A Fatal Debt

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.”

9

The 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 facade 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 omerta 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