John Gapper - A Fatal Debt

Sitting there, with the weight of history and authority bearing down on me, I felt sweat on my forehead. Some impulse had brought me there, a determination not to let Greene’s deception die with him, but my pretext for coming felt awfully thin.

“You wanted to see me,” Henderson said.

“Thanks for sparing the time.”

He nodded self-deprecatingly, as if half an hour of his time were an expensive gift he’d decided to bestow on me. The other man looked on silently.

“As I mentioned when I called, I’m a psychiatrist in New York and Harry Shapiro was one of my patients. He told me a number of things that may come out in evidence at a trial, but there is one matter that I don’t think can wait.”

Henderson said nothing, but cocked his head slightly to one side, his Buddha-like smile unchanged. I’ve no idea where you’re going with this, but I’m fascinated to see how you’ll finish , said the smile.

“I’ve just seen Mr. Shapiro in the Riverhead Correctional Facility, where he is being held on murder charges. He told me that he wishes you harm because he blames you as well as Mr. Greene for his predicament. Given that he’s already confessed to one killing, I must take that seriously. Have you heard of the Tarasoff case?”

Henderson pursed his lips and shook his head a couple of times as if he’d not only not heard of it, but saw no reason to care.

“It involved a woman called Tarasoff who was killed by a therapy patient after he’d told his psychiatrist that he intended to do it,” I said. “The courts held that therapists have a duty to protect anyone they suspect might be harmed by their patients. The normal rules of confidentiality are waived. That’s why I’m here.”

It wasn’t really the reason, of course. Harry was no immediate danger to Henderson. But it had given me a plausible excuse to demand to see him and to watch how he reacted to the other things I wanted to say.

Henderson nodded. “Thank you, Doctor. However, I’m not sure what the rush was. Shapiro’s in jail, isn’t he? He doesn’t present much of a threat to anyone at the moment, does he?”

“I still felt that I should come. Mr. Shapiro told me a number of things about what he thinks happened as a result of the merger between his bank and Mr. Greene’s. He believes that he was deceived.”

Henderson gazed at me, looking innocently bemused. He had an intimidating quality that had nothing to do with threats or with overt aggression, like Harry. It was subtler than that: a benign puzzlement that anyone could question his version of the truth unless they were misguided or malign.

“Really? I suppose there was a rivalry between the two of them. That’s now evident. I’m not sure how it affects me.”

I took a deep breath. “Mr. Shapiro claims that you placed pressure on the board to fire him because you and Mr. Greene were close as a result of having worked together at Rosenthal. He thinks Rosenthal was behind the whole thing.”

Henderson hardly moved, and his expression was unchanged, but he coughed once and then deflected his face slightly to the left to address the man behind him. “Andrew, I think Dr. Cowper has some things to say in private. Would you mind?”

The man replaced the cap on his pen, folded his notebook, and left the room without a word. When he’d gone, Henderson smiled at me again, just as broadly but this time with the warmth turned down to a low simmer.

“Dr. Cowper, forgive me, but I’m going to ask a question. Why are you here?”

“I was curious.”

That answer seemed to amuse him, and the skin crinkled around his eyes. Then his face turned watchful again. “I’m told that you’re no longer Mr. Shapiro’s physician and your job at Episcopal is in doubt,” he said, tapping a finger on his chair.

“You’re right,” I said. I didn’t know how he knew, but I supposed he was in a position to find out, and there was no point in lying.

“So I surmise that you don’t feel you have a lot to lose. If you’ll forgive the description, you’re a loose cannon. Correct?”

I saw that beneath his veneer of calm, I had him worried. Maybe he believed I was losing control and was ready to denounce him.

“Perhaps,” I said, nodding.

“I’m going to indulge you for a few minutes, between the two of us, to satisfy your curiosity. You tell me why you think Marcus died.”

“I think that Grayridge was in trouble and Greene needed a white knight. Something was wrong with these mortgage bonds-the Elements. You were at Rosenthal and he trusted you. Maybe you told him to merge with Seligman to cripple a competitor. By the time Seligman got into trouble, you were here. You bailed out the bank and then you ensured that Greene took over.”

“And his death?”

“Mr. Shapiro found out what had happened, I don’t know how exactly. It made him so angry that he killed Greene. He couldn’t get to you.”

Henderson tapped his finger contemplatively as he thought it over and then smiled again. He didn’t seem particularly upset by me accusing him of conspiracy to defraud Seligman and the U.S. government.

“It’s a gripping theory. You think there was some kind of plot involving Rosenthal, do you? You’re not the only one. It’s a fine institution and it produces a great many people who go into public service. They sometimes face this kind of accusation, which is long on gossip and short on evidence. We are, sadly, used to it.”

As he spoke, his voice rose and there was a flash of passion in his eyes for the first time. He looked more upset by my doubting Rosenthal than by my accusation against him, as if the bank were like a country and came before self. We , he’d said.

“When the president appointed me,” he went on, “I shed all my ties to Rosenthal and sold my stock in the firm, which was not a good investment decision, let me assure you. There are many conflicts of interest on Wall Street, and if people don’t deal with them in the appropriate manner, they’re out of business. Mr. Greene and I once worked at the same firm. Is that all you’ve got?”

“I think it’s more than that.”

“Not from what you’ve said. You don’t have any evidence, merely the imaginings of a psychiatric patient. As I told the Senate, the board chose Marcus without consulting me. But you know what, Dr. Cowper? I’d have done exactly the same thing in their shoes. He was a great banker and a fine leader. Shapiro …”

He paused as if he had a lot of thoughts on the subject of Harry that he didn’t want to go into. There was a contemptuous glint in his eye, and he stood to end our meeting as he finished his sentence.

“Was never stable.”

It was the “never” that stayed with me. As the Acela looped northward to New York after I’d been shown off the premises by a still-silent Andrew, I sat by the window wondering what it had signified. The Maryland coast gave way to the boarded-up row houses of Baltimore and North Philadelphia while it rattled in my brain. Except for that word, I might have accepted defeat, but something bugged me about it. I was certain Henderson had ejected Harry and put Greene in the job, but he wouldn’t have done it just because Greene was an old colleague at Rosenthal. That would have been crude, and Henderson was subtle.

He’d known Harry for a long time, though. That was what his final words told me. There was history there-an echo of the past.

A quotation from John D. Rockefeller, inscribed on a long panel, greeted me as I walked into the New York Public Library’s business branch on Madison Avenue the following morning: Next to knowing all about your own business, the best thing to know is all about the other fellow’s business . That was what I’d come for. I’d thought of Harry talking about Greene that day on the beach, scraping sand from a seashell as he spoke. I knew a guy who’d run private equity in Europe for Rosenthal. Marcus Greene , he’d said.