A Fatal Debt

knew what he’d done to Harry and he was a spineless coward. He said he’d try to make it up, so I told him what to do.”

That was what Felix meant, I thought. He had walked into the sea and drowned himself. Was that the act of a man who’d merely been indiscreet about Harry’s affair to his old friends at Rosenthal? That shouldn’t have been enough to prompt suicide. Felix had been far more involved in Greene’s murder than he’d confessed, and he’d known that his deception was unraveling. Nora had made him pay dearly for his betrayal of Harry.

“Felix called Marcus and told him he should contact us that afternoon. When he called, I said Harry wanted to see him in East Hampton later. Harry was in a bad way, not coherent. The pills hadn’t helped, they’d made it worse. He was lying on his bed, really depressed. I took him to the car and I drove him out there. We left Felix in the apartment. I thought he might be needed.

“When we arrived, I gave Harry the Beretta and told him what to do. He was shaking and sweating, very ill. I was so sad for him. I went to the study and I waited. I heard the whole thing on the intercom. Harry brought Greene in here. He’d just walked from Sagaponack, he said. It was such a nice day. Harry told him he knew everything he’d done, and Greene just laughed. ‘Too late now, Harry,’ he said.

“I waited for Harry to do it, but he was too far gone. It was like Greene had cast a spell over him. I wasn’t thinking straight. My head felt jammed and I couldn’t hear myself breathe. I’d brought a gun from New York. I walked out of the study and along the back of the house. I saw Marcus with his back to me. I came through the conservatory. He didn’t notice me until I was inside.”

“You killed him?” I asked.

“He turned toward me. He looked shocked, like he couldn’t grasp it, when he saw the gun, I remember. Then he smiled. I don’t think he thought I could do it. He was stupid. When Harry bought that gun for me, there was something I didn’t tell you. I learned to use it on a range.”

As she said it, she swung the Beretta up with both hands, one wrapped over the other around the stock, and pointed it directly at me. Her arms briefly locked in position and my heart raced. Then she lowered it, the demonstration over.

“I didn’t say anything, I just shot him in the chest. He went down and lay on the ground twitching. There was a lot of blood right away. I knew he was dying.”

I thought of the photo of Greene lying on the floor that Pagonis had pushed in front of me at Yaphank, and I glanced at the spot on the floor where Anna had made me stand to punish me. I’d had no idea what she’d really meant.

“Did you try to save him?”

“Why would I have done that?” she said, as if the idea were stupid. “I wanted him out of our lives forever. I wanted Harry back.”

“You got what you wanted, then?”

She looked happy for the first time, remembering it. “I did. It was as if the sound of the gun woke Harry up. He took charge. I was standing here, shocked at what I’d done. He took the gun from me and said, ‘You have to leave.’ He wiped off my prints and he fired it again out of the window.”

Nora waved the gun toward the ocean, as if indicating the path of the bullet. “That’s what saved Harry,” she said. “Not pills. Not a talk about it.”

She kept saying that word-talk, talk, talk-and every time she did, she sounded more scathing. I wondered if she hated me as much as my profession, and if that was why she was holding a gun on me. I’d defied the rules of psychiatry, but I’d found her by asking questions. Asking questions had its uses. It occurred to me as I listened that Pagonis had a lot to answer for. She’d taken Nora at her word and instead tried to bully me into undermining Harry’s defense. The fingerprints on the gun, the powder burns on Harry’s hands, the call to New York from East Hampton-she’d fallen for everything that Nora had faked to throw her off the trail. I’d been naive, but her performance had been terrible.

“I called Felix in New York to tell him to come for me,” she went on. “I knew I couldn’t leave in the Range Rover. Harry had to have driven it there. There was only one way to escape. On foot.”

I nodded, for I knew where she’d gone. Look around, Anna had called to me. Nora had killed Greene in the room where we sat, yards from their lawn and beyond that the steps down the dune to their private wilderness. It was labeled public, but it wasn’t really. No stranger could make it there without approval. Greene had died in a cottage with a ready-made escape route-that’s where Nora had lured him.

“I walked along the beach until I got close to Water Mill. There’s a road that leads down to the dunes there and I waited for Felix to come and pick me up. He had a place near there. I went to shower and clean myself off. Then we drove back to the house.”

She stopped talking, exhausted, and I tried to work out what to do next. The talk had delayed the moment of confrontation, but she’d soon either have to put the gun down or use it-we couldn’t stay in this standoff forever. Whenever I was caught with patients who could turn violent, I retreated. That wasn’t an option here. Her eyes looked slightly softer, some of the steeliness gone.

“I think you should give me that, Mrs. Shapiro,” I said, holding out a hand toward her and trying not to look threatening.

Nora looked at me blankly as I reached forward. I still remember her expression, its utter lack of emotion, because of what happened next. She said nothing at all. She simply pulled the trigger of the automatic. There was a deafening roar and I can picture a flash from the muzzle, but I may be imagining it. I lurched backward with shock, but she stayed in the same position, with the gun still pointed at me. The surge of adrenaline made me quiver, but after a few seconds, I realized that she’d fired over my shoulder.

“Get up,” she said, and the blankness in her face was matched by the monotone of her voice. There was nothing I could engage with in her-the affect of the truly dangerous-so I obeyed.

“Walk backward. Keep facing me,” she said.

When I’d got to where Greene had died, she told me to halt. She was now fifteen feet away-an impossible gap for me to cover safely, but probably close enough for her to shoot me. She’d killed Greene at that distance. Time was moving very slowly, or the adrenaline made it seem like that. Every move felt as if it took an age to complete.

Then, over her shoulder, I saw something glint. It was the conservatory door opening in the moonlight as Anna stepped through. I couldn’t let my eyes linger for fear of being noticed, so I kept them on Nora’s face and half monitored the blurred shape growing behind her like a ghost. The room was silent. Even knowing that Anna was there, I couldn’t hear her walking. She trod lightly and the sound of the gunshot had been so loud that my hearing was muffled, so Nora’s probably was, too. It felt like a surreal reconstruction of the story that Nora had told me, with Anna in Nora’s place, walking through the room unnoticed. Nora drew up her left hand to grip the gun, wrapping her fingers around her right hand again.

“Don’t do this, Mrs. Shapiro,” I said, trying to make my voice sound soothing rather than challenging. “We can sort it out.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. Her arms shifted slightly and stiffened as if readying herself to fire. As they did, Anna called from behind her.

“Nora,” she said. “Put it down.”

She spoke gently, but the sound broke the silence in the room as completely as the gunshot and Nora flinched. She swung around, the gun turning with her, and I launched myself forward, reaching into my pocket.

I had a half-conscious fear that it would be like my dream, when my feet had slipped on the wooden floor as I’d tried to reach the stricken Harry, but the nightmare didn’t come true. My shoes gripped the floor and I ran as fast as I could. Mortal fear and adrenaline do amazing things. I reached Nora in five long strides with my right hand high in the air, holding a syringe of Haldol and Ativan.

Nora started to turn back as she heard my steps behind her, but it was too late. I flung my elbow around her neck, hitting her arm to push the gun away from Anna, and toppled her forward. As we fell, I slammed my right hand down and plunged the syringe into her thigh, as close as I could to her gluteus maximus, where the big muscles would absorb the chemicals into her blood fastest. The gun fell from her hand, skittering across the floor as I squeezed the plunger. The drugs overwhelmed her within fifteen seconds.

I rolled off her body, now slumped facedown; she was unconscious. We had an hour or more before she came around-I’d loaded the dose for a grown man just in case. I sat there dazed, hardly taking anything in and only half-