THE COAT. The coat raised a number of questions that none of us could answer. If, during the attack on Robert Sutliff and Charles Kraus, the man had been wearing steel-toe work boots, jeans, and an open-necked plaid flannel shirt over a T-shirt, then we might have subscribed to the theory of protest: the attacker, a blue-collar worker, bore a grudge against the white-collar element of our town. Since, however, the man was wearing a fashionable coat, with the belt looped in front, and was therefore dressed like a successful businessman who might easily have lived in our town and ridden our train, the theory of social or class protest was unacceptable — unless, of course, the stranger had deliberately adopted a costume that wouldn’t draw attention to itself in the station parking lot. The third attack — we hadn’t yet learned about Walter Lasher — complicated our already complicated sense of things. A man dressed like a businessman had attacked a cable repairman in work clothes. What could it mean? Perhaps, we thought, the stranger had lost his job; simmering with rage, he was taking out his frustration on anyone still fortunate enough to have work. It was also possible that the coat had nothing at all to do with the man and what he was after, and that we were guilty of reading into a piece of clothing a significance that was meaningless.

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