Iterconnected Circles

… At the bottom of the ransom note are two interconnected blue circles surrounding a single red circle. The red circle has a hole punched through its center. To the left and right of said red circle are two holes spaced distinctly and in the same measure from one another.
At this juncture in the investigation, we have no immediate explanation as to what this symbol represents.

Signed,
Captain Benj. W. Webb.
Hatfields, New Jersey Police Department.


“Two interconnected blue circles surrounding a single red circle…” Towler repeated. About that, about the circles, nobody knew what they meant, and nobody knew anybody they could ask.

The two men looked at each other. They were alone in the little room the jailers allowed for attorneys to speak privately with their clients. They sat at a table in the middle of the room. The stale air was heavily tinged with BO.

It made no sense to the person now holding the report, the German. He began waving it about. The quoted paragraph had been underlined and starred in leaky fountainpen blue ink. It was a messy star; like an inverted Pentagram perhaps. And it drew the eye.

It did Richard Hauptmann’s eye, the accused, the German, who was now holding the ten-page report on the Lindbergh kidnapping with the last paragraph underlined; the very man sitting in the Hatsfields City Jail accused of the sensational and heinous crime of stealing one Charles Lindbergh Junior, the infant son of the single most recognized man in the world in those days.

“What the fuck eist zist shienhotzenputty?” Hauptmann said. Something like that. His accent was thick and un-American and hard to understand.

He looked across the dented metal desk at Dennis Towler, his PD. His Public Defender. His possibly Jewish Public Defender. Towler was a short, middle-aged man with unnaturally white teeth. He had no chin to speak of, but he had a big Jewish snozz, and his ears seemed ill designed.

“What do you think it is?” Towler asked.

Hauptmann never liked this Towler, this assigned lawyer-- though he’d been trying hard to like him for the last twelve days, sitting here behind bars as he was. His only friend in here, really. Just the same, now more than ever, he didn’t like him a lot, didn’t trust him in the slightest bit, and it was starting to show in his eyes--his blue and angry eyes. His German eyes.

He waved the report in his right fist, and the ten pages fluttered above his head in an angry German way; a Hun’s way; held high.

Hauptmann bellowed in rage. He said nasty sounding German words, guttural and seething words, but none of this mattered to Towler. Towler was not taking offense to Hauptmann’s antics. He liked Hauptmann’s antics.

Truth be known, Towler was a man who didn’t much care about the Lindbergh baby. He would have liked it if the baby was found unharmed, sure, but other than that, he wanted to get his client off. Fortunes are made in cases such as this. He had worked hard, Towler had, and earned a measure of success in his twenty-year career. Why else would he have gotten this case?

The case of the century…

“You tell me what it is,” Towler said again. He gave his client a defiant stare and his chin suddenly popped into view from out of nowhere. “You. Tell. Me…”

Their eyes met and locked on.

Hauptmann broke first. He asked: “You zink I have… what? Some Satan zing going on? Zis symbol zing with the rings?”

Towler nodded his head, up and down, repeatedly. Then: “The devil got inside you,” he said.

“Zee devil made me do it?” Hauptmann asked. “Zaat what you are after?”

Towler nodded his head again, in the same solemn manner as before. Up and down. Repeatedly.

“Really? Zat’s our defense? I stole zee little kinder-brat because zee devil made me?”

“It’s the only way out, kid,” the lawyer said, still nodding.

“Yeah,” said Hauptmann, now feeling sick to his stomach. “I have not a chance, but yeah…okey-dokey!”

He was planning now to get word to the judge tomorrow—I want a new Jew lawyer, he would say. Hauptmann’s mind was made up. He sat back silently in his metal chair and stared at nothing.

“Think about it!” Towler urged. He could see this wasn’t going well. He could read the eyes, so cold and blue and German, from across the table.

“You don’t see it?” Towler said. “You don’t see the beauty. The Salem Witch Trials man! They began on this day in 1692! Think about it! People will believe anything! That’s our out! They believe in witches!”

“That’s it? Brum Hilda?”

“That’s our out!”

The next morning Hauptmann sent word to the judge demanding a new lawyer, preferably a Hebrew with a big snozz. He would not take no for an answer. He knew his constitutional rights.

And he got a new lawyer.

And Herr Hauptmann was electrocuted four years late on April 3, 1936.

While they were strapping him into “Old Sparky” that fateful day, Hauptmann had time to think back on his actions, on his reactions, on his life. He remembered “The Devil Made Me Do It,” defense. He maybe wished he had listened to Towler back then, but he still didn’t know how it would have ever worked. He was unaware that in the time of the Salem Witch trials, twenty women were put to death for being witches. Thousands had been tried. Three hundred years later Hauptmann died at his own witch trial, not knowing that people will believe anything. In 1936 this wasn’t so well known, not even by blue-eyed Germans.

By 2017, however, the fact that people will believe what they want to believe is common knowledge, known across the world. By the year 2017, few would bother to argue.

--999 Words--