A Long Line of Dead Men

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?"