In the Heat of the Night

Anything that might point to who did it?”
    “Possibly,” Tibbs answered vaguely. He added, “Mr. Endicott has asked to have Mantoli’s body moved to the undertaker’s as soon as possible.”
    Sam waited a moment and then gave up. “What next?” he asked.
    “Let’s go back to the station. I want to see that fellow Oberst they’re holding there.”
    “I forgot about him,” Sam confessed. “What are you going to do to him?”
    “I want to talk to him,” Tibbs answered. “After that a lot depends on how much leeway Gillespie is going to give me.”
    They drove the rest of the way in silence. As he guided the car down the turns of the winding road, Sam tried to decide whether or not he wanted the man sitting beside him to succeed in what he had undertaken. In his mind he saw a clear picture of Duena
    Mantoli; then, as a projector shifts slides, he saw Gillespie and, without looking at him, the Negro by his side. That was what hurt. An outsider might be all right if he were a good fellow and all that, but the idea of a black man stuck up like a jagged rock in the middle of a channel. By the time they had reached the police station, Sam had still not made up his mind. He wanted the crime solved, but he wanted it solved by someone whom he could look up to and respect. The only trouble was he couldn’t think who it might be.

- 6 -

    Virgil Tibbs stopped at the desk and made a request. Then he disappeared in the direction of the colored washroom to allow time for it to be considered and for Gillespie to be consulted. The chief was out of the building so the desk man had to make his own decision. After recalling his instructions carefully, he made up his mind, called Arnold, and asked him to admit Tibbs to Harvey Oberst’s cell.
    When the steel door swung partly open, Oberst half rose to his feet. “You don’t have to put him in here,” he protested. “Put him someplace else. I don’t want no nig—”
    The steel door clanked shut. “He wants to talk to you,” Arnold said acidly, and left. Oberst sank down on one extreme end of the hard 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.