“A neuropsychologist?” I said.
Quick said, “She’s a therapist, that’s all I know. Woman shrink, Koppel, she’s been on TV, radio.”
“Mary Lou Koppel.”
“You know her?”
“I’ve heard of her,” I said.
“At first Gav saw one of her partners, but they didn’t hit it off, so he switched to her.”
“What was wrong with the first partner?”
Quick shrugged. “The whole process—you pay for your kid to go in and talk to someone, it’s all hush-hush, you’re not allowed to know what’s going on.” He dragged on his cigarette. “Gavin told me he wasn’t comfortable with the guy and that Koppel was going to see him. Same price. They both charged two hundred bucks an hour and didn’t accept insurance.”
“Was it helpful?”
“Who knows?”
“What feedback did Dr. Koppel give you?”
“Nothing. I was out of that loop—the whole therapy thing. I travel a lot. Too much, been meaning to cut back.”
He smoked the cigarette down to the butt, snatched another, and chain-lit, then snuffed out the first one between his thumb and index finger. Onto the carpet.
He mumbled something.
Milo said, “Sir?”
Quick’s smile was abrupt and unsettling. “I travel all the time, and it’s hell. You know the airlines, disciples of the devil. Frequent business flyer? They could care less. This time, after Sheila called me about Gavin, and I told them why I needed to go home, I got treated like a king. They tag you as bereaved, and you get prioritized all the way. Upgrade to first class, no one could do enough for me.”
He barked what might’ve been laughter. Smoked, coughed, smoked some more.
“That’s what it took. That’s what it took to get treated like a human being.”
*
Milo asked him about his daughter, and Quick said, “I told Kelly to stay in Boston. She’s got law school, what good can it do her to come here? If you release the . . . release Gavin to us and we have a funeral, then she can come home. When will that be?”
“Hard to say, sir,” said Milo.
“That seems to be your tune.”
Milo smiled. “Kayla Bartell—”
“Haven’t seen her around for a while. She knew Gav from high school, and they fooled around for a while.”
“Fooled around?”
“Like kids do,” said Quick. “Her father’s some kind of composer. Eileen informs me he’s important.”
“You’ve never met him.”
“Why would I?”
“Gavin and Kayla—”
“That was Gav’s business . . . to be honest, guys, I don’t get these questions,” said Quick. “What happened can’t have anything to do with Gav. He went up to Mulholland with some girl and a pervert—some sex fiend—took advantage, right? It’s obvious, right? Isn’t that what you’re thinking?”
Before Milo could answer, Quick’s eyes swung to the stairs. Eileen Paxton stomped down, ignored us, and hurried into the kitchen.
A kitchen faucet opened. Then, the hard clash of pans. Moments later, Sheila Quick made her way down the stairs, tentative, unsteady. She stopped on the bottom step, studied the floor, as if unwilling to commit. Her eyes were unfocused, and she gripped the banister for support. She wore a pink housecoat, had aged a decade overnight.
She saw us, said, “Hello” in a slurred voice. She noticed the cigarette in her husband’s hand, and her lips turned down.
Jerome Quick smoked defiantly. “Don’t stand on the bottom like that, come all the way down—be careful, you’re on Valium.” He made no effort to help her.
She remained in place. “Is there anything . . . new, Detective?”
Milo shook his head. “Sorry to bother you again, Mrs. Qui—”
“No, no, no, you’re helping me—us. You were very . . . gracious. Last night. It can’t have been easy for you. You were gracious. It wasn’t easy for you or for me.”
Jerry Quick said, “Sheila, go back to bed. You’re—”
“They were nice last night, Jerry. It’s only polite that I—”
“I’m sure they were great, but—”
“Jerry. I. Want. To. Be. Polite.” Sheila Quick came down the stairs and sat down on a side chair. “Hello,” she said, brightly.
“Ma’am,” said Milo, “we have learned that the girl with Gavin wasn’t Kayla Bartell.”
Sheila Quick said, “You said she was blond.”
Jerome Quick said, “There’s a rare commodity in L.A.”
“I do have a picture,” said Milo. “It’s not a pleasant picture, it’s postmortem, but if you could look at it—if we could identify her, it might speed things along.”
Sheila Quick stared at him. He showed her the death shot.
“She looks so . . . dead. Poor little thing.” Shaking her head. She snatched the photo from Milo and held it closer. Her fingers trembled, and the corners flapped. “Are you showing pictures like this of Gavin to other people?”
“Sheila,” said Quick.
“No, ma’am,” said Milo. “We know who Gavin is.”
She examined the photo. “Gavin never said he had a new girlfriend.”
“Gavin was twenty,” said Jerome Quick. “He didn’t need to check in about his social life.”
Sheila Quick continued to stare at the picture. Finally, she handed it back.
“Another one,” she said.
“Ma’am?”
“Someone else’s baby is gone.”
CHAPTER
5
Milo received written permission to speak to Gavin’s doctors, and we left. It was nearly 5 P.M., the sky was milky white and poisonous, and both of us were low and hungry. We drove to a deli on Little Santa Monica, had sandwiches and coffee. Mine was roast beef with hot mustard on pumpernickel. Milo opted for a wet, multidecked monster layered with pastrami and coleslaw and pepperoncinis and some things I couldn’t identify, all stuffed into a French roll. When he bit into it, it collapsed. That seemed to give him joy.
He swallowed, and said, “Model family.”
“They’re no ad for domestic life,” I said, “but the father may be right, and it doesn’t matter.”
“Perverted stranger kills his boy. That sure distances it from the family.”
“I don’t see this as a family crime,” I said. “The fact that the family doesn’t know the girl could mean she’s the kind of girl you don’t bring home to Mother. Which may lead us to her being the primary target.”
“Someone with nasty friends.”
“The killer impaled her and took her purse. That could’ve been trophy-taking, but what if he didn’t want her identified quickly?”
“The primary target for sex, killing, or both?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “There was no sexual assault, but to me the impaling still has a sexual quality to it. Gavin was shot once—dispatched. That’s consistent with the killer wanting him out of the way so he could take care of his real business.”
“If Gavin was shot first. No way we can pinpoint that.”
“Logic says he was,” I said. “The girl was alive when the killer impaled her. It’s unlikely Gavin would’ve sat by passively while that happened. Or that the killer would’ve taken the risk of fighting a young, healthy male. He dispatched Gavin, with a single shot, then turned his attention to the girl. Her size, her fear, and the killer’s overwhelming dominance subdued her. Maybe he promised her he wouldn’t hurt her if she didn’t resist. Any signs she fought back?”
He shook his head.
I said, “She watched Gavin get murdered, sat there, terrified, and hoped for the best. The killer used the spear on her, then he shot her, too. To me that says big-time anger. With both kids dead, he had time to inspect his handiwork, fool with the scene. Either Gavin and the girl had already begun a sexually charged tableau, or he set one up. Either because it was a sex crime, or he wanted it to be seen that way.”
He put his sandwich down. “You’re offering me lots of choices.”
“What are friends for?” I said. “Have you come across any other impalement murders?”
“Nothing yet.” He picked up his sandwich, and a huge chunk disappeared in his maw. Think the condom was Gavin’s, or did the killer bring it?”
“It was in his pocket, so it was probably his.”
“So you think exploring Gavin’s psyche is a waste of time? I was thinking his therapist might be helpful. And you know her.”
“I know who she is.”
“From her being on TV.”
Here we go. I hid my mouth behind my coffee cup.
He said, “You make a face when you talk about her.”
“She’s not someone I’d refer to,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I can’t get into the details.”
“Give me the basics.”
*
Five years ago, an otherwise thoughtful judge had asked me to evaluate a seven-year-old girl caught in a vicious divorce. Both parents were trained marriage counselors. That should have been ample warning.
The mother was a young, passive, pinch-featured, preternaturally anxious woman who’d grown up with violent, alcoholic parents and had shifted from couples work to processing hardened drug addicts at a county-financed clinic in Bellflower. Her ex-husband, twenty years older, was pompous and psychopathic, a newly minted sex therapist and guru of sorts, with an Ivy League Ph.D. and a brand-new job at a yoga institute in Santa Barbara.
The two of them hadn’t spoken in over a year but each insisted upon joint physical custody. The arrangement was to be simple: three days at one home, four at the next. Neither parent saw the problem shuttling a seven-year-old girl ninety miles between her father’s faux-adobe house at the ashram and the mother’s sad, furnished apartment in Glendale. The alleged crux of the conflict was the calendar—who got four days, who got three, and what about holidays? After two months of raging debate, the topic switched to coordinating the conventional diet favored by the mother with the vegan regimen embraced by the father.
The real crux was mutual hatred, two hundred thousand dollars in a jointly owned investment account, and the alleged sexual rapaciousness of the father’s four girlfriends.
When I do custody evaluations, I make it a point to talk to therapists, and these combatants each had one. The father’s was an eighty-year-old Indian swami who spoke heavily accented English and took medication for high blood pressure. I made a trip to Santa Barbara, spent a pleasant two hours with the corpulent, bearded fellow, breathing in incense and learning nothing of substance. The father hadn’t kept an appointment with his avatar in six months.
“Is that okay with you?” I asked the swami.
He shifted out of lotus position and did something impossible with his body, winked, and smiled. “What will be, will be.”
“There’s a song like that.”
“Doris Day,” he said. “Terrific singer.”
*
The mother’s therapist was Mary Lou Koppel, and she refused to talk to me.
First she avoided me completely by ignoring my calls. After my fifth attempt to get through, she phoned and explained. “I’m sure you understand, Dr. Delaware. Confidentiality.”
“Dr. Wetmore’s given consent.”
“I’m afraid it’s not hers to give.”
“Whose is it?”
The phone crackled. She said, “I’m speaking conceptually, not legally. Teresa Wetmore is in an extremely vulnerable place. Thad is extremely abusive, as I’m sure you know.”
“Physically?”
“Emotionally,” she said. “Where it counts. Teresa and I have made progress, but it’s going to take time. I can’t risk unleashing the demons.”
“My concerns are for the child.”
“You have your priorities, I have mine.”
“Dr. Koppel, what I’m after is any insight you can give me that might help me make recommendations to the court.”
Silence on the line. Static.
“Dr. Koppel?”
“The only insight I can give you, Doctor,” she said, “is to avoid Thad Wetmore like the plague.”
“You’ve had troubles with him.”
“I’ve never met him, Doctor. And I intend to keep it that way.”
I wrote her a follow-up letter that was returned unopened. The custody case festered until the Wetmores ran out of money, and the lawyers quit. The judge followed my recommendations: Both parents needed extensive child-rearing education before joint custody had a chance of working. In any event, a weekly two-hundred-mile round-trip shuttle wasn’t in the best interests of the child. When the judge asked if I’d like to be the educator, I said I’d supply a list of names, then I thought about who’d annoyed me recently.
Three months later, Teresa and Thaddeus Wetmore filed separate ethical complaints against me with the state psychology board. It took a while to get out from under that, but finally the charges were dismissed for no cause. Shortly after that, Dr. Mary Lou Koppel seemed to be popping up all over the airwaves.
An expert on couples communication.
*
Milo finished his sandwich. “Sounds like a lovely person. What’s her shtick for the media?”
“Anything she wants it to be.”
“Self-proclaimed expert?”
“Talk shows are always hungry for filler,” I said. “If you say you’re a specialist, you are. My guess is Koppel hired a publicist and bought herself a nice little dog and pony show that feeds her practice.”
“So young, yet so cynical.”
“One out of two ain’t bad.”
He grinned, sopped juice from his plate with his sandwich, and finished off the soggy mess. “Is head injuries a hot media topic?”
“If you’re asking whether Koppel’s a qualified neuropsychologist, I don’t know. Which is what Gavin needed, at least in the beginning. Someone who could find out what was really going on with his brain and make specific recommendations for rehabilitation.”
“The neurologist said he couldn’t find anything.”
“All the more so,” I said. “If I had to bet, I’d say Koppel wasn’t into neuropsych. It’s a small field that requires specialized training. Most neuropsych people don’t do straight psychotherapy and vice versa.”
His eyes half closed. “Claire Argent was into that, right?”
Dr. Claire Argent had been one of many victims of a monster we’d chased a couple of years ago. A quiet woman, cloaked in secrets, found bisected at the waist and stashed in the trunk of her car.
“She was,” I said.
He breathed in deeply. Closed his eyes and massaged the lids. “You’re saying Gavin mighta been mishandled by Koppel?”
“Or I’m wrong, and he got a thorough workup.”
“I was thinking it would be smart to talk to Koppel. Even if Gavin turns out not to be the primary vic, maybe he mentioned the blonde to his shrink, and I can cut through a lot of procedure.”
“Don’t hold your breath trying to get through. Given her high profile, I don’t imagine she’d want to be associated with a murdered patient.”
“I’ve got written consent from the parents.”
“That allows her to talk,” I said. “It doesn’t compel her. She can be choosy about what she tells you. If she tells you anything.”
“You really don’t like her.”
“She was obstructive when she didn’t have to be. A child’s welfare was at issue, and she didn’t care.”
He smiled. “Actually, I was thinking I could ask you to speak with her. One doc to another. That would free me up to do the other stuff. As in following up with Missing Persons, maybe expanding to searches up and down the state, going over the autopsy reports, ballistics records, checking out the girl’s clothes. No sweat, though. I took this one on, I’ll see it through.”
He threw money on the table, and we left the deli.
“I’ll talk to her,” I said.
He stopped on the sidewalk. Beverly Hills women glided around us, in a cloud of perfume. “You’re sure.”
“Why not? No phone tag this time. Face-to-face, it’ll be interesting.”
CHAPTER
6
My house, designed for two, is set among pines and perched above a bridle path that snakes through Beverly Glen. High white walls, polished wood floors, skylights in interesting places, and not too much furniture make it look larger than it is. Realtor’s hype would label it, “airy yet proportioned for intimacy.” When I arrive home alone, it can be a mass of echoes and negative space.
This evening it felt cold. I walked past the mail on the dining room table and headed for my office. Booting the computer, I looked up Mary Lou Koppel in the American Psychological Association directory and ran her through a few Internet search engines.
She’d earned her Ph.D. at the same place I had, the U. A year older than I, but she’d entered grad school shortly after I’d finished. Her dissertation on breast-feeding and anxiety in new mothers had been accepted five years later, and she’d followed up with an internship at one of the university hospitals and a postdoc fellowship at a mental health clinic in San Bernardino.
Her license was bona fide, and the state board listed no disciplinary actions against her. I’d been right about her lacking any training or certification in neuropsychology.
Her name pulled up 432 hits on the computer, all excerpts from interviews she’d given on various TV and radio shows. A closer look revealed lots of repetition; it cooked down to three dozen actual references.
Mary Lou Koppel had spoken with great confidence about communication barriers between men and women, gender identity, eating disorders, weight loss strategies, corporate problem solving, midlife crisis, adoption, learning disabilities, autism, puberty, adolescent rebellion, premenstrual syndrome, menopause, panic disorder, phobias, chronic depression, posttraumatic stress, sexism, racism, ageism, sizeism.
Alex 18 - Therapy Page 4