Things Have a Habit

Crawford Taylor is not your ordinary shylock, no sir. None of your hook-nosed Fagins or Semitic stereotypes here, if you please. Crawford Taylor is your modern day shylock. He's suave and handsome and cool and elegant in his charcoal gray Armani suit and black Prada slip-ons. He's Harvard-educated with a grace and style you see all the time on the pages of GQ. Think George Clooney here only younger and without the gray hair. Crawford Taylor is perfectly tanned and dark-haired from people, they say, that go all the way back to the Mayflower. He carries himself like a leading man. Center stage. Head high. And the spotlight always shining on him, even if it's not. Crawford is upset. Payment is due. Not just due, very due, and a lot of money is at stake. A guy he was doing well with has been giving him the run-around. And payment is due. And nothing is forthcoming. One of the two people Crawford sends to collect the debt is shot and killed by the man that owes him the money in the parking lot of the diner in Columbia, a fictional small town in northern Westchester, N.Y. Columbia's only detective, Jimmy Dugan, handles the investigation. The trail leads Jimmy to drug dealers at the local school, a serial killer who preys on old people, and a New York garment center hot shot who owes Crawford a great deal of money. Such is the complexity of the intertwining plot lines that the only way to describe the outcome is something Jimmy's father used to say to him when he was a kid, "If you can only hang on long enough, things have a habit of working out."