Doctor Dealer (43 page)

As the agents listened to the long, rambling conversation, they noted all the names of customers Larry and Bruce mentioned, and they realized that the tape had completed another important link in the case. They had Larry’s conversation with Wayne Heinauer, and they had pictures of Bruce meeting with Wayne in Phoenix. Now they had directly established Larry’s link to Bruce.

It was time to start reeling in the big fish.

It had been snowing hard through Monday, January 16. As was their habit, Suzanne Norimatsu-Taylor and her husband, Bruce, had gotten to bed in their downstairs bedroom at about 6:00 a.m. Tuesday morning. Suzanne slept the sound sleep of one spent by a long weekend of partying with cocaine. Normally she would have slept until early afternoon, but this morning the tall, dark-haired woman was awakened suddenly at about eleven by the sound of heavy footsteps on the outside stairs. Through partially opened blinds she could see men hurrying, carrying guns.

“Bruce, wake up! FBI! Shotguns!” she shouted.

Even with the blinds partly open it was dark in the bedroom. Sitting up in bed, Suzanne could see the pool table in the next room where lights were still on. At the far side of that room were the stairs up to the living room at ground level. Just as Bruce roused himself from sleep she saw legs descending the stairs.

“FBI! Who’s in there!” shouted one of the lead men. “Get down on your hands and knees and crawl out here!”

Bruce rolled out of the bed on his hands and knees. He grabbed Suzanne by the hand.

“Get down on the floor!” he said.

Instead, Suzanne stood up, pulling on her robe, and defiantly walked into the next room. A female FBI agent stepped up and patted her down for weapons. There were about twenty agents moving around the house.

Suzanne and Bruce were escorted upstairs and told to sit together on the couch in the living room. As the agents methodically searched, Bruce and Suzanne dozed. One of the agents brought them a blanket. After about an hour, one of the agents escorted Suzanne downstairs to go to the bathroom and to let her get dressed. She pulled on a black jumpsuit in the bathroom. Bruce was then taken downstairs.

While he was gone, Chuck Reed approached Suzanne.

“See, Suzanne? If you had spoken to me six months ago, none of this would have happened,” he said.

Suzanne pulled the blanket over her head and sank further down into the couch.

“I’m not fooling around, this is serious,” said Chuck angrily. “Sit up! Are you sober?” Chuck turned to one of the other agents and repeated, “Is she sober?”

The agent nodded. Chuck turned back to Suzanne. “Do you understand that this is serious?”

“Yes, I know you’re serious,” said Suzanne.

“Well, now’s your chance. You can help us get Larry.”

Suzanne looked away, avoiding the bearded agent’s steady gaze.

“Don’t be so stupid, Suzanne. You know Larry is sitting over there in his hot tub, and he doesn’t give a damn about you.”

Chuck stood up silently and left the room just before Bruce came back.

For three hours Bruce and Suzanne were on the couch.

Sid Perry, Chuck’s partner since the summer before, a smaller, easygoing agent with a soft Tennessee accent and a milder manner than his partner’s, approached the couch and said, “We’d like to talk to Bruce.”

Bruce followed Sid and Chuck into one of the back bedrooms. Suzanne waited, tucking the blanket more tightly around herself. A few minutes passed, and then Sid emerged from the back room.

“Bruce wants to talk to you,” he said.

Suzanne joined her husband in the bedroom. They sat together on the edge of the bed. Bruce explained in a whisper that the agents had shown him pictures of him meeting with Wayne Heinauer at the Phoenix airport. Chuck had told Bruce he was going to be sent away
to jail for a long time, perhaps as long as fifteen years, unless he was willing to help them now. He would still go to jail, but perhaps not for so long.

“What did you say?” asked Suzanne.

“I told them no. I said I wasn’t going to make any deals.”

He said the agents had asked what he was afraid of. One of the agents had said, “Frannie and Larry don’t know where your family lives.” Bruce said he had just laughed. Suzanne indicated to Bruce that she was behind him whatever he decided.

They were escorted back out to the couch.

At 3:00 p.m., Chuck came back in the living room and said, “Okay, stand up. We’re going downtown.”

Suzanne and Bruce stood up together. One agent clapped handcuffs on Bruce. Suzanne held out her hands, but the agent said, “No, Suzanne, you’re not going.”

“Good,” said Bruce.

She was shocked. Bruce leaned over to kiss her goodbye, and whispered, “Call your uncle.” Suzanne often referred to Larry as “Uncle Larry.”

When the agents left with Bruce, Suzanne called her sister. Kim had stayed angry with her sister for about four months after Suzanne and Bruce ran off to Las Vegas and got married. But they had gotten together before Christmas and had a long talk and a cry. Now they were as close as they had ever been.

Before Suzanne said a word about the raid, Kim blurted, “Guess what just happened?”

“What?”

“The FBI was at Michael Schade’s!” Schade was a Drexel student who had gotten involved with dealing through Kim.

“Oh, yeah?” said Suzanne. “Well, they were just here, too.” “What! Oh, God!”

“Yeah. That’s right. I want you to call our uncle and see if we can see him later.” Suzanne spoke cryptically because she assumed now that the phone was tapped.

“Okay,” said Kim. “I’ll be right over.”

Suzanne asked Kim to first alert Larry.

Next, Suzanne called Emmett Fitzpatrick, a well-known Philadelphia defense attorney. Fitzpatrick had been retained initially by David Ackerman in late 1982 when the FBI approached him asking questions about Mark Stewart and the Arena arson. Suzanne had met the lawyer once or twice with David.

“They took Bruce away!” Suzanne said.

“Who took Bruce away?” said Fitzpatrick.

“The FBI!”

“Oh,” said the lawyer. “Who’s Bruce?”

“He’s my husband!” said Suzanne. “I married Bruce. I’m not with David anymore.”

“Oh, well, congratulations,” said the bass-voiced attorney.

“Thanks,” said Suzanne.

“Now, tell me why they took Bruce away.”

“Well, you see, they had a search warrant, and they were looking for cocaine.”

“But they didn’t find any, did they?” he asked.

“Well, yeah, they found about a pound.”

“Ahh, but it wasn’t yours, was it?”

“Well, uh, no!”

“And it wasn’t Bruce’s either, was it?” he asked.

“No!” said Suzanne. She was cheering up.

“Where was it?” the lawyer asked.

“It was in this black box.”

“Uh-huh. Is there a back door?”

“Yes,” said Suzanne.

“What side of the bed was it on? The one closest to the door?”

“Yes.”

“Mmm. That’s very interesting. Do you know where they’ve taken him?”

“No.”

“Well, you wait there. Try to find out where he is. If he calls you or you find out, let me know.”

Suzanne hung up and waited. She walked through the house inspecting the damage. The house was a mess—had been a mess before the agents came, but now it was worse. She couldn’t find her car keys. Late Christmas presents that Suzanne was planning to deliver to Bruce’s nephews, about forty of them, had all been unwrapped. There was Christmas paper scattered around the floor in the basement, like the aftermath of a party. While the search was under way, Suzanne had felt excited about it all. It was at least
interesting.
But now she felt empty and sad. She wished they had taken her with Bruce. Suzanne assumed that the FBI was raiding everybody else that day, too, if they were at Wayne Heinauer’s and Michael Schade’s. She wanted to phone Larry and warn him and Frannie. Maybe there was still time for them to get away. But she was afraid to use the phone, and without her car keys she couldn’t easily get to a pay phone. The agents had seized what cocaine they found, which was Bruce’s personal stash. For some reason they had left behind a case of inositol on the dining room table. It was all tagged and marked for evidence, but they had left it behind.

Before Kim arrived, Fitzpatrick called to say that he had located
Bruce in a cell at the federal courthouse. There would be a hearing to set bail later in the day. That relaxed Suzanne. She was in the shower when Kim arrived in a cab.

“Can I have a line?” Kim asked, standing in the bathroom by the shower stall wearing tight jeans and a black leather jacket with Walkman earphones framing the wild curls of her hair. Kim was much smaller than Suzanne and had fair hair, but she had the same exotic blend of Japanese and European features.

“They took it!” said Suzanne.

“They took it all?”

“They scraped the top of the microwave,” said Suzanne—that was where they sometimes drew out lines of cocaine for snorting. “They took it all.”

Kim said she had phoned Larry at his office. He had wanted to know more. So she had promised to call when she got to Bruce and Suzanne’s.

Suzanne told her sister that she didn’t want to talk to Larry over the phone. She asked Kim to call him back and ask him to meet with her as soon as he could get away. Suzanne knew she would need money to post Bruce’s bail.

So Kim placed the call. Larry’s receptionist put her on hold, and then Larry came on with his usual cheerful hello.

“Why don’t you just come over here when you’re done?” asked Kim.

Larry groaned, as if to say he didn’t think it was a good idea.

“No?”

“I’m dying,” Larry said.

“He’s dying,” Kim said, speaking to Suzanne.

“You’re torturing me.”

“It’s not good. You’re not going to like it,” said Kim.

“You should just tell me on the phone. I mean, what the heck, they’ve already been there.”

“Well, uh, I don’t know. Do you think?”

“Yeah, what difference does it make if they’ve already been there? She can tell me what happened, at least . . . what they said.”

“All right. Hang on.” Kim called to her sister. “Suzanne, pick up the phone! Larry wants to talk to you. He says since they’ve been here, it doesn’t matter. He’s dying to know what happened.”

“Hello?” said Suzanne.

“How you doin’ ?” said Larry sadly.

Suzanne listened as Larry explained why he felt it was safe at that point to talk.

“Just tell me what happened,” he said.

“Well, uh,” Suzanne fumbled for a way to begin. “We woke up
and there were about twenty of them running around here with shotguns. And they had a search warrant. It was the same, it was Charles Reed, I don’t, do you remember him?”

“Yep.”

“Yeah, well, he came in later on. It was like his little—”

“Thing.”

“Thing, yeah. He came in and, uh . . .”

“When was this? Early this morning?”

“They started at around ten o’clock this morning and they left around three, I think.”

“Jeez.”

“And I didn’t know until the moment they were leaving that they weren’t going to take me. I don’t know why, because up until then they had said different. They had mentioned a couple of people’s names, you know, that—”

“What did they find?”

“They found some cocaine and some money, and I called Mr. Fitzpatrick.”

“Right. Did he call down there or anything?”

“Yes. He spoke to Bruce. . . . He called me back at four-thirty and said I needed, um, twenty-five hundred by—First they wanted a quarter of a million, then they reduced it to twenty-five thousand, I mean twenty-five hundred.”

“That’s a big move.” Larry laughed.

“I know. Fitzpatrick was going, like, ‘I did this for you.’ By five o’clock, and I said, well, first of all, they took all my keys. I don’t have any car keys or house keys, and they took all my money. So I said I didn’t even have any money, I couldn’t get down there by five o’clock. So he called back and said nine o’clock tomorrow morning I’ll be able to post bail, down at Fifth and Market.”

“Okay. So, how much of each thing do you think they got? A rough guess.”

“Oh, about eighty-five.”

“Eighty-five thousand?”

“Yeah.”

“And the other thing?”

“About a pound, I think.”

“And did they take all types of paraphernalia?”

“Yeah.”

“I imagine what they would do is dump all that in, any cut or anything, and call it all one.”

“Fitzpatrick did say to me that he can’t represent Bruce because it’s a conflict of interest with he and David.”

“Yeah, well, you know. Someone can get someone else.”

“Well, no, you see, they took all these—the evidence they took were pictures of me and David, anything that was written to me from David.”

“And what? That’s nothing, right?”

“No. It isn’t anything, I mean, it’s just strange that they want—”

“What did—can you figure any way that they knew to go there?”

“Oh, well, they said that they had photographs of Bruce and someone named Wayne from about a year ago.”

“Someone named Wayne,” said Larry, musing, unclear who that might be.

“Um-hmm,” said Suzanne. “Who they were visiting today also at the same time.”

There was silence on Larry’s end. Then, softly, with real concern in his voice, “Ooh, my gosh!”

At first Larry thought,
Maybe it’s a different Wayne, someone Bruce did things with on his own.

“Did they mention a state or anything?” he asked.

“Yeah, it’s out there.”

“Yeah, they did?”

“Yeah.”

“Ooh, my gosh.”

“They said they had been looking at him for a while.”

“Ooh, my gosh,” Larry sighed. “A year ago!”

“Yeah. They showed him the pictures.”

“So what did Bruce do this whole time?”

“Slept on the couch.”

Larry laughed. “He slept there?”

“Yeah, me and him. We slept on the couch.”

“They didn’t really hassle you?”

“Well, no . . . well, they—That’s why I don’t—Every time he asked me questions about anyone, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t look at him, so then they finally went away.”