Johnny Get Your Gun Page 8

  Checking again that no bus was visible for several blocks, he began to walk southward in the general direction of Los Angeles. That helped him to feel much better, he was already on his way to Anaheim and every step that he took put the nightmare of the previous evening farther behind him. A few other people were beginning to appear now, in a little while he would no longer look so alone.

  When he reached the next corner he walked to the curb and again looked up the street behind him for any sign of an approaching bus. At his feet there was a loose pile of throwaway newspapers, put there for some deliveryman to pick up.

  Again there was no sign of a bus, but coming down the street less than a block away a police car was approaching, cruising slowly close to the curb. On the instant Johnny was flooded with a new and fearful sense of disaster, his confidence vanished and fear gripped him. He knew with frightening immediacy that he was still a hunted creature, but it was too late to run and hide.

  Swiftly he bent over and picked up as many of the papers as he could with one hand. He threw them over his arm to conceal the shoe box, then squatted down and put another bunch on top. As he finished, the police car pulled up beside him and stopped.

  There were two uniformed men in it; the one closest to him leaned out the window and said, “Morning, son, how are you feeling?”

  “Fine.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mike.”

  “How long have you been delivering papers, Mike?”

  “About two months.”

  “Have you seen another boy around here this morning, one with a worn-out red jacket?”

  Johnny shook his head. “I just got here,” he replied.

  “OK, thanks a lot.” The policeman waved a hand as the car moved away and continued down the street.

  For the next ten minutes Johnny played his role as a newsboy, fearful only that the rightful holder of the job would arrive and challenge him. He walked rapidly down Orange Grove Avenue tossing a paper on the sidewalk or lawn before each house. As he did so he kept a careful watch back down the street for any sign of a bus that would rescue him from his precarious situation. He had almost run out of papers when he saw at last the square, flat face of the big vehicle two and a half blocks away. Breaking into a run, he dropped his remaining papers and reached the bus stop just in time to signal it to stop.

  Having ridden a bus once before on his own, he climbed up into the vehicle with assurance and offered the driver fifty cents.

  “Los Angeles?” the man asked.

  Johnny nodded and received a penny in change. He walked back and sat down full of a wonderful sense of escape. He had never enjoyed a bus ride so much; he was unhappy only when it stopped for other passengers and delayed his progress. He wished also that he could talk to his mother and tell her that he was all right. If she had been with him, then he would have felt infinitely better.

  Maggie McGuire sat before her kitchen table, staring unseeing through the wall that faced her. She was alone. Mike had gone to work. He had wanted to stay home and wait for news of his son, but with the expensive citation hanging over his head he had reluctantly decided that he could not afford even a momentary loss of income. Maggie had promised to call him the moment there was any word.

  The considerations of money and the hard realities of day-to-day living washed over her like breakers running up a sandy beach and then retreating back into the anonymous vastness from which they had come. Her baby was gone, and that single fact dominated her. She understood that he had killed another boy and that he would have to go to prison, but if she could only hold him for just one long, all-engulfing minute in her arms, then, she felt, she would be able to face up to almost anything.

  He had been with her here less than twenty-four hours ago, and she had given him little or no attention. If she had just taken the time to look at him she might have seen the bulge of the fatal gun in his pocket or stuck in his clothing, but she hadn’t bothered. Now, in the bitterness of her loss, she told herself that she was an unfit mother who had not taken proper care of the precious life entrusted to her. She put her head down and cried a little more. It was then that the phone rang.

  Anxiously, fearfully, she picked it up.

  “Mrs. McGuire?”

  “Yes, yes!”

  A worn-out, clacky voice began to recite a sales pitch about carpet and upholstery cleaning. The crews would be in the neighborhood and a free estimate…

  “No!” she cried, and hung up the accursed instrument. Helplessly she beat her hands against the top of the table.

  The phone rang again. “Yes?” she snapped.

  A thin, small voice said, “Hello, Mommy.”

  She grasped the phone as though she could make the voice at the other end come closer. “Johnny?” she asked.

  “I just wanted to tell you that I’m all right,” her son said.

  Her voice went dry and she could barely speak. “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Right here in the phone booth, Mommy.” A slight whimpering sound came over the wire. “Mommy, my radio’s broken.”

  “I know, Johnny, that’s all right. Don’t worry, you’ll get a new one.”

  “Is Daddy mad?”

  “No, Daddy isn’t mad. He knows that you didn’t break it.” A sense of reality began to come back to her and she tried to think. “Tell me where you are, dear, and I’ll come.” She knew when she spoke those words that she had no means of transportation, but she would even have called a taxi—anything—to reach him.

  “Mommy, I think I’m in trouble.” The voice was a little softer, a thread of guilt running through the words.

  “Johnny, I don’t care! Tell me where you are, Mommy wants you!”

  “Mommy, I took Daddy’s gun and I shot a nigger boy with it.”

  Maggie could stand no more, raw emotion shattered the little composure she had and caution deserted her.

  “Johnny, I don’t care if you did kill that boy, come home—Daddy will take care of you!”

  There was a fearful silence.

  “Mommy,” came a very small voice, “did you say I killed him?”

  “Johnny…” she began when another voice cut into the line. “Your three minutes are up. Please signal when you are finished.”

  After that she heard nothing for three or four seconds, then the mechanical sound of the handset on the other end being replaced. The connection was broken.

  She wiped her eyes with the backs of her trembling hands, picked up the card which was next to the telephone and dialed.

  When she had an answer she said, “Mr. Tibbs, please,” and waited.

  9

  As he drove back toward his office, Virgil Tibbs realized that he would have to snap out of it. It did no good to tell himself that he did not know which way to turn next, it was his job to do the turning.

  By the time he had parked and climbed one flight to the second floor he had managed to gather the right amount of resolve. He said hello to Bob Nakamura, glanced once at the accumulated pile of work which awaited him, and then sat down as a man should who is equal to the challenges before him. But before he could begin on anything, Bob had news for him.

  “The cat’s loose on your kid with the gun,” he said. “It’s on all the newscasts. You’ve had several frantic telephone calls, the usual sort. Someone from the National Rifle Association wants you to call him back. I could use your help on this double header we had last night, apparently the same gang pulled both jobs, but the captain says you can’t be spared until the youngster has been picked up and disarmed. Any light?”

  Tibbs shook his head. As Bob watched he pulled open a drawer and took out his service revolver. Very carefully he removed the six bullets that it contained. Then he checked the barrel, carefully reinspected the cylinder, and absolutely verified that the weapon was empty. “I want you to help me with something,” he said in a voice that was collected and businesslike. “Come here, will you?”

  Bob got to his feet and t
ook the gun when it was offered to him.

  “Check that it’s empty.”

  Nakamura broke the Colt .38 open and gave it a careful scrutiny. “OK.”

  “All right, now turn your back on me. Imagine that you’re holding a bead on someone about twelve or fifteen feet in front of you.”

  “Do I aim for his head or do I know what I’m doing?”

  “Aim for the abdomen, but assume, if you can, that you have no real intention of shooting. You’re not a marksman, you’re a small boy who knows very little about handling a gun.”

  The Nisei detective turned so that he was facing the window and then pointed the gun steadily at an invisible target. Virgil let him stand there for a good half minute, until he knew that his partner’s reflexes would be automatically slowed down. Then, without warning, he threw his arms around him from behind, catching him just above the elbows. Bob jerked back.

  “Now,” Tibbs asked, “under those circumstances could you have pulled the trigger accidentally?”

  “Definitely, in fact it’s possible that I did, I had my finger inside the guard.”

  “Next I want to try something else. As you were.”

  Obediently Bob resumed his pose, holding the gun horizontally in front of him as he imagined a child might do. Once more Virgil quickly grabbed his arms, held him for a few seconds, and then attempted to fit his right hand over the gun, his fingers on top of Nakamura’s. Immediately his partner drew away and, turning to his left, aimed the gun squarely at Tibbs. “Is that what you wanted me to do?” he asked.

  “Exactly. Now the question is just this: if for any reason I had wanted to, could I have forced you to fire the gun a second time? And if so, could I have guided your aim?”

  Bob thought for a moment. “Possibly,” he said with considerable hesitation. “But it would have to be a very long shot. The moment you let go with your right hand to grab the gun it was easy for me to twist away from you. Even assuming that I’m an untrained small boy.”

  “Then I’m satisfied on that point. I wasn’t before.”

  Tibbs took the gun back, reloaded it, and replaced it in his desk drawer.

  “Care to tell me what it’s all about?” Nakamura asked.

  “There isn’t really anything to tell. I noticed something last night that set me thinking. It was pretty uncertain, but I wanted to check it out anyway.”

  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.