11 Slandered

Before Des could slander anyone else, Carmela muted the awful broadcast and suggested we might want to watch after we’d cooled down a bit. “I’ve been recording it from the beginning because Josh needs to see his own performance. I think we should share this part with him.”

Helen agreed, then immediately went outside for a smoke. Raj was so angry he could hardly speak, but he stayed, “to see what lies he’s going to tell about us.” About himself, more likely.

I was portrayed as a spoiled brat, who cut classes and never studied–receiving top grades only as a special favor from Josh and Carmela’s faculty friends. Desmond followed up this bald lie by showing a picture of Sonia’s wrecked Kia Spectra, “which Ms. Myers had been driving without a license.” True enough, but without the little detail that I’d been chasing a known murderer.

Carmela received similar treatment, but when his turn came, Raj turned off the sound. From the pictures Desmond showed of Raj surrounded by admiring girls, I received the impression that he was the campus Casanova. Once again, not entirely false, but what’s wrong with being attractive to the other sex? Or your own, for that matter, though Raj would have been crushed by the slightest hint that he was gay.

When Desmond finished defaming everybody but Heathcliff, Raj turned the sound back up so we could listen to his interviews with ex-friends and a rejected applicant. The applicant was Travis Wikkins, a young man about my age. With his thin blond hair parted in the middle, and wearing a Spock t-shirt, he definitely looked the stereotypical computer nerd. When the sound came back on, he was telling the TV audience about the cruel way he’d been rejected by the Residue Class.

“As part of their initiation, they tried to force me to share drugs with them, but of course I refused. When I did, they used their vicious dog to try to intimidate me.” On the screen behind him, we saw a picture of leaping Heathcliff with his teeth bared. I recognized the clipping. Heath was about to grab a flying frisbee, but the flying disk had been Photoshopped out of the picture.

“I know why he’s picturing Heathcliff like that,” Sonia said. “There were drugs all right, but Travis was the one using them.”

Carmela looked at Cosette and elaborated. I suppose she thought Cose needed to know the true story, but she never would have believed it in the first place. “Heath approached Travis the moment he arrived, sniffing his pants and then sitting in his I-smell-drugs pose. Travis tried to back away, so Heath growled at him.”

“He wet his pants,” Sonia giggled. “Travis, I mean. We shouldn’t have, but we laughed at him.”

I looked at Carmela with a question in my eyes. She confessed to laughing, too, then said, “The laughing was wrong but it wasn’t the reason we rejected him.”

Travis was before my time, so I asked, “What was the reason.”

“The drugs. None of us is a user, and Josh is particularly livid when he encounters one. We don’t talk about it, but his daughter Jenny died from an overdose.”

Cosette sounded horrified. “Oh, that’s awful. I didn’t know you had a daughter. I’m so sorry for you.”

Carmela looked at her with soft eyes. “I agree, Cosette. Terrible doesn’t begin to describe what her death did to him. But she wasn’t my daughter. Her mother was Roberta, Josh’s first wife.”

I could see wetness glistening in Carmela’s eyes as she said, “That was a long time ago, but its effects are still with us. If you use drugs, say goodbye to the Residue Class.”

“Not just drugs,” Helen said. “Anything that spoils thinking.”

I wondered if smoking was one of those thought-spoilers. It seemed that Helen didn’t think so. Besides, she smoked like a river steamer, but when it came to thinking, none of us were her equal.

West’s next guest neatly illustrated Helen’s point. We didn’t have to know what sort of drug Colin McGregor used to spoil his thinking. Perhaps it wasn’t even something he used. It could have been his mother’s vice while she carried him in her womb. The cause was not the issue. The end result was.

I couldn’t see it in the interview, but Helen told us that Colin had no mathematical imagination. He was rather adept at manipulating symbols, and that kind of work might have made him a valuable person to have around–in 1890 or so. Nowadays, that kind of symbol manipulation was best left to computers.

In another century, Colin’s skill might have qualified him for a job as a shipping clerk, but in the twenty-first, it dropped him out of the running for a place on the Residue Class roster. “It was too bad,” said Sonia. “He was a very nice guy. Clean. Polite. And his shoes were always polished.”

Helen stabbed her own forehead with her index finger. “But not much up here.”

Colin was the last of Desmond’s lineup of Residue rejects. West thanked him, said a few kind but insincere words about our team’s detective work, and turned the camera over to a 30-day weight-loss plan, one of his faithful sponsors.

Carmela snapped off the TV, giving Cosette the opportunity to ask the question that had bothered me, too, through all the interviews. “Are they all like that?”

“Like what?” Raj asked.

“Resentful? Carrying a grudge against us?”

“Shame on you, Cosette. Of all of us, you should be the last to commit a sampling error.” Raj seemed particularly pleased to have caught her in an mistake.

Cosette, however, saw what he meant before his full sentence was out of his mouth. “I guess I was assuming those two were representative of the rejects.”

He shook his head slowly, as if he couldn’t believe she’d made such a statistical blunder. He turned to Helen and asked, “You’ve been around from the beginning. How many applicants have we rejected.”

Helen hesitated. I knew she didn’t like to give approximate answers. Carmela knew that, too. She spoke up, rescuing the one of us who rarely needed rescuing. “I’d say at least a hundred. Closer to two.”

“And most of them are resentful, like those two?” Cosette asked.

“No, not at all. Maybe one out of twenty, or–.”

Cose cut her off. “That’s not so bad. Better than I–”

Carmela didn’t like to be interrupted before she’d given her full answer. “–or fewer. Maybe one out of forty.”

She held up her hand to prevent any further interruption. “But that one can cause more harm than the other thirty-nine can help.”