John Gapper - A Fatal Debt

“Too much for my liking,” I said.

“At least the paparazzi have gone. There were TV trucks here until last week. Luckily, they never worked out who I was. The neighbors are pissed-it’s been frosty in the elevator.”

“But you’re all right?”

“I’m okay.”

She raised both eyebrows and thrust out her chin defiantly, but she looked sadder than before, her bohemian spirit dampened.

“We could try Indian at Whole Foods,” she said. “I’m a very cheap date.”

We walked down Sixty-first Street and across the knot of traffic by Columbus Circle. I enjoyed the bobbing sensation of her blond head next to my shoulder as she walked, sometimes skipping around obstacles and hopping over the rivulets when we crossed the road. It had rained earlier, the usual brisk drenching, and the drains had overflowed. Passing under the Time Warner Center’s jagged towers, we took the escalator that headed down into the crowded Whole Foods, where midtown office workers turned into Upper West Side apartment dwellers, with a last bout of sharp-elbowed aggression at the border.

Anna had found a seat in the cafe area under the escalator by the time I had fought my way through the lines. As she’d promised, she had chosen inexpensively: a small bowl of vegetables and rice, with dal and pickles. She picked up her fork and pushed rice and vegetables on it to eat, which gave me a chance to look at her. Her hair was gathered at the back, held there by a tortoiseshell clip, and her eyes were downcast. The second she stopped expressing her feelings, she became impossible to fathom.

“Thanks for this,” I said.

“My pleasure,” she said, and took a sip of water. “I don’t get asked out much these days, what with working for a notorious killer.”

Had I asked her out? I didn’t really know. It had given me the same pleasure when she’d accepted my invitation as if I had, but beneath it was a feeling of anxiety. I wanted to know from her how the disaster had occurred. Nora and Felix had left several questions unanswered, such as where Anna had been while Harry had been killing Greene and what Nora had been thinking about when she’d talked of “who” had supplied the gun. I wished it could simply have been a date, but I had another agenda.

“You never told me your second name.”

“Amundsen, like the explorer. My father’s family was from Finland; they made it to Minnesota in the twenties. My great-grandfather was a railway engineer.”

“Anna AmUndSen ,” I said, trying it out. “Quite a tongue twister.”

“My name’s like me. One big muddle.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Sweet of you, but it’s true.”

“This affair must be a terrible shock.”

“Duh, yeah. I’ll say so.”

“When did you find out?”

I felt awkward as I turned the conversation from pleasantries to what I hoped to discover from her. Having experienced her sensitivity, I expected her to look up and call me a hypocrite or worse, but instead she treated my question seriously. She frowned painfully as she thought back, which only made me feel worse.

“They left for the city on the Friday after you’d been there. Nora drove them. I didn’t want to be alone all weekend, so I went over to Montauk to see a friend.”

“I see,” I said, unable to stop myself from wondering who her friend was and then unable to hold back a blush. I’ve mastered the poker face for therapy, but I’ve never managed it in life.

Anna smiled. “A girl friend, Doctor. Quite innocent. I was there all Saturday. She’s a waitress so she was out for the evening and I was watching television-not a very exciting weekend-when Nora called. It was about ten thirty. She was calm, but I could hear police radios crackling in the background. Nora told me what he’d done. By the time I got there, it was chaos. The place was lit up. I had to force the cops at the end of the lane to let me through.”

“Mr. Shapiro had been taken away?”

“Leaving a mess behind him. They wouldn’t let me in the house. It was full of people in white suits, like there’d been an alien invasion. They’d taken Nora down to the guesthouse.”

“How has she been?”

Anna looked at me warily, as if weighing me.

“You’re a big one for boundaries, aren’t you?” She put on a stiff British accent. “ ‘We mustn’t mix business and pleasure, my dear.’ So which one is this? I probably shouldn’t be talking to you at all.”

“Why do you think that?” I said neutrally.

“Don’t give me your therapy bullshit. Answer the question,” she said, her cheeks reddening.

I gazed at her as blankly as I could, wanting to avoid the accurate answer, which was a mixture of the two, the very thing I’d warned her against. She was the only one who could tell me the Shapiros’ secrets, perhaps help to salvage my career. Yet in that moment, all I wanted was to reach across and touch her.

“Pleasure,” I lied.

“Then let’s get out of here,” she said.

We were walking together in Central Park, the trees around silhouetted against the dusk, when Anna answered my question.

“Nora’s all right. She’s a lot calmer than I would be, if my husband had just blown my life apart. Sometimes she seems very still and controlled, like she’s holding her feelings in check. I hear her crying in her room sometimes.”

“You don’t sympathize with Mr. Shapiro?”

“He can rot in jail for all I care.”

Her voice had a hard edge, and when I looked across at her, her hand nearest me was clenched in a fist.

“That’s pretty harsh.”

“Is it? Men are assholes. Everything had to revolve around him, the great financier. He’s never cared about anyone except himself.”

We walked for a while, past boulders massed into artificial mounds and a tourist horse and buggy jingling around the park. I agreed with her about Harry-he was a narcissist-but I bridled at how she’d phrased it, bundling all men into the same category. I was devising a retort when she spoke again.

“He’d already betrayed her,” she said.

As she said the words, I went rigid with anxiety. It was the thing I’d been searching for, the truth that had been hidden from me, but I knew immediately in that moment that I didn’t want to hear it from her after all-I didn’t want Harry’s secret to get in the way of our relationship. Someone else should tell me , I thought, but it was too late.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think? He’d had an affair. I saw them together. She was a banker, had a place in Sag Harbor. He got me to drive her to the house when Nora was away on weekends. He didn’t even have enough respect for his wife to keep it a secret. You could tell by the way he looked at her.”

“You could tell ? Is that it?” The words came out more fiercely than I’d intended-I was still irked by her condemnation of my sex.

“No, that isn’t it , Ben,” she said sharply. It was the first time she’d called me by my name. “There was something else. She knew the house. When we went in, she knew exactly where to go. And I could have sworn she had a key. When we got to the door, she reached into her bag for something, then stopped as if she’d just realized I was there.”

I heard her gulp in the darkness and realized she was upset. I sensed there was something more to her emotions than just the murder. She appeared to have taken Harry’s betrayal of Nora personally, as if he’d hurt her too.

“I’m sorry, Anna,” I said. “I didn’t mean that.”

“It’s okay,” she said, waving away my attention and composing herself. “The thing is, I did something I shouldn’t. Can I trust you?”

“Of course,” I lied again.