Doctor Dealer (37 page)

Stewart’s profile was so odorous that more than one federal agency had come sniffing. Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agents were looking into the King Arena arson, and the IRS was intrigued by WMOT-TEC Records. Reed’s role would be to look for the root of these suspicious leads.

Somebody’s money was behind all this.

It was a happy family spring and summer on Timber Lane. The house and yard wore a profusion of blossoms, azalea and dogwood, roses and tulips. In the air was the balmy odor of new-cut lawns. Larry would awaken early to let out Rusty, the copper-colored Lab that was now full grown, and then open the window of his study on the second floor and throw tennis balls out into the backyard for the dog to chase. On one morning in late May there was a wild duck swimming in the new pool. Larry ran for his camera.

Christopher was baptized on June 27, which called for a family gathering around the new pool in the backyard. Marcia’s brother and his wife were godparents. In July, Larry’s sister was married in an outdoor ceremony in New Hampshire, which occasioned another gathering of the Lavins and gave Larry a chance to show off his new son.

There were long afternoons around the pool, with the dog plunging tirelessly into the water in pursuit of tennis balls. After a round on the golf course, Ken and Larry would sip beer and eat hamburgers. At night, Larry liked to sit on the back porch or by the pool talking
on his portable phone, reading his dental journals, or going over his financial records while listening to the Phillies game on the radio. Marcia always went to bed hours before Larry did. He still had his old dental school habit of staying up until well after midnight. Before going to bed, Larry liked to prop his feet up in the den and watch the
Tonight
show or an old movie and eat a standard postmidnight fourth meal of three or four hot dogs.

Yet, much as Larry enjoyed the idea of being a family man, he chafed at the new homebound existence the baby demanded. Marcia was as happy with her new baby as she had ever been in her life. For the first six months she refused to leave Christopher with a babysitter, which irritated Larry, who had grown used to frequent outings for dinners with the Mikutas, the Thomases, or the Weidlers. Larry fought constantly against Marcia’s fierce domesticity, and always lost. He had wanted to hire a professional to come decorate and furnish the house, but Marcia was indignant—she would do it herself, right down to sewing curtains for the windows. Larry urged her to buy new clothes, offering to take her on a spree, but Marcia always refused.

She loathed Larry’s new style. She blamed it on Mark Stewart’s influence. “Just like Mark Stewart,” she would say with scorn, at each new sign of ostentatiousness. In school, Larry had lived as simply as—in fact, even more simply than—Marcia. He had seemed oblivious to meals, to what he wore or what he drove. Now Larry’s shirts all had to be handmade and professionally cleaned. He carried a roll of cash in his pocket—“like a cheap hood,” thought Marcia. When the kid down the street got finished cutting the lawn, Larry would pull out his wad and peel off a twenty-dollar bill when she thought five would have been more appropriate. Whenever Larry bought anything, it was always the most expensive and flashy version, whether it was a TV set or a new briefcase or his brand-new car. When she complained that Larry never helped with household chores, right away Larry wanted to hire a maid. “I don’t want a maid!” said Marcia. She saw it as another step in the wrong direction. She was determined she would not let money change her the way it had changed Larry. If there was one type of woman Marcia had always despised it was the kind that wore heavy makeup, expensive clothes and jewelry, who had her hair and nails professionally tended, left her children with babysitters, who hired decorators to furnish her home and left home-making to the maid. Yet she often feared that this was the kind of woman Larry secretly wanted her to be. It just wasn’t going to happen. Marcia wore no makeup. She preferred an old loose dress or worn jeans and a sweater. At night she still sat up doing cross-stitch and needlepoint.

Marcia was so wrapped up in her new role as mother that she
did not even notice that Larry had gone back to directly supervising the cocaine business. She was past arguing with him about it, anyway. All the years she had struggled to pull Larry away from his dealing and his persistent circle of male friends had failed. She was beyond trying to force him to change. It was enough that she had purged those things from her own life. She felt she had managed to create a normal family out of sheer force of will. There were four thick photo albums lined up in the shelf in the den, each filled with hundreds of snapshots portraying the happy, typical life Marcia wanted. There were pictures of her with Larry from all of their vacations and Christmases, a full album of traditional wedding pictures, snapshots of Rusty as a puppy, of Christmas parties and family gatherings at graduations. Now there were dozens of new snapshots portraying little Christopher’s growth from month to month, newborn shots in the hospital, Marcia with Chris in the Snugli, Larry feeding the baby a bottle, the baby on his grandmother’s lap, in the bathtub, in his carseat. . . . Larry was finally working as a dentist with what seemed like dozens of legitimate business interests to occupy him. To Marcia, the bad years on Osage A venue and at Willings Alley Mews were a distant memory in the summer of 1982. She had succeeded in removing it from her life entirely. She never connected drug earnings with the beautiful home with its greenhouse and solar panels and Jacuzzi, Larry’s BMW and her Volvo. These were all trapping of the world she had wanted for her family all along and that, with Larry’s busy new dental practice, she and Larry could have expected to own eventually, even without any of the dealing Larry had done as a student. Now that Marcia was no longer working as a physical therapist, her pretty house in the quiet suburbs, her baby, and her busy husband the dentist were real enough to absorb all of her time and interests. It was all sweet hard-won victory.

It was not long before Brian Riley’s connections in Florida were also calling him Bear. Since Larry had strict rules about using telephones, Brian had a regular sequence of pay phones and times worked out with his people for getting in touch. On Tuesday, November 16, 1982, Riley walked through bitter cold down to the end of his block—Larry had recently moved him to an apartment on Pennsylvania Avenue in a trendy neighborhood northwest of Center City called Fairmount, near Philadelphia’s famous art museum—stepped into a bar and restaurant called Tavern on Green, squeezed into the tiny foyer between the outer entrance and the inner doorway to the restaurant, and placed a scheduled phone call to Miami.

“This is Bear,” he said to his contact. “I’m coming down tomorrow afternoon. I’ll need twenty.”

“It might not be a good idea,” his contact answered, a voice with a thick Hispanic accent. “Your grandfather is in town.”

“My grandfather? What the hell are you guys talking about?”

“It’s just not a good idea.”

“I don’t care,” said Brian. “I got to come down anyway.”

“All right.”

So the next day Brian flew into Miami. He had prearranged to have more than a half million dollars driven down by Stan Nelson, a short, stocky Florida lawyer whom he had recruited to do the driving. Brian was met at the airport by two of his contacts and driven through a hard rain to the Omni Hotel. As Brian got out of the car under the hotel eave and started toward the front entrance, four men in suits surrounded the car parked at the curb behind him. The driver had just gotten out and opened the trunk. Brian didn’t stop. He just went straight through into the lobby, where Stan Nelson was waiting, pale and shaking. Stan looked like a middle-aged businessman on holiday, wearing a pair of gray pants that belonged with a suit and a pastel yellow polo shirt stretched taut over a broad belly. His hair was black flecked with gray and he wore glasses.

“The president is staying here!” said Stan.

“The who?” said Brian.

“The president. Ronald Reagan. There’s Secret Service all over the place! They’re checking
everybody
out.”

“Where’s the car?” Brian asked.

Stan gestured out the front entrance and pointed to a car parked across the street.

“I don’t want to go near it,” he said.

“Well, we got to do something,” said Brian. “Fuck it. Let’s go get in the car and drive over to this guy’s place.”

Outside, the two men who had brought Brian were still shaken from being searched and questioned by the Secret Service. They had missed signs saying the front driveway was temporarily off limits, and were preparing to pull out after satisfying the agents that it was just an accident.

“We’re parked across the street,” Brian said.

“Follow us,” the driver said.

They drove for a quarter mile and then pulled into the parking lot of a high-rise apartment building. Planning to exchange money and cocaine in a few moments, they wound up the spiral ramp through the multilevel parking garage to the roof. As they got out of the car, Brian and Stan each took a heavy suitcase full of cash from the trunk. As they walked away from the car two security guards and two men in suits ran across the empty parking area to stop them.

“You can’t park here,” one of the men said. “We’re holding this as a possible landing area for the president’s helicopter.”

“I’ll just take the bags in and you move the cars back down there,” Brian said to the other men, gesturing back down to the ground-level lot. The guard said that would be okay. Stan handed one of the men his car keys.

Brian and Stan then took the bags inside and rode up the elevator. Once inside, Brian just looked at Stan and said, “Jesus Christ! What fucking timing I’ve got.”

Stan looked faint.

They were let into the apartment by a third man, who poured them a drink and explained that Reagan was in town to commend the members of a south Florida antidrug force that had seized a record amount of drugs, guns, and cash that year.

“More than three billion dollars since January,” the man said. “I heard it on the TV. He’s going to be down there tomorrow morning.” He pointed to a 110-foot Coast Guard cutter in the bay below. “That’s the
Dauntless.
It chases down pot smugglers.”

“Marijuana?” said Brian.

The men chuckled.

In the back room, Brian was shown twenty kilos of cocaine. Stan left, and Brian spent a few hours testing the merchandise. Afraid to leave the apartment again with so much cocaine, he sat through the night by himself, watching TV. He learned that Reagan would board the
Dauntless
the next morning and give a speech.

Brian snorted cocaine through the night and dozed for a few hours on the couch. He could imagine what a headline he would make if someone caught him in the middle of Ronald Reagan’s antidrug party.

“They’d hang me from the bow of the boat,” Brian told his host.

That morning Brian and his supplier watched from the apartment window as the presidential ceremony took place. On the television, they heard the president commend the Coast Guard crew.

“Without your efforts, these drugs would have been on the marketplace providing profits for organized crime, fueling the drug culture that has done so much damage to so many lives in our society,” Reagan said.

“Fuckin’ marijuana,” scoffed Brian.

Fall more than lived up to its name on Timber Lane, blanketing Larry and Marcia’s front lawn with a thick layer of red and orange leaves. Larry stopped before going to work one morning to pose in the front yard with Chris and Rusty. Larry wore a short-sleeve white shirt
with a red-and-blue striped tie under a button-down collar. Chris was five months old, dressed in red corduroy overalls. Larry propped the baby on the dog’s back and Marcia snapped the picture. They had never lived in a place that transformed so dramatically and beautifully with each turn of the season.

It was on a morning just a few days later, one of Larry’s days with no office hours, that Marcia left Chris with Larry while she went shopping at the nearby Acme. When she returned, Larry was in the kitchen with Ken Weidler. Chris was in a little windup swing by the kitchen table.

Larry turned to Marcia as she came in through the door from the garage, her arms full of bags, and said, “We’ve got trouble.”

“What?” said Marcia.

“The FBI is investigating Mark Stewart.”

Marcia dropped the bags on the kitchen table.

“That’s just great,” she said. She was angry, angry at Larry. Marcia had always believed that Larry was headed for big trouble, and that Mark Stewart was its most likely source. Even the drug dealing never worried Marcia as much as Larry’s association with Stewart. The dealing was all among friends. How could the police ever crack that? But ever since that first day she saw Mark, as she left for work that morning on Osage Avenue, Marcia had believed the man was trouble personified, a chilling presence in her world. She had grown to despise him more and more through the years, to despise his influence on Larry. She had complained and complained to Larry about associating with him. So hearing those words was like sudden confirmation of her worst fears.

“That is just
great!
” she repeated, shouting now. “Just what we need. What happened?”

“Mark didn’t pay Frankie Smith the royalties he was owed by the record company.”

Marcia wheeled around and stormed back out to the car to get more of the grocery bags. Ken gave Larry an awkward look. Marcia’s angry reaction had taken them both by surprise.

“Well, I guess you can’t go golfing today,” said Ken sheepishly. He walked out through the garage toward his car.

Back in the kitchen, Marcia wanted more information.

“What’s going to happen?” she said. “They’re going to find out about your drug dealing!”

“Oh, no, they’ll never find out about that,” said Larry. “Mark would never say anything.”

“Larry, wake up. If they start investigating him, they’re going to see where the money is coming from and then they’re going to
come and see what you’ve been doing. They’re going to see your name. The district attorney already has your name as a drug suspect.”