Nobody Runs Forever

“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