Cassius had nothing on Larry Feld when it came to lean and hungry. He’d always been gaunt, even as a six-year-old. The hunger came with age. Larry’s eternally meager flesh was covered in black crocodile loafers, matching belt and a steel gray, woolen suit with angle-cuffed trousers. His neck was so thin that the starchy white collar of his shirt and the shantung paisley tie that slid through it hung a thumb’s width off his apparent Adam’s apple.
Larry Feld was just another kid from the old block, a childhood friend by default. His parents were fat, somber people with forearm tattoos they hadn’t gotten as a lark on an all-night drunk. No, they’d seen more than just dreams go up in smoke. The blue moons they’d seen were the by-products of burning relatives distorting the night’s reflected sunlight. And they’d raised their son to bear their crosses well.
As is too often the case, the children of victims transform themselves into victimizers. Larry epitomized the process. He always took unnatural joy in getting over, in cheating. When we were kids, Larry’s specialty was convincing a cashier he’d paid her with a twenty when it’d only been a ten spot. It was Larry Feld against the world. Not just every now and then, but for every breath.
None of this is to say Larry wasn’t a hard worker. On the contrary, he took jobs none of the other guys would have even considered. All Larry asked of a job was that it afford him the opportunity to fuck the public where they breathed. As long as it provided that certain slant, it was meat for Mr. Feld. He pumped gas—mid-winter, graveyard shift—during the first oil crisis. With almost sexual ecstasy, Larry would recount tales of extortion. How he’d garnered huge sums of cash from drivers desperate for a few extra gallons of unleaded. Our moral outrage was tempered, however, by Larry’s ability to get our families a tankful on demand at pre-extortion prices.
With two oil shortages behind him, Larry bankrolled himself through three years at Brooklyn Law. Eventually, he squeaked by the New York Bar and his practice took off like a missile to Mars. Lawrence Solomon Feld did certainly shine in the world or torts and tarts and litigation. Positioning himself to profit from human misfortune and disaster was Larry’s particular niche in the food chain. Not all vultures have feathers.
I hated going to Larry. It was Larry who supplied me with a career and direction when I had neither. He’d gotten me into the investigations racket. He schooled me in the basics of the work. And after I was done teething on some easy jobs that paid too much, he set me up in an office. Neither one of us labored under any false notions about his charity or my drive and ability. Trust was the issue. Larry trusted me more than he trusted most. It was a vestigal bond left over from childhood.
I don’t think I liked Larry more than the other kids on the block. I’m not certain liking him was even an option. You sort of tolerated Larry and in return he rewarded you with the profits of his misdeeds. I guess I was less two-faced in my toleration. The other guys would ask Larry along, but give him the wrong meeting time or place. I wouldn’t hold for that. I would either correct the misinformation or just hang with Larry. Sometimes I laughed at my naive nobility. At other times, I wondered where it had gone.
Our business relationship worked pretty smoothly for a while. He fed me plenty of jobs and he knew he could take my reports at face value; nothing faked, nothing fabricated. When he didn’t have cases for me, he’d refer other lawyers my way. I was making a living. And if I wasn’t Philip Marlowe, I was, at least, competent.
Things got rough when Larry’s bill came due and I refused to pay. His clientele was changing. Cases involving old Haitian women with whiplash were being given to the firm’s fledglings or farmed out to other shops altogether. I started recognizing the names on case files as those I’d read in the newspapers. In a two-year span Larry defended a list of accused that might have made Beelzebub blush.
There was the yuppie doctor who was charged with first-degree sexual assault and second-degree murder for strangling his kid’s babysitter with a stethoscope. I helped find another of the dead girl’s clients who’d slept with her. Larry twisted the rape and murder into accidental death during voluntary sexual relations. The stethoscope, you see, was being used to heighten the babysitter’s orgasm. The doctor spent less time in Attica than he had at Johns Hopkins.
There were other cases, all notorious. Hey, I wasn’t thrilled, but I’ve always been an ace at rationalization. No, the problems came when Larry started handling organized crime cases. That’s when the tab came due. At first he added small tasks to my caseload. I had to drop this off or pick that up or . . . You know, little things, little favors. I was becoming a better bagman than investigator. Bagman paid better.
One day my job description took too big a leap. A leap I wouldn’t take no matter how good the pay. One of Larry’s big Mafia trials wasn’t going at all well and he figured a mistrial was better than the certain guilty verdict. He met me in a diner in the Bronx and passed two attaché cases full of hundreds underneath the table to me. I was supposed to plant the money in one juror’s car and bury the second case in another’s backyard. I left the diner and Larry and the bag money behind. I owed Larry, but not that much.
I hated going back to him. But it’s in the nature of people like Larry to be acquainted with almost everyone, to have feelers everywhere. For one thing, he knew the Diamond Exchange inside and out. His somber little parents had run a booth there since after the war. That would help with the orphaned heart. He’d also have connections in the Police Department. His word could get me in doors I couldn’t even knock on. I needed him and that was a bad spot to be in, a very bad spot indeed.
“Dylan,” his voice and handshake were welcoming and firm. “You like?” He caught my eyes staring over his shoulder at a still photo of Mike Wallace, himself and his latest Mafia client, Dante “Don Juan” Gandolfo, during an interview on 60 Minutes.
“Nice shot,” I flattered. “I see your taste in clients hasn’t changed,” I added foolishly.
“Klein. Klein. Klein,” Larry shook his oval, high crowned head. “What am I gonna do with you? What’s it five, six years—”
“Seven,” I corrected, “but who’s counting?”
“I haven’t seen or spoken to you in seven years and you’re already busting my chops. But that’s you, Klein, isn’t it? You should have been one of King Arthur’s knights, a hero, someone to read about, someone from a time of honor. Tell me, Sir Knight, did such a time ever exist?”
“Sorry, Larry. I was outta line.” And I was.
“So,” he poured his lank into a black leather and tubular steel chair behind his desk and waved me into a similar model on my side, “what is it?”
“What is it?” I repeated dumbly.
“You need something. You want something. Something needs fixing. What? What? What?” Larry shot off rapid fire, his Adam’s apple skittering up and down his neck like a mouse caught in a garden hose.
“Here,” I handed him my rendition of the diamond heart.
“I’ve got a lot of pull in this town,” my ex-employer commented, still surveying my drawing, “but even I couldn’t get you into art school.”
“That’s not—” I started to explain.
“I know what you want, Sir Knight. What’s it made out of?”
“White gold and diamonds.”
“You want to know who handles this kinda piece at the exchange?” Larry smiled with that old chilling look of self-satisfaction.
“Who?” I found myself standing, hands on his desk.
“Can’t tell ya.” He looked disapprovingly at my hands until I withdrew them and sat back down. “But I know who can.”
“Who?” I asked again without unseating myself.
“Mojo,” was his reply.
“Mojo? Mojo who?”
“Don’t worry about Mojo who. Use my name and anyone who knows his tush from his tits will put you onto Mojo. Here,” he flipped one of his business cards at me. “Is that it?”
“One thing more.” I put forth weakly.
“That is . . .”
“Got an ex-detective for a friend these days. I wanna throw him a big bash, but I don’t know how to get in touch with his old buddies and partners. I figured you could get me a list without alerting anyone’s attention.”
“Name?”
“John Francis MacClough. Rhymes with cow,” I added out of habit.
“You’ll have your list tomorrow. I won’t be in, but I’ll leave it at the front desk.”
“Thank’s, Larry,” I was up, extending my hand for a good-bye shake.
Cassius wasn’t having any of it. I wouldn’t be exiting just yet. His cold gaze directed me back to my seat.
“Mary,” he pressed a button and spoke into a speaker box, “come in a minute. You,” Larry turned to me, “want anything?”
I shook him off. The longest ten seconds I’d ever experienced went by before Mary, a stern-faced woman of the middle years and the bulging middle, trotted her rasping pantyhose over to Larry’s desk.
“Call Billy Minter at One Police Plaza. Get me a copy of this guy’s file,” Mary plucked the paper with Johnny’s name on it out of her boss’s fingers. “I want to know who his partners were, the whole nine yards. And if Minter, that fat fuck, gives you a hard time, put him on the line.”
Mary was gone.
“I hear you’re an author these days,” Larry focused back on me.
“I write.”
“I’ve read all of it. It’s good.”
I nodded my thanks and surprise.
“Yeah, I read it. That’s why I thought you came here today. I thought maybe you needed a little help in getting an agent or a contract. But no.” Larry did a rare thing. He laughed, really. “That’s not you, Klein,” the laughing came to an abrupt end. “You wouldn’t come to me for yourself. Not you. Not Sir Knight.”
“Look Larry—”
“Don’t ‘look Larry’ me. Don’t you dare. I appreciated what you did for me as a kid, Klein. That’s why there was no fallout last time. I closed that account a long time ago,” Larry wiped his bony hands past one another twice. “I’m a powerful man now and my favors cost considerably more than my legal services. These days I pull more strings than Harpo Marx. Do we understand one another?”
I indicated that I did.
“Good,” Larry twisted his thin lips into an approximation of a smile. “This time, Sir Dylan, when I ask for a favor in return, don’t disappoint me.”
We didn’t shake hands. You didn’t need to shake with the devil. I had my hand on the door when the fallen angel called out to me.
“Party! Big bash, huh. Don’t forget to invite me. I’m a lot of things, Klein, but stupid isn’t one of ’em. I just hope this cop’s worth it to you.”
So did I.
Mr. Fancy Picasso
“Mojo?” the hefty, black security guard smiled, resting his hand carelessly on the handle of his Magnum. “You’ll find Mojo down the second isle on your right, third stall on your right. Can’t miss Mojo.”
But apparently I had. I stood in front of a small grubby booth. The cheaply engraved plaque read, “Minkowitz, Inc.-Purveyors of Fine Gems and Jewels.” Seated on a shaky piano stool behind the low wall and glass was a sour-looking Hasidic man in his late forties, early fifties maybe. The wiry salt and pepper beard and curls made a more accurate guess impossible. He wore a dandruff-speckled yarmulke held in place with a worn shiny hairpin. Currently he was inspecting a herd of small diamonds laid out on his sickly pale and pudgy palm.
I watched him. His concentration was incredible, and he manipulated the little stones with an ease and confidence that seemed more instinctive than learned. Occasionally he would remove his black-rimmed glasses, the joints of which were held together with bandaids, shove an eyepiece into his left eye and hold the clear rocks up to his face. All very interesting, but I had to find Mojo. I started back to the security guard.
“I’m who you’re lookin’ for mister,” the man behind the Minkowitz sign called to me without picking his head up from the stones. His voice had that familiar roller coaster lilt of a Yiddish speaker.
“Sorry,” I came back over, “not buying today.”
“From me, you couldn’t afford to buy,” he let the diamonds roll off his palms like so much dust into a folded paper envelope. “You lookin’ for Mojo? I’m Mojo.”
“Mojo Monkowitz?” everything about me was incredulous.
“Listen totaleh, vit a last name like Minkowitz, vould it matta vhat vent in front?” he asked in an accent thick like chicken fat on rye bread.
“You got a point. How—”
“Before we start with the questions, he cut me off, returning to a less theatrical dialect, “who sent you? Nobody comes to Mojo without being sent.”
I handed him Larry’s business card and my infantile drawing of the heart. He read the card, looked at the drawing and shook his head.
“You friends with this man?” Mojo inquired, holding up the business card.
“We grew up together. Did a little work together. I wouldn’t call us friends.”
“Good. Larry Feld is not a righteous man,” Minkowitz sat down and inspected my artwork. “I knew his parents. Good people. Sad little people, but they ran a clean shop. You knew them, Izzi and Anna?”
“Lived two doors down from ‘em for eighteen years. But it’s hard to really know camp survivors,” I offered my opinion.
“Quite so,” he showed me his numerical tattoo. “I do these favors not for the son, but for the pain of the parents. You understand this?” He seemed anxious that I understand and I nodded that I did. “You want to know who handles pieces like this, who makes pieces like this?”
“That’s the big question.”
“Describe a little better what the piece is made out of. How many stones? How big?”
I gave him the specs to the best of my memory. As I did, he shook his head in agreement as if I was simply reinforcing the conclusion he’d already arrived at.
“Fischel Kahn,” Mojo winked. “Fine work. Not much demand for his stuff anymore.”
“Where’s his booth?”
“Four aisles over, but he’s retired maybe fifteen twenty years already. Sold his business to an Iraqi Jew,” Mojo’s sour expression returned. Despite the monolithic image, there were large groups of Jews that couldn’t stomach one another.
“Shi—” I stopped myself. “Sorry.”
“Quiet. Quiet,” Minkowitz waved off my apology and began stroking his beard as if it were a Siamese cat. “Can’t a man think a little?” A moment passed. “Sylvia . . . Sylvia . . . Sylvia Kim!” Mojo’s eyes lit up.
“Kim? An Asian?” I wondered.
“Used to be Kimmelmann. Now it’s Kim. She’s got her own shop. Next aisle over. Once worked for Fish. Maybe she can help,” he handed me Larry’s card and my rendering and shook my hand. “Mazel and brucha, luck and a blessing to you on your journey.”
“I understood. Thanks. What do I owe you?”
“Like I said before,” the survivor admonished, “from me you can’t afford to buy.”
“You think she’ll remember the piece?” I questioned as an afterthought, pointing at my drawing.
“Listen, Mr. Fancy Picasso with the drawing already. If she was around when the piece was sold, she’ll remember. We’re very good at remembering.” He looked at his tattoo and went back to work.
Sylvia had frosty blond hair that was blown and permed and sprayed into submission. Her teeth were as white as the Himalayas and as natural as astroturf. The skin on her face was Florida tanned and taut as if it were a plastic bag stretched to its limit. Her flaming nails weren’t quite as long as piano keys and there was so much jewelry on her fingers, I could barely see the flesh. She was covered in enough metal and mineral to cover half the Periodic Chart. I wondered if she floated when the hardware came off.
But none of it affected her memory.
“Nice couple. Nice couple.” She got a far away look in her violet contact len
ses. “He was a roughly handsome boy, German, Irish maybe. She was a looker, a Jewish girl. She spoke the language.” I took that to mean Yiddish. “Had a figure to die for and the features of a goddess. They were a funny pair.”
I described Johnny and Jane Doe to Sylvia.
“Could be them. Got a picture?” she asked.
“Sorry.”
“Got a girlfriend? she winked at me with black lashes as long as butterfly wings.
“Sure do,” I lied.
“Now I’m the one who’s sorry. What’s this all about?” Rejected, she suddenly got curious.
I showed her Larry’s card.
“Why didn’t you say so?” We were friends again. “Anything else I can do for you? Anything at all?”
“No thanks, Sylvia. Here,” I gave her one of my old business cards with the office number scratched out and my home number scribbled in. “If there’s something else that you recall about the couple or the piece, even if it seems trivial or insignificant, call me.”
“Maybe,” she read my card, “Dylan Klein, I’ll just call you.” If nothing else, Sylvia was persistent.
I kissed the back of her right hand, nearly slicing a lip open in the process, took one of her cards and was gone. On the way out onto West 47th Street, I bumped into the security guard I’d met on the way in.
“Did you find Mojo, all right?” he laughed and slapped my shoulder playfully. “Don’t look much like a Mojo, does he?”
“No, I had to admit that. “How did—”
“—he get that nickname?” the jolly guard finished my question. “Some big gambler give it to him. Said he had to get his Mojo workin’ and bought a big piece from Mr. Minkowitz. Gambler went to Vegas and practically shut down three casinos. Gamblers been comin’ ever since. You know, to get their Mojo workin’. Moshe. Mojo. It just kinda stuck.”
“Not a very kosher name for a Hasidic Jew,” I mused.
Little Easter Page 5
