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.”