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1 It must have been around nine o’clock when the old man stood up and tapped his spoon . . .
2 By the time I met Lewis Hildebrand, thirty-two years and six weeks after he became a member of the club . . .
3 “We got together last month,” he said. “At Keens Chophouse on West Thirty-sixth Street.
4 In addition to the homicides, Lew told me, there were cases of suicide and accidental death, . . .
5 “God, it’s such a guy thing,” Elaine said. “Thirty-one grown men sitting around wooden tables . . .
6 In the morning I deposited Lewis Hildebrand’s check and walked over to the main library at Fifth and Forty-second.
7 Hal Gabriel had lived on West End Avenue at Ninety-second Street.
8 When I first moved to my hotel, Jimmy Armstrong had a saloon right around the corner on Ninth . . .
9 Joe Durkin said, “Tell me something, because I find myself wondering.
10 There was a message from Wally Donn at the hotel desk. “I’ll be here for the next hour,” he said when I called.
11 I treated myself to the afternoon, catching a movie on Twenty-third Street, . . .
12 Commerce Street is only two blocks long. It angles southwest from Seventh Avenue . . .
13 “I’m hungry,” he announced around six. He called up a Chinese restaurant.
14 In the morning I beeped TJ and met him for breakfast across the street at the Morning Star.
15 We got on the A train and split up at Columbus Circle. TJ was on his way to the shop to show Elaine how . . .
16 I caught the Number Seven train and got off at the 103rd Street station in Corona, two stops before Shea Stadium.
17 The meeting was in a brownstone on Eighty-second Street off Second Avenue.
18 It was well past midnight by the time I got home. Elaine’s Girls’ Night Out had evidently had an early ending; . . .
19 Paris Green does a nice brunch on Sundays, with tables set up outside under green-and-white umbrellas.
20 They assembled, nine of fourteen of thirty-one, at three o’clock on the last Tuesday in June, . . .
21 “They each put up a thousand dollars,” I told Elaine. “The ones who’d brought their checkbooks along . . .
22 “You just missed him,” Burke said. “He stepped out not fifteen minutes ago.
23 And so I told the story of the club of thirty-one. I talked for a long time.
24 For a full twelve years, Gerard Billings had been the weather reporter for an independent New York broadcast channel.
25 Martin Banszak took off his rimless glasses and fogged the lenses with his breath, . . .
26 “I’ll tell you something,” Ray Galindez said. “This is a piece of cake.
27 “Jim,” I said. “I’m glad you called. I was hoping I’d hear from you.”
28 I arranged to meet Felicia Karp at four o’clock. I got to the house on Stafford Avenue . . .
29 I met Ray Gruliow in a bar called Dirty Mary’s a block from City Hall.
30 The first week in August I got a call around one in the afternoon.
31 Two hours later I was in a Laundromat on the corner of Manhattan Avenue . . .
32 When he woke up I was the first thing he saw. I was sitting on a metal folding chair.
33 When the dust had settled I took Elaine to a high-style vegetarian restaurant on Ninth Avenue in Chelsea.