Текст книги "A Fatal Debt"

Автор книги: John Gapper

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

We don’t want the wrong guy leaving, he’d told me, training a flashlight on it to light it up. Then they’d slid open the bars and I’d walked through to find Harry waiting for me in the corner. That was where Lauren had been before she’d come down the street looking ashen-in Suffolk County with her lover. Five minutes later, I’d blundered to her door to press her about the secret she’d shared with him, days before he’d killed Greene. That circle worried me more than her warning, for it told me that Harry was still close to her. They’d never been out of touch-not before the killing and not since. I’d believed all along that Nora was Harry’s confidante, but I’d been wrong.

Should I take her words to heart, I wondered, and keep myself from further harm by abandoning this quixotic effort to discover the truth about Harry? My father had left town and no one else was speaking to me, so it would be simpler and less risky to call a halt. But momentum had taken me, and Lauren’s words echoed in my brain as a provocation, not a deterrent. I might have lost my job, but I wouldn’t let Harry use me.

If she wouldn’t tell me what had gone on between them, I’d find out in the place where it had all begun.

21

Seligman Brothers took up a block of Broadway, and it was hard to discern, looking down the avenue toward Times Square, the border between the worlds of finance and entertainment. The bright screens in Times Square outdid the spring sunshine with ads for movies and electronics, while the Seligman building was lined with strips of pulsing colors, blaring out stock prices from around the world.

One strip was a ticker of prices from the New York Stock Exchange, the stock symbols racing sideways with red or green numbers next to each one-BRK, ABK, TCI, GS, USX. I had no idea what they meant, but I knew they signified a lot to others. Buried in them were fortunes rising and falling.

I was sitting in a street garden, a collection of white metal chairs arranged around a courtyard space, with a waterfall running down a wall. The sun fell on a sliver of the square, the rest thrown into shadow by the canyon of skyscrapers around me. I tilted my head back to gaze up the forty floors of the Seligman building, its blank wall of glass and metal. A small jet passed way above the tower, streaming a faint white wisp into the blue and making me dizzy. Near me, a couple of office workers-a man and a woman-were lingering over a pair of torn-up croissants, heads down in whispered conversation. I wondered if they were doing a deal or having an assignation.

As I strained to hear, a man walked up to my table and asked me for change. I’d seen him on the street before-a tall Robinson Crusoe figure with a straggly gray beard and his rambling story written on a cardboard sign. He had to be schizophrenic, I guessed. I often felt as if I saw more mental illness on the way to work than when I arrived. I briefly considered trying to talk to him but gave him a dollar instead.

Then I saw Underwood coming out of the doors of the Seligman building, dressed in his banker’s uniform-an Italian suit and mustard yellow Hermes tie. He smoothed his hair with his right palm as a gust of wind lifted a lock, then walked over the road and up to me.

“Hello, Doctor,” he said, enclosing my hand in a lean grip. “It’s good to see you again. A lot of water under the bridge. Isn’t that the expression?”

There was sardonic amusement in his eyes, suggesting that I’d conceded something by coming to see him.

“A lot,” I said.

He took a newspaper someone had left on my table before and used it to swipe some invisible dirt off the chair opposite me, then sat down, looking over at the dealmakers, or lovebirds, near us. The man nodded to him furtively.

“Do we need to be out here?” Underwood said distastefully. “We might get more privacy inside.”

“I didn’t know what you’d prefer,” I lied.

I’d suggested meeting there because I’d felt afraid of going inside. I feared bumping into Felix in the building, not wanting to put him in the awkward position of seeing me. I also wondered whether it would be safe to confide in him. He’d made it clear that his loyalties were still with Harry, and enough information had already found its way to Riverhead.

“Okay then,” Underwood said, looking around again with the air of a celebrity who attracts attention if he lingers too long. “Let’s go.”

We walked back over the road and through the doors into the Seligman lobby. It was marble-floored, with a wide desk facing the entrance, behind which a line of women in uniform was handing out visitors’ passes. Underwood ignored them and strode toward the barriers to one side, glaring at the guard who stepped forward to try to impede my progress. The man stepped back obediently and instead waved a card at a barrier, making it part for me.

I expected us to rise far up the tower, but Underwood stepped out of the elevator on the fourth floor, leading me through some glass doors with a swipe of his card. We stepped onto a trading floor, with long lines of desks covered in multiple screens stacked beside and on top of one another as if they’d been dividing and multiplying like cells.

I’d never been in such a place before, and I had always imagined it would be a hive of noisy activity, like those they show on television, with young men in bright jackets waving and calling to one another. Instead it had a detached air, like a station that was monitoring the action on some far-off planet. There must have been a thousand people on the floor and a few were typing on keyboards, but most seemed to be doing nothing. They leaned back in their seats, gazing half-attentively into the digital void or chatting to others nearby. None looked especially happy or sad, just intrigued by the numbers on the screens.

A woman in a suit like Lauren’s sat on a desk, talking with three men gathered by her. They all nodded deferentially at Underwood as he passed by, walking between lines of desks toward a corner of the floor. I walked beside him, seeing the tilt of heads as we passed. Everyone was sitting in plain view, with none of the usual trappings of status-individual offices with assistants-yet I knew that all of these people probably earned more than me.

As we reached the corner, Underwood led me into a glass box office with windows looking out over Broadway and panels giving onto the trading floor to the interior. A blind was pulled down one of the four panels, but the others remained open, so he could watch everything that was going on outside and those who were interested could observe us, like animals in a zoo. There were photographs of his family on one ledge, but the room was otherwise free of personal touches, as if he were a short-term tenant who might be evicted at any moment.

He waved me to an armchair on the side with a vista of the open floor. A woman walked in and gave him a pile of papers that he perused with a frown before handing it back. Then he came and sat by me, grinning.

“So, Ben. How can I help?” he said.

I didn’t like Underwood any more than the first time we’d met. He was like a primate in expensive clothes that might tear me limb from limb. He emanated barely contained aggression and contempt for the mortals who didn’t exist in his elite world of corporate wheeler-dealing. I wondered if it was an act to intimidate opponents or if he really was like that. There was something of that quality about the whole place. He was the leader now, but I could imagine a pack of those traders crashing through the door at his first sign of vulnerability.

“When we talked before, by the plane, I remember you saying it was Mr. Shapiro’s fault, everything that had happened to him, before Mr. Greene’s death. I wanted to know what you meant,” I said.

Underwood let out a breath and laughed flatly. “That’s a long time ago. I don’t know what I might or might not have said back then, when Marcus was still alive. I don’t remember you telling me much, Ben. Not even your name, as I recall.”

“I didn’t. Things were different then.” I didn’t see any reason to apologize for that, to him of all people. “Look. Mr. Underwood. John. Could I ask you something? How much do you know of my involvement?”

“I’ve seen the documents and I’ve talked to the Greene family. It’s not a happy story, is it? There are accusations against this bank as well as you, and I need to be careful what I say. I don’t know if we should be talking. Margaret is a good friend of my wife’s.”

I leaned forward in my seat. If I was to get anything from him, he had to believe I wasn’t a threat. Despite his familial references to the Greenes, I suspected that he didn’t care too much about them now that Marcus, his boss and patron-the man who could influence his career-was dead. I’d adapted my pitch from something Lauren had said.

“When we met before, Mr. Shapiro was my patient, as you know. I couldn’t say anything about him. You’ll understand that as a banker. You can’t talk about the clients you’re working for. I can’t tell you anything that was said to me in confidence, and I’m not asking you to do it either. But my career is in jeopardy and I’m trying to understand why Mr. Shapiro killed Mr. Greene. Can you help me?”

Underwood nodded as if I’d made some sense. “I would have thought that was obvious,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “The merger went wrong. Harry was unstable and blamed his own failure on Marcus. He shot him. End of story.”

“But why did it go wrong? That’s the part I don’t yet understand. I’m not a financier. All this”-I waved my hand at the glass panels giving onto the vast, hushed trading floor-“mystifies me. It’s your world.”

I wondered whether the flattery had been too obvious as Underwood gazed at me. But it turned out that Lauren had been right about something else: male investment bankers have big egos. He stood and beckoned to me.

“You want to know how Harry fucked up? I’ll show you,” he said.

Underwood and I left the elevator on the thirty-fifth floor. It led to a softly furnished lobby like an English drawing room, with a grandfather clock in a corner, its mechanical ticks echoing in the empty space. There was little sign of life, nobody sitting at the oak reception desk near the elevator. After the glass-and-steel floor, it felt as if I’d stepped into a Walt Disney version of the nineteenth century. There were no doors or electronic panels to impede us here, just a long, dimly lit corridor, visible through a mahogany arch. As we walked, I saw dark rectangles marked on the walls, each illuminated by a brass wall lamp.

“Harry kept the Old Masters from the art collection up here. They’re in storage now. I don’t want them,” Underwood said.

He opened a wooden door at the end of the hallway and led me into a small space, with two empty desks next to each other, then through another into an enormous office. It was a shock to enter after the gloomy hallway, for it was filled with light from two sides. It was on the corner of the building, facing south toward Times Square to one side and Rockefeller Center and the East River to the other.

I looked around the room. There was a wooden desk bearing two neat piles of paper and a computer with a twin screen. It was still blinking figures and graphs, although it looked as though it hadn’t been used for a long time. On the side by the hallway, there was a recessed alcove lined with books, like a kind of tiny library with a sofa and chairs, where the occupant had received guests. A Persian rug, an antique by the look of its muted threads, dominated the floor.

I walked behind the desk to look out at the room from that angle. Two framed photographs stood on the desk-one of a boy, a college student, perhaps, wearing the bulky pads and bright purple shirt of a hockey player. Other players had flanked him, you could see, but they had been cropped out to leave only his face, staring out cheerfully from under a helmet. The other was a portrait of Nora, looking happier than I’d known her.

It had been Harry’s desk.

Underwood was standing on the rug, waiting for recognition of where we were to dawn on me. “What can you see from there?” he said.

I looked around me, casting my eyes across the empty office and then out of one window. “Rockefeller Center?”

He snorted. “Nothing. That’s what you can see. Fuck all.”

“What do you mean?”

“The guy was in his own world, cut off from what was happening, just his few cronies up here with him. The first thing Marcus did was to move down to the trading floor, get a proper grasp of what was going on.”

“Where you are now?”

“Someone’s got to keep the place going. Maybe I’ll keep the job-they’ll give it to me if they’ve got any sense. Marcus wanted to gut this whole floor, put some real revenue earners up here, but he hadn’t gotten around to it.”

I walked toward the window to look out at the view, a glittering panorama of the lower wedge of Manhattan. Underwood took my place behind the desk, pushing the chair back and planting his polished shoes on the surface. One of his heels grazed Nora’s photo, shifting it by an inch.

“So you’re saying he shouldn’t have agreed to the merger? He should have known there’d be problems?”

He shrugged. “Sure looks like it to me. Harry had got too grand. He thought he’d be able to lord it over Marcus. He was a fool-that guy knew more about making money than anyone I’d ever met. He was a great salesman, one of the best.”

“He wasn’t honest with Mr. Shapiro, though, was he? Didn’t tell him everything he should have.”

Underwood laughed out loud. “What should he have told him, Ben? This is Wall Street, for God’s sake. Harry wasn’t a widow or orphan. He was paid $45 million, he had a Gulfstream. There were bankers being paid millions of dollars to advise him. If you want me to feel sorry for him, you’re out of luck.”

“I suppose so,” I said doubtfully.

“Listen, what’s the biggest deal you’ve ever done? You’ve sold a house, haven’t you? So did you tell the buyers everything or did you cover up a few cracks? I bet you did. It’s theirjob to find them. That’s why they have an engineer.”

That wasn’t far from the truth, in fact. My mother’s house had some dampness, but we’d replastered it smoothly enough not to be obvious when we’d sold it after her death. That had allowed me to buy my apartment in New York.

“Caveat emptor,” I said.

“Right. Buyer beware. I was Marcus’s banker, and Harry got his own people to advise him, a woman he should have known wasn’t very good. She didn’t work hard enough or ask the right questions. That wasn’t our fault.”

I tried to look amused at his and Greene’s achievement in having deceived Harry and his female banker.

“Does she still work here?” I said.

He grinned. “No, she decided to leave, before we got rid of her. That was smart. She wouldn’t have lasted long.”

As he spoke, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his BlackBerry, the same one I’d seen him using on the Gulfstream.

“Okay, I’ll be there soon,” he said, and tucked it away again. “Well, Ben, I think that our excursion is over. I hope you learned something.”

I once witnessed an accident, a hit-and-run in which a car went through a red light and struck a woman before accelerating away. After she’d been taken away in an ambulance, the cops at the scene interviewed me and another passerby. The thing I remember best was that although we had no reason to lie and wanted to tell them exactly what had gone on, my version was completely at odds with his.

I told them the driver had ignored a red light. He said it was amber. The driver was a woman. No, it was a man. The cops who took it all down weren’t riled. They looked as if they expected a mixed-up version of the event. It was bad enough when we were doing the best we could to be honest. When people want to bend the truth, it’s a wonder anyone agrees on anything.

The scene that Anna had witnessed from the dune in East Hampton fit Underwood’s story. If Lauren had messed up the deal, had failed to realize that Grayridge was in much worse trouble than Greene admitted, that accounted for Harry’s distress.

Although Underwood was the type to lie for his own advantage, I didn’t see what his motive would be here. He hadn’t had to tell me about Lauren, and his contempt had looked genuine in the moment. He hadn’t even mentioned her name, just gloated about her in passing. If his rival had been male, I wouldn’t have known whom he’d meant. Yet one thing he’d said-she hadn’t worked hard enough and hadn’t noticed the flaw in Greene’s bank-made no sense to me. I didn’t think she’d told me the whole truth, but I believed she’d been honest about how she worked.

I’d seen the contempt in her face for Underwood and the men with whom she competed. Lauren had ascended Seligman on sheer merit-doing her job relentlessly, sweating the details, and leaving nothing to chance. I work harder, I hear more, she’d told me. I knew she’d have dug up every scrap of information before signing off on the deal. The woman who’d warned me not to ask difficult questions was not lazy, or vague, or willing to let things slide. If she hadn’t foretold the looming disaster, she’d had a reason.

22

After stashing my things in the locker at Riverhead, I was led inside without needing to have my hand stamped. This time, an officer guided me down a hallway into a wedge-shaped area lined with cubicle-like rooms just large enough for two people to sit. It was the place where lawyers came to meet prisoners, and they’d allowed me in as a psych. A guard sitting at a desk pointed me to a room with two chairs and a table squeezed inside. Once I’d waited a couple of minutes, I heard the guard greet someone and Harry came in, dressed in a dark green jumpsuit rather than the yellow for the visiting room. He stared at me as if I were a bug he’d tried to squash that was still buzzing around.

“You’re back,” he said.

“I am.”

I felt uneasy, although the officer sat just on the other side of the door. It looked as if he’d kept up his visits to the gym. His face was leaner and his arms were muscled under the short-sleeved jumpsuit. Wherever he ended up after this-a psychiatric hospital or a prison-he’d be able to take care of himself. After everything that I’d been through since I’d come to Riverhead the first time, it was disorienting to see him again. On my first visit, I’d gotten some inkling that something was wrong with his version of events, but I hadn’t known what it could be. Now I could feel myself getting close to the truth.

“What do you want?” he said disdainfully.

I’d come for a reason-to gain an introduction. I needed him to say something to me, but I couldn’t let him know what it was or why it mattered. The idea had come to me as I’d thought about what Lauren had told me. She’d told me I was in danger and that I should take care. It had struck me later that I wasn’t the only one at risk. The man in front of me had killed someone-he was dangerous. That had its uses, for it released me from some of the duties that constrained me. The only thing it required was to get him to lose his temper, which I didn’t think would be hard.

“Tell me why you killed Mr. Greene,” I said.

“I can’t remember what happened. I told you that.”

“I don’t think it had anything to do with the settlement or the plane. You were angry that Greene had deceived you before the merger. He’d hidden the truth about his bank. He’d made a fool of you.”

Harry didn’t move, but I felt something alter inside him, like the click of a thermostat just before the boiler fires up. There was a faint glow in his eyes now, the same ember I’d seen in the psych ER. I attempted to fan it into flames.

“You weren’t the only one he screwed,” I said.

Harry’s eyes narrowed as if he could hardly believe what I’d just said. Then he levered himself to his feet, leaning over me with his eyes a few inches from mine. I was shocked by their animal intensity. This was the Harry I’d always known was there: the ferocious one that Greene must have seen in his last seconds. I glanced through the glass panel in the door for help, but the guard was still absorbed in his paper.

“What the fuck do you mean by that? You should mind your own business. Why don’t you listen?” he hissed.

I tried to hold his gaze, but it wasn’t easy. Lauren had warned me to take care, and I knew then she was right. I’d always thought that Harry fell into another category from schizophrenics who were dangerous, but now I wasn’t sure. He really is violent, I thought– he didn’t just put it on in the Wall Street jungle. He stood over me for thirty seconds with his hands planted firmly on the table. Then his stare softened and he sat down, breathing unevenly.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know anything,” he said, as if reassuring himself.

“Tell me, then. What went wrong?” I said. “When we spoke in East Hampton, you said it was to do with mortgage bonds.”

His jaw was still clenched, but the question seemed to settle him, as if it were comforting to be back on finance and not fencing off hints about Lauren.

“Interested in Wall Street, are we?” he said, his voice like battery acid. “You wouldn’t understand that stuff even if I told you.”

“Try me.” I’d given up trying to be polite.

He gazed pointedly at me, as if I’d forced him to show that I was out of my depth, but he started talking. I wasn’t really interested in mortgages-I wanted to talk him down from his fury for a while before we got to the subject I was there for-but I tried to keep up with him as he spoke.

“Grayridge was into mortgage securitization. They took subprime mortgages from Texas and California and they bundled the paper into CDOs. They made money with that, so they got into synthetic CDOs, built from credit default swaps. I’m not going to try explaining that to you. They had a bunch named after elements. Cobalt, Gallium, Radon.”

“Elements?” I said.

“Yeah. Don’t ask me why. The guy who ran the origination desk was into chemistry.” He laughed grimly. “It was like alchemy in reverse. The substance the Elements turned into was shit.”

“So if the Elements were Mr. Greene’s responsibility, why didn’t the bank fire him when they went wrong? Why you?” I asked innocently.

Harry stared at me. “Now that isa good question. You’re asking the wrong guy, though. I mean, look.” He waved expansively at the tiny room. “Does this look like the Federal Reserve? Or the Treasury?”

“Who should I ask? Tom Henderson?”

Harry’s eyes registered that I knew something. “Maybe.”

“You told me you wanted your bank to be like Rosenthal but they wouldn’t allow it. I thought that was a strange thing to say, but I did some research. I found out that Henderson was at Rosenthal before the Treasury. You told me that Greene worked there, too. That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?”

Harry laughed bitterly. “Is it? That’s all you need to know about Wall Street, not the math about CDOs. Rosenthal runs the place, it always has. Why do you think Henderson is Treasury secretary? Count how many Treasury secretaries they’ve had. They’ve got Washington stitched up.”

I’d heard lots of people say Wall Street was a cabal. To hear one of its own saying that, even in jail, was different. Was Harry paranoid? I wondered again. There was something almost possessed about him, but perhaps he’d been driven to obsession. I thought of Henderson on the C-SPAN video, his quality of controlled calm.

“I went to my board, told them all the problems we’d had with Grayridge, how he’d landed us with all that crap. I didn’t know the full story then. I …” He paused and seemed to think better of what he’d been about to tell me. “They didn’t listen. They’d all had calls from Henderson saying he wanted me out.”

“Could he do that?”

“He could do whatever the hell he wanted. They needed the Treasury’s money. They were cowards.”

We’d reached the moment for which I’d come to Riverhead.

“So Mr. Greene’s dead but Mr. Henderson’s doing just fine, isn’t he? What does that make you feel?” I said.

Harry grimaced, then got up and walked a couple of paces to the door, looking through the pane of glass set into it to check on the guard outside. Then he turned to face me with his back to it, his face fervent.

“You know what I feel, Doctor?” he said contemptuously. “I feel like doing to him what I did to Greene.”

He’d given me what I’d come for-a threat to Henderson. It was all I needed and I didn’t want to spend any more time there, although I’d learned some other useful things. I signaled to the guard and got up, leaving Harry staring bitterly after me. The road was clear when I drove out of the lot, but I stayed well below the speed limit until I was a long way clear of Suffolk County. I didn’t want to be hauled off to Yaphank again.

Somewhere on the journey from New York to Washington, D.C., maybe around Chesapeake Bay, you cross the border into the South. The air turns softer, the humidity rises, and you are deposited off the Acela at Union Station into another country entirely, with its slow cabs and steadier, more baroque manners than its Yankee cousin.

It was a bright June day, with all of the city’s monuments shining in the sun, and I stood for a few minutes gathering my thoughts on the paved section of Pennsylvania Avenue, where tourists massed in groups next to the White House railings. I was at the edge of the strip opposite the eight Greek columns of the Treasury, its granite facade drab and gray next to its iridescent neighbor.

I’d arrived early, having caught the early train out of New York, and I pulled a dollar bill from my pocket to look at it. On it were the crumpled face of George Washington, the Treasury seal in green, and Tom Henderson’s scrawled signature. To the left, over the Bon the Federal Reserve Bank of New York seal, was a promise in uppercase letters: THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE. I’d come to ask about a fatal debt.

Having climbed the steps and passed security, I was directed up a stone staircase to the third floor. I set out along a dim corridor, checking a piece of paper on which I had scrawled the number of the room. When I looked up, I saw to my surprise the man I’d come to visit. He was standing by himself about fifty yards down the corridor, gazing at me kindly. On the C-SPAN video, I’d seen senators melt in his presence, but I hadn’t grasped why until that moment. He stood in socks with a gentle smile on his face as if he had all the time in the world. He looked completely relaxed, his shoulders at ease and his face soft and knowing, like a beneficent monarch. As I reached him, he stepped forward one pace to squeeze my hand.

“Dr. Cowper, I presume,” he said, pronouncing my name correctly and smiling wryly at his own Victorian reference.

He led me into a high-ceilinged room with ornate plasterwork and a chandelier that looked as if it could do with a dust. It was a drawing room, I guessed, with drapes that hung in folds and Louis XV-style chairs arranged by a mahogany table. As we entered it, a young man appeared. He was plump, with a bland smile and rimless glasses-impossible to pick out in a crowd. Henderson waved me to an armchair and sat opposite, while his new companion perched a few feet behind him like a stage prompt.

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.”