"It's beginning to sound like a circus."
"Well, if you hired me you'd get a much lower profile. I don't even have a PI license, let alone influence in high places. Any investigation I might mount would have to proceed at a relatively slow pace, and I don't know how much of a factor time might turn out to be. Have you discussed this with any of your fellow members?"
"I haven't said a word to anybody."
"Really? That's a surprise. I would have thought… Oh."
He gave a long slow nod. "The club's not a true secret society, but we've certainly kept it a secret from the world. Nobody else knows we exist." He took hold of the glass of brandy. "So if there's a killer," he said evenly, "it would almost have to be one of us."
5
"God, it's such a guy thing," Elaine said. "Thirty-one grown men sitting around wooden tables eating meat and checking for chest pains. You can just about smell the testosterone, can't you?"
"I'm beginning to understand why they didn't tell their wives about it."
"I'm not putting it down," she insisted. "I'm just pointing out how intrinsically masculine the whole thing is. Keeping it all a secret, only seeing each other once a year, talking solemnly about Important Subjects. Can you imagine the same club composed of women?"
"It would drive the restaurant crazy," I said. "Thirty-one separate checks."
"One check, but we'll make sure it gets split fairly. 'Let's see, Mary Beth had the apple pie á la mode, so she owes an extra dollar, and Rosalie, you had the Roquefort dressing, which is an additional seventy-five cents.' Why do they do that, anyway?"
"Splitchecks item by item? I've often wondered."
"No, charge extra for a tablespoon of Roquefort. When you're paying twenty or thirty dollars for a meal it ought to include whatever salad dressing you want. Why are you looking at me like that?"