A Long Line of Dead Men

"And was it there?"

"No, it wasn't."

"So you went all the way there for nothing?"

"No," I said. "I found what I was looking for."

29

I met Ray Gruliow in a bar called Dirty Mary's a block from City Hall. They do a brisk lunch business there, the crowd ru

Hard-Way Ray looked as though he, too, could have been left over from the night before. His face was drawn and he had dark circles under his eyes. He was in a booth with a cup of coffee when I got there, and I told the waiter I'd have the same.

"No he won't," Gruliow said. "He'll have an ordinary cup of coffee. Black, right?"

"Black," I agreed.

"And I'll have another the hard way," he said. That, he explained when the waiter had withdrawn, was with a shot in it. I told him I'd figured that out.

"Well, you're a fast study," he said. "I don't usually start the day this way, but I had a hell of a night last night. Anyway, I've been up for hours. I had to be across the way there when the gavel came down at nine o'clock. I got a postponement, but I had to show up and ask for it." He sipped his fortified coffee. "I like drinking out of coffee cups," he said. "Gives you an idea what Prohibition must have been like. And I like a shot of booze in a cup of coffee. It keeps the caffeine from making you too edgy."

"Tell me about it."

"You used to drink it that way?"

"Oh, once in a while," I said. I took out a copy of the sketch and handed it to him. He unfolded it, got a look at it, shook his head, and started to refold it. I put out a hand to interrupt the process.

"God," he said. "I've looked at this guy's ugly face until I can see it in my dreams. And I find myself expecting to see him everywhere, do you know what I mean? In the cab coming down here this morning I kept sneaking peeks at the driver, trying to see if it could be him. I took a second look at the waiter before."

"Just take a look at the sketch for now," I suggested.

"What am I going to see that I haven't already seen?"

"You used to know this man," I said.

"I already told you he looks familiar, but-"

"You haven't seen him in thirty years. He was in his middle twenties when you knew him."

He ran the numbers, frowned. "He's forty-eight now, isn't he? Thirty years ago he would have been-"

"He lied about his age, either to be consistent with his fake ID or because he didn't want to be considered too old for the security-guard job. He must have taken eight or nine years off his real age. It's not the biggest lie he ever told."

"God, I know him," he said. "I can picture his face, I can see him talking, I can almost hear the voice. Help me out, will you?"

"You know his name. It's part of your a

"Part of our-"

"For years now," I said, "you all thought he was dead."

"My God," he said. "It's him, isn't it?"

"You tell me, Ray."

"It is," he said. "It's Severance."

"I made a couple of stops on my way here," I told him. "I went over to Lew Hildebrand's apartment and caught him before he left for work. I saw Avery Davis at his office. They were both able to identify the sketch as James Severance. In fact Davis said he had already been struck by the killer's resemblance to Severance, and would have mentioned something except that he knew Severance was dead. Everybody knew it, and how could you possibly forget it? You've been reading his name all those years."

"And he's not dead?"

"I went down to Washington yesterday," I said. "I went to see if his name was engraved on the Memorial down there."

"And it wasn't?"

"No."

"I'm not sure if that proves anything, Matt. Their accuracy's a long way from a hundred percent. People have been left off the Memorial, and guys who survived the war have found their names carved in stone. He could be carried on the books as MIA, he could have been overlooked in any number of ways-"

"He never served," I said.

"He was never in Vietnam?"

"He was never in the service, period. I went to the Veterans Administration and I found somebody who knew somebody at the Pentagon. They did a pretty comprehensive check of the service records. He was never in any branch of the service. I don't know if he was ever called up, or if he even bothered to register for the draft. That would be harder to check, and I'm not sure there's any point to it. What's relevant is he didn't die in Vietnam, and he doesn't seem to have died anywhere else, either. Because he's still alive."

"It seems impossible."

"Avery Davis said it's like finding out at age thirty that you were adopted."

"I know what he meant. I barely knew Severance. He never said much. I saw him once a year for a couple of years, and then he missed a di

"How did he get chosen for the club?"

"I don't know. Either he was somebody's friend or Homer found him all by himself. Did Lew or Avery-"

I shook my head. "They met him for the first time at Cu

"Let me think." He took a sip of his hard-way coffee. "God, it was a long time ago. I seem to remember Homer reading a letter from him, explaining that his heart was with us even though his body was wearing a uniform. And he hoped to be with us soon, and if anything happened to him he'd made arrangements for us to be notified."

"He was setting you up."

"I guess so. It must have been a year later that Homer read his name along with Phil Kalish's and explained that he'd received a telegram a couple of months before."

"From whom?"

"I don't think he said. I suppose I assumed it was either from the army or from a relative of Severance's. Obviously it wasn't from either, no matter how it may have been signed. Severance sent it himself."

"Yes."

"Was he already pla

"Hard to say."

"And why, for God's sake? What did we ever do to him?"

"I don't know," I said. "You know, I met him a few times. I sat across a table from him."

"So you've said."

"And I've met the surviving members, most of them, anyway. And it's hard to imagine him sitting down to di

"Well, hell," he said. "I didn't like to say it when I regarded him as one of our honored dead, but I can say it now, can't I? He came across as a loser."

"A loser."

"A nobody, a nebbish. A guy who wasn't going to make the cut. You're right, he wasn't in our league. He didn't belong at the same table with the rest of us."

"Maybe he realized that himself," I said. "Maybe it pissed him off."

He wanted to speculate on Severance's motives, and what might have gone through his mind. Earlier, he said, before he had any idea who the killer was or what might be motivating him, it had struck him that the whole affair was a sort of collective form of erotomania, where a disturbed individual becomes fixated on someone, often a celebrity. "Like that woman who kept breaking into David Letterman's house," he said. "Or the lunatic who killed John Le