The Fate Of Eddie “Fingers”-With The Film Adaptation Of George V. Higgins’ “The Friends Of Eddie Coyle” In Mind

The Fate Of Eddie “Fingers”-With The Film Adaptation Of George V. Higgins’ “The Friends Of Eddie Coyle” In Mind                 

By Fritz Taylor

“Did yah hear about Eddie “Fingers,” Eddie Coyle who used to come in here all the time to do his drinking and his business if you know what I mean. That found him, his body, in some Impala, a damn Chevy for Christ sakes,  over in Dorchester, over at that all night bowling alley, Timmy’s Lanes I think it is called off of Gallivan Boulevard. Found him the cops did on a routine run when they saw the car there for a few hours just before dawn with two slugs to the head, to his brains it probably was not a pretty sight,” Dillon, John Dillon but everybody called him Dillion, yelled to Joe Ricco, Joey “Bangs” who was approaching the far end of the bar to do his drinking-and his business if anybody was asking (and nobody should except the parties involved or you were as likely as not  to find out why Joe Ricco was called Joey “Bangs” by friend and foe alike).      

Joey “Bangs” took the news with something less than full blown interest since Eddie “Fingers” and he worked different sides of the street in their various “transactions” although he looked at Dillion with a little side glance when he told the story since Eddie had obviously been taken out for some indiscretion, got on somebody’s wrong gee list, somebody high up in the food chain and had paid the price. The funny thing was that Dillon who gave the appearance to the world of being a chatty kind of hare-brained bartender, of being a guy who had taken a couple of rides to stir when he was young and so had an undisclosed interest in the bar since he was a convicted felon, was a “hit” man for hire, for hire mostly by the Rizzo mob out of Providence. Knew that about Dillon since one of the guys who he had “scragged” had been a guy that he was supposed to “hit” himself except he was on another “job” and the guy who wanted to hire him let it out that he would get Dillon to do what needed to be done. Since they found the guy who was supposed to be “hit,” Johnny Shine, washed up on the banks of the Neponset River he knew Dillon had taken the job.             

Joey, as a matter of professional interest despite given no fucking consideration to Eddie’s fate, Eddie was a guy pretty low in the his organization, “Butter” Carney’s tribe, the Irish tribe, over in Southie, decided to pump the talkative bartender to see which way he would go with his story, see what lies he could make up since Dillon always was most talkative when he had something on his mind, when he talked the talk about some guy being scragged. “Hey, Dillon while you are getting me a Jack Daniels Red neat what is your take on Eddie “Fingers” going down. He was so low in Butter’s organization I figure that he would not be worth offing, would maybe just get his other hand put in a drawer and slammed like the last time he fucked up when he said a guy was okay and he wasn’t and Jimmy “Scrambles” got a ticket for a dime at Walpole.”           

Dillon, sweating a little by the heat of the day even though the air conditioning was on, came up to Joey’s end of the bar with his finger glass of Jack’s Red for Joey and whispered, although at that time of day Joey and a couple of others sitting at far corner tables were the only ones in the place, 

“I heard that Eddie had turned “stoolie,” had gone to work for “Uncle” in order to get out from under some federal stolen goods charge he was facing up in New Hampshire. I know for a fact that he was scared to do any more time, said he was too old for that, and what would happen to his wife and kids. Said some shit about how his kids would get laughed at because their father was in stir. Like that was a reason to cry to “Uncle.”  I heard he was the guy who set Jimmy “Scags” up for the fall when they had that rash of robberies a few weeks ago and one of the jobs got botched up and some bank employee got killed in a crossfire. Heard too that he set some other guy up, a young kid who was selling guys to anybody who wanted them as long as they had the dough. Heard that this kid, Jacko something was selling machine guns and Eddie had brought him down to save his ass from doing time. How do you figure a stand- up guy, stand-up because he had to who took the fall a couple of times and caught a couple of years a couple of times and didn’t cry about it went ‘soft.’”      

Joey, usually pretty stone-faced especially when he knew a guy was lying or at least was skirting the truth, just sat there with that same expression waiting for Dillon to go on. The fact that he knew as much as he did convinced Joey that he had been part of Eddie’s execution for whatever reason. Dillon continued, “ Yeah, Eddie was in here the last several weeks like this was his home using the back room telephone I had put in for guys, hell, for you to take care of your business without a lot of daytime drunks listening in to your private conversations. Always asking if this guy or that guy had left a message for him here like I was some fucking answering service. Drinking hard too a few shots in a row just for warm-ups so I knew he was feeling some kind of pressure like when guys have something serious in front of them. Asking if Jimmy “Scags” had called so I knew there was some connection. What I heard was that Jimmy had asked Eddie to get him some guys for some job and somehow Eddie had found the kid who had a source for weapons as they were coming off the line, unused, and not traceable. Heard that some Army kids were grabbing half the weapons up at Devens and selling them to the kid to feed their cocaine habit, or their girlfriends’ habits something like that.”       

“I suppose you heard about that bunch of robberies down on the South Shore, a bunch of banks?” Joey nodded in the affirmative since everybody had heard about them at some point if not the first few then the last two where a bank employees was killed and the next one where Jimmy “Scags” and his boys were jolted by the Feds in some banker’s house as they were going for one last score. “You know Jimmy was master at robbing banks, no fooling, he would have the job cased out to perfection. The beautiful thing about these robberies was that it was like taking candy from a baby, see he knew who was vulnerable, who had something to lose, and he would take himself and the boys and grab the guy at his house and leave “Jerry The Lid” to keep watch over whatever hostages they had taken. Beautiful work. 

Except that one where “Fats” Malzone, probably full of dope, went crazy when he thought that bank employee had pulled the alarm. Then the last caper where the Feds were tipped off. Tipped off by Eddie the more you think about the matter since he was the “missing link,” the guy who provided the guns from what Lou Reilly told me since he had seen a grocery bag full of them one afternoon when Eddie had given him a ride to the supermarket and he saw the bags when Eddie opened the trunk of his car.”              

Joey, still sitting there stone-faced, knew that Dillon had been somehow involved in Eddie’s death since he knew far too much for a guy who was supposed to be on the outside on this stuff. In the closed-mouth world of doing this and that not always legal he just knew too much. Maybe he had “tipped” the coppers himself who knows, maybe he had something hanging over him and he needed to do something for “Uncle” to get well. “You know they, the Feds, grabbed that kid, that Jacko out at the Sharon commuter rail stop with a lot of machine guns in shopping bags so you know Eddie must have “snitched” trying to do himself some good since the kid was not connected, was a free-lancer from what Dougie the Dope told me after the kid was pinched and taken to the police station downtown to be held for arraignment before a federal judge. The kid was screaming bloody murder that somebody had turned him over. Yeah, Eddie fits the bill.”          

Joey sat there and ordered another drink, another Jack’s Red and thought hard about what Dillon had said and made certain conclusions about what he was to make his report about. Then Dillon, still sweating from his bald head said out loud that he wondered how Eddie had cashed his check. Joey had already pieced together that Dillon had probably got Eddie drunk, probably at some other place than this bar, probably had, since Dillon was notorious for not having a car, not having a driver’s license, his driver drive someplace and then dumped the body over at the fucking bowling alley. Yeah, this had Dillon’s fingerprints all over it.      

Joey figured out his report in his head as he got up from the bar, paid his bill and left a tip on the counter. As he exited the door he thought that Butter would be hiring him for a job pretty soon. See Joey Bangs knew, knew as well as he knew anything in his world that no matter how low the late  Eddie Fingers was in Butter’s organization you had to take care of your own, avenge what needed to be avenged. Just another job though. 

Stick With The Crooks, Jerry-George V. Higgins’ Sandra Nichols Found Dead

Stick With The Crooks, Jerry-George V. Higgins’ Sandra Nichols Found Dead

Book Review   

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Sandra Nichols Found Dead, George V. Higgins, 1996

 

Recently I have been on a crime novelist George V. Higgins tear as a result of re-reading his classic first and I believe still his best crime novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (and re-watched as well as a result of that read the film adaptation starring Robert Mitchum as Eddie). As is my wont when I get on a tear on an author I have been picking off his later work although in no particular order. Higgins certainly had an ear, a close ear, for dialogue, especially down in the streets dialogue gained from his growing up working-class town of Brockton where in the old days he would have found plenty of corner boys in the old Irish or Italian streets and from his having been a federal government prosecutor. So Higgins has tackled all kinds of criminal situations, murder, extortion, leg-breaking, money laundering, you name in the rough crime categories and has tackled white collar crime, you know, taking bribes, dishing out contracts for a cut, embezzlement, the whole litany of governmental and private company crimes. Along the way there seems to have been three main story lines that Higgins’ work can be grouped around. Stories about the classic street hoods like Eddie, corrupt government officials like Billy Ryan, and those amorphous tales like the one in the book currently under review, Sandra Nichols Found Dead, involving, for lack of a better term, private citizen crimes, rough or white. I have mentioned previously that I believe that the prolific Higgins had his best days when he took on the street hoods, brought them to life, and the contrast to that in this book makes that case stronger in my mind.

Higgins starts off here with a simple premise, or maybe a couple. Not every murder, done in passion or by design, gets solved in this wicked old world and taking a leaf from old F. Scott Fitzgerald the rich, the very rich that we don’t even see, are very different from you and me. They are as likely as not to get away, one way or the other, with murder, murder most foul. Here the subject named in the title has been found murdered, brutally murdered and dumped to be found several months later. If she had been an ordinary citizen, or had not married a very rich man, Peter Wade, Sandra would have, given her checkered history of marriages, affairs, and “working the streets,” been chalked up as a lost cause. As usual the police and District Attorney work the case as best they can but then not finding enough clues to build an airtight case and with the case leading nowhere they put the thing in the “cold case” files.        

But this is where Sandra not being an ordinary citizen and having signed a pre-nuptial agreement with Wade to benefit her three emotionally battered and bruised kids (a big part of that as a result of her own behavior by the way) if she and Peter were divorced or something else happened to her. Smart woman in that regard. After Sandra is found in some desolate swamp the case takes a turn for the better when one of the DAs investigators, a plugger, keeps looking for the murderer and has a damn good idea of who did it, or ordered it done, Wade. The case also takes a turn for the better when the probate judge in the case, a law school classmate of recurring Higgins character, Attorney Jerry Kennedy, is assigned the case by him and will not take no for an answer. Now Kennedy is strictly a criminal lawyer, a guy who got Billy Ryan the public official grafter off without working up a sweat, but this probate stuff acting on behalf of the three children seems beyond his expertise. Worse, even that plugger investigator knew that although murder was in the air, knew the nuts and bolts of how it was done, knew as well that Wade was not going to take the fall for murder one since no way could the prosecution prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.                

Kennedy is no quitter though and so he plans his strategy as an end around, make Wade pay like he should under that pre-nuptial agreement for the kids’ education and their pain and suffering, about three million he thought would square things. Kennedy spends the bulk of the novel proving to his own satisfaction that Wade is the one who ordered the murder of his wife once he tired of her and wanted to move on to the next best thing and set up the framework where Wade would be forced to pay out. And he does in the end. The problem for me with this plot-line though is that I could not suspend my disbelief long enough to figure out why the mostly absent and hence not fully sketched out by Higgins Wade felt he needed to order the “hit” on Sandra when forking out the  dough would have worked just as well. Moreover unlike the tight narrative in a work like Coyle this one has way too much sidebar talk about camera clubs, Kennedy’s unhappy marriage, the history of private schools and lots more, not remotely relevant to the case. I think Higgins bulked this one up when he too found the plot-line rather thin. Enough said.