A Long Line of Dead Men

by Lawrence Block

Page 4

 

  "Dont you like us anymore, Bill?"

  "I like you all just fine," he said, "but I find myself inclined to keep things separate. Hell, I havent even been to Cunninghams since the last get-together. I dont know how many times someonell suggest it for lunch or dinner, and I always make sure we wind up someplace else instead. Oh, Id rather not, I told a fellow just last week. I had a bad meal last time I was there. The place isnt what it used to be. "

  "Jesus, Billy," somebody said, "have a heart, huh? Youre gonna put them out of business. "

  "Well, Id hate to see that happen," he said, "but do you see what I mean? Once a years enough for me. I like having thirty guys that I only see once a year, in a place I only go to once a year. "

  "Thats twenty-seven guys now, twenty-eight including yourself. "

  "So it is," he said gravely. "So it is. But you see my point, dont you? Im not telling the rest of you what to do, and I love you one and all, but Im not coming to your funerals. "

  "Thats okay, Billy," Bob Ripley said. "Well come to yours. "

  "Thirty men in 1961, ranging in age from twenty-two to thirty-two with a median age of twenty-six. Thirty-two years later, how many would you expect to find alive?"

  "I dont know. "

  "Neither did I," Hildebrand said. "After the dinner last month I went home with a headache and tossed and turned all night. I woke up knowing something was very wrong. Youve got a group of men in their late fifties and early sixties, youre going to have some losses. Death is going to start making in-roads.

  "But it seemed to me we were way over the probabilities. My mind kept coming up with different explanations, and I decided the first thing to do was find out if my sense of things was accurate. So I called up a fellow I know whos always trying to sell me more life insurance and told him I had an actuarial problem for him. I ran the numbers for him and asked him what percentage of deaths youd expect over that span of time in a group like that. He said hed make a couple of calls and get back to me. Take a guess, Matt. How many deaths would you expect in a group of thirty?"

  "I dont know. Eight or ten?"

  "Four or five. There ought to be twenty-five of us left and instead were down to fourteen. What does that say to you?"

  "Im not sure," I said, "but it certainly gets my attention. The first thing Id do is ask your friend another question. "

  "Thats just what I did. Tell me your question. "

  "Id ask him to gauge the significance of a sample with three or four times the expected number of deaths. "

  He nodded. "That was my question, and he had to call somebody to find out. The answer that came back to me was that sixteen deaths out of thirty was remarkable, but it wasnt significant. Do you know what he meant by that?"

  "No. "

  "According to him, the samples too small for any result to be significant. We could have one hundred percent surviving or one hundred percent dying and it wouldnt really signify anything. Now if we had the same percentage in a substantially larger group, then it would mean something from an actuarial standpoint. See, actuaries like large numbers. The bigger the group, the more they can read into the statistics. If we had a hundred forty survivors in a group of three hundred, that would have some significance. Fourteen hundred out of three thousand, that would be even more significant. A hundred forty thousand out of three hundred thousand, that would begin to suggest that the sample was composed of people who lived in Chernobyl, or whose mothers took DES during pregnancy. It would really set the sirens wailing. "

  "I see. "

  "Ive had some experience in direct-mail advertising. We tested everything. You have to. If we had a list of half a million names, and we did a test mailing to a thousand of those names, we knew wed get the same response ratio within a point or two from the entire list. But we knew better than to send out a test mailing to thirty names, because the results wouldnt mean anything. "

  "Where does that leave you?"

  "It leaves me impressed with the percentages, and never mind the size of the sample. I cant get past the fact that statistically we should have suffered four or five deaths and instead we took a hit three or four times as heavy. What do you make of it, Matt?"

  I gave it some thought. "I dont know anything about statistics," I said.

  "No, but youre an ex-cop and a detective. You must have instincts. "

  "I suppose I do. "

  "What do they tell you?"

  "To look for special circumstances. You mentioned one man who died in Vietnam. Were there any other combat deaths?"

  "No, just Jim Severance. "

  "How about AIDS?"

  He shook his head. "We had two gay members, although I dont believe anybody knew they were gay when the chapter was founded. I wonder if that would have made a difference. In 1961? Yes, Im sure it would have, and when we stood up and recounted the most interesting fact about ourselves at that first meeting, that particular fact went unmentioned. But later on both of the fellows saw fit to tell the group about their sexuality. I dont know when those revelations burst upon us, but we were still meeting at Cunninghams then, I remember that much, so it was quite a while ago. In any event, neither of them died of AIDS. Lowell Hunter very well may, in the course of time. Hes told us that hes HIV-positive, but as of our meeting last month he was still completely asymptomatic. And Carl Uhl died in 1981, before anybody even heard the word AIDS. I gather the disease existed then, but I certainly hadnt heard a thing about it. In any case, Carl was murdered. "

  "Oh?"

  "They found him in his apartment in Chelsea. He lived just around the corner from Cunninghams, but of course Cunninghams was long gone by the time Carl was killed. I gather it was a sex killing, some sort of sadomasochistic game gone out of control. He was tied up and wearing handcuffs and a leather hood, and hed been eviscerated and subjected to sexual mutilation. Its a hell of a world we live in, isnt it?"

  "Yes. "

  "After I spoke to my insurance man, I spent a few nights sitting up late and trying to concoct explanations. The first, of course, is sheer chance. There might be long odds against such a high number of deaths, but any gambler will tell you that long shots come in all the time. In the long run youll go broke betting on them, but what is it they say? In the long run were all dead, which, when you stop and think of it, is one of the clubs underlying principles. " He picked up his glass, but he still didnt drink the damn thing. "Where was I?"

  "Sheer chance. "

  "Yes. No way to rule it out, but I set it aside and looked for other explanations. One that occurred to me was that the group was composed of men with a strong predisposition toward early death. It seemed at least arguable that natural selection might have operated to steer such persons into our club. A person genetically destined for an early grave might be aware of his fate on some unconscious level, and might thus be more likely than the next fellow to accept an invitation to join a group preoccupied with death. I dont know whether or not I believe in fate, it probably depends when you ask me, but I certainly believe in genetic predisposition. So thats one possibility. "

  "Tell me some of the others. "

  "Well, another one that came to me is a little more mind-over-matter. It strikes me as possible that the club itself could have the effect of increasing its members chances of dying young. "

  "How?"

  "By focusing our attention on our own mortality to an unnatural degree. Id hate to argue that a man can prolong his life by systematically denying his own mortality, but its still possible that we can hasten the day by sitting around waiting for it, and getting together once a year to find out who caught the bus. Im sure theres a part of me that longs for death, just as theres another part that wants to live forever. Maybe our meetings strengthen the death wish at the expense of the life urge. The mind-body connection is sufficiently established these days that even the doctors are grudgingly aware of it. People are vulnerable to illness because of their mental state, they become accident-prone, th
ey make dangerous decisions. It could be a factor. "

  "I suppose it could. " I wanted more coffee, and Id barely raised my head to look around for the waiter when he hurried over to fill my cup. I said, "Homer Champney sounds like a fellow with a pretty strong life urge. "

  "He was a remarkable man. He had more energy and zest for living well into his nineties than most men ever have. And dont forget he was of a generation that didnt live as long as we do today, or stay as active. A man our age was supposed to be ready for a rocking chair, assuming he still had a heartbeat. "

  "What about the others in his chapter?"

  "They died," he said ruefully, "and thats all Ive ever known about them. I dont remember any of their names. I only heard them the one time, when Homer read the list and burned the paper it was written on. He made a real point of never mentioning any of their names again. As far as he was concerned, the chapter was closed, period. I dont know how long they lived or how they died. " He laughed shortly. "For all I know, they never even existed. "

  "What do you mean?"

  "Its a thought I havent entertained in years, but it came to me late one night and Ive never entirely forgotten it. Suppose there never was a chapter before ours. Suppose Homer picked those thirty names out of the phone book. Suppose he made up the whole kit and caboodle, including the man whod fought in the Mexican War, along with the legends about Mozart and Isaac Newton and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Suppose he was just a nut with a gift of gab who thought it would be interesting to eat beef once a year with a group of young fellows while he waited for the man with the scythe. "

  "You dont really believe that. "

  "No, of course not. But whats interesting is that theres no real way to disprove it. If Homer had any written records of the previous chapter, Im sure he destroyed them after our first meeting. If any of his chapter brothers left anything on paper, I suppose what their heirs didnt throw out is moldering in some attic somewhere. But how would anyone know where to look?"

  "Anyway," I said, "it doesnt really matter, does it?"

  "No," he said. "Because if theres a destiny operating, genetic or otherwise, I dont suppose theres anything to be done about it. And if our membership in the club is killing us by poisoning our psyches in some insidious fashion, well, its probably too late to look for the antidote. And if Homer was a sly old duffer and ours is the first club of thirty-one in human history, well, so what? Ill still turn up at Keens the first Thursday in May, and if I turn out to be the last man alive, Ill make it my business to pick out thirty honorable men and keep the old flame burning. " He snorted. "I could say that it gets harder every year to find thirty honorable men, but I dont know that its true. I have a feeling it was never easy. "

  I said, "You think the members are being murdered. "

  "Yes. "

  "Because the actual deaths have been so greatly in excess of probability. "