A Fatal Debt by John Gapper Page B

Harry’s jet. Pushing the key to redial, I waited.
    “Lustgarten,” a voice said smoothly and evenly after two rings.
    Had it been anyone else, and I hadn’t heard the sound of raised voices in the background, I would have thought it was the tone of someone having a relaxed Sunday afternoon. By his standards, however, he sounded edgy.
    “Felix, this is Ben Cowper.”
    “Ah, Dr. Cowper. How are you?”
    “Fine, thanks. I’m sorry to disturb you. It sounds as if you’re busy.”
    “Just a little, yes. Could you hold on a minute? I’ll be right with you.”
    “Sure,” I said.
    He put his hand over the phone, but I could hear his muffled voice call across a room.
    “Andrew! … Andrew! Tell him he’ll have to wait. We’ll have astatement in ten minutes.… No, I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s God Almighty.”
    There was a rustle as Felix removed his hand and spoke to me.
    “Sorry about that. The roof’s fallen in, as you might expect.”
    “Are the papers calling?” I asked densely.
    “A few. That happens when the chief executive of a Wall Street bank dies violently. The vultures circle.”
    If I’d been thinking in that moment, if my brain hadn’t been frozen with shock, I would have caught it.
Chief executive
, he’d said, not
former chief executive
. But I pressed on with my questions blindly, and it took another few seconds for Felix to deliver the news unambiguously.
    “How’s Mrs. Shapiro coping?”
    “Nora’s in quite a state, very traumatized. She’s with the police now. She thinks she can get Harry out on bail. Best of luck, I say.”
    “Get him out? From where?”
    “Out of jail, I mean. Where else?”
    “But he’s dead, isn’t he? I saw it on the news.”
    Felix made a strained gurgling sound, half mirth and half horror, at my words. Then he told me. The peculiar thing is that when I first heard the words, my first, instinctive reaction was relief. It turned out I hadn’t let my patient commit suicide after all.
I’m not going to kill myself
, he’d promised me on the beach in East Hampton, and he’d told the truth—just not the whole truth.
    “Harry?”
said Felix. “No, Harry’s absolutely fine, apart from being under arrest for murder. It’s Marcus Greene who’s dead. Harry shot him last night.”

9
    T he Riverhead Correctional Facility loomed from the mist in the cold morning. I saw a couple of trailers set back in the woods off the Long Island Expressway and the eyes of a startled deer, then I was pulling up to the security gate. It was a gloomy place, six or so floors high with a few narrow slits in the walls to let in light. The walls were covered with rolls of shining razor wire, one piled on another, and patterns were molded on its façade in a halfhearted effort to make it less drab.
Don’t get yourself locked in here
, the building said. The blue-uniformed guard glanced at my license and waved me on.
    Inside, a thin, dull-eyed correction officer told me to take off my belt and jacket and put them in one of the lockers. I sat on one of the bucket chairs fixed to the floor in the waiting area with a knot of visitors—mostly women and children who looked as if they knew thisritual well. On the hour, a shift of visitors drifted out, a couple joking idly with the officers.
    The entrance to the visiting room was a cage with red barred doors on two sides. Visitors had to walk into it and have the door locked behind them before the guards released the other. They weren’t taking chances. Before I entered the cage, an officer stamped the back of my hand with a small green circle.
    “What’s this?” I asked.
    “Ultraviolet,” he said, shining a flashlight on it to light it up. “We don’t want the wrong guy leaving.”
    The visiting room was large and dimly lit, with long trestle tables running its length. Each table had a Perspex screen in the middle, perforated with holes to let through the sound of voices. Prisoners in yellow jumpsuits with VISITING