A Long Line of Dead Men

"I want to thank you for coming," he said. "I've talked with each of you about the situation we're facing, and I know some of you have talked to one another. Let me see if I can summarize what we're up against, and then we can go around the room in our usual fashion and get a sense of where we are on this. There's a fellow who'll be joining us at three-thirty, a detective by the name of Scudder. It would be good if we could reach some sort of consensus by the time he gets here…"

I got to Commerce Street fifteen minutes early and killed the time wandering the narrow winding streets. It took me back to when I was a new face at the Sixth Precinct, itself housed on Charles Street in those days. I was new to the Village, and excited by what I saw, but I kept getting lost on those eccentric streets. I thought I'd never get the hang of it, but nothing familiarizes you with an area like a tour of duty there. I caught on.

At 3:30 exactly I mounted the steps at Gruliow's house and worked the lion's head door knocker. Gruliow opened the door at once and met me with a smile, one he'd shown me before, the one that suggested that we two shared a secret. "You're right on time," he said. "Come on in. There's a bunch of fellows here who want to meet you."

The heat notwithstanding, I was glad I'd worn a suit. They were all in dark business suits, except for Lowell Hunter, whose suit was seersucker, and Gerard Billings, the TV weatherman, with his trademark bow tie and a Kelly-green blazer. Gruliow introduced me and I shook hands all around, trying to fix each face in my mind and match it with a name I already knew. I didn't have that many to remember; of the nine, I had already met Gruliow and Hildebrand, and I recognized Billings and Avery Davis. That left Hunter, along with Bob Berk, Bill Ludgate, Kendall McGarry, and Gordon Walser.

Of the other five, Brian O'Hara was trekking in the Himalayas with his eldest son and wouldn't be back for another ten days. John Youngdahl lived in St. Louis; he'd moved there eight years ago, never missed the annual May meeting, but was unable to come in this afternoon on such short notice. Bob Ripley was in Ohio to attend a daughter's college graduation, while Douglas Pomeroy and Rick Bazerian had business appointments they'd been unable to reschedule.

After the introductions we all took our seats and they all waited for me to say something. I looked around at the ring of expectant faces and all I could think of was that I wanted a drink. I took a deep breath and let it out and pushed the thought aside.

I told them I was grateful to them for the meeting. "I know you've had a little time to discuss the situation," I said, "but I thought I might tell you what it looks like from my perspective, which is that of an outsider and a professional investigator." I talked for fifteen or twenty minutes, discussing the various deaths in turn, speculating on the probable legitimacy of the suicides and accidents. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I didn't trip over my own tongue and I guess I made some sort of sense. From the looks on their faces, they were hanging on every word.

"Where we go from here," I said, "is up to you gentlemen. Before I list the alternatives, I'd like to use this conference for another purpose and take advantage of the opportunity to ask you some questions."

"Like what?" Gruliow wanted to know.

"Your club's had a death rate well in excess of average. That's what prompted Lew to hire me. I wonder how many of you were similarly disturbed at the number of deaths, and if the possibility of murder ever suggested itself to you."

Kendall McGarry, one of whose ancestors had signed the Declaration of Independence, said he'd had exactly that thought, and that it had come to him a full two years ago. "But I dismissed it at once as fanciful and preposterous, the sort of premise you'd hang a miniseries on, good enough for television but utterly incredible in real life."

Bob Berk confessed to a similar fleeting thought. Gordon Walser, who'd announced at the very first meeting that he'd been born with an extra finger on each hand, said that he'd lost both parents and several other family members over the past decade, and that this may have kept him unaware of the club's high death rate. Similarly, Lowell Hunter had lost "more friends than I could count" to AIDS; the club's death rate, he could assure us, was considerably lower than that of his own social circle.

Gerard Billings said he'd have been bothered more if a higher proportion of the deaths had been the result of illness. "That's threatening," he said. "Cancer, heart attacks, all those little time bombs in your cells and blood vessels. Those are the things that scare you. Suicide, though, that's a choice, and one I've never even considered for myself. A private plane crash, well, I don't fly my own plane, so how's that going to happen to me? As far as murder's concerned, that's like getting struck by lightning. It happens to other people. You stay out of bad neighborhoods, you keep your hands off other men's wives, you don't walk through Central Park at night, and you don't mess around with Jim. You know, the Jim Croce song?" He sang a few bars, his voice trailing off as the others stared at him.

Bill Ludgate said he'd been acutely aware of the high death rate, but that it had never made him suspicious. He'd just been bothered by the realization that his generation had started to die off, and that he himself might be closer to the end of life than he'd thought. Avery Davis said, "You know, I took the same thought and went in the opposite direction with it. I figured the fellows who'd passed on had done the dying for us. If they were dead, then my odds of hanging around for a while were that much better. Which is nonsense when you think about it, but it seemed almost logical at the time."

I asked if any of them had noticed anything suspicious. Any sense that they were being followed or stalked? Any strings of wrong numbers, or callers who rang off without identifying themselves?

No one had anything substantial. Bob Berk, who lived in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, said there had been a lot of clicking and static on his residential phone line for a while, almost as if it were tapped, but that the problem had cleared up several months ago as inexplicably as it had started. Bill Ludgate said his wife had been bothered by someone calling and hanging up without saying anything, and that he'd been on the verge of doing something about it when he happened to learn the identity of the caller; it was a girlfriend of his, trying to reach him at home.

"You dog, you," Gerry Billings said.

But the affair was over, Ludgate said, and the calls had stopped.

I asked a few more questions. I didn't tell them this, but I was less interested in the information they could give me than in the sense I got of who they were. I knew where they lived, I knew how old they were, I knew what they did for a living and how good a living it brought them, but I wanted some sense of who they were as individuals.

I wasn't sure what I wanted with it.

When they were out of answers and I was out of fresh questions, I reviewed their options. They could go to the police, starting either with Joe Durkin, who knew a little about their situation, or anywhere else in the chain of command. If they weren't happy with the response they received, or if they wanted to ensure a full-scale high-priority investigation from the jump, they could go directly to the media.

Or I could continue my one-man investigation, moving slowly, sifting leads, and waiting for some kind of break. That would keep the spotlight off the club, and keep everybody's name out of the paper, but it might not get anywhere. Still, I'd have certain recommendations to make regarding personal security, and they'd be able to function as auxiliary investigators, keeping in contact and reporting anything irregular or suspicious the minute they noticed it.

"There's no guarantee I'll get anywhere," I told them. "But the cops can't give you a guarantee, either. And they'll turn your lives inside out."

"Because of the media attention, you mean?"

"Even without that. If I were a cop, you know the first thing I'd do? I'd ask each of you to account for your whereabouts on the night in February when Alan Watson was murdered."

A couple of them reacted visibly; it had not yet struck them that they were suspects. "Maybe you should anyway," Avery Davis said. "All of us and the five men who couldn't make it." I shook my head. "Why not?"

"Because I haven't got the resources to check your alibis effectively. Personally, I don't think the police would crack this by checking alibis. My guess is that there'd be a few of you who'd be unable to prove you couldn't have followed Watson home and killed him. That's no indicator of guilt. As a matter of fact, whoever did kill Watson might very well have an alibi in reserve, and it might be impossible to disprove. But the cops would have to check everything out, because you can't leave a single stone unturned in an official investigation. Especially when the case has a high profile."

Gruliow said, "What's your recommendation, Matt?"

"I don't have one. How can I recommend anything? You gentlemen have to make the call. You're the ones with your necks on the block."

"And if it were your neck?"

"I don't know," I said. "It's easy to argue either side. It would seem obvious that the safest course is to go public right away, but I'm not sure that's so. This is a very patient killer. What would he do if the police gave the investigation priority and the newspapers splashed it all over the front page? My guess is he'd crawl in a hole and lay low. He's in no hurry, he hasn't got a train to catch. He can afford to wait a year or two. Then, when everybody's convinced he never existed in the first place, he can select his victim and kill again."

"For God's sake, why?" Lowell Hunter demanded. "It's not one of us, is it? It can't be."

"I can't believe it's anybody in this room," Bob Berk said.

"And outside of this room? You think it's Ripley or Pomeroy or Brian O'Hara or- who else? John Youngdahl? Rick Bazerian?"

"No."

"If it's one of us," Bill Ludgate said, "that means one of us is crazy. Not a little bit eccentric, not marching to a different drummer, but genuinely nuts. I only see you fellows once a year, but I think you're all relatively sane."

"Can I quote you on that, Billy?"

"So it has to be someone outside the club," he continued, "but who could possibly want to kill us? Who even knows we exist, for Christ's sake?"

"An ex-wife," Ray Gruliow said. "How many of us have been divorced?"

"Why would an ex-wife want to-"

"I don't know. Alienation of affections? Who the hell knows why an ex-wife would do anything? But we're spinning our wheels now, aren't we? We came here to reach a decision, and I think we should do that before we do anything else." He turned to me. "Matt," he said, "would you mind giving us ten minutes to figure out how we want to handle this? You're welcome to wait upstairs, there's a bedroom where you could stretch out if you want."

I said I'd just as soon get some fresh air, which turned out to be a particularly inappropriate figure of speech; when I left Gruliow's centrally air-conditioned house, the airless heat hit me with physical force. I stood on the top step for a moment to get my bearings. Across the street, a black limousine was parked in front of the Cherry Lane Theater. The driver was leaning against the fender and smoking a cigarette. For a moment I thought he was staring at me, but his eyes didn't follow me when I came down the stairs, and I realized he was looking at the door to see if anyone else was about to come through it.