Free In the Heat of the Night by John Ball Page A

board bunk, Tibbs seated himself calmly on the other. He had taken off his coat and tie and had rolled up his sleeves. He folded his lean, dark fingers in his lap and sat silently, paying no attention to Oberst. The minutes passed unnoticed as neither man made any attempt to do anything. Then Oberst began to fidget. First he moved his hands, then he began to shuffle his feet. After a period of increasing nervousness he found his voice and spoke. “What you doing with white man’s clothes on?” he asked.
    For the first time Tibbs appeared to notice that Oberst was present. “I bought them from a white man,” he answered.
    Harvey Oberst turned his attention now to his cellmate and looked him up and down with unconcealed appraisal. “You been to school?” he asked.
    Tibbs nodded slowly. “College.”
    Oberst bristled. “You think you’re smart or something?”
    Virgil Tibbs continued to look at his locked fingers. “I graduated.”
    The silence returned for a moment.
    “Where’d they let you go to college?”
    “In California.”
    Oberst shifted his position and lifted his feet up onto the hard surface of the bunk. “Out there they don’t care what they do.”
    Tibbs ignored the comment. “Who’s Delores Purdy?” he asked.
    Oberst leaned forward. “None of your business,” he snapped. “She’s a white girl.”
    Tibbs unfolded his hands, swung around, and put his own feet on the bunk exactly as Oberst had done. “Either you answer my question,” he said, “or take your chances on being hanged for murder.”
    “Don’t you give me any of your lip, black boy,” Harvey snarled. “You ain’t nobody and you ain’t never going to be nobody. High school or college don’t make you white and you know it.”
    “I don’t especially want to be white,” Tibbs said, “but white or black, it doesn’t make much difference when you’re at the end of a rope. And after you’ve rotted for a few months in the ground—say, a little more than a year from now—no one will know or care what color your skin was. You won’t have a skin anymore. Is that the way you want it?”
    Oberst pulled his knees up close to his chest and clasped his arms around them as though to protect himself. “Who the hell do you think you are?” he demanded. But there was fear in his voice and the arrogance with which he tried to replace it didn’t come off.
    “I’m a cop. I’m after the man who killed the one you robbed. Whether you believe it or not, that’s so. I also happen to be the only one around here who thinks you might not be guilty of murder. So you’d better back me up because I’m the best chance you’ve got.”
    “You ain’t no cop,” Oberst said after a pause.
    Tibbs reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a small white card sealed in plastic. “I work in Pasadena; I’m an investigator. Call it detective if you like. I’ve been loaned to the police department here to find out who killed Mantoli—that’s the dead man you found. Never mind how or why. Either you gamble on me or stand trial for murder.”
    Oberst remained silent.
    Tibbs waited a long minute. “Who is Delores Purdy?” he asked again.
    Oberst made his decision. “She’s a girl who lives near where I do. One of a whole flock of kids.”
    “How old is she?”
    “Sixteen, almost seventeen.”
    “You know what we call that kind in California? San Quentin quail,” Tibbs said.
    Oberst reacted quickly. “I got in trouble with her, but not that way.”
    “What happened?”
    Oberst didn’t answer.
    “I can go out and look up the record,” Tibbs reminded him. “I’d rather get it from you.”
    Oberst accepted defeat. “This Delores, she’s young but real stacked, if you know what I mean. A real hot sweatergirl type.”
    “There’re lots of those,” Tibbs commented.
    “Yeah, but this Delores is real proud of what nature done for her. She likes to show off. I took her on a date to Clarke’s Pond. We weren’t plannin’ nothing