Doctor Dealer

by Mark Bowden

  Then one of the men was in the living room shouting, “Don’t look at us! Don’t look at our faces!”

  He saw Marcia in the kitchen.

  “Come here, bitch!” he shouted, showing his gun. Marcia stepped toward the living room and he grabbed her by the arm and pushed her down on the floor. L.A.’s face was pressed straight into the thick blue rug. He was bleeding and his glasses were shattered. Next to her Larry raised his head, and one of the standing men clobbered him again with the gun. One of the men held a gun to the back of her head.

  “Just don’t look at us and nobody is going to get hurt,” he said. Marcia pushed her nose into the carpet.

  Larry lifted his head again. “I know who you guys are and you better leave right now!” He got hit over the head again. Marcia thought, Why doesn’t he just shut up?

  One of the men had gone directly back to Larry’s study. They could hear him trying the drawers to Larry’s desk. He came striding back into the living room hollering, “The keys. We know you have keys to the desk back there. Where you keep the money.”

  Larry fished the keys from his pocket and handed them up. “Look, this man’s hurt; we have to get him to the hospital,” he said, and got hit on the back of the head again.

  “Stop lifting your head up, you idiot,” Marcia told him.

  L.A. hadn’t stirred.

  One of the men went through the kitchen and down the hall. They could hear the keys jingle and the desk drawers being opened. The other man moved around the living room, jerking the phone cords from the wall and then trying, still holding the gun, to work Larry’s stereo out from its space on a shelf by the TV. Suddenly, the gun went off.

  There was a moment of stunned silence.

  “Did anyone get hurt?” Larry shouted.

  Both men bolted. They slammed the door shut behind them and were gone.

  Larry, Marcia, and L.A. lay quietly for a few moments until they were sure the men had gone. Then Larry bounded up to check out his desk in the back room. Marcia turned to help L.A., who sat up dazed and bleeding. A neighbor from upstairs, a dental school classmate whom Larry paid to help break up cocaine shipments, banged on the door.

  “Are you all right?” he shouted through the door. “Should I call the police?”

  The men had taken off with Larry’s keys, and in the confusion of the moment Marcia couldn’t remember where she had put hers, so she couldn’t open the door.

  In the back room Larry inventoried his drawers. Two cash drawers had been opened. One was filled with neatly stacked ten-dollar bills. They hadn’t been touched. The drawer that had been filled with twenties was empty. There had been a pound of cocaine in a Ziploc plastic bag on top of the desk. That was gone. They had evidently torn the bag open before taking it, because there was a mess of white powder on the floor.

  Larry was thinking fast. Someone had surely heard the shot. The police were going to be there soon.

  He ran out to the living room.

  “Are you okay?” he asked Marcia.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Go vacuum the back room.”

  Through the locked door, he told his neighbor to run around back to the window of his study. With Marcia running the vacuum, Larry hurriedly passed handfuls of bills and bags of drugs out the window to his neighbor. They had the room completely cleaned long before the police arrived.

  Larry’s wheels were turning fast. He found Marcia’s keys and opened the front door. Then he got his neighbor to help him move the stereo. The more stuff he could remove to the basement fast, the more he could claim had been stolen. He certainly couldn’t report that they had gotten away with thirty thousand in cash and a pound of cocaine.

  He was carrying the stereo down the hallway to the basement steps when the police arrived.

  Larry blurted an explanation. “I was afraid they’d come back, so we’re moving a few things out,” he said.

  The cops couldn’t have been nicer.

  “They got the stereo, huh?” one of the cops said.

  Larry caught on immediately. “The stereo? Yeah, my five-hundred-dollar stereo.”

  Inside the apartment the same cop glanced over at Larry’s new Sony.

  “They got your TV, too, did they?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Larry, smiling.

  “Damn shame,” said the cop, adding it to his report.

  When the police were gone and L.A. had bandaged his head and gone home, Marcia collapsed on the bed. She was numb, and frightened. As usual, Larry went right to the phone. He called Tyrone and Mark Stewart—lately it was as if Mark Stewart were taking over their lives. Marcia couldn’t stand him. She sobbed.

  Paul Mikuta stopped by to see if she and Larry were all right. He sat on the bed and wrapped his arms around Marcia to comfort her.

  “I feel sorry for you,” said Paul. “All the things that Larry puts you through.”

  “This wasn’t his fault,” she said.

  Then Larry marched in and angrily announced that he knew why this had happened.

  “It’s Warren,” he said.

  Warren was one of the toughest characters among the West Philly dealers Larry had met through his dealings with Tyrone. Even Tyrone had warned Larry about him. That afternoon Warren had come by with some Quaaludes. Larry had a weakness for Quaaludes, and in 1980 they were becoming rare. So he had counted out a few thousand dollars to pay for them, being careful not to open the drawers where major cash was stacked. But as he was counting, one of his runners had stopped in unexpectedly and, without thinking, had cheerfully poured sixty-five thousand in cash out of a tennis bag onto a chair in the back office. Larry had half expected Warren to pull a gun right there. He was so nervous he inadvertently overpaid for the Quaaludes.

  “I just talked to Tyrone, and he said Warren was telling people just this afternoon that if I wasn’t more careful, I was going to be ripped off,” said Larry. “Anyway, I got word out on the street about these guys. I’m going to get them.”

  Marcia had listened to all this as though in shock. She was no longer just frightened. Now that she knew how and why this had happened, she was furious!

  “This is your fault!” she said, glaring at Larry.

  “What?”

  “How could you let that happen to us! You let those people into my home bringing money and drugs at all hours of the day and night. I can’t even sit around on the couch at night and watch TV without people coming in and out of my own home! You let anyone in from off the street! I’m not surprised this happened! We could have all been killed!”

  Larry was stunned. Her sudden outburst took Larry and Paul by surprise.

  “This wasn’t my fault,” Larry protested.

  “Larry, you have got to stop. You have got to stop doing this. Something worse is going to happen! Don’t you see?”

  “I’ve got word out on the street right now about these guys,” Larry said. “It’s not going to happen again. I’m going to get these guys.”

  “Oh, that’s just great!” said Marcia. It was as if they were on different wavelengths.

  Paul excused himself, awkwardly, leaving Marcia and Larry to fight things out. She could not get him to see that it was his fault, that it had grown out of his dealing, not just because one stupid runner had dumped money on the couch in front of the wrong person.

  “You’re like an addict,” Marcia said. “You keep promising to quit, and then you don’t. It’s like you’re crazy or something, Larry. You’re addicted to this. And you can’t even admit it to yourself.”

  “That’s not true, Marcia. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Well, I’m leaving. I just can’t take any more of this.”

  Larry was, for once, silent. Marcia had gotten angry before about his dealing. They had shouted at each other about it often enough. But she had never before threatened to leave.

  “Please don’t,” he said at last. There was no cockiness in his voice now. “Don’t leave,” he said. “I’ll stop.”

&nb
sp; Marcia was moved by his depth of feeling. In recent months she had had serious doubts about his affection for her, and as their wedding date approached the issue was coming to a head. It was more than six years since Marcia’s first day at Penn, since the day she met Larry. She had matured from a pudgy, insecure teenager to a very poised and pretty young woman. She wore her straight brown hair short. Her face had lost all trace of its teenage chubbiness. It was now a wide oval with gentle contours at the high cheekbones, with large brown eyes and dark eyebrows. Gone was the round, childlike figure of freshman year. Marcia had a small, lean figure and kept herself in good shape. And just as she had physically shed baby fat, Marcia’s personality had become more lean and sharply defined. Earning her own degree and making her own way as a physical therapist had given her confidence in herself. Although she remained resolutely devoted to him, she no longer hesitated to criticize Larry. She had no doubt that her judgment was sounder than his. To Marcia, Larry’s obsession with dealing and making money had become pathetic. She knew she loved him, despite everything, and it relieved her deeply to see that he was not so far gone that he was ready to throw away their future. Surely Larry was too bright and too basically decent to avoid eventually being drawn into her orbit.

  So Marcia stayed.

  Of course, in the next few weeks Larry explained that he would have to wrap up a few loose ends, jut to shore up his million.

  “After that I’ll never have to do this again,” he said. “We’ll have money for the rest of our lives.”

  Larry always tried to emphasize the benefits of his dealing: They had spent a lovely week in the Bahamas the previous spring after Larry came back from Aspen, and in the fall they had traveled to Williamsburg and Virginia Beach—she and Larry both loved the area. In a month they were planning to take off again for Miami Beach. And it was true that Marcia loved the vacations. But what Larry couldn’t seem to grasp was that she loved them mostly because they took him away from the damn telephone for a week. When they were on vacation they were like a normal couple! She would have been just as happy to spend a week at the Jersey shore on her own salary.

  Before Marcia went to bed, Larry had also promised that they would move out of the neighborhood immediately, and that he would never again allow the world of his drug dealing to intrude on their home.

  Marcia tried to sleep while Larry spent the rest of the night on the phone. She could hear his voice in the back room, sharing his anger over the lost money and conspiring to get it back.

  Larry was talking to Tyrone, who said he had a friend who would get the thirty thousand back for a fee of five thousand dollars.

  “How are you going to do that?” asked Larry.

  In a tone that conveyed menace, Tyrone explained, “Well, Larry, Fred is just going to go in there and get it back . . . you know what I mean?”

  “I don’t want them killed!” said Larry. “I just want the money back!”

  “Supposing they don’t want to just give it to us?” said Tyrone, laughing.

  “Then forget it,” Larry said, exasperated.

  “You don’t do anything about this, word will get around and you’ll get ripped off a lot, man,” said Tyrone.

  First thing in the morning Marcia insisted that Larry call a locksmith to have the front and back door locks changed. She called her boss at the VA hospital and explained what had happened, and got the day off.

  Then Larry called Mark Stewart again.

  Before noon they were driving down to look at a townhouse in Society Hill, which featured the most expensive residential real estate in the city. Society Hill originally took its name from a pre-Revolutionary War maritime commerce firm called The Society of Free Traders, but the name had long since come to signify the pinnacle of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods. Larry and Marcia were shown a three-story maroon brick townhouse, 4 Willings Alley Mews, one in a row of small modern structures that blended easily with the Colonial architecture in the heart of Philadelphia’s most historic: district. The new houses were shoehorned in a tiny alley, just two blocks away from Independence Hall and directly opposite Saint James Church, the oldest Catholic church in America. The house had one room on each of its five levels, counting the basement kitchen and rooftop patio, and cost $150,000. Larry was worried about the IRS. If a $150,000 home out of the blue wasn’t a “red flag,” nothing was. But according to Larry, Mark reassured him.

  “Look, Larry, you need the house,” Mark said. “If worst comes to the worst, I can always say that I loaned you the money.”

  These were much fancier digs than those of ordinary Penn graduate students. The basement kitchen was spacious and modern, with all new appliances and a black-and-white checkered tile floor. The first level, which one ascended to up an open stairwell on curving stairs, was a completely open living room with a fireplace and with floors inlaid with beautiful parquetry. The second floor was a big bedroom and bath with a wide closet area with a new washer and dryer. The third floor was another bedroom, a good place for Larry’s study and Marcia’s sewing machine and, thought Larry, maybe a pool table. The rooftop patio overlooked the city’s most quaint, historic sights and offered, in the distance, a panoramic vista of America’s fourth largest metropolis. To the east was the Delaware River and the lights of Penn’s Landing. Upriver was the blue steel Ben Franklin Bridge. Downriver the gray span of the Walt Whitman Bridge. Below, on the slate gray river, moved vessels of all shapes and sizes: tiny speedboats, tugs, warships, barges and giant tankers. Larry loved it.

  Marcia hated it.

  “It’s too vertical,” she said. “It’s like living in an elevator shaft. And there aren’t any trees or grass.”

  But Larry wanted it. Marcia knew she couldn’t go back to Osage Avenue. And she had hopes that by moving away from Penn, Larry’s dealing connections would dry up.

  So they took it. Mark Stewart was only too eager to make the financial arrangements. Larry gave him sixty thousand in cash and Mark wrote him a check, which Larry deposited at Bank Leumi. Larry then obtained a ninety-thousand-dollar mortgage. Larry hired two men and a truck to move their belongings, and they were living in Society Hill by evening. Larry didn’t tell Tyrone and Fred that he was moving. He promised Marcia that he was leaving that kind of dealing behind for good.

  Sometime in the next few weeks Larry bought a gun, a black .22-caliber short Beretta. He had been advised to get a .25-caliber, because it was small enough to fit comfortably inside a vest pocket when he wore a three-piece suit, but the gun shop didn’t have any of that model so he settled on a smaller but equally suitable model.

  Mark had been angry when he heard about the robbery, with concern that was both paternal and proprietary. He offered Larry help in tracking down the people who had done it, and chided him for being so casual about letting people come by his house. Mark helped with arrangements for the gun, telling Larry where to buy it and directing him (with instructions to pay a hundred dollars) to Abe Schwartz, the Philadelphia police detective responsible for processing gun permits. Larry put the pistol in the top drawer of the table beside his bed.

  Three months had passed since the afternoon when Paula Van Horn reported the robbery. For all of that time, David Ackerman had spied on his housemate. He hid a long-playing tape recorder in her room and steamed open all of her mail. Slowly, he accumulated evidence. Paula had bought skis for her children. David thought that was odd, because Paula never had seemed to have any extra money before.

  “Oh, come on,” said Larry. “She bought skis for her kids. What’s the big deal?”

  Next, Ackerman came up with a phone conversation where Paula, from what could be learned listening only to her end of the conversation, appeared to be discussing plans for buying and rehabbing a dilapidated row home in South Philly.

  “This is nothing,” said Larry. “I’ve been paying her well.”

  But when Ackerman found the key to a safe-deposit box, and a receipt that showed Paula had opened it shortly after the “robbery,”
Larry’s faith was shaken. He still wasn’t convinced, but he agreed that it was worth checking out.

  Through Mark Stewart, Larry had met Slim Robinson, a big black man who trained fighters. Slim was a stylish man, favoring wide-brimmed colorful hats and matching suits. He drove a big black Delta 88 with a plush velour interior and spoked wheel covers—all of it adding an aura of mystery, power, and menace. Larry asked Slim to accompany him on a visit to Paula’s apartment. When Glen Fuller showed up from one of his Florida runs, he wanted in on it, too. This was Glen’s kind of action. Larry gave Glen his unloaded .22-caliber pistol.

  “This’ll get her thinking,” he said.

  Before leaving, Larry phoned Paula. He said he was coming over with two Philadelphia police detectives.

  “They think they’ve finally got a break in the case, and they want you to come down to headquarters to pick the suspect out of a lineup,” he said.

  When Paula opened the door of her apartment on Fitzwater Street, she took a long look at his companions and decided they looked nothing at all like policemen.

  Glen immediately reached out and stuck the gun in her belly.

  “We want the money back,” he said.

  And Paula confessed. It happened that fast. None of it was her idea, she said. She said she met this guy—the man who had come forward on the day of the robbery and told police he had witnessed it and given chase to the thief. He had forced her to do it.

  “Where’s my money?” asked Larry.

  “He took it,” she said.

  “Well, where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Then Larry produced the safe-deposit-box key. Paula seemed shocked.

  “Where’d you get that?” she asked.

  “Never mind about that.”

  “The guy was nice to me. He let me keep some of the money.”

  “How much?”

  “Half—but I spent some of that already.”

  “Let’s go,” said Larry.

  Paula said she had to change her clothes first.