Therapy (35 page)

Milo showed him the death shot. Savarin’s tan lost some bronze.

“That’s Christi. Oh, man. What the hell happened to her?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

“Christi,” said Savarin. “Oh, man. She was basically a nice kid. Not too smart, but nice. Talk about your farm girl. I think she was from Minnesota or someplace. Natural blonde. Oh, man. That’s a shame.”

“Big shame,” said Milo.

“Let me see if I can find you that paperwork.”

*

Out in the vestibule Savarin unlocked one of the unmarked doors on a closet full of boxes and bottles of cleaning fluids. He rummaged through file boxes. It took a while but he came up with a single sheet of pink paper labeled Employee Data that listed a Social Security number and a mailing address for Christina Marsh and nothing else.

Vanowen Boulevard, North Hollywood. Not far from Angie Paul’s apartment complex. Christina Marsh had begun working at the club eight months ago, stopped showing up six months later.

Soon after Gavin had begun therapy.

Milo said, “There’s no phone number here.”

Savarin took a look at the sheet. “Guess not. I think she said she hadn’t gotten one yet. Just moved, or something like that.”

“From Minnesota.”

“I think it was Minnesota. She looked Minnesota, real creamy. Sweet kid.”

“Not bright,” I said.

“When she filled this out,” said Savarin, “it took her a real long time, and she was moving her lips. But she was a great worker.”

“Uninhibited,” I said.

“She’d squat for a dollar tip, show you everything. But there was nothing . . . foxy about it.”

“Sexy but not foxy?”

“Sexy
because
it wasn’t foxy,” said Savarin. “What I’m trying to say is there was nothing
teasy
about her. It was like fucking the pole and showing everything was just a way to show off what nature gave her. Wholesome, you know? Guys like that.”

Milo said, “Did she mention where she worked before?”

Savarin shook his head. “When I saw how she moved, I didn’t ask any more questions.”

“She have any regulars?”

“No, she wasn’t that way, she circulated.”

“Unlike Angie.”

“Angie knew she couldn’t compete physically, so she concentrated on finding one guy, really worked him. Christi was a people person, pulled in max tips. That’s why I was surprised when she didn’t show up. How long ago was she . . . when did it happen?”

“Couple of weeks ago,” said Milo.

“Oh. So she was doing something in between.”

“Any idea what?”

“I’d say dancing at another club, but I’d have found out.”

“The club grapevine.”

Savarin nodded. “It’s a small world. Girl moves to the competition, you hear about it.”

“Who’s the competition?”

Savarin rattled off a list of clubs, and Milo copied them down.

“The girls working tonight,” he said. “Any of them know Christi or Angie?”

“Doubt it. None of them have been here longer than a couple of months. Not at this branch, anyway. That’s our big thing. We cycle the talent.”

I said, “Helps avoid too many ‘Jerrys.’ ”

“Keeps
everything
fresh,” said Savarin.

Milo said, “It’s a small world. Maybe one of the girls knew Angie or Christi from before.”

“You can go backstage and talk to them, but you’d probably be wasting your time.”

“Well,” said Milo, “I’m no stranger to that.”

*

Backstage was a cluttered corridor crowded with costumes on racks and makeup on tables, bottles of aspirin and Mydol, lotions and hair clips, ambitious wigs on Styrofoam forms. Three girls lounged in robes, smoking. A fourth, slender and dark, sat naked with one leg propped on a table, trimming her pubis with a safety razor. Up close, the pancake makeup caked. Up close the girls looked like teenagers playing dress-down.

None of them knew Angela Paul or Christina Marsh and when Milo showed them the death shot, their eyes grew frightened and wounded. The girl with the razor began to cry.

We muttered some words of comfort and left the club.

*

The detectives’ room was empty. We continued to Milo’s office, and he kept the door open and stretched in his chair. It was nearly 2 A.M.

He said, “So what’re they doing in Minnesota? Milking the cows? Harvesting wild rice?” He shook his head. “Milk-fed.”

I said, “Too early to start calling locals?”

He rubbed his eyes. “Want coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

He pulled out the picture of Christi Marsh and stared at it. “Finally, a name.” Switching on his computer, he ran her name through NCIC, the local databases. No hits. Not even a driver’s license, and her Social Security number pulled up no record of employment.

“Phantom girl,” he said.

“If she was freelancing at a cash business,” I said. “There’d be no need for record-keeping?”

“A pro, like you suspected. So where’d she meet Angie?”

“Working at a club that doesn’t file paper. Or Angie was hooking, too. The Vice guys didn’t know Christi because she was new in town, hadn’t gotten caught.”

“Minnesota,” he said. “I’ll start calling there in a couple of hours. Got
lots
of calls to make. Sure you don’t want some coffee? I’m gonna have some.”

“No sleep for the weary?”

“I got out of the habit.” He pushed himself to his feet, slouched away, returned with a Styrofoam cup. Plopping down, he drank, rubbed his eyes some more.

“When’s the last time you did sleep?” I said.

“Can’t recall. What, you’re fading?”

“I’m good for a while longer.”

He put his cup down. “It’s like there are two parallel things going on, the Jerry Quick side and the Albin Larsen–Sonny Koppel side. I’m having trouble putting them together. Let’s start with Jerry: shady guy, sexually inappropriate, uses prepaid phones, travels a lot, allegedly to trade metals but doesn’t make much money at it. Doesn’t pay his rent on time, chases tail, and doesn’t bother to hide it from his wife. When he’s in town, he leaves his wife alone at night so he can enjoy his favorite stripper. Eventually, he hires her away to be his alleged secretary even though her nails are too damn long for typing. Savarin was probably right, Jerry kept Angie on the side, put her in the office as a way to make it look legit. That way, she’d be in proximity if he felt like a little desktop aerobics. Now he’s gone, and so is Angie.”

“The two of them hiding out together,” I said.

“The question is: hiding from what?”

“Things are falling apart, the scam’s gone bad. Jerry and Angie know why Gavin was murdered. Know they could be next.”

He considered that. “I still can’t see any role for Quick in the scam, but who knows what the hell he’s really about . . . okay, so maybe he even feels guilty about Gavin, but most of all he doesn’t want the truth to come out because that’ll point the finger at him as helping cause his kid’s death. He cleans out Gavin’s room, stashes Sheila at her sister’s, plans to go back home and finish the cleanup but gets scared and lams, taking Angie with him. She’s got to be freaked out, too—losing her friend, Christi. The girl she and Jerry hooked up with Gavin, to keep Gavin happy.”

“Angie didn’t seem freaked when we talked to her,” I said. “She blinked when you showed her the picture—but that’s still pretty cool.”

“True,” he said. “Cool girl. A pro.”

“In terms of Jerry’s role in the scam, maybe he worked for Sonny as a fixit guy, some kind of procurer. What if he hired Angie away from the club for more than sex on the side? A hooker/stripper might know some cons, and cons are raw meat for the scam.”

“Jerry’s a pimp . . . They’d have Bennett Hacker and Ray Degussa to supply cons.”

“For all we know,” I said, “it was Jerry who put Hacker and Degussa in contact with the others. Degussa is a bouncer, and a guy like Jerry who frequents strip clubs would meet bouncers. Through Degussa, Jerry met Hacker. He introduced the two of them to Sonny Koppel, who just happened to have an interest in some halfway houses.”

“Jerry’s being Sonny’s tenant was a front, and Sonny spun us that yarn about Jerry not paying his rent to snow us.”

“And to distance himself from Jerry. An enterprising fellow like Sonny would’ve seen the opportunity. He’s got the halfway houses and, because of Jerry Quick, the contacts. Toss in an ex-wife with an interest in prison reform and her partner, a guy with a twenty-year history of making money off misery, and it would’ve seemed perfect.”

“Meeting of the nasty little minds,” he said. “Perfect till it wasn’t.”

I said, “Gavin’s accident started the downward spiral. He underwent personality changes, turned into a stalker, got busted, and needed court-ordered therapy. Sonny could fix that, by sending Gavin to someone who could be counted upon to say the right things to the court. But that good deed came back to bite him, because Gavin started thinking of himself as a muckraker. He snooped and found some serious muck.”

Milo closed his eyes, and sat without moving. For a moment I thought he’d fallen asleep. Then he sat up and stared at me, blankly, as if he’d been dreaming.

I said, “You still with me?”

Slow nod.

“Jerry lied to us about the referral, made up the story about Dr. Silver being his golf partner precisely because he wanted to hide his ties to the group. He suggested it was a sex crime. Another attempt to deflect you.”

“Dear old Dad,” he said. “Claims to be a metals dealer, but he’s really a pimp.”

“With Gavin’s stalking problem, Jerry probably figured he was being a
great
dad by setting him up with Christi. And Gavin seemed happy, bragged to Kayla about his sex life with his new girlfriend. The only trouble was his brain injury continued to skew his thinking. He took down license numbers, including his father’s. Someone found out, and that got him and poor Christi Marsh killed. Mary Lou figured it out, and it scared the hell out of her. Bilking the Department of Corrections is one thing, murder’s another. Maybe she pressured Sonny and Larsen to drop the whole thing. She knew Sonny carried a torch for her, thought she had him under control. But cornered, Sonny wasn’t harmless, at all. And neither was Albin Larsen.”

“If Bumaya can be believed about Larsen, we’re talking monster.”

“Monster with a Ph.D.,” I said. “Clever, calculating, dangerous. Mary Lou overvalued her own charisma.”

“What about Sheila? In the dark about all of it?”

“Sheila’s got serious emotional problems. She and Jerry have been unavailable to each other for years, but he’s stuck by her for appearances. Now one kid’s out of the house, and the other’s dead. Toss in some panic, and it would be the perfect time for him to split.”

“Appearances,” said Milo. “The house, the Benz, B.H. school district for the kids. Then Gavin gets his cranium shaken up, and it all falls apart. What about the impalement? The sexual angle? For simple executions, shooting would’ve been enough.”

“The impalement’s icing on the cake,” I said. “Someone who enjoys killing. Someone who’s done it before.”

“Ray Degussa,” he said. He got up, walked to the door, looked up and down the empty corridor, said, “It’s quiet,” and sat back down. “So Mary scammed but couldn’t handle murder?”

“She could’ve rationalized the scam, told herself they were doing good, just padding the bill a bit. Who was the victim anyway? A corrupt prison bureaucracy.”

“It’s exactly the line of bullshit an asshole like Larsen would’ve fed her.” He frowned. “Problem is, this whole house of cards is predicated upon a scam, and we don’t even know one exists.”

“I’ll check with Olivia in a few hours.”

“You really think Mary Lou would be foolish enough to threaten Larsen and the others? Would she be blind to the kind of people she was dealing with?”

“Believing your own PR can be very dangerous.”

“What about Gull?”

“Either he was involved, or he wasn’t.”

“I wonder why Gavin fired him.”

“Me, too.”

“Crazy kid,” he said. “Stupid, crazy kid. Crazy family.”

“What about the other kid in the family?” I said. “The one who didn’t come home after her brother died. Sometimes it’s the ones who get away who have the most interesting things to say.”

“Kelly, the law student at BU.”

“Her first year at law school would be over by now. But she stayed in Boston.”

“Another item for the old to-do list. Lots of to-dos. I need to sleep.”

“We both do,” I said.

He struggled to his feet. The rims of his eyes were scarlet, and his face was gray. “Enough,” he said. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

CHAPTER

37

T
he phone woke me up. I’d gone to bed at 3:30 A.M.

As my eyes cleared, I focused on the clock. Six hours later.

I grabbed the receiver, fumbled, got hold of it.

“Found it,” said Olivia Brickerman. “The key was divergent thinking.”

“Morning,” I said.

“You sound groggy.”

“Long night.”

“Poor baby. Want to brush your teeth and call me back?”

I laughed. “No, tell me.”

“The problem,” she said, “was that I was being too limited, concentrating on awards and grants. As if that’s the only way stuff gets funded. Finally, I shifted gears and voila! This thing was
legislated
, Alex. Tacked on as a rider to a tough felony sentencing law. Assemblyman Reynard Bird, D-Oakland—you know him, used to be a Black Panther?”

“Sure.”

“Bird got the rider stuck on the bill as part of the old give-and-take. So now you can send bad guys to prison for long periods, but when they get out, they get free therapy.”

“Any bad guys?”

“Any paroled felons who ask for treatment get it. Up to a year of individual and/or group for each bad guy, no restriction on hours, and the funding comes straight from Medi-Cal. That’s why I couldn’t find the money stream. It’s a drop in the ocean of general medical payments.”

“Sweet deal for felons,” I said. “And for providers.”

“Sure is, but few providers have taken the state up on it. Either they don’t know about it, or they don’t want criminals crowding their waiting rooms. Probably the former. Bird never publicized it, and usually he’s the first to throw a press conference. I found out his third wife’s a psychologist, and guess what: She’s running two of the biggest programs in Oakland and Berkeley. Almost all the activity’s up north. There’s another program in Redwood City, and some groups in Santa Cruz that are run by an eighty-five-year-old shrink who practiced in L.A. and retired. The one you’re probably interested in is Pacifica Psychological Services, Beverly Hills, California. Right?”

“How’d you know?”

“It’s the only program in Southern Cal.”

“Payment straight out of the Medi-Cal cookie jar,” I said. “What’s the reimbursement level?”

“Wait, there’s more, darling. We’re talking Medi-Cal
plus
. The bill authorizes surcharges because of an ‘exigency’ clause. The funds come out of some legislative slush account, but the administration’s through Medi-Cal.”

“Meaning these are patients your average doctor wouldn’t want to treat, so the state provides an incentive. How much of one?”

“Double reimbursement,” she said. “Actually a bit more than double. Medi-Cal pays fourteen dollars for group therapy by a Ph.D., fifteen for an MD. Providers under this bill get thirty-five. The same goes for individual therapy. From twenty an hour to forty-five. Seventy bucks for the initial intake and forty-eight for case conferences.”

“Thirty-five an hour for group,” I said, recalculating my previous estimates. Lots of zeroes. “Not bad.”

“There’s no fiscal oversight I can find, just bill the state and collect.”

“Any way to find out how much each program has billed?”

“Not for me, but Milo could probably do it,” she said. “If he wants to pursue it further, I’d call Sacramento. Ask for Dwight Zevonsky, he’s a good guy who investigates fraud.”

I copied down the number.

“What’s the official name of the program?” I said.

“No name, just Assembly Bill 5678930-CRP-M, Amendment F,” she said. “Subtitled ‘Psychocultural demarginalization of released offenders.’ Which was one of your buzzwords. I found a couple others in the text of the rider. ‘Attitudinal shifting,’ ‘Holistic emphasis.’ The individual programs are free to take on their own names. The one in Beverly Hills is called—”

“Sentries for Justice.”

“Yes, just like you said. So, what, this has been done before?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

“Where?”

“You don’t want to know.”

*

I found out the name of Assemblyman Reynard Bird’s third wife and ran her through the Internet.

Dr. Michelle Harrington-Bird. A tall, Scottish-born redhead in her forties who favored African robes and spoke out frequently about political issues. The assemblyman was in his seventies, a legislative vet known for passionate oration and the ability to fix potholes in his district.

In one of the many photos I found, Harrington-Bird was posed with a group of fellow psychologists that included Albin Larsen. A bunch of therapists hanging out at a convention. Larsen stood next to Harrington-Bird, goateed, bespectacled, wearing a tweed suit over a sweater-vest and looking like Hollywood’s incarnation of Freud. His body language implied no intimacy with the assemblyman’s current spouse.

All business. Plenty of incentive for that.

Harrington-Bird had borrowed Larsen’s terminology for the wording of the bill. No doubt Larsen had impressed her with descriptions of his human rights work in Africa. I wondered what she’d think about his role in African genocide. About two little boys left in their beds with their throats cut.

I found Larsen and Harrington-Bird paired three more times, as signatories on political ads. After printing what I thought was relevant, I got on the phone.

*

Milo said, “Oh, man, Olivia. She should run the world.”

“She’s overqualified,” I said. “Now we know the funding’s real and that Larsen got in on it early.”

“Reynard Bird. Wonder how high this will go.”

“There’s no evidence Bird or his wife colluded on any scam. Larsen knew her professionally, and they hobnobbed politically. He may have used her, too.”

“She’s into human rights?”

“She’s into petitions. Protesting U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, et cetera. Larsen signed the same ads.”

He grunted. “So when did the funding start?”

“Year and a half ago. Reimbursements began sixteen months ago. Pacifica was in at the outset.”

“Thirty-five bucks for each con-hour,” he said. “Even more than we estimated.”

“Huge incentive to keep it going. And to cover up when exposure was threatened. If Mary Lou posed any sort of threat, the obvious solution was to eliminate her.”

“Bullet and impalement. Speaking of which, here’s my contribution to the database. Through some fancy detective footwork, I located a retired guard supervisor at Quentin who actually knew Raymond Degussa. He’s certain Degussa was responsible for not two but
three
inmate contract killings and maybe as many as five others. In-house hit man, the gangs hire them to keep their own noses clean. With all that, they just couldn’t get any evidence on the asshole. When Degussa wasn’t offing people, he did all things that make parole boards salivate. Attended church, served as a pastor’s assistant, volunteered to make Christmas toys for ghetto kids, worked as a volunteer library clerk. And get this: He went regularly for counseling. This is a guy who appreciates the value of therapy.”

“Bet he does.”

“And here’s the fun part, Alex: This supervisor, God bless him, told me all the hits featured some kind of impaling and a combination MO, which is unusual for prison killings, mostly it’s cut and run. Degussa cut all right—your basic throat and multiple body slashing by shiv. But he followed it up with a coup de grâce through the neck or chest with some sort of pointed object. In a couple of cases, the objects were found: sharpened fountain pen, meat skewer purloined from the prison kitchen. Raymond’s definitely our bad guy.”

“He has no record of sexual crimes?”

“His sheet’s what I told you—larceny, drugs, armed robbery. But those are only the things he gets caught for. Who knows what he does in his spare time? Starting tonight, I’m switching Sean Binchy from surveilling Gull to watching Degussa. I’ll be there at the start, to make sure he doesn’t get into trouble. Watching a sweating shrink’s one thing, this bad boy’s another.”

“Gull’s off the screen?”

“On the contrary. Now that we know the scam’s real, we’ve got something to use against him. Assuming you still see him as the weakest link.”

“If you want to lean on someone, he’d be my choice.”

“I want
badly
to lean,” he said. “A couple more things. The address Christi Marsh gave is a mail drop, big surprise. She only rented the box for two months, and the clerk has no recollection of her. Did you check the paper this morning?”

“Not yet.”

“They finally ran the photo. Page thirty-two, at the bottom, along with three sentences asking anyone with knowledge to call me. No calls yet. On the Quick family front, I tracked down sister Kelly. She stayed in Boston to work at a law firm. But she just took a sudden leave of absence, supposedly sick grandmother in Michigan.”

“You think she could be well west of Michigan.”

“I phoned the house but no answer, have a call in to Eileen Paxton just in case she got sisterly, again. How about we get together, sooner rather than later, to talk about Franco Gull. I have a few ideas about the fine art of social pressure.”