A Fatal Debt (34 page)

The Range Rover had meant nothing to Pagonis. The Shapiros inhabited a world with so many houses, so many cars, even a jet, that they wouldn’t have wondered at the use of one vehicle. But to anyone who knew Nora, it jarred. She hadn’t been infantilized by wealth like Harry: she knew her way around the world.

“Oh, shit,” Pagonis said finally. “I don’t know how we’re going to clean this up. You’ll have to provide a statement. Doctor, I don’t understand you. One minute you won’t tell us anything about Shapiro, the next you’re tackling his wife.”

“She wasn’t my patient,” I said.

After living through Joe’s diminishing faith in my prospects of survival, I enjoyed seeing his face when I told him what I’d been doing the previous day. I’d got back from Yaphank with Anna at two a.m. after Pagonis had let us go.

“You’re kidding me, right?” he said.

“It’s all true.”

We were sitting in his office on a sunny Manhattan morning, light reflecting off the skyscrapers through his broad windows. He was at his desk, checking a couple of law books and looking up cases on his computer screen. He seemed less disheveled than I’d seen him before, with his shirt buttoned up and his hair brushed neatly. Perhaps it was later in the day, when the vagaries of law and oddities of his clients had agitated him too much, that his body burst out of its confines. His smile broadened steadily as he looked at the screen, and when he turned to me to summarize, it was a full-blown grin.

“It’s over,” he said. “Finito, kaput.”

Coming from a professional pessimist, that was surprisingly categorical. I’d worked out that Harry not having killed Greene had to be good for me, but I wasn’t sure if my responsibility transferred wholesale to Nora. It turned out, however, that my retort to Pagonis about Nora was the crucial legal point.

“There’s no wrongful death here, not for Episcopal, anyway, and no misconduct. You weren’t treating Mrs. Shapiro and you didn’t discharge her, so you’re not responsible for what she did. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

“Pagonis said they’d want to interview me again.”

Joe dismissed that with a wave of the hand. “Sure, they might want to find out what happened. You seem to know a lot more about it than they do. But there’s no civil case and the grand jury testimony’s irrelevant. Baer will have to put that in the trash. You made a judgment that Shapiro was safe to be discharged, and guess what? You were right. You could have flown around the world in their Gulfstream and it wouldn’t matter. The wrongful death is on Mrs. Shapiro, and they can wrestle it out with Mrs. Greene.”

I gave Joe the treat of calling my father with the news, since he
deserved it for what I’d put him through. While he did that, chuckling happily over legal points that appeared to amuse them both, I sat with my coffee and the buzz of Anna’s desire for me and gazed at the thicket of the Manhattan skyline, the view granted only to the city’s leviathans and power brokers. From this vantage point, it was tempting to believe you could do anything—that an underling would spring out to fulfill any wish. That had been Harry’s life until it had been taken from him, and he had never adjusted to losing it. He’d needed Nora to do everything.

Joe showed me to the elevator in an expansive mood, putting his hand up to my shoulder as we waited for its arrival.

“Take care of your father. I’ll see you soon.”

“I’ll tell you the whole story one day.”

He had a gleam in his eye as he held back the elevator door for me. “Ben, as your attorney, I don’t want to know.”

“Can I show you something?” Lauren asked.

We were in the parlor floor of her house and she led me to a table in the corner, on which stood a maroon instrument case. She snapped open the latches with her long fingers and lifted out a violin. I could tell that it was valuable even though I knew little about them. It had a faded golden patina, and the pattern on the back as she swiveled it over was striped like a tiger’s fur. Near the edge, where the chin rest was clipped to the body, the polish was worn away.

“It’s lovely,” I said.

“Isn’t it? It’s a Guadagnini, made in 1773. I never thought I’d ever own a violin like this—I bought it at Sotheby’s in London two years ago. It cost me £340,000.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“It is. I learned the violin when I was young, but I was never quite good enough to play professionally. I became a banker, and you know what? It meant no one had to lend me this. I could buy it for myself. That’s what money means to me—this violin, and this house. My husband said the money would do better in Treasuries.”

She laughed and stroked the instrument. Lauren seemed to have made the opposite transition in personality to Nora. Her sharpness and wariness had eased, replaced by someone I could imagine having a nap in Gabriel’s chair—or even being a friend in another life. When I’d called, she’d invited me to visit her as if our last encounter were forgotten. She made coffee and we sat under the crab apple tree in her yard.

“I wasn’t sure about you for a while,” I said. “You lied to me about not having seen Harry. You’d been to Riverhead. That stamp was on your hand.”

I prodded a finger on the back of my left hand to indicate the circular mark that had been on hers, and she shook her head ruefully.

“I wasn’t thinking straight that afternoon.”

“You threatened me, Lauren,” I said gently.

“I’m sorry. It wasn’t meant as a threat. Things were falling apart and I didn’t know what you’d do. I’d just found out from Harry about what Nathan Greene had done to you. You’d broken the rules by coming to my house. You frightened me.”

Reaching out of the frame of therapy had been more effective than I’d known at the time. That was what Henderson had said as he’d heard my story in Washington:
If you’ll forgive the description, you’re a loose cannon
.

“I wouldn’t have betrayed your confidence,” I said. “I knew you’d come for treatment to shield yourself but I did take an oath. I’d have honored it.”

“You got pretty badly treated, didn’t you?” Lauren said, looking at me sympathetically. “Underwood’s such a reptile.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. I thought I’d known everything, but there was one more layer of deception.

“You didn’t know?” she said. “He blabbed to the detectives about you flying on Harry’s jet. I saw Peter Freeman the other day. He’s a decent guy. He told me he’d been on that trip. He said Underwood had laughed about it. He thought you deserved it, Peter said.”

Felix had been annoyed when Underwood had pushed his way onto our flight, but I was the one who’d ended up suffering. I thought
of the nasty smirk on Underwood’s face as he had given me his tour of Seligman Brothers.

“God,” I said. “That man really is a jerk.”

“He’d sell his mother for a bonus,” she said. “He was the one who told Greene about me. I’d found the whole thing—the Elements, Rosenthal, everything. I was about to tell Harry when Greene trapped me. It wasn’t just that he blackmailed me; it was the way he did it, the pleasure he took in humiliating me.” She shuddered briefly. “You think Underwood’s a jerk? He’s got nothing on Greene.”

“And Mr. Shapiro?”

“I did love Harry. I told you it was nothing, but I lied. That’s over now, though. I went to see him in East Hampton. Anna drove me. I felt so terrible about it—the way I’d let him down to save my skin. He said it wasn’t my fault.”

Her voice trailed away and she looked across her yard to where a patch of sunlight had settled on a weathered brick wall.

“When I saw you, he’d let me visit him in Riverhead at last. All he could talk about was her, how great she was. I knew I’d lost him, but I hadn’t realized why until then. That’s the irony. I wanted them to separate and now they’ll be apart for life. Too late, though.”

It was a cold-blooded thing to say, but I was beyond shock. Nora had killed Greene to get Harry back. Lauren wasn’t violent, but she was ruthless in her way. Whatever Harry’s flaws, he had the knack of being wanted. I sipped my coffee and looked up into the branches of the tree. There was a red cardinal hidden in the leaves. Nature was so weirdly bright and exotic in New York when it poked through the concrete and skyscrapers.

After we’d finished, she opened her front door to let me out onto the street. I left her alone on her stoop, clearing the scattered flyers.

Sarah Duncan had survival instincts that I’d come to appreciate: she didn’t look back. The past was another country to her, one that she had no intention of visiting given its dangerous reputation.

By the time I sauntered into her office the following day, still enjoying
the sensations of love and professional salvation, the news had reached her that the hospital’s legal liability in the Shapiro case had been lifted and a member of her board was being interrogated in Yaphank for murder. It hadn’t yet made the evening news, so there was a curious lull for those who knew about Nora before bedlam struck again, and Duncan didn’t hang around. Seconds after my arrival, a summons came.

“This is shocking news,” she said after I’d been speeded into her sanctum in a record-breaking five minutes. “I’d come to regard Nora as a friend.”

She didn’t look in the least perturbed, and her slightly more distant way of phrasing their relationship felt as if it would be the first in a series of downgrades. This time, she’d come to sit by me on the sofa and had rustled up a bottle of sparkling water. Lots of people seemed to have regained their respect for me suddenly.

“Tell me about you,” she said. “How do you feel? It must be a relief.”

“Do you still want my resignation?”

“Resignation?” she said, frowning. “I don’t know why you’d resign, Dr. Cowper. You are a valued member of our team. We have great hopes for you.”

With that, as far as Episcopal was concerned, the affair was filed and forgotten. Within months, she’d found a way to remove Nora’s and Harry’s names from the pavilion and from the plaque above the FDR Drive. A hedge fund manager who’d made billions by shorting mortgage-backed securities came forward and the Shapiros disappeared into the recesses of the hospital’s history.

I saw Harry once after that, when they’d indicted Nora and had let him out of the Riverhead jail. There was talk of charging him as an accomplice, but Baer needed Nora to testify against him. She wouldn’t do it voluntarily, and as Harry’s wife, she couldn’t be compelled.

It was August by then, in the full gridlock of a Long Island summer, with cars jamming the Long Island Expressway and crawling
down Route 27. East Hampton was one long line of vacationers, and I felt a proprietary sense of resentment at having to squeeze past a pickup truck with surfboards in the back that had halted by the village pond.
I’ve come to visit a resident
, I thought.
Why are you here?
Not just any resident, it turned out. The Shapiros’ house had become a draw on the tourist circuit, and when I reached the end of the lane, there was a security guard checking credentials. The sign saying private road was bigger than before. He waved me past and I drove slowly down the lane, trying to spot the bump that Nora’s Range Rover had hit that night, catching my face in its headlights.

A middle-aged man wearing a white jacket like a chef’s opened the door to my knock. He regarded me sternly, as if I were being over-familiar by coming to the kitchen rather than the main entrance, which I’d never used. Once I’d announced my business, he softened a little and led me through to Harry’s study, where the ex-jailbird sat with a book. Harry rose and clasped my hand, taking off his glasses and resting them on the desk.

“Come on, let’s take a walk,” he said.

We strolled through the conservatory, which had been redecorated yet again, and crossed the lawn to the dunes. Harry was still thinner than when I’d first met him, and there was some hesitation in his stride. He took the steps gingerly, as if they might give way.

“You’ve got new staff,” I said conversationally.

“Thomas is here now. He runs the place. That girl had to go after what she did. Oh yes, she’s … Nora told me,” he said.

He grinned as if, whatever he thought of Anna, he could appreciate man-to-man my having fallen for her. It was the first time he’d ever shown any interest in my life, and I found it endearing.

“How are you feeling?” I said as we reached the beach and walked by the sea.

“I’m okay. It’s Nora I worry about.”

I stopped walking at the mention of his wife’s name. We were about two hundred yards along the sand to the west—the same route taken by Nora on the night of the killing, and by Anna, too. Far in the distance, I saw a lone figure walking down the beach. The wind
was blowing off the sea and Harry shielded his eyes as he looked at me.

“I won’t apologize for what I did, Mr. Shapiro, because I’d be lying. But I am sorry you’re apart from your wife.”

“You had a right to defend yourself,” he said sadly.

We walked on for two minutes in silence before Harry spoke again.

“You know about Lauren, don’t you? She came to see me in Riverhead, and I told her we couldn’t see each other again. I don’t blame her for running away, but Nora stuck with me. My wife’s an amazing woman, isn’t she?”