A Fatal Debt

by John Gapper

  My name’s like me. One big muddle, she’d told me. That was the image she projected of herself, just a yoga waif picked up by Nora who would soon be on her way. It was an affectation, I’d come to realize. Anna was the organized one. Nora had been scared to enter her own kitchen, but Anna made sure there was food in the fridge. She’d arranged for their East Hampton house to be redecorated to cover up the killing. She knew everything about their lives, was privy to their secrets. I was Harry’s psych, but she knew what he’d hidden.

  That Friday, I drove out of the city toward her with an object sitting on my dashboard. It was the glove she’d left behind when she’d abandoned me. I took the I-495 through Queens, past the ruined remnants of the World’s Fair, driving until the buildings by the road petered out into a line of trees. The only landmarks out there were the strange objects sticking out of the woods: two white water towers and a cellphone mast disguised as a gigantic tree. It hung above the green horizon, a white stick with dark metal branches spaced at unnaturally perfect intervals.

  There was a truck outside the Shapiros’ house, and when I walked to the rear and looked through the conservatory windows, I saw two workmen standing on ladders, roller-brushing the ceiling with white paint. Anna was at the far end, dressed in overalls with her hair pinned up, pointing something out. I watched for a minute before she looked up and saw me. As she did, her face stiffened and she stared at me as if I were an enemy who was about to invade. She walked into the kitchen, and as I came around the side of the house, she opened the door and stood silently.

  “You left this behind,” I said, holding out her glove.

  She frowned at me. “If you’ve driven all this way, you can come in for a minute,” she said, taking it from me.

  Inside, she poured me coffee from a French press and perched on a chair as I sipped it, which seemed as far as she was prepared to go by way of hospitality. The silence lengthened and she glanced around distractedly, as if my presence made her jumpy. When I’d first come to the Shapiros’ house, it had reminded me of a fairy-tale cottage, but now it felt like a sinister place, marked irrevocably by a murder that had sapped the energy of its occupants. Anna looked no better than Nora when I’d last visited-just as pale, with dull eyes.

  “You know who attacked me, don’t you,” I said.

  The question instantly enraged her, as if she were already on edge and it took only a small provocation to send her over the edge.

  “How would I know? I told you to leave me alone,” she shouted.

  She threw her glove at my feet and walked into the living room, slamming the door closed. As I followed, the door handle struck my knuckles, making me shake my hand and cry out-an appeal for mercy that she ignored. As I emerged into the living room, the workmen had looked up at the commotion.

  It was already hard to remember what the room had been like before. The sofas and furniture had gone the way of the geometric rug. Even the doors to the conservatory had been removed and replacements fitted. The men had painted the walls in a delicate pale blue, erasing the previous colors. Anna wasn’t there and one of the men shrugged at me, as if to indicate that he knew all about furious women. He pointed silently to a door on the far side of the room. I walked along the hallway and saw that the door to Nora’s study was open. Anna was by the window overlooking the drive to the bay side, with her back to me.

  “Remember in the car, when you drove me to the city, that first day?” I said. “You told me you were too honest for your own good. You said you’d always got into trouble for trying to tell the truth. What happened to that?”

  She didn’t speak, so I carried on talking. I felt my anger and bewilderment at how she’d behaved toward me bubbling up, and my voice starting to crack. “You’re so honest, are you? It doesn’t seem like that to me. You just want to keep Harry’s secrets.”

  I was shouting now, but her back was still facing me. I walked across and pulled at her shoulder, but she shrugged my hand off as if she couldn’t bear my touch.

  “Yeah, you know what?” she said. “I do my job, and my job means I know stuff about people who employ me, even if sometimes it’s not nice. Why don’t you do your job? Why pick on me?”

  She paced across the room toward Nora’s desk, and her words were spoken standing by it. As I looked at her, I was distracted from her face by the sight of a metal plate embedded into the wall by her left shoulder. It was Nora’s safe, where she’d told me she had placed Harry’s gun for safety. I stared until Anna glanced behind her.

  “You know how to open it,” I said. “Don’t you?”

  She stared at me contemptuously for a few seconds, then swiveled and put her hand up to the dial. She spun the wheel to the left and right four times, then placed her hand on the brass lever and pulled open the door. Inside were some jewelry boxes and a stack of papers. On top of them, I saw the glint of the nickel Beretta: Nora had told the truth.

  “Satisfied? Happy now?” she said bitterly, then shut the safe door and walked out. When I got back to the living room, she was standing in the middle of the floor, beckoning to me. Her face was stiff and hostile.

  “Come here,” she said, and I walked slowly, one pace at a time, across the wooden boards toward her. “A little further.… Stop there.”

  I was close to her, and the man who’d given me directions was standing on a ladder a few feet to my left, painting a cornice silently, as if willing himself to be invisible. Anna ignored him as she spoke.

  “That’s where the body was,” she said. “They had to sand Marcus’s blood off the boards. It took a long time.”

  I remembered Pagonis handing me the photograph of Greene’s body and seeing it lying in a pool of blood. I felt as if I was treading on sacred ground and I took a step backward as Anna walked off again. She strode through the half-painted doors of the conservatory and onto the lawn, halting by the edge of the pool. She was white and shivering, her arms wrapped under her breasts as if holding herself together. I stepped toward her, but she swayed back, keeping her distance. The sea breeze pushed aside the last of the thin clouds, and sunshine spread across the grass. The light changed so fast that if you blinked, everything changed.

  “I realized something,” she said.

  She walked to the stairs leading down the dune, as Harry had done, and I saw her step down, her head sinking from view. I hurried after her, getting close enough to throw a final question.

  “What was it? Tell me.”

  “Look around. Work it out for yourself,” she said.

  She ran down the steps to the beach, where waves cascaded into foam and were sucked back into the ocean, becoming nothing again. I struggled along behind her for a few yards, my feet sinking into the sand, but she easily outpaced me. Halting, I watched her walk furiously, head down, away to the west.

  18

  I wore a dark tie and my wedding suit-pale gray with a waistcoat-to testify to the Suffolk County grand jury. It hadn’t been my wedding: it had been my brother’s two years earlier. The suit had already outlasted the marriage. Maybe it was all of the traveling that Guy did for his job or there’d been something he hadn’t confessed to us, but Marianne had steadily become more absent from our family get-togethers until finally he’d admitted that we wouldn’t see her anymore. They hadn’t had children, so it had been a simple divorce.

  I’d enjoyed the wedding. Rebecca had helped me choose the suit at Bloomingdale’s and had flown with me to London. They’d held the ceremony in a tiny, ancient church in the City of London with a Henry Moore sculpture-a huge block of white stone-in the middle, and the choir had sung in Latin, I remembered. My father had behaved himself and, remarkably, so had Jane. Rebecca and I had spent the Sunday walking round the West End and in Hyde Park. I remembered lying on the grass by the Serpentine with her, feeling as if I had no cares in the world.

  This wasn’t such a nice occasion, and the surroundings were a lot gloomier. I sat in a witness box in a drab windowless room in the Riverhead court buildi
ng, with a grand jury spread out in front of me. Few of its members had made much of an effort to dress up. The men were in casual pants and sweatshirts except for two middle-aged guys in jackets, and the women weren’t much smarter. They didn’t seem to be taking the matter as seriously as I was-they had less at stake. Most of them seemed bored, and a man at the back was already yawning, although it was only ten thirty a.m. You’d have thought that the Shapiro case would have been more exciting than routine indictments, but it didn’t appear to be.

  The only other people in the room were a court reporter and Baer, who sat cozily with each other in another box; he shuffled through his papers and she stroked the keys of her transcription machine. The twenty-three members of the jury were sitting on two raked rows of chairs as if we were in an experimental Off-Broadway theater.

  Joe had briefed me one last time on how it worked-urging me not to talk too much, just to answer questions briefly-and was cooling his heels in the hallway. As Pagonis had said, he wasn’t allowed in the room. There was no judge to interrupt Baer, who’d walked us up to the jury room at his usual stately pace, and Joe’s plea for me to halt proceedings and come out to consult him if I was worried felt like a poor substitute.

  When I’d called Joe to tell him about Pagonis delivering the subpoena, he’d sounded gloomily unsurprised, like a man who wasn’t disappointed by events because he always expected the worst. “I didn’t want to worry you, but I thought he might do this. We should talk,” he’d said.

  The next day at his office, he’d told me how it worked. Mostly, grand juries were impaneled to arraign and indict suspects. They heard ADAs present preliminary evidence and rubber-stamped indictments. The hard work of proving that the suspect had committed the crime came later, in a full trial. But the grand jury could also investigate a case if the ADA had an unwilling witness he wanted to put under oath. That was what Baer had done to me-unless I took the Fifth Amendment, I had to testify.

  “You first treated Mr. Shapiro in the psychiatric emergency room at Episcopal, is that correct?” Baer said.

  Joe had told me to look at the jury and to try to be sympathetic, but when I glanced up, I wasn’t encouraged. The foreman who had put me under oath, a chunky man with a gold chain and a chin bulging beneath a trimmed beard, was staring at me as if I were a defendant rather than a witness.

  “Mr. Shapiro was brought to the hospital by his wife. I assessed him there and advised him to admit himself voluntarily, which he did.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “I believed he was a danger to self-that he was at risk of suicide. He had a number of symptoms of depression. He’d lost his job and his wife was concerned about his mental state.”

  “Did he tell you he might kill himself?”

  “He didn’t say that directly.”

  “Why did you believe it, then?”

  “His wife had found him earlier that day at their house in East Hampton with a gun on his desk. She’d been worried.”

  Mention of the gun brought the jury to life. A woman in the front row who had been glancing around as if not fully engaged sat up in her seat, and a man at the back gave a silent exclamation, his mouth shaped in an “O.” I tried to maintain a blank, neutral expression, as if I were an expert witness, but my heart thudded as I waited for Baer’s next question. If he asked me more about the gun, I’d have to say that Nora had brought it into the ER and I’d let her leave with it. There were too many witnesses to lie.

  “So you knew he was dangerous?” Baer said, an edge in his voice.

  It was his toughest question so far, but it wasn’t what I had feared, and I relaxed a little. Joe had anticipated that question, and so far, we were within our prepared testimony. We had practiced in a long rectangular room at his office with blinds covering the windows to block out the sunshine. I’d sat at one end of a mahogany table and Joe had walked up and down, lobbing questions at me. He’d filmed my responses and afterward we’d watched my performance on a screen that covered an entire wall at the head of the table, observing each hesitation and note of anxiety. It was reverse therapy-an exercise in hiding my feelings.

  “I was concerned that Mr. Shapiro might be a danger to himself. I never believed he was a danger to anyone else.”

  “Your diagnosis was wrong, then?”

  I started to feel the absence of a judge in the room. Surely he would object to this kind of questioning? I thought. It wasn’t just the foreman who seemed to regard me as the defendant. Taking my eyes off the jury, I looked across at Baer and the court reporter, who had her head bowed over the machine. He gazed back at me mildly but imperturbably, as if I’d brought this on myself by being uncooperative.

  “Mr. Shapiro hasn’t faced trial, so I can’t say,” I said.

  Strictly speaking, I was pushing the truth since Harry had admitted killing Greene to me, but I was legally correct, as Baer conceded with a tight smile and a skeptical glance to the jury.

  “He stayed in the hospital two days and then you discharged him, I believe. You let him out, just like that. The man you’d been so worried about only two days before, a man who had been found with a gun?”

  “He’d admitted himself voluntarily and he expressed the wish to leave on Monday. We’d started treatment and I didn’t think there was cause to convert him to involuntary status.”

  Baer’s eyes glinted. “So Mr. Shapiro became your private patient. Until he was arrested one week later for killing Mr. Greene, that is. That must have felt good. He was a rich and powerful banker, Episcopal’s biggest donor. Quite a catch.”

  I felt things slipping out of my control. Baer was right-that was exactly the thought that had gone through my mind. Wanting to acquire a rich patient wasn’t such a crime; that was why Jim had relocated to Park Avenue, for God’s sake. But Greene’s death had changed everything, transformed human ambition into medical misconduct. I hesitated, wondering whether I should insist on a pause in the hearing and go out to the hallway to get Joe’s advice, but it felt as if it would be an open indication of guilt.

  “I–I wanted to ensure that Mr. Shapiro was cared for properly,” I stammered. “Just as I’d have done for any patient.”

  “How do you normally treat patients?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They come to your office, don’t they? But Mr. Shapiro didn’t do that. You went to his house in East Hampton. And you got special treatment in return. You’d helped him out, so he flew you to London in his private jet, didn’t he?”

  One juror gasped when he said it, and another one scribbled a note on paper. My mind went blank and I struggled to find a way to explain why I’d taken that Gulfstream flight. I had to protect Harry. He should have been in hospital. I’d been told I had to discharge him. I’m not to blame. After a few interminable seconds, I refocused, with everyone in the room staring at me, and forced out a reply.

  “My father had taken ill and I had to visit him. Mrs. Shapiro offered the flight so I could see her husband promptly. I thought it would be wise.”

  “You’re saying Mr. Shapiro wasn’t stable? You’d discharged him but you were still worried about him?”

  “I just wanted to be sure.”

  The half truth I’d just told about Harry’s discharge made me sound guilty of terrible misconduct-guilty alone. That’s it, I thought as Baer paused so that the jury could absorb my testimony. Whatever Duncan does, my career is finished.

  “You did everything Shapiro wanted because he’d bought you off. He had you on a string, didn’t he?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I muttered, unable to look at him. My face was flushed and two middle-aged women on the jury were gazing at me sympathetically, as if it were a one-sided boxing match that should be halted.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Baer said, sensing the mood and bringing his questioning adeptly to an end.

  I found Joe outside, sitting on a low bench by one window, doing correspondence on a BlackBerry. “Go okay?” he said brightly.
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  I couldn’t bear to tell him what had gone on-my head was still reeling. We walked to Baer’s office, where my tormentor had invited us for a post-hearing discussion. He had taken off his jacket and loosened a couple of buttons on his waistcoat by the time we got there and looked satisfied.

  “I hope you didn’t think I was too hard on you, Doctor. Just wanted to get some of the facts established,” he said, shaking Joe’s hand.

  I saw Joe wince as he realized something nasty had occurred out of his sight. “What’s next?” he asked Baer, moving to the critical point.

  “We’ll see. We can keep Dr. Cowper’s grand jury testimony under seal for now, not hand it to the defense immediately. I don’t want to cause him any trouble that I don’t need to. But you and I should talk about how he might help us, whether he’ll cooperate now. Shall we take a stroll?”

  Sitting in Joe’s car, I saw him and Baer through the windshield a hundred yards away, their shapes outlined against the gray prison walls. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I got a sense of it from watching Baer’s gestures and Joe’s solemn, accommodating nods as they walked side by side.

  They looked like what they were-two professionals who had abandoned the job’s public showmanship and were striking a deal. I was still shaken from the trauma of giving evidence and I wanted to escape from that place, with all its nasty associations, as fast as I could, but Joe had asked me to wait. I thought of Harry playing cards or lifting weights in the jail that loomed above their heads. They talked for twenty minutes and then I saw them shaking hands. Baer headed toward the DA’s offices and Joe turned back to me. He kept his head down as he walked, looking grim and pensive. As he approached the car, he looked up and smiled, but it required an effort.

  “So?” I said as he climbed in beside me.