A Long Line of Dead Men

"We all did or we wouldn't be here. But I talked to Frank DiGiulio the other day and he said he wasn't coming, that he didn't think it was appropriate. And now I've decided I agree with him. You know, back when this thing first got rolling, there were a few members I used to see socially. A lunch now and then, or drinks after work, or even getting together with the wives for dinner and a movie. But I stopped doing that, and when I spoke to Frank I realized it was the first conversation I'd had with any of the group since dinner last May."

"Don't you like us anymore, Bill?"

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

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

"Well, I'd hate to see that happen," he said, "but do you see what I mean? Once a year's 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."

"That's twenty-seven guys now, twenty-eight including yourself."

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

"That's okay, Billy," Bob Ripley said. "We'll 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 don't 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. You've got a group of men in their late fifties and early sixties, you're 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 who's 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 you'd expect over that span of time in a group like that. He said he'd 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 don't know. Eight or ten?"

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

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

"That's just what I did. Tell me your question."

"I'd 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 wasn't significant. Do you know what he meant by that?"

"No."

"According to him, the sample's too small for any result to be significant. We could have one hundred percent surviving or one hundred percent dying and it wouldn't 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 inChernobyl, or whose mothers took DES during pregnancy. It would really set the sirens wailing."

"I see."

"I've 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 we'd 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 wouldn't mean anything."

"Where does that leave you?"

"It leaves me impressed with the percentages, and never mind the size of the sample. I can't 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 don't know anything about statistics," I said.

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

"I suppose I do."

"What do they tell you?"