why he was coming up. He didn’t talk then, but he had a fall coming and he
knew it. I thought maybe he was thinking about dumping me, but of course
he wouldn’t do that without making a will first. So I guess he dumped Jimmy
and Artie instead. Bastard.”
“He’s the one the Scal mentioned,” the man said. “LeDuc give his name
to the man. Coyle. Eddie Fingers. That’s the one.”
“You want him hit?” Dillon said.
“The man wants him hit,” the man said. (163)Because rhetorical readers know from chapter 22 that Scalisi’s girlfriend
Wanda has done the informing, the authorial disclosure framing the whole
scene is that Dillon is unreliably interpreting Eddie’s role. Part of the reason,
Higgins suggests, is that these men cannot even conceive that a woman would
be responsible for anything happening in their world. In this respect, Higgins
combines his depiction of the sexist assumptions of the criminal underworld,
especially evident in the Scalisi-Wanda relationship (“My kid brother talks
about his goddamned Mustang the same way you talk about me,” she objects
[110]), with his predilection for dramatic irony. This dimension of the scene
also helps set up the authorial disclosures that arise from Higgins’s juxtaposi-
tion of chapter 29, which recounts Dillon’s extremely professional and efficient
execution of Eddie, who goes to his grave thinking that Dillon is his friend,
and chapter 30, which emphasizes the flaws in the way the official legal sys-
tem will deal with Jackie Brown. As I discuss in more detail in chapter 1, the
authorial disclosure across the chapters is that the flaws in the official system
are ultimately preferable to those in the more efficient mob system.
There are other key authorial disclosures in this conversation in chapter
- Dillon’s interlocutor apparently takes Dillon’s report about Coyle as con-
firmation of the information that Scalisi gave the mob lawyer LeDuc. But of
course Scalisi’s source is Dillon. Consequently, the authorial disclosure is that
Dillon acts as witness, prosecutor, judge, and eventually executioner of Eddie.
The simultaneous conversational and authorial disclosure that Dillon hired
Eddie to drive the stolen whiskey subtracts several more degrees from Dil-
lon’s increasingly cold blood. Rather than feeling any responsibility for Eddie’s
plight or any sense of gratitude or loyalty for Eddie’s taking the rap without
informing on him, Dillon remains suspicious of him. Indeed, Eddie’s getting
“hooked” there and his earlier mistake with the traceable gun lead Dillon to
think of him as less than fully trustworthy—and therefore expendable. It is
this logic that underlies his conversations with Foley: let me trade the weak,
mistake-prone Coyle for whatever protection Foley can give me. Poor Eddie,
rhetorical readers now realize, never had a chance.
184 • CHAPTER 9