Nobody Runs Forever (9 page)

7

H
e makes a perfect ex-husband,” Grace said.

Monica, who had one husband, no exes, shook her head yet again, and said, yet again, “Well, to me it seems weird.”

The two women, who clerked together in the claims office of one of the big insurance companies in Hartford, and who had been pals since both had hired on here almost ten years ago, were similar in kind: both rangy and sharp-featured, both pessimistic about life in general and their own lives in particular, and both choosing to face the world with a kind of humorous fatalism. They disagreed about very few things, but one of those things was Grace’s ex, a subject that tended to come up, as it had today, while they were on their ten a.m. coffee break in the ladies’ lounge, where they could have some privacy.

Monica was going to do the litany again, no stopping her. “You never see him,” she said.

“A good thing in an ex,” Grace said. “I got a memory bank full of pictures, I ever want to go stroll down there.”

“But I mean you
never
see him,” Monica insisted. “I don’t think anybody ever sees him.”

“No, that’s pretty true,” Grace admitted. “I guess he’s like the tooth fairy in that.”

“The
tooth
fairy!”

“Or Santa Claus. You know he’s been, because the tooth is gone or the presents are there, but you never see him at work.”

“Grace, he’s a criminal!”

“Another good reason not to see him at work. If people see Nick at work, they’ll dial nine-one-one. Right away.”

“Let me say this about Harold,” Monica said, referring to her husband, which sooner or later she always did. “Harold may not be the most exciting man in the world, or the most brilliant man in the world, but at least he’s
there
. And when he puts bread on the table, he puts it there with the sweat of his brow.”

“With the ink of his brow, you mean,” Grace said. “Monica, he’s an
accountant.
”

“You know what I mean. It’s honest money, honestly earned, and it puts honest bread on the table. Grace, you’re living off a gangster!”

“He is not,” Grace said. “In the first place, he’s not a gangster, he’s a heister, which is a very different thing. Gangsters deal in prostitution and gambling and drugs, and Nick would never do any of that. In his own way, he’s almost as law-abiding and moral as your Harold.”

“That’s why he’s in hiding all the time?”

“He’s not in
hiding,
he’s just very careful, because you never know. The world he’s in is full of dangerous people, so he’s smart to be cautious.”

“Harold can walk the street in the sunshine with his head up high and not be afraid of anything.”

“Monica, Harold lives in the world of accountancy.”

“Don’t try to make Harold sound dull.”

“That wasn’t my intent.”

“Anyway,” Monica said, “not that I ever expect anything like this for myself, God forbid, but you don’t even have proper alimony.”

“That’s the other thing I was gonna say,” Grace told her. “I’m not living on Nick, I get a salary here, same as you do. I get a supplement from Nick.”

“When he feels like it.”

“Which is often. From time to time I can help him out a little, pass a message on, whatever, and from time to time he helps me out a little, with a money order. It probably works out to more than alimony anyway, and there’s no lawyers involved, no judges, no bad feelings on any side. Honest to God, Monica, I understand why you think what you think, but I’m telling you, I’ve got the best ex-husband in the world, because I never have to confront him, I never have to argue with him, and I never have to be mad at him.” With a little grin, she added, “And in addition, I’ve got Eugene.”

“Oh, Eugene,” Monica said, with her own little grin, because both women agreed that Eugene was a total stud muffin. Unfortunately married, but nobody’s perfect.

“Never you mind Eugene,” Grace told her, though she had no fear that Monica might poach. “You just go on feeling sorry for me over Nick.”

“I don’t feel
sorry
for you,” Monica insisted. “I just think it’s weird, that’s all. Well, you heard me on this before. Time’s up, anyway.”

Back at her desk, Grace saw that a fax had come in. It was just the one sheet of paper, blank except for a large, scraggly handwritten 4.

This was precisely the sort of thing Monica would find weird, so Grace had never gone into detail with her about the kinds of favors she sometimes did for Nick. He’d phoned her about this a few days ago, that a fax would come in containing a number from one to thirty. He didn’t tell her what it was about, and she didn’t want to know.

So here it was, and now she was to phone Nick. He wouldn’t answer—he didn’t even have the ringer on at his place, wherever that was—but after ten rings a light would go on, and she’d hang up. On her way home today, she would stop at the public library and go to the hardcover mystery section, and put the folded fax into
The Gracie Allen Murder Case,
by S. S. Van Dine, which was always there, and then she’d continue on home.

And in a little while, a nice money order would arrive in the mail. What was so weird about that?

8

T
he bullet coming out was worse than the bullet going in. Not the instant of it—they had him doped for that—but the aftermath. The anesthetic wore off slowly, leaving him dazed, with a jumble of dreams he couldn’t remember, couldn’t even understand when they were going on, except that some of them seemed to have something to do with prison. Happy goddam thing to dream about.

What brought him out of the daze finally was the discomfort. They had his leg in a sling hung down from a contraption over the bed, so it was up in the air with the heel pointed at where the ceiling met the wall to the right of the room door. He was like that, and would be for the next few days, because they didn’t want him to lie on the wound for a while. But that meant he couldn’t move much of himself at all, except his arms.

His leg hurt like hell, once he was conscious again. It felt much worse than when he was shot, like a really hard punch that just wouldn’t ease up.

There was a television set on a shelf high on the wall, and he tried watching it for a while, but everything he saw irritated him. So after a while he switched the thing off and just lay there, alone with his thoughts.

Alone. They’d told him, no visitors right after the operation; he’d be too woozy. But he wasn’t woozy exactly; he was just uncomfortable, with the leg aching as if a dinosaur had just bit him there, and stuck up at an angle so he couldn’t get comfortable even without the ache.

He spent a lot of the time thinking about yesterday’s visit from Wendy. The amusing part was her meeting with Parker. It took a lot to knock Wendy off her pins, but Parker had done it. Jake wished he could have been there when Parker opened the candy box and showed her the gun. She was still a little green around the gills when she’d told him about it.

The other things she’d told him were more serious, and they all had to do with the fact that it was
Elaine
who had shot him, and she’d shot him so he’d be in the hospital at the time of the robbery and wouldn’t be a suspect. Stupid Elaine; where did she ever get that bright idea?

If he’d known she was going to react this way, the hell with it, he’d have skipped his parole officer meeting after all; he’d have gone to Vegas or someplace and checked himself into a county jug.

But the worst thing Wendy’d told him was that the woman detective, Reversa,
thought
maybe it was Elaine that had done it. Elaine or the useless husband—she was ready to go either way—but the problem was, she was already pointed in the right direction.

She didn’t have any motive yet, not for Elaine, but thought maybe she had one for the husband. But when the robbery went down? Here she had a woman linked both to the bank and to the guy that was shot, her onetime and maybe still boyfriend. Here she had a woman whose gun was conveniently lost just at the right moment. Here she had a robbery of that bank just when all its assets were being transferred. And to put the cherry on the icing, the mysteriously shot guy was an ex-con with former associates of the wrong kind, what Wendy yesterday had called his “bad companions.”

Was that enough for Reversa? Would she look at what she had, and connect the dots? Jake might not remember those anesthesia-induced prison dreams, but he remembered prison, and he didn’t want to go there again.

Maybe the job was no good. Maybe Elaine had screwed it up for everybody, and now it was nothing but trouble.

And if it
was
trouble, some of the other people might take it on the lam, but Jake himself wouldn’t get far, on his back in a hospital bed with his leg pointed at the ceiling.

Come to think of it, the trouble was probably exclusively for Jake and Elaine. Parker and Dalesia could go ahead as planned. So far as they were concerned, nothing had changed.

Jake was beginning to feel desperate. This was some miserable bind he was in, all of a sudden.

What if . . . what if he could give Detective Reversa a different motive, one that didn’t have anything to do with the bank? But what motive would that be? “Oh, yeah, Detective, I think you’re right, Elaine shot me, because uhh . . .”

And then what? Yeah, we’re seeing each other again? How does that get me away from the robbery? If Elaine is the one that shot me, then that ties me to the robbery.

But what if it was Jack? Oh, he’s wrong about us, we aren’t seeing each other any more. But if he’s wrong, and there’s no evidence, why would he suddenly turn into this violent guy he’d never been before?

It made Jake’s head ache, along with all the other parts that already ached and itched and burned. It made him so frustrated, this unexpected problem looming down on him, that he did get woozy, and dropped off to sleep, and when he woke up, Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa was sitting there in the chair beside the bed.

“Oh, good, you’re awake,” she said with a bright smile.

“I’m not supposed to have visitors,” was the first thing he thought to say, because he wasn’t ready to deal with all this, to deal with Elaine and this keen-eyed cop and the fact that Parker and Dalesia had nothing to worry about.
They
had nothing to worry about.

“Oh, I get special dispensation,” Detective Reversa told him, still with that sunny smile he didn’t trust for a second. “I promised I wouldn’t stay long, and I wouldn’t get you all upset.”

“Well, good luck with that,” he said.

She cocked her head, smiling and alert. “Really? Why do you say that?”

“Because if you’re here,” he said, scrambling to keep his mind ahead of his mouth, and also feeling ridiculous because he was lying here in front of this fine-looking woman with his leg aimed upward like an antiaircraft gun, “if you’re here, that means you think you know more about who shot me, and anything you want to tell me about that is going to upset me.”

“Well, there is news, you’re right,” she said. “We now know more about the bullet that was used.”

“Well, sure,” he said. “It isn’t in me any more, so you could look at it.”

“It was a thirty-eight Special,” she said. “Do you know anybody with a gun that uses that ammunition?”

“I don’t know anybody with a gun at all,” he said. “When I was in security, and before that in the police, I was around guns, but not any more.”

“It’s hard for me to remember,” she said, “you used to be on the police yourself.”

“Not like you,” he said. “Not a detective. I was just the guy who waved at the traffic.”

“But the fact is,” she said, “you do know at least one person who owns a gun.”

He frowned. “I do?”

“Your friend Elaine Langen.”

“Oh, my God!” he said. “She told me that years ago!” I hope I’m not overdoing this, he thought, and then, trying to tiptoe his way through the right reactions, he frowned at her and said, “You don’t think
she
did it.”

“Not necessarily,” she said. “We do know it was the right caliber. Unfortunately, Mrs. Langen has lost her gun.”

“Lost? How do you
lose
a gun?”

Detective Reversa’s smile turned ironic. “That’s a very good question, Mr. Beckham,” she said. “But really there’s another question first.”

“There is?”

“Well, two people had access to that gun,” she reminded him. “Both Elaine Langen and her husband.”

“Oh, because it’s in the house.”

“Exactly.” Leaning forward, being concerned, being
on his side,
she said, “If it turned out that Mrs. Langen’s gun
was
the one that shot you, which of the Langens would you guess might have used it?”

This was the nub, the hinge. This was the point where, if he was ever going to get out from under what Elaine had done to both of them, he would do it now. He would find the words. He would deflect the investigation, take it off somewhere far from the robbery.

She watched him, smiling faintly, in no hurry, and he thought, I can’t put it on Jack Langen. I would love to, but no way. “No way Jack Langen would shoot me,” he said.

She looked surprised. “You seem very positive of that.”

“In the first place,” Jake told her, “he’s got no reason to be sore at me, not any more, not for years. And in the second place, that isn’t what he’d do, it isn’t the way he operates. If Jack Langen wanted me shot, he’d get somebody else to do it. And he wouldn’t loan the guy his wife’s gun.”

“No, I don’t suppose he would. So you think Elaine did it.”

He turned away from those sharp eyes, that fake smile. Elaine did it; yes, of course, Elaine did it. They were going to know that, if they didn’t already. They might not ever be able to prove it, but they’d know it. “I’d hate to think so,” he said.

“Because you were very good friends.”

Well, he didn’t have to put up with that much irony. Facing the detective again, he said, “I had an affair with Elaine Langen. It was never going anywhere, we were never gonna run away together, and we both knew it. Then her husband must’ve found out the same time he found out I was stealing. He got his revenge, he pressed charges, he paid me back, it’s all over as far as he’s concerned.”

“
Is
it all over? Between you and Mrs. Langen, I mean.”

“Absolutely,” he said, and all at once he saw it. The road out of the woods. “She wanted to start up again,” he explained, “when I got out, but I’m done with
all
of that, every bit of it. I’m Mr. Staight-and-narrow. I told her, it can’t pick up like before, it just can’t.” Then he allowed himself to get a bit wide-eyed. “Holy shit.”

Alert, she said, “Yes?”

“You’re right. She did it.” Hushed, he said, “Elaine took a shot at me.”

“That’s what you think happened.”

“But, listen,” he said. “Think about it. Look where she shot me,” and he pointed up at his inclined leg.

“Yes?”

“She’s a good shot, Elaine,” he said. “She told me, she used to go to the firing range and practice all the time. So if she did shoot at me, and okay, maybe she did, but if she did, she wasn’t trying to kill me.”

Detective Reversa looked skeptical. “Why would she do that, Mr. Beckham?”

“She was trying to attract my attention,” Jake said. “She really can’t stand her husband, I can tell you that, but she’s stuck with him, and for a while there I helped her sort of put up with the life she had to lead. I went into prison, I came out, I said no, she got desperate— I don’t mean I’m some kind of fantastic lover or anything, I’m just the guy that made it easier for her to live her life, that’s all. I was like, I don’t know, like her Valium. And I said no. And she brooded about it, and she decided, let’s attract his attention.”

Looking and sounding honestly amused at the idea, the detective said, “And to let you know, next time it could be worse.”

“That’s it,” he said. “Jesus, Detective Reversa, I bet you that’s just what happened.”

“You could very well be right.”

“And she threw the gun away. At least she threw the gun away. Though she could buy another. Or maybe she just hid it. But I don’t care, I don’t want to press charges.”

“She
shot
you, Mr. Beckham.”

“I understand that,” Jake said. “But I understand why she did it, and I understand it was a felony for her to do it, and if you can catch her on your own, that’s fine. But I don’t want to help. I’m sorry I said as much as I did.”

Detective Reversa considered the situation, then nodded. “For your sake, Mr. Beckham,” she said, “I hope Mrs. Langen appreciates your gesture.”