In the Heat of the Night

long, slender fingers and looked out once more at the mountain panorama before her. “He wasn’t a big man, or important,” she said half to the silent hills. “All his life he hoped and worked for the big break. This would have been it, his chance to be somebody in music. It’s a hard world and it’s almost impossible to get anywhere unless you somehow manage to belong to just the right group. Whoever killed my father killed all of his hopes and dreams—just before they were all to have come true.” She stopped speaking, but she continued to stare straight ahead. Sam looked at her carefully and was angry with himself for, at a time like this, deciding she was beautiful. He wanted desperately to offer her his protection, to let her cry on his ample shoulder if she wanted to, to hold her hand in a reassuring grip.
    What he could not do physically, he tried to do with words. “Miss Mantoli, I want to tell you something that may help, just a little. All of us in the police department are going to do our best, no matter how hard we have to work, to find and punish the person responsible. That isn’t much comfort for you, but it might help a little.”
    “You’re very kind, Mr. Wood,” she said, as though she was really thinking of something else. “Is Mr. Tibbs’s being here going to cause you any trouble?” she asked abruptly.
    Sam wrinkled his brow for a moment. “Truthfully, that’s hard to answer. I honestly don’t know.”
    “Because he’s a Negro.”
    “Yes, because he’s black. You know how we feel about things like that down here.”
    When the girl looked at him steadily and evenly, Sam felt a sudden emotion he could not analyze. “I know,” she said. “Some people don’t like Italians; they think we’re different, you know. Oh, they’ll make an exception for a Toscanini or a Sophia Loren, but the rest of us are supposed to be vegetable peddlers or else gangsters.” She pushed back her hair carelessly with one hand, looked away from him out over the mountains.
    “Perhaps we ought to go back,” Sam suggested, acutely uncomfortable.
    The girl rose to her feet. “I suppose so. Thank you for coming with me,” she said. “It helped.”
    As they reached the door of the house, it opened and Eric Kaufmann appeared. He held it open for Virgil Tibbs, who followed him, and then made a particular point of carefully shaking hands. Even Sam realized it was formal patronizing. “Mr. Tibbs,” Kaufmann said in a voice loud enough for Sam and the girl to hear, “I don’t care what it costs or what you have to do. I’m not a rich man, but I’ll stop at nothing to see that the murder—that the person who did what he did to the maestro is captured and made to pay.” His voice broke. “To strike him down like that, a man like him! Not even to give him a chance. Please, do your very best!” Sam wondered how much of the speech was sincere and how much was calculated to impress the girl. He must know her well, Sam thought, and perhaps... He did not let himself finish the thought. Unreasonably he wished that the girl had somehow risen out of the ground that day so that he might be the first to know her and to take care of her.
    He decided he was losing his grip and it was time to toughen up.
    Virgil Tibbs excused himself and they climbed into the car. Sam started the engine and turned down the road that led back to the city. When they were safely out of range of the house, he spoke. “Did you make any progress?”
    “Yes, I did,” Tibbs answered him.
    Sam waited for a fuller explanation, then found he had to ask for one. “Such as what, Virgil?”
    “Mostly background on Mantoli and the music festival. The Endicotts are strong local sponsors. What they had set up here was what they hoped would develop into another Tanglewood or the Bethlehem Bach Festival. Some projects of that kind have been highly successful.”
    “Most of us around here regarded the whole thing as being nuts,” Sam said.
    “The response from the advance announcements was surprisingly good,” Tibbs added. “I don’t know too much about music, but apparently Mantoli had arranged some special programs that had a lot of appeal to the kind of people who come to things like this. At least they were willing to pay good money to sit on logs or camp chairs for a whole evening until the thing was proved a success and something better put in.
    “How about something that will help us with the problem we’ve got right now?