Doctor Dealer (54 page)

He misses you & I do too.

Love,

Marcia

The questions raised about his best friend and former dental partner’s conduct haunted Larry enough that he skipped his next two scheduled monthly calls to Ken. In a previous call, months before, Larry had been warned by Tom Bergstrom not to phone Ken Weidler and David Ackerman. He told Tom that he didn’t believe Ken would ever betray him. There was something between him and Kenny that ran too deep for the government to penetrate. In fact, after skipping the two prearranged calls, Larry had second thoughts. If he couldn’t trust Ken, whom could he trust? Besides, curiosity was eating at him. Larry believed only he would be able to tell what was really going on with Kenny. And the only way to do that was to talk with him.

So Larry sent word through Richard of a time and place to contact Ken. Marcia was dead set against it. It was foolish to call in the first place, she argued, and even more foolish to call after they had been given cause to suspect that Ken was cooperating. For all they knew, the indirect information they were getting about Kenny might have been his way of warning them to keep away.

But Larry had made up his mind. He drove out to a nearby shopping mall. Marcia stayed in the van with Christopher and the baby. Larry promised to keep the call down to two minutes, which he felt would ensure that it could not be traced, and told Marcia to watch the digital clock on the dashboard and signal him when time was about up. It was a sunny, hot Saturday, June 8, 1985. In a hallway just inside the doors to the mall, where he could still see Marcia in the parking lot, Larry fed quarters into the pay phone and punched in the Philadelphia area code and number. The line was busy. Larry tried again. Again it was busy. So Larry walked back out to the car, waited another five minutes, and then tried again. Again, the phone was busy. Larry debated with himself, then tried one last time.

“Yo!” said Ken.

“Kenny,” said Larry.

“Oh, oh, Larry,” said Ken, pronouncing his friend’s name as a baby would, “Way-wee,” the way he always did when they were joking around. “I couldn’t believe it. This fuckin’ guy would not get off the phone.”

“I was just about to give up, man. Maybe you had somebody to see or you weren’t there or something. You fucked up—”

“Kenny here! Kenny was gonna go to the shore but Kenny didn’t go to the shore ’cause—”

“Sorry,” said Larry. “I didn’t know whether you would be working today or not.”

“Come on!”
groaned Ken. Larry had always teased his friend about his lackadaisical work habits. “This is
Saturday.
What’s wrong with you?”

“Well, first of all, I want to tell you I’m sorry. You know, I heard that you told Marcia’s mom you thought I didn’t trust you and all that stuff.”

“Yeah?”

“So . . .”

“Well, she said the same thing.”

“Well, I
don’t
trust her,” said Larry, laughing. “I do now, but, you know, she’s not as smart. You know, she took him to my house.”

“You want to hear what the story was behind that? At least what she told me?”

“Yeah.”

“She said that Reed came to her door and said that he wanted her to take him up to the house. And she said, ’Well, I can’t do that,’ and that she would have to call Bergstrom. So she called Bergstrom and Bergstrom apparently said they’d either do it today or they would come back with an order, a court order for her to do it tomorrow.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” said Larry.

“So she wanted me to press upon you that she didn’t just, you know, go open the house up to him. She called the lawyer first and that’s what he told her to do.”

“Yeah. I see. That’s too bad. You know, Richard should have told me that.”

“Yeah,” said Ken.

“He should have told me that. He made it sound like . . . but, aw, I don’t want to waste too much time on the past. I’d like to hear what’s going on with you. But I’ll just tell you, the only reason I didn’t call you is I called Bergstrom one time, before this happened, you know”—Larry was referring to his flight—“and he had just talked to your guy. And he said, ’Just don’t talk to Weidler or Ackerman.’ He said, ’They’re under extreme pressure right now. . . . I’m telling you. Don’t talk to them.’ So I hear that, and then I call Joe. . . . He’s telling me that you’re, you’re in there looking at demographics. I’m there . . . well, why would he do that? And I said, ’I guess he’s looking for a new practice.’ And then he says, ’Well, I don’t really know.’ But then I’m thinking about it, well, jeez, it sounds like, you know, you’re under all this pressure, that you’re going to be moving practice, and, ah, so I just didn’t want to add any more temptation. That was my bottom line.”

“Yeah?” said Ken.

“I took this one little course and I found out they can tap a phone in two minutes. They can find out. You know how I found out? These numbers where people call for suicides. You know? If they hang up,
they just drop the phone, that’s how long it takes them to find the place.”

“Oh, Jesus!”

“But, anyway, tell me what’s going on,” said Larry.

They discussed the dental practice. Ken had been having a hard time making a go of it without Larry. He had never been the one to keep books or deal with the women who worked as receptionists and hygienists. Larry had always taken care of that. And the “girls,” as they called them, had always liked Larry more than Ken. So it had been difficult, and Ken had been looking for a buyer to take over Larry’s patients and his own.

Then the conversation wandered. Larry told Ken about the new baby, about how she had been sick with a virus and how the doctors scared him and Marcia by ordering up a whole battery of tests that had all proved negative. He had recently taken Chris to his first visit with a dentist.

“It killed me,” said Larry. “He’s telling me he’s got some type of overbite. I’m there, ’Oh?’ I felt like saying, ’Is it a Class Two?’ You know?”

They talked about sports. Ken teased Larry about his facility for picking losers. Larry had picked the Miami Dolphins to beat the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl, and the 49ers had won. And Larry had picked the Celtics to beat the Lakers in the NBA championship, and Boston had lost a game the night before.

Out in the car Marcia was signaling Larry that time was up, but he felt comfortable talking to Ken now, and had decided to take the risk. He waved back to Marcia, indicating that he was going to stay on the line. She scowled and just shook her head sadly.

Larry asked Ken how his legal situation was developing. Ken said he was definitely going to be charged for tax fraud, but he still might escape drug charges. He told Larry that Mark Stewart had just been sentenced to four years.

“Oh,” said Larry.

Ken laughed. “I thought—”

Then Larry erupted in laughter.

“I thought you’d be interested in that,” said Ken.

Larry suggested that Ken give them everything he knew about Mark Stewart, but then realized most of what Ken knew was hearsay.

“Well, I can remember meeting him before the fire,” said Ken.

Larry reminded him of the meeting where Mark had said, “Just give me two more weeks.”

“Yeah . . . but that can’t be corroborated, right?” said Ken. “I mean, what if the boy [meaning David Ackerman] decided to say
that, the same thing, too? . . . It looks like the boy’s got a problem. The boy doesn’t think he has a problem.”

“The bad thing about that is you, if you really push that [the meeting with Stewart], they can probably charge you with that, too.”

“Yeah.”

“At least, that’s my thought. . . . Even though it was vague . . . it looks like everyone conspired to do it then, and actually we had very little—”

“Input,” said Ken.

“Control,” said Larry. “It was just, we were listening to what he was going to do. We didn’t have much choice anyway.”

“Well, wasn’t one motive . . . to get you . . . the insurance settlement?”

“Right. Right. . . . You know, I just can’t believe the stupidity of it all. You know? Every month you get older you just think how you handled different things in your life and you just can’t believe them, you know?” Larry laughed wistfully.

“Yeah,” said Ken.

“So I gotta just think back like to fraternity days, how I would have handled things now, you know? It’s just, it’s just so different . . . but, so anyway.”

“So I don’t know what my exposure is,” said Ken.

“But they haven’t done any more, huh?”

“Not yet.”

“Do they project any dates or anything?”

“No.”

“So you’re in that same limbo as when I left?”

“I’m in limbo and the reason, that’s one of the reasons I’m liquidating,” said Ken. He said he wanted to convert his assets into cash, anticipating the cost of defending himself from the pending indictment, and he also didn’t want to just leave the girls in the office jobless and the patients without a dentist. Conversation drifted back to children. Ken’s little girl had just started to walk. Larry said Christopher, who had been slow learning to talk, “won’t shut up . . . sometimes I just have to put my hands over my ears, I just can’t handle it anymore, you know?” He said Chris was adjusting well to the baby.

“It is a girl,” said Larry.

Ken told Larry that the FBI had been questioning everyone in their office, all their friends.

“Kenny out on the limb here,” he said. “. . . All friends left Kenny. No Boy. No Way-wee.”

“Boy in New York now?”

“Boy in New York. Boy’s setting up with Dad. Doesn’t think he
has a problem, and, ah, thinks you’re in the Witness Protection Program.”

They both laughed hard.

“No, I’m in a much better situation than that,” said Larry.

“Yeah?”

“I like my situation, Ken, I think.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, I like my situation. If everything could clear up and change, I don’t think I’d go back anymore. I’m just having too much fun.”

“That’s good.”

“I don’t think I’m really into playing dentist anymore, you know?” said Larry, laughing.

“To playing dentist?”

“No, I said I don’t think I’m really into that anymore. I like talking to people but I don’t really like drilling, I guess. . . . I never really liked doing the work, you know? I realize that now, now after having not done it. You know, at first it really bothered me, now it doesn’t. . . . You really see how people think about doctors when you, when they don’t know you’re a doctor, you know?”

“Yeah?”

“When you hear comments like, ’This guy had this piece of land because he’s a doctor,’ and, you know, they wink at you or something. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah. . . . So, your picture’s in the post office. Do you know that?”

“No!” Larry laughed with surprise.

“You’re ’Wanted,’ Way-wee.”

“It’s really in the post office?”

“Sure is,” said Ken.

“I looked in the post office here and I didn’t see it.”

“. . . They said it wasn’t posted on the wall. Like, there’s this thing of ’Wanted’ people and it was in it.”

“I’ll have to check that out,” said Larry.

“Yes, Way-wee, you could have a nice picture.”

“That sucks . . . it just kills me ’cause every time I read those they’re for real
severe
people.”

Larry asked about his house. Ken said it was still empty, the grass was overgrown. It painted a sad picture for Larry. They talked more about the sale of the dental practice. Then Ken asked about Rusty. Larry said he was amazed, but the FBI didn’t seem to be giving his family much trouble. They had not even spoken to his parents.

“It’s very weird,” said Ken.

“They don’t even make the minimal—”

“That’s what your mother-in-law says. She goes, you know, ’They’ve been here, why don’t they go see Larry’s parents?’ “

Larry laughed.

Ken ran down the list of their friends and associates, giving Larry the latest news. The Rasners had gotten off—no jail time. Suzanne Norimatsu-Taylor had been sentenced to two years. Her husband, Bruce, had gotten ten.

“Taylor got ten?” said Larry.

“Yeah.”

“He got the Eight Forty-eight conviction.”

They discussed money that was owed Larry by various people. Larry asked Ken to steer any payments to Rusty, so that he could use it to help support his parents.

“Well, I’m glad to hear that you’re not going to jail or anything yet,” said Larry.

“Not yet. Way-wee, that bring up another point. If Kenny go to jail, will you help wife and family?”

“Yes, yes, yes. I make sure your wife get constant amount of it,” said Larry, laughing lecherously. “That’s not going to happen, right? Do you think?”

“I don’t know. All I can say is, if something happens to me, I’d like you to somehow maintain an open communication with, somehow with me, and if I feel that there’s a problem, like if I, if, if they want me to do something, if we have a prearranged time, I was thinking that if I answer the phone and say ’Hello’—instead of ‘Yo’ or ‘Way-wee!’—just hang up and don’t, don’t ever call me again.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay? I don’t think, I don’t know if that is going to happen, but . . . So if I ever say ’Hello,’ then just—”

“Good,” said Larry. “See, I don’t mind calling you today because I’m several states away from where I live anyway, you know? So it doesn’t really bother me. They can fuckin’ do all they want, but it would be pretty hard for them to. ’Cause I had to be out of town anyways.”

“Yeah.”

“See, I’m in the real world again, Ken. You know, I got a job and—”

“You do?”

“Yeah.”

“You got a job, Way-wee?”

“Yeah, a little bit. Once in a while I do some work.”

“Yeah?”

“Most of the time I work out and just take it easy and read books. Run Marcia around.”

“You play any golf?”

“No, I really haven’t. I just haven’t got around to that yet.”

“. . . So, you losing weight?”

“I’m swimming and all that,” said Larry. “No. I’m about the same weight. I have to run Marcia around all the time and, you know, it’s the same old life. Going to malls, going to stores, buying this, buying that. Fix up the house . . . all that type of stuff takes up so much time.”