“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.”
“Did you think she might misrepresent a situation for her own glory?” I asked.
“Oh, no. Nothing like that. She wasn’t out for glory—she was on a mission. I’m telling you, some of the younger women started calling her Mother Teresa, and not always out of admiration. Actually, that was part of the problem; she split the office straight in half between Rhea worshipers and Rhea doubters. And then she wouldn’t let you question how she came to a conclusion. Like in that one case where the guy she was accusing of molestation was a former prosecutor who’d been nominated for a federal judgeship. Rhea wouldn’t let us see her case notes before she testified. If the case had backfired, we could have been facing a ton of damages.”
I thumbed through my stack of printouts. “Wasn’t the daughter who brought the charges part of Wiell’s private practice?”
“Yes, but Rhea was still on the state payroll, so the guy could have claimed she was using state office space or facilities for photocopying or whatnot—anything like that would have brought us into a lawsuit. We couldn’t afford that kind of exposure. We had to let her go. Now you tell me, since I’ve been so frank with you, what’s Rhea done that means a PI is interested in her?”
I’d known I’d have to cough up something. Tit for tat, it’s how you keep information coming to you. “One of her clients was in the news this week. I don’t know if you saw the guy with the recovered memories from the Holocaust? Someone wants to write a book about him and about how Rhea works. I’ve been asked to do some background checking.”
“One thing Rhea knows better than any other therapist who ever worked for this office, and that’s how to attract attention.” My informant hung up smartly.
IX
Princess of Austria