The Posture of Innocence proper, day 1
All right, @freewritehouse, @fitinfun, @owasco, @deemarshall, @mgaft1, @iamsaray, @wakeupkitty, @misschance, @scribblingramma, and @whatisnew -- the next HUGE chunk of the neverending Lofton County story has arrived! Here is the beginning at last of The Posture of Innocence, more extended content than even the fastest typist could type in any five minutes! My first extended content, Black, White, and RED All Over is now a bonafide book on Amazon Kindle -- not QUITE worldwide although it SHOULD be, but I will be working with Amazon "this and updates will be here!
Meanwhile, there were some questions the daily freewrites stirred up in my regular readers, a lot of them wrapping around Captain Lee's personal and love life, past and future ... stay tuned for the answers!
I don't have a dividing graphic for The Posture of Innocence yet ... I have some thoughts and I would be glad to hear yours as well!
In the meantime, here we go ... check out yesterday's "Harbor Cruise" freewrite for the prologue if you want, but, you are also welcome to dive right in ...
Some kind of alarm – perhaps a fire alarm – should have started going off in the ritziest neighborhoods in Big Loft, VA on a particular Saturday morning in the late summer of 2019.
Before the dawn's early light, it should have sounded in the homes of bankers and financiers and investors, in the homes of police and political bigwigs who had not yet learned enough from all the implications of the issues around the Gilligan House Burning, in the homes of Loftons and Slocums and Slocum-Loftons and Lancasters and Yorks and many others who had dominated the region since slavery days, and whom General Robert E. Lee, in his surrender at Appomattox, had thus spared the Union Army from ever touching … the Federal armies had never ravaged that far down into those parts of the Roanoke Valley that had been eventually called Lofton County.
However, several of General Lee's many, many later nephews simply never had gotten with the Confederate program – and, one of them was not only the nearest thing to his image, but the nearest thing to having met the general in his Federal prime, as if the war had come and he had not switched his allegiance.
That Lee, Colonel Henry Fitzhugh Lee of the U.S. Army, had gone into the Reserve in 2019, and begun his transition from his last active service in the Judge Advocate General (JAG) branch of the Army to full civilian life by accepting a position in the Big Loft police department as a captain, to work cold cases that were just stacked like cord wood and beginning to be a dangerous embarrassment to the credibility of the police force.
That Lee knew the crimes of the past were hardly ended, and that use of Big Loft's and Lofton County's Black people as chattel for profits had not even slowed down significantly as slavery had given way to Jim Crow, and Jim Crow to the government implantation of drugs and guns in Black communities as preparation for the prison industrial complex that feasted on Black captive bodies.
That Lee had inadvertently been handed all the evidence of the modern facts, hidden among the nearly 1,700 cold cases he had been charged to start clearing, and then inadvertently tipped off to his surmise about the fact being correct by overtures from certain corrupt police officers hoping to bring him into the scheme.
That Lee had been accepted as an official assistant by a great movement of Black men in Lofton County determined to get things right, and they and he and his cousin Captain Ironwood Hamilton of Tinyville had already cleared Lofton County and Big Loft's police force of a bunch of rogue officers, during and after the incident known as the Gilligan House Burning (White news sources) or the Gilligan House Stand (as it was written in the Lofton County Free Voice, Lofton County's new and first-to-survive-even-a-month Black news source since Black people had come to America).
That Lee had killed his own corrupt boss, police commissioner Orton Thomas, when said commissioner had resisted arrest by trying to shoot down Captain Hamilton. That was the commissioner's last mistake; the second-to-last mistake had been leaving his back door unlocked. Captain Lee had been in Special Forces for years before JAG, and had a personal kill record that far, far exceeded his Uncle General's. Orton Thomas was no. 183 on that record.
That Lee, while those who had been paying Commissioner Thomas and many, many others slept comfortably, clocked into work on a Saturday dawn. There should have been an alarm, warning men and women across Lofton County who were thought of as the pillars of society, the paragons of virtue, the always innocent so far as the stories were told, that Lee was on the attack, not the defense, this time, and that he was again inside Lofton County. Only his Slocum-Lofton grandmother, who despised him but understood him, was even alert to the reality that the day would eventually come, but even she was asleep at this particular moment.
Not even Captain Lee knew precisely what he was about to kick off. There were too many moving pieces for any one person to comprehend. The Black men who had founded the Lofton County Free Voice and the men who had gathered around them continued with their agenda, but Captain Lee was not so trusted that he had been let in on that – they had him on a need-to-know basis, so he knew from day to day only what the paper made publicly available. He did not know that powerful allies of the Free Voice had orchestrated his meeting with 91-year-old Mrs. Tallie Mae Jones, and her plea to him to look at the Soames case again.
What Captain Lee did know was how deeply moved – even shaken – he had been by Mrs. Jones, whose grandson Tom Jones had been accused of a murder he had not committed: the murder of John Soames. The record said that Tom Jones, at the age of 20, had been tried and acquitted, outright – but news articles had recorded that he and his young wife and child still had to flee the state because of attempts on their life by the Soames family and other “anonymous” agents.
Of course, Tom Jones, a big, dark, Black young man, had not been expected to beat the case – in Virginia, even as late as 1993, that was still almost unbelievable. He had to run because there were plenty of people outside of the Soames family who refused to accept it – only a full public exoneration would allow him to return home, so far as Virginia could ever be home after 25 years of hate. That was his grandmother's plea … for someone to clear her grandson's name. A plea for full justice, at last.
Captain Lee had scarcely been able to control his emotions during the interview with Mrs. Jones …the captain, during his high school days, had found his first and only love in a Black family – Vanessa Morton, whom he had married in 1991 and essentially had to get out of state with her and her entire family. He himself, that year, was beginning in West Point – but the Slocum-Lofton half of his family was so angered by the idea of their trust fund grandson producing a “mulatto” heir to the fortune that trust represented that had he left the Mortons in Virginia, none of them would have been safe. So: Captain Lee understood the problem. He had also lost his wife and son in childbirth, so he understood what it was to lose a Black son, a son who would not have been much older in 2019 than Tom Jones had been in 1994. He remembered the agony of Mama Morton, in having lost her daughter and her grandson ... all of that was triggered by the weeping of Mrs. Tallie Mae Jones over her grandson Tom, whom she had raised.
However, Captain Lee had locked away his tears … he knew he couldn't even start with that or he would be no use to the cause at hand. On the books of his medical record, there was a recent note: “Subject is extremely high-functioning, in stark contrast with the severity of his PTSD that has roots likely pre-dating Army service.” The Army had overlooked and continued to overlook that latter fact, not willing at any time to let loose so valuable an officer who apparently was managing his stuff so well – but Captain Lee and those closest to him knew: he could manage his stuff until he couldn't. A full breakdown had occurred in 1992, after the loss of his wife and son … but the danger had never been far enough away. He could function or emote: not both.
Captain Lee also knew the fullness of something else Mrs. Jones pointed out to him: she had mentioned that her grandson's defense attorney had pointed out that there was an entirely different suspect the police investigating the matter were purposely covering up – somehow, he had gotten admissible evidence to the fact. Sure enough, that was in the court records appended to the file – but the information that should have been in the file on the police side had been removed. That made the Soames case related to 25-30 others Captain Lee referred to as his personal “stone wall,” all of which had a number of the same officers involved, and all of which had missing information that Captain Lee was rebuffed in trying to get. The fact that one of those officers was then-Captain Orton Thomas told Captain Lee all he really needed to know about the corrupt elements hiding behind that “stone wall.”
However, not enough was missing from the Soames case. One element had been left to latch onto: if Tom Jones was innocent, then Mrs. Lilith DeVille, the case's sole witness, was not. She was a bold-faced liar, for all of her description of how Tom Jones had killed John Soames had simply never happened. If that could be proven, and was publicly acknowledged, perhaps that would open the door to someone feeling safe to bring more information to light. But indeed, in Virginia, this was the kind of job no Black man would be likely to survive doing publicly. That was a White man's kind of job. Henry Fitzhugh Lee considered himself White and definitely privileged enough to safely pull it off. Being a Lee, and being the nearest thing to the body double of the Lee, had its advantages.
So, Captain Lee had expended the energy another man would have spent weeping or raging into tripling his workload. His division never had slack time: he and his five lieutenants could have thought they had job security for years just on those hundreds of cases that needed solving. Even their combined and fabulous record of cracking four or five of those cases every two weeks was scarcely denting the pile – and that was with Captain Lee having charge of building the division from scratch and training his lieutenants on the methods he had been using to crack a case every 8-10 days. In addition to all of that, Captain Lee tacked on the 14 reams of documents on the neighborhood Tom Jones and Lilith DeVille and John Soames had all shared at the time of the murder. That had taken a week. Captain Lee had gone home Friday having crunched all that data mentally and in Morton Data Master, the computer program his wife and brother-in-law had laid the groundwork for. No answers.
Captain Lee had been still reviewing information when he dropped off to sleep dreamed of his wife and a conversation they had in 1992 … and then woke up with a start, his head on his kitchen table – 3:35am, Saturday morning.
“Henry F. and Henry V.: we Lees will have to go and see … .”
That had been Vanessa Morton Lee … she and Henry V. – V for Victor, her father's name – had gone to see Heaven, but Henry F(itzhugh) Lee would have to go see something – in 14 reams of data, there was something he needed to see with his own eyes that was the key to the matter.
Captain Lee had a few weaknesses in his investigative style, and he knew this. While serving in JAG, his cousin and best friend Major Ironwood Hamilton – later Captain Hamilton of Tinyville, VA – had been the superior field investigator. Give Major Hamilton a fresh crime scene, and that scene would speak to him and tell him everything that had happened and was about to happen with whoever had done the crime. Colonel Lee had gladly let his adjutant do all of that: his specialty was breaking down larger patterns of connected criminality. However, the former Special Forces commander was not helpless in a field situation; his brilliant ability to do assessments on the spot of a tactical situation and respond was roughly adaptable, because it required the same grasp of subtle detail. The challenge was one of perspective.
Captain Hamilton had raised his siblings for a while after his parents' death, had gone to West Point, fallen in love, had gotten married, and had become father to eleven children over the 23 years of his marriage. He had learned to assess and gently investigate situations without hurting anybody long before becoming a police captain. Captain Lee, having been made a childless widower, never made that adjustment – in the field, he had earned his nickname the Angel of Death for a reason. By the time he finished assessing and adapting to a tactical situation, his opponents were dead – just a matter of time. His Unit 6 had never been defeated or forced into retreat. Major Hamilton had to gently chide their subordinates of those days for jokes like “Appomatt-who? Our Lee ain't never heard of such a thing as surrender!”
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, especially if the sufferer is high-functioning, has many cruel and strange wrinkles. Colonel Lee, in accepting a police position, had been careful to get a desk job for that reason, for he knew that unlike Major Hamilton, he had not been able to change his mindset to be a peace officer in the field. He was every reason that military veterans who had been in combat from door to door and house to house should not be put on the beat. The old patterns could re-emerge at any moment of stress. Some of his early solo missions had some patterns that did not need to be re-enacted … he had lived to get a unit because he had been really, really good at coming back unscathed. His targets? Not so much. That would still be true anywhere, if a field situation triggered his PTSD. Colonel Lee was an extremely efficient killer. Everyone, therefore, was safer if he did not have to come from behind his desk, save for excursions to do research a bit too deep for his young lieutenants (he was 45, and thought of his lieutenants, in their late 20s, as being about the age of the son he would have had).
So: Saturday morning was a very, very early research trip. Captain Lee had gone to his office before the sun was up that Saturday to review planning maps from the 1990s and then concurrent maps in 2019 to see what the neighborhood Tom Jones had integrated looked like in terms of infrastructure and buildings, and how it had changed – or not changed. With that data in mind and also downloaded to his cell phone, he changed into plain clothes – jogging, to be exact – got in his car, and drove out to the neighborhood in question.
Captain Lee maintained himself in solo-mission fitness, and on Reserve Weekend routinely frustrated men half his age with his strength and endurance. It wasn't personal. It merely represented what a man like that did for his body, given nothing but time to do it, and needing to keep his mind off of why he had all that time. Had Vanessa Morton Lee lived, perhaps he would have aged a little more softly – after all, he was an army colonel, and there were younger subordinates better suited to certain things. But, on the other hand, when you could be 45 years old and get up on five hours of sleep and jog every street in a neighborhood without even thinking about the physical strain, you did have certain advantages, and Captain Lee, being a tactician's tactician at heart, used all advantages to the hilt. By 6:30, he was just lapping the block across the street from Mrs. DeVille's block, every other street finished, reviewing her testimony again in his mind as he considered what she said she had seen two blocks over from her apartment window – and then he stopped cold at the corner and looked up at Mrs. DeVille's apartment building.
“That's it,” he said. “She said she saw it on the top floor of that apartment building, which indeed has six floors and is plenty tall enough – but until 2004, the building only had three floors, meaning she couldn't have seen anything in Roland Park over the top of the apartment buildings here, here, here, and here in 1992. She did lie.”
Captain Lee smiled … in his dream, he had remembered how he and his wife had looked up how tall the Statue of Liberty was, and then decided that they had to go see for themselves … that was the point of the memory. It was the height of the buildings, and the fact that he would have to see for himself to pull out that one fact out of 14 reams of data.
Captain Lee photographed Ms. DeVille's building to compare with photographs of the building from earlier years … back in his office, he was very pleased to find construction photos and pictures pre-dating all of that. The timeline held up. Mrs. DeVille had lied, for 25 years, boldly, gladly, consistently … the idea stirred up Captain Lee's well-restrained but dangerous temper, for it reminded him of another old and wicked woman he knew all too well. Yet he shut down the fury again with the idea that Mrs. DeVille wasn't worth the anger – all she had done was wrack up perjury charges for herself in the end, and actually provided an opportunity to him to further train members of his division.
Lieutenant Anderson had been Captain Lee's research assistant on the Soames case, and was showing promise as a good investigator. This would be an excellent learning opportunity for him to see if he could crack the case independently … with a little help narrowing down the 14 reams of data in question. Captain Lee very pleasantly spent the rest of his morning putting together a single ream of key data for his lieutenant to work on, and also preparing protocol for the lieutenant to interview Mrs. DeVille for himself. The last thing he did before clocking out for the day was to call Mrs. Tallie Mae Jones.
“We have a break in the Soames case,” he said after greeting her. “Lilith DeVille is indeed a bold-faced liar – and it can be proven, although we have a little work left to do in order to do so.”
“God be praised,” she said. “I knew He would finally send somebody who cared enough just to try – it only took you a week, Captain Lee.”
“Lord willing, it will not go another week,” he said. “I know that time is of the essence.”
“It surely is,” Mrs. Jones said. “Thank you for what you are doing, Captain Lee.”
“My duty, and my honor, ma'am. Good morning.”
“Good morning.”