the instability in Eddie’s relation to Jackie Brown: it’s not just a question of
whether Eddie can trust Jackie but also a question of whether Eddie can use
Jackie. Even as Eddie schools Jackie in the importance of Eddie’s being able to
trust him, Eddie begins looking for a way to exploit Jackie for his own advan-
tage. This reconfiguration introduces a pattern of ironic reversals that will
become increasingly significant as the narrative continues.
Reading across the conversations also leads rhetorical readers to recognize
a third authorial disclosure: Eddie has jumped to unwarranted conclusions—
or at least to the conclusions that he thinks will be most attractive to Foley—
with his reference to a “colored gentleman,” since Jackie never answered
his question about race. This jump highlights the casual racism underlying
his assumption either that the purchaser must be connected with the Black
Panthers (Higgins here taps into the paranoia about the Black Panthers that
existed in the late 1960s and early 1970s) or that Foley would be more inter-
ested if that were the connection. More than that, it highlights how eager
Eddie is to have something to offer Foley. This disclosure, along with Eddie’s
willingness to overlook the limits of Foley’s promise, conveys how much the
looming presence of the sentencing hearing affects Eddie’s behavior.
In the second part of the passage—from Foley’s question, “Does the col-
ored gentleman have any friends?,” to the end—the conversation unfolds as
a kind of sparring match, with Foley on offense and Eddie on defense, until
Foley decides to let up on Eddie and give him some breathing room. Again,
it is helpful to look at the conversational disclosures in light of each speak-
er’s purpose. Foley’s questions (who else and when) indicate that he wants to
know how solid and how detailed Eddie’s information is, while Eddie’s specu-
lative and evasive answers indicate that he does not have specifics and that
he is primarily interested in knowing what Foley would be willing to do for
him, if he could provide those details. Foley’s shift to asking, “Do you need
anything else?” suggests that he understands the relation between what Eddie
wants and what Eddie knows. The more natural follow-up to Eddie’s “the first
thing you know, you heard something,” would be “Did you hear anything
else?” By asking instead, “Do you need anything else?,” Foley implies that he
knows Eddie does not have any more information and that he has already
given Eddie a lot of what he needs to get more, namely the appropriate incen-
tive. Finally, by ending with his ironic “Merry Christmas,” a wish that Eddie
conspicuously does not return, Foley reminds Eddie of who has the upper
hand.
whose initial exchanges between Lois and Howard Ambrie seem less fully motivated by the
mimetic context than by the need to disclose necessary information to the audience.
178 • CHAPTER 9