  “More or less. According to the terms of the agreement among the partners, none of them could sell without common consent. However, Peterson hoped that Dr. Roussel, being a bachelor and living in Europe, might be sympathetic about his situation. He knew he would have no chance with Walter McCormack, but he thought that Dr. Roussel might be willing to advance him a substantial sum against the sale of the company—something he strongly advised.”

  “And badly,” Holt-Rymers added.

  “Is he married?” Linda asked.

  “Yes, but his wife is suing him for divorce.”

  “Then there was only one thing for him to do: let his wife divorce him in Reno and marry the girl he got into trouble,” she said.

  Tibbs looked at her and shook his head. “Marrying under those circumstances seldom solves anything, particularly if you consider marriage as something more than a legal convenience. Anyway he couldn’t. She was already married—to a serviceman overseas.”

  “Good night!” Forrest said.

  “Agreed,” Virgil went on. “And when you add all of these things together, you can see why Peterson might have been in a frame of mind to attempt murder. He had motive and he is a big, powerful man, which made him a definite possibility. However, from the strictly legal standpoint all he had done that was unlawful was to have an affair with a consenting adult. He had plenty to worry about, but from a police point of view he wasn’t in very deep. Also if the company had been sold, most of his difficulties would have been solved for him.”

  “How about the girl?” Linda asked.

  “She went down to Mexico for a vacation. While there, she had a slight accident and lost her child. Enough about Oswald Peterson. Now, on to Mrs. Pratt.”

  “No, thank you,” Holt-Rymers muttered.

  “Quiet,” Linda retorted.

  Virgil sipped his iced tea.

  “Mrs. Pratt is a woman of insane vanity; her whole history proves it. Originally she turned down Dr. Roussel because at that time he couldn’t provide her with enough money. Then she married an older man who could. She was diminutive and ‘cute,’ so that to certain
men she was very appealing; she cashed that asset like a traveler’s check. When she was widowed, she was left in very comfortable circumstances-enough to keep her well for the rest of her life. But that wasn’t enough for her, so she planned to remarry—and again to the highest bidder. To accomplish this she bought herself a very expensive and costly-to-maintain home and worked her way into society. If she could find herself a new husband in ample circumstances, fine; if not, she was sure that Albert Roussel still desired her and he was now making lots of money.”

  “She should have grabbed him,” George commented.

  “Don’t wish that on Uncle Albert,” Ellen said a little tartly.

  “Sorry,” George apologized.

  Virgil continued, “She splurged far beyond her income and didn’t receive the romantic returns she expected. She was certainly no longer young and some of her less desirable traits of character were beginning to show through. So when her money began to run out, she wrote to Dr. Roussel and more or less put herself on the block. He turned her down.

  “Hurrah!” Ellen said. “One question—how did you find this out?”

  “I had quite an extended telephone conversation with her maid. Normally I don’t believe she would have told me this, even if I had asked her officially. But there was a small incident: Mrs. Pratt embarrassed her when she made tea for me during my first visit. Also she was told that I was not to be considered a guest in the house, either because of my profession or, more likely, my race. This did not set well with that young lady, so when the subject came up in our little talk, she told me about it. Of course Mrs. Pratt has very few secrets from her maid, who lives in.”

  “I would think not,” Emily agreed.

  “Now come the beginnings of murder,” Virgil continued. “She was a woman scorned. This was her prime and basic motivation; to a person of her vanity, having her supposed long-time suitor refuse her hand when it was freely offered was insufferable. It was a gross humiliation and her overdeveloped ego demanded revenge.”