The Cool Cottontail (8 page)

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.

Tibbs looked at her, somewhat more accustomed now to her lack of clothing. “You’ll never need to be jealous of anyone,” he declared without emphasis. He put his coat over his arm and left.

Linda watched him as he retreated across the lawn toward his car, “You know,” she said, “he’s quite a man.”

“I like him,” Forrest answered. “He’s a gentleman and a very intelligent one.”

“The girl who gets him will be pretty lucky,” Linda mused.

Her mother gave her a quick, surprised glance that had in it a touch of concern. Although Linda was not looking at her, the girl read the reaction and understood it. “I assume he would prefer a Negro girl, but they want good men, too, don’t they?”

Emily Nunn relaxed the touch of tension that had appeared on her face. “I’m certain of it,” she agreed.

When Virgil Tibbs walked into his office at close to three in the afternoon, Bob Nakamura took one look at the face of his Negro associate and knew that he had got his teeth into something. “Identify the body?” he asked.

“No,” Virgil answered shortly. “But I have got an angle to try, and it might work. Are you busy?”

Bob leaned back, clasped his hands behind his head, and beamed. “Shoot,” he invited.

“I want to trace down all the likely places where a man arriving from overseas within the past week or ten days might have had a reservation and didn’t pick it up. Or where he did check in and then disappeared. The first is the best bet, because if he had walked out and left his luggage or his bill behind him, we’d hear of it.”

“Nice idea,” Bob agreed. “But it’s worse than doing the pawnshops—just too many places around here that take reservations. How many hotels and motels do you think there are in Los Angeles alone?”

“I know,” Tibbs answered, “but there is an end to it somewhere, particularly when you cut out the second- and third-class spots.”

“Are you going to do just L.A. or all the rest of the basin?”

Tibbs dropped into his chair, letting his weight fall. “I’m
going to go the whole route and ask for the cooperation of all of the law-enforcement agencies between here and Palmdale. Ask them to check every likely spot where a well-to-do man might make a reservation. I’ll start myself with the big places, like the Beverly Hilton, that a stranger might pick out of a travel guide or an agency might line up. But I don’t know that he was a stranger; he might have had a favorite spot he always used. If I read him right, that’s a good chance, too.”

“Needle in a haystack,” Bob commented agreeably.

“I know it, but at least there’s only one haystack. Want to help?”

The benign look left Bob’s face. “Let’s get going,” he said.

Despite the warmth of early summer, the air in the San Bernardino Mountains had a touch of crispness and the subtle scent of many growing plants that had found a home above five thousand feet. Here on the rolling plateau behind the first range of the mountains time moved with less urgency. The roads were more casual and wound their way with dignity, satisfied to handle light traffic at thirty miles an hour. The frantic drive of the ramrod freeways did not exist here; the buildings scattered among the trees were principally cottages with occasional small establishments suited to the more leisurely life of a semirural vacation area. Yet in spite of the outward appearance of a calmer world, the whole area was laced with modern communications, power-distribution lines, and occasional special facilities for defense and air-traffic control.

A pleasant thing about driving on one of the roads through this lightly wooded, lightly settled area was the fact that the birds could be heard singing. The rush of the wind was absent, and the sounds of nature could penetrate even into the
hostile atmosphere of an automobile. Officer Richard Mooney noted all this and enjoyed it. He was an impressive figure in his California Highway Patrol uniform, which radiated authority. The official car he was driving ran beautifully and seemed, like him, to be responding to the perfect day. Though his uniform was a little warm and his feet in particular were uncomfortable from the tight embrace of too much leather, he was relaxed and contented.

He was on a routine checkup that involved no problems. He was in love with his job, and although the pay was less than it should have been, he was human enough to enjoy the aura of authority and the sense of being a member of an élite group that the job gave him. He was a friendly man, but he maintained a careful distance between himself and others so that his position as part of the long arm of the law would not be compromised.

He had so far stopped at eight resorts without success. He was not disappointed, as he had expected nothing. In police work, he knew, much time and effort had to be futilely spent. It was part of his responsibility to do his share.

He pulled into the gravel driveway of one of the more elaborate spots, shut the car door firmly, and went inside. He was back out again shortly—negative. He noted the name of the place on his report sheet, slipped the car into gear, and moved smoothly on.

A half mile more brought him to the next place, which was small but neat and attractive. The drive was packed earth this time, with a scattering of pine needles from the tree branches overhead; the pattern of light and shade across the entrance was exactly right for the kind of place it was. Dick Mooney, who did not live in the immediate area, decided that this
would be a nice spot for a short vacation sometime. It would be certain to please his wife, Elaine. From the outside, at least, it was just the sort of place she liked. He pulled his car to a stop, got out, and walked to the door.