For NaNoWriMo: The Field of Blood, part 18
Captain Hamilton gives his official take on the closing of the case to the press, and then explains it all ... get caught up on part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, part 13, part 14, part 15, part 16, and part 17 to catch up on all the twists and turns!
In the morning, Captain Hamilton gave his official interview to both George Kraft of the Tinyville Times and Malik Thompson of the Lofton County Free Voice. Mr. Kraft was in a foul mood, not all mollified by the fact that the Tinyville police department had finally come around to his opinion and the coroner's findings and declared the death of J. Oscar Rett a suicide. He was not mollified because he and the Tinyville Times were 18 hours behind the Lofton County Free Voice yet again.
“Well, you know the Free Voice follows me around quite ardently,” Captain Hamilton said good-naturedly when Mr. Kraft arrived with the complaint in his mouth, “and sometimes they beat me to evidence, they are so good at investigative journalism and have so much more staff to work with.”
“How did they get like this – how have you let them get like this?” Mr. Kraft cried.
“I was not aware,” the captain said without altering his smile, “that competent, aggressive journalism is a crime.”
Mr. Kraft turned red, and would have said more, but there was something in Captain Hamilton's eyes that suggested that if Mr. Kraft were to make that smile disappear, he would not like what would be coming next.
So, Mr. Kraft was somewhat subdued with Mr. Malik Thompson arrived. Mr. Thompson was slightly subdued as well, his organization's efforts having led to the correct conclusion without Captain Hamilton's input, but he himself not authorized to do anything but to get the captain's official statement and withdraw from the scene. As much as Mr. Thompson would have liked to rub it in on Mr. Kraft, he didn't. So, they both listened to Captain Hamilton's calm, official explanation of his decision, and Mr. Thompson stayed calm.
Mr. Kraft, however, couldn't help himself, in the end.
“You could have concluded this when the coroner's report came out – millions of dollars in progress for this town, wrecked, because you decided to get all persnickety!”
That did it. Ironwood Hamilton had heard enough. His smile disappeared, and his marble face and gray eyes turned as cold as the coming winter. His drawl slowed down to the speed of molasses in January as he combined icy politeness with lethal sarcasm.
“Your statement forces me to give you the benefit of the doubt, Mr. Kraft. Since your paper neglected to mention that the vice president of Topia commissioned an actual crime in breaking and entering Mr. Rett's apartment and stealing paperwork out of it, perhaps you did not know the actual sequence of events that brought Topia down and thus caused the city council to pull out. That is the only rational explanation for your having said something so completely and utterly asinine on the record.”
Mr. Kraft turned bright red and his eyes stood out from rage. Captain Hamilton went right on.
“There may be something to be said for learning investigative journalism from your counterparts at the Free Voice,” he continued. “There is most definitely something to be said for the fact that this department does not exist as a profit center or booster club for Tinyville. I don't know if the memo has been received yet at the Tinyville Times, but if you would take it back with you today, I would consider myself greatly in your debt, Mr. Kraft. I do not expect that the fact will be forgotten again.”
Mr. Kraft's mouth fell open, but then he noticed Mr. Thompson just writing away, and got a grip on himself.
“Now then,” Captain Hamilton said, smiling once again, “did you gentlemen have any other questions?”
“No,” both reporters answered, and shortly departed.
“Usually, that's hilarious,” said Lieutenant O'Reilly, “but not today. I see more and more why we had to see that through to the end. Here he is still harping on the millions in progress, with no feeling for anything that has happened on that field.”
“Yes,” Captain Hamilton said. “Him and thousands of others like him. They will never be convinced, for they only see progress as how much better their lives can become, without reference to the well-being of any others. But we are not their slaves. We are free to make sure that we discharge our duty to our entire community. We are in no hurry to do their bidding.
“Of course the evidence was supporting the finding of suicide from the very beginning. For all the tramping around the sheriff and his deputies were desperately doing in order to snatch that case from us, there was still only one set of footprints in front of that tree, and it matched Mr. Rett's shoes. Of course, there could have been a missing set because the leaf cover in that area is pretty thick behind the tree going deeper into the stand, but that tree was clearly climbed from the front, because the pattern of disturbed and broken small branches and stems showed that, and so did the oak leaf pressed firmly into his permed hair. There was no sign of a ladder, high chair, or vehicle removed from beneath Mr. Rett; that left only the possibility that he had sat on the branch, carefully tied the noose to it and then to himself, and then stood up and jumped off to hang himself.
“However, this led to another problem – a cold-blooded self-murder is a difficult thing to pull off. The precision of the tying of the rope and the noose was shocking. So too the placement of the phone and the wallet and the crisp $30 in $1 bills in the car – and the car, too, pointing the way to the tree. It was deliberate, almost like a ritual.
“But so too, the precision of a last meal … so many of his friends and relatives that I talked with talked about how his favorite thing was a chocolate milkshake, and that was still largely undigested when he arrived. In terms of mindset … the combination of cocaine and morphine would leave one energetic enough to do the deed, mellow enough to be casual enough to be calm enough to go through with it. Chocolate, sugar, cocaine, morphine – a potent combination to work with for any endeavor.
“So much for the physical evidence. Yet there was also the possibility, faint through it may have been, that it was a lynching, well-disguised, because of all the community work this particular Black man was involved in – and that it should take place on the very site of the 1967 massacre was also striking.
“Of course, our constituents whom we serve immediately made assumptions based on their history – some of our White neighbors, not knowing facts in evidence before the coroner's report, knew it might be a lynching but wanted it to be declared a suicide so the old history would not be dredged up and the recreation project could move on, and our Black neighbors, not knowing facts in evidence before the coroner's report, assumed a lynching and determined that not only would Mr. Rett's death not be swept under the rug as a suicide, but to dredge up all the old history – not so old, actually, just 52 years ago – and again fight over the meaning and the future of the field. In that sense, Mr. Rett succeeded in providing a lever to use – he knew the people he was betraying, just as Judas Iscariot knew the Lord's habits and where he was likely to be after the Passover. Mr. Rett knew the Varicks, and Mrs. Drake, and those with them: even though they had been defeated in court, they would take up the fight again as soon as they were given a good chance.
“So, here we were, Lieutenant, in the middle of an explosive situation. The case for suicide was good before the coroner's report, and nearly perfect afterward. The case for murder was not bad, however, notwithstanding that one would have to assume a murderer of great size and strength to have pulled it off. However, a suspect arrived: Joe Dillard was big enough and strong enough to have carried an unconscious Mr. Rett to the tree, climbed the tree, tied up what needed to be tied up, hauled Mr. Rett up afterward, and just pushed him off the branch. Farfetched, but possible, and Topia certainly had reasons to want Mr. Rett dead if he had started asking for more money. They knew he had evidence on the company and what it had paid him for.
“Then, once we discovered that Mr. Rett was betraying the community he was serving, there came another possibility: a revenge killing from within the Black community. That is quite rare in the class of people Mr. Rett ran with, but imagine Mr. Varick, enraged – he is big enough and strong enough to have managed that hanging, and there are plenty like him, of the stock that made that stand at the Gilligan House.
“It is a blessing for you and me, Lieutenant, that the Black man in general is far from the violent beast he is made out to be – if that were true, men like us would find it hard to survive. Yet since it is not true, and since all the people around Mr. Rett are so incredibly sensitive about the history of violence against Black people, it seemed to me even more farfetched that any one of them would simulate a lynching, of all things, to kill Mr. Rett. Furthermore, no one seemed aware of what Mr. Rett had done to them when we first inquired – that there was a traitor they could believe, and they could believe that Mr. Rett might be killed because he with his great intelligence might have been getting close to discovering the traitor. No one seemed to have thought that Mr. Rett with his great intelligence was the traitor – like Judas, he was trusted with money and court documents and all of that.
“Yet, in conjunction with the $30 in $1 bills, it was exactly the significance accorded to Mr. Rett that tipped me off to his own motives in life and in death. He worked hard for it, Lieutenant. His work inside the organizations he betrayed – his day-to-day work was impeccable, award-winning. He loved the praise of those around him; while betraying, he wanted their approval and praise. That was like Judas Iscariot in John 12. My daughters Ilene and Allison love for me to read the story about the alabaster box Mary the sister of Martha broke to give worship to the Lord Jesus, and since they are just six years old I do not read the rest to them for a bedtime story.
“The nuts and bolts of that matter, Lieutenant: Judas Iscariot was the treasurer for the Lord and the disciples, but was always stealing from the bag, so he was angry that the box had not been converted to a form of value he could get his hands on. But he just had to speak up about it in a pious way, talking about the needs of the poor. In other accounts one sees that his talk carries the other disciples away with him, and the Lord has to stop all their murmuring against Mary.
“So, imagine, if you will, Lieutenant, Mr. Rett working with the Lofton County Black Historical Preservation Society and other organizations like it, everyone sitting around talking about what they are up against and what they need to do, and he joining right on into the conversation and solving day-to-day problems with all his skills and getting that praise. That was the note that struck false to me in the end.
“It is true that Mr. Rett had cancer – it is in the coroner's report, as is the biopsy wound that burst open from the impact of his body snapping against that rope … he burst open in the midst, a la that same Judas Iscariot according to the Apostle Peter's accounting in Acts 1. That cancer was serious enough so that a man might consider ending it all before going through all that would be necessary to survive said cancer if it were possible at all. There was also the fact that Mr. Rett was unhappy with Topia and what it was paying him – and then he noticed the attention that everybody gave Delford Drake III when he had his mental snap and was going to kill himself on the steps of City Hall. Like he said in the note to Mrs. Drake, her 16-year-old son was showing him up for dedication.
“So, in order to escape his dreadful prognosis, to precipitate his revenge on Topia, and to cement himself as a hero in the minds of all those he had been serving all those years, he returned to Tinyville's field of blood, and did what Judas had done to create his own field of blood. Mr. Rett killed himself, like a great X marking the spot of the 1967 massacre and assuring that all future plans that Topia and Tinyville had for it would be destroyed.”
“All for significance and attention,” Lieutenant O'Reilly said. “What a narcissist!”
“Well, consider who he ran with in Big Loft – whose hair and skin and lifestyle he emulated to the point of twisting himself out of phase with his true self and those who sincerely valued and loved him. We must consider our side of the culture, Lieutenant. But for the grace of God, we would be right with our White brethren who want to be seen – seen, mind you – as superior and beyond question in every way, while putting up monuments and merry-go-rounds on the sites of massacres our people have participated in. No one – Black, White, or any other color – can be identified with such people and such a culture without being a Judas to all things right and good – and since God is the Author and Completion of all things right and good … .”
Lieutenant O'Reilly shook his head.
“We all could be Judases, one step removed,” he said.
“There but for the grace of God goes each and every one of us,” Captain Hamilton said. “That is the lesson. That is why we took our time on this case and made sure we got every piece of it together. To do anything less would have been a betrayal of right and good and a specific right and good: for Tinyville to develop in such a way that opportunity presents itself to all without being totally at the expense of some, and that the next generation, if not ours, can build and enjoy in peace, one with another. We must not be Judases to the possibility of that future.”
Then, quite suddenly, Captain Hamilton smiled and picked up the day's copy of the Lofton County Free Voice.
“Beside that, we will be left behind if we do the old things,” he said. “Others are already building on this entire experience in a way that is going to be encouraging to the younger generation. Nobody in the world is waiting on us in the United States to get with the program – men like us will get right or get left behind, and from how Mr. Varick managed to frame up this thing, it's already started right here in Lofton County!”
The phone rang; it was Captain Lee.
“You were right, Ham,” he said. “I can't believe how James Varick IV pulled it off, but he did, and beautifully.”