“The only problem is, Alex, a couple of shrinks doing all that billing would be physically impossible.”
“So they use assistants—peer counselors. And they flat out lie, bill for sessions that never take place.”
“Peer counselors,” he said. “Meaning other cons? Yeah, that’s the rage, ain’t it? Ex-gangbangers become facilitators, junkies go the drug-counseling route. That’s where a guy like Degussa would fit in . . . scumbags doing therapy. That’s legal?”
“Everything depends how the contract’s written,” I said. “And a guy like Sonny would know how to get a juicy government contract.”
“All those billable hours,” he said. “The place would be jumping. But it’s not.”
“Maybe that discrepancy occurred to Gavin.”
“Brain-damaged ace reporter ferrets out fraud,” he said. He drank juice, put the carton down, wiped his lips with his sleeve. “All you need is a room and some chairs to make a million. Yeah, it’s a fat scam, but Sonny gives away a million a year. Why would he mess with this? The game?”
“Maybe something else,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Making Mary Lou happy.”
“She didn’t end up too happy,” he said.
“Maybe something went wrong.”
“So they were cleaning the carpet. The day after we spoke to Sonny. Who was doing it, scuzzbags like Roland Kristof?”
“Didn’t appear to be,” I said. I gave him the name of the company, and he copied it down.
“A rehab scam,” he said. “But we’re back to the same question: Where does Jerry Quick fit in?”
“That office of his,” I said. “Not much business goes on there.”
“A front.”
“Maybe his real job’s working for Sonny.”
He frowned. “This whole scenario, it makes Quick more than just a sleazy bastard. It means he knows why his son was killed and instead of telling us, he cleans out the room.”
“That could’ve been fear,” I said. “First Gavin, then Mary Lou Koppel. That’s why Quick left town. When you called the office, no one answered. Maybe Quick told Angie to take some time off.”
“He splits . . . leaves his wife behind . . . because they don’t get along anyway. He doesn’t give a damn about her.”
“That would also explain the daughter—Kelly—not coming home after Gavin’s death. Quick wants her out of the way.”
“The scam crumbling . . . if it really exists.”
“A scam would explain Flora Newsome, too. While she was working in the parole office, she learned something she shouldn’t have. Maybe Mary Lou got greedy and wanted a bigger cut. Or Gavin’s getting killed changed her perspective.”
“What, she suddenly developed moral fiber?”
“Money games are one thing, murder’s another. Perhaps Koppel panicked and wanted out. Or she tried to lean on Sonny.”
He got up again, circled the room a couple of times. “There’s another possible angle on Flora, Alex. She could’ve been in on the scam, flagging files of incoming parolees, passing along names.”
“Could be,” I said, thinking about Evelyn Newsome, living on memories, trying to put her life together.
He stared out the kitchen window for a long time. “Career criminal, parole officer, shady metals dealer. And Professor Larsen, the human rights dude. We’ve been focusing on Gull, haven’t paid much attention to Larsen.”
He drained the juice carton, let out a long, windy sigh. “I’ve got an appointment with Jerry Quick’s CPA in Brentwood. Then I’d better start doing detail work on Degussa and Hacker, find out, among other things, if either of them interfaced with Flora’s satellite office.”
He snapped the case shut and saluted. “All this still leaves Crystal, the mystery blonde.”
“Gavin’s girl,” I said. “He confided in her. Or he didn’t, and she just happened to be in the wrong place.”
“So you’ve changed your mind, she wasn’t the primary target.”
“Flexibility is the hallmark of maturity.”
He grinned. “Seeing as your schedule’s open, should you choose to accept the mission . . .”
“What?”
“Scholarly research. Excavate every goddamn thing you can about Albin Larsen and the others. Look for the kind of easy government money we’re guessing about. State, local, Fed, private. Something with poor oversight that would be easy to pad.”
“Sounds like a typical grant,” I said.
“So young, yet so cynical. So, do we have a deal?”
“A deal implies reciprocity,” I said.
“Virtue, m’lad, is its own reward.”
CHAPTER
32
Virtue took its sweet time paying off.
Jerome Quick’s name pulled up no hits. Neither did Raymond Degussa’s or Bennett A. Hacker’s.
Edward “Sonny” Koppel was a man of means, but his public profile was low: twenty references in all, sixteen noting Koppel’s charitable contributions. Most of those consisted of Koppel’s name on donor lists. When he was identified at all it was as an “investor and philanthropist.” No photos accompanied any of the citations.
Albin Larsen was a good deal more cybervisible. For the last decade, he’d balanced the practice of psychology with delivering lectures on the role of psychology in social activism in his native Sweden as well as in France, Holland, Belgium, Canada, and Kenya. His name popped up sixty-three times.
That kind of travel conflicted with doing long-term therapy; then again, it was easier to maintain a patient load when you weren’t actually seeing your patients.
I began slogging through the hits. Larsen’s connections to Africa went beyond giving speeches; he’d been a U.N. observer in Rwanda during the genocide that had seen eight hundred thousand Tutsis exterminated and had consulted to the subsequent war crimes tribunal.
Some of the citations were repetitive, but the thirty I examined were all more of the same: Larsen doing good works.
Not the profile of a swindler or a murderer. Before reaching the end, I shifted gears and started searching for psychotherapy programs for parolees and other ex-cons, found surprisingly few. No government projects in California, other than a state-funded truck-driving school for recently released felons. That one had earned a bit of scrutiny when one of its graduates, tanked up on meth, had crashed his big rig into a restaurant in Lodi. But I found no sign the grant had been terminated.
Everything else I came up with was academic—a smattering of social scientists espousing theories and playing with numbers. When treatments for criminals did exist they tended to be outside the therapy mainstream. A group in Baldwin Park promoted meditation and “attitudinal healing” for ex-cons, and one in Laguna trumpeted the power of arts and crafts. Martial arts, tai chi specifically, was the treatment of choice for an organization in San Diego, and there was no shortage of religious groups touting techniques of moral change.
I phoned the State Department of Health, endured nearly an hour of voice mail and on-hold stupor before speaking to a jaded woman who informed me that she hadn’t heard of any treatment groups for parolees but that if one existed, they wouldn’t know about it, the Department of Corrections would. Another forty minutes of telephonic torment by the Corrections switchboard, as I was shunted from menu to menu. I started pressing “0” like a man possessed, finally reached an operator and was told that the office was closed.
Four-fifteen. My tax dollars working overtime.
I returned to the last dozen citations on Albin Larsen. A few more speeches, then a joint statement issued by Larsen and a U.N. commissioner named Alphonse Almogardi, in Lagos, Nigeria, promising that the United Nations would do everything in its power to bring the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide to justice.
Links attached to that one connected me to an African public affairs website. The big story took place in Kigali, the Rwandan capital: a June 2002 march by thirty-five hundred genocide survivors branding the Internationa
l Criminal Tribunal a farce. During the eight years since the tribunal’s establishment, only seven war crimes trials had been convened, all of low-level military officers. As the years ground on, witnesses died or disappeared. Those who persisted had endured threats and harassment. Accused butchers grew wealthy as their defense attorneys kicked back shares of tribunal-financed legal fees.
More damaging was the accusation that the tribunal judges were actively conspiring to delay the trials of big-ticket mass murderers because of fears that hearings in open court would reveal the complicity of U.N. personnel in the genocide.
From the safety of her office in Dublin, a tribunal registrar named Maria Robertson responded by scolding the survivors for their “incendiary language” and cautioned against “instigating a cycle of violence.” Speaking in Lagos, consultant Professor Albin Larsen stressed the complexity of the situation and advised patience.
The nineteenth hit also emanated from the Nigerian capital, and it gave me pause: description of a program called Sentries for Justice, aimed at helping steer young African men away from lives of crime.
The group, staffed by European volunteers, functioned by “offering synergistic alternatives to prison that engender efficacious rehabilitation and attitudinal shifting through a holistic emphasis upon the interplay between socially altruistic behavior and communal social norms set into place during the pre-Colonial era but disrupted by colonialism.” Services offered included parenting education, jobs skills training, drug and alcohol counseling, crisis intervention, and something called “cultural demarginalization.” Synergy was illustrated by the use of Sentries buses, driven by Sentries alumni, for transporting criminal detainees to court. Most of the volunteers had Scandinavian names, and Albin Larsen was listed as a senior consultant.
I printed the citation, and moved to the last few hits. More speeches by Larsen, then the final reference, posted three weeks ago: calendar of events at a Santa Monica bookstore named The Pen Is Mightier. A Harvard professor named George Issa Qumdis was scheduled to deliver a speech on the Middle East, and Albin Larsen would be there to introduce him.
The speech was tonight, in four hours. Professor Larsen was a busy man.
I scanned the Sentries for Justice citation for buzzwords and keyed them into several search engines. “Syngerstic alternatives,” “efficacious rehabilitation,” “attitudinal shifting” “demarginalization” and the like pulled up lots of academic verbiage but nothing useful.
It was 5:30 P.M. when I pushed away from the computer, and I had nothing much to show.
I made some coffee, munched on a bagel, and drank, thinking and looking out my kitchen window at a graying sky. I realized I’d been seduced by the cheap trick that was cyberresearch and decided to do it the old-fashioned way.
*
Olivia Brickerman and I had worked together at Western Pediatric Hospital, she as a supervising social worker, I as a fledgling psychologist. Twenty years my senior, she’d seen herself as my surrogate mother. I hadn’t minded one bit because she’d been a benevolent mother, down to home cooking and a cheerfully nosy interest in my love life.
Her husband, an international chess grand master, had written the Final Moves column for the Times. He’d since passed on, and Olivia had dealt with her loss by plunging herself back into work, taking a series of short-lived, well-paying state consultantships, then easing into a position at the genteel old school across town where I was nominally a med school professor.
Olivia knew more about grantsmanship and the way government operated than anyone else I’d ever met.
At five-forty, she was still at her desk. “Alex, darling.”
“Olivia, darling.”
“So nice to hear from you. How’s life?”
“Life is good,” I said. “How about you?”
“Still kicking. So, how’s the new one working out?”
“She’s working out great.”
“Makes sense,” she said. “Both of you in the same profession, lots of common ground. Which isn’t to say I have anything against Robin. I love her, she’s lovely. So’s the new one—that hair, those eyes. No surprise there, a good-looking guy like you. Get yourself a new dog?”
“Not yet.”
“A dog is good,” she said. “I love my Rudy.”
Rudy was a walleyed, shaggy mutt with a lust for deli meat. “Rudy rocks,” I said.
“He’s smarter than most people.”
Last time I’d spoken to her—three or four months ago—she’d sprained an ankle.
“How’s the leg?” I said. “Back to jogging yet?”
“Hah! Can’t get back to a place you’ve never been. Truthfully, the leg’s still a little gammy; I should take off weight. But thank God. The latest thing is, I’m on blood thinners.”
“You all right?”
“Well,” she said, “I’ve got thinner blood. Unfortunately, nothing else got thin. So what can I do for you, darling?”
I told her.
“Department of Corrections,” she said. “Haven’t had much to do with those yokels in a long time. Not since I consulted to Sybil Brand. Back then they had some state grants for therapy, but that was all for inside the prison, helping inmates with kids learn to be good mothers. Good idea, but the oversight was pathetic. Never heard about an outside project such as you’re describing.”
“It may not exist,” I said.
“And you’re asking about this because . . .”
“Because it may relate to some murders.”
“Some murders,” she said. “Ugly stuff?”
“Very ugly.”
“You and Milo . . . how’s he doing, by the way?”
“Working hard.”
“He’ll always be doing that,” she said. “Well, I’m sorry nothing comes to mind but just because I haven’t heard about it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I’ve been teaching, have kind of lost touch with the divine world of public monies . . . what you’re describing could be a pilot study, let me fire up my Mac and see . . . okay, here goes, click click click . . . can’t seem to find any pilot postprison rehab therapy studies from NIH or HHS or . . . the state . . . maybe it’s private . . . no, nothing on that list, either. So maybe it was approved as a full-term grant, not a pilot.”
I said, “You might want to check under ‘Sentries for Justice,’ and if that doesn’t work, I’ve got some other buzzwords for you.”
“Give them to me.”
“ ‘Synergy,’ ‘demarginalization,’ ‘attitudinal shifting,’ ‘holistic interplay—’ ”
“That sound you’re hearing in the background is Mr. Orwell groaning.”
I laughed. Waited. Listened to Olivia humming and muttering to herself.
“Nothing,” she said, finally. “Not on any databases I can find. But not everything makes it into the computer in a timely fashion, there are good, old-fashioned printed lists. I don’t keep them here, have to go over to the main office. Which is locked for the night . . . give me some time, darling, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks, Olivia.”
“You’re more than welcome. Come over sometime, Alex. Bring Allison. Is she a vegetarian or something like that?”
“On the contrary.”
“Oh, lucky you,” she said. “Then definitely bring her over. I’ll marinate some skirt steaks, my skirt steaks are famous. You bring Allison and some wine. I could use some adorable people in the house.”
*
Six-thirty. Milo called me from his desk.
“Jerry Quick’s CPA was cagey, but I managed to get a few things out of him. First of all, I got a clear impression Quick is not a big-money client. Secondly, Quick’s income comes in spurts, he’s got no regular income coming in, just whatever deals he can close, and the CPA never sees the checks, just writes down what Jerry tells him. His main gripe was that Jerry’s income was unstable, so establishing estimated tax was a hassle.”
“Not a big-money client,” I said. “How’s he’s be
en doing recently?”
“Couldn’t get the guy to spill specifics, but he did say Quick was late to pay his bill.”
“Same thing Sonny Koppel complained about, so maybe Quick’s living on the edge. House in Beverly Hills, a Mercedes, albeit one that’s a few years old. Appearances are important. Toss in Gavin’s medical bills, and there’d be pressure.”
“Sure,” he said. “It would explain Quick getting into something iffy and lucrative. But what it doesn’t explain is why would Sonny and the others want him involved? Guy’s a middling metals dealer. What could he offer?”
“Guns are metal.”
“From therapy to guns? A burgeoning crime syndicate?”
“It’s just what came to mind,” I said. “Dealers like to deal. Quick travels around buying scrap. Don’t police departments scrap confiscated weapons?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Anything’s possible, but there’s still nothing to connect Quick or anyone to therapy mischief, let alone arms mischief. And I still can’t locate the bastard. I got hold of his home phone records, but there’re no calls to any airlines. No travel-related stuff of any kind. Couldn’t find any business phone, so I asked Sheila about it. She said he uses prepaid cells. Which is just what you’d do if your business was shady. Meanwhile, Sheila still has no idea where he is. So maybe you were right and he is on the lam.”
“How’s she taking that?”
“She was pretty soused but did sound a little scared. As in maybe this is more than just another of Jerry’s business trips. When she sobers up, it’ll be worse; lucidity can be a bitch. I also bopped over to Quick’s office. Closed, no sign of Angie Blue-Nails, mail’s piled up in front of the door, all junk solicitations.”
“Maybe his important mail goes somewhere else.”
“That would not shock me,” he said. “I phoned Angie’s apartment in North Hollywood. No answer. On the other fronts, Mr. Raymond Degussa works as a bouncer at a club in East Hollywood. Petra doesn’t know him, but she checked Hollywood files, and Degussa’s name came up on a patrol call. Hassle at the club, Degussa got into it with an unruly patron, patron called the cops, showed them a shiner, claimed Degussa threatened to kill him. But there were no witnesses, and the complainant was stoned and hostile and obnoxious, so no charge.”
Alex 18 - Therapy Page 27
