The Conspiracy Club (3 page)

“Would you have time for a drink?” said Arthur. “Alcoholic or otherwise?”

“Sorry,” said Jeremy, tapping the coat cuff that concealed his wristwatch. “Busy afternoon, as well.” His next patient was in an hour and a half.

“Ah, of course. Sorry, then. Another time.”

“Absolutely,” said Jeremy.

Later, that evening, walking to his car, he noticed Arthur in the doctors’ parking lot.

This is too much. I’m being stalked.

But, as with the bookstore encounter, Arthur had arrived first, so that was ridiculous. Jeremy chided himself for self-importance — paranoia’s first cousin. Had he slipped that far?

He ducked behind a pylon and watched Arthur unlock his car, a black Lincoln, at least fifteen years old. Glossy paint, shiny chrome, kept up nicely. Like Arthur’s suit: well used, but quality. Jeremy envisioned Arthur’s home, guessed the pathologist would inhabit one of the gracious old homes in Queen’s Arms, on the North Side, a shabby-elegant stretch with harbor views.

Yes, Q.A. was definitely Arthur. The house would be a Victorian or a neo-Georgian, fusty and comfortable, chocked with overstuffed sofas in faded fabrics, stolid, centenarian mahogany furniture, layers of antimacassars, doilies, gimcracks, a nice wet bar stocked with premium liquors.

Pinned butterflies in ornate frames.

Was the pathologist married? Had to be. All that cheer bespoke a comfortable, comforting routine.

Definitely married, Jeremy decided. Happily, for decades. He conjured a soft-busted, bird-voiced, blue-haired wife to dote on Dear Arthur.

He watched as the old man lowered his long frame into the Lincoln. When the big sedan started up with a sonorous rumble, Jeremy hurried to his own dusty Nova.

He sat behind the wheel, thinking of the comforts that awaited Arthur. Home-cooked food, simple but filling. A stiff drink to dilate the blood vessels and warm the imagination.

Feet up, warm smiles nurtured by routine.

Jeremy’s gut knotted as the black car glided away.

T
wo weeks to the day after the bookstore encounter, a second-year medical resident, an adorable brunette named Angela Rios, came on to Jeremy. He was rotating through the acute children’s ward, accompanying the attending physician and house staff on pediatric rounds. Dr. Rios, with whom he’d exchanged pleasantries in the past, hovered by his side, and he smelled the shampoo in her long, dark hair. She had eyes the color of bittersweet chocolate, a swan neck, a delicate, pointy chin under a soft, wide mouth.

Four cases were scheduled for discussion that morning: an eight-year-old girl with dermatomyositis, a brittle adolescent diabetic, a failure to thrive infant — that one was probably child abuse — and a precocious, angry twelve-year-old boy with a miniscule body shriveled by osteogenesis imperfecta.

The attending, a soft-spoken man named Miller, summarized the basics on the crippled boy, then arched an eyebrow toward Jeremy. Jeremy talked to a sea of young baffled faces, trying to humanize the boy — his intellectual reach, his rage, the pain that would only intensify. Trying to get these new physicians to see the child as something other than a diagnosis. But keeping it low-key, careful to avoid the holier-than-thou virus that too often afflicted the mental health army.

Despite his best efforts, half the residents seemed bored. The rest were feverishly attentive, including Angela Rios, who hadn’t taken her eyes off Jeremy. When rounds ended she hung around and asked questions about the crippled boy. Simple things that Jeremy was certain didn’t puzzle her at all.

He answered her patiently. Her long, dark hair was wavy and silky, her complexion creamy, those gorgeous eyes as warm as eyes could get. Only her voice detracted: a bit chirpy, too generous with final syllables. Maybe it was anxiety. Jeremy was in no mood for the mating game. He complimented her questions, flashed a professorial smile, and walked away.

Three hours later, Arthur Chess showed up in his office.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

Oh you are, you are.
Jeremy had been working on the draft of a book chapter. Three years before, he’d been the behavioral researcher on a study of “bubble children”: kids with advanced cancers treated in germ-free, plastic rooms to see if their weakened immune systems could be protected against infection. The isolation posed a threat to young psyches, and Jeremy’s job had been to prevent and treat emotional breakdown.

At that he’d been successful, and several of the children had survived and thrived. The principal researcher, now the head of oncology, had been after him to publish the data in book form, and a medical publisher had expressed enthusiasm.

Jeremy worked on the outline for seventeen months, then sat down to draft an introduction. Over a year’s time, he produced two pages.

Now he pushed that pathetic output aside, cleared charts and journals onto the chair that abutted his desk, and said, “Not at all, Arthur. Make yourself comfortable.”

Arthur’s color was high, and his white coat was buttoned up, revealing an inch of pink shirt and a brown bow tie specked with tiny pink bumblebees. “So this is your lair.”

“Such as it is.” Jeremy’s designated space was a corner cutout at the end of a long, dark corridor on a floor that housed nonclinicians — biochemists, biophysicists. Bio-everything, except him. The rest of Psychiatry was a story above.

A single window looked out to an ash-colored air shaft. This was an older part of the hospital, and the walls were thick and clammy. The bio-folk kept to themselves. Footsteps in the hallways were infrequent.

His lair.

He’d ended up there four months ago, after a group of surgeons came by to measure Psychiatry’s space on the penthouse floor of the main hospital building. Less glamorous than it sounded, the upper floor looked out to a heliport, where emergency landings sometimes rendered therapy impossible. Any view of the city was blocked by massive heating and air-conditioning units, and pigeons enjoyed crapping on the windows. From time to time, Jeremy had seen rats scampering along the roof gutters.

The day the surgeons came, he’d been trying to write and was rescued by their laughter. He opened his door to find five dapper men and a matching woman, wielding tape measures and
hmm
ing. A month later, Psychiatry was ordered to relocate to a smaller suite. No suite existed to accommodate the entire department. A crisis of space was solved when an eighty-year emeritus analyst died, and Jeremy volunteered to go elsewhere. This was shortly
After Jocelyn
, and isolation had been welcome.

Jeremy never came to regret the decision. He could come and go as he pleased, and Psychiatry was faithful about forwarding his daily mail. The chemistry lab stink that permeated the building was all right.

“Nice,” said Arthur. “Very nice.”

“What is?”

“The solitude.” The old man blushed. “Which I have violated.”

“What’s up, Arthur?”

“I was thinking about that drink. The one we discussed at Renfrew’s shop.”

“Yes,” said Jeremy. “Of course.”

Arthur reached under a coat flap and drew out a bulbous, white-gold pocket watch. “It’s approaching six. Would now be a good time?”

To refuse the old man now would be downright rude. And simply postpone the inevitable.

On the bright side: Jeremy could use a drink.

He said, “Sure, Arthur. Name the place.”

The place was the bar of the Excelsior, a downtown hotel. Jeremy had passed the building many times — a massive, gray heap of gargoyled granite with too many rooms to ever fill — but had never been inside. He parked in the humid subterranean lot, rode the elevator to street level, and crossed a cavernous Beaux Arts lobby. The space was well past its prime, as was most of downtown. Disconsolate men working on commission sat in frayed, plush chairs and smoked and waited for something to happen. A few women with overdeveloped calves walked the room; maybe hookers, maybe just women traveling alone.

The bar was a windowless, burnished mahogany fistula that relied upon weak bulbs and tall mirrors for life. Jeremy and Arthur had taken separate cars because each planned to head home after the tête à tête. Jeremy had driven quickly, but Arthur had gotten there first. The pathologist looked tweedy and relaxed in a corner booth.

The waiter who approached them was portly and militaristic and older than Arthur, and Jeremy sensed that he knew the pathologist. He had nothing upon which to base the assumption — the man had uttered nothing of a familiar nature, hadn’t offered even a telling glance — but Jeremy couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a favorite haunt of Arthur’s.

Yet when Arthur put in his order, there was no “The usual, Hans.” On the contrary, the pathologist enunciated clearly, careful to specify: a Boodles martini, straight up, two pearl onions.

The waiter turned to Jeremy. “Sir?”

“Single malt, ice on the side.”

“Any particular brand, sir?”

“Macallan.”

“Very good, sir.”

As he left, Arthur said, “
Very
good.”

The drinks came with stunning speed, obviating painful small talk. Arthur savored his martini, showing no inclination to do anything but drink.

“So,” said Jeremy.

Arthur slid a pearl onion from a toothpick to his lips, left the mucoid sphere there for several moments. Chewed. Swallowed. “I was wondering if you could clarify something for me, Jeremy.”

“What’s that, Arthur?”

“Your views — psychology’s views on violence. Specifically, the genesis of very, very bad behavior.”

“Psychology’s not monolithic,” said Jeremy.

“Yes, yes, of course. But surely there must be a body of data — I’ll retrench. What’s
your
take on the issue?”

Jeremy sipped scotch, let the subtle fire linger on his tongue. “You’re asking me this because . . .”

“The question intrigues me,” said Arthur. “For years I’ve dealt with the aftermath of death on a daily basis. Have spent most of my adult life with what remains when the soul flies. The challenge, for me, is no longer to reduce the bodies I dissect to their biochemical components. Nor to ascertain cause of death. If one excavates long enough, one produces. No, the challenge is to comprehend the larger issues.”

The old man finished his martini and motioned for another. Motioned at an empty bar; no sign of the portly waiter. But the man materialized moments later with another frosted shaker.

He glanced at the nearly empty tumbler of scotch. “Sir?”

Jeremy shook his head, and the waiter vanished.

“Humanity,” said Arthur, sipping. “The challenge is to maintain my humanity — have I ever mentioned that I served a spell in the Coroner’s Office?”

As if the two of them chatted regularly.

“No,” said Jeremy.

“Oh, yes. Sometime after my discharge from the military.”

“Where did you serve?”

“The Panama Canal,” said Arthur. “Medical officer at the locks. I witnessed some gruesome accidents, learned quite a bit about postmortem identification. After that . . . I did some other things, but eventually, the Coroner’s seemed a fitting place.” He took several thoughtful swallows, and the second martini was reduced by half.

“But you switched to academia,” said Jeremy.

“Oh, yes . . . it seemed the right thing to do.” The old man smiled. “Now about my question: What’s your take on it?”

“Very bad behavior.”

“The very worst.”

Jeremy’s stomach lurched. “On a purely academic level?”

“Oh, no,” said Arthur. “Academia is the refuge of those seeking to escape the big questions.”

“If it’s hard data you’re after—”

“I’m after whatever you choose to offer. Because you speak your mind.” Arthur finished his drink. “Of course, if I’m being offensive or intrusive—”

“Violence,” said Jeremy. He’d spent hours — endless hours, all those sleepless nights — thinking about it. “From what I’ve gathered, very, very bad behavior is a combination of genes and environment. Like most everything else of consequence in human behavior.”

“A cocktail of nature and nurture.”

Jeremy nodded.

“What are your thoughts about the concept of the bad seed?” said Arthur.

“The stuff of fiction,” said Jeremy. “Which isn’t to say that serious violence doesn’t manifest young. Show me a cruel, bullying, callous six-year-old, and I’ll show you someone worth watching. But even given nasty tendencies it takes a bad environment — a rotten family to bring it out.”

“Callous . . . you’ve treated children like that?”

“A few.”

“Six-year-old potential felons?”

Jeremy considered his answer. “Six-year-olds who gave me pause. Psychologists are notoriously bad at predicting violence. Or anything else.”

“But you have seen youngsters who alarm you.”

“Yes.”

“What do you tell their parents?”

“The parents are almost always part of the problem. I’ve seen fathers who took great joy when their sons brutalized other children. Preaching restraint in the presence of strangers — saying the right things, but their smiles give them away. Eventually. It takes time to understand a family. For all intents and purposes, families still exist in caves. You have to be inside to read the writing on the wall.”

Arthur waved for a third drink. No sign of intoxication in the old man’s speech or demeanor. Just a slight increase in his high, pink color.

At least, Jeremy mused, a slip of
his
scalpel wouldn’t kill anyone.

This time, when the waiter said, “For you, sir?” he ordered a second Macallan.

Finger food came, unbeckoned, with the drinks. Boiled shrimp with cocktail sauce, fried zucchini, spicy little sausages skewered by black plastic toothpicks, thick potato chips that appeared homemade. Arthur hadn’t ordered the hors d’oeuvres, but he was unsurprised.

The two men nibbled and drank, and Jeremy felt warmth — a lacquer of relaxation — flow from his toes to his scalp. When Arthur said, “Their smiles give them away,” Jeremy was momentarily confused. Then he reminded himself: those obnoxious, pathogenic dads he’d been talking about.