“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.”
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.”
