I’ll bet he did, I thought, but I tried not to let my resentment show. “He seemed to be bearing up well.”

The fragile look came back to her face and she turned away from me to examine a steel sculpture on a side table. She brushed a tear away with one finger.

“He’s happier with something to work on-his defense, I mean. That’s what I wanted to talk about. We’ve talked to the lawyers and they think he has a strong defense. He wasn’t thinking clearly, that’s obvious to anyone. He was in a bad way, and seeing Marcus was too much. Poor Marcus.”

Poor Nora, poor Harry, poor Marcus. What about poor Ben?I thought. I liked Nora and felt for her, but I suspected that she wouldn’t be any more use to me than Harry or Duncan when it came to it. Her first loyalty was to her husband, and I was Harry’s alibi for killing Greene, his best hope of evading life in jail. I’d let him out of the hospital, and as Pagonis had observed, it had been very convenient. If it came to a choice between Harry and me, I knew she wouldn’t hesitate. Love would triumph over sympathy.

“I spoke to the detectives. They told me Mr. Shapiro left without you knowing. How did he manage that?”

It was a blunt question, and I meant it that way. I wanted to shock her into acknowledging her failure to heed my warnings. It had the intended effect, for she paled.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Cowper. You told me to keep an eye on him. I know you did. I was in the kitchen and Harry was taking a nap. I heard the phone and him answering, then nothing. When I went to check on him twenty minutes later, he’d gone.”

“So Ms.…” I hesitated, not wanting to sound intimate but realizing as I started on the sentence that I didn’t know her second name. “Anna. She didn’t see him leave?”

“She was with a friend in East Hampton. I wish she’d been here-things would have been different. Anna wouldn’t have let it happen, I know she wouldn’t.” She looked at me sadly, but I wasn’t ready to let her off that easily.

“You called Mr. Lustgarten?”

“He came over, but we couldn’t find Harry. The men downstairs said the car was gone from the garage. They’ve got a way of knowing. It was evening before he called. It was terrible. I still don’t understand where Harry got that gun from. You told me to lock up the Beretta and I did that. It’s still in my safe in East Hampton. He got hold of another somehow, I don’t know who from.”

Who from, I noticed she’d said. Not where from. I wondered if she was telling the whole truth or if she had more of an idea than she’d admitted. Sometimes in therapy, a single word is a clue to what the patient is hiding.

Nora looked at me penitently. “Dr. Cowper. Ben. I want you to know how sorry I am that I didn’t take your advice in the hospital. I’ve thought about that a lot since then, and I’ll always regret it. If I can do anything to make it up to you, I will.”

They were only words, but after the aggression and blame that I’d faced over the previous few days, they meant something to me. She sounded genuinely mortified by her blunder.

“There is one thing,” I said, not wanting to miss the opportunity. “You know Sarah Duncan, don’t you? She told me you’re friends.”

She looked anxious. “She scares me, to tell you the truth. I tried to leave the board once, but she wouldn’t let me. I guess she saw Harry’s money leaving, too. She took me out to lunch and forced me to stay.”

I smiled at that-I could imagine the scene in some Upper East Side restaurant and how implacable Duncan must have been.

“It’s very important for me that the hospital supports me. If there’s anything you can do to persuade her, I’d be grateful,” I said.

Nora’s face lightened as I said it, as if she welcomed the chance to expiate her guilt. “Of course. She has to do that. It’s only right.”

She walked me out of the apartment to the elevator, and on the way, I glanced into their kitchen in the hope of spotting Anna again. The room was empty. She was somewhere else, deep inside.

Harry sat at a green baize-covered table, his face rigid, his right hand clamped stiffly over his left. In front of him, a scrum of photographers-some standing, others crouching, and two leaning forward so that the tips of their lenses were a couple of feet from his nose-was clicking away, sounding like a swarm of cicadas. Harry looked as if he were only just restraining himself from punching one of them.

He was in banker’s garb, which I hadn’t seen him wearing before-black suit, white shirt with a button-down collar, and a red tie with a pattern it was hard to make out on my computer screen. I’d located the recording of the Senate hearing, as Felix had said, in the C-SPAN archive. It had taken place the previous fall, just after Seligman had been rescued and Harry had resigned. I sat alone that night, searching the past for what had driven Harry to murder.

The man to Harry’s right on the screen was at ease. He was tall-or looked as if he would be standing up-and trim. His brown hair was so neat that it looked molded, like that on a Ken doll. He had pale, clear skin and a strong jaw with a cleft in his chin. The snappers were mauling him, too, but he didn’t look stressed. His bearing suggested that he was sure everything would work out fine for him. He leaned forward and minutely adjusted the card in front of him: MARCUS GREENE. I hardly recognized him alive.

The snappers hurried back to crouch in front of a curved table on a dais at which the twenty senators sat. The room was vast and ceremonial, richly paneled in mahogany and marble, and above the dais was a spatchcocked eagle and the American flag. Pasty-faced staffers in boxy suits who looked light- and sleep-deprived were passing through a brass-engraved door beneath the eagle. The chairman looked unhealthy-plump and rumpled, with thick white hair, jowls, and a pug nose-but he exuded satisfaction at being the center of attention, as if this moment were enough to repay his slog to seniority. He rapped his gavel.

“I will remind everyone that this is a hearing, so we will not have any disruptions, no matter what they feel,” he said croakily. “Believe me, I feel as strongly as anyone here about curbing the excesses we’ve witnessed on Wall Street. We will ask the Treasury secretary about that later, but our first panel has many questions to answer. I urge them to talk openly, not to attempt to hoodwink the American people.”

The camera cut to Harry and Greene and showed the lawyers and officials arrayed to their rear in mute support. Just left of Harry’s head, about two rows back, was Nora. In the front row, precisely between Harry and Greene, as if to emphasize his neutrality between his old and new bosses, was Felix. Sitting in my apartment, months after this show trial had been enacted, I found myself urging Harry to stay calm. It was useless to try to influence the past, but I couldn’t stop myself. As if hearing me, Harry nodded as Greene took the microphone.

“Senator, I pledge the full cooperation of Seligman Brothers in uncovering the mistakes that were made, because there were significant errors that we all regret, and in ensuring that the taxpayers’ investment is repaid,” Greene said sternly.

Not having bothered to follow a congressional committee hearing before, I didn’t know what to expect, but it turned out that the first order of business was to let all the senators make a speech while the witnesses sat silently. Greene composed his face in a supportive expression, while Harry glowered. I skipped through this interlude until I saw the camera focus on Harry, who was reading from a piece of paper clutched in both hands, wearing his spectacles. Once I’d slowed down the video to listen, his speech sounded good. I assumed that Felix had drafted something contrite.

“I would like to assure the committee that, while I regret bitterly what happened, I always did what I believed was best for Seligman Brothers and for this country.” His voice was calm, but his shoulders slumped in relief as he came to the end of the sentence. He’d obviously been tensing himself to get through it.