A Fatal Debt (9 page)

“A guy Emma knows invited us to his apartment in TriBeCa. His parties are great, they say. He works on Wall Street,” he said.

“I don’t know, Steve. I don’t think I want to spend my Saturday night with a bunch of bankers.”

After my week with Harry and his entourage, it didn’t feel like relaxation to be plunged back into his world.

“Right. You’ve got so many other choices, don’t you? That’s why you’re calling me at six o’clock. Come on, it’ll be fun.”

When the sun had set and the lights had gone on in Union Square, casting a glow over the rooftops, I went into the bathroom. I opened a medicine cabinet above a jar of seashells that Rebecca had collected on a vacation we’d had in Cape Cod. I poked among the lotions and deodorants, behind the Ambien that she’d sometimes taken to help her sleep. I found a bottle full of orange ovals—30-milligram tablets of Adderall. Doctors shouldn’t self-medicate, especially not with amphetamines meant to treat attention deficit disorder, but Steve did and sometimes I did, too. At that moment, I craved anything that would blank out the thoughts in my head.

By the time I’d hailed a taxi downtown, my skin was prickling and a sheen of sweat had broken out on the backs of my hands as the amphetamine salts filtered into my blood, tampering with the norepinephrine and dopamine inside my brain. My mouth was dry and I felt the worry of the past few days drop away, leaving a light-headed fascination with the colors and shapes around me. All of the emotional clamor, the buzz of discomfort, grew muted. The discordant groans of the taxi’s air conditioner congealed into a pleasing harmony. I lowered the window as we shot along Broadway and the lights streamed behind us like a vapor trail in blue sky.

I pushed fruitlessly at the buzzer on the metal door to the building for five minutes before a couple rolled down the stairway on their way out and admitted me. It was obvious why I’d been ignored when I reached the tenth floor of the building and heard the roar of voices from inside the apartment. It was a vast multifloored loft with white-painted iron columns and a crush of guests shouting over hypnotic
music being mixed on an Apple laptop by a DJ. Urban wealth was on display everywhere, from the canvases of rusting bridges and desolate landscapes on the walls to the black-uniformed waiters pouring Krug champagne into flutes. I walked out through the doors onto a terrace with a glittering view of nearby towers and, in the distance, City Hall. Steve was standing in a knot of people, and I walked up to him.

“So you made it. Ben, this is Lucia,” he said.

The young woman by him smiled. She was pretty—dark cropped hair, mascara, and gleaming eyes. She wore a silk dress, and the amphetamines made the straps over her shoulders appear to sparkle in the light.

“Great to meet you,” I said, feeling her soft hand in mine.

“Isn’t this apartment awesome?”

“Amazing.”

“It’s Gabriel’s. He’s over there with Josh.”

She pointed to a corner of the balcony where two men were talking. The man she indicated had a ruddy face, a flat jaw, and alert eyes. He seemed amused by the whole event, as if he were a guest rather than the host.

“I’m going to find a drink. Can I get you one?” I said.

Later on, back at her apartment in the East Village, after she’d gone to sleep, I stood at her bedroom window overlooking a dark alley and stared at the brick wall opposite. It was two a.m. and the Adderall was wearing off, making me shaky and paranoid. I remembered my walk on the beach, Harry telling me how he’d lost everything in the crash, and shivered, my faith in him evaporating along with the drugs. He’d told me he wouldn’t harm himself.
Why should I trust him?
I thought.

Hot water cascaded over my head and down my body on that Sunday morning as I stood in the shower at the gym, trying to absorb the news. I’d just watched it on television, the thing I’d feared. I’d left Harry in what I’d believed was a stable condition, and he had taken his own life. If I’d stuck with my instincts—the treatment in which I’d
believed—instead of giving way to Duncan, I could have saved him. I thought of Nora and the distress she must now be in. After all she’d been through to save him, Harry had abandoned her. How could I face her again?

After a few minutes, I turned off the faucet and stepped out of the shower to dress. The treadmill runners were still panting on their machines as I’d been half an hour before, oblivious to the outside world. Walking out of the gym, I saw the same spring scene—the chess players on the sidewalk, a couple walking a dog, an old lady talking to a doorman—but my pleasure in it had gone.

Back home, I lay on my bed for a minute, thinking about Harry’s death and what it meant for me. I couldn’t talk to Rebecca; I didn’t want to worry my father in his convalescence; I couldn’t face calling Episcopal. Reminding myself that I advised patients not to wallow in their misery, I got up and paced my living room for a while. Then I decided that I had to find out exactly what had happened.
Felix
, I thought.
He’d know
. I looked through my jacket for my phone and scrolled through the Calls Received list to the previous week. There was the cellphone number from which he’d called me to fix the return trip on Harry’s jet. Pushing the key to redial, I waited.

“Lustgarten,” a voice said smoothly and evenly after two rings.

Had it been anyone else, and I hadn’t heard the sound of raised voices in the background, I would have thought it was the tone of someone having a relaxed Sunday afternoon. By his standards, however, he sounded edgy.

“Felix, this is Ben Cowper.”

“Ah, Dr. Cowper. How are you?”

“Fine, thanks. I’m sorry to disturb you. It sounds as if you’re busy.”

“Just a little, yes. Could you hold on a minute? I’ll be right with you.”

“Sure,” I said.

He put his hand over the phone, but I could hear his muffled voice call across a room.

“Andrew! … Andrew! Tell him he’ll have to wait. We’ll have a
statement in ten minutes.… No, I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s God Almighty.”

There was a rustle as Felix removed his hand and spoke to me.

“Sorry about that. The roof’s fallen in, as you might expect.”

“Are the papers calling?” I asked densely.

“A few. That happens when the chief executive of a Wall Street bank dies violently. The vultures circle.”

If I’d been thinking in that moment, if my brain hadn’t been frozen with shock, I would have caught it.
Chief executive
, he’d said, not
former chief executive
. But I pressed on with my questions blindly, and it took another few seconds for Felix to deliver the news unambiguously.

“How’s Mrs. Shapiro coping?”

“Nora’s in quite a state, very traumatized. She’s with the police now. She thinks she can get Harry out on bail. Best of luck, I say.”

“Get him out? From where?”

“Out of jail, I mean. Where else?”

“But he’s dead, isn’t he? I saw it on the news.”

Felix made a strained gurgling sound, half mirth and half horror, at my words. Then he told me. The peculiar thing is that when I first heard the words, my first, instinctive reaction was relief. It turned out I hadn’t let my patient commit suicide after all.
I’m not going to kill myself
, he’d promised me on the beach in East Hampton, and he’d told the truth—just not the whole truth.

“Harry?”
said Felix. “No, Harry’s absolutely fine, apart from being under arrest for murder. It’s Marcus Greene who’s dead. Harry shot him last night.”

T
he Riverhead Correctional Facility loomed from the mist in the cold morning. I saw a couple of trailers set back in the woods off the Long Island Expressway and the eyes of a startled deer, then I was pulling up to the security gate. It was a gloomy place, six or so floors high with a few narrow slits in the walls to let in light. The walls were covered with rolls of shining razor wire, one piled on another, and patterns were molded on its façade in a halfhearted effort to make it less drab.
Don’t get yourself locked in here
, the building said. The blue-uniformed guard glanced at my license and waved me on.

Inside, a thin, dull-eyed correction officer told me to take off my belt and jacket and put them in one of the lockers. I sat on one of the bucket chairs fixed to the floor in the waiting area with a knot of visitors—mostly women and children who looked as if they knew this
ritual well. On the hour, a shift of visitors drifted out, a couple joking idly with the officers.

The entrance to the visiting room was a cage with red barred doors on two sides. Visitors had to walk into it and have the door locked behind them before the guards released the other. They weren’t taking chances. Before I entered the cage, an officer stamped the back of my hand with a small green circle.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Ultraviolet,” he said, shining a flashlight on it to light it up. “We don’t want the wrong guy leaving.”

The visiting room was large and dimly lit, with long trestle tables running its length. Each table had a Perspex screen in the middle, perforated with holes to let through the sound of voices. Prisoners in yellow jumpsuits with
VISITING
written in black on the back sat on the stools on one side, awaiting their visitors. As wives and girlfriends approached, they stood up to hug or kiss them briefly before sitting again. I didn’t see Harry at first, but then I spotted him in the far corner, away from the others, sitting on a stool by himself and looking toward me with a placid expression on his face. A bulky officer stood by him, like his personal bodyguard, as I walked over to greet him. He stayed seated, as he’d done on his lawn two weeks previously, but thrust up one hand over the Perspex to shake mine.

“Hello, Doctor. Sorry about this,” he said, pointing across at the other inmates. “Not much privacy here.”

“It’s all right, Mr. Shapiro. How are you?”

“You know. Keeping busy.”

I looked at him through the screen. It was only the fourth time I’d seen him, but it felt as if our relationship had lasted months. I’d have said that we’d become intimate except that he’d so obviously deceived me. We were also back together in an institution, this time with him in a yellow uniform instead of blue. Since his arrest ten days before, he seemed to have changed in a way I hadn’t expected. I’d imagined that he would be feeling desperate and unhappy, but the tightness in his jaw had gone, his eyes were alert, and his skin was ruddy. Despite having been detained for murder, he looked better.

I’d put in my request to see him as soon as he’d been arraigned. An all-star legal team and an offer of $20 million bail had not been enough to win him release. The correctional facility was to the rear of the Suffolk County Court, where serious crimes on Long Island were tried. It was an enormous holding pen for those in criminal purgatory, awaiting trial or a jury’s verdict. To my surprise, the request had been promptly approved and I had been given a time the following week. Harry wanted to see me.

Perhaps he craves a familiar face
, I’d thought on the drive. A media frenzy had erupted since the killing, and every paper and cable show was full of speculation and opinions about Harry’s fate. The fact that a Wall Street baron had been arrested for murder rather than a white-collar crime had provided the public spectacle that people craved as revenge on all bankers. I’d informed the jail that Harry was my patient and he seemed to have played along with that, but I didn’t believe it was true any longer. I knew that he’d see a jail psych to get his meds—he had no need for me.

Yet I felt we were now kindred spirits: he was locked up and I was in limbo. The explosion of Greene’s death had been succeeded by an eerie calm. When I’d arrived on Monday at Episcopal, having watched people around me on the 6 train reading about Harry on the front page of the
Post
, it felt like a forbidden topic. The others were surely talking about it behind my back, but no one dared mention it to my face. The most honest was Maisie, who hailed me with a sympathetic look and a “How are you doing?” that sounded genuine.

Jim Whitehead had finally made clear what everyone else was thinking when, unable to take it any longer, I walked into his office after lunch.

“Ben. How are you?” he said.

When Dr. Formality used my first name, it had to be bad.

“I’ve been better,” I said.

“Has Mrs. Duncan spoken to you yet?”

It was evident from the way he said it that they’d discussed the case. She’d be the one to let me know the hospital’s verdict.

“No one’s said anything.”

“Well,” he said, standing to head off the possibility of a long conversation, “I believe she’ll be in touch.”

With that, the Episcopal omertà had resumed and I’d reached Friday without anyone uttering a word. Even Steve, when I’d called him, had no parties to offer for the weekend. I was left to myself, thinking over the previous week and seeking the clues that I’d missed. If Harry had planned to kill Greene all along, he’d done a good job of hiding it, or I was incompetent. I preferred a third possibility, although it didn’t reflect well on me either—that he hadn’t known what was on his mind until he’d confronted his victim. That wasn’t much better, but at least it wouldn’t make me feel such a fool.

“You look well. How are the conditions?” I said.

Harry chuckled at the question as if he were holed up in summer camp rather than a jail. “It’s not like being in my own bed, but I’ve made the best of it. The other guys on the tier treat me okay. I’m spending time in the gym.”

This was a change from the Harry of York East. That bed hadn’t been good enough for him although it was the best we offered, yet a jail mattress was fine.

“I wanted to see how you were, after all that’s happened.”

“I’m good. No need to worry about me.”

I was finding the conversation unreal. Not only were we glossing over the fact that Harry had just killed someone, but his mood had changed entirely. An enormous weight seemed to have been lifted from him. He’d been shattered by losing his job, but the likelihood of spending the rest of his life in jail didn’t appear to bother him. I glanced at the officer, but he was looking at the gray sky through the room’s high window and didn’t seem to be listening. All the same, I leaned forward and spoke quietly, my breath misting a patch around the Perspex holes.