The judge finally ruled that the problem of jurisdiction could be sorted out later, since this was simply a preliminary hearing. The young woman from the public defender’s office hotly took exception, which the judge wearily noted.
“All right then,” the judge said finally, “I guess you may proceed, Mr. Wilson.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” the prosecutor said. “This is one of three hearings to be held in this matter. At the request of the police department and in the interests of maintaining order, it was deemed wise to keep the members of the three gangs strictly segregated.”
“Objection, Your Honor,” the defense counsel said, leaping to her feet. “The word ‘gangs’ is pejorative.”
“Sustained,” the judge decided. “Select another word, Mr. Wilson.”
“Would counsel accept ‘groups’?” the prosecutor asked. “ ‘Groups’ is all right,” she replied.
The prosecutor turned back to the judge. “If it please the court, I have one witness who is severely disabled. His testimony may be out of sequence, but he has asked that he be allowed to testify early in the proceedings since he experiences a great deal of discomfort when required to sit for extended periods.”
“Of course, Mr. Wilson.”
The prosecutor called Raphael’s name, and Raphael rose, went to the witness stand, and sat. He drew in a deep breath and pulled an icy, detached calm about himself. Frankie’s warnings were very much on his mind, and he knew that he could not allow anything to rattle him. He was sworn in, and then they began.
“Mr. Taylor,” the prosecutor said, “are you acquainted with this group of young men?” He indicated the assembled Angels.
“I’ve met some of them—briefly. They live a few doors up the street from me.”
“But you were, I take it, much better acquainted with a Mr. Jacob D. Flood, Junior—now deceased.”
“Yes.”
“Would you please elaborate on that acquaintance?”
“We were roommates at college,” Raphael replied. “He came to Spokane last spring when he found out that I was here.” “You were friends then?” “I thought so.” “Mr. Flood was educated?” “Yes.”
“He came from a wealthy family?” “Yes.”
“Did he ever explain to you the nature of his association with the group of individuals here in this courtroom? I mean, they do not appear to be the sort of people with whom someone of education and wealth would normally associate.”
“They amused him. He had other reasons, but basically it was because they amused him.”
“Objection, Your Honor,” the defense attorney said, coming to her feet. “Purely speculative.”
“I think we can allow a certain latitude, Miss Berensen,” the judge told her patiently. “These proceedings are preliminary after all, and whether or not Mr. Hood was amused by the defendants hardly seems to be a major issue.”
“Your Honor!” she protested.
“Overruled, Miss Berensen.” The judge sighed.
Quite suddenly, perhaps because of the hard chair or his nervousness or the aggravation of the defense attorney’s objection, Raphael’s left thigh and leg and foot began to ache intolerably. He grimaced and shifted his position.
“Are you in pain, Mr. Taylor?” the judge asked, a note of concern in his voice.
“No more than usual, sir.”
The judge frowned slightly and looked down at his notes for a moment. “Mr. Wilson,” he said, looking up, “what is the proposed thrust of your examination of Mr. Taylor?”
“Uh”—the prosecutor faltered—“background, primarily, Your Honor. Mr. Taylor appears to be the only person in Spokane who really knew Mr. Flood, and since Mr. Flood and his role in this matter are likely to play a major part in any trials resulting from these proceedings, I felt that Mr. Taylor’s testimony would help us all to understand that rather strange young man.”
“Then Mr. Taylor is here not so much as a witness for the prosecution as he is in the capacity of a friend of the court?”
“Uh—I suppose that’s true, Your Honor.”
“Miss Berensen.” The judge turned to the defense. “Would you take exception to designating Mr. Taylor a friend of the court?”
“Most strenuously, Your Honor. The man Flood was the instigator of this whole affair. The defense could never accept testimony from his close friend with an amicus curiae label attached to it.”
“Your exception will be noted, Miss Berensen. It does not become any of us, however, to inflict needless suffering upon the witness. What I propose is to permit Mr. Taylor to present narrative testimony concerning the man Flood—his background and so forth—in order to allow the testimony to be completed as quickly as possible. Would you accept narrative testimony from the witness based upon humanitarian considerations, Miss Berensen?”
The defense attorney seemed about to protest further, but thought better of it. “Very well, Your Honor.” She was almost sullen about it.
Behind her the two young women scribbled furiously.
“All right then, Mr. Taylor,” the judge said, “why don’t you just give us a brief outline of Mr. Flood’s background—insofar as you know it?”
“Yes, Your Honor.” Raphael thought for a moment, looking at the patch of golden morning sunlight slanting in through the window at the back of the courtroom, and then he started. “Damon Flood’s dead now, so nothing I can say will matter to him. It’s taken me a long time to piece his story together, so I hope you’ll be patient with me. Flood himself isn’t on trial, but his motives in this business may be important.” He looked inquiringly at the judge, silently seeking permission to continue.
“I think we can all accept that, Mr. Taylor. Please go on.”
“Thank you, Your Honor. Jacob Damon Flood, Junior, was born in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. His family is well-to-do. Mr. Flood’s mother died when he was four, and his father was totally immersed in the family business. Flood was not particularly lovable as a child, and he was in continual competition with a cousin who appears to have been everyone’s favorite—even his own father’s. I suppose it finally came to a head during one of those confrontations between Flood and his cousin. Whatever the reason, they fought, and Flood received a very public and humiliating beating while his own father looked on approvingly. As closely as I can reconstruct it, that was the point where something slipped or went off center. He knew who he was. He knew that it was his father who was the head of the company that was the source of all the family wealth. I guess that all his relatives kowtowed to his father, and he expected the same kind of respect. When he didn’t get it, it unsettled him. He became obsessed with the idea of getting revenge—on the cousin certainly and probably on his own father as well. Of course a child can’t attack an adult—or a physically superior child—directly, so Flood transferred his rage and hatred to others—to people who resembled the cousin and whose destruction or disgrace would most severely hurt some older authority figure, who represented his father, I suppose. Does that make any sense at all? I’ve thought about it for a long time, and it’s the only explanation I can come up with.”
“It’s not inconsistent with things we encounter occasionally, Mr. Taylor,” the judge said approvingly. “Please continue.”
Raphael took a deep breath and looked down into the courtroom. The two young women Frankie had warned him about had stopped writing and were staring at him with open hostility. “In time Flood was sent to a number of those exclusive and very expensive private boarding schools in the east where the wealthy dump their children. He developed a game—a very personal and vicious kind of game. He made a point of seeking out boys who resembled his cousin. He would befriend them—and then he would destroy them. Sometimes he planted evidence of crimes or expellable violations of the rules among their belongings—those were his earliest and crudest efforts. Later he grew more sophisticated, and his plots— if that’s not too melodramatic a term—grew more complicated. I’m told that this happened several times i
n various prep schools and during his first two yean at college. It was at that point that I met him. We both transferred to Reed College in Portland from other schools, and we roomed together there. I’ve been told that I closely resemble Flood’s cousin, so I suppose his reaction to me was inevitable.”
The judge looked startled. “Mr. Taylor,” he interrupted, “are you implying that this man was responsible for your injury?”
“No, Your Honor. The accident was simply that—an accident. Flood really had nothing to do with it. I can’t be sure exactly what it was that he originally had planned for me. By this time he had refined his schemes to the point where they were so exotic and involved that I don’t think anyone could have unraveled them. I honestly believe that my accident threw him completely off. It was blind chance—simple stupid bad luck—and he couldn’t accept that.
“Anyway, after the accident, when I had recovered enough to be at least marginally ambulatory, I left Portland and came here to Spokane. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going, and it took Flood five months to find me. He wasn’t going to let me get away from him, but my condition baffled him. How can you possibly hurt someone who’s already been sawed in two?”
“Your Honor,” the defense counsel protested. “I don’t see the pertinence of all this.”
“Miss Berensen, please sit down.”
The young woman flushed and sank back into her seat.
“Go on, Mr. Taylor.”
“When I first came to Spokane, I entered therapy. Learning to walk again is very tedious, and I needed a diversion, so I started collecting losers.”
“Losers? I’m not sure I understand, Mr. Taylor.”
“In our society—probably in every society—there are people who simply can’t make it,” Raphael explained. “They’re not skilled enough, not smart enough, not competitive enough, and they become the human debris of the system. Because our society is compassionate, we take care of them, but in the process they become human ciphers—numbers in the system, welfare cases or whatever.
“I was in an ideal spot to watch them. I live in an area where they congregate, and my apartment is on a rooftop. I was in a situation where I could virtually see everything that went on in the neighborhood.”
“Your Honor,” the prosecutor said, “I don’t want to interrupt Mr. Taylor, but isn’t this getting a bit far afield?”
“Is this really relevant, Mr. Taylor?” the judge asked.
“Yes, Your Honor, I believe so. It’s the point of the whole thing. If you don’t know about the losers, nothing that Flood did will make any sense at all.”
“Very well, Mr. Taylor.”
“It’s easy to dismiss the losers—to ignore them. After all, they don’t sit in front of the churches to beg anymore. We’ve created an entire industry—social workers—to feed them and keep them out of sight so that we never have to come face-to-face with them. We’ve trained whole generations of bright young girls who don’t want to be waitresses or secretaries to take care of our losers. In the process we’ve created a new leisure class. We give them enough to get by on—not luxury, regardless of what some people believe—but they know they won’t be allowed to starve. Our new leisure class doesn’t have enough money for hobbies or enough education for art, so they sit. I suppose it’s great for a month or two to know that you’ll never have to work again, but what do you do then? What do you do when you finally come face-to-face with the reality of all those empty yean stretching out in front of you?
“For most of the losen crisis is the answer. Crisis is a way of being important—of giving their lives meaning. They can’t write books or sell cars or cure warts. The state feeds them and pays their rent, but they have a nagging sense of being worthless. They precipitate crisis—catastrophe—as a way of saying, ‘Look at me. I’m alive. I’m a human being.’ For the loser it’s the only way to gain any kind of recognition. If they take a shot at somebody or OD on pills, at
least the police will come. They won’t be ignored.”
“Mr. Taylor,” the judge said with some perplexity, “your observations are very interesting, but—”
“Yes, Your Honor, I’m coining to the connection. It was about the time that I finally began to understand all of this that Flood showed up here in Spokane. One day I happened to mention the losers. He didn’t follow what I was talking about, so I explained the whole idea to him. For some reason I didn’t understand at the time, the theory of all the sad misfits on the block became very important to him. Of course with Flood you could never be entirely sure how much was genuine interest and how much was put on.
“Anyway, as time went on, Flood started to seek out my collection of losers. He got to know them—well enough to know their weaknesses anyway—and then he began to destroy them one by one. Oh, sure, some of them fell by natural attrition—losers smash up their lives pretty regularly without any outside help—but he did manage to destroy several people in some grand scheme that had me as its focus.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow that, Mr. Taylor,” the judge said.
“As I said, sir, I collect losers,” Raphael explained. “I care about them. For all their deliberate, wrongheaded stupidity I care about them and recognize their need for some kind of dignity. Social workers simply process them. It’s just a job to all those bright young girls, but I cared—even if it was only passively.
“Flood saw that, and it solved his problem. He’d been looking for a way to hurt someone who’d already been hurt as badly as he was likely to ever be hurt, and this was it. He began to systematically depopulate my block—nothing illegal, of course, just a nudge here, a word there. It was extraordinarily simple, really. Losers are pathologically self-destructive anyway, and he’d had a lifetime of practice.”
“Your Honor,” Miss Berensen protested, “this is sheer nonsense. It has no relation to any recognized social theory. I think Mr. Taylor’s affliction has made him …” She faltered.
“Go ahead and say it,” Raphael said to her before the judge could speak. “That’s a common assumption—that a physical impairment necessarily implies a mental one as well. I’m used to it by now. I’m not even offended at being patronized by the intellectually disadvantaged anymore.”
“That’ll do, Mr. Taylor,” the judge said firmly.
“Sorry, Your Honor. Anyway, whether the theory is valid or not is beside the point. The point is that I believe it—and more importantly Flood believed it as well. In that context then, it is true.
“In time Flood insinuated himself into this group of bikers up the street. The gang posed special problems for him. He’d been able to handle all the others on the street one-on-one, but there’s a kind of cumulative effect in a gang—even one as feebleminded as this one.”
Big Heintz came half to his feet. “You watch your mouth, Taylor!” he threatened loudly.
The judge pounded his gavel. “That will be all of that!”
Big Heintz glowered and sank back into his chair.
The judge turned to Raphael then. “Mr. Taylor, we’ve given you a great deal of latitude here, but please confine your remarks to the business at hand.”
“Yes, Your Honor. Once he became involved with the gang, I think Flood began to lose control. Crisis is exciting; it’s high drama, and Flood was pulled along by it all. He could handle the gang members on a one-to-one basis quite easily, but when he immersed himself in the entire gang, it all simply overpowered him. Being a loser is somehow contagious, and when a man starts to associate with them in groups, he’s almost certain to catch it. I tried to warn him about that, but he didn’t seem to understand.” Raphael paused. “Now that I stop and think about it, though, maybe he did at that. He kept after me—begging me almost—to move away from Spokane. Maybe in some obscure way those pleas that we get out of this town were cries for help. Maybe he realized that he was losing control.” He sighed. “Perhaps we should have gone. Then this might not have happened—at least not here in Spokane. Anyway, when I saw t
he gun, I knew that he’d slipped over the line. It was too late at that point.”
“Then you knew he had a gun?” the judge asked.
“Yes, Your Honor. There’d been a skirmish between the two gangs, and Flood had been beaten pretty severely. I suppose that’s what finally pushed him over the edge. In a sense it was like the beating he’d received from his cousin in his childhood, and Flood could never let something like that just slide. He had to get even, and he had to arm himself to make sure that it didn’t happen to him again. I think that toward the end he even forgot why he’d gotten mixed up with the gang in the first place. Anyway, when Heintzie’s grand and final war came, Flood was caught up in it—hooked on crisis, hyped on his own adrenaline, not even thinking anymore—a loser. I suppose it’s sort of ironic. He set out to destroy the gang, but in the end they destroyed him. And what’s even more ironic is that all Flood really wanted to do when he started out was to try to find a way to hurt me. He knew that I cared about my losers, so he thought he could hurt me by destroying them. In the end, though, he became a loser himself and wound up destroying himself. I suppose that his plan really succeeded, because when he destroyed himself, it hurt me more than anything else he could have done. It’s strange, but he finally won after all.” Raphael looked up at the ceiling. He’d never really thought of it before, and it rather surprised him. “I guess that’s about it, Your Honor,” he told the judge. “That’s about all I really know about Damon Flood.” He sat quietly then. It had not really done any good; he realized that now. Denise and Frankie had been right. The categories and pigeonholes were too convenient, and using them as a means of sorting people was too much a part of the official mentality. But he had tried. He had performed that last service that a man can perform for a friend—he had told the truth about him. In spite of everything, he realized that he still thought of Flood as a friend.