A Fatal Debt (14 page)

“I have a question,” I said. “What difference does it make that Episcopal’s president told me I should release Mr. Shapiro?”

I had the small satisfaction of knocking Joe off his guard with that. He removed his feet from where they had been resting on his desk during his peroration and sat upright in his chair.

“Did he?” he said.

“She. Yes, she did. He wanted to be discharged and she emphasized that the Shapiros were big donors to the hospital. She said to use my judgment, but to make sure that I made the right decision.”

“Make sure you made the right decision,” he repeated skeptically, and I realized how hollow it sounded out of context.

“She said ‘but,’ ” I said, feeling stupid. “ ‘But make the right decision.’ It was clear what she meant. She’d called me to her office to make sure I obeyed.”

“Uh-huh,” Joe said slowly, rubbing his chin. “I don’t know. That’s difficult. It might help as mitigation in a misconduct case, but you’d have to prove it, and how likely is it that she’ll admit that under oath?”

“She says she can’t remember it.”

He laughed wryly. “I’ll bet she can’t. Amnesia is a common legal condition. The question is, how much do we want to upset her? We need the hospital to back you up.”

“Isn’t all this privileged anyway? Can’t I just keep quiet?”

“Afraid not. As soon as they present a mental state defense, confidentiality gets waived. Everyone gets to see the hospital records and the notes on the case. If you’re called to give evidence, you’ve got to talk. I’ll have to try to make sure that doesn’t happen. That’s why it’s important you don’t tell them anything. If they don’t know what you’re going to say on the stand, they won’t call you. Anything else you ought to tell me?”

He looked at me as if he knew there probably was. I thought of Anna again, but I didn’t feel brave enough to confess. There was something too personal, too juvenile, about it—falling for a girl in the middle of this debacle. It was embarrassing.

“That’s it so far,” I said.

As Joe walked me out to the elevator, he cleared up the mystery of
just what he and my father had done with their nights in Vegas. It was nothing more incriminating than one evening at the craps tables and two nights in a VIP suite drinking bourbon, or at least that’s what he said. The memory seemed to lift his mood.

“Don’t worry. We’ll think of something,” he said, shaking my hand and slapping me on the shoulder before the doors closed. On the ride down, I reflected that people kept on telling me not to worry. That was what worried me.

As I lingered across the street from the Shapiros’ building, I saw Anna emerging along the glass-walled corridor and pausing at the front desk to exchange a couple of words with the uniformed guys—they seemed to stand straighter in her presence, to become more animated. Then she headed into the courtyard, wearing a dark green coat with velvet-trimmed lapels, and I stepped forward to greet her.

“What’s up, Doc?” she said, reaching me. There was a pause as we both considered an embrace and mutually decided against it. Shaking hands was out of the question after the way she’d treated that as a joke when she’d dropped me off by my apartment, so we settled for nothing instead.

“Too much for my liking,” I said.

“At least the paparazzi have gone. There were TV trucks here until last week. Luckily, they never worked out who I was. The neighbors are pissed—it’s been frosty in the elevator.”

“But you’re all right?”

“I’m okay.”

She raised both eyebrows and thrust out her chin defiantly, but she looked sadder than before, her bohemian spirit dampened.

“We could try Indian at Whole Foods,” she said. “I’m a very cheap date.”

We walked down Sixty-first Street and across the knot of traffic by Columbus Circle. I enjoyed the bobbing sensation of her blond head next to my shoulder as she walked, sometimes skipping around obstacles
and hopping over the rivulets when we crossed the road. It had rained earlier, the usual brisk drenching, and the drains had overflowed. Passing under the Time Warner Center’s jagged towers, we took the escalator that headed down into the crowded Whole Foods, where midtown office workers turned into Upper West Side apartment dwellers, with a last bout of sharp-elbowed aggression at the border.

Anna had found a seat in the café area under the escalator by the time I had fought my way through the lines. As she’d promised, she had chosen inexpensively: a small bowl of vegetables and rice, with dal and pickles. She picked up her fork and pushed rice and vegetables on it to eat, which gave me a chance to look at her. Her hair was gathered at the back, held there by a tortoiseshell clip, and her eyes were downcast. The second she stopped expressing her feelings, she became impossible to fathom.

“Thanks for this,” I said.

“My pleasure,” she said, and took a sip of water. “I don’t get asked out much these days, what with working for a notorious killer.”

Had I asked her out? I didn’t really know. It had given me the same pleasure when she’d accepted my invitation as if I had, but beneath it was a feeling of anxiety. I wanted to know from her how the disaster had occurred. Nora and Felix had left several questions unanswered, such as where Anna had been while Harry had been killing Greene and what Nora had been thinking about when she’d talked of “who” had supplied the gun. I wished it could simply have been a date, but I had another agenda.

“You never told me your second name.”

“Amundsen, like the explorer. My father’s family was from Finland; they made it to Minnesota in the twenties. My great-grandfather was a railway engineer.”

“Anna
AmUndSen
,” I said, trying it out. “Quite a tongue twister.”

“My name’s like me. One big muddle.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Sweet of you, but it’s true.”

“This affair must be a terrible shock.”

“Duh, yeah. I’ll say so.”

“When did you find out?”

I felt awkward as I turned the conversation from pleasantries to what I hoped to discover from her. Having experienced her sensitivity, I expected her to look up and call me a hypocrite or worse, but instead she treated my question seriously. She frowned painfully as she thought back, which only made me feel worse.

“They left for the city on the Friday after you’d been there. Nora drove them. I didn’t want to be alone all weekend, so I went over to Montauk to see a friend.”

“I see,” I said, unable to stop myself from wondering who her friend was and then unable to hold back a blush. I’ve mastered the poker face for therapy, but I’ve never managed it in life.

Anna smiled. “A
girl
friend, Doctor. Quite innocent. I was there all Saturday. She’s a waitress so she was out for the evening and I was watching television—not a very exciting weekend—when Nora called. It was about ten thirty. She was calm, but I could hear police radios crackling in the background. Nora told me what he’d done. By the time I got there, it was chaos. The place was lit up. I had to force the cops at the end of the lane to let me through.”

“Mr. Shapiro had been taken away?”

“Leaving a mess behind him. They wouldn’t let me in the house. It was full of people in white suits, like there’d been an alien invasion. They’d taken Nora down to the guesthouse.”

“How has she been?”

Anna looked at me warily, as if weighing me.

“You’re a big one for boundaries, aren’t you?” She put on a stiff British accent. “ ‘We mustn’t mix business and pleasure, my dear.’ So which one is this? I probably shouldn’t be talking to you at all.”

“Why do you think that?” I said neutrally.

“Don’t give me your therapy bullshit. Answer the question,” she said, her cheeks reddening.

I gazed at her as blankly as I could, wanting to avoid the accurate answer, which was a mixture of the two, the very thing I’d warned her against. She was the only one who could tell me the Shapiros’
secrets, perhaps help to salvage my career. Yet in that moment, all I wanted was to reach across and touch her.

“Pleasure,” I lied.

“Then let’s get out of here,” she said.

We were walking together in Central Park, the trees around silhouetted against the dusk, when Anna answered my question.

“Nora’s all right. She’s a lot calmer than I would be, if my husband had just blown my life apart. Sometimes she seems very still and controlled, like she’s holding her feelings in check. I hear her crying in her room sometimes.”

“You don’t sympathize with Mr. Shapiro?”

“He can rot in jail for all I care.”

Her voice had a hard edge, and when I looked across at her, her hand nearest me was clenched in a fist.

“That’s pretty harsh.”

“Is it? Men are assholes. Everything had to revolve around him, the great financier. He’s never cared about anyone except himself.”

We walked for a while, past boulders massed into artificial mounds and a tourist horse and buggy jingling around the park. I agreed with her about Harry—he was a narcissist—but I bridled at how she’d phrased it, bundling all men into the same category. I was devising a retort when she spoke again.

“He’d already betrayed her,” she said.

As she said the words, I went rigid with anxiety. It was the thing I’d been searching for, the truth that had been hidden from me, but I knew immediately in that moment that I didn’t want to hear it from her after all—I didn’t want Harry’s secret to get in the way of our relationship.
Someone else should tell me
, I thought, but it was too late.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think? He’d had an affair. I saw them together. She was a banker, had a place in Sag Harbor. He got me to drive her to
the house when Nora was away on weekends. He didn’t even have enough respect for his wife to keep it a secret. You could tell by the way he looked at her.”

“You could
tell
? Is that it?” The words came out more fiercely than I’d intended—I was still irked by her condemnation of my sex.

“No, that isn’t
it
, Ben,” she said sharply. It was the first time she’d called me by my name. “There was something else. She knew the house. When we went in, she knew exactly where to go. And I could have sworn she had a key. When we got to the door, she reached into her bag for something, then stopped as if she’d just realized I was there.”

I heard her gulp in the darkness and realized she was upset. I sensed there was something more to her emotions than just the murder. She appeared to have taken Harry’s betrayal of Nora personally, as if he’d hurt her too.

“I’m sorry, Anna,” I said. “I didn’t mean that.”

“It’s okay,” she said, waving away my attention and composing herself. “The thing is, I did something I shouldn’t. Can I trust you?”

“Of course,” I lied again.

“There was something strange about the way they were together. He said she was there for work, but it didn’t look like that. I went for a walk and came along the beach at the back of the house. I climbed the dune stairs to take a look.”

Her words brought back the memory of ascending the steps myself after Harry and seeing the rear elevation of the house, with Nora sitting on a sofa reading a magazine. From that spot, you could see anything that was going on inside the house.

“They were in his study. Harry was in a chair, bending forward, his head in his hands. He looked as if he was crying. I’d never seen him like that. She was kneeling in front of him and she had her hands around his head as if she was trying to comfort him. I think she was crying, too. I watched them for a minute and they hardly moved. I went back down the stairs before they saw me.”

“When was this?”

“A month ago.”

A month. One week before Nora had found Harry in that same room with a gun and had brought him to the psych ER. Whatever had gone on between him and that woman must have still been on his mind. What was more, he’d never told me about it, and I couldn’t have known. Harry had lied to me, I realized, but instead of being disappointed I felt a glimmer of relief.

“Does Mrs. Shapiro know?”

“I don’t think she does. She keeps saying how sorry she is for him, what an awful time he’s had. If she only knew. It makes me so angry. You’re the only person I’ve told, Ben. You have to keep it secret.”

Anna stopped walking and put out an arm to halt me, too. We stood in the park under a pale moon, looking at each other. It was an extraordinary intimacy—we were the only ones who knew of Harry’s affair, although lawyers, reporters, photographers, and cops were out seeking any tidbit about him and what he’d done. I felt as if we’d been bound together emotionally, although we’d only flirted with a relationship.

She wasn’t the only one who was upset. Her description of Nora’s faith in Harry had evoked a memory in me of my mother’s refusal to condemn my father. The compulsion she’d had to think the best of him had infuriated me. It was something Anna and I had in common apart from the elusive spark between us. We shared a kind of blind faith in marriage and outrage at it being betrayed by a self-indulgent man.

“Who was this woman?” I asked.

“Do you promise me?” she insisted.

“I promise.” I didn’t want to bind myself, and Anna wasn’t my patient so I owed her nothing, but I couldn’t refuse. She had a hold on me, and I felt guilty about using her.

“All I know is her name, Lauren Faulkner, and that she’d worked with him once. He told me that. She didn’t say much in the car, just hello, thank you. Oh, and she loved being by the sea, I remember her saying. She was there an hour and then I drove her home. At least I didn’t catch them fucking.”

We looped across the park and returned to Columbus Circle, where we stopped on the side of Sixty-first. She looked up at me, and the lights shining off the towers lit her face like a clown’s makeup.

“I’d better go,” she said. “I like talking to you.”

She faced me, placed one hand on my shoulder, and placed her lips briefly on mine. Then she turned and bolted through a gap in the traffic before I had a chance to respond, leaving that sweet memory behind.

I
can’t recall everything that happened next, but I know I stood there thinking to myself for a couple of minutes, trying to process both the kiss and what she’d told me. Then I turned back the way we’d walked.
I’ll cross the park and get the subway at Fifty-ninth and Lex
, I thought. My mind was crammed with emotions—happiness at being with her, excitement at her revelation, and guilt at having deceived her.