Then, to his utter confusion, the girl got up, walked to him, and stood inches away. He felt his heart quicken as some mysterious mechanism within his body released adrenalin into his bloodstream. And for the first time in many years he was suddenly frightened.
“Your first name is Sam, isn’t it?” she said.
“I want you to call me Duena. Say it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sam answered, wondering.
“Duena,” Sam repeated obediently.
“Take hold of me, Sam,” the girl said. “I want you to hold me close to you.”
Sam’s mind, which had said no so many hundreds of times during the last twenty-four hours, refused to let him obey. When he didn’t move, the girl threw her head back. With her right hand she pulled the hat from her head. Then she shook her head quickly and let her dark-brown hair ripple down the back of her neck. “You said you would do it,” she challenged, “now do it.” As she spoke the last three words, she closed the gap between them and rested her hands on his shoulders.
Without thinking, without caring for anything else, Sam put his arms around the girl before him. In a confused instant he knew she was warm, and yielding, and beautiful. He never wanted to let her go. The bars of the cell vanished in the surge of manhood he felt within himself.
“Look at me,” Duena said.
Sam looked. Sam had held girls in his arms before, but nothing in his lifetime had approached the sensation that engulfed him now.
“Now,” the girl said, “I want you to look at me and say, ‘Duena, I did not kill your father.’ Do it,” she commanded.
Sam spoke through the lump that crowded his throat. “Duena …” He tried again. “Duena, I didn’t kill your father.” Sam’s arms let go. They fell to his sides, and strong and courageous as he was, he suddenly wanted to cry. The reaction had been too much.
While he stood there, fighting to regain his composure, he felt the pressure of her hands on his shoulders grow stronger. Then they moved and locked behind his neck. “I believe you,” she said. And then, before he realized what was happening to him, Sam felt his head being pulled downward, the warmth of Duena’s body against his own, and then a cool; electrifying pressure as she pressed her lips against his.
She was herself again before he could move. Quite calmly she picked her hat up off the floor, looked for a mirror in a quick glance around the bare cell, and then took her small handbag from the end of the bunk. “How do I get out?” she asked.
Sam filled his lungs with air and called for Pete.
All through the long afternoon, Sam sat quietly and lived over and over again the few brief minutes that had given him a new reason to live. He even permitted himself to hope that he would emerge from this whole experience exonerated and respected by everyone. He was immeasurably strengthened by the knowledge that she believed in him even though he stood accused of murdering her own father. And her faith would bring him through!
Then he remembered something else. The ripe figure of smirking Delores Purdy rose in his mind. The oceans of eternity separated her from the girl he had held that day. But Delores said he had seduced her. What would Duena think when she learned of that?
The dream castles which Sam had allowed himself to build split and crumbled into piles of arid and spiritless sand.
CHAPTER 11
It was nearly dark when Virgil Tibbs drove the ancient car he had been loaned into the little filling station and garage operated by Jess the mechanic. The big man was working on a huge, air-conditioned Lincoln that was up on blocks in the rear of his garage.
“I need some gas, Jess,” Virgil said, “and I think maybe I can give you your car back tomorrow.”
“Leaving us?” Jess inquired as he started the pump.
“I think so,” Tibbs replied, “but that’s between you and me. Don’t let it out.”
Jess fitted the hose and began to feed gas into the tank. “I won’t.”
“Pretty fancy car.” Tibbs nodded toward the Lincoln. “How come you’re working on it?”
“Tourist car,” Jess answered laconically. “The garage on the highway gets ‘em, then they farm ‘em out to me to fix. I’d like to get what they do for my work.”
“They’ve got to pay their overhead,” Tibbs pointed out, “and if they’re on the highway, it must be a lot more.”
Jess finished filling the tank. “Wait a minute,” he said, and disappeared around the side of his shop. In three minutes he was back. “We figure on you eating with us,” he announced flatly.
“Thanks a lot,” Tibbs replied, “but I couldn’t.”
“I got a boy,” Jess explained, “he’s thirteen and he’s never seen a real live detective. I promised him.”
Silently Tibbs got out of the car. A few minutes later he sat down to eat a modest meat-loaf dinner which was obviously being stretched for his benefit. At his right, Jess’s son Andy watched his every movement until it was an embarrassment to eat. Finally, when the boy could contain himself no longer, he burst into speech. “Would you tell us about your first case?” he blurted, and waited with shining eyes.
Tibbs obliged. “It was a narcotics-smuggling problem. Somewhere in Pasadena little capsules of heroin were being transferred and sold. I was assigned to the case along with several officers.”
“Were you a detective then?” the boy interrupted.
“No, I wasn’t. But I had five years’ service on the force and they decided to give me a chance. Then one day at a downtown shoeshine stand a man who was getting his shoes shined finished his newspaper and offered it to another man, who was waiting for service. The point was that the first man had on a new pair of shoes that didn’t really need shining.”
“How did you find that out?”
“I was the shoeshine man,” Tibbs explained. “No one expected a Negro in a job like that to be a police officer.”
“So if’n you’d been white, you couldn’t of done it!” the boy burst out.
“I guess you’re right,” Tibbs agreed. “Though of course they’d have been caught sooner or later. But that was my real first case.”
Andy turned to his food and tried the difficult job of eating without taking his eyes off the sensational guest who was actually sitting at his father’s table.
When dinner was over, Tibbs excused himself, saying that he had urgent work to do. Since Jess’s house was a short block from the garage, where he had parked, Virgil said his good-byes at the door and began to walk down the darkened street to where he had left his car. His mind was reviewing carefully what he had to do next. It would not be pleasant and there would be problems. But, as he had learned many years ago, he would have to overcome problems if he wished to remain in his profession. It was harder here, that was all. This thought was still in his mind when a warning was flashed to him-too late.
He whirled to look into the faces of two men who had crept up behind him. As they lunged forward, he saw only that one of them held a heavy piece of wood in his hand and that he had it raised to strike. Tibbs braced himself, although he knew he was slightly off balance. As the man swung, Virgil leaped toward him and thrust his left shoulder into the man’s right armpit. The heavy piece of wood snapped downward. As it did, Tibbs grabbed the man’s forearm and at the same instant straightened his knees upward with all his strength.
The assailant’s arm was trapped on top of Tibb’s shoulder. His weight was thrust forward so that when Tibbs bent his back sharply forward, he had no choice but to ride over on Tibbs’s back until he was upside down. In the same coordinated motion, Tibbs yanked hard at the attacker’s trapped wrist. The man screamed as the back of his neck hit the concrete.
He was still falling when Tibbs let go of him and spun to face the other man, who was big but awkward, and had no weapon. Instead he doubled his fists and rushed in. Tibbs ducked under his first wild swing, grabbed his wrist, and spun around to the left. The big man, propelled by his own strength, twisted through the air and then fell heavily. Tibbs picked up the piece of firewood which so closely resembled the murder weapon. Then he looked up to see Jess’s boy, attracted by the noise, staring at him with mixed fright and disbelief.