Marian Boehmer’s cheeks were clear of the wolf-mask rash that signaled her immune system had gone awry. If you got past the fear, she really did look okay. Fair-skinned and fair-haired, a bit underweight, nice features. Wedding band and a diamond chip on her ring finger. Where was the husband? Did that mean something, his not being here?
Everything means something. At the moment, so what? This woman was going to have her breastbone punctured.
Jeremy introduced himself. Smiled and talked and smiled and talked and held her hand and felt the familiar pangs of his own anxiety—the tight chest, the empathy sweat, the twinges of vertigo.
No danger of embarrassing himself—the horror of the first time had been his hazing.
By now he expected the fear. Welcomed it.
When he helped, he suffered. The key was to hide it.
The key to life was hiding it.
He stroked the woman’s hand, chanced a gentle swipe of her brow and, when she didn’t recoil, told her how well she was doing as he lapsed into the singsong seduction of hypnosis.
Not a formal induction, nothing that theatrically vulgar. Just a subtle, gradual reach for the parasympathetic reaction that combined relaxation and concentration and slowed down mind and body.
Transport yourself to a good place, Ms. Boehmer—may I call you, Marian, thank you, Marian, that’s good, Marian, excellent, Marian.
What a great job, Marian—and here’s Dr. Rios and yes, yes, just hold on, good great—terrific, Marian and . . . there you go, you did a great job, it’s over and you did great.
During the procedure, Marian Boehmer had wet herself, and he pretended not to notice as the nurse wiped her thighs.
When he took hold of her hand again, she said, “Oh, look at me. I’m such a baby.”
Jeremy patted her hair gently. “You’re a trouper. If I was in trouble, I’d want you on my team.”
Marian Boehmer burst into tears. “I have two children,” she said. “I’m a very good mother!”
Jeremy stayed with her until the orderly came to wheel her back to her room. As he opened the door, he braced himself for a hallway conference with Angela Rios. Clinical chitchat that would inevitably wind its way toward social overture. Rios was lovely but . . .
He stepped out to the echoes of distant voices, phones, clinical footfalls, page announcements, rattling gurneys. A single nurse sat charting at the nearest station, ten yards away.
Empty hallway. No sign of Angela.
6
On a rainy Thursday evening, just before seven, on his way out of the hospital, Jeremy encountered the raincoated bulk of Detective Bob Doresh.
Doresh was hanging by the main elevators, near the candy machines, rubbing his heavy jaw and munching on something. When he saw Jeremy, he pocketed a colorful wrapper and trotted over. “Got a minute, Doc?”
Jeremy kept walking and motioned for Doresh to accompany him.
“How’ve you been doing, Doc?”
“All right. And you?”
“Me?” Doresh seemed offended by the common courtesy. As if his job gave him the right of total privacy. I’ll ask the questions . . .
“I’m fine, Doc.” He wiped a speck of chocolate from his lips and blinked several times. “Well balanced and nourished. So everything’s copacetic with you.”
“I’m surviving.”
“Well, that’s good,” said Doresh. “Especially considering the alternative.”
They passed the marble wall engraved with the names of hospital benefactors, pushed through the glass doors, walked through the covered breezeway that led to the doctors’ parking lot. The convenient lot. After Jocelyn, there’d been talk about moving the nurses closer, but nothing had materialized.
Doresh said, “Nice to keep dry.”
Jeremy said, “What’s up, Detective?”
“I’ll get right to the point, Doc. This is going to sound like one of those movie cliches, but where were you last night, let’s say between ten and midnight?”
“At home.”
“Anyone with you?”
“No. Why?”
“Just routine,” said Doresh.
For a moment, Jeremy thought he’d go along with the script. Then something snapped, and he barked, “Bullshit,” and moved well ahead of Doresh.
The detective caught up. Chuckled loudly, but there was no humor to the sound he emitted. The warning growl of a big, watchful dog.
Those eyes. Regarding Jeremy with what seemed like new respect. Or maybe it was contempt.
Doresh said, “You’re right, it’s total bullshit. I’m not going to waste my time driving over here and making small talk. So tell me this: Is there any way you can verify being home by yourself last night? It would help both of us if you could.”
Jeremy suppressed the reflexive why-the-hell-should-I? “Not for an entire two hours there isn’t. I got home late—around eight-thirty, took a walk in my neighborhood for an hour or so. Someone may have seen me, but if they did, I didn’t notice. After that, I returned home, showered, had a drink—scotch. Johnny Walker, if you care—and called out for some dinner. Twenty-four-hour pizza place. I ordered a medium, half-cheese, half-mushrooms. It was delivered around ten-fifteen. I gave the boy a five-dollar tip, so he’ll probably remember. I ate three slices of pizza—the rest is in my refrigerator. The scotch made my mouth dry, and the pizza didn’t help, so I drank water. Three eight-ounce glasses. I read the papers, watched TV—if you’d like I can name the shows.”
“Sure,” said Doresh.
“You’re kidding.”
“Anything but, Doc.”
Jeremy rattled off the list.
“That’s a lot of TV, Doc.”
“Normally I’d be reading by candlelight,” said Jeremy, “but I just finished the entire Great Books Compendium and Chaucer and Shakespeare, thought I’d give myself some downtime.”
Doresh studied him. “You’ve got a sense of humor. I didn’t see that before.”
The situation didn’t exactly warrant it, idiot.
The doctors’ lot came into view, and Jeremy walked faster. Rain pebbled down on the roof of the breezeway, poured down the sides, like glycerine drapery.
Doresh said, “What’s the name of the pizza place?”
Jeremy told him. “Who got killed?”
“Who said—”
“Spare me,” said Jeremy. “I went through hell, and you didn’t make it any easier. Now you’re still bugging me instead of finding out who killed Jocelyn.”
Doresh’s eyes narrowed, and he moved in front of Jeremy, blocked Jeremy’s progress. “Making people feel good isn’t my job.”
“Fine. So let’s cut to the chase. You’re here because something happened. Something similar enough to Jocelyn to want to take another look at me.”
Doresh’s eyes dropped to the ground. As if the truth disgraced him. As if crime was a personal failure.
He said, “Why not, you’ll read about it in tomorrow’s paper. Yeah, something very much like Ms. Banks happened.” He drew the lapels of his raincoat tight across his chest but left the coat unbuttoned. “What happened was a woman, a prostitute, over in Iron Mount. A girl known to the department for a while, drugs, soliciting, the usual. In that sense, not like Ms. Banks, at all. But the wounds . . .”
Jeremy said, “Dear God.”
Doresh moved out of his way.
Jeremy said, “Iron Mount. That’s not far from The Shallows.”
“Not far at all, Doc.”
“A prostitute . . . you really think—”
“From time to time, I do think,” said Doresh. He smiled at his own wit. “That’s all, Doc, have a nice day.”
“I left several messages for you, Detective. A photo your guys took from my house—”
“Yeah, yeah. Evidence.”
“When will I get it back?”
“Hard to say. Maybe never.” Doresh’s shrug was so casual Jeremy fought not to hit him. “Better get going, Doc. Have my work cut out for m
e.”
7
That night, Doresh sat in Jeremy’s dreams, a raincoated Buddha, and the taste of slightly off, greasy harbor shrimp bit his tongue. In the morning, he got up early and retrieved the newspaper. The headlines were soaked with economic woe and the felonies of politics, the Clarion’s histrionic journalists exulting about wars-to-be, injustice and indignity.
He found what he was looking for on page 18.
The woman’s name was Tyrene Mazursky. Polish surname notwithstanding, she’d been black, forty-five, a drug-addicted streetwalker with the extensive police record Doresh had cited.
Also a mother of five.
Iron Mount was a scrofulous warren of misshapen streets and afterthought alleys as narrow as they’d been since the city’s horse-and-carriage, slag-and-smelt origins. Jeremy had been there exactly once: a very long time ago, as an intern, doing a home visit on a kid everyone was sure was being abused.
Drunken mother, junkie father, the five-year-old boy barely in the first percentile of height and weight, speech and vocabulary testing out as that of a two-year-old. One happy family plus some unnamed addict pals, living in a railroad flat above an auto body shop, far from the waterfront but close enough to where the Kauwagaheel River cut inland from the lake and swamp stench permeated the rotting plaster walls.
Jeremy did his thing, wrote it up. So did a terrified social work intern, but it turned out that despite their character flaws and bad habits, the boy’s parents were doing a pretty good job of tending for the kid, who had picked up a viral liver infection with ensuing bowel blockage that choked off his nutrients and retarded his growth.
Surgery and IV antibiotics worked wonders. Counseling for the parents proved a good deal less miraculous, and three weeks after the kid’s last surgical follow-up, the family cut town.
Iron Mount. Due east from The Shallows, a place that made The Shallows look like horse country.
He put down the paper, forced coffee down his throat, and thought about Tyrene Mazursky, savaged.
The wounds.
Five orphans.
He wondered how a black woman ended up with a Polish name, felt an inexorable sadness at the mysteries of Tyrene Mazursky’s life.
All the mysteries of Jocelyn he’d never unravel. The thought of her—the gone-ness. The day had barely broken, but he had.
When he walked to his car, the neighbor two doors down—the Romanian woman with the victimized eyes, the one who rarely left her own place and couldn’t see Jeremy’s house for the hedges—was standing by her front window watching.
Had Doresh been by, asking questions?
Mrs. Bekanescu was one of the few on the block who owned and didn’t rent. He waved at her, and her curtains snapped shut.
His ability to unsettle someone this early felt perversely gratifying, and he drove faster than usual, switched on bright music. When he got to his desk, he threw off his coat, organized some papers, booted up his computer, and spent the morning punching buttons and rechecking data tables and constructing pretty charts for his book. He gave a try at the introduction but his mind impacted and the words crumbled. He switched topics, began an outline for the chapter he’d have to write: Time/Space Disorientation Secondary to Pediatric Gnotobiotic Isolation.
The only analogues in the literature were studies of scientists stranded in the Antarctic or some such hellhole.
Jeremy’s mind wandered from bottomless glacial rifts to blue ice that could kill you if you kissed it, to the hackneyed horror of falling endlessly, a million ice violins scratching out a tundra symphony. A hard, confident knock on his door shook him upright, and Arthur Chess stepped in, beaming.
8
The pathologist made himself comfortable in an uncomfortable chair. “Have you given any more thought to the question I posed?”
“The origin of evil,” said Jeremy.
Arthur turned one hand palm-side up. “Evil is a . . . weighty word. Theologically burdened. I believe we’d settled upon ’very bad behavior.’ ”
We. “No, I haven’t thought about it. As I mentioned, there’s a database—sparse but suggestive. If you’re really interested.”
“I am, Jeremy.”
“I’ll get you some references. But the conclusions might be uncomfortable.”
“For whom?”
“An optimist,” said Jeremy. “A humanist.” He waited to see if Arthur would place himself in either category.
The pathologist smoothed his beard and said nothing. Jeremy’s desk clock ticked the hour.
“The bottom line, Arthur, is that certain people seem to be born with a hard-wired propensity for impulsiveness. Of those, a few turn to violence. Males, mostly, so testosterone may be part of it. But there’s more than hormones at work. The significant variable seems to be low arousability. Slower than normal resting heart rates. A cool nervous system.”
“Preternatural calm,” said Arthur, as if he’d heard it before.
“You know the research?”
Arthur shook his head. “However, what you’re saying makes perfect sense. A stranger to fear is a stranger to conscience.”
“That’s one theory,” said Jeremy. “Fear’s a terrific teacher, and those who don’t learn from it miss out on valuable social lessons. But there’s another way to look at it: adrenaline addiction. A congenitally understimulated central nervous system leads to a need for progressively stronger thrills. The everyday term is ‘excitement junkies.’ ”
“I’ve seen that in Army snipers,” Arthur agreed. “Fellows who lived for the thrill, registering heartbeats so slow one thought one’s stethoscope was malfunctioning. Had one fellow could sit for hours at a time, a veritable statue. Would you say, then, that military service is a form of sublimated criminality?”
Jeremy recalled Arthur’s own military history. The old man had enjoyed the service. “Thrill-seeking by itself isn’t the issue. Mountain climbers and sky divers are all hooked on the adrenaline high, but most of them don’t commit crimes. It’s the combination of recklessness and cruelty that leads to your very, very bad behavior. And that’s where environment comes in: Take a child with the biological markers, expose him to abuse and neglect, and you’re likely to create a . . . problem.”
Arthur smiled again. “A monster? Is that what you were going to say?”
“Monsters,” said Jeremy, “come in all forms.” He stood. “I’ll pull those references for you, send them over by tomorrow.”
A rude gesture, but Arthur was unfazed. Plinking a vest button, he sprang to his feet with the vigor of a much younger man. Those same pale pink stains speckled the left cuff of his lab coat. Identical color, different stains. “One more question, if you don’t mind?”
“What’s that?”
“Abuse, neglect—your assumption that those factors are environmental. Could it be that what you term family dysfunction is inherited as well? Violent parents passing on their proclivities toward their children?”
“Back to the bad seed,” said Jeremy.
“Another theologically loaded concept. And, as you said, discouraging. But are the data inconsistent with that notion?”
“The data are too muddy to prove anything, Arthur. They merely suggest.”
“I see,” said Arthur. “So you find it inconceivable that the totality of violence—or even the majority—is passed along in the nucleic acid.”
“Sins of the fathers,” said Jeremy. “Your jungle beetle injecting his parasitical spawn.”
Nothing’s accidental with you, is it, Dr. Chess?
Arthur chuckled and crossed to the door. “Well, this has been illuminating. Thank you for your patience, and anytime I can reciprocate, please feel free.”
He left, and Jeremy remained standing. Wondering if the old man’s parting words were simple courtesy, or did he really expect Jeremy to drop in with a question.
What would he ever want from a pathologist?
His mind camera-shuttered to Jocelyn’s face. What lay below her fa
ce. Wounds he’d never seen but had imagined. A rending of flesh that haunted him with its terrible ambiguity.
Now, Tyrene Mazursky.
There was nothing in common between a middle-aged hooker and sweet Jocelyn but the wounds.
Enough in common to put Doresh back on his trail.
His heart hammered as he punished himself with imagined horror. Arthur would be at home with all that, would reduce it to cell biology and organ weight and chemical compounds.
Arthur would deal with the stuff of screaming nightmares the way he waxed eloquent about carcinomas and sarcomas every Tuesday morning: avuncular manner, easy smile—perpetual coolness—what was his resting pulse?
The questions he wanted to ask the old man stuck in his craw.
Are we talking about this because you know what I’ve been through? Is this just morbid curiosity, or do you have a point?
Why hadn’t he spoken up?
What do you want from me?
9
When his heart slowed, Jeremy went on the wards and comforted his patients. He must have functioned adequately because eyes brightened, a few smiles broke, hands clutched his fingers, and one teenage girl flirted with him, harmlessly. When he was alone, charting, the imprint—the feel—of every single patient remained with him. As if he carried them around, a mama kangaroo.
The flesh of the afflicted felt no different than anyone else’s. Not until the terminal stages. Dying patients reacted in different ways. Some were gripped with last-minute bravura, became garrulous, told inappropriate jokes. Some reminisced endlessly or offered noble blessings to the acolytes who ringed their beds. Others simply faded. But they had something in common—something Jeremy had yet to identify. A person working the wards long enough could tell when death was imminent.
Jeremy had never felt anything but a terrible fatigue when a patient left him.
He tried to imagine someone getting a thrill out of another’s death. Simply considering that possibility made his shoulders sag.
The Conspiracy Club Page 4