Johnny Get Your Gun

by John Ball

  By a murderer.

  Billy had seized his radio, tortured it, and then hurled it to its helpless death.

  His emotion changed. Total grief began to give way to blinding red anger. In awful rage his body tightened so that he could hardly breathe. Then the lust for violent revenge seized complete control of him, a great sob escaped him, and his fingers locked fiercely around the broken case of his beloved, trusted, murdered companion.

  With frozen, terrible detachment he saw that for what Billy had done, Billy would have to pay. An obsession took hold of him, a total determination to do as he had been taught.

  Billy was too big for him in a fist fight. He could run faster, he was stronger, and he had much longer arms. But there was another remedy that would still Billy’s mocking laughter, a way to make him pay, and pay completely, for what he had done. He could have his revenge and have back his shattered honor, because he knew where his father kept his gun.

  2

  Estelle Hotchkiss was disturbed about her son.

  He had seemed all right when he had returned from school, but he had been quieter than usual and when she had spoken to him, he had replied only in monosyllables. She had at first dismissed this as another manifestation of the kaleidoscopic moods of a growing boy.

  Later on the phone had rung. Billy had answered it and had had a short conversation; when she had seen him shortly after that he had appeared to be downright terrified.

  “Is there anything wrong?” she had asked. He had answered something under his breath and she had let it pass, he was often that way when he had suffered a minor setback of one kind or another. He was having trouble with history and he had mentioned that there was going to be a test on the Revolutionary War or some such topic. That, she decided, was probably it—he knew that he had done badly on the examination and it was preying on his mind.

  It was good for him to worry a little, it might inspire him to study a little harder the next time.

  By five o’clock Billy’s odd mood had not passed, if anything it had deepened. By now Estelle had decided that something more than just an examination had gone wrong and that her son would tell her about it in his own good time. She went quietly about her normal affairs and waited for the moment to arrive.

  The first real indication came when she said to him, “Billy, go outside and see if the paper has come, will you?”

  “I don’t want to.” It was an abrupt, unusual answer.

  She stopped the work she was doing and looked at him. “Billy, I asked you nicely to go and see if the paper is here, now please do it.”

  “I can’t.”

  Those two words caused her a sudden chill, her son had never spoken to her like that before. She put down the carrot she had been scraping, laid the tool aside, and turned to give him her full attention.

  Billy stood there, not defiantly, but with his head down.

  “Billy, look at me,” she said.

  Reluctantly he obeyed.

  “Ever since you came home from school you’ve been acting very strangely. I know that something is wrong. I want you to tell me what it is.”

  After a long moment he lowered his head again and remained silent. For a moment she thought that it was stubbornness, then she sensed that it was far more than that. She dropped down until she was sitting on her heels and he could not escape her by looking down any longer.

  “I want to know what’s wrong,” she repeated.

  After another long pause Billy answered, dragging out the words only because he had to. “I can’t tell you,” he said.

  Estelle Hotchkiss had grown up with three brothers, one older and two younger than herself, so she had a better than average insight into the sometimes strange world of boys. “Something happened at school, didn’t it,” she said.

  Billy hesitated for another long interval and then nodded his head.

  “Did you have trouble with one of your teachers?”

  “No.”

  From his tone, and the way in which he spoke, she concluded reluctantly that he was in some manner in the wrong, otherwise he would have been more anxious to defend himself. She pressed her lips together for a moment, thought carefully, and then looked at her boy once more.

  “Is that why you can’t go and bring in the paper?” she asked.

  Billy’s voice was barely above a whisper. “Yes,” he confessed.

  “Then we’ll go out and bring it in together.”

  Suddenly he became alive; he grasped her arm with almost frantic strength and his eyes widened in terror. “No, no!” he exploded.

  She looked at him steadily. “Billy, what have you done?”

  When he did not answer she started toward the front door, almost dragging him with her.

  “Don’t go out there!” he shouted.

  That settled it, something very serious was wrong. Her voice changed as sympathy gave way to authority. “Billy, I want you to tell me this minute what happened. If you don’t I’m going to call your father on the phone. This can’t go on any longer.”

  Billy’s eyes were suddenly wet with tears and she knew that he was close to the breaking point. “I’m going to bring in the paper,” she said. It had suddenly occurred to her that there was something in it that Billy was most anxious she not see. She resolved to get the paper and to at least scan every item in it. Nothing else she could think of made sense. Without saying anything she forced him to let go of her arm and started for the door.

  Then it came. In a voice that she had never heard him use before Billy cried to her, “There’s a boy out there with a gun and he’ll shoot you!”

  She gasped for breath; she whirled toward her son. “A real gun?” she demanded.

  “Yes!” The words came in a torrent now; Billy’s hands were clenched into fists as he fought to make her believe him. “I broke his radio. I didn’t mean to do it, but I did. He called me up a little while ago. He told me he had his father’s gun and that he was going to come here and kill me!”

  There was a pause, a cold moment of frozen horror, then Estelle Hotchkiss looked carefully at her son. He was not lying, she could see that. In three quick steps she reached the telephone and dialed operator.

  “Get me the police,” she said, and her own voice was shaking.

  The desk sergeant who took her call passed a message to radio dispatch within seconds. It went on the air at once to officers Dick Stone and Barry Rothberg who were cruising less than two miles from the Hotchkiss home; within five minutes they were ringing the bell at the front door. At the sight of their uniforms Estelle swung the door wide and with a tight voice said, “Please come in.”

  A painful few minutes passed while Billy reluctantly told his story, shamefaced at having to admit what he had done, terrorized by the realization of what he had begun.

  As soon as he had finished Stone looked at his partner. “I’ll go outside and have a look around,” he said. “Suppose you stay with these people until I come back.”

  “I’ll go,” Rothberg volunteered.

  Stone did not bother to answer, he loosened his side-arm in its holster and then went promptly out the front door. He paused on the flagstone entryway for a few seconds and looked about carefully, particularly at the places where someone might be concealed. Across the street there was a parklike wooded area which had been left undeveloped; Stone noted that it would offer good concealment for anyone who might want to watch the house without being seen. Keeping a careful lookout, he walked with normal speed to the patrol car and picked up the mike. Still keeping his attention focused on the area of trees and shrubs which was much too conveniently located, he reported in.

  At that hour most of the members of the day staff, including the investigative and juvenile divisions, had already gone home, but there were others who remained on the job. Community disturbances, traffic problems, fires, crime, and other matters which require police action do not obligingly cease at five, in fact the coming of darkness seems to stimulate them into greater activ
ity. Most of the night work was done in Pasadena by the uniformed division, but there were others always available to respond when they were needed.

  Virgil Tibbs was at his desk because he was scheduled for a court appearance and he wanted to be absolutely sure that his preparation was complete. Fresh in his mind was a fiasco of a few weeks before when a confidence man he had spent weeks tracking down went free because he had not been formally notified of his constitutional rights. This time the accused would not be able to get off the hook on any such excuse, but his attorney would be looking for any loophole. Tibbs was determined not to provide one.

  When his phone rang he picked it up, spoke his name, and then listened. Within a few seconds he began to jot notes on a pad of ruled paper which was always in a convenient position. As he wrote down the address he was given he visualized the area and the economic bracket of the people who lived there.

  “I’ll go right out,” he said. Automatically he set aside the plans he had made for the evening; it was most unlikely that the sort of thing he had just been told about could be resolved quickly. He could not take time even to stop for a quick hamburger, when people wanted police help every minute was magnified.

  Thirteen minutes later Estelle Hotchkiss heard the doorbell ring once, discreetly, and hurried to answer it. Her husband had unfortunately picked this time to be out of his office and he was late coming home, so the full burden still rested in her hands. When she swung the door open she found herself face-to-face with a Negro; this was not what she had been expecting and for a moment she was taken aback. Then she looked again and noted that he was slender, somewhere in his early thirties, and dressed in a dark-colored, lightweight summer suit of unmistakable quality.

  “I’m from the Pasadena police, Mrs. Hotchkiss,” he said. “My name is Tibbs.”

  His speech confirmed what Estelle’s quick eye had already told her, that here was a well-bred person. She had no Negro friends, but she did know that there were many Negroes of superior attainment; she was prepared to accept this man in that category. “Please come in, Mr. Tibbs,” she invited. The tightness was still in her voice, but she knew he would understand that.

  Virgil Tibbs walked in just as a dark blue Continental swung into the driveway. The man who got out was on the right side of forty, moderately tall, and cut from the pattern which shapes the modern businessman. He glanced quickly at the police car parked before his door, at the unmarked car with the UHF antenna which was immediately behind it, then at his wife who was still framed in the doorway. He hurried quickly across the lawn.

  “What…?” he asked, making the single word do the work of a sentence.

  “Nothing—yet,” Estelle replied. She did not need to add that she wanted his help desperately—her face showed that.

  When Ralph Hotchkiss came into the foyer of his home he found Virgil Tibbs standing there, quietly waiting for Estelle to explain his presence. “Billy’s in trouble,” she said. “This is Mr. Tibbs from the police.”

  Her husband looked startled and concerned. “Come in,” he said, and led the way into the living room where Barry Rothberg was seated beside Billy. One glance at his boy told him that his son had done something seriously wrong. He was relieved only to see that he was apparently all right, at least he had not been run over by a car.

  “Billy, this is Mr. Tibbs,” Estelle said, and then realized that without thinking she had presented an adult to an eleven-year-old child. She looked toward the man who had come to help her and apologized with her eyes; Tibbs saw it and understood. Few people took the trouble to be courteous to policemen any more; his receptions in the past had ranged from simply being taken for granted to downright hostility. There had been exceptions, like the Nunn family at Sun Valley Lodge, but they were relatively few in number.

  Hotchkiss waved Virgil to a chair and then sat down beside his son. He rested his arm across his boy’s shoulders as a symbol of his support and then looked at Tibbs. “I take it that you’re in charge,” he said.

  Tibbs nodded. “I only know a little of what has happened,” he began, and looked at Billy. “Suppose, son, that you start at the beginning and tell your father and me the whole story. Don’t leave anything out, even if you think that it’s not important. I want to know about everything just as it happened, do you understand?”

  Billy looked up once into his father’s face in a silent plea.

  “Well, there’s this funny kid at school, his name’s Johnny McGuire.” He stopped.

  “Funny in what way?” Tibbs asked.

  Billy squirmed and rubbed his palms together before he replied. “Well, he’s just funny. He talks kinda funny-like and his clothes are real funny too. He’s got this one jacket and it’s all worn out—his elbows stick out. But he still wears it all the time. And he goes right off his rocker if you kid him a little. He can’t take a joke, he gets real hot right away.”

  “Would you say that he is quick-tempered?”

  Billy hesitated. “No, I guess not exactly. He’s not a bad kid, just that he can’t stand being ribbed.”

  “Do you play with him very much? Normally is he a friend of yours?”

  “No,” Billy admitted. “He doesn’t have any friends because he’s new and he’s funny—like I told you. I tease him some, I guess, because it’s a lot of fun. I guess I shouldn’t.”

  “You’ve teased him before, then?”

  Billy nodded.

  “Suppose now you tell us what happened.”

  Billy unfolded his story. He did not realize that the few questions he had answered had been designed to warm him up, to get him talking, he only knew that he would have to tell it all again and that now he could hold nothing back. He felt a sense of relief as he unloaded his burden. He described how he had snatched away the radio and how he had been responsible for its being broken.

  “What happened then?” Tibbs prompted.

  “I said I was sorry,” Billy answered, “but he didn’t pay any attention. He just cried over it like it was a dead dog or something, I told you he was funny. I know I took away his radio, but what’s listening to the radio? Anybody can do that anytime.”

  “Not if he doesn’t have one,” Virgil pointed out. “If you wanted to hear the ball game very badly and didn’t have any kind of a radio, you might be pretty unhappy about it.”

  “There’s lots of radios,” Billy countered.

  Tibbs looked for a moment at Ralph Hotchkiss who nodded that he understood. At his age Billy did not have any conception of financial limitations, he had never experienced any and to him the worn-out jacket was a symbol of eccentricity.

  “With Mr. Tibbs’s permission I want to say something right here,” Hotchkiss said. “As soon as we are through here, Billy, you and I are going out to buy a new radio for the McGuire boy. It’s going to be a good one and you’re going to have to pay for it out of your own money. Then together we’re going to call on the McGuires. You have a very big apology to make and it’s going to be tonight.”

  The words had the wrong effect. The boy who a moment before had been contrite and submissive was transformed; his hands tightened into fists and he drew his feet back under himself as though he wanted to leap away—to seek shelter somewhere and hide. “No!” he exploded. “You don’t understand. Johnny McGuire wants to kill me!”

  Ralph Hotchkiss tightened his arm across his son’s shoulders. “Take it easy, Billy,” he cautioned. “You’re getting much too excited. How old did you say that Johnny McGuire is?”

  “Nine, maybe…”

  “All right then, he’s a little boy—smaller than you are, you said that yourself. I don’t think that we need to worry too much about his trying to do something desperate.”

  Billy grew icy cold and made a determined effort to be believed. “Dad, you don’t understand. Johnny’s father’s got a gun, he keeps it loaded in the house.”

  Hotchkiss looked quickly at Tibbs. The officer nodded his head grimly. “It’s very common,” he said. “We advise
citizens to register their guns for their own protection, but the great majority don’t bother. There are hundreds of accidental shootings every year. And a lot more that aren’t accidental.”

  “By children?” Hotchkiss asked, incredulity in his voice.

  “Normally no, but an angry or badly upset child who has access to a loaded gun…” The sentence hung in the air.

  Quietly and calmly Virgil Tibbs continued the thread of the interrogation. “Billy, I want to ask you two or three things and I want you to answer me as carefully and as accurately as you can, do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tibbs knew then that the persistent barrier which his race often imposed in his work was not present here. He went on, simply a plainclothes policeman talking to a very upset young boy.

  “Have you ever been to Johnny McGuire’s home?”

  “No. He doesn’t have a home; they live in an apartment.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I don’t know. I just know, that’s all.”

  “Does Johnny know where you live?”

  “Yes.” Virgil detected a downward inflection and took note of it.

  “Has he ever been here?”

  “Once.” The tinge of guilt was still present.

  “Did you invite him over?”

  “Yes.” It was more pronounced now.

  “This is very important, Billy, and I want you to give me a truthful answer, do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why did you invite Johnny McGuire to come here?”

  Billy hesitated and then shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I just invited him.”

  “A little while ago you told me that he hadn’t any friends because he was ‘funny,’” Virgil said, speaking very clearly. “You implied, if you know what that word means, that you didn’t want to be his friend either, for the same reason. Yet you invited him to your home.”

  Dead silence.

  Tibbs waited until the full meaning had sunk in, then he continued with calculated quiet and clarity. “Billy, you have a very beautiful home here—a much better than average home. You realize that, don’t you?”