A/N: Sometimes you find a friend you already had. Based on the 1967 film "In the Heat of the Night" and since I haven't seen the television series it quite probably differs from that.
Call for Backup
Man's best support is a very dear friend - Cicero
Virgil Tibbs stepped off the 12:35 from Brownsville train and his feet fell onto the platform of the small station located in Sparta, Mississippi. Scarcely five minutes later the train was already starting to pull out, its business complete. Few passengers ever wanted to get on at Sparta, and even fewer wanted to get off. The only reason for Virgil to be here was to visit with his elderly mother, and he had no intention of driving his own car down from his home in Philadelphia.
As he entered the passenger waiting area, he saw a familiar face. Attached to the familiar face was a heavyset man who had managed to find a crate to prop his feet up on in front of the bench upon which he sat. The eyes behind the wire-rimmed glasses watched him, not with a look of suspicion but rather one of amusement. "Did they throw you off the train or did they at least stop?" Police Chief Bill Gillespie asked.
Tibbs looked back over his shoulder and saw that no sign of the train remained. "They stopped - barely. How are you, Chief?" he asked as he stuck out his hand. Gillespie, who was already moving his feet off the crate, stood up and accepted the handshake.
"About the same. I tried calling you at work but your boss said you were heading down here, so I decided to wait. For the record, I thanked him again for your help with our little problem." Tibbs had been unlucky enough to be a stranger in town in September of the previous year when a murder had occurred - a murder of the most important visitor the town had had since Woodrow Wilson had come through during the election of 1912. Phillip Colbert represented the biggest boon to the Sparta economy in some time with the planned building of his new Electronic Systems Center and the thousand jobs created, and only the solving of the murder with Virgil's help had kept the planned factory moving forward.
"I know. He, ah, made several comments about me traveling the country solving crimes. Is there a reason why you wanted to call me?"
"Oh no. I always make long distance calls just for the hell of it - Courtney forgets how to do it if I don't ask every week or so. Let me give you a ride to your mother's and I'll tell you about it." Gillespie wasn't much older than Tibbs but he let the younger man carry the suitcase outside and to the squad car, where he put it in the back seat.
"Five blocks that way and make a right," Tibbs said as they entered the roadway.
The squad car traveled slowly down the road, taking its time as Gillespie scanned the area. He wasn't looking for anything really, but it was a habit that was hard to break. "I needed someone's opinion on something, and the more I thought about it the less I wanted to ask anyone around here. I...well...respect your opinions. I may not agree with all of 'em, but I respect them."
"You don't respect other people's?" Gillespie had already confessed when they worked together that the townspeople weren't particularly keen on him being the Chief of Police. Even Mayor Schubert didn't give the chief his full support, being slightly aghast at some of the 'progressive leanings' Gillespie showed.
"You'd be surprised. Besides, this is a...kind of a professional thing. We're both professionals. Something has come up that I don't rightly know how to handle. I figure maybe...well...maybe you run into something like it up North there in Philadelphia." Tibbs was a homicide detective with that city's police force, and it was his expertise that had helped crack the Colbert case. However, there was resistance to the idea of a black man being a policeman here, something that wasn't limited to age. The older generation like the plantation owner Eric Endicott saw themselves above the black population, while some of the younger people saw them as below - it was a subtle difference and in the end amounted to the same division in the social structure of the town. Even Gillespie had to overcome his prejudice, although he had to admit part of it was geographic in nature. It was really hard to trust a northerner. "How do you feel about women?"
Tibbs stared at the driver for a moment to see if it was a joke, then couldn't help but laugh anyway. Gillespie wasn't laughing though, and Tibbs sobered himself to ask "I like them just fine. I told you I almost married one once. You called me because you're having woman trouble? Turn at the next corner."
"No, I'm not having woman trouble! Not yet." The car made a right turn.
"Three blocks and make a left."
"You're momma lives in the poor part of town."
"It's the black part of town, but here it means the same thing like it does in most places." The houses, which had been in generally fair shape, were looking more run down as they drove. There were very few houses in the town that were new, although the hope was that might change after the factory was completed. "So what's the trouble?"
"You and I know the times are changing. Things just aren't the way they used to be. It wouldn't be so bad if everyone was either the old-fashioned way or the newfangled way. The trouble is when people go to mix up the two ways; change is too fast for the old ways and too slow for the new ones."
"Welcome to every generation this country has had. The only difference now is that you get to see it on television every night on the news."
"Oh yeah. Those riots in Detroit you had in July sure made the news. Have anything like that in Philadelphia?"
"Not yet," Tibbs answered. "We just keep our fingers crossed. It's not everyone that's causing the trouble, but some people are just itching for a chance to fight and looking for a reason. Or an excuse."
"Same here. It's one thing to have a little fun, another when people get hurt. We're not big enough for protest parades, and too poor to have a university for the students to refuse to go to class for."
"I thought this was about women."
"I'm getting to it!" Gillespie yelled, then lowered his voice again. "Everything's changing. Businesses shutting down. Kids going off to the big city or to go fight in some war. And I'm about to get a police officer I don't know if this town is ready for. Damn it, I don't know if I'm ready for it."
"Chief, you're telling me you're finally going to get a black police officer?"
"Oh no Tibbs, it's worse than that."
"A right here," Tibbs interrupted as he pointed to a house on the right.
Gillespie pulled the car up in front of the house alongside the street and shoved it into park. "I had a woman apply to be a police officer."
"And?" Tibbs asked after waiting in vain for elaboration.
"Isn't that enough? It's hard enough to get through a day without wanting to fire Courtney, Harold and every one of the other officers I got. But at least I can talk to them because they're men."
"And you can't talk to a woman?"
"Of course I can talk to a woman. But, you know, not like a colleague. I never worked with no woman officer." Gillespie was genuinely flustered. "What if I say something stupid. What if she's smarter than me? I interviewed her, and she knows her stuff. Came back here from San Francisco."
"Chief, we have women on the force in Philadelphia. They're fine officers. They're just as capable as men, although to be fair..." Tibbs said to hold off an objection "...they generally aren't physically as strong as men. But you know the most important part of being a police officer is up here," he said while tapping his head. "Just treat her like one of the men."
"How many women detectives do you have up there in your department where you've learned to do that."
"Well, um, none actually. But I bet I could."
"See! You don't know for sure since you don't work with one either."
"But it takes time, Chief, you know that. You get hired and they put you on a beat and then you work your way through until you advance and if you're good enough you can apply to become a detective. I don't know about here."
"We haven't got one. Just me and the Keystone Kops. I don't know that we could afford a real detective."
"Then you can use a good police officer."
"But..." Gillespie said before wringing his hands. "But what if I start to like her? What if she starts to like me and then we start sneaking off to the shore to watch the sunset and then folks will start to talk and the guys...well I'll never hear the end of it now, will I? What if she gets hurt on a call?"
"Do you like her?" Tibbs asked. He could see his mother peeking through the curtains at them from the house.
"I don't even KNOW her! I was just sayin' is all."
"Well Chief, it sure seems like you've put a lot of thought into this if you've got everything up to the honeymoon figured out. Listen, you owe it to her to give her a chance and you owe it to the town to have a competent officer. Maybe nothing will happen. Things are very different in San Francisco and she might not like it here. Maybe she's just as scared of working with you as you are of working with her. All I'm saying is don't start naming your children before she's even accepted the position. If something starts to develop, then you'll have to work out something different."
"I don't know."
"Do you want me to interview her? I could pretend to be homicide expert."
"You ARE a homicide expert."
"Then it shouldn't be hard to convince her. I could feel her out, see if she's as hard-headed as you were when we first met."
Gillespie hemmed and hawed as he considered the offer, refusing to acknowledge the joke at his expense. "You'd do that for me?"
"I'd be happy to, on a personal and a professional level." Both men got out of the car, and the chief pulled the suitcase out of the back seat and handed it to Tibbs. "I'll be in town until Tuesday. Let me know when you need me."
"I'll do that. Thanks," he said as they shook hands. "Do you want me to have Jess fix you up with a car again?"
"No, I don't plan on canvasing the countryside trying to solve a murder this time around."
"Virgil?" an older woman called from the door of the house. "Why don't you come in and have some iced tea? And ask the Chief in, too."
"Thank you ma'am, I don't want to interrupt your time with your son."
"Nonsense young man. Any friend of Virgil is welcome here."
Virgil smiled and lowered his voice. "The tea is a bit on the sweet side, but Mama makes a coffee cake that can't be beat. Come on, Chief."
Gillespie raised his voice. "Thank you ma'am, I do believe I'll stay for a few minutes."
The End
A/N: A great film, but I honestly don't remember anything about the second film and never saw the third. (After the first film they changed Tibb's backstory and put him in San Francisco.) For the record, Philadelphia didn't get its first female homicide detective until the 1970s.
I don't think any of my stories have started with an epigraph, so I thought I would pick one at random and go from there to depict the evolving relationship between Gillespie and Tibbs where both might call the other friend and then be surprised to hear themselves say it.
Now that I actually live in the south, I can see some racial bias even today that I was unaware of growing up in California. Change isn't ALWAYS bad.
