“I don’t know a hell of a lot about it,” he said. He was fiftyish, heavyset, weak and a little dour from having been shot, but there was nevertheless something boyish about him, as though, instead of lying around here in a hospital bed, he’d much rather be out playing with the guys. He said, “I was just coming out of work—”
“Trails End Motor Inne.”
“Yeah, that’s where I work, assistant manager. I was coming off my shift, I went out to my car—they want us to keep our cars out at the end of the parking lot—”
“Sure.”
“I was on my way, I felt this sting first, my right leg”—he rubbed it beneath the hospital sheet and blanket—“I thought it was a bee sting, something like that, I thought, Jesus Christ, now I’m getting stung, and then, at the same time— See, I didn’t hear the shot at first. I mean, I heard it, but I didn’t pay any attention to it because I was distracted by this bee sting, whatever it was. Then I realized, my leg’s going out from under me, that’s something more powerful than a bee, and then I realized, holy shit, that was a shot! And there I am on my ass in the parking lot.”
“Did you hear a car drive away?”
“I didn’t hear or see a goddam thing,” he assured her. “I’m on my back on the blacktop, I’m suddenly weak, now I’m getting sudden-like light flashes around my eyes, I’m thinking, I was shot with a poisoned bullet! I gotta get outa here! That’s what I’m thinking, and I try to roll over, and that’s when I passed out, and woke up in the ambulance.”
“The bullet came from behind you.”
“Yeah, behind and to my right, cause that’s where the bullet went in, halfway up between the knee and the top of the leg. They tell me the bullet’s still in there, but it didn’t hit any bone, they’ll take it out in a couple days.”
There’d been very little to write so far in this first notebook. Gwen now opened the second, which contained the details she’d already collected, and said, “So whadaya think? This the past catching up with you?”
He looked almost angry at that. “Past? What past?”
“Well, Mr. Beckham,” she said, tapping the notebook with her pen to let him know she had the goods, right in here, “you have been known to hang out with the wrong kind of people.”
“Not any more!”
“You’ve done time—”
“All over!” He was agitated, determined to convince her. “I did the minimum, got all my good behavior, that’s behind me.”
“You’re on parole right now.”
“Perfect record,” he insisted. “You could check with Vivian Cabrera, she’s my parole—”
“I’ve talked with her,” Gwen said. “On the phone, before I came here.”
“Then she can tell you,” he said, pointing at the notebook as though wanting her to write all the good reports down in there. “Not one black mark, no unacceptable associates, got a legitimate job, I learned my lesson, that’s all over. And it was only the one mistake anyway. Over.”
“So,” she said, “you have no idea who would take a shot at you.”
The way his face went, for just a second there, told a different story. His eyes shifted, his mouth skewed as though searching for some safe expression, and the whole countenance seemed to go slack with wariness, as though he’d just heard a dangerous noise. Then it was all swept off his face; he turned, round-eyed with innocence, and said, “I been lying here, I been thinking about it, I mean, I got nothing else to think about, and I just don’t get it. Maybe it was mistaken identity, because the guy was behind me, or just a wild shot, or I don’t know what.”
He knows who did it, Gwen thought, or he thinks he does. The worst thing to do now, she knew, was confront him directly, push him, because then he’d just close up forever. She said, “Well, we’ll hope to find out from the shooter himself what he had in mind.”
“That’s the way to go,” he agreed.
She tapped the notebook again. “So who do you pal around with these days?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, and he was just a little too casual. “There’s some people at work I hang out with sometimes, that’s about it. You know, the position I’m in, I gotta be very careful these days, I don’t wanna mess things up after I built all this good record.”
“No, I can see that,” she said. “You’re smart to think that way. Any lady friends at the moment?”
“Nah.” He was being boyish again. “You meet somebody, you know, you say you’re on parole, it isn’t a turn-on.”
Laughing, she said, “For some women, it is. I’ve seen them.”
“Well, those are the ones,” he said, “I shouldn’t hang out with anyway.”
“You’re right. Elaine Langen? See much of her any more?”
“Oh, my God, you even know about that! You sure checked me out, Det— What is it?”
“Reversa. Just Detective is fine.”
“Okay. Anyway, you know everything about me, you know more’n I do, you don’t need to ask me nothing.”
“Well, just in case,” she said. “Elaine Langen, for instance.”
“That was a long time ago, Detective,” he said, and when he was being solemn like that, as though talking about a religious subject, he was more boyish than ever. “That ended when I did the crime and I did the time.”
“You don’t see her any more.”
“Not like that. We live, I don’t know, seven, eight miles apart, I see her on the street, that’s about it.”
“And her husband? Jack Langen, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, Jack.” There was something dismissive in the way he said the name.
“Do you see much of him these days?”
“What, Jack Langen? I don’t think I’ve seen him since I got out. Well, since I went in.”
“Do you think he holds a grudge?”
“Against me? After all this time? I—” Then his face lit up with amusement. “What, you think he did it? Shot me? Jack Langen? He isn’t gonna shoot anybody.”
“You’re sure of him,” Gwen said.
Beckham was sure. There was no faking now. He said, “Jack Langen got even with me when he pressed charges and got me put away. The old man wanted to give me a pass. No, if anybody was gonna shoot anybody, and I’m not going to— No, I won’t even say it.”
“But since you’re not seeing her any more, there’s no reason to.”
“Exactly.”
She tapped the notebook some more, looking at the history recorded there in her small, neat printing. There was too much emptiness in this life; there was something missing. She said, “So you aren’t close to anybody right now? You won’t be having any visitors while you’re in here?”
“Well, my sister,” he said, and suddenly lit up with triumphant amusement. Pointing at the notebook, he crowed, “You didn’t know about her!”
“That’s true,” Gwen admitted. “Tell me about your sister.”
“She’s been living over in Buffalo,” he said. “To tell you the truth, we haven’t been so close for a while. Long time, really. But she got divorced last year, and one of her kids is in college and the other works for IBM, so when I called her to tell her about this she said she’d come help out while I’m laid up. You know, water the plants in my house and like that. In fact, she’s gonna stay in my house while I’m in here, she’s driving over from Buffalo today, she might even be in the place by now. Well, not yet, she’ll phone when she gets there.”
“Well, that’s good,” Gwen said. “You’ll have family close by. What’s your sister’s name?”
“Wendy Rodgers.”
“So she’s a Wendy,” Gwen said.
“Yeah. Wendy Rodgers. If she’s keeping the husband’s name.” Then he laughed and said, “Well, she kept everything, the house, the kids.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting her,” Gwen said, and got to her feet. Picking up her shoulder bag, putting the notebooks and pen away, she said, “If I think of anything else to talk about, I’ll drop back.”
“Any time,” he said. “I’ll be here.”
She handed him her card. “And if you think of anything that might be of some help to me, give me a call.”
“Will do.” He held the card as though it were precious.
“Bye for now,” she said, and as she waited for the elevator out in the hall, she thought, he lied twice, about not knowing who might have shot him and about his current relationship with Elaine Langen. But he doesn’t think those two things are connected, he doesn’t think the husband shot him.
There’s somebody else in this story, she thought. Jake Beckham’s life can’t be that unpopulated. He’s concealing something, and whatever it is, that’s what shot him.
Maybe the sister, Wendy, knows. Be interesting to talk to her. But first, it would be very interesting to talk with Elaine Langen.
2
When the duty nurse told Dr. Myron Madchen that a police detective was in with Jake Beckham, the doctor, in the first instant, thought everything must have come undone, that the detective must be here to arrest Jake and that everybody’s plans were now destroyed, his not least of all, plus those of Jake himself and those two tough-looking fellows Jake had met with in his examining room. But then, on a moment’s reflection, he realized that the detective must be here to investigate the shooting, that in this instance Jake was the victim, not the perpetrator.
“I’ll wait till the detective’s finished,” he told the duty nurse. “Call me, I’ll be in the staff lounge.”
She looked doubtful, but raised no objections. “Certainly, Doctor.”
The fact was, as he knew full well, he had no real right to the staff lounge here, not being attached to this hospital or, at the moment, having a patient checked in here. Jake couldn’t be considered his patient under these circumstances. Myron Madchen was Jake’s primary care provider, but in this hospital it was the specialists who mattered, not the GPs.
Still, Jake was his patient in the normal course of events, and there was a certain professional courtesy to be expected in the circumstances, and no one would really expect him to go sit out in the regular waiting room with the civilians, so through the unmarked door he went and back to the area of peace and privilege of the staff lounge, a place rather like an airline’s club members’ lounge, but without the alcohol.
Sitting there, leafing through a recent Newsweek, he thought that in some ways what had happened was a positive thing. It was like the false hospitalization they’d been planning, but with the advantage that it was real; no lies had to be told.
Of course, the disadvantage was that a shooting would naturally draw the attention of the police. Would their presence interfere with the robbery? Dr. Madchen sincerely hoped not. He sincerely needed that robbery. He sincerely needed it to save his life.
Some years ago, when Dr. Madchen was at a very low point in his life, when he had reached a point where he wasn’t sure he would be able to go on, he had happened to come across a very strange statistic in a professional journal. It seemed that a quarter century before, the state of California had done a statistical survey, using state records, to compare divorces and suicides according to occupation. One result showed that doctors of all kinds, except for psychiatrists, had the highest suicide rate and the lowest divorce rate of any occupation in California.
When Dr. Madchen read that item, his immediate reaction was dread. He became as frightened as if a tiger had walked into his living room. He felt so threatened, so alone and vulnerable and helpless, that he had to stop reading and leave the house and go for one of the longest walks of his life, around and around and around his lovely, expensive neighborhood with its curving, quiet streets and broad green lawns and large, sprawling wood or brick houses, mostly prewar, set well back from the road.
It was late spring at that time, and the gardeners of the neighborhood had been hard at work, so the bright, hard colors of northern flowers were everywhere, backed by the eternal bass note of the dark pines. Dr. Madchen, walking, looking at the beauty of his world, had thought, I don’t want to die. I don’t want to leave this. I have to remember that.
Because, in fact, suicide had been very much on his mind. On his mind but not acknowledged, the idea seeping into his brain like dampness in a basement until, without a drop of water having been seen to move, the entire basement is soaked.
He had been thinking about it, thinking about simply checking himself out of this life, thinking how easy it would be for him, as a doctor, to find a gentle, peaceful, painless way to end it all. That was what the article had suggested, that one reason doctors were so high on the suicide scale was because it was so easy for them and they could act with the assurance that they would neither hurt themselves nor make a mistake.
And the other reason, the article suggested, had to do with imagination. If a person in an unhappy life could imagine some other life, he was likelier to seek a divorce. If his training in the hard realities of medicine had left him unable to imagine another way out, he would reach for the sleeping pills. That was why writers and psychiatrists were at the extreme other end of the scale in that survey, having the highest divorce and lowest suicide rates. They were used to looking for new narratives, new connections. They could imagine a satisfying alternative to what they had, whether they ever achieved it or not.
I can imagine a different life, Dr. Madchen told himself as he walked through that spring day. I can imagine . . . something.
But how? A loveless marriage was at the heart of Dr. Madchen’s unhappiness—a marriage entered into for cold reasons, a mistake from the beginning. He had married Ellen for her money, and it was still her money, and he was still tied to it. Ellen was a cold, vindictive woman, who begrudged him any thought that wasn’t of her. To divorce her would be so grueling, so harsh, that of course he thought of suicide as the easier way. A divorce from Ellen—that he could imagine, and the image left him weak with misery.
Besides which, even if he managed to extricate himself from the marriage, what then? It was still her money. In fact, since she’d helped pay for his medical education and had entirely paid for his office, and given Ellen’s disagreeability, she would no doubt not only keep all her own money but would also use her lawyers to beat some of his money out of him. No, no, it could not be contemplated.
One thing that article did do for him, however, was make him more self-aware and more open to anything at all that might bring comfort to his life. And his life needed comfort. He had come to believe, during that period, that many of his patients led much better lives than he did—even some with chronic medical problems, even those with quite serious illnesses. He could see happiness and hope in their faces, when he knew he had neither in his.
One of these patients was Jake Beckham, a hearty, rowdy man who would surely never put up with a woman like Ellen, not for (literally) a million dollars. Dr. Madchen admired and envied Jake, and when Jake was arrested and imprisoned, neither the admiration nor the envy lessened. How staunchly Jake took his bad luck; how thoroughly he refused to be defeated. There was a man who could imagine another life for himself and make a leap for it, and so what if he failed this time? He would surely try again.
It was a happy coincidence that Jake wound up in the same state prison where Dr. Madchen’s worthless cousin, after years of drug addiction, had inevitably been placed. It had been to remain in contact with Jake as much as to be of help to Conrad that Dr. Madchen had asked Jake to help the worthless man. And of course Jake had helped.
A very different kind of patient, toward whom Dr. Madchen felt tenderness and pity, was Isabelle Moran, a healthy and beautiful young woman whose medical problems centered on an abusive husband. It was Dr. Madchen who patched up the bruises and the sprains and the scrapes, while telling Isabelle time and again that she should report the husband to the police. But she wouldn’t; she couldn’t; she was too afraid.
When, shortly after reading the statistics article, he had to treat Isabelle once more, this time for a badly scraped
knee, a broken rib, and a broken finger (the man always left her face alone), Dr. Madchen realized that he and Isabelle were in one way very much the same: tied to a hateful spouse, unable to escape.
But they could console each other. They had been consoling each other for nearly three years now, secretly, hiding from the wrath of their spouses, and it had become, for both of them, intolerable. They had to get away, somehow. Neither could divorce, but both could flee. Or they could flee if they had money.
Jake, for Dr. Madchen’s assistance and silence and cover concerning the upcoming bank robbery, would give the doctor a third of his share of the take. A third.
He and Isabelle already knew they would go to California.
The wall phone in the lounge rang, and another doctor, in green scrubs, went to answer it, then turned to say, “Dr. Madchen?”
“Yes,” the doctor said, dropping the unread magazine and getting to his feet.
“Your patient is ready.”
3
Feeling better about herself, feeling she had done everything she could to ensure her more pleasant future, Elaine Langen drove homeward in the crisp fall afternoon light and thought how she would miss the seasons here, if nothing else. Not this white Infiniti, beautiful as it was, and so much more like a glove she wore than a machine she drove. Not the house toward which she steered, full as it was of bitter memories. Not her past, her friends, her remaining relatives—all of them felt tired in her thoughts, a dusty and dog-eared aura about them. Only the seasons—that’s all that she would miss.
Not that the south of France doesn’t have seasons—of course it does, but they’re not the same ones. They don’t contrast so much; they don’t so often create their own excitement. Well, too bad. Once this bank business was over, Elaine was prepared to create her own excitement, on her own terms, in a setting of her own choice.
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