A Fatal Debt (33 page)

“I waited for Harry to do it, but he was too far gone. It was like Greene had cast a spell over him. I wasn’t thinking straight. My head felt jammed and I couldn’t hear myself breathe. I’d brought a gun from New York. I walked out of the study and along the back of the house. I saw Marcus with his back to me. I came through the conservatory. He didn’t notice me until I was inside.”

“You killed him?” I asked.

“He turned toward me. He looked shocked, like he couldn’t grasp it, when he saw the gun, I remember. Then he smiled. I don’t think he thought I could do it. He was stupid. When Harry bought that gun for me, there was something I didn’t tell you. I learned to use it on a range.”

As she said it, she swung the Beretta up with both hands, one wrapped over the other around the stock, and pointed it directly at me. Her arms briefly locked in position and my heart raced. Then she lowered it, the demonstration over.

“I didn’t say anything, I just shot him in the chest. He went down and lay on the ground twitching. There was a lot of blood right away. I knew he was dying.”

I thought of the photo of Greene lying on the floor that Pagonis had pushed in front of me at Yaphank, and I glanced at the spot on the floor where Anna had made me stand to punish me. I’d had no idea what she’d really meant.

“Did you try to save him?”

“Why would I have done that?” she said, as if the idea were stupid. “I wanted him out of our lives forever. I wanted Harry back.”

“You got what you wanted, then?”

She looked happy for the first time, remembering it. “I did. It was as if the sound of the gun woke Harry up. He took charge. I was standing here, shocked at what I’d done. He took the gun from me and said, ‘You have to leave.’ He wiped off my prints and he fired it again out of the window.”

Nora waved the gun toward the ocean, as if indicating the path of the bullet. “That’s what saved Harry,” she said. “Not pills. Not a
talk
about it.”

She kept saying that word
—talk, talk, talk
—and every time she did, she sounded more scathing. I wondered if she hated me as much as my profession, and if that was why she was holding a gun on me. I’d defied the rules of psychiatry, but I’d found her by asking questions. Asking questions had its uses. It occurred to me as I listened that Pagonis had a lot to answer for. She’d taken Nora at her word and instead tried to bully me into undermining Harry’s defense. The fingerprints on the gun, the powder burns on Harry’s hands, the call to New York from East Hampton—she’d fallen for everything that Nora had faked to throw her off the trail. I’d been naïve, but her performance had been terrible.

“I called Felix in New York to tell him to come for me,” she went
on. “I knew I couldn’t leave in the Range Rover. Harry had to have driven it there. There was only one way to escape. On foot.”

I nodded, for I knew where she’d gone.
Look around
, Anna had called to me. Nora had killed Greene in the room where we sat, yards from their lawn and beyond that the steps down the dune to their private wilderness. It was labeled public, but it wasn’t really. No stranger could make it there without approval. Greene had died in a cottage with a ready-made escape route—that’s where Nora had lured him.

“I walked along the beach until I got close to Water Mill. There’s a road that leads down to the dunes there and I waited for Felix to come and pick me up. He had a place near there. I went to shower and clean myself off. Then we drove back to the house.”

She stopped talking, exhausted, and I tried to work out what to do next. The talk had delayed the moment of confrontation, but she’d soon either have to put the gun down or use it—we couldn’t stay in this standoff forever. Whenever I was caught with patients who could turn violent, I retreated. That wasn’t an option here. Her eyes looked slightly softer, some of the steeliness gone.

“I think you should give me that, Mrs. Shapiro,” I said, holding out a hand toward her and trying not to look threatening.

Nora looked at me blankly as I reached forward. I still remember her expression, its utter lack of emotion, because of what happened next. She said nothing at all. She simply pulled the trigger of the automatic. There was a deafening roar and I can picture a flash from the muzzle, but I may be imagining it. I lurched backward with shock, but she stayed in the same position, with the gun still pointed at me. The surge of adrenaline made me quiver, but after a few seconds, I realized that she’d fired over my shoulder.

“Get up,” she said, and the blankness in her face was matched by the monotone of her voice. There was nothing I could engage with in her—the affect of the truly dangerous—so I obeyed.

“Walk backward. Keep facing me,” she said.

When I’d got to where Greene had died, she told me to halt. She was now fifteen feet away—an impossible gap for me to cover safely,
but probably close enough for her to shoot me. She’d killed Greene at that distance. Time was moving very slowly, or the adrenaline made it seem like that. Every move felt as if it took an age to complete.

Then, over her shoulder, I saw something glint. It was the conservatory door opening in the moonlight as Anna stepped through. I couldn’t let my eyes linger for fear of being noticed, so I kept them on Nora’s face and half monitored the blurred shape growing behind her like a ghost. The room was silent. Even knowing that Anna was there, I couldn’t hear her walking. She trod lightly and the sound of the gunshot had been so loud that my hearing was muffled, so Nora’s probably was, too. It felt like a surreal reconstruction of the story that Nora had told me, with Anna in Nora’s place, walking through the room unnoticed. Nora drew up her left hand to grip the gun, wrapping her fingers around her right hand again.

“Don’t do this, Mrs. Shapiro,” I said, trying to make my voice sound soothing rather than challenging. “We can sort it out.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. Her arms shifted slightly and stiffened as if readying herself to fire. As they did, Anna called from behind her.

“Nora,” she said. “Put it down.”

She spoke gently, but the sound broke the silence in the room as completely as the gunshot and Nora flinched. She swung around, the gun turning with her, and I launched myself forward, reaching into my pocket.

I had a half-conscious fear that it would be like my dream, when my feet had slipped on the wooden floor as I’d tried to reach the stricken Harry, but the nightmare didn’t come true. My shoes gripped the floor and I ran as fast as I could. Mortal fear and adrenaline do amazing things. I reached Nora in five long strides with my right hand high in the air, holding a syringe of Haldol and Ativan.

Nora started to turn back as she heard my steps behind her, but it was too late. I flung my elbow around her neck, hitting her arm to push the gun away from Anna, and toppled her forward. As we fell, I slammed my right hand down and plunged the syringe into her thigh, as close as I could to her gluteus maximus, where the big muscles
would absorb the chemicals into her blood fastest. The gun fell from her hand, skittering across the floor as I squeezed the plunger. The drugs overwhelmed her within fifteen seconds.

I rolled off her body, now slumped facedown; she was unconscious. We had an hour or more before she came around—I’d loaded the dose for a grown man just in case. I sat there dazed, hardly taking anything in and only half-aware of Anna. Then I felt her arms reach around me and I started to shake with relief.

“Are you hurt? Are you hurt?” she cried.

“You’re a complete idiot,” I said, holding one of her hands in mine. “You could have been killed. What possessed you?”

“I heard what she was saying on the intercom. She was going to kill you. I heard the shot and I ran. I didn’t want to lose you.”

I turned around and kissed her, and then we stayed half-slumped on the floor, with Nora’s body next to us, until we’d settled down. Then I got up and fished the card out of my top pocket that bore Pagonis’s cellphone number. From this point onward, I was going to play by the rules.

We sat side by side on the sofa. Anna was in a tracksuit, a T-shirt, and white socks stained green by the lawn.

“She was
wulnerable
from the south,” I said, nodding at Nora’s inert body.

Anna gave a weak laugh and slapped my hand.

“When did you know?” I said.

“She went to see Margaret Greene. I think it had something to do with you. That’s what she said. But Nathan was there and he told her about seeing you with me. When she came back, she was in a terrible temper. I’d never seen her like that before. She told me I had to drop you. I’d regret it if I didn’t, she said.”

“I remember that,” I said, thinking of finding Anna in Le Pain Quotidien and how her manner had changed.

“She sent me out here, like I was in exile, and it gave me time to think. I wondered if I’d got Nora wrong—that thing about us being best friends. The more I thought, the more frightened I was. I realized her story didn’t make sense.”

Anna hadn’t been the only one to experience Nora’s other side. As I’d sat by the woods with Nathan, he’d recalled how she’d played on his jealousy of me. After I’d told her that I was deserting Harry, she’d called Nathan again.
He’s been with your girlfriend again and he’s going to get away with murder. I can’t stop him without your help
, she’d said to him. He’d been easy for her to manipulate—in despair about his father’s death and angry with me. He had never been stable, as Anna had said. Anna had confessed to Nora as well as her therapist about how he’d cycled between charm and cruelty, like his dead father.

Nora had sent Nathan to get rid of me, counting on him being so out of control that he’d tear me apart the way he’d slashed Rebecca’s dress. But Nathan was more emotional than his father and less polished. He lacked focus. He’d rushed after me again before he’d even known what he’d do if he caught up. Instead of coming for me with a knife or a gun, as she’d counted on, he’d used his hands. She hadn’t been able to correct Nathan’s mistakes the way she’d corrected Harry’s. So I’d survived.

I held Anna’s hand. “Poor you,” I said.

“Then you rescued me.”

“You rescued
me
.”

She put her head on my shoulder and we stayed like that for five minutes, next to Nora’s body. Then I heard sirens along the lane and watched the conservatory windows flashing blue and red.

P
agonis burst through the door first, with Hodge right behind her. She had her gun drawn in front of her, but when she saw us sitting together on the sofa and Nora immobilized on the floor, she placed it back in her holster.

The fact that no one was firing at her didn’t seem to make her any happier. She had a dark, glowering expression on her face as she looked at me. She walked over to Nora and bent down to check her pulse as if unable to credit the story I’d told her on the phone. Finally, she called in the uniforms behind her. They came into the room in force—the village police, a paramedic crew, and others I couldn’t place.

Pagonis approached us and spoke to me alone, treating Anna as if she weren’t beside me—as if she really had been a ghost.

“Bag his hands,” she said to Hodge.

“What?” I said indignantly.

“There’s been gunfire here and there’s a woman on the ground. I want to know who fired the weapon. I’m testing you for powder,” she said.

“Maybe you should have tested her for powder the first time round. You might have saved a lot of trouble,” I said, pointing at Nora.

I felt that one strike home. Despite all her bluster, she’d missed Greene’s killer at the start, not even submitting Nora to an examination when she’d arrived back on the murder scene later that night. It was understandable, given that the obvious suspect had already confessed, but it didn’t look very good. Hodge reached into a case and produced two plastic bags, which he ceremoniously placed over my hands and taped at the wrists. Anna silently held out her hands, too, but Hodge ignored her.

“She fired the gun at me. There’s probably a bullet in the woodwork over there,” I said. “You’re wasting your time.”

Pagonis sighed heavily, as if feeling the weight of every frustration and misdirection she’d faced during the investigation. I could see it dawning on her that the only charge she could bring against me was assaulting Greene’s killer. The paramedics had now turned Nora on her back and were checking her reflexes and her blood pressure.

“I subdued her with an intramuscular shot. Five milligrams of Haldol and two of Ativan. The syringe is over there,” I called across to them, pointing to the middle of the floor where I’d dropped it.

“Okay, let’s find somewhere to talk,” Pagonis said. She beckoned to us, acknowledging Anna for the first time. “Mike, you go with her to the hospital. Don’t let her go.”

She gestured at Nora, who was being lifted onto a gurney by the medics and was about to be wheeled away to an ambulance. Hodge gave me one last hostile look before following. Anna and I followed Pagonis out of the living room, looking faintly ridiculous—Anna in socks and me with plastic bags taped over my hands. I wasn’t worried, though. We weren’t the ones who would come out of this looking
stupid. As we left the room, it was filling up with white-overalled technicians preparing for another round of swabbing and sampling.

We walked into Nora’s study and sat near the window.

“So what the hell’s been going on?” Pagonis said.

“Shouldn’t you read me my rights?” I said.

“Forget it,” she said wearily. “You’re not under arrest. You’re not going to be under arrest. You’re just a witness. Okay?”

I should have refused to talk to her and called Joe, but I wasn’t too worried anymore and I felt a bit sorry for her. So I started to talk and explained the story as best I could, with Anna interjecting the odd supportive comment from beside me. Pagonis looked more and more unhappy as we talked.

It was a small thing that had made me first question Nora’s story: the image of her by the Range Rover in Green-Wood Cemetery. It was the vehicle in which Anna had driven me to New York, the one I’d seen in the Fox News helicopter shot in my gym that Sunday. Nora and Felix had both told me that Harry had disappeared from his apartment in New York that Saturday and driven to East Hampton from the Shapiros’ building. Once I’d stopped to consider, that made no sense. For years, Harry’s life had been one chauffeured Town Car and piloted Gulfstream after another. Even the old Harry wouldn’t have thought of driving himself there: it was out of the question for the man I’d known. Only Nora could have done it.