A Fatal Debt (20 page)

She paused as if she had imparted a self-evident truth.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

She laughed. It was a nice sound, high and throaty, as if she liked my bluntness. The pristine contours of her face relaxed, giving a glimpse of a different woman, one who wasn’t so constrained.

“I’ll try again,” she said. “I advise CEOs, tell them to sell companies or buy others, or restructure. Every time there’s a deal, we get a fee. It could be $5 million, could be $20 million. It’s a lot, anyway. The business is full of liars and egomaniacs. That’s what they do—
buy ice cream. Tell the CEO they love whatever he’s got. All deals are great.”

“But they’re not?”

“No, they’re not. A few are disasters and it’s our job to warn the CEO, to stop him from doing the wrong one. If you tell him not to do the deal, you won’t get paid your fee, but it’s the best advice you’ll ever give.”

So why didn’t someone tell Harry not to buy Greene’s bank?
I thought. It was the first time I’d thought of that. I hadn’t known how Wall Street worked until she’d told me. Harry had made the affair sound like a handshake between the two men.
Sure, Marcus, we’ll take a look
, he’d told Greene. But if there had been something wrong with Greene’s bank, why hadn’t anyone found it? On the most important deal of all—the one involving Seligman itself—Harry had been stranded.

The thought distracted me for a minute, and when I looked up, Lauren had a strange expression, as if something were welling up inside her. Her lips were pursed and she was staring at me.

“Psychiatrists mustn’t sleep with their patients, must they?” she said.

She looked at me inquiringly, as if it were an intriguing academic point rather than the most explosive issue in therapy. The relationship between a psych and a patient of the opposite sex involves the greatest intimacy there is short of a sexual one, albeit one-sided. The patient tells us things she wouldn’t confess to anyone else but a lover. That makes it dangerous. We were schooled in the pitfalls as well as the uses of transference, the risk of therapy slipping into illicit intimacy.

“That’s malpractice. It’s an abuse of the therapeutic relationship and it would harm the patient.”

“You’d lose your job?” She gazed directly at me, and I started to feel embarrassed, as if she were accusing me of misconduct.

“Any psychiatrist who did that would.”

“So your job’s like mine.”

She wasn’t talking about me, I realized—she meant herself. Her
gaze had gone from me and was back in the middle distance. Her expression didn’t change, but for the first time I sensed sadness in her, a lake of longing.

“I had an affair with Harry Shapiro,” she said flatly. “It was so …” She paused, as if searching for a big enough word, and frowned with frustration and regret. “Stupid,” she concluded.

“What happened?”

“Underwood did it, that’s the crazy thing. I worked with him and he couldn’t stand me showing him up. He was so keen to stop me making partner, to block me. He would shut me out of the credit on the deals I’d brought in, throw me off others. It happened so often, I decided I either had to leave, or go to Harry.

“I’d never really spoken to him, only in client meetings. I thought he was an animal, like people said. But he wasn’t like that. He listened to me, he sympathized. He sorted it out so that Underwood backed off. I hadn’t seen that side of him. I’d just separated, I was lonely.”

I waited. It wasn’t hard to contain my reaction since I’d known about her affair, but it was a relief. The tension I’d felt of waiting for her revelation to emerge had dissipated. We were back on the usual footing of a psych and his patient, with her holding the secrets rather than me. Yet I also felt a sense of foreboding. The door of confidentiality had slammed shut on the secret of Harry’s affair, like that of a jail or a closed ward.

“Like I said, it was stupid. You’re so vulnerable on Wall Street, all these men thinking you’re just a woman so you don’t deserve to have your job. If anyone had found out about us, that would’ve been it for my career—sleeping with my boss. I came to my senses one day and took another job. It was almost over by then.”

“Why did it end?”

She half smiled, as if mocking my innocence. “It was just an affair, nothing more. We were both consenting adults. He didn’t want to wreck his marriage and I had to move on. We shouldn’t have got carried away.”

“Are you still in touch with him?”

“We haven’t seen each other since I left.”

Her gaze was unblinking. If Anna hadn’t told me about her visiting East Hampton and seeing them together with her holding his head in her hands, I don’t think I’d have known that Lauren was lying. I didn’t envy the bankers who had to negotiate with her—she didn’t give anything away. Over her shoulder, my clock showed six p.m., and although I yearned to press her further, another patient was waiting.

“Our time’s up, I think,” I said.

At night, when I heard the sirens crossing the city and I’d turned from one side to the other in an effort to fall asleep, I thought about Anna. I’d called her several times since she’d walked away from me, leaving messages on her cellphone, but had gotten nothing in return.

I willed there to be an innocent explanation so we could return to the state in which we’d existed before, but I couldn’t convince myself. I thought of what Nora had told me the first time I’d seen them together, with her arm draped around Anna’s shoulders:
I can’t tell you how much I rely on her
.

When I’d met Anna, she’d seemed young and innocent, hardly a part of the Shapiros’ world. But she was Nora’s confidante and Harry’s protector. She’d said she didn’t like him, but she’d driven Lauren to him and kept their rendezvous secret from Nora. She’d served him no matter what she’d thought of him. Now that the Shapiros were under threat, I wondered how far Anna would go—or had gone—to shield them.

My name’s like me. One big muddle
, she’d told me. That was the image she projected of herself, just a yoga waif picked up by Nora who would soon be on her way. It was an affectation, I’d come to realize. Anna was the organized one. Nora had been scared to enter her own kitchen, but Anna made sure there was food in the fridge. She’d arranged for their East Hampton house to be redecorated to cover up the killing. She knew everything about their lives, was
privy to their secrets. I was Harry’s psych, but she knew what he’d hidden.

That Friday, I drove out of the city toward her with an object sitting on my dashboard. It was the glove she’d left behind when she’d abandoned me. I took the I-495 through Queens, past the ruined remnants of the World’s Fair, driving until the buildings by the road petered out into a line of trees. The only landmarks out there were the strange objects sticking out of the woods: two white water towers and a cellphone mast disguised as a gigantic tree. It hung above the green horizon, a white stick with dark metal branches spaced at unnaturally perfect intervals.

There was a truck outside the Shapiros’ house, and when I walked to the rear and looked through the conservatory windows, I saw two workmen standing on ladders, roller-brushing the ceiling with white paint. Anna was at the far end, dressed in overalls with her hair pinned up, pointing something out. I watched for a minute before she looked up and saw me. As she did, her face stiffened and she stared at me as if I were an enemy who was about to invade. She walked into the kitchen, and as I came around the side of the house, she opened the door and stood silently.

“You left this behind,” I said, holding out her glove.

She frowned at me. “If you’ve driven all this way, you can come in for a minute,” she said, taking it from me.

Inside, she poured me coffee from a French press and perched on a chair as I sipped it, which seemed as far as she was prepared to go by way of hospitality. The silence lengthened and she glanced around distractedly, as if my presence made her jumpy. When I’d first come to the Shapiros’ house, it had reminded me of a fairy-tale cottage, but now it felt like a sinister place, marked irrevocably by a murder that had sapped the energy of its occupants. Anna looked no better than Nora when I’d last visited—just as pale, with dull eyes.

“You know who attacked me, don’t you,” I said.

The question instantly enraged her, as if she were already on edge and it took only a small provocation to send her over the edge.

“How would I know? I told you to leave me alone,” she shouted.

She threw her glove at my feet and walked into the living room, slamming the door closed. As I followed, the door handle struck my knuckles, making me shake my hand and cry out—an appeal for mercy that she ignored. As I emerged into the living room, the workmen had looked up at the commotion.

It was already hard to remember what the room had been like before. The sofas and furniture had gone the way of the geometric rug. Even the doors to the conservatory had been removed and replacements fitted. The men had painted the walls in a delicate pale blue, erasing the previous colors. Anna wasn’t there and one of the men shrugged at me, as if to indicate that he knew all about furious women. He pointed silently to a door on the far side of the room. I walked along the hallway and saw that the door to Nora’s study was open. Anna was by the window overlooking the drive to the bay side, with her back to me.

“Remember in the car, when you drove me to the city, that first day?” I said. “You told me you were too honest for your own good. You said you’d always got into trouble for trying to tell the truth. What happened to that?”

She didn’t speak, so I carried on talking. I felt my anger and bewilderment at how she’d behaved toward me bubbling up, and my voice starting to crack. “You’re so honest, are you? It doesn’t seem like that to me. You just want to keep Harry’s secrets.”

I was shouting now, but her back was still facing me. I walked across and pulled at her shoulder, but she shrugged my hand off as if she couldn’t bear my touch.

“Yeah, you know what?” she said. “I do my job, and my job means I know stuff about people who employ me, even if sometimes it’s not nice. Why don’t you do
your
job? Why pick on me?”

She paced across the room toward Nora’s desk, and her words were spoken standing by it. As I looked at her, I was distracted from her face by the sight of a metal plate embedded into the wall by her left shoulder. It was Nora’s safe, where she’d told me she had placed Harry’s gun for safety. I stared until Anna glanced behind her.

“You know how to open it,” I said. “Don’t you?”

She stared at me contemptuously for a few seconds, then swiveled and put her hand up to the dial. She spun the wheel to the left and right four times, then placed her hand on the brass lever and pulled open the door. Inside were some jewelry boxes and a stack of papers. On top of them, I saw the glint of the nickel Beretta: Nora had told the truth.

“Satisfied? Happy now?” she said bitterly, then shut the safe door and walked out. When I got back to the living room, she was standing in the middle of the floor, beckoning to me. Her face was stiff and hostile.

“Come here,” she said, and I walked slowly, one pace at a time, across the wooden boards toward her. “A little further.… Stop there.”

I was close to her, and the man who’d given me directions was standing on a ladder a few feet to my left, painting a cornice silently, as if willing himself to be invisible. Anna ignored him as she spoke.

“That’s where the body was,” she said. “They had to sand Marcus’s blood off the boards. It took a long time.”

I remembered Pagonis handing me the photograph of Greene’s body and seeing it lying in a pool of blood. I felt as if I was treading on sacred ground and I took a step backward as Anna walked off again. She strode through the half-painted doors of the conservatory and onto the lawn, halting by the edge of the pool. She was white and shivering, her arms wrapped under her breasts as if holding herself together. I stepped toward her, but she swayed back, keeping her distance. The sea breeze pushed aside the last of the thin clouds, and sunshine spread across the grass. The light changed so fast that if you blinked, everything changed.

“I realized something,” she said.

She walked to the stairs leading down the dune, as Harry had done, and I saw her step down, her head sinking from view. I hurried after her, getting close enough to throw a final question.

“What was it? Tell me.”

“Look around. Work it out for yourself,” she said.

She ran down the steps to the beach, where waves cascaded into foam and were sucked back into the ocean, becoming nothing again. I struggled along behind her for a few yards, my feet sinking into the sand, but she easily outpaced me. Halting, I watched her walk furiously, head down, away to the west.

I
wore a dark tie and my wedding suit—pale gray with a waistcoat—to testify to the Suffolk County grand jury. It hadn’t been my wedding: it had been my brother’s two years earlier. The suit had already outlasted the marriage. Maybe it was all of the traveling that Guy did for his job or there’d been something he hadn’t confessed to us, but Marianne had steadily become more absent from our family get-togethers until finally he’d admitted that we wouldn’t see her anymore. They hadn’t had children, so it had been a simple divorce.

I’d enjoyed the wedding. Rebecca had helped me choose the suit at Bloomingdale’s and had flown with me to London. They’d held the ceremony in a tiny, ancient church in the City of London with a Henry Moore sculpture—a huge block of white stone—in the middle, and the choir had sung in Latin, I remembered. My father had behaved
himself and, remarkably, so had Jane. Rebecca and I had spent the Sunday walking round the West End and in Hyde Park. I remembered lying on the grass by the Serpentine with her, feeling as if I had no cares in the world.

This wasn’t such a nice occasion, and the surroundings were a lot gloomier. I sat in a witness box in a drab windowless room in the Riverhead court building, with a grand jury spread out in front of me. Few of its members had made much of an effort to dress up. The men were in casual pants and sweatshirts except for two middle-aged guys in jackets, and the women weren’t much smarter. They didn’t seem to be taking the matter as seriously as I was—they had less at stake. Most of them seemed bored, and a man at the back was already yawning, although it was only ten thirty a.m. You’d have thought that the Shapiro case would have been more exciting than routine indictments, but it didn’t appear to be.