A Fatal Debt

I still had a job, at least temporarily, and I turned up to do it the following day, having fixed to meet my father that evening. He hadn’t been forthcoming about why he’d arrived out of the blue, although he’d mentioned that Joe had called him. The day went by unremarkably, with nothing further from Duncan or Jim. It almost felt as if the Shapiro affair had been a dream. I nodded through forty-five minutes of Arthur Logue and then waited for Lauren.

The minute hand clicked around the wall clock. Five minutes after five, ten minutes after five. She’ll be getting out of the Town Car now, I thought. Walking through the lobby and showing her ID to the guards. With two minutes to go, I started listening for the sound of her heels clicking down the hallway. I knew little of her beyond what she’d told me the previous week, but she was the only connection I had left to Harry. Everyone else-Anna, Nora, even Joe-had spurned me. I hadn’t even heard from Felix in a while.

Only when the hand clicked past five fifteen and kept descending did I realize. She wasn’t coming. That shocked me more than it should have. It wasn’t unusual for patients to fail to show up and she’d hardly been entirely truthful with me, yet I’d been so sure that she’d come. Why did I have such faith in her? I wondered as I sat there, feeling spurned. It was because she seemed so unafraid. If she’d decided she didn’t want to see me again, she’d have told me to my face. But when the hand reached five thirty, I knew there was no point in waiting. I gave her two minutes’ grace and then called her cellphone on the off chance she’d been in an accident. She wouldn’t have forgotten.

“Ms. Faulkner, this is Dr. Cowper. I was expecting you for our appointment. I hope nothing is wrong,” I told her voice mail.

I sat for another few minutes, feeling abandoned. “Fuck,” I said softly. I had no one left to talk to except Baer and Pagonis. The previous day, I’d felt elated by my decision to tell the truth about Harry, but now I was desolate. This was it-the end of the line. My last patient of the day was on vacation so that was the end of my duties. I unclipped my red-and-white badge and went to find my father.

He was at a table in a corner of the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis Hotel, with a large martini in front of him. Behind the bar, the Maxfield Parrish mural of the monarch grinned as inscrutably as Harry in Riverhead. It’s fine for you, with your pipe and your slippers, and your fiddlers three, I thought. If I had your job, I’d be merry, too. The waiter brought a glass of wine and my father clinked his own, brimming with bulbous green olives, against it.

“Here we are again. Cheers,” he said.

I studied his face as he sipped. It was sallow in the soft bar light, and the lines around his eyes were deeper. The heart attack had aged him-he looked older than the undaunted image I carried in my head. He’d lost some weight and his legs had looked stick thin as he’d padded around my apartment in a dressing gown in the morning. I’d given up my bed for him and slept on a couch. In the early hours of the morning, I’d woken to hear his raspy snores from the bedroom, like a foghorn in the night.

“What are you doing here, Dad?” I said.

“Joe’s worried about you. He says you’ve been under a lot of strain and you haven’t been telling him everything. He thinks you could be in trouble. I’m due in D.C. later in the week so I thought I’d take a detour, see if I could help.”

I looked around the bar, which was filling with an early evening throng. Waiters passed among tables with trays bearing drinks and silver bowls of nuts and snacks. Opposite, a white-haired tycoon sat alongside a pale-faced beauty-perhaps his daughter, perhaps his mistress. I should have been grateful to my father for flying on this mission, but it irritated me-I was too exhausted to be angry. Why play the concerned parent now, when he’d never bothered to do it before? He’d arrived at the exact moment when it was too late.

“You told Joe I was secretive,” I said.

My father sucked one of the olives off his cocktail stick and munched it. He looked at me warily, trying to gauge my mood.

“Even as a kid, you were always a mystery to me,” he said.

“So you’ll remember the secret I kept for you.”

He widened his eyes, taken aback. I routinely confronted my patients with awkward questions about things they had suppressed from their past, but I had never summoned the nerve to do it to him. I could be grateful to Harry for that, at least-he’d battered me into a condition in which I didn’t care anymore.

“I’ll have another. What about you?” he said, signaling to the waiter.

“Is that a good idea?” I said. Then I decided against acting as his heart doctor as well as his psych. “Oh, hell. I’ll join you.”

My father sat silently with his head tipped back as the waiter tidied up the table and brought over new drinks. He gazed at the ceiling of the bar, as if seeking divine inspiration for what to say. By now, the tycoon was resting his hand in a position on his companion’s leg that proved she wasn’t his daughter.

“The thing with Jane,” my father finally said. “When you found us that day. It’s so long ago, isn’t it? I’m surprised you remember.”

“Are you really? It’s not the kind of thing you forget. I was only a child. How could you have done that?”

I forced myself to look at him-not wanting him to escape the force of my outrage-and to my surprise saw weakness and shame. It hadn’t occurred to me that he was capable of feeling guilty. He’d always seemed so adept at moving on rapidly from his emotional failures, leaving others with the aftereffects.

“I know,” he said quietly. “I hurt your mother and I hurt you. I fucked it all up, that’s the truth. I wish I’d never done it.”

“Done what? Made me lie for you?”

He sighed. “Not just that, the whole thing. The affair, breaking up the family like that. I know you think I’m just a selfish bastard, but it crushed me when your mother died. It felt like I was being punished for what I’d done. It hurt Jane, how long it took me to get over it, but she’d been my wife. You don’t forget that.”

“And Jane?”

“Benny, you think what you like about me-God knows I deserve it-but don’t keep blaming her. It’s not her fault.”

He took a gulp and sighed again. I didn’t know what to feel. Part of me thought it was a masterful performance from a man who was good at getting others to pity him-another of his manipulative ploys. But there was a kernel of something genuine in it. Even if it was just a show, I was grateful he’d cared enough to fly here to put it on. An awful lot of people fall apart and end up in therapy or in the psych ER, but thousands of others carry on with their lives. They just bear their burden of guilt or unhappiness as privately as they can. Maybe he’d been one and I hadn’t noticed. What kind of psychiatrist was I?

“You’re right. She doesn’t,” I said.

“Could we talk about something else now?” he said plaintively. “And don’t tell Jane what I just said, will you? Please?”

I put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it. I felt better that I’d at least managed to voice the resentment I’d bottled up against him for years-it was as if I’d managed to seize back some power over our relationship.

“I’m glad you came, Dad,” I said.

“Of course,” he said, waving his hand magnanimously. “Tell me about this case of yours. What do you think happened?”

“Honestly?” I said. “I think Shapiro planned to kill Greene before I even saw him the first time. He played along with his wife when she found him with the gun because he knew he’d have an excuse if he looked crazy. Then he got himself discharged and did what he’d always planned to do. So now I’m his defense.”

“That’s clever, I’ve got to admit,” my father said, easing seamlessly back into the role of lawyer. “Why did he want to kill the guy in the first place?”

“I don’t know exactly. Something happened between them that I don’t understand, before Seligman got into trouble. It’s not just Greene he blamed. He had a thing about the Treasury and Rosenthal. Greene had worked there and so did Henderson, the Treasury secretary.”

“Those Rosenthal people do stick together. I’ve dealt with one or two of them in London. They’re like the Moonies. What’ll you do now?”

“I’m going to tell the Suffolk County ADA what Shapiro said to me and let him deal with it. There’s nothing