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.