For NaNoWriMo: The Field of Blood, part 5
This portion was written on Nov. 6.
You can get caught up on part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 -- after completing the initial portions of the investigation of a Black man's gruesome death by hanging, Captain Hamilton is interviewed by two newspapers with very different editorial stances, whose representatives have about as much ability to get along as the gray and the blue in Virginia long ago ...
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Captain Hamilton restrained a laugh as both George Kraft and Malik Thompson gave him a look that would have killed if looks could kill. The one didn't appreciate being ordered around by a White man; the other did not appreciate being ordered around by “a bleeding-heart liberal lawman married to a Yankee woman.” That was what Mr. Kraft had written in an editorial, six months earlier.
Yet all that was surface, all justification for human beings not wanting to obey even legitimate authority. However, both men obeyed, for it mattered not whether the commander was Black or conservative White. Captain Hamilton knew: he who masters himself can easily master those not in control of themselves.
Captain Hamilton had the coffee on, and served his guests with that element of specialty that had caused his Army commanders to happily make him the junior officer who managed all such matters to the unit. That is, people being ordered around endured that much more if they knew those who commanded them cared about them, or least saw them as more than cogs to a wheel. Captain Hamilton had long been the master of subtly reinforcing care from a command perspective, right down to offering excellent coffee to his lieutenant and his guests, day after day. One taste, and both Mr. Thompson and Mr. Kraft began to settle down with the captain and each other.
“If your editors had asked me,” the captain said gently, “I would have been glad to schedule interview interview time for both of you gentlemen. But as it is, I am in the critical information-gathering stages in the first 24 hours after a violent death, and so my time is limited. I have 20 minutes right now. However, I welcome you each scheduling individual time with me if you desire a more extensive interview with me on Monday.”
“My first question was going to be how seriously you are taking this investigation,” Mr. Thompson said. “That's a good partial answer.”
Mr. Kraft looked over at Mr. Thompson with a side-eye and lip curl so contemptuous that it would have started a fight had Mr. Thompson seen it.
“It is the position of the Tinyville Police Department that, given the violent history of Lofton County, all violent deaths will be investigated with the same seriousness,” said Captain Hamilton.
“Oh, I wish you would quit all this social justice pandering,” Mr. Kraft growled.
“Oh, not at all; you misunderstand me,” Captain Hamilton said with a smile. “I am not a respecter of persons – after all, at the Gilligan House Burning, there was violence on all sides of the color line. First time it was an even match and White men doing violence were openly outwitted by Black men defending themselves, but violence is violence.”
That confounded Mr. Kraft for a moment while delighting Mr. Thompson. However, he went right on as if nothing had happened.
“How many department resources are you allocating?” he asked.
“90 percent – there are just me and my lieutenant, and he is out – er, just pulling up to the station and returning from investigative work while I am here. I have informed the sheriff that we will not be available to man the festival today, and Lieutenant O'Reilly will be working on this case all day, barring any emergency in town that we have to meet.”
“What do you know so far?” asked Mr. Kraft.
“The victim's name is J. Oscar Rett – 47 years old, widower, career bank teller at Big Loft's downtown Wells Fargo. Approximate time of death was 3:30pm yesterday. The cause was hanging, and the place was the edge of the oak stands in the field between Tindley and Garrison Roads.”
Something in Malik Thompson's face suggested there was a question the captain needed to ask him, a question answered in Mr. Thompson's next question.
“Are you aware of the history of the murders of Black people in that same field?”
“No, I was not, but my research on the history of the scene is part of my process of the available evidence. Here comes someone who can work on that right now – welcome back, Lieutenant.”
“Thank you, sir,” he said, and was then introduced to the press men before the captain handed him his next assignment – researching of the Lofton County Black Historical Society, to which the captain added, with a handwritten note, a directive to research the history of the field. The lieutenant took that and set to work as Captain Hamilton and the press men continued.
“Is there any evidence that this is other than a suicide?” Mr. Kraft asked.
“Is there any evidence that this is other than a lynching?” Mr. Thompson asked.
“I do not have enough evidence to say either way,” Captain Hamilton said, “which is why I can only give you 20 minutes, 10 of which have already gone, gentlemen.”
“What can you tell us about the sequence of events leading up to Mr. Rett's death?” Mr. Kraft said.
“According to representatives at Mr. Rett's branch of Wells Fargo, Mr. Rett worked from 9 to 2 as usual. There was nothing out of the ordinary except that he withdrew $30 in $1 bills before leaving at 2:15 in his car. As usual, he gave two co-workers a lift to the Jonathan Lofton Transit Center. My office has reached out to those co-workers, but nothing yet is forthcoming. Given that it takes 25-45 minutes to drive downtown Big Loft to Tinyville depending on the midday traffic, I am comfortable in establishing time of death around 3:30pm until the coroner makes his report.”
“Was there any sign of violence other than the hanging itself?” Mr. Kraft asked.
“That would better be asked of the coroner,” Captain Hamilton asked.
“Any visible sign of struggle, then?” Mr. Kraft asked.
“Again, the question would be better asked of the coroner,” Captain Hamilton said. “Lieutenant O'Reilly and I were working in poor lighting conditions because of the nearness to twilight.”
“The coroner won't be in until Monday,” Mr. Kraft said.
“You won't see me from five minutes from now until then, so you aren't losing anything,” Captain Hamilton said.
“Any suspects yet?” Mr. Thompson said.
“Too early,” Captain Hamilton said. “There are of course people we need to talk with, but it is too early in our understanding of the case to have suspects.”
“Am I wrong in thinking that you are resisting characterizing this as a murder, Captain Hamilton?” said Mr. Thompson.
“Sir, you are free to think whatever you like, and I won't call you wrong. But if you even so much as intimate that thought as a fact in print, I will sue you and your publication for libel – and understand that if there is one White man in Lofton County who is not afraid in the least of the Lofton County Free Voice, I am he. You can print that, by the way.”
Both men had nearly fallen out of their chairs at that.
“I don't ask for or expect an objective press in these parts, but what I will not allow myself to do is give you erroneous information just because you both desperately want to please your camps of readers. Nor will I allow you to make up stuff. Now, on Monday, should you wish to interview me, I will gladly share with you whatever information I can without compromising the investigation. Until then, gentlemen, we are at 20 minutes, and good morning.”
That was that. The two newsmen closed their notebooks and turned off their recorders and started on their way out. Both of them, at different points of their progression toward the door, turned around to see if there was a chance to get in one more question. The cold marble front and icy iron-gray eyes of the captain told themselves both that there was no such chance. Of course, Mr. Thompson's paper was doing its own robust investigation, so he was not to be daunted in the end … but then both were gone.
After the newsmen left …
“Now, Lieutenant,” Captain Hamilton said, and Lieutenant O'Reilly slumped over his desk, laughing.
“How do you do that?” he said.
“By the grace of God,” the captain answered, “as an adaptation to the need to not cuss people like that out daily.”
The lieutenant fell over again, laughing.
“So, let's see and hear your reports, Lieutenant, now that the prying eyes are gone,” Captain Hamilton said.
“Toxicology was interesting, Captain,” he said as he handed the captain the report. “Have a look at that.”
“Wow – not quite what one expects,” he said. “But, well...”
Captain Hamilton fell into a multitude of thoughts … Mr. Rett had done an upper-class and expensive upgrade on something he did as a young man, an elder brother charged with the support of his siblings after the death of his parents.
Until his Uncle Ira got home from the military to take over as head of household, young Ironwood had carried the entire load for his three siblings and himself. An old folk remedy had helped a lot: with breakfast, coffee – coffee with a heaping teaspoon of nutmeg added. The caffeine was an upper, the nutmeg a downer in common parlance of drug use – the one perked him up and gave him the energy to deal with school and work and housework and homework and helping his siblings with school and homework and all of them keeping going in their devastating grief of both losing their parents and the revenge their town had taken upon his late parents in not taking their children in … the nutmeg kept him relaxed and somewhat detached emotionally without robbing him of the ability to focus mentally and emotionally when he needed to.
As he continued on, the teenager found other legal combinations … he had an athlete's body, and minor injuries, without ever playing sports because he worked so hard, and full healing had to wait until after Uncle Ira arrived. So: Excedrin because caffeine gave that energy edge in addition to the pain-relieving aspects, and Excedrin because the ibuprofen kept the inflammation down and the muscles around the injured part relaxed. The combination was fast-acting because of the effect of the caffeine quickening the heart rate and opening up the blood vessels – the ideal thing if you had to keep moving, but needed to stay as relaxed as possible too.
Uncle Ira had arrived, and snatched the entire family out of Tinyville after he had assessed the situation and realized the hatred of the townspeople, and thus up to Big Loft – and thus, with the pressure relieved, young Ironwood had never combined anything stronger than Excedrin and Motrin. Yet the experience had given him empathy with others who never had the pressure of their lives relieved, and to whom illegal drugs were as readily available as over-the-counter remedies. In his thinking, drug use did not represent isolated individual moral failure as it did the shared problem of human moral failure and weakness, and the human need to be relieved from the suffering of pain.
So: the fact that Mr. Rett had both cocaine and morphine in his system at the time of his death did not indicate to Ironwood Hamilton any of the thoughts common to his fellow conservative Southerners that tended to their thinking they were morally superior. To Captain Hamilton, the combination indicated that Mr. Rett was in great pain, and of a particular type: the type that required extra energy to keep going, but enough calming power to stay relaxed enough to follow through. The levels were not high enough to keep him from being able to function with what looked like normalcy – enough to be thoroughly intoxicated, but, like alcohol and coffee, the appearance of sobriety because of the balance of upper and downer might well be present. Given that the levels were so high in his stool, he must have taken both by mouth, not too long before his death, for his stool had not been fully digested before being ejected after his death.
Mr. Rett's last meal: likely a chocolate milkshake, perhaps two. Milk sugars and fats along with cocoa were present in the sample, not digested enough to escape notice. The liquidity of this meal was what had caused its swift exit after death.
The hair … this caused Lieutenant O'Reilly to blush, and look around …
“That was interesting too,” he said, “but I surely hope nobody from the Free Voice hears me say this … you know how Black people used to straighten their hair with lye and stuff to get it like ours?”
“Permanent press,” Captain Hamilton said. “That was more or less out of fashion by the time I was born.”
“Well, Mr. Rett didn't know that,” the lieutenant said quietly. “His hair was permed, and that piece of skin was from a chemical burn from that.”
Again, Captain Hamilton had gone into his thoughts … his cousin Henry Fitzhugh Lee had married a beautiful young Black woman, and the two had been together since high school. Miss Vanessa Morton in those years had often said, “I ain't changin' my hair for nobody – Harry doesn't want me on the creamy crack anyway, and loves my thick curls the way they are. Conking is so last decade!”
Of course, Miss Vanessa couldn't fit in anyhow – too Black, too beautiful, and far too smart to care about dumbing down and fitting in. She was the inventor of the prototype for Morton Data Master, which prototype had been the core for Morton Technologies, which prototype was still the core of the the software that her widower and his cousin were still using to solve crimes through managing evidence with the software. A more modern “hidden figure” had been Vanessa Morton Lee, and in a since, she and her brother Victor, who had carried the vision he and his elder sister had shared to completion, represented every reason the Black people of Lofton County could not be kept down forever. They were too innately powerful, and those proud of their history and their lineage were bound to take back their power eventually.
But that wasn't everybody. Some of Lofton County's Black people were more convinced of the necessity to integrate into White society as far as White society in Lofton County would allow – which was very little, but even so, the effort was being passionately made.
In his mind, Captain Hamilton recalled the social media he had seen of Mr. Rett, who he was with, where he had been, what events he had attended … and then recalled the body, and realized why it had seemed even more ghastly … it had not just been the strangeness of the abundant, permed hair.
“Captain, are you all right?” said Lieutenant O'Reilly.
“Perfectly fine,” he said, “but just lost in thought because of all this information. We've got our first big contradiction, as we will see when we update all our data. Well done in getting good work out of the lab on a Saturday morning.”
“Oh, they weren't happy about it,” Lieutenant O'Reilly said, “but I smiled really big at the lab technicians and gave them the two dozen donuts you told me to buy!”
“Bribery, done ethically, can get you everywhere,” Captain Hamilton said, with a smile.
Yet as his young lieutenant laughed, Captain Hamilton looked on with a certain amount of sadness … he and his lieutenant had never known what it was to live in a society that degraded them for not being precisely who they were – the society presented White men as what to be. Other people had never known what it was to not have the pressure of not being able, ever, to be what it was best to be, according to society's rules.
Some people, like the Mortons, had rejected and escaped the pressure in their minds and hearts and had carried that freedom with them while in Lofton County and in their new lives in New York – they yet carried it and believed in it so thoroughly that they had changed the entire viewpoint and trajectory of the life of the one White man who had thrown his his lot with them … Henry Fitzhugh Lee never ceased to give them credit for finishing his development the upright, moral, free, and thoroughly modern man that he was, thus transcending the limitations of his Blue Ridge upbringing (although in all fairness, Horace Fitzhugh Lee had set down a good, holy, non-racist foundation on his grandson, for the mountain man, living off the grid into the 21st century, had learned to see people for what they were early in life).
Others had not been able to make it that far … and the pathologies to the mind and heart that resulted were legion.