AMERICAN PAIN (4 page)

Chris wasn’t sure if the clinic would work out, but he was confident about his business skills. He believed no physician-run operation could compete with him. Doctors didn’t understand marketing, minimizing costs, maximizing efficiencies, managing people, accounting. The basics of business. Chris had studied business and construction management. He’d gone to college for four years, two years at Palm Beach Community College and another couple at Florida International University, but he never graduated, just took classes he wanted to take and avoided the ones he thought were stupid. His father would say Chris and Jeff absorbed business principles by growing up in an entrepreneurial family, sitting at the dinner table during the years John George was building Majestic Homes, driving a back-hoe as soon as their feet could reach the pedals. John George had moved to Florida as a young guy, taught shop class for a while, and he wasn’t shy about mentioning the time he’d been named the Palm Beach County Teacher of the Year. John had stood out as a teacher before quitting to follow in his own father’s footsteps—construction—where he
really
stood out, making millions building houses. He’d taken a huge gamble, quitting a steady job, and he made a success of it. John George divorced the boys’ mother when they were eight, but he and Denice stayed on good terms most of the time, and she even worked for him for seven years.

After his prison stint on the steroid conviction, Chris went to work for his father. He moved to North Port to expand Majestic Homes’s reach to the west coast of Florida. Chris built some fifty custom houses for Majestic Homes before the crash, juggling subcontractors, buyers, realtors, suppliers, and banks. By comparison, he figured, running a pain clinic would be a piece of cake.

Derik had a buddy drive him out to Oakland Park Boulevard to take a look at the future location of Chris’s pain clinic. It was kind of a dump, three miles from the beach and a few doors from a dive motel and a Publix supermarket. Most of the surrounding buildings—an auto insurance agency, a bridal headpiece shop, a podiatry office—were a similar size and shape as the Mobile One storefront: single-story stucco bungalows. Four parking spaces in the front, a few more around back. The storefront was an orangey-tan with white trim. Two dilapidated columns held up the front overhang, including one that had crumbled and detached from the roof, revealing the pole underneath the stucco shell. The brown fronds of an ungroomed palm tree spilled into the parking lot.

Chris and Derik renovated the building with a couple pals, not exactly a bang-up job. Chris just wanted to get the place open. He figured it didn’t much matter how it looked. So they tore all the walls down and reframed the interior, about eleven hundred square feet. There was a waiting room, a window where Dianna could greet customers, three examination rooms in the back, a little closet where the drugs would be kept. New carpet, doors, paint, the cheapest stuff they could find. A two-week job. But one of the first things Chris did was put a sign on the big white pole out front. Big red letters on a white background: P
AIN
C
LINIC.
And even bigger letters on the sign on the roof of the small building: S
OUTH
F
LORIDA
P
AIN
C
LINIC.
Chris bought stick-on lettering for the windows:

P
AIN
M
ANAGEMENT
T
ESTOSTERONE
W
EIGHT
L
OSS
HGH
W
ALK
I
NS
W
ELCOME

Basically the offerings included everything that people desperately wanted from a doctor but usually couldn’t get. Drugs to make their life more enjoyable, without the usual hassle. Dr. Overstreet believed pain meds would be the big draw, but he had experience with the muscle and weight-loss stuff from Jeff’s steroid clinic, so they’d decided to throw those into the mix.

The signs worked. Pretty much every day somebody stopped by to ask about when they were opening. Oakland Park Boulevard regulars: fidgety, dirty, aggressive. Derik and Chris would be working, covered in sawdust, pencils behind their ears, and some guy would stick his head inside, inquire about their status. One night around 8:00 p.m., Derik was gluing down fresh carpeting and a guy walked in, nonchalant, or trying to act that way. He looked at Derik, who was covered with carpet glue, sweaty, dirty. The floor was half-carpeted, tools everywhere.

The guy: I need a doctor. Can I see a doctor?

Derik looked at him like he was crazy.

Derik: For real, bro, look around. Does it
look
like we’re open for business?

The visitors made an impression on Derik. People were crazy for this painkiller stuff, talking themselves into believing they could find a doctor at eight o’clock at night in a place that was torn apart.

One day, Chris and Derik took a break from the renovation to try to track down a guy who owed Chris money. Driving around, they saw a pain clinic sign and decided to check the place out. Once inside, they said they were in pain, and asked if they could see a doctor. A staffer gave them forms to fill out, and then they walked out the door with the forms. Chris decided to use the same forms. Chris had Dianna cut the clinic name off the top of the forms and make copies with S
OUTH
F
LORIDA
P
AIN
C
LINIC
on top. Chris figured he’d need some paperwork, to keep up appearances, look legit and everything.

A friend of Derik was helping with the renovation. He had a hard time grasping the whole concept.

He kept saying: But you guys aren’t
doctors
.

Another friend, also from back home and visiting Derik at the time, couldn’t believe it either. It made no sense to him that a guy who wasn’t a doctor could open up a pain clinic. No way this could be aboveboard.

He said: Yo, Derik, you’re gonna get thrown in jail again.

But Chris George kept telling the guys that it was all legal. As long as you had a doctor ordering the drugs and writing prescriptions, you were fine. That’s how the other pain clinics in Florida did it. No one cared who
owned
the place.

Chris told Derik that once Jeff got his West Palm Beach clinic open, Jeff might give Derik a job at the patient window. Nothing great, maybe $12 an hour or so. But they had to see how it went first, whether Jeff would take enough time away from his other ventures to get the place open, and whether the clinic would attract enough customers to survive. Derik was only mildly interested. He figured Chris and Jeff might be able to turn the pain clinics into moderately successful small businesses, something along the lines of South Beach Rejuvenation, but working the patient window wasn’t going to make Derik rich.

So Derik finished the renovation and went back to his construction business, thinking that was that.

Derik didn’t know much about painkillers. Drugs, to him, meant weed or cocaine. He’d never messed with heroin or meth or OxyContin, didn’t hang out with anybody who did what he considered hard stuff. A girlfriend a few years back had always been on the hunt for Lortabs, though, and he’d noticed in recent years that some of the guys on his construction crew were too. Further back, the aunt who’d raised him in Binghamton, New York, had been taking prescription painkillers for years, doling them out when the kids had injuries, but that seemed different to Derik.

Derik’s family was hard to explain. Growing up, he lived with his aunt and uncle during the school year, then with his real father during the summers. So he had a mess of half-siblings and cousins he called his brothers and sisters. Derik didn’t mind explaining why his family was so splintered, but few people ever asked for the full story of what had happened, especially if they knew something about it.

Derik was an accidental pregnancy in 1977, his parents just out of high school in Sullivan County in upstate New York. Robert Nolan and Margaret got married, and Robert built a home insulation and window installation business. They separated when Derik was still a toddler, and Margaret moved with Derik to the village of Loch Sheldrake, where she worked as a barmaid at a place called Bum & Kel’s. She started seeing the tavern owner.

Derik was only four the day his mother died, but the memories appear to him in vivid visual flashes, bound together by facts he’d read or heard over the years. Derik and his father spent the day fishing. He fell asleep watching TV at his father’s house. In the middle of the night, his father woke him up, said they were going to look for his mother. They drove to the bar, and it was closed. Down the road, they saw Margaret’s car in the driveway of the bar owner. His father parked up the road, and carried Derik to the house. Through a front window, they saw Margaret and the bar owner in the living room, having sex.

Derik remembers his father banging through a screen door and setting him down inside.

He remembers his mother grabbing a knife from the kitchen, and his father pulling out the buck knife he’d used during the fishing trip.

He remembers his father chasing the bar owner outside.

He remembers his mother screaming:
Don’t kill him, kill me!
and Derik’s father replying:
Don’t worry, bitch. You’re next.

He remembers his father, back inside and on top of his mother, stabbing her with the buck knife, over and over.

He remembers shaking his mother awake. She opened her eyes and looked at him, and her eyes were strange. Derik gave her another push, and blood sprayed, so he stopped shaking her.

He remembers finding his father, who was on his knees, his flannel shirt soaked in blood, the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth. Derik called to his dad, who looked at him, let out a sigh. His dad dropped the gun and picked up Derik.

He remembers hanging onto his father as he ran to the truck, Derik looking back, over his father’s shoulder, the house getting smaller and smaller.

Of the next year, Derik remembers almost nothing.

Hours after the double homicide, Robert Nolan turned himself in to police. He went to trial the following summer on charges of aggravated manslaughter. He argued that he’d been driven temporarily insane by seeing Margaret and the tavern owner having sex. The jury deadlocked, causing a mistrial. In a second trial, he was acquitted. He did some out-patient therapy and then resumed his life. He remarried, this time to a woman five years younger than himself who had been named Miss Sullivan County the year before Robert killed Margaret. They moved to Free-hold, New Jersey, where Robert built a concrete company and sponsored a Little League team. Robert’s company thrived. The Nolans put up showy Christmas decorations and threw a pool party every summer.

Derik’s aunt and uncle had taken him in during the trials, so he continued to live with them during the school years. They had a small farm, where they raised horses and chickens. Summers, he lived with his father and his new family, which included three young sons. Derik played quarterback in the fall and pole vaulted in the spring, and when he wasn’t doing those sports, he was likely skipping school, hunting deer and riding four-wheelers on the farm. The day after his high school graduation party in 1995, he moved to Florida. He said he was going to college, but he just wanted out of New York. He got a job at a nightclub, went to a few classes at Palm Beach State College before quitting. He became a plumber, making good money.

But the story with his father wasn’t finished. Almost three years after Derik graduated from high school, Robert Nolan’s second wife served him with divorce papers. They’d been married for ten years. She said he was extremely cruel, though not physically abusive. The day after he got the divorce papers, Robert followed her into a walk-in closet and shot her point-blank with a 20-gauge shotgun. He went out behind the pool cabana, smoked a cigarette, drank a Scotch, and shot himself in the head with a .25-caliber Beretta handgun.

The story of Robert Nolan’s dead wives became a cautionary tale about the persistence of domestic violence as well as the fatal flaw of the insanity defense (his first trial had taken place the same summer as would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley Jr., was found not guilty by reason of insanity). The
New York Times
published an in-depth story about the case. So people knew about Derik’s father, and Derik didn’t keep it a secret. Chris George knew about it, though he and Derik never discussed it in any detail. Derik already had a reputation. People already thought he was crazy. Better, he thought, to leave a little mystery.