The Conspiracy Club (2 page)

“Oh, really?” The oncologist’s smile was acrid. “She’s ready to see her witch doctor, then curl up and die?”

“She believes treatment made her sick and that more will kill her. It’s a stomach carcinoma. What are we really offering her?”

No answer. Everyone in the room knew the stats. Stomach cancer so advanced was no grounds for optimism.

“Calming her down’s not your job, Dr. Carrier?” said the oncologist. “What exactly
is
your job, vis à vis Tumor Board?”

“Good question,” said Jeremy. And he left the room.

He’d expected a summons to the Chief Psychiatrist’s office for a reprimand and a transfer off the board. None came, and when he showed up next Tuesday, he was met with what seemed to be respectful looks and nods.

Drop your interest in patients and patients talk to you more readily.

Mouth off at the honchos and gain collegial esteem.

Irony stank. From that point on, Jeremy found excuses for missing the meeting.

“The thing is,” said Arthur, “we cellular types get so immersed in details that we forget there’s a person involved.”

In your case, there’s no longer a person involved.

Jeremy said, “Dr. Chess, I just did my job. I’m really not comfortable being thought of as an arbiter of anything. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

“Of course,” said Arthur, unperturbed, as Jeremy bussed his tray and left the dining room. Mumbling something Jeremy couldn’t make out.

Later, much later, Jeremy was fairly certain he’d decoded Arthur’s parting words:

“Until the next time.”

T
he way Jocelyn had died — the image of her suffering — was plaque on Jeremy’s brain.

He was never allowed to read the police report. But he’d seen the look in the detectives’ eyes, overheard their hallway conferences.

Sexual psychopath. Sadistic. One for the record book, Bob.

Their eyes. To do that to a detective’s eyes . . .

Jocelyn Banks had been twenty-seven, tiny, curvy, bubbly, talkative, blond, a blue-eyed pixie, a source of great comfort for the senescent patients she chose to care for.

Ward 3E. All ye who enter here, abandon all reason.

Advanced Alzheimer’s, arthrosclerotic senility, a host of dementias, undiagnosed rot of the soul.

The vegetable garden, the neurologists called it. Sensitive bunch, the neurologists.

Jocelyn worked the 3 to 11
P.M.
shift, tending to vacant eyes, slack mouths, and drool-coated chins. Cheerful, always cheerful. Calling her patients “Honey” and “Sweetie,” and “Handsome.” Talking to those who never answered.

Jeremy met her when he was called up to 3E for a consult on a new Alzheimer’s patient and couldn’t find the chart. The ward clerk was surly and intent on not helping. Jocelyn stepped in, and he realized this was the cute little blonde he’d noticed in the cafeteria.
Thatfacethoselegsthatrear.

When he completed the consult, he went looking for her, found her in the nurses’ lounge, and asked her out. That night her mouth was open for his kisses, breath sweet, though they’d eaten garlicky Italian food. Later, Jeremy was to know that sweetness as an internal perfume.

They dated for nine weeks before Jocelyn moved into Jeremy’s lonely little house. Three months after that, on a moonless Monday just after Jocelyn ended her shift, someone carjacked her Toyota in or near the too-dark auxiliary nurses’ parking lot half a block from the hospital. Taking Jocelyn with him.

Her body was found four days later, under a bridge in The Shallows, a borderline district within walking distance of the city’s cruelest streets. A place of thriving businesses during the day, but deserted at night. On the periphery were derelict buildings and ragged fencing, stray cats and long shadows, and that was where the killer had dumped Jocelyn’s body. She’d been strangled and slashed and wedged behind an empty oil drum. That much the detectives revealed to Jeremy. By that time, the papers had reported those bare facts.

A pair of detectives had worked the case. Doresh and Hoker, both beefy men in their forties, with drab wardrobes and drinkers’ complexions. Bob and Steve. Doresh had dark, wavy hair and a chin cleft deep enough to harbor a cigarette butt. Hoker was fairer, with a pig snout for a nose and a mouth so stingy Jeremy wondered how he ate.

Big and lumbering, both of them. But sharp-eyed.

From the outset, they treated Jeremy like a suspect. The night Jocelyn disappeared, he’d left the hospital at six-thirty, gone home, read and listened to music, and fixed dinner and waited for her. The hedges that sided his tiny front lawn prevented his neighbors from knowing what time he’d arrived or left. The block was mostly renters, anyway, people who came and went, barely furnishing the uninviting bungalows, never taking the time to be neighborly.

The late supper he’d prepared for two proved scant reassurance to Detectives Bob Doresh and Steve Hoker, and, in fact, fed their suspicions. For at 3
A.M.,
well after verifying that Jocelyn hadn’t taken on an emergency double shift, and shortly after phoning a missing persons report to the police, Jeremy had placed the uneaten pasta and salad in the refrigerator, cleared the place settings, washed the dishes.

Keeping busy to quell his anxiety, but to the detectives, such fastidiousness was out of character for a worried lover whose girl hadn’t come home. Unless, of course, said lover knew all along . . .

It went on that way for a while, the two buffaloes alternating between patronizing and browbeating Jeremy. Whatever background check they did on him revealed nothing nasty and a DNA swab of his cheek failed to match whatever they were trying to match.

His questions were answered by knowing looks. They spoke to him several times. In his office at the hospital, at his house, in an interrogation room that reeked of gym locker.

“Was there tissue under her nails?” he said, more to himself than to the detectives.

Bob Doresh said, “Why would you ask that, Doctor?”

“Jocelyn would resist. If she had a chance.”

“Would she?” said Hoker, leaning across the green metal table.

“She was extremely gentle — as I’ve told you. But she’d fight to defend herself.”

“A fighter, huh . . . would she go easily with a stranger? Just go off with someone?”

Anger seared Jeremy’s chest muscles. His eyes clenched and he gripped the table.

Hoker sat back. “Doctor?”

“You’re saying that’s what happened?”

Hoker smiled.

Jeremy said, “You’re
blaming
her?”

Hoker looked over at his partner. His snout twitched, and he looked satisfied. “You can go now, Doctor.”

Eventually, they left him alone. But the damage was done; Jocelyn’s family had flown in — both her parents and a sister. They shunned him. He was never informed of the funeral.

He tried to keep up with the investigation, but his calls to the detective squad were intercepted by a desk officer:
Not in. I’ll give ’em yer message.

A month passed. Three, six. Jocelyn’s killer was never found.

Jeremy walked and talked, wounded. His life shriveled to something sere and brittle. He ate without tasting, voided without relief, breathed city air and coughed, drove out to the flatlands or the water’s edge, and was still unable to nourish his lungs.

People — the sudden appearance of strangers — alarmed him. Human contact repulsed him. The division between sleep and awareness became arbitrary, deceitful. When he talked, he heard his own voice bounce back to him, hollow, echoing, tremulous. Acne, the pustulant plague forgotten since adolescence, broke out on his back and shoulders. His eyelids ticced, and sometimes he was convinced that a bitter reek was oozing from his pores. No one seemed repulsed, though. Too bad; he could’ve used the solitude.

Throughout it all, he kept seeing patients, smiling, comforting, holding hands, conferring with physicians, charting, as he always did, in a hurried scrawl that made the nurses giggle.

One time, he overheard a patient, a woman he’d helped get through a bilateral mastectomy, talking to her daughter in the hallway:

“That’s Dr. Carrier. He’s the sweetest man, the most
wonderful
man.”

He made it to the nearest men’s room, threw up, cleaned himself off, and went to see his next appointment.

Six months later, he felt above it all, below it all. Inhabiting a stranger’s skin.

Wondering what it would be like to degenerate.

A
fter the chat in the dining room, Jeremy braced himself for some sign of familiarity from Arthur Chess at the next Tumor Board. But the pathologist favored him with a passing glance, nothing more.

When the meeting ended, Arthur made no further attempt to socialize, and Jeremy wrote off the encounter as a bit of impulse on the older man’s part.

On a frigid autumn day, he left the hospital at lunchtime and walked to a used bookstore two blocks away. The shop was a dim, narrow place on a grimy block filled with liquor stores, thrift outlets, and vacancies. A strange block; sometimes Jeremy’s nose picked up the sweetness of fresh bread, but no bakeries were in sight. Other times, he’d smell sulfurous ash and industrial waste and find no source of those odors, either. He was beginning to doubt his own senses.

The bookstore was filled with raw pine cases and smelled of old newsprint. Jeremy had frequented its corners and shadows in the past, searching out the vintage psychology books he collected. Bargains abounded; few people seemed interested in first edition Skinners, Maslows, Jungs.

Since Jocelyn’s death he hadn’t been back to the store. Perhaps now was the time to return to routine, such as it was.

The shop’s windows were black, and no signage identified the business inside. Once you entered, the world was gone, and you were free to concentrate. An effective ruse, but it also had the effect of discouraging venture; rarely had Jeremy seen other customers. Maybe that was the way the proprietor wanted it.

He was a fat man who rang up purchases with a scowl, never spoke, seemed pointedly misanthropic. Jeremy wasn’t certain if his mutism was elective or the result of some defect, but he was certain the man wasn’t deaf. On the contrary, the slightest noise perked the fat man’s ears. Customer inquiries, however, elicited an impatient finger point at the printed guide posted near the shop’s entrance: a barely decipherable improvisation upon the Dewey Decimal System. Those who couldn’t figure it out were out of luck.

This afternoon, the bearish mute sat behind his cash register reading a tattered copy of Sir Edward Lytton’s
Eugene Aram
. Jeremy’s entrance merited a shift of haunches and the merest quiver of eyebrow.

Jeremy proceeded to the
Psychology
section and searched book spines for treasures. Nothing. The sagging shelves bore the same volumes he’d seen months ago. Every book, it appeared, remained in place. As if the section had been reserved for Jeremy.

As usual, the shop was empty but for Jeremy. How did the mute make a living? Perhaps he didn’t. As Jeremy continued browsing, he found himself fantasizing about sources of independent income for the fat man. A range of possibilities, from the loftiest inheritance to the monthly disability check.

Or, perhaps the store was a front for drug-dealing, money-laundering, white slavery, international intrigue.

Perhaps piracy on the high seas was hatched here, among the dusty bindings.

Jeremy indulged himself with thoughts of unimaginable felonies. That led him to a bad place, and he cursed his idiocy.

A throat clear stopped him short. He stepped out of
Psychology
and sighted down the next aisle.

Another customer stood there. A man, his back to Jeremy, unmindful of Jeremy.

A tall, bald man in a well-cut, out-of-fashion tweed suit. White fringes of beard floated into view as a pink skull turned to inspect a shelf. The man’s profile was revealed as he made a selection and extricated a tome.

Arthur Chess.

Was this the
Lepidoptery
section? Jeremy had never studied the fat man’s guide, had never been interested in expanding.

Funnel vision.
Sometimes it helped keep life manageable.

He watched Arthur open the book, lick his thumb, turn a page.

Arthur kept his head down. Began walking up the aisle as he read.

Reversing direction, head still down, coming straight at Jeremy.

To greet the pathologist would open the worm-can of obligatory conversation. If Jeremy left now, quickly, stealthily, perhaps the old man wouldn’t notice.

But if he did notice, Jeremy would earn the worst of both worlds: forced to socialize and robbed of browsing time.

He decided to greet Arthur, hoping that the pathologist would be so engrossed in his butterfly book that the ensuing chat would be brief.

Arthur gazed up before Jeremy reached him. The book in his arms was huge, bound in cracked, camel leather. No winged creatures graced the densely printed pages. Jeremy read the title.

Crimean Battle Strategy: A Compendium.

The tag on the nearest shelf said,
MILITARY HISTORY.

Arthur smiled. “Jeremy.”

“Afternoon, Arthur. No lunch today?”

“Large breakfast,” said the pathologist, patting his vest. “Busy afternoon, a bit of diversion seemed in order.”

With what you do all day, it’s a wonder you ever have an appetite.

“Lovely place, this,” said the old man.

“Do you come here often?”

“From time to time. Mr. Renfrew’s quite the crosspatch, but he leaves one alone, and his prices are more than fair.”

For all his purchases, Jeremy had never learned the proprietor’s name. Had never cared. Arthur had obtained the information because, like most gregarious people, he was excessively curious.

Yet, for all his sociability, the old man had chosen to work among the dead.

Jeremy said, “Very fair prices. Nice seeing you, Arthur. Happy hunting.” He turned to leave.