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His partner was ahead of him. “You were impersonating someone right now; a look at his record might be interesting.”

Virgil nodded. “I’m planning to check it. You see, the gun was fired twice last night, during the scuffle I mean, when an older boy tried to grab Johnny McGuire. I saw a possibility that the bigger boy might have had something to do with that second shot.”

“Did he ever have possession of the gun?”

“No.”

“Then after the experiment we just tried, Virg, I can’t see it. I’m sure you’d never get a conviction in court, even if you could show murderous hostility.”

Tibbs did not reply, too many other ideas were piling up in his mind. He tried to deal with the matter of Johnny McGuire first, and against his better judgment decided to hope for the best. A small boy, even with sixteen dollars in his pocket, could not keep going on his own for too long. Probably he would have discarded his gun as too conspicuous, too heavy, or too dangerous to carry any longer. In that case after he was picked up, the job of recovering the weapon should be simple. That would be the easy way.

At any moment, he fervently hoped, the phone would ring with the news that Johnny had been seen somewhere or had managed to find his way home. Every patrol car, every policeman on duty, even the law enforcement personnel of all the nearby communities were now on the lookout for him. He rationalized that it would be the soundest procedure to sit tight and wait for a break.

Then he knew that he couldn’t do that. The problem of Johnny McGuire, grave as it already was, had been intensified by the shadow of the militant black power advocates. These hardened professional agitators and their followers could descend on Pasadena and whip up a first-class riot in short order, despite the fact that police riot-handling tactics had improved considerably since the days of the terror in Watts.

He picked up the phone, but before he could place his call he was told that he had visitors in the lobby. Three minutes later Charles Dempsey and a young Negro girl were shown into his office. The boy acknowledged an introduction to Nakamura and then presented the young lady. “This is Luella,” he said. “She wanted to come along.”

Virgil placed chairs for them and invited them to sit down. The girl did so, but Dempsey preferred to remain on his feet. “I wanna find out what’s happenin’,” he began abruptly. “Because, man, you got trouble. Big trouble.”

“I’m in the trouble business,” Tibbs answered. “What do you want to tell me?”

“Well, right off Willie was a mighty popular boy, he’d got a lot of friends. An’ a lot of the guys are already lookin’ for the white boy that shot him.”

Tibbs turned to the girl. “Do you agree with that?” he asked.

Luella took a few moments to consider her answer. She was about fifteen and he noted that she was undeniably ripe for her age. Her features were somewhat on the aquiline side, her waist slender, her breasts conspicuously high and full. Her voice, when she spoke, gave evidence of some training. “Willie was a real comer, Mr. Tibbs. He was a smart boy, mighty good-looking, and he had a lot of real talent. He was going places.”

“Damn right,” Sport added. “An’ I wanna tell ya that if any o’ our guys get hold of that white boy with the gun, somethin’s gonna happen.”

“What do you think I should do?” Virgil asked.

Dempsey responded at once to the flattery; he leaned forward against the desk to emphasize his words. “Well, if you can put out that you got this kid in the can, and no smart lawyer’s gonna get him right out again, it might make people feel a lot better. See he didn’t shoot no ordinary kid-he shot a black boy. You know how things are.”

“I know.”

“Well maybe you don’ know that right now they’re gettin’ a meetin’ organized down in Brookside Park. And if it gets swingin’, it ain’t gonna be no picnic, you can bet on that.”

Tibbs’s face tightened for just a moment. “I want to make something clear to you,” he said. “The person who shot your friend is still a little boy. That doesn’t excuse or undo what he did, but a child of nine isn’t wholly responsible for his actions.”

The girl nodded, but Sport looked at him through narrowed eyes. “You sound like you’re for this white kid. Are you with us or ain’t ya?”

A pencil snapped between Virgil’s fingers. “That has nothing to do with it, and you’re old enough to know it. If you must look at it that way, then color me blue-I’m a policeman.”

“Well I thought…” the youngster began, and then stopped.

“You mean that you’re going to let the white boy go?” the girl asked. Her voice rose at the end of the sentence.

“No, of course not,” Tibbs answered. “Nobody shoots anybody around here and gets away with it-or if he does it’s because we did our very best and failed. But a murder case is never closed until it’s resolved. And for that matter…” A shadow seemed to pass across his dark features. Whatever he was going to say remained unspoken, instead he added quietly, “You should know better than to ask that of me-or any other police officer.”

“Look,” Sport said, “I’m the big man around where I live, you just ask anybody. You get that kid an’ I can make you look good-the cops, I mean. You remember ’bout Watts? Well, a cop, he started that. I don’t want nobody more to get hurt, so I can help you maybe, huh?”

“Fine,” Tibbs answered. “That’s a deal. Suppose you begin by passing the word that if anybody locates the boy, don’t try to take him, call me. I’ll see that you get all the credit, but your people are too valuable to get shot, OK?”

Dempsey revealed a wide toothy grin. “Leave it ta me,” he promised.

As soon as he was well out of the office Bob Nakamura shook his head. “Virg, that line about his people being too valuable to get shot was a classic.”

“It’s perfectly true,” Tibbs said.

“Of course it is, it’s just the way that you put it. It implied, of course, that we’re expendable and he ate it up. I don’t think he’s quite as stupid as he pretends to be.”

“Of course not.” Tibbs picked up his phone once more, called records and asked for a check on Charles Dempsey, about eighteen, Negro, and a self-proclaimed leader in the youth group. As soon as he had that working he called the MTA bus information number and inquired about the early evening schedule on the line which ran close to Billy Hotchkiss’s home. After a few seconds delay he got exactly what he had suspected-confirmation that a bus had gone past at almost the same time that the shot had been fired. After that there had not been another for a full hour.

He silently cursed the luck that had given Johnny McGuire that convenient ride; if the shot he had fired into the Hotchkiss house had been delayed for only two or three minutes then the search for the boy would almost certainly have been successful and a tragic death would have been avoided. The more than ten years he had spent in police work had taught him, through frustrating experience, how often perverse breaks can go against the members of the force; for every good one that came along at least three others seemed always to go the wrong way.

The phone rang. It was records reporting that Charles Dempsey had had a total of six traffic moving violations, had been uncooperative twice when cited, and had been arrested fourteen months previously on suspicion of armed robbery. When faced with this last charge he had provided an alibi which had checked out. He had given enough information to establish his own innocence, but had refused to volunteer anything more.

Tibbs evaluated this. Being uncooperative while being cited was all too common-some of the most prominent citizens of Pasadena had that noted in their records. Nobody likes traffic tickets. Since the alibi had been proved, the armed robbery charge was out. It boiled down to a somewhat above average number of traffic tickets, two of which had made him mad. For a late teen-ager coming from a marginal environment it was, all things considered, a satisfactory report.