Therapy (30 page)

“The first thing that comes to mind,” I said, “is basic fraud—overbilling insurance or the state. The easiest target would be the state—some kind of government contract. Sonny would know how to work that angle. He gets the government to finance his halfway houses and his senior citizen housing. He claims the halfway houses were Mary Lou and Larsen’s idea. Maybe that’s true, but if owning halfways helped plug Sonny into a subsidized treatment plan, that would appeal to his business sense.”

“Therapy for cons,” he said.

“A built-in supply of patients. Patients they could bill for whether or not they treated them because who’s going to complain?”

“Sonny and Mary Lou and Larsen. And Gavin saw some kind of staff meeting.”

“Gavin didn’t copy down Gull’s license number,” I said. “So maybe Gull missed the meeting. Or he wasn’t involved. He’s got personal problems, and he sweats too much. If I were setting up a slick criminal enterprise, I’d view him as a poor risk.”

“I’d still like to know why Gavin ditched him as a therapist.” He paced some more. “For a guy like Sonny to get involved in a scam, it would have to be big money.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “Sonny claims he’s not into accumulating stuff. That seems to be true, meaning he’s turned on by the game—the
process
of making money.”

“Soaking the government.”

“Or Sonny did figure out a way to make some serious money. He claims he was holding the ground floor open until Koppel and the others decided about group therapy. If they were setting up some sort of parolee treatment that brought in big bucks, that would justify leaving the Charitable Planning suite vacant. I got into the space, yesterday. They were cleaning the carpets, and I was able to walk in. Empty, except for a small office for Sonny and a big room with some folding chairs. Why would Sonny need chairs if all he did was come in and sign checks? But they’d be useful if someone checked and you were claiming to be running groups. Of course if the person checking was your pal, you wouldn’t need to put up much of a front.”

“Bennett Hacker,” he said. “There’s some deal with the parole board, and Hacker’s the overseer.”

“A guy in Hacker’s position could also supply names in return for kickback. And Raymond Degussa, being a wily, dominant con—someone who pulled off robberies using intimidation alone—could convince the patients to cooperate.”

“Headshrinking for parolees,” he said. “Something like that could really bring in serious money?”

“If there were enough parolees,” I said. “Let’s do the math. Private practice group therapy can run between fifty and a hundred bucks an hour. Medi-Cal reimburses for much less—fifteen, twenty. But there are all sorts of other things you can bill Medi-Cal for. Individual treatment, initial intakes, follow-ups, testing, case conferences—”

“Case conferences. As in getting together, after hours, at the building. How much does Medi-Cal pay for that?”

“Thirty-six bucks for thirty minutes. If these people have hooked on to some supplemental program that adds to the Medi-Cal billing—something Sonny wangled—the fee could be substantially higher. But let’s be conservative and assume the core is group therapy at twenty dollars per patient per session. I saw at least two dozen folding chairs. If they’re running groups of twenty—or claiming to be—each group session would bring in four hundred bucks an hour. Running six groups a day five times a week would bring in twelve thousand dollars. That alone would be six hundred grand a year. Add more patients, toss in additional fees, and it could get interesting. Especially if you’re not really doing any work.”

“Millions,” he said.

“It’s not inconceivable.”

“Each con gets daily group therapy . . . how many groups could you justify for a single patient?”

“If you’ve set up an immersion model, you could treat him all day.”

“What, like that deal where you sat all day and some guy yelled at you for being weak-willed and wouldn’t let you pee?”

“Est, Synanon,” I said. “There’s plenty of precedent, particularly with substance abuse. A case could be made for immersion for cons, because the aim would be large-scale change on several dimensions. The answer to an inquiring skeptic would be that it was still cheaper than keeping them in prison. And that if it really straightened them out, it was a giant money
saver
.”

“Mary Lou and her rehab kick,” he said. “Going on the radio—she and Larsen.” He laughed. “The government pays to shrink bad guys. I’m in the wrong business. So are you, for that matter.”

I said, “How many parolees live in Sonny’s halfway houses?”

“Three houses? I’d guess a couple of hundred.”

“Think about the income if everyone got on the rolls.”

“Hundred bucks a week per con—five grand a year. A million bucks for group therapy alone.”

“Plus other charges.”

“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

V
irtue 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 International 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.”