A Fatal Debt

else I can do.”

“You can’t give up like that,” my father cried, so loudly that the couple at the next table glanced worriedly at us. “You can’t just sit there. You have to find out what happened, why he did it. That’s your only hope.”

He sounded outraged. All the talk about Harry seemed to have revived him-either that or the two martinis. The color had returned to his cheeks and he talked as animatedly as if it were his own case. He must be tough to face on the stand, I thought. He was just as relentless as Baer.

“That’s not my job, Dad.”

“What the hell is your job, Ben?” he said indignantly. “You sit and listen to what people tell you, but if they feel like lying to you, you let them get away with it? That doesn’t sound very smart. Joe said you wouldn’t even tell him what you know because of a patient.”

“I can’t. You’re a lawyer. You know the rules.”

“I know rules are sometimes made to be broken.”

He drained his martini and glared at me as if only a coward would disagree. I didn’t reply because I was thinking of Anna and how similar their complaints about my profession had been. She didn’t have much faith in me, I thought. I remembered her final words as she’d walked away on the beach: Work it out for yourself. She had flung that at me not believing that I would.

It was time to prove her wrong.

Lauren’s house was beautiful. It must have been mid-nineteenth century, flat-fronted in red brick with what looked like the original brass knocker on a black-painted wooden door. It was off West Fourth Street in the middle of the West Village.

Peering through the windows, I saw wide-planked floors and marble fireplaces that stood out against the chalky walls. All of the furniture and fittings, from the chandeliers to the chairs, looked selected for the space. There was a yard at the back with a crab apple tree, from which a copper lantern hung. It looked almost too perfect- nothing was out of place. It reminded me of the way Nora had decorated the house in East Hampton. They had something of the same aura. Was that why Harry had fallen for both women? I wondered. They both provided some haven from his uncontrollable rage.

Lauren wasn’t home, and I retreated along the street to a cafe to await her return. I knew she’d be back-it was a warm Saturday morning and a copy of The Wall Street Journal rested on a table in the living room, still in its wrapper. She must have retrieved it before going out earlier. I’d called her once more since she’d failed to arrive for her session earlier that week, but there’d been no reply. Whatever she’d wanted from me had taken only two meetings and I knew I’d have to seek her out if I wanted to discover more. Her address was in my records, but I’d had to steel myself to follow my father’s advice.

It was four hours later, after lunchtime, when I saw her walk down the street in a pale overcoat. I let her go inside and gave her five minutes’ grace. Only when I’d climbed her stoop and was at the top about to knock did I have a feeling of hopelessness. I was once again chasing one of Harry’s women, knocking on a closed door. I’d already gone to Nora and Anna and gotten nowhere. It was a hopeless mission-Harry was the only one who knew why he had done it. I’d had one chance to get it from him, and I’d failed. Why am I here? I wondered. I felt like a stalker who can’t forget the object of his obsession.

When Lauren opened the door, something had changed. It wasn’t just her shock at seeing me and her frown of displeasure. It was something else. She wasn’t the same controlled woman who’d come to my office and told her story: she looked despairing and adrift. Her face was blank, like that of a distressed starlet caught by surprise in a paparazzi flashlight, and she hesitated before she could articulate her words.

“Dr. Cowper,” she said.

“Can we talk for a minute? It won’t take long.”

She paused, as if trying to reconcile my presence with what she’d been thinking of before, and looked dazed. Then she stood aside and ushered me through. She led me along the hallway into a living room dominated by a long oak table. Sunshine streamed through the rear windows, with frames that bowed at the top. I could hear the faint sound of traffic from the street outside, but it was a peaceful refuge.

“You’ve got something to say?” she asked.

We were still standing, since she hadn’t offered me a seat and showed no sign of doing so. She gave the impression that she wanted to get me out of there as fast as she could and resume pondering whatever had been on her mind.

“You didn’t keep our appointment,” I said.

“I decided I didn’t want to,” she said crisply, regaining some of her former poise. “I’m sorry I haven’t returned your call. I was intending to. Do you always chase your patients like this?”

“I don’t, but you’re an unusual patient.”

She arched her eyebrows. “How so?”

“You know what I mean. You didn’t pick me out of a list in a magazine. You came to me because I’d treated Mr. Shapiro. You wanted to make sure I couldn’t tell anyone about your relationship.”

“That sounds too clever for me,” she said.

“You’re an intelligent woman.”

“What do you want from me?” she said.

“You told me that you didn’t see Mr. Shapiro after you left Seligman, but that wasn’t true. You visited him in East Hampton only a week before he killed Marcus Greene. Why was that?”

Lauren trailed one hand on the table and then tapped it a couple of times, as if coming to a decision. She looked purposeful again, more like the woman I’d known before. She stepped forward and put her hand on my arm, as if trying to ensure that I listened to her, and her eyes were fierce.

“I want you to leave now. You shouldn’t be asking questions like that. It’s not a good idea, believe me. You’ve already been attacked once. Do you want to put yourself in more danger?”

She had started to guide me out of the room and back toward her door, but her question stunned me. How did she know about my assailant in the park? I had only just told Joe of my suspicions.

“What do you mean? Tell me,” I said. I grabbed her arm. “Tell me.”

“I mean what I say. You should take care,” she said.

My father had left for Washington and I was alone in my apartment, thinking of my final glimpse of Lauren as she’d opened her door to usher me out. The moment when she’d warned me not to ask questions had been shocking, but it wasn’t what I remembered most vividly.

The image printed on my mind was her arm reaching past me in the last moments before I’d stepped onto her stoop and walked away. As she’d turned the bolt, I’d noticed a mark on the back of her hand. It was a green circle, faint against her skin, and I might not have seen it if it hadn’t been familiar. It was the same ultraviolet stamp with which I’d been marked before the officer let me through the cage at Riverhead.

We don’t want the wrong guy leaving, he’d told me, training a flashlight on it to light it up. Then they’d slid open the bars and I’d walked through to find Harry waiting for me in the corner. That was where Lauren had been before she’d come down the street looking ashen-in Suffolk County with her lover. Five minutes later, I’d blundered to her door to press her about the secret she’d shared with him, days before he’d killed Greene. That circle worried me more than her warning, for it told me that Harry was still close to her. They’d never been out of touch-not before the killing and not since. I’d believed all along that Nora was Harry’s confidante, but I’d been wrong.

Should I take her words to heart, I wondered, and keep myself from further harm by abandoning this quixotic effort to discover the truth about Harry? My father had left town and no one else was speaking to me, so it would be simpler and less risky to call a halt. But momentum had taken me, and Lauren’s words echoed in my brain as a provocation, not a deterrent. I might have lost my job, but I wouldn’t let Harry use me.

If she wouldn’t tell me what had gone on between them, I’d find out in the place where it had all begun.

21

Seligman Brothers took up a block of Broadway, and it was hard to discern, looking down the avenue toward Times Square, the border between the worlds of finance and entertainment. The bright screens in Times Square