The Conspiracy Club Read Free

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.
     
3
     
    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