Her footsteps announced her identity from a long way away. Most people in the place, even the doctors, tended to shuffle, but Lauren’s heels clicked along the corridor. She rapped loudly on the door with none of the tentativeness of my neurotic patients.
It had been easy to look Lauren up after she’d called, to find her photograph, her age-the same as mine-her magna cum laude education, and her list of jobs. High school in Beverly Hills, then Yale, then a job with a consulting company, then Harvard for an MBA, then to Seligman Brothers and a rapid rise from analyst to co-head of the Financial Institutions Group. I thought of Felix’s summary of Underwood’s job as we sat in the Gulfstream: A banker who advises other bankers. Go figure.
A photograph on her new bank’s website showed a woman with dark hair that curled around her ears before straightening, as if coming to its senses, and an unflinching gaze. There were two other photos, one at a fund-raiser in the city and another at a party in Southampton with a group of blue-blazered men. She’s got nice legs under that dress, I had thought, but the image hadn’t done her justice. She wore a silk blouse and an expensive-looking pantsuit that demurely covered the legs I’d noted. In person, her sleekness lit up the room.
“Dr. Cowper? I’m Lauren,” she said.
“Come in, Ms. Faulkner.”
Since she’d called, I’d been wondering why she’d tracked me down. Psychs are wired not to believe in coincidence. We quiz patients who claim they missed a train they wanted to catch or happened to meet a friend in the street. Deep down, we think, it was deliberate. The idea that Harry’s lover had selected me by sheer chance was ridiculous. I’d been attacked on the evening I’d been told about Lauren, and the man whose house she’d been observed visiting was in jail, accused of murder. This wasn’t a coincidence.
“Where should I sit?” Lauren said, glancing around the room. “I haven’t done this before, believe it or not. I’m the only one of my girlfriends who hasn’t. Man trouble, money, the usual things.”
Her voice was low and melodic and her tone unworried, suggesting our meeting was perfectly ordinary.
I indicated my patients’ chair. “Let’s see if I can help you.”
“I’m sure you can,” she said, as if it would be a waste of effort to try to dissuade her. She crossed her long legs and placed her black leather bag on the floor. She was more finely groomed than women I knew-so polished that she looked as though she wore a mask. Her red lipstick matched the soles of her Christian Louboutin shoes, and her eyebrows were exactly shaped.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
She paused for a few seconds, and I saw her assessing me. Both of us knew the answer to the question, but she avoided it.
“You’re on a list, aren’t you? Top doctors in New York,” she said.
I knew that New York magazine list, and I knew I wasn’t on it. She smiled, displaying pearl white teeth against red lips. She gave the impression of being in complete control-she wouldn’t reveal anything that she didn’t care to.
She didn’t look even vaguely ill, certainly much less than Harry when I’d first met him. She was talking brightly and at a normal speed, her face was full of life, and she smiled easily, so there was no depression there. It was conceivable she was bipolar or had another condition, but there were few signs of it. She wasn’t manic, and she was lucid and rational. If anything, she seemed less stressed than I.
“Can I ask why you’re interested in therapy?” I said. “Is there something happening in your life at the moment?”
She gazed at me as she absorbed the question, but she showed no sign of wanting to answer it. Instead, she leaned back in the chair and expelled a slow breath of air through her nostrils, gathering her thoughts.
“May I ask you a question?” she replied. “Can I be sure that nothing I tell you will go outside this room?”
“Of course. It will be in confidence.”
“I’ve heard of cases where personal matters came out in court,” she said, gazing at me. “Things a patient had told his psychiatrist.”
I looked back at her, both of us knowing what she meant and both knowing that the other one knew. It was absurd. I should have stopped her there, told her that I couldn’t treat her. Anything she told me in this room, including her affair, would immediately become sealed. Even if Anna released me from my promise, which she showed no sign of doing, it would have to remain secret and I’d have nothing to tell Pagonis or Baer. I’d be bound as tightly as ever by professional obligation.
I felt as if I were becoming more enmeshed even as I tried to fight my way free, yet I couldn’t resist it. The lure was as powerful as when my father had turned pleadingly to me in the car when I was twelve years old and asked me to keep secret Jane’s illicit presence in our house. I’d been drawn into Harry’s world, and I had to know the truth. Anna had only spied upon it from afar, and she wouldn’t tell me more. Even if I could never find my way out of this maze, I wanted to proceed.
“It only happens when a patient who’s been accused of a crime waives privilege. It’s his choice, not the doctor’s,” I said.
She smiled. “You’ve got a duty of care. Like a banker.”
“I imagine so. I’m not an expert.”
“So you’ll take me as a patient?”
“Perhaps you should tell me about yourself first,” I said.
“Thirty-three, separated, investment banker. What else?” she said, as if she’d already exhausted the subject of her personality.
“You’re separated?”
She sighed, and her confidence seemed to falter. She looked away from me, speaking to the bookshelf on one wall.
“Wall Street’s a relentless place. You make partner in your early thirties and you need to work hard just to prove yourself, harder than the men. Seven or eight meetings a day, work every weekend. My husband couldn’t accept that. He wanted children.”
“You didn’t?”
“I did. I do. But I had no choice. That’s the job.”
She gave a brittle smile, and a few minutes later, our meeting was over. She didn’t bother to ask me how much therapy would cost, and it didn’t seem likely to bother her any more than it had Harry. We arranged for her to return at the same time the following week, and I opened the door for her. She walked toward the elevators as precisely as she’d come, bag at her side, head aloft, the legs of her expensive pants swishing together. I couldn’t remember a patient who’d come for treatment in such good health.
I was at home that evening, eating a sandwich and watching television aimlessly to distract myself, when Bob called up from the front desk to tell me that two detectives had come to see me.
“Fine, send them up,” I said as casually as I could manage, although they hadn’t given me any warning.
“Sure thing, Doctor.”
His voice had the doorman’s guarded neutrality. I couldn’t tell whether he believed that it was as routine as I’d tried to make it sound or he expected me to be led out in handcuffs in a few minutes. When I peered out of my apartment, I saw Hodge slouching down the corridor as if he hadn’t thought much of me the first time we’d met and had since had his view fully vindicated. Pagonis carried a document that she tapped lightly on one wall as she walked.
“We’re here to give you this,” she called with a tone of malicious pleasure. As she got to me and proffered it, I saw it was a document in a legal-looking manila envelope, fastened with red string to a buttonlike clip.
“Come in for a minute,” I said. The way they’d arrived without warning and looked so self-satisfied wasn’t reassuring, and I didn’t want them to depart before I knew what they’d brought with them.
Pagonis led the way, Hodge squeezing me against the wall with his stomach as he passed. She was wearing a pantsuit that was less flattering than Lauren’s. It was a pale shade of gray, and it creased around her knees and waist. Yaphank detectives had less of a clothes budget than bankers, I imagined. As Hodge examined my bookshelves, Pagonis walked to the end of the room by a window that looked south over another block to a high school and a rooftop jumble of water tanks and air-conditioning units.
“Nice place,” she said. “I like these drapes. My husband and I are looking for something like that, but we can’t agree, you know?”
“Why don’t you take a seat?” I said, gesturing at my sofa. I felt the need to corral them. They were behaving as if they already owned the place.
I sat down and opened the envelope. Inside were three sheets of paper, the first one headed “Subpoena Ad Testificandum for a Witness to Appear Before the Grand Jury of Suffolk County.” My heart sank as I saw that the People of the State of New York “commanded” me to be in Riverhead in two weeks’ time to testify. It was just what I’d gone to Anna to try to avoid. I didn’t really know what a grand jury was, although I’d heard of them, but the document looked genuine-Baer had signed it.
“Mr. Baer wasn’t happy with our last meeting with you. The one with that New York lawyer,” Pagonis said. “Now you have to testify.”
She extended her legs on my rug, bending her toes back to stretch her calf muscles. It had been a long journey just to deliver me a subpoena. Didn’t they have better things to do with their time, like catching criminals?
“My lawyer will get back to you,” I said.
Pagonis shook her head. “Your lawyer can’t come to a grand jury hearing. It’s just going to be Mr. Baer and you. We’ve got new evidence that suggests you haven’t been honest with us. You spent time at Shapiro’s house in East Hampton, it turns out, just after you’d discharged him from the hospital.”
How does she know? I thought. There’d been only three witnesses in East Hampton-Nora, Anna, and Harry. One of them must have told Pagonis about what happened that day, and she’d already started closing in on me. Things felt as if they were moving a lot faster than Joe had predicted.
Pagonis smirked. “I’ll bet he poured out his heart to you.”
“You shouldn’t have come all this way,” I said, standing to usher them out of the room and the building.
“It was worth the trip,” she replied.
After they’d left, I made some tea and sat at the kitchen table, thinking about what Pagonis had said. Maybe I’d been foolish to provoke her-it had made her go and dig up something to use against me-but she’d probably have discovered it anyway. What else does she have up her sleeve? I wondered. She’d seemed very confident it was worth putting me in front of a grand jury, despite Joe’s belief that Baer wouldn’t risk it.
I thought back to that day on the beach. Perhaps Pagonis was right: Harry had given me a clue about his intentions and I hadn’t realized it. All I remembered was feeling happy that he was less depressed and volatile. Maybe there was another way to interpret his mood: he’d made up his mind to kill Greene by then, so he was less oppressed by anxiety.
I closed my eyes and tried to think back. The waves had rolled along the beach, and Harry had walked back toward the house as if defeated. Why had he been sure that his life was ruined? I thought. Depressed people often think that, but they have their own logic. They feel trapped by something or someone, unable to break free. Who had Harry believed was trapping him? It had to be Greene, surely. His dead body was proof of that. I pictured Harry standing despairingly at the foot of the dune stairs as he’d told me of Seligman’s collapse.
I lost everything. They ruined me, he’d said.
Not him, not Greene alone. They. Who were they? I wondered. Were they simply the fates that everyone blames when things go wrong, or had it been someone in particular? Who had he been thinking of when he’d said the words? I remembered him sweeping his hand across his throat-that violent gesture and his tortured face.
Treasury demanded a sacrifice, he’d said.
There was something else-something I’d heard recently-that those words reminded me of. It had been in this room, not long ago. Then I remembered. I went into the living room to retrieve my laptop from my desk and brought it to the kitchen. After firing it up, I found my way to the C-SPAN archive and the Senate committee hearing I’d been halfway through. When I’d spotted Anna at the end of the tape, they’d been about to grill the Treasury secretary.
I clicked on the second video of the morning’s proceedings and saw the earlier witnesses walking jerkily offscreen-Greene with Underwood at his side, raising his head in what looked like a laugh. There was a pause while the senators went out of the room to vote. Finally, another group of officials and advisers started gathering in the front row of seats behind the witness table, and one official replaced Harry’s and Greene’s nameplates with a sign that read SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY.
As I slowed the video, a man in his sixties walked into the shot. He was handsome and tanned, his face comfortably lined and shrewd. His movements were spare and he clasped his hands as the photographers took shots, looking born to the limelight. When he was introduced, he bowed his head, acknowledging the panel’s seniority and status. His opening statement was brief, and he leaned back to take questions as if eager to chat.
It was a tricky audience-the Democrats were unhappy because Wall Street had been bailed out, and the Republicans were just angry-but he was unfazed.
“Secretary Henderson, I appreciate your public service, but I must ask why on earth you think Wall Street deserves $700 billion for getting us in this mess?” asked the twitchy senator I’d seen before.
Tom Henderson rearranged the papers before him with his long fingers, his gestures delicate and precise, and gave an exasperated laugh.
“Senator, that’s a fine question,” he said. “The truth is that the banks did not deserve our money. We would have preferred for them to learn a lesson they wouldn’t easily forget. You may remember I used to work on Wall Street myself, and I can tell you, people who made such errors suffered a far deal more.”
I used to work on Wall Street myself. Curious, I pulled up another tab on the browser and searched for his biography on the Treasury website. “Before his nomination, Secretary Henderson served as chairman and chief executive officer of Rosenthal amp; Co., where his career began in 1968,” it read. Rosenthal was the bank that had recruited Greene, the place Harry had tried to emulate, and the one that had come through the financial crisis unscathed. Treasury made sure of that, Harry had said.
I clicked back to Henderson’s watchful face, and then I knew. That was what Harry had meant. “They” was Greene and Henderson’s alma mater, the pinnacle of Wall Street’s inner establishment that Harry had both admired and despised. He’s always felt like an outsider to Wall Street, not part of the club. When he was pushed out, he imagined that everyone was laughing at him. Those had been Felix’s words. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? Harry had told me himself: I wanted us to be like Rosenthal. They were never going to let it happen. I know that now.
Perhaps he’d been imagining it. Harry was depressed and angry, and he believed his bank had been stolen from him. Many people came through Episcopal’s psychiatry wards with similar delusions, believing that someone was out to get them. Their villain was often the government. Just because Harry had thought the Rosenthal alumni, including the Treasury secretary, had ruined him, that didn’t prove it was true. It didn’t make much difference, though. Harry had believed that and he’d killed Greene as a result.
The twitchy senator was still talking as I restarted the tape.
“Why did you bail them out with our money, then?”
Henderson smiled imperturbably. “Our responsibility was to stop the financial system from collapsing because of Wall Street’s errors. It was for these banks’ boards to determine what action was taken as a result of the mistakes. Some CEOs lost their jobs, as you’ve heard.”
The chairman passed the questions to a Republican I had not seen before, a boyish puritan with round glasses who looked as if he’d been bullied at school by jocks and was now taking it out on others. He had a reedlike, insinuating voice.
“From what we heard, Mr. Shapiro didn’t know what was going on in his own bank. I bet you’re glad he was fired.”
“That was the board’s decision, as I’ve said.”
“They were right, though, weren’t they?”
“I believe Seligman Brothers now has sound leadership in place,” Henderson said coolly. “That’s all I’d say.”
Henderson’s face filled the screen as I clicked off the video. Either he or Harry had not been honest. Harry had insisted to me on the beach that the Treasury had wanted his head, but the man in charge had just blithely denied it-it had been a decision of the Seligman board, and he had been a mere bystander.
I didn’t trust Harry and this was the first time I had even caught a glimpse of Tom Henderson, but I looked at his bland, practiced expression of innocence and I thought: You’re lying.