A Fatal Debt (18 page)

I hadn’t told him anything that might help me, though, and why not? Because I’d made a pledge to a girl on whom I had a crush. That wasn’t loyalty, it was stupidity. Until she released me, I’d be trapped.

Anna agreed to meet me on the Upper East Side at a Le Pain Quotidien near the hospital where I sometimes took a break. It was a long way from the Shapiros’ apartment, but she’d prefer that, she said. She was there when I arrived, sitting at the rear by one of the trestle tables,
a paperback in hand. She’d draped her coat over the bench next to her and was dressed in a scoop-necked T-shirt, a silver necklace, and gray pants. It was an ordinary getup and she didn’t seem to be wearing makeup, but I still found it glamorous. She was nursing a cup of coffee in one hand and I’d almost reached her before she glanced up.

“Oh, my God. What happened?” she said, putting a hand to her mouth in shock. The sight of my face seemed to hurt her, as if she’d been attacked herself—I found it moving how personally she took it. As I sat next to her, she reached out briefly to touch the side of my head with her fingertips and then withdrew them quickly, as if regretting the intimacy.

“I ran across a man in the park after I left you. He didn’t seem to like me very much,” I said.

“Jesus, Ben,” she said, looking dazed. She seemed to be musing to herself, struggling to understand what had happened. “I took you there. How could I have been so stupid? You’ve got to be careful. Promise me you will.”

Not another promise
, I thought—she was one for extracting pledges from people. It still pleased me that she cared.

“I promise I’ll look both ways crossing the road.”

She didn’t smile. “Fuck,” she said quietly to herself, as if the news were still sinking in. Her face was stricken and a tear trickled from one of her eyes onto her face, where she wiped it with the back of her hand. I wanted to reach across to hold it, but nervousness defeated me as surely as the Perspex dividing the tables in the Riverhead jail. To fill in while she recovered, I called over the waitress and ordered a cup of tea. We sat in silence for a while until she spoke again, flicking a crumb from the table as she did.

“I’m glad you called. There’s something I have to say.”

“Oh dear. That sounds bad.”

“You said the reason you wanted to see me was pleasure.” She looked up at me and her eyes shone unhappily, renewing my guilt at the way I’d misled her. “I don’t think I can. Enjoy it, I mean. Not with all this.”

“I understand,” I said.

That wasn’t true. Harry was locked up in Riverhead, but he’d been there the night she’d kissed me and it hadn’t stopped her. I didn’t want to lose her when I’d only just started to feel for her—I needed her on my side. I’d come there to persuade her to release me from my pledge, but that felt unimportant suddenly. She had that effect on me. When I was with her, nothing else seemed to matter. She was my drug.

“I wish I could,” she said.

“I wish you could, too.”

She looked miserable and her hand trembled slightly as she picked up her coffee to sip it. Then she put it down and started to gather her things, stuffing her book into the bag by her side and threading one arm through her coat.

“I’m no good at this, I have to go,” she said.

“Wait,” I said, half rising and putting out a hand to touch her arm. “I need your help. The thing you told me about that woman. It’s important. I have to tell my lawyer.”

It was as if I’d sent an electric shock through her. She straightened up and jerked her arm back, pulling it free of my hand. She stared with her mouth open and her eyes glossy and hard. Then the corners of her mouth tightened and she spat out her words.

“I
trusted
you. That was a secret.”

“But I’m in trouble. The police think I’ve been hiding things from them. You need to help me.”

As I said that, I knew it was a mistake. A strand of her blond hair detached itself from where it was fixed and she looped it back over her ear as she stared at me.

“Right, so your job’s important and mine doesn’t matter? That’s what this was about, Ben? You just strung me along to find out what you wanted. Was that it? You think I’m stupid, do you?”

“Of course not,” I protested.

“You listen to me. You promised me and I expect you to keep your promise. You don’t want your hospital to know how you behaved.”

My guilt and shame, and my wish somehow to placate her so that
we could go back to the night she’d kissed me, evaporated instantly. She was no better than the rest of them. As soon as she was under the least threat, she resorted to blackmail. Why had she played with me like that, teasing me with her secret about Harry and then forbidding me to use it? I spoke before I’d thought.

“You don’t want Nora to know how
you
behaved,” I said.

Anna stared at me hatefully and reached into her pockets for cash, twisting the cloth in her rush. She cursed under her breath as she struggled to extract her hand again.

“Forget it. I’ll pay,” I said.

“Stay away from me,” she replied.

She almost ran out of the café and off down First Avenue, disappearing back into the city’s millions. We’d degenerated from awkward fondness to blazing bitterness inside a minute and I didn’t know why it had happened. I guessed it was my awkwardness at feeling vulnerable around her, which had expressed itself as rage. She hadn’t cared for me, after all: at the first sign of difficulty, she’d fled.

As I got up, I saw a glove beneath the bench. It must have fallen from her pocket when she’d left. I held it to my face to catch her scent and placed it in my own.

That night as I got ready for bed, I brushed my teeth, looking in the bathroom mirror as toothpaste dribbled down my chin. My bruises had flowered purple, black, and yellow, there were dark circles under my eyes, and my cheeks were puffy in the halogen light. The only comfort was that Rebecca had done a nice job on the cut, sealing it so neatly that it was fading from sight. I looked and felt like an aging boxer: my days were filled with body blows.

None, however, had felt as bad as fighting with Anna. Something had made her abandon me, something she hadn’t told me. I hadn’t cared that she’d kept her secret from Nora, but I cared that she was keeping one from me. I remembered how she’d touched my face, the shock in hers, as if she were responsible.

I rooted through my pills, seeking something to put me out for as
long as possible. Then I realized I wouldn’t need it—I was so tired that I’d only have to lie down to fall asleep. The last thing before turning in, I called voice mail to check my messages. Two were from patients who had to change appointments and one was from a man giving an excuse for not turning up that day. I was about to hang up when I heard a voice that I didn’t recognize.

It was Lauren Faulkner.

H
er footsteps announced her identity from a long way away. Most people in the place, even the doctors, tended to shuffle, but Lauren’s heels clicked along the corridor. She rapped loudly on the door with none of the tentativeness of my neurotic patients.

It had been easy to look Lauren up after she’d called, to find her photograph, her age—the same as mine—her magna cum laude education, and her list of jobs. High school in Beverly Hills, then Yale, then a job with a consulting company, then Harvard for an MBA, then to Seligman Brothers and a rapid rise from analyst to co-head of the Financial Institutions Group. I thought of Felix’s summary of Underwood’s job as we sat in the Gulfstream:
A banker who advises other bankers. Go figure
.

A photograph on her new bank’s website showed a woman with
dark hair that curled around her ears before straightening, as if coming to its senses, and an unflinching gaze. There were two other photos, one at a fund-raiser in the city and another at a party in Southampton with a group of blue-blazered men.
She’s got nice legs under that dress
, I had thought, but the image hadn’t done her justice. She wore a silk blouse and an expensive-looking pantsuit that demurely covered the legs I’d noted. In person, her sleekness lit up the room.

“Dr. Cowper? I’m Lauren,” she said.

“Come in, Ms. Faulkner.”

Since she’d called, I’d been wondering why she’d tracked me down. Psychs are wired not to believe in coincidence. We quiz patients who claim they missed a train they wanted to catch or happened to meet a friend in the street. Deep down, we think, it was deliberate. The idea that Harry’s lover had selected me by sheer chance was ridiculous. I’d been attacked on the evening I’d been told about Lauren, and the man whose house she’d been observed visiting was in jail, accused of murder. This wasn’t a coincidence.

“Where should I sit?” Lauren said, glancing around the room. “I haven’t done this before, believe it or not. I’m the only one of my girlfriends who hasn’t. Man trouble, money, the usual things.”

Her voice was low and melodic and her tone unworried, suggesting our meeting was perfectly ordinary.

I indicated my patients’ chair. “Let’s see if I can help you.”

“I’m sure you can,” she said, as if it would be a waste of effort to try to dissuade her. She crossed her long legs and placed her black leather bag on the floor. She was more finely groomed than women I knew—so polished that she looked as though she wore a mask. Her red lipstick matched the soles of her Christian Louboutin shoes, and her eyebrows were exactly shaped.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

She paused for a few seconds, and I saw her assessing me. Both of us knew the answer to the question, but she avoided it.

“You’re on a list, aren’t you? Top doctors in New York,” she said.

I knew that
New York
magazine list, and I knew I wasn’t on it. She
smiled, displaying pearl white teeth against red lips. She gave the impression of being in complete control—she wouldn’t reveal anything that she didn’t care to.

She didn’t look even vaguely ill, certainly much less than Harry when I’d first met him. She was talking brightly and at a normal speed, her face was full of life, and she smiled easily, so there was no depression there. It was conceivable she was bipolar or had another condition, but there were few signs of it. She wasn’t manic, and she was lucid and rational. If anything, she seemed less stressed than I.

“Can I ask why you’re interested in therapy?” I said. “Is there something happening in your life at the moment?”

She gazed at me as she absorbed the question, but she showed no sign of wanting to answer it. Instead, she leaned back in the chair and expelled a slow breath of air through her nostrils, gathering her thoughts.

“May I ask
you
a question?” she replied. “Can I be sure that nothing I tell you will go outside this room?”

“Of course. It will be in confidence.”

“I’ve heard of cases where personal matters came out in court,” she said, gazing at me. “Things a patient had told his psychiatrist.”

I looked back at her, both of us knowing what she meant and both knowing that the other one knew. It was absurd. I should have stopped her there, told her that I couldn’t treat her. Anything she told me in this room, including her affair, would immediately become sealed. Even if Anna released me from my promise, which she showed no sign of doing, it would have to remain secret and I’d have nothing to tell Pagonis or Baer. I’d be bound as tightly as ever by professional obligation.

I felt as if I were becoming more enmeshed even as I tried to fight my way free, yet I couldn’t resist it. The lure was as powerful as when my father had turned pleadingly to me in the car when I was twelve years old and asked me to keep secret Jane’s illicit presence in our house. I’d been drawn into Harry’s world, and I had to know the truth. Anna had only spied upon it from afar, and she wouldn’t tell
me more. Even if I could never find my way out of this maze, I wanted to proceed.

“It only happens when a patient who’s been accused of a crime waives privilege. It’s his choice, not the doctor’s,” I said.

She smiled. “You’ve got a duty of care. Like a banker.”

“I imagine so. I’m not an expert.”

“So you’ll take me as a patient?”

“Perhaps you should tell me about yourself first,” I said.

“Thirty-three, separated, investment banker. What else?” she said, as if she’d already exhausted the subject of her personality.

“You’re separated?”

She sighed, and her confidence seemed to falter. She looked away from me, speaking to the bookshelf on one wall.

“Wall Street’s a relentless place. You make partner in your early thirties and you need to work hard just to prove yourself, harder than the men. Seven or eight meetings a day, work every weekend. My husband couldn’t accept that. He wanted children.”

“You didn’t?”

“I did. I do. But I had no choice. That’s the job.”

She gave a brittle smile, and a few minutes later, our meeting was over. She didn’t bother to ask me how much therapy would cost, and it didn’t seem likely to bother her any more than it had Harry. We arranged for her to return at the same time the following week, and I opened the door for her. She walked toward the elevators as precisely as she’d come, bag at her side, head aloft, the legs of her expensive pants swishing together. I couldn’t remember a patient who’d come for treatment in such good health.

I was at home that evening, eating a sandwich and watching television aimlessly to distract myself, when Bob called up from the front desk to tell me that two detectives had come to see me.

“Fine, send them up,” I said as casually as I could manage, although they hadn’t given me any warning.

“Sure thing, Doctor.”

His voice had the doorman’s guarded neutrality. I couldn’t tell whether he believed that it was as routine as I’d tried to make it sound or he expected me to be led out in handcuffs in a few minutes. When I peered out of my apartment, I saw Hodge slouching down the corridor as if he hadn’t thought much of me the first time we’d met and had since had his view fully vindicated. Pagonis carried a document that she tapped lightly on one wall as she walked.