Chapter 22
Bubba’s condition was improving. He could talk but still had several monitors connected to him to read his vital signs. Caley listened as he told what happened to him.
“It was Sunday morning when I went into the clubhouse just to take a look. I wasn’t looking for anything specific. I remember opening the door and walking into the room. I knew immediately that I had been shot. I heard a shot, and my arm exploded. Then I heard another shot, and that is the last thing I remember. I guess that is when I was hit in the chest and blacked out.”
“Did you get a look at the shooter?”
“No. I never saw where the shot came from and didn’t see anyone at all. After being shot, the next thing I remember is coming around when I hit the water. I assume someone carried me someplace and tried to drown me.”
“Yes, it appears that is what happened. So far we have not collected any evidence that would indicate who shot you and dumped you into the river. We have questioned all the members of the Cobb Club, but none of them has or is willing to give up any information. At this time I think our best bet is to bring Oats Schoenfeld back in and interrogate him again. He seems like a tough old nut and may stonewall us, but right now, he is our most promising lead. We have taken several samples from the blood found in the clubhouse. The only match that we can find is yours, which means that it is likely some of the blood was left from a fight among club members, which is what Oats told us. In any event, it doesn’t matter now that we know where you were shot. The fact that it was on his property gives us plenty of reason to interrogate him.”
By the time, Caley had returned to her office the sector deputy sheriff patrolling near Oats’ place had already contacted him and had him in a sheriff’s car on the way to Warrenton. Caley and J.D. decided they would tag team Oats. Having teamed on interrogations with some of the others, they knew they would trade off questioning, and if they were lucky or skilled enough at it, could burn him down and confuse him or trip him into revealing useful information.
Caley and Oats sat on opposite sides of the table in the interrogation room. J.D. didn’t bother sitting down in the other chair, but casually folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the wall on one shoulder. He watched Oats intently with the intention of making him nervous. The trick had worked before, but J.D. wasn’t sure it would this time. In his former role as the leader of the local KKK, Oats had been questioned many times by law enforcement officials and was cool under pressure. Never the less he was going to try anything that he thought might break Oats.
Caley started the questioning, “Oats we know you have been lying to us about the blood that we found on the floor at your club house. We have conclusively matched it to Agent Vandi’s blood. So now, there is no doubt he was shot at your place. The only problem is whether you shot him. If you did, you could save everybody a lot of time by coming clean and confessing. ”
“You must be crazy. I told you before when I left my place Saturday night, there were several people there. Anyone of them could have shot that man. I don’t know when or who shot him and that is the truth.”
“I want the name of all the people who were when you left Saturday night.”
“Well, let’s see. There were Tee and Skeeter for sure. Then there were several other people, but I can’t remember who.”
“What about Al Ramseth?”
“Oh yea, he was there too.”
“Did you go to the house on Sunday?”
“I can’t remember.”
“I think you are telling a lie Oats. I think you went down there and found Bubba and shot him and then dumped him into the river. Did you?”
“Bullshit!”
They continued to question Oats for another six hours. Caley and J.D. traded off the questioning as planned, but Oats never gave up any information. Finally, they put him in a cell. They knew unless they found something more solid, they would have to release him within 48 hours. By this time, Skeeter, Tee, and Big Al had been brought in for questioning, but after repeated interrogations, nothing useful was obtained.
Then Caley commented that they needed to bring Patrick in also for two reasons. First, to deflect any suspicions of him working with them, and second, it would permit them to talk with him to see if he had learned anything. Caley started, “Patrick you know of course that we have brought in several people for questioning regarding the attempted murder of Agent Vandi. What do you hear on the rumor circuit about the situation?”
“Lots of comments about who did it, but most of them seem to be just negative race-related from the white boys that come into the bar. Of course, few black people visit Flood’s Place, so I don’t know what they are saying. I have never seen anything like the people that come to the bar. They all talk openly about how they hate black people and talk about doing violent things to them. I’m not used to such open bigotry against other people. It’s unbelievable. ”
“Patrick, can you recall anything that Oats may have done last Saturday and Sunday that was out of the ordinary? Did you see Big Al around at all that weekend? We feel sure that he was involved in Bubba’s shooting some way, but need more accurate information to get him to talk.”
“I didn’t see Al at all that weekend. But you know, I do remember last Sunday Tee, and Mr. Oats went out early in the morning in the pickup. They said that with the shad season opening up, they wanted to test some new fishing nets.”
“Think Patrick! Could they have been going to the river to dispose of a body?”
“Well I suppose, they had what they said were nets in the back of the truck covered up with a tarp. I didn’t actually see the nets. It could have been a body or anything else beneath the tarp. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, but then I don’t know anything about what kind of fishing they do here in South Carolina.”
“Did you see them return?”
“No, I don’t know what time they came back.”
Caley and J.D. decided to bring Al back in for another interrogation session. Al took the initiative the second he sat down. “I want to go home. I never done nothing and I’m tired of this bullshit. When can I go home?”
“You can go home when you give us some straight answers Al,” said J.D.
“I already answered all your questions.”
“Al tell us when is the last time you have been on the river?” said Caley.
“I don’t know. Not in a long time. I don’t have a boat, so why would I go to the river?”
“Maybe you would borrow a boat to dump a body in the river, Al.”
“You’re crazy.”
“What did you do last Sunday, Al?”
“I slept off a bad night, the same as I usually do on Sunday.”
“Well, let’s go back to Saturday night. What did you do Saturday night?”
“Me and some of the boys drank some moonshine at the club house, far as I can remember. I told you that before. Don’t you listen?”
“What time did you leave the clubhouse Al?”
“I don’t know. You are not listening to me. I told you I had a bad night, so how could I remember what time I left the clubhouse,” Al retorted sarcastically.
The questioning continued for another hour, when Caley asked again, “Tell us, Al, where were you Sunday morning?”
By now, Al was confused and had made several contradictory statements regarding his activities over the last week. This is exactly what Caley wanted to happen. She continued, “Tell me, Al, did you see Oats any place last Sunday?”
“No. I know him and Tee were busy all day trying out some new shad nets.”
“You told me before that you slept off a bad Saturday night Al, how do you know Oats and Tee were on the river? Did you sleep or did you go down to the river with Oats and Tee.”
Al kept talking. The more he said, the more his statements contradicted each other. Finally, Caley said, “OK Al, we know that you, Oats
and Tee took Bubba’s half dead body down to the Combahee and threw him in. You want to tell us about it?”
“I’m not saying shit,” said Al.
Al refused to say anything else, and Caley and J.D. stopped the questioning and put him back in the cell. But by his actions, they felt that were right about how Bubba had disappeared. Still, it was not clear who shot him.
Tee had been brought into the facility and was in a cell to be questioned. Caley and J.D. put him through the same series of questions that they did with Al, but he steadfastly refused to reveal anything important.
The Caley said, “Let’s give Oats another run,” and within a few minutes he was back in the interrogation room.
“Well Oats, Al gave you up. He said you shot Agent Vandi, he and Tee helped you dump him in the river thinking he was dead. So, all you need to do now is give us the details. Maybe you can make a deal with the prosecutor,” said Caley.
“I never done no such thing, and you’re crazy if you think so,” said Oats.
“Then why would Al say that you did?”
“That son-of-a-bitch is crazy, and it wouldn’t surprise me at anything he would say.”
“Well we know you, Al or Tee actually pulled the trigger and then all of you dumped Bubba in the river.”
Of course, Caley may have suspected this to be the case, but she was just guessing. She and Bubba had both come from the same school. In addition, like him, she knew that intuition was 90 percent of investigative work. Somehow, she had more than a hunch that Al, Tee, or Oats were responsible for Bubba’s attempted murder, and she had to continue to play that card.
“If Al said I did something to Vandi, then we need to give him a new name. Instead of calling him Big Al we need to call him Crazy Al,” said Oats.
“No, I don’t think he is crazy Oats. I think you shot Bubba and got Al and Tee to help you dump the body in the river. We know he was shot at your clubhouse because the blood on the floor matches his. Bubba has also told us that you shot him. Right now, the only thing we need to know is why you did it. So, tell us Oats, why did you shoot Bubba?”
“I never shot anybody. That’s all I’m gonna’ say.”
Back in the holding cell, Al was under a mental siege. The questioning by Caley and J.D. had put him under extreme stress. When he had been returned to his cell, his stomach was churning, and he vomited all over the floor. The guards were already mad at him because he had given them a hard time when he was brought in and booked. When they saw the mess on the floor, one of them threw an old-fashioned string mop into the cell and said, “Clean it up or leave it on the floor. I don’t care which, buddy.”
Al elected to ignore the order and recline on the bunk to cope with his headache. Within minutes, he was in a restless sleep. His body was shaking and rolling from side to side. Fuzz was back to torment him again. As on the previous occasions, Fuzz was manifested through a cloud of fog. But the fog disappeared, and the image was focused and clear this time. It was as though Fuzz and Al were carrying on a normal conversation.
The white-haired old man leaned against the cell wall on one shoulder with one foot crossing the other as he said, “Well Al, I think you have gotten yourself into a lot of trouble this time.”
This time fuzz seemed to be more of a confidant than an adversary.
Calmly, Al said, “I didn’t shoot Vandi or do nothing else to him. Why do you care that I shot him? He never did nothing to help your people.”
Stroking his enormous white beard, Fuzz said, “Oh but he has. He is a Geechee, one of us. Al, you tried to run over that boy, and now you shot Vandi. You are lucky, Vandi will survive. Why do you hate black people so much, Al?”
“I just do. It’s how I was brought up. My daddy and mommy all hated them, and I hate them. But I didn’t shoot no special agent, and you can’t convince anybody that I did.”
“That’s not a good thing Al. You gotta pay for your misdeeds, and you gotta change your thinking about us too.”
Al and Fuzz continued the conversation as though they were old friends just chatting about the weather.
“No, I haven’t done anything to be punished for. Vandi deserved to be shot, but I didn’t do it. I know that Oats did it.”
“How ‘bout that boy Al? He was just an innocent young person, and you tried to kill him. We have to decide what your punishment will be for that evil deed Al.”
“Well maybe, but he shouldn’t have been out that late at night. He was up to no good, so I did everybody a favor by running him off the road,” Al rationalized.
“No Al, that’s not true. You can’t just do away with people ‘cuz they’re out on the road at night. What do you think your punishment should be Al?”
“I don’t want to be punished,” said Al starting to cry like a baby. Suddenly Fuzz was no longer Al’s friendly counselor but his judge. In Al’s illusion, Fuzz had total authority to impose whatever punishment he decided necessary.
Fuzz’s last words were, “You have to be punished, Al. I’ll be back soon, so think about your punishment and we will talk about it later.”
In a flash, Fuzz was gone. Al settled into a deep sleep, gasping for air with each inhaled breath. As he did so, his quick gasps made a sucking sound that could be heard throughout the cellblock. Al was not aware of it, but Fuzz wasn’t finished with him yet. Not by a long shot.
He had nightmares and visions all night that he had actually hit and killed the boy. With each dream, Fuzz was back. For most of the night, Al’s vision of Fuzz was vague when it flashed in and out of his perturbed dreams. Al would scream and yell periodically as he saw Fuzz chopping at him with a huge ax. As the ax came down, Al woke up and jumped up on the jail cot. Then he would hold the sides of his head and scream, “Leave me alone, leave me alone, you bastard.” Then he would be able to go back to sleep until the next distorted vision appeared, always having something to do with Fuzz who would castigate him in some way.
The inmates in adjacent cells woke up each time Al had one of his fits. They yelled, cussed at him, and made threats, idle though they were. Eventually, the guards came in and tried to quiet Al down, but he was under a total mental breakdown. He began tearing at his face with his hands and butting his head against the wall. In his demented mind, he was trying to silence Fuzz. But Fuzz would have no part of it. The harder Al smashed his head against the wall, the more vivid the image of his tormentor became. It was 4:00 AM when Al had his most violent episode. By this time, his head was bleeding profusely. The skin had been totally broken away from his knuckles, and several of his knuckles were broken from pounding the wall. Al’s self-deprecation was most severe by the time the guards decided to place him in a straitjacket.
When three guards entered the cell, he fought and stood up on his cot flailing at them with both bloody fists. It was all the guards could do to get the 300-pound man into the strait jacket. Due to his overwhelmingly fat stomach, the jacket didn’t fit very well. When they finally forced it on him and rolled him over onto his face, they realized the strap in the back of the jacket barely reached the last buckle hole. They pulled it tight almost taking away his breath. They dragged him to the cellblock entrance and put him on a gurney where two waiting EMT attendants transported him to the county hospital mental ward. There he would be held until he could be moved to the state mental facility in Columbia for evaluation and treatment.