Jonathan Kellerman: The Conspiracy Club

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.

After 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.