A Long Line of Dead Men

"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 annual litany."

"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 dinner because he was in the army, and then the following year or the year after Homer read his name. And I've heard it read once a year ever since."

"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 Cunningham's. And they didn't know how he got there. I wonder how he faked his death. How did you learn of it?"

"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 planning to kill us?"

"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 dinner with the rest of you. I'll grant you that you've all worked hard and created successful lives for yourselves while he's been living in cheap hotels and eating in diners and holding subsistence jobs when he's worked at all. The different paths you've taken for the past thirty years would account for some of the difference, but I think he must have been different to start with."