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.”
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.