Image by Sergei Tokmakov, Esq. https://Terms.Law from Pixabay
Everybody who had a reason to know knew that the days of Col. H.F. Lee also being the captain of the Blue Ridge Precinct and also Special Investigations of the Big Loft Police Department were numbered.
The problem for the higher-level criminal element was that he also could count the days, and knew how long he and his men had to break every case left. He knew that it would be better to allow his men to channel their anger about their divisions being dissolved into clearing the casebook than to be a day out of his discipline still angry like that.
So, on a Wednesday afternoon in late August, a whole lot of people in a whole lot of high places in Lofton County found they had met their afternoon of judgment. All of Western Precinct, into which the much smaller Blue Ridge Precinct would be folded, turned out to help … thus bonding the two sets of officers in a great moment of triumph.
That evening, the men of the Blue Ridge Precinct, overwhelmed by joy at how somehow their new situation had become more than palatable to them, hoisted their commander up onto their shoulders.
“For Lee's the jolly good fellow, for Lee's the jolly good fellow, for Lee's the jolly good fellow, which nobody can deny!”
Not since 1863, probably, had so many deep-lunged Virginian men in uniforms sung more loudly and lustily about a man of that name … in his last great victory for them.
“He took the hit to our pride and turned it around – he made us feel like we had same agency and control in what is happening under the coming conservatorship, and some reason to stick to the process,” Officer Riker said about it years later. “That's all most of us needed. It made the rest easy.”
“I'm not going to lie,” Lieutenant Horatio Lightfoot said. “I was ready to go postal on some people just because we and Capt. Lee didn't deserve what they were going to do to us for being the best – but we showed everybody they couldn't do without us after all.”
“We were his right- and left-hand lieutenants,” by-then-Captain James Longstreet said as Lt. Andrew Anderson nodded. “We knew that half the people in that book were the ones pushing the state to include shutting us down when the department came under conservatorship. They kinda gave themselves away, and so he told us before he told the rest: 'I cannot save my job: you know that Lee since 1865 means Lightning-Ever-Expected. But they want you out, too. Let's find out why before we go.”
So, Blue Ridge Precinct was rolled into Western in the end, but Special Investigations, under its new captain, James Longstreet, would survive conservatorship. The old captain managed that outcome in one afternoon of work, and then went back to his persona of Cousin Harry at the Ludlow house, in the waning days of his guardianship of the Ludlow grandchildren, and found eight-year-old Edwina and nine-year-old George, formerly sibling rivals who were often fighting each other, curled up asleep in his chair, in perfect peace.
“It was and is a good day,” he said to his wife Maggie when she asked. “Things are changing and coming to an end, but I know the Lord is blessing it all, and it is going to be quite all right.”