The Friends of Eddie Coyle
going on, and I told you, people making telephone calls. I’m always getting calls for people that aren’t there, and pretty soon the guy that isn’t there shows up, or maybe I get another telephone call and it’s from him, and he wants to know, is anybody calling for me? Now there isn’t that many guys that’ve got something going and they don’t want their wife to find out. Remember that?”
    “Yeah,” Foley said. “You said Eddie Fingers was having something to do with Scalisi.”
    “I mentioned Eddie Fingers,” Dillon said, “and I mentioned Scalisi too. I don’t remember saying they had something working. They were just two of the guys I was talking about, that had a lot of time to spend on the telephone. That fucking Coyle, I don’t see how he can walk, he must have so many dimes in his pockets. You throw him in the water, he’d sink like a fucking stone, he’s so heavy.”
    “Okay,” Foley said, “Eddie’s making a lot of calls.”
    “I ain’t seen Scalisi around in a while,” Dillon said.
    “I heard that,” Foley said. “Nobody has. I heard he was down in Florida getting some sun.”
    “I heard he wasn’t,” Dillon said. “I heard he made a lot of money recently.”
    “That so,” Foley said. “All by himself?”
    “Sure,” Dillon said. “You know Jimmy, everybody likes him. I imagine some friend of his give him a good tip on a horse or something, you know?”
    “It’s good to have friends,” Foley said.
    “Certainly is,” Dillon said. “I had a call from Scalisi there yesterday night, and the fellow he wanted wasn’t around, so I say, sure, I’ll have him call you soon as he gets in. You got a number? And he says: ‘I’m not going to be here very long. I tell you, it’s kind of important. Why don’t you tell him soon as you see him, it’s important and I want to talk with him, and that’ll probably do it.’ ”
    “Uh huh,” Foley said.
    “So this afternoon,” Dillon said, “I’m in there as usual and listening to the feature at the Rock and getting my brains whippedout as usual, and probably I sold four dollars’ worth of beer all day, nobody drinks a straight shot any more, and who comes in but the fellow that Jimmy Scal calls about yesterday. So I finish out of the money as usual, old Babe never did me no good, and then I go up to him and he’s got this kind of a tense expression on his face, like he thinks maybe he’s got his tit caught in the wringer, and I say to him, you know, what’ll you have and all, and he orders a shot and a beer, bless my soul. So I bring it up, and I’m giving him a little gas, you know, one thing and another, and then I remember, because I got so many people calling in, I remember that this guy is one of the guys they been calling in for. So I say to him: ‘Hey, Jimmy Scal get in touch with you?’
    “Well,” Dillon said, “he gets this look on his face and he says: ‘No, I didn’t know he was looking for me.’ And from the way he looks I think it’s probably just as well he didn’t, he looked like somebody knocked the whey out of him.
    “So I say: ‘Yeah, he called last night, looking for you. Said it was important. He didn’t get in touch with you, huh?’ See, I’m giving it to him a little bit.
    “ ‘No,’ he says, ‘no, I told you he didn’t. He leave a number?’
    “So I’m standing there, still playing Mickey the Dunce, all these guys running around like mad all over the countryside, keeping in touch by calling me up, I practically haven’t got time to pour the booze, I’m so busy answering the fucking phone, but nobody trusts me all the same, see, I’m just the switchboard operator. So I’m entitled to some of my own. And I say: ‘Jesus, no. I asked him for one and he says to me, he says he’s leaving and just to tell you it’s important, he wants to talk with you.’
    “That party sits there,” Dillon said, “and all of a sudden, whomp, he’s got that shot down and the beer running right

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