In the Heat of the Night

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’sshoulder. 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.
    “Andy, go get your father as fast as you can. Then call the police and tell them to come here.”
    Andy ran off