The Friends of Eddie Coyle Read online

  Lawyer, journalist, and teacher, George V. Higgins was the author of more than thirty books. He died in 1999.

  ALSO BY GEORGE V. HIGGINS

  Fiction

  The Digger’s Game

  Cogan’s Trade

  A City on a Hill

  The Judgment of Deke Hunter

  Dreamland

  A Year or So with Edgar

  Kennedy for the Defense (Jerry Kennedy series)

  The Rat on Fire

  The Patriot Game

  A Choice of Enemies

  Old Earl Died Pulling Traps: A Story

  Penance for Jerry Kennedy (Jerry Kennedy series)

  Imposters

  Outlaws

  The Sins of the Fathers

  Wonderful Years, Wonderful Years

  Trust

  Victories

  The Mandeville Talent

  Defending Billy Ryan (Jerry Kennedy series)

  Bomber’s Law

  Swan Boats at Four

  Sandra Nichols Found Dead (Jerry Kennedy series)

  A Change of Gravity

  The Agent

  At End of Day

  Nonfiction

  The Friends of Richard Nixon

  The Progress of the Seasons

  Style Versus Substance

  On Writing

  Praise for The Friends of Eddie Coyle

  “One of the best of its genre I have read since Hemingway’s The Killers.”

  —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

  “What dialogue . . . The American writer who is closest to Henry Green. What I can’t get over is that so good a first novel was written by the fuzz.”

  —Norman Mailer

  “Aspiring novelists of any genre, not just legal suspense, would be wise to read lots of George Higgins.”

  —John Grisham

  “A writer of Balzacian appetite . . . the poet of Boston sleaze . . . confident and totally convincing.”

  —Mordecai Richler

  “Higgins can plot a whole book like one long chase scene. He can write dialogue so authentic it spits. He can catch character like a ‘make’ in a file of mug shots. . . . This cops-and-robbers novel qualifies him for the corner table where all the best tellers of low tales sit.”

  —Life

  “George V. Higgins was an American original and a writer of lasting importance.”

  —Scott Turow

  THE FRIENDS of

  EDDIE COYLE

  George V. Higgins

  Picador

  Henry Holt and Company

  New York

  THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE. Copyright © 1970, 1971 by

  George V. Higgins. Introduction copyright © 2010 by Dennis

  Lehane. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of

  America. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth

  Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.picadorusa.com

  Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Henry Holt

  and Company under license from Pan Books Limited.

  For information on Picador Reading Group Guides,

  please contact Picador.

  E-mail: [email protected]

  A part of chapter 6 appeared in a different form under the title

  “Dillon Explained That He Was Frightened” in North

  American Review, Fall 1970.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Henry Holt edition as follows:

  Higgins, George V., 1939–

  The friends of Eddie Coyle : a novel / George V. Higgins.—1st Owl Book ed.

  p. cm.

  “An Owl book.”

  ISBN 978-0-805-04152-4

  1. Criminals—Fiction. 2. Boston (Mass.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.I356 F7 1995

  813'.54—dc20

  95014538

  Picador ISBN 978-0-312-42969-0

  First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  First Picador Edition: May 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Introduction

  You hold in your hands the game-changing crime novel of the last fifty years. It is also quite possibly one of the four or five best crime novels ever written. It casts such a long shadow that all of us who toil in the genre known as American noir do so in its shade. Same goes for all of us who write novels set in Boston. How can a slim book with minimal description and no heroes lay claim to the status of modern masterpiece?

  Let’s start with the title, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Eddie Coyle has no friends. Eddie barely has acquaintances. Eddie Coyle is our hopeless, helpless, hapless Everyman in the Boston criminal underworld of 1970. He might be the worst guide ever, because he is utterly out of his depth. Or, on second thought, maybe he’s the best guide ever, because most of the people who swim in this sea are out of their depth, which is how they end up on the ten o’clock news or on a metal slab, doing ten-to-twelve on C Block, or hanging from a post office wall. In Eddie Coyle’s world, no one is out to screw anyone on purpose; it just happens that way. No one wakes up trying to do bad or put a hurt on anyone; they’re just trying to get by, and sometimes getting by means leaving a fair share of accidental wreckage in your wake. But rest assured, it’s nothing personal.

  The “friends” who surround Eddie are Jackie Brown, the not-as-slick-as-he-thinks gunrunner; Dave Foley, the pitiless Federal agent; the bank robbers Artie Van and Jimmy Scalisi; and Dillon, a full-time bartender and part-time hit man. Jackie sells guns to Eddie, who passes them along to Artie and Jimmy, who need them to rob banks in the suburbs south of the city. Eddie is facing jail time and he’d love to get out of it. The only way he can do that is provide information on upcoming crimes to Dave Foley, who doesn’t hand out Get Out of Jail Free cards for nothing. Dave uses Eddie as much, if not more so, than he assumes Eddie would use him. (Everyone, by the way, uses everyone in this novel.) While Foley presses Eddie to get him harder and harder evidence on his “friends,” Eddie tries to maintain a semblance of loyalty. Problem is, all his “friends” know he’s facing hard time, so everyone worries he’s talking to a guy like Foley. Maybe saddest and most ironic of all is that while Eddie is talking to Foley, he isn’t telling him much, but someone else, whom nobody suspects, is blabbing away to Foley. Unfortunately for Eddie, no one suspects that other “friend” of being a rat; they only suspect Eddie. As his date with prison nears, that suspicion becomes the vise that closes in on Eddie, its teeth colder and closer with every chapter.

  In most novels, it’s easy to spot the good guys and the bad guys. In this novel, the late George V. Higgins refuses to truck in easy morality. Relying on his own experience as an assistant U.S. attorney, Higgins pulls back the veneer on the real criminal underworld, not the romanticized version readers kept in their heads before The Friends of Eddie Coyle was published. There are no noble gangsters swept up in high tragedy in Higgins’s world and no righteous cops obsessed with justice. There are only guys punching a clock, day in and day out; for some the job is to rob, to kidnap, or, in the case of Dillon, to kill. For others, the job is to arrest or prosecute. They’re working stiffs, essentially, and no one gets too hot and bothered about the work unless they think someone ratted them out. Near the end of the book, one character asks another, “Is there any end to this shit? Does anything ever change in this racket?” The other character responds, “Of course it changes. . . . Some of us die, the rest of us get older, new guys come along, old guys disappear. It changes every day.”

  This is the rat race Eddie runs in—a grimy, dingy world of grimy, dingy men. And if that’s all there was in this novel—a heroless, hyperrealistic view of a grim criminal su
bculture—it might not be worthy of its classic status. But we haven’t gotten to the dialogue. Ah, the dialogue. It takes up a good eighty percent of the novel, and you wouldn’t mind if it took up the full hundred. No one, before or since, has ever written dialogue this scabrous, this hysterically funny, this pungently authentic—not Elmore Leonard, who cites this novel as a primary influence, not Richard Price, not even George V. Higgins himself, who spent the rest of his career trying to fix what wasn’t broken, attempting to refine his dialogue in subsequent novels to such a degree of phonetic miscalculation that it became a near parody of the mastery on display here. Open any page of this book and you will find vast riches of the spoken word. The characters here love to talk; they’d probably talk to a chair. Lucky for us, they have each other to talk to and what, at first blush, seems a novel of lowlifes doing low-life things until their time runs out, soon reveals itself to be a demented novel of manners, a brilliant satirical riff on all the hoary genre clichés that proceeded it. In most novels, talk is the salt and plot is the meal. In The Friends of Eddie Coyle, talk is the meal. It’s also the plot, the characters, the action, the whole shebang.

  What we are left with—after all that flawless dialogue, after our tour of the dampest cellars of the criminal underclass, after we’ve hopscotched from antihero to loser to manipulative cop to a killer so banal and unaffected by what he does that the only moral principle he can find in his heart regards the price of a job, not the nature of it—is a portrait of life on the street as realistic as any ever written. So in the end Eddie Coyle did earn some friends—the legion of readers who consider him the greatest tragic antihero in the annals of crime fiction. When you finish his story, raise a glass to him. Here’s to Eddie Coyle. As with his creator, we’ll never see his like again.

  DENNIS LEHANE

  THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE

  1

  Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns. “I can get your pieces probably by tomorrow night. I can get you, probably, six pieces. Tomorrow night. In a week or so, maybe ten days, another dozen. I got a guy coming in with at least ten of them but I already talk to another guy about four of them and he’s, you know, expecting them. He’s got something to do. So, six tomorrow night. Another dozen in a week.”

  The stocky man sat across from Jackie Brown and allowed his coffee to grow cold. “I don’t know as I like that,” he said. “I don’t know as I like buying stuff from the same lot as somebody else. Like, I don’t know what he’s going to do with it, you know? If it was to cause trouble to my people on account of somebody else having some from the same lot, well, it could cause trouble for me, too.”

  “I understand,” Jackie Brown said. People who got out early from work went by in the November afternoon, hurrying. The crippled man hawked Records, annoying people by crying at them from his skate-wheeled dolly.

  “You don’t understand the way I understand,” the stocky man said. “I got certain responsibilities.”

  “Look,” Jackie Brown said, “I tell you I understand. Did you get my name or didn’t you?”

  “I got your name,” the stocky man said.

  “Well all right,” Jackie Brown said.

  “All right nothing,” the stocky man said. “I wished I had a nickel for every name I got that was all right, I wished I did. Look at this.” The stocky man extended the fingers of his left hand over the gold-speckled For mica tabletop. “You know what that is?”

  “Your hand,” Jackie Brown said.

  “I hope you look closer at guns’n you look at that hand,” the stocky man said. “Look at your own goddamned hand.”

  Jackie Brown extended the fingers of his left hand. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Count your fucking knuckles,” the stocky man said.

  “All of them?” Jackie Brown said.

  “Ah Christ,” the stocky man said. “Count as many of them as you want. I got four more. One on each finger. Know how I got those? I bought some stuff from a man that I had his name, and it got traced, and the man I bought it for, he went to M C I Walpole for fifteen to twenty-five. Still in there, but he had some friends. I got an extra set of knuckles. Shut my hand in a drawer. Then one of them stomped the drawer shut. Hurt like a fucking bastard. You got no idea how it hurt.”

  “Jesus,” Jackie Brown said.

  “What made it hurt more,” the stocky man said, “what made it hurt worse was knowing what they were going to do to you, you know? There you are and they tell you very matter of fact that you made somebody mad, you made a big mistake and now there’s somebody doing time for it, and it isn’t anything personal, you understand, but it just has to be done. Now get your hand out there. You think about not doing it, you know? I was in Sunday School when I was a kid and this nun says to me, stick out your hand, and the first few times I do it she whacks me right across the knuckles with a steel-edged ruler. It was just like that. So one day I says, when she tells me ‘Put out your hand,’ I say, ‘No.’ And she whaps me right across the face with that ruler. Same thing. Except these guys weren’t mad, they aren’t mad at you, you know? Guys you see all the time, maybe guys you didn’t like, maybe guys you did, had some drinks with, maybe looked out for the girls. ‘Hey look, Paulie, nothing personal, you know? You made a mistake. The hand. I don’t wanna have to shoot you, you know.’ So you stick out the hand and—you get to put out the hand you want—I take the left because I’m right-handed and I know what’s going to happen, like I say, and they put your fingers in the drawer and then one of them kicks it shut. Ever hear bones breaking? Just like a man snapping a shingle. Hurts like a bastard.”

  “Jesus,” Jackie Brown said.

  “That’s what I mean,” the stocky man said. “I had a cast on for almost a month. Weather gets damp, it still hurts. I can’t bend them fingers. So I don’t care what your name is, who gave it to me. I had the other guy’s name, and that didn’t help my goddamn fingers. Name isn’t enough. I get paid for being careful. What I want to know is, what happens one of the other guns from this bunch gets traced? Am I going to have to start pricing crutches?

  This is serious business, you know. I don’t know who you been selling to before, but the fellow says you got guns to sell and I need guns. I’m just protecting myself, just being smart. What happens when the man with the four gives one to somebody that uses it to shoot a goddamned cop? I gotta leave town?”

  “No,” Jackie Brown said.

  “No?” the stocky man said. “Okay, I hope you’re right about that. I’m running short of fingers. And if I gotta leave town, my friend, you gotta leave town. You understand that. They’ll do it to me, they’ll do worse to you. You know that.”

  “I know that,” Jackie Brown said.

  “I hope you do,” the stocky man said. “I dunno who you been selling to, but I can tell you, these guys’re different.”

  “You can’t trace these guns,” Jackie Brown said. “I guarantee it.”

  “Tell me how come,” the stocky man said.

  “Look,” Jackie Brown said, “these’re new guns, follow me? Proof, test-firing’s all they ever had. Brand-fucking-new guns. Airweights. Shrouded hammers. Floating firing pins. You could drop one of these pieces right on the hammer with a round in the chamber—nothing. Thirty-eight Specials. I’m telling you, it’s good stuff.”

  “Stolen,” the stocky man said. “Serial numbers filed off. That’s how I got caught before. They got this bath they drop the stuff in, raises that number right back again. You better do better’n that, neither one of us’ll be able to shake hands.”

  “No,” Jackie Brown said. “They got serial numbers. Man gets caught with one of them, perfectly all right, no sweat. No way to tell it’s stolen. Brand-new gun.”

  “With a serial number?” the stocky man said.

  “You look up the serial number,” Jackie Brown said, “it’s a Military Police model, made in 1951, shipped to Rock Island, never reported stolen. But it’s a brand-new
Detective Special. Never reported stolen either.”

  “You got somebody in the plant,” the stocky man said.

  “I got guns to sell,” Jackie Brown said. “I done a lot of business and I had very few complaints. I can get you four-inchers and two-inchers. You just tell me what you want. I can deliver it.”

  “How much?” the stocky man said.

  “Depends on the lot,” Jackie Brown said.

  “Depends on what I’m willing to pay, too,” the stocky man said. “How much?”

  “Eighty,” Jackie Brown said.

  “Eighty?” the stocky man said. “You ever sell guns before? Eighty is way too high. I’m talking about thirty guns here now. I can go into a goddamned store and buy thirty guns for eighty apiece. We got to talk some more about price, I can see that.”

  “I’d like to see you go into a store and order up thirty pieces,” Jackie Brown said. “I don’t know who you are and I don’t know what you got in mind and I don’t need to know. But I would sure like to be there when you tell the man you got some friends in the market for thirty pieces and you want a discount. I would like to see that. The FBI’d be onto your phone before you got the money out.”

  “There’s more’n one gun store, you know,” the stocky man said.

  “Not for you there isn’t,” Jackie Brown said. “I can tell you right now there isn’t anybody for a hundred miles that can put up the goods like I can, and you know it. So no more of that shit.”

  “I never went over fifty before,” the stocky man said. “I’m not going that high now. You haven’t got that many guys around waiting to take thirty, either. And if these work out all right, I’ll be coming back for more. You’re used to dealing in twos and threes, that’s why you want to deliver three or four times.”