The Conspiracy Club

2

The 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.