from Eddie for a series of well-executed bank robberies. Meanwhile, Dillon
has his own meetings with Foley at which he reveals that Eddie and Scalisi
have been working together on some unspecified activities. Although Eddie
does inform on Jackie, the New Hampshire prosecutor tells Foley that’s not
sufficient to keep Eddie out of jail. Eddie thus has to decide whether to inform
on Scalisi, and he goes so far as to set up a meeting with Foley. But before they
can meet, Scalisi and his crew get caught because they have been informed
on by Scalisi’s girlfriend, Wanda, who wants payback for Scalisi’s disrespectful
treatment of her. In the gunplay accompanying the arrest, the protégé of the
Mafia boss gets killed, and the boss wants his own payback. The word circu-
lates through the mob that Eddie must have made the deal he’d only been con-
templating. Therefore, the boss hires Dillon to eliminate Eddie, a job Dillon
skillfully executes. In the final chapter, as I noted in my discussion in chapter
1, a prosecutor and a defense lawyer discuss Jackie’s case and his probable fate
as someone who will be in and out of the official legal system repeatedly in
the coming years.
HIGGINS AND EDDIE; OR, AUTHORIAL AND
CONVERSATIONAL DISCLOSURE IN CHAPTER 2
I turn now to readerly dynamics by examining Higgins’s first method of pro-
viding indirect guidance to his audience’s efforts to configure the narrative. I
will look most closely at the conversation between Eddie and Foley at the end
of chapter 2, but it will be helpful first to reconstruct the context provided by
chapter 1. Since Eddie is turning to Jackie for the first time, his deal immedi-
ately places Eddie in a new network involving Jackie, his suppliers, and Jackie’s
other customers. Although, at twenty-six, Jackie is young, he is confident and
tough—already a hard case. He is not at all intimidated by Eddie’s story about
his broken fingers. Shortly after hearing it, he says, “I got guns to sell. . . . I
done a lot of business and I had very few complaints. I can get you four-inch-
ers and two-inchers. You just tell me what you want. I can deliver it” (7). In
addition, Jackie holds his own in the negotiation with Eddie about the price
of the guns. But Jackie makes a young man’s mistake when he brags to Eddie
about selling machine guns.
As I noted above, Higgins uses Eddie’s story about his broken fingers to
initiate his audience into his handling of the relationship between conversa-
tional and authorial disclosure (as Eddie warns Jackie, Higgins also marks
Eddie as a small-timer in a vulnerable position). Nevertheless, throughout his
dialogue with Jackie, Eddie comes off as appropriately careful, as knowledge-
CONVERSATIONAL AND AUTHORIAL DISCLOSURE IN DIALOgUE • 175