A Fatal Debt (24 page)

Lauren wasn’t home, and I retreated along the street to a café to await her return. I knew she’d be back—it was a warm Saturday morning and a copy of
The Wall Street Journal
rested on a table in the living room, still in its wrapper. She must have retrieved it before going out earlier. I’d called her once more since she’d failed to arrive for her session earlier that week, but there’d been no reply. Whatever she’d wanted from me had taken only two meetings and I knew I’d
have to seek her out if I wanted to discover more. Her address was in my records, but I’d had to steel myself to follow my father’s advice.

It was four hours later, after lunchtime, when I saw her walk down the street in a pale overcoat. I let her go inside and gave her five minutes’ grace. Only when I’d climbed her stoop and was at the top about to knock did I have a feeling of hopelessness. I was once again chasing one of Harry’s women, knocking on a closed door. I’d already gone to Nora and Anna and gotten nowhere. It was a hopeless mission—Harry was the only one who knew why he had done it. I’d had one chance to get it from him, and I’d failed.
Why am I here?
I wondered. I felt like a stalker who can’t forget the object of his obsession.

When Lauren opened the door, something had changed. It wasn’t just her shock at seeing me and her frown of displeasure. It was something else. She wasn’t the same controlled woman who’d come to my office and told her story: she looked despairing and adrift. Her face was blank, like that of a distressed starlet caught by surprise in a paparazzi flashlight, and she hesitated before she could articulate her words.

“Dr. Cowper,” she said.

“Can we talk for a minute? It won’t take long.”

She paused, as if trying to reconcile my presence with what she’d been thinking of before, and looked dazed. Then she stood aside and ushered me through. She led me along the hallway into a living room dominated by a long oak table. Sunshine streamed through the rear windows, with frames that bowed at the top. I could hear the faint sound of traffic from the street outside, but it was a peaceful refuge.

“You’ve got something to say?” she asked.

We were still standing, since she hadn’t offered me a seat and showed no sign of doing so. She gave the impression that she wanted to get me out of there as fast as she could and resume pondering whatever had been on her mind.

“You didn’t keep our appointment,” I said.

“I decided I didn’t want to,” she said crisply, regaining some of her
former poise. “I’m sorry I haven’t returned your call. I was intending to. Do you always chase your patients like this?”

“I don’t, but you’re an unusual patient.”

She arched her eyebrows. “How so?”

“You know what I mean. You didn’t pick me out of a list in a magazine. You came to me because I’d treated Mr. Shapiro. You wanted to make sure I couldn’t tell anyone about your relationship.”

“That sounds too clever for me,” she said.

“You’re an intelligent woman.”

“What do you want from me?” she said.

“You told me that you didn’t see Mr. Shapiro after you left Seligman, but that wasn’t true. You visited him in East Hampton only a week before he killed Marcus Greene. Why was that?”

Lauren trailed one hand on the table and then tapped it a couple of times, as if coming to a decision. She looked purposeful again, more like the woman I’d known before. She stepped forward and put her hand on my arm, as if trying to ensure that I listened to her, and her eyes were fierce.

“I want you to leave now. You shouldn’t be asking questions like that. It’s not a good idea, believe me. You’ve already been attacked once. Do you want to put yourself in more danger?”

She had started to guide me out of the room and back toward her door, but her question stunned me. How did she know about my assailant in the park? I had only just told Joe of my suspicions.

“What do you mean? Tell me,” I said. I grabbed her arm. “Tell me.”

“I mean what I say. You should take care,” she said.

My father had left for Washington and I was alone in my apartment, thinking of my final glimpse of Lauren as she’d opened her door to usher me out. The moment when she’d warned me not to ask questions had been shocking, but it wasn’t what I remembered most vividly.

The image printed on my mind was her arm reaching past me in the last moments before I’d stepped onto her stoop and walked away. As she’d turned the bolt, I’d noticed a mark on the back of her hand. It was a green circle, faint against her skin, and I might not have seen it if it hadn’t been familiar. It was the same ultraviolet stamp with which I’d been marked before the officer let me through the cage at Riverhead.

We don’t want the wrong guy leaving
, he’d told me, training a flashlight on it to light it up. Then they’d slid open the bars and I’d walked through to find Harry waiting for me in the corner. That was where Lauren had been before she’d come down the street looking ashen—in Suffolk County with her lover. Five minutes later, I’d blundered to her door to press her about the secret she’d shared with him, days before he’d killed Greene. That circle worried me more than her warning, for it told me that Harry was still close to her. They’d never been out of touch—not before the killing and not since. I’d believed all along that Nora was Harry’s confidante, but I’d been wrong.

Should I take her words to heart, I wondered, and keep myself from further harm by abandoning this quixotic effort to discover the truth about Harry? My father had left town and no one else was speaking to me, so it would be simpler and less risky to call a halt. But momentum had taken me, and Lauren’s words echoed in my brain as a provocation, not a deterrent. I might have lost my job, but I wouldn’t let Harry use me.

If she wouldn’t tell me what had gone on between them, I’d find out in the place where it had all begun.

S
eligman Brothers took up a block of Broadway, and it was hard to discern, looking down the avenue toward Times Square, the border between the worlds of finance and entertainment. The bright screens in Times Square outdid the spring sunshine with ads for movies and electronics, while the Seligman building was lined with strips of pulsing colors, blaring out stock prices from around the world.

One strip was a ticker of prices from the New York Stock Exchange, the stock symbols racing sideways with red or green numbers next to each one—BRK, ABK, TCI, GS, USX. I had no idea what they meant, but I knew they signified a lot to others. Buried in them were fortunes rising and falling.

I was sitting in a street garden, a collection of white metal chairs arranged around a courtyard space, with a waterfall running down a
wall. The sun fell on a sliver of the square, the rest thrown into shadow by the canyon of skyscrapers around me. I tilted my head back to gaze up the forty floors of the Seligman building, its blank wall of glass and metal. A small jet passed way above the tower, streaming a faint white wisp into the blue and making me dizzy. Near me, a couple of office workers—a man and a woman—were lingering over a pair of torn-up croissants, heads down in whispered conversation. I wondered if they were doing a deal or having an assignation.

As I strained to hear, a man walked up to my table and asked me for change. I’d seen him on the street before—a tall Robinson Crusoe figure with a straggly gray beard and his rambling story written on a cardboard sign. He had to be schizophrenic, I guessed. I often felt as if I saw more mental illness on the way to work than when I arrived. I briefly considered trying to talk to him but gave him a dollar instead.

Then I saw Underwood coming out of the doors of the Seligman building, dressed in his banker’s uniform—an Italian suit and mustard yellow Hermès tie. He smoothed his hair with his right palm as a gust of wind lifted a lock, then walked over the road and up to me.

“Hello, Doctor,” he said, enclosing my hand in a lean grip. “It’s good to see you again. A lot of water under the bridge. Isn’t that the expression?”

There was sardonic amusement in his eyes, suggesting that I’d conceded something by coming to see him.

“A lot,” I said.

He took a newspaper someone had left on my table before and used it to swipe some invisible dirt off the chair opposite me, then sat down, looking over at the dealmakers, or lovebirds, near us. The man nodded to him furtively.

“Do we need to be out here?” Underwood said distastefully. “We might get more privacy inside.”

“I didn’t know what you’d prefer,” I lied.

I’d suggested meeting there because I’d felt afraid of going inside. I feared bumping into Felix in the building, not wanting to put him in the awkward position of seeing me. I also wondered whether it would
be safe to confide in him. He’d made it clear that his loyalties were still with Harry, and enough information had already found its way to Riverhead.

“Okay then,” Underwood said, looking around again with the air of a celebrity who attracts attention if he lingers too long. “Let’s go.”

We walked back over the road and through the doors into the Seligman lobby. It was marble-floored, with a wide desk facing the entrance, behind which a line of women in uniform was handing out visitors’ passes. Underwood ignored them and strode toward the barriers to one side, glaring at the guard who stepped forward to try to impede my progress. The man stepped back obediently and instead waved a card at a barrier, making it part for me.

I expected us to rise far up the tower, but Underwood stepped out of the elevator on the fourth floor, leading me through some glass doors with a swipe of his card. We stepped onto a trading floor, with long lines of desks covered in multiple screens stacked beside and on top of one another as if they’d been dividing and multiplying like cells.

I’d never been in such a place before, and I had always imagined it would be a hive of noisy activity, like those they show on television, with young men in bright jackets waving and calling to one another. Instead it had a detached air, like a station that was monitoring the action on some far-off planet. There must have been a thousand people on the floor and a few were typing on keyboards, but most seemed to be doing nothing. They leaned back in their seats, gazing half-attentively into the digital void or chatting to others nearby. None looked especially happy or sad, just intrigued by the numbers on the screens.

A woman in a suit like Lauren’s sat on a desk, talking with three men gathered by her. They all nodded deferentially at Underwood as he passed by, walking between lines of desks toward a corner of the floor. I walked beside him, seeing the tilt of heads as we passed. Everyone was sitting in plain view, with none of the usual trappings of status—individual offices with assistants—yet I knew that all of these people probably earned more than me.

As we reached the corner, Underwood led me into a glass box office with windows looking out over Broadway and panels giving onto the trading floor to the interior. A blind was pulled down one of the four panels, but the others remained open, so he could watch everything that was going on outside and those who were interested could observe us, like animals in a zoo. There were photographs of his family on one ledge, but the room was otherwise free of personal touches, as if he were a short-term tenant who might be evicted at any moment.

He waved me to an armchair on the side with a vista of the open floor. A woman walked in and gave him a pile of papers that he perused with a frown before handing it back. Then he came and sat by me, grinning.

“So, Ben. How can I help?” he said.

I didn’t like Underwood any more than the first time we’d met. He was like a primate in expensive clothes that might tear me limb from limb. He emanated barely contained aggression and contempt for the mortals who didn’t exist in his elite world of corporate wheeler-dealing. I wondered if it was an act to intimidate opponents or if he really was like that. There was something of that quality about the whole place. He was the leader now, but I could imagine a pack of those traders crashing through the door at his first sign of vulnerability.

“When we talked before, by the plane, I remember you saying it was Mr. Shapiro’s fault, everything that had happened to him, before Mr. Greene’s death. I wanted to know what you meant,” I said.

Underwood let out a breath and laughed flatly. “That’s a long time ago. I don’t know what I might or might not have said back then, when Marcus was still alive. I don’t remember you telling me much, Ben. Not even your name, as I recall.”

“I didn’t. Things were different then.” I didn’t see any reason to apologize for that, to him of all people. “Look. Mr. Underwood. John. Could I ask you something? How much do you know of my involvement?”

“I’ve seen the documents and I’ve talked to the Greene family. It’s
not a happy story, is it? There are accusations against this bank as well as you, and I need to be careful what I say. I don’t know if we should be talking. Margaret is a good friend of my wife’s.”

I leaned forward in my seat. If I was to get anything from him, he had to believe I wasn’t a threat. Despite his familial references to the Greenes, I suspected that he didn’t care too much about them now that Marcus, his boss and patron—the man who could influence his career—was dead. I’d adapted my pitch from something Lauren had said.

“When we met before, Mr. Shapiro was my patient, as you know. I couldn’t say anything about him. You’ll understand that as a banker. You can’t talk about the clients you’re working for. I can’t tell you anything that was said to me in confidence, and I’m not asking you to do it either. But my career is in jeopardy and I’m trying to understand why Mr. Shapiro killed Mr. Greene. Can you help me?”

Underwood nodded as if I’d made some sense. “I would have thought that was obvious,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “The merger went wrong. Harry was unstable and blamed his own failure on Marcus. He shot him. End of story.”

“But why did it go wrong? That’s the part I don’t yet understand. I’m not a financier. All this”—I waved my hand at the glass panels giving onto the vast, hushed trading floor—“mystifies me. It’s your world.”