A Fatal Debt Read Online Free Page B

point. Anxiety and wealth had made Harry hypersensitive. The thread count on the grayish sheets was lower than he was used to, and there was no goose-down duvet. He wouldn’t have noticed either if he’d been at ease.
    “I’m sorry, Mr. Shapiro. Perhaps we can discuss all this with your wife and make a discharge plan. We’ll try to agree on a way forward.”
    Harry gave a cynical grunt, but he at least agreed to wait for Nora. On the way back to Twelve South, I considered my predicament. Jim’s escape to Westchester had put me in charge of Harry, and he was becoming a difficult assignment despite my earlier wish to get hold of him. I couldn’t in good conscience let him out immediately, but he had a lot more power than most patients—and no compunction about using it.
    My best hope, I thought, was Nora.
    An hour later I was standing in what we generously called the library, a room with a sprinkling of books and a computer on which patients could send email, listening to Lydia Petrovsky, a birdlike patient whohad been with us for a week. Unlike Harry, she showed no sign of wanting to leave—quite the opposite—but her insurer was threatening to withdraw coverage and the finance department wanted her out. As I was trying to persuade her to go back to her apartment and attend the day clinic, my pager vibrated with a summons to see the president.
    Sarah Duncan’s office was in a corner of the Shapiro Pavilion, with a view toward the Queensboro Bridge that went to waste. Her twin assistants were both pale and pretty, in their mid-twenties, and dressed immaculately in short skirts and chunky jewelry. One gave me a bottle of water from a small refrigerator and a pro forma apology for Duncan keeping me waiting, which seemed to be the normal course of events. Then she returned to clicking through emails. Since no one else was appreciating the view, I looked at the cars rumbling over the bridge from Queens to Manhattan. The Williamsburg Bridge and the far reaches of Brooklyn were visible through its girders as a cable car looped its way to Roosevelt Island.
    “Dr. Cowper?” said a low voice from the doorway, making me jump in surprise. “Please come through.”
    Duncan had translucent eyes, silver hair shorn into a bob, and a face that was too smooth to be natural. She scared me. I followed her into a cool corner office that was laid out neatly with no stray papers. There was a sofa, two armchairs, and a glass-topped desk with two inch-thick files resting on it, a fountain pen set precisely beside them. None of the furniture was the standard-issue stuff of the kind that cluttered the rest of the place. She stood by her desk, moving a sheet of paper in front of her and examining it minutely.
    “Dr. Cowper, I’ve just been reading about your work here.” She tapped the file. “Very impressive, I must say. You are clearly a highly valued member of the team,” she said, as if pinning a minor medal on me.
    “Thank you, Mrs. Duncan. That’s kind.”
    “I didn’t interrupt you, by the way? You have a few minutes to spare?”
    “It sounded as if it was urgent.”
    “That’s one thing I like about doctors—always ready for an emergency,” she said with a curt laugh as she gestured for me to sit opposite her on a sofa. There were clearly other things about us that she didn’t like. “This must be one of the trickiest situations I’ve faced in my time here.”
    “I take it you mean Mr. Shapiro?”
    “I count myself as a friend of Nora Shapiro, whom I recruited to our board, so I’m anxious to do everything we can for them. You did the right thing to admit him, but I’m hearing that he now prefers to be discharged.”
    “He told me so this morning.”
    “I take it that we can fulfill his wishes,” she said, gazing at me firmly.
    There was a pause while I thought about what to say, apart from:
Mind your own business. You’re a bureaucrat, not a doctor
. I’d taken the Hippocratic oath to heal patients, while