Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

When I unlocked the Mustang the men shouted over a jovial offer to trade. I grinned and waved. Oh, the kindness of strangers. It was only when people talked to me they got so hostile. There was a lesson in there for me, but not one I particularly wished to pursue.

It was almost three: I hadn’t eaten since my yogurt at eight this morning. Maybe the situation would seem less depressing if I had some food. I passed a strip mall on my way to the expressway and bought a slice of cheese pizza. The crust was gooey, the surface glistened with oil, but I ate every bite with gusto. When I got out of my car at the office I realized I’d dripped oil down the front of my rose silk sweater. Warshawski zero, visitors five, at this point. At least I didn’t have any business meetings this afternoon.

My part-time assistant, Mary Louise Neely, was at her desk. She handed me a packet with the video of the Radbuka interviews, which Beth Blacksin had messengered over. I stuffed it in my briefcase and brought Mary Louise up to date with the Sommers case, so she could check on the other men who had bought insurance from Rick Hoffman, then told her about Don’s interest in Paul Radbuka.

“I couldn’t find anyone named Radbuka in the system,” I finished, “so either-”

“Vic-if he changed his name, he had to do so in front of a judge. There will be a court order.” Mary Louise looked at me as though I were the village idiot.

I gaped at her like a dying pike and meekly went to turn on my computer. It was small comfort that if Radbuka or Ulrich or whatever his name was had taken any legal action, it wasn’t in the system yet: I should have thought of that myself.

Mary Louise, not wanting to go stomping far and wide through the city, didn’t believe Radbuka wasn’t somewhere in the system. She did her own search and then said she would stop at the courts in the morning to double-check the paper record.

“Although maybe the therapist will tell you where to find him. What’s her name?”

When I told her, her eyes opened wide. “Rhea Wiell? The Rhea Wiell?”

“You know her?” I spun around in my chair to face her.

“Not personally.” Mary Louise’s skin turned the same orangy pink as her hair. “But because, you know, because of my own story, I followed her career. I sat in on some of the trials where she testified.”

Mary Louise had run away from an abusive home when she was a teenager. After a tumultuous ride through sex and drugs, she’d pulled herself together and become a police officer. In fact, the three children she was fostering had been rescued from an abusive home. So it wasn’t surprising she paid special attention to a therapist who worked with molested children.

“Wiell used to be with the State Department of Children and Family Services. She was one of the staff therapists, she worked with kids, but she also was an expert witness in court cases that hinged on abuse. Remember the MacLean trial?”

As Mary Louise described it, the details began coming back to me. The guy was a law professor who’d started life as a Du Page County criminal prosecutor. When his name was put forward for a federal judgeship, his daughter, by then a grown woman, came forward to denounce him as having raped her when she was a child. She was insistent enough that she forced the state to bring charges.

Various right-wing family foundations had ridden to MacLean’s rescue, claiming the daughter was the mouthpiece of a liberal smear campaign, since the father was a conservative Republican. In the end, the jury in the criminal sexual-assault trial found for the father, but his name was dropped from consideration for the judgeship.

“And Wiell testified?” I asked Mary Louise.

“More than that. She was the daughter’s therapist. It was working with Rhea Wiell that made the woman recover the memories of abuse, when she’d blocked them for twenty years. The defense brought in Arnold Praeger from the Planted Memory Foundation. He tried all kinds of cheap shots to make her look bad, but he couldn’t shake her.” Mary Louise glowed with admiration.

“So Praeger and Wiell go back a ways together.”

“I don’t know about that, but they definitely have been adversaries in court for quite a few years.”

“I put in a search to ProQuest before I left this morning. If their fights have been in the news, I should have the stories.” I brought up my ProQuest search. Mary Louise came to read over my shoulder. The case she had mentioned had generated a lot of ink at the time. I skimmed a couple of pieces in the Herald-Star, which praised Wiell’s unflappable testimony.

Mary Louise bristled with anger over an op-ed piece Arnold Praeger had run in The Wall Street Journal, criticizing both Wiell and the law, which would allow the testimony of young children who had clearly been coached in what they remembered. Wiell wasn’t even a reputable therapist, Praeger concluded. If she was, why had the State of Illinois dropped her from its payroll?

“Dropped her?” I said to Mary Louise, sending the piece to the printer with several of the others. “Do you know about that?”

“No. I assumed she decided private practice was a better place to be. Sooner or later, just about everyone gets burned out working for DCFS.” Mary Louise’s pale eyes were troubled. “I thought she was a really good, really genuine therapist. I can’t believe the state would fire her, or at least not for any good reason. Maybe out of spite. She was the best they had, but there’s always a lot of jealousy in offices like that. When I saw her in court, I used to imagine she was my mother. In fact, I was incredibly jealous of a woman I met who saw her professionally.”

She laughed in embarrassment. “I’ve got to go, time for me to pick up the kids before class. I’ll do those Sommers queries first thing tomorrow. You filling in your time sheets?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I saluted her smartly.

“It’s not a joke, Vic,” she said sternly. “It’s the only way-”

“I know, I know.” Mary Louise doesn’t like to be teased, which can be boring-but probably also is why she’s such a good office manager.

When Mary Louise had left, promising to stop by the courts to check for Radbuka’s change-of-name filing, I called a lawyer I knew in the State Department of Children and Family Services. We’d met at a seminar on women and law in the public sector and kept in touch in a desultory way.

She referred me to a supervisor in the DCFS office who would speak if it was far off the record. The supervisor wanted to call me back from a pay phone, in case her desk line was being monitored. I had to wait until five, when the woman stopped at a public phone in the basement of the Illinois Center on her way home. Before she’d tell me anything, my informant made me swear I wasn’t calling on behalf of the Planted Memory Foundation.

“Not everyone at DCFS believes in hypnotherapy, but nobody here wants to see our clients hurt by one of those Planted Memory lawsuits.”

When I assured her, by running through a list of possible references until I hit on a name she knew and trusted, she was amazingly frank. “Rhea was the most empathic therapist we ever used. She got incredible results from kids who would hardly even give their names to other therapists. I still miss her when we have certain kinds of trauma cases. The trouble was, she began to see herself as the priestess of DCFS. You couldn’t question her results or her judgment.

“I don’t remember exactly when she started her private practice, maybe six years ago, doing it part-time. But it was three years ago when we decided to sever her contract with the state. The press release said it was her decision, that she wanted to concentrate on her practice, but the feeling here was that she wouldn’t take direction. She was always right; we-or the state attorney general, or anyone who disagreed with her-were wrong. And you can’t have a staff person, someone you rely on with kids and in court, who always wants to be Joan of Arc.”