Death Will Fire Your Therapist Read online

  DEATH WILL FIRE YOUR THERAPIST

  Elizabeth Zelvin

  OUTSIDER BOOKS

  Death Will Fire Your Therapist

  I’m nothing like Woody Allen, and neither is any other guy I know. But it’s true that in New York City, if you walk out the door and spit, you might hit six therapists. Their offices form one of New York’s hidden communities, like the secret gardens behind the rows of brownstones and the church basement meeting rooms of AA. They’re all virtual neighborhoods, each one a necklace strung out all over the city.

  Beryl Feingold’s office on the Upper West Side had the diplomas on the wall, the big leather chair, the circle of folding chairs for group, and the box of tissues on every horizontal surface in case we wanted to cry. I was damned if I would cry in here. You got a problem with that?

  I shifted from buttock to buttock, trying to get comfortable in the inadequate folding chair like Sisyphus pushing the stone uphill. Beryl looked around the circle, eyes bright and head cocked to one side like a bird contemplating a captive audience of worms. Which of us would speak up first today? Me? Forget it.

  “My dad called me last night.” Josh had a round face that made him look about twelve and an impressive ten years clean and sober. “He’s coming in from California next week, and he wants to take me to a Yankees game. He still thinks if he stuffs me with enough beer and hot dogs, I’ll kick Terry out of the apartment and find myself a nice girl.”

  “He’s in denial that you’re gay?” Vanessa asked. She had short spiky hair, numerous piercings, and tattoos up her arms and down to her cleavage. “I wouldn’t put up with that, and neither would Claudia.” Her girlfriend, about whom we heard all too much every week.

  “He’s in denial about everything,” Josh said. “My sobriety, my being a vegan, the fact that Terry and I are legally married.”

  “He wants you to get out and smell the testosterone.” Lucas grinned. The only other straight guy in the group, he’d become a body builder as soon as he was old enough to join a gym without parental consent. He wore sleeveless tank tops all year round to show off his well-oiled biceps and could bench press an elephant.

  “If he only knew,” Josh said, “there’s more testosterone in a gay bar than in Yankee Stadium.”

  “Could it be his way of showing love?” Beryl spoke for the first time. She liked to hang back and make us talk to each other, not to her.

  “Did he take you to ball games when you were a kid?” Olivia asked. Beryl cast her a reproachful glance for not giving Josh time to answer her deeper question. Olivia blushed and bent to pick up a minuscule scrap of lint from the floor. She had a crush on Beryl or thought she did. Shrinks call it transference.

  “Yeah,” Josh said, “and lecture me about the plays and then drag me to Little League for further torture.”

  “My father used to beat me for playing stickball with the boys,” Vanessa said. She always had to top your story. Her father was more abusive, her girlfriend more possessive, her inventory (Step Four) more fearless and thorough than thou. Thine.

  “Show-off,” Lucas said.

  “Look who’s talking,” Vanessa said.

  “Focus, please, everyone,” Beryl said. “Who can relate to what Josh is saying about his dad?”

  “Not all men are like that.” Mary Anne fingered her pendant, a gold broken heart on a thin gold chain.

  “How would you know?” I didn’t realize I’d said it out loud until I felt the laser beam of Beryl’s gaze on me.

  Mary Anne didn’t seem to mind.

  “Sure, I’ve picked rotten men in the past,” she said. “But Warren is different. We haven’t been together long, but he really loves my little girl.”

  “Does he let her play stickball?” Vanessa asked.

  “Amy doesn’t want to play stickball,” Mary Anne said. “She’s a very feminine little girl. But if she did, Warren would be fine with it. He wants whatever makes her happy. And he likes to spend time with her. He babysits when I go to my spinning class and when I come here. And he takes her to the movies. My ex wouldn’t do that, and she was his own daughter.”

  “My father never took me anywhere but the nearest bar,” I said. It was true. I could remember the yeasty smell of beer and my little legs dangling off the barstool from way back. “And my mother used to tell me to go out and play in traffic.”

  Also true. At our last one-on-one session, Beryl had said I used being entertaining as a defense, a charge I knew I was guilty of. I hated to admit it, but my shrink already had my number.

  “Bruce, what feelings do those memories of your parents bring up for you?”

  The whole group looked at me while I thought about it, but I was saved by the bell, the ping on Beryl’s cell phone that she always followed up with, “We’re out of time, but we’ll pick this up next week.”

  Beryl smiled as she ushered us out the far door through which clients always exited for the sake of confidentiality. “I’ll see you all next Wednesday,” she said.

  But she didn’t.

  The lot of us arrived at the same time and piled into the elevator together. We found the door to the waiting room unlocked. That wasn’t unusual. There was a concierge in the lobby, and the building was supposed to be safe. Beryl not opening the door to the group room on the dot was unusual.

  We waited ten minutes, thinking she might be spending extra time with her previous client, whom of course we’d never seen. Olivia picked dead leaves out of the giant planter in the waiting room, which held a young tree that didn’t seem to mind artificial light, a low ceiling, or the sound of people crying and screaming in the next room. She was a neat freak, though she didn’t have OCD, as she told us every week. Everyone in the group had a tic. Lucas stroked his upper arm muscles. Josh jiggled his leg. Mine was smoking, though lately I’d been trying to graduate to fiddling with an unlit cigarette. Thanks to New York’s cutting-edge laws, I couldn’t even smoke in an AA meeting, much less a shrink’s waiting room. Anyhow, we all got more and more antsy until I finally volunteered to make the first move. I knocked. Lucas knocked. Vanessa knocked. When there was still no answer, we cautiously pushed open the door and found Beryl lying on the floor. The blood soaking into her white blouse and pooling around her prone body made an indelible impression, as did the slim brass letter opener sticking out of her back.

  The police came quickly. They herded us down to the lobby, leaving the crime scene guys to set up their yellow tape and start swarming over the office. While we sat waiting to be interviewed, the concierge, a voluble Puerto Rican about five feet tall with graying hair and a grizzled five o’clock shadow, kept assuring the cops he hadn’t let anyone else up to Beryl’s office since the last client left an hour before. Tenants coming home were asked to wait, since both the elevator and the stairs were part of the crime scene. The lobby was big enough that the two groups didn’t have to fraternize, but they cast dirty looks our way, holding us responsible for the inconvenience.

  I noticed that none of us were sharing our feelings. Mary Anne had her back turned to the rest of us, hunched shoulders heaving as she sobbed. We were all controlling our tics. Nobody wanted to appear more nervous than everybody else. Lucas didn’t stroke his biceps. Josh didn’t jiggle. Olivia left two crumpled scraps of paper and a penny on the floor. I didn’t twiddle a cigarette, though as the afternoon wore on, they let me go outside to smoke under a uniformed cop’s eye, along with a couple of tenants and the concierge. The concierge was an old-fashioned smoker, lighting one unfiltered cigarette off the butt of the last. I wondered if he drank.

  “We’re all suspects,” I told my friends Jimmy and Barbara that evening. Their apartment on West 86th Street wasn’t far from Beryl’s office, and they had good takeout from a dozen restaurants within a couple of blocks. Besides, I didn’t want to be alone.

  "Oh, my poor Bruce," Barbara said. "You must be devastated and terrified."

  On the other hand, I didn't particularly want Barbara diving into my abandonment issues. I was glad when Jimmy said, "Why you? She had other clients."

  “I guess she didn’t have anyone scheduled right before us," I said. "If she had, they wouldn’t be leaning so hard on us.”

  “They think one of you snuck up there early,” Jimmy said, “killed her, then snuck back down to arrive again with the rest of you?”

  “The concierge swore nobody would have got past him,” I said.

  “Concierge, schmoncierge,” Barbara said. “It’s a big building. There must be a service door. He could have gone out to smoke.”

  “He wouldn’t admit it,” Jimmy said. “He could lose his job. He might even be suspected himself.”

  “Can you think of a motive?” Barbara asked.

  “Maybe Beryl didn’t tip him enough at Christmas,” Jimmy said.

  “Very funny,” Barbara said. “Anyhow, therapists who practice in residential buildings have to tip well. They don’t want building staff to treat their clients like nutcases.”

  “Nutcases?” Jimmy said. “Is that a DSM diagnosis?”

  “I’m just saying,” Barbara said. “So which of the group members has a motive? Bruce, give us the rundown so we’ll know where to start.”

  “Don’t you ever get tired of snooping?” I demanded.

  “I don’t want them to think it’s you,” Barbara said.

  “What about confidentiality?” I asked. Barbara’s job is counseling. “You’re the one who said it’s just like anonymity in program and
I shouldn’t tell anyone what I heard in group.”

  “But she’s dead,” Barbara said. “And it’s only us. Anyhow, murder trumps confidentiality. You don’t want the killer do go free, do you?”

  Why did I bother? It’s not that I didn’t care. But unlike Barbara, I don’t always have to do something. When it comes to minding other people’s business, which Al-Anon considers part of The Disease, she’s a chronic relapser. She’s always promptly admitting it (Step Ten) and then doing it again. Jimmy says she treats telling us confidential stuff and then making amends the way good Catholics who enjoy their vices do sin and absolution.

  “Okay, okay. They all have issues. What do you expect? But it would take some powerful motivation to kill your therapist.”

  “Where are their primary loyalties?” Barbara asked. “They’re all ACOAs, aren’t they? Adult children of alcoholics are known for their extreme loyalty to family, no matter how abusive that family is.”

  “Vanessa never stops talking about her girlfriend Claudia, who’s very possessive. She seems to be jealous of Vanessa’s friends, her job, everything that doesn’t involve her. She doesn’t even like her being in therapy. She’s practically a stalker. Beryl encouraged the group to give Vanessa some tough love about standing up to her, but Vanessa never wanted to hear it. Hey, maybe Claudia killed Beryl.”

  “Was Vanessa in individual treatment with Beryl as well as group?”

  “Yeah, we all were. It was one of the conditions of being in that particular group.”

  “So you all had more intense relationships with Beryl than came out in group.”

  “Who says I did?” What I said when I was alone with Beryl was between me and Beryl, and one of us was dead. Oh, God, and detectives were no doubt reading all her confidential records right now.

  “Bruce, you’re so cute when you lie,” Barbara said.

  “Shut up, Sherlock. Do you want to hear this or not?”

  “Okay, okay, go on.”

  “Olivia’s the one who was in love with Beryl,” I said.

  “She’s a lesbian too?” Jimmy asked.

  “It’s transference,” Barbara said impatiently. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Bi,” I said, “and not in a relationship. I don’t think she cared that it was transference. From the way she acted around Beryl and talked about her to the rest of us, it was love to her.”

  “So she could have had unrealistic expectations,” Barbara said. “Fantasies. And Beryl would have had to set firm boundaries, which Olivia would interpret as rejection.”

  “Mary Anne, the other woman in the group, is straight,” I said. “She seemed devastated to lose Beryl. Until now, she’s picked a string of losers, men who hit her or ripped her off for money. But since she started therapy, she’s finally found a guy who’s good to her. He’s not even an alcoholic.”

  “Imagine that,” Jimmy said.

  Barbara poked him amiably in the side.

  “I suppose her father was a total bastard,” she said.

  “What do you think? Her ex-husband, too. She’s got a little girl she’s crazy about, though.”

  “What about the men in the group?”

  “There are only two of them besides me, and I don’t think transference is an issue for either of them. Josh is gay. He and his partner Terry got married in Toronto years ago. His father is still trying to get him to be macho, refuses to accept who he is. Hey, wait a minute. The father is supposed to be in town this week. Would the father blame the shrink for Josh being gay?”

  “Sounds like Josh came out long before he started seeing Beryl,” Barbara said. “But if the father is irrational on the subject, why not? He’s got to blame someone.”

  “Josh would be insane to tell his father who his therapist is,” Jimmy said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but he’s been angrier at his father every week, and Beryl thought that was a good thing. The man was going to drag him to a Yanks game and wave beer under his nose. What if he and Beryl made a plan in his individual session that he’d confront his father at the game? In the heat of the moment, he could have let the information slip out.”

  “Or the father could have visited Terry,” Jimmy said, “that’s the husband, right? Made a scene, intimidated him, got the shrink’s name out of him somehow.”

  “Josh hated his father,” I said. “But would he blow the whistle on him if he thought he’d murdered Beryl?”

  “That’s where that crazy ACOA family loyalty might kick in,” Barbara said. “I wouldn’t take a bet on it either way.”

  Lucas was the only one left on the list. I didn’t think he loved anyone but himself. But he was the most guarded of all of us in group. Who knew what secrets he’d been keeping, or more important, what secrets he’d revealed to Beryl? He could be dealing steroids, for all I knew. How would she react to that? Would she keep it confidential? Would she press him to do the right thing? We needed to know more.

  Beryl had discouraged us from outside contact with each other, but she’d let us make up a phone tree in case of emergencies. The only number I had was Vanessa’s. But I started with Josh, because I thought he’d be more likely to let his hair down with me. I found him in the inevitable church basement at a gay AA meeting down in the Village.

  He was willing to dish the dirt, and he didn’t think it was impossible that one of the others in the group had killed Beryl.

  “Not Olivia,” he said. “She was so crazy about Beryl that she’d rather have died herself. And Vanessa was always sucking up to her, don’t you think? Killing her wouldn’t win her approval, that’s for sure. But that girlfriend of hers sounds scary. Possessiveness and jealousy are ugly character defects.”

  “Are you speaking from experience?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that was me when I first got sober. I did a lot of hard work on it when I went through the Steps. To tell the truth, Terry would have left me if I hadn’t. But as far as I know, Claudia isn’t in recovery, so she probably thinks making scenes, opening Vanessa’s email, and listening to her private voice mails prove how much she loves her. Maybe she decided to eliminate the competition.”

  “Did you do those things with Terry?”

  “Yeah. I got so good at following him around I could have become a private eye. But the real result is that I could have lost him. I’ve left that far behind.”

  “How about Lucas? I’ve never been able to figure him out.”

  “I’ll tell you what pissed him off,” Josh said. “He’s the only one who won’t admit he has an alcoholic father. He’ll tell you all about his mother’s drinking. But his father is very high functioning. He’s a politician, so his reputation matters. Maybe Beryl was trying to crack his denial one on one, and Lucas thought it threatened his dad’s career.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “For one thing, Beryl wouldn’t tell anyone something a client said in therapy. Unless one of us told her we were planning to murder someone. Then she’d be legally required to warn the victim, or the family could sue her after he got killed.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope, it’s the law. My friend Barbara is a counselor. She told me. Anyhow, I thought Lucas started lifting weights so his father couldn’t beat him up any more. How come now he’s protecting him?”

  Josh shrugged.

  “Hey, you know what alcoholic families are like. And denial has nothing to do with reason.”

  I called Vanessa next. She was reluctant to meet me. She’d never even kissed a man, but that wouldn’t stop her girlfriend from freaking out if she caught her having coffee with one. She finally agreed to meet me at a meeting, the one place Claudia never followed her in, though she’d been known to lurk outside the door. She chose one I hadn’t been to for a while, in the cafeteria of a school on the Upper West Side. We had to arrive and leave separately, or she wouldn’t talk to me at all.

  “I don’t think it was one of us,” Vanessa said. “Maybe it was one of Beryl’s other clients.”

  “The concierge didn’t see anyone go up.”

  “So he says.” Vanessa sniffed. “That guy is a chain smoker if I ever saw one. I don’t believe he watched the door for an hour without sneaking out to smoke around the corner. Or maybe he killed her himself.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “What would his motive be?”