In the Heat of the Night

drove on and her little plan fell out.”
    Sam Wood discovered that everyone was looking at him. He knew he had not thought it out quite that way, but there was clearly no point in saying so. At least he had behaved himself as he was credited with doing He kept his breathing even and his mouth firmly shut
    “Then the thing happened that finally forced me onto the right track; Chief Gillespie, on the basis of some evidence which he himself had uncovered, arrested Mr. Wood on suspicion of murder. Now my prime objective was no longer to track down Mr. Kaufmann but to prove Mr. Wood’s innocence and get him out of jail. Here Miss Purdy came to my rescue; believing Mr. Wood to be in trouble, she immediately accused him of intimacies with her, feeling that he was in no position to protest.”
    “A nice girl,” Jennings commented.
    “Yes, but there are lots like her,” George Endicott added. His wife nodded her silent agreement.
    Virgil went on. “Mr. Wood provided me with a clue that pointed to the Purdy house and I began to take an awakened interest in that young woman. Thanks to Chief Gillespie’s fast thinking, I listened in on a conversation that he had with her and her father; in the course of that talk she stated flatly that Mr. Wood used to call on her evenings on his way to work. That wasn’t so, of course, but at that point the lights went on; there was one other person who went to work at that hour and a far more likely candidate for the doubtful distinction of being her boyfriend. Then I remembered how Ralph had tried to involve a clearly innocent man in an almost idiotic way.
    “Now the pieces fell together fast. I checked and found six people who had seen Mr. Wood on his rounds on the night of the murder; the four of them who would talk to me in combination gave him a reasonably sound alibi. I found these people, incidentally, by calling at the houses where I had noticed lights on when I had covered the route with Mr. Wood in his patrol car.
    People who get up in the small hours of the night often do so reasonably regularly and quite a few of them had noticed the police car on its rounds.
    “Then I finally realized two more very important facts: the person who placed Maestro Mantoli’s body in the middle of the main highway had to have an intimate knowledge of the probable traffic at that hour; Ralph met that qualification. And I saw the significance of the fact that it was a blazing hot night.”
    “You mean the weather had something to do with this murder?” Frank Schubert asked.
    “Definitely, in two different ways. Both of them tended to give Ralph a very good alibi which he himself hadn’t in any way planned. As soon as I remembered the heat of the night, a tremendous objection to Ralph disappeared and I knew that this time I had my man. I knew the motive, I had established opportunity, and as an individual he fitted perfectly into the pattern of conduct of the murderer.”
    “Exactly what did he do?” Endicott asked.
    “He left early for work in order to see Delores. She made it clear that he must either ‘take care of her’ or face the consequences. All he thought he needed to escape from his predicament was money, but he had no savings and his salary was totally inadequate. He was cornered, or thought he was.”
    “But the girl really wasn’t pregnant at all,” Duena contributed.
    “That’s right,” Tibbs said. “How did you find out?” The girl looked at him. “The day I met her. Her relief was so evident it stuck out all over. She didn’t want anything from anybody, only to be left alone. And she said she couldn’t be examined.”
    “Go on,” Gillespie said to Tibbs.
    “On that night Ralph drove up the highway on his way to work thinking what to do. He decided he would have to rob somebody and the question was who a few minutes before, Mr. Endicott had dropped Maestro Mantoli at his hotel, which is second rate and not air conditioned. Excited and enthusiastic about the music project, the Maestro probably realized he couldn’t sleep immediately, and decided to take a short walk. Do you recall my asking if he was likely to make such impulsive decisions? At the same time I inquired if he was able to make friends quickly and easily, and if he would be likely to discount someone because he was of a real or imagined lower social status than himself.”
    “And I told you he was impulsive and met people almost eagerly,” Duena said.
    “You did. Then I saw how it