A Fatal Debt (12 page)

After thirty seconds, he picked up the phone in his study. “Hey, Benny, we’re just having breakfast. You rushed off the other day. What’s up?”

“I’m in trouble, Dad,” I said, my voice starting to shake. “A patient killed someone and it’s being blamed on me. I couldn’t have stopped it. It wasn’t my fault.”

I felt myself babbling with exhaustion and stress, triggered by the sound of his voice and my nighttime loneliness.

“Whoa, slow down. I’m sure it wasn’t, but take it from the top.”

I told him the whole story. It took twenty minutes, and he interrupted occasionally to ask me a question, but he listened. Just talking to him made me feel overwhelmingly grateful to have someone on my side.

“Hmm,” he said at the end. “Listen, I’ve got a friend over there who’ll be able to help you, but you must promise me something. It’s important.”

“Yes, Dad,” I said, a child again.

“Don’t talk to the hospital or the insurers or the police until you’ve spoken to him. And don’t go visiting any more prisons. You need a lawyer.”

I
n New York City, the Shapiros lived in a tower on Central Park West near Columbus Circle that had been built in retro-classic Manhattan style, all limestone and marble. It had become famous for the bankers and hedge fund managers who’d bought apartments there just before the crash. The address was a symbol of the city’s new wealth, and magazines recorded each $30 million apartment sale in awed detail.

I’d called to arrange a time to see her, and she’d sounded grateful to hear from me. Despite my father’s warning about not talking to anyone, she was—or had been—the wife of my patient and I owed it to her. Besides, I wanted to find out what had gone wrong. She’d kept one gun away from Harry, as I’d insisted to her, but he had slipped away from her and found another one to kill Greene. I still sympathized
with her, but what she’d told Felix was true. She should have listened to me and not her husband.

Dusk was falling when I arrived, making the Mercedes sedans and BMWs in the courtyard glow. Everything was polished and shiny, down to the buttons on the coats of the doormen inside who scanned all visitors. After one of them had called upstairs to announce my arrival, another pointed toward the elevator to the thirty-seventh floor. The elevator gave onto a private lobby with a large oak door, which was opened by Anna. She was barefoot and wearing a blue flowered dress, and she gave me a small, pained smile.

“Dr. Cowper?” said a voice from somewhere inside the apartment. Then Nora emerged from a room and walked up to us. Anna stepped a few paces back, ceding her position, and paused briefly before turning away.

“Call me,” she mouthed silently.

I’d hardly had time to register that before Nora kissed me on the cheek again—her flesh cooler than it had felt in East Hampton—and stood back in acknowledgment. She wore gray pants and a cream blouse, and she looked pale and fragile, like a widow in mourning.

“It’s good to see you, Doctor,” she said, her voice wavering.

“And you, Mrs. Shapiro. I’m sorry about everything that’s happened. It must have been very difficult.”

“It has been,” she said simply. I wondered if she was going to cry, but she recovered and gestured for me to follow her inside.

The apartment was grand and high-ceilinged and seemed to recede through endless rooms like a manor house. It was flanked by floor-to-ceiling windows through which I saw the sun casting a glow along Central Park South, its line of hotels and apartment blocks bordering the green block of Central Park. Nora led me to a walnut-paneled study with walls that displayed a mosaic of modern paintings. I saw a Jasper Johns and a Warhol-like lithograph that I couldn’t place. A large photograph hanging over the black marble fireplace dominated the room: a Marlboro cowboy galloping against a vast and cloudy sky.

“It’s a Richard Prince. I bought it for Harry,” Nora said, seeing me look at it.

“It’s great,” I said politely.

“I don’t know what Harry thinks. He was shocked at what I paid.”

“You’re the collector?”

“My mother was a sculptor and I picked up the habit from her, although I couldn’t afford to buy much before I met Harry,” she said. She was sitting on a sofa with the Prince behind her, a shadow cast on her face, and she smiled for the first time. She seemed to want to talk.

“How long have you two been married?”

“Ten years in June. June ninth. Not how I expected to spend our anniversary.”

“How did you meet?”

Nora smiled. “Harry’s first marriage had broken up. He’d waited a long time to end it. They’d been college sweethearts and he’d never been happy. That’s what he told me.” She laughed faintly.

“Perhaps it was true.”

“Maybe. I was kind of a mess then—nothing was working out. I was in my early thirties, no kids, no relationship, a job I hated. A friend invited me to a party in the Hamptons, and I ended up chatting to this twelve-year-old boy in a back room. It was Harry’s son, Charlie. He’s at Harvard now. Harry was a guilty father, grateful that I’d entertained his son. He latched on to me. He’d been married for so long, he had no idea how to talk to women.”

“You liked him, though?”

“I did. I was seeing this guy in his twenties and Harry was such an
adult
compared to him. On our second date, Harry said he wanted to marry me. I was living in this tiny apartment on the Upper West Side. He came over once and refused to come back. He booked a suite at the Pierre and moved me there instead.” She laughed at the extravagance. “My boyfriend was young and he was like, ‘I want to be an artist, but I’m not sure. I love you, but I’m not sure.’ Harry never had second thoughts. He liked seeing you the other day, by the way,” she said.

I’ll bet he did
, I thought, but I tried not to let my resentment show. “He seemed to be bearing up well.”

The fragile look came back to her face and she turned away from me to examine a steel sculpture on a side table. She brushed a tear away with one finger.

“He’s happier with something to work on—his defense, I mean. That’s what I wanted to talk about. We’ve talked to the lawyers and they think he has a strong defense. He wasn’t thinking clearly, that’s obvious to anyone. He was in a bad way, and seeing Marcus was too much. Poor Marcus.”

Poor Nora, poor Harry, poor Marcus. What about poor Ben?
I thought. I liked Nora and felt for her, but I suspected that she wouldn’t be any more use to me than Harry or Duncan when it came to it. Her first loyalty was to her husband, and I was Harry’s alibi for killing Greene, his best hope of evading life in jail. I’d let him out of the hospital, and as Pagonis had observed, it had been very convenient. If it came to a choice between Harry and me, I knew she wouldn’t hesitate. Love would triumph over sympathy.

“I spoke to the detectives. They told me Mr. Shapiro left without you knowing. How did he manage that?”

It was a blunt question, and I meant it that way. I wanted to shock her into acknowledging her failure to heed my warnings. It had the intended effect, for she paled.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Cowper. You told me to keep an eye on him. I know you did. I was in the kitchen and Harry was taking a nap. I heard the phone and him answering, then nothing. When I went to check on him twenty minutes later, he’d gone.”

“So Ms.…” I hesitated, not wanting to sound intimate but realizing as I started on the sentence that I didn’t know her second name. “Anna. She didn’t see him leave?”

“She was with a friend in East Hampton. I wish she’d been here—things would have been different. Anna wouldn’t have let it happen, I know she wouldn’t.” She looked at me sadly, but I wasn’t ready to let her off that easily.

“You called Mr. Lustgarten?”

“He came over, but we couldn’t find Harry. The men downstairs said the car was gone from the garage. They’ve got a way of knowing.
It was evening before he called. It was terrible. I still don’t understand where Harry got that gun from. You told me to lock up the Beretta and I did that. It’s still in my safe in East Hampton. He got hold of another somehow, I don’t know who from.”

Who from
, I noticed she’d said. Not
where from
. I wondered if she was telling the whole truth or if she had more of an idea than she’d admitted. Sometimes in therapy, a single word is a clue to what the patient is hiding.

Nora looked at me penitently. “Dr. Cowper. Ben. I want you to know how sorry I am that I didn’t take your advice in the hospital. I’ve thought about that a lot since then, and I’ll always regret it. If I can do anything to make it up to you, I will.”

They were only words, but after the aggression and blame that I’d faced over the previous few days, they meant something to me. She sounded genuinely mortified by her blunder.

“There is one thing,” I said, not wanting to miss the opportunity. “You know Sarah Duncan, don’t you? She told me you’re friends.”

She looked anxious. “She scares me, to tell you the truth. I tried to leave the board once, but she wouldn’t let me. I guess she saw Harry’s money leaving, too. She took me out to lunch and forced me to stay.”

I smiled at that—I could imagine the scene in some Upper East Side restaurant and how implacable Duncan must have been.

“It’s very important for me that the hospital supports me. If there’s anything you can do to persuade her, I’d be grateful,” I said.

Nora’s face lightened as I said it, as if she welcomed the chance to expiate her guilt. “Of course. She has to do that. It’s only right.”

She walked me out of the apartment to the elevator, and on the way, I glanced into their kitchen in the hope of spotting Anna again. The room was empty. She was somewhere else, deep inside.

Harry sat at a green baize–covered table, his face rigid, his right hand clamped stiffly over his left. In front of him, a scrum of photographers—some standing, others crouching, and two leaning forward so that the tips of their lenses were a couple of feet from his nose—was clicking
away, sounding like a swarm of cicadas. Harry looked as if he were only just restraining himself from punching one of them.

He was in banker’s garb, which I hadn’t seen him wearing before—black suit, white shirt with a button-down collar, and a red tie with a pattern it was hard to make out on my computer screen. I’d located the recording of the Senate hearing, as Felix had said, in the C-SPAN archive. It had taken place the previous fall, just after Seligman had been rescued and Harry had resigned. I sat alone that night, searching the past for what had driven Harry to murder.

The man to Harry’s right on the screen was at ease. He was tall—or looked as if he would be standing up—and trim. His brown hair was so neat that it looked molded, like that on a Ken doll. He had pale, clear skin and a strong jaw with a cleft in his chin. The snappers were mauling him, too, but he didn’t look stressed. His bearing suggested that he was sure everything would work out fine for him. He leaned forward and minutely adjusted the card in front of him: M
ARCUS
G
REENE
. I hardly recognized him alive.

The snappers hurried back to crouch in front of a curved table on a dais at which the twenty senators sat. The room was vast and ceremonial, richly paneled in mahogany and marble, and above the dais was a spatchcocked eagle and the American flag. Pasty-faced staffers in boxy suits who looked light- and sleep-deprived were passing through a brass-engraved door beneath the eagle. The chairman looked unhealthy—plump and rumpled, with thick white hair, jowls, and a pug nose—but he exuded satisfaction at being the center of attention, as if this moment were enough to repay his slog to seniority. He rapped his gavel.

“I will remind everyone that this is a hearing, so we will not have any disruptions, no matter what they feel,” he said croakily. “Believe me, I feel as strongly as anyone here about curbing the excesses we’ve witnessed on Wall Street. We will ask the Treasury secretary about that later, but our first panel has many questions to answer. I urge them to talk openly, not to attempt to hoodwink the American people.”

The camera cut to Harry and Greene and showed the lawyers and
officials arrayed to their rear in mute support. Just left of Harry’s head, about two rows back, was Nora. In the front row, precisely between Harry and Greene, as if to emphasize his neutrality between his old and new bosses, was Felix. Sitting in my apartment, months after this show trial had been enacted, I found myself urging Harry to stay calm. It was useless to try to influence the past, but I couldn’t stop myself. As if hearing me, Harry nodded as Greene took the microphone.

“Senator, I pledge the full cooperation of Seligman Brothers in uncovering the mistakes that were made, because there were significant errors that we all regret, and in ensuring that the taxpayers’ investment is repaid,” Greene said sternly.

Not having bothered to follow a congressional committee hearing before, I didn’t know what to expect, but it turned out that the first order of business was to let all the senators make a speech while the witnesses sat silently. Greene composed his face in a supportive expression, while Harry glowered. I skipped through this interlude until I saw the camera focus on Harry, who was reading from a piece of paper clutched in both hands, wearing his spectacles. Once I’d slowed down the video to listen, his speech sounded good. I assumed that Felix had drafted something contrite.

“I would like to assure the committee that, while I regret bitterly what happened, I always did what I believed was best for Seligman Brothers and for this country.” His voice was calm, but his shoulders slumped in relief as he came to the end of the sentence. He’d obviously been tensing himself to get through it.

The first senator to ask questions had a crew cut, a beaky nose, and a rough gaze. He stared at Harry and Greene as if they were beneath him, not just physically but morally, and thrust a hand up to scratch his temple as he spoke.

“Mr. Shapiro, that all sounds dandy, but I’m puzzled by one thing. If everything you did was fine, then why did you step down?”

“Senator, I believed Seligman needed a fresh start after—”