Jonathan Kellerman - Therapy

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.”

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.