This causes Lena, the young, attractive waitress and friend of Eddie, to erupt with a torrent of verbal barbs and insults aimed at Plyne.
The bar's bouncer, Wally Plyne aka the Harleyville Hugger, admits to taking money for giving Eddie's address to the two hit-men. With this background and insight into Eddie's character, we have a more complete overview of the violence taking place one afternoon at Harriet's Hut. The author conveys Eddie's reflections on this period in his life, "Now, looking back on it, he saw the wild man of seven years ago, and thought, What it amounted to, you were crazy, I mean really crazy. So violent is Eddie that a strong-arm specialist in the Bowery tells his buddies the next time he fights with the guy he'll need an automatic rifle. He then seeks out more violence again and again and gives as good as he gets, including mauling two policemen. Late at night in Hell's Kitchen NYC, he gets himself mugged, robbed and beaten up, enjoying every minute of the violence. Thus, we are given yet again another side of Eddie the piano player, the cool guy with his soft-easy smile, when, after the funeral, Edward goes ballistic. Seeing herself as unclean trash, Teresa jumps out a window.
Completely unhinged, Edward stomps out of the room. One evening at a midtown Manhattan party, Teresa confesses to Edward that she had an affair with his high-class concert manager. Turns out, Edward was once deeply in love and married to a beautiful Puerto Rican woman named Teresa.
Then why, we may ask, is one of the world's greatest pianists tickling the eighty-eight at a rundown bar? It isn't until midway through the novel that we are given Eddie's backstory. In the first few pages we also come to know there is another side to cool Eddie, that is, some years ago Edward Webster Lynn, a concert pianist trained at the Curtis Institute, toured Europe and performed at Carnegie Hall, captivating and mesmerizing audiences with musical talent bordering on genius. Remaining cool, detached and emotionally uninvolved is the key note (no pun intended) of Eddie's threadbare, solitary life. Eddie acknowledges his brother but remains cool and doesn't stop playing his sweet honky-tonk music on the joint's piano. Turley ducks into a run-down neighborhood bar called Harriet's Hut and finds his brother Eddie (the novel's main character) who he hasn't seen in over six years. This gritty, hard-boiled novel by David Goodis opens with an action scene where a bloody-faced Turley Linn is running for his life through the alleys of a Philadelphia slum, fleeing from two professional hit-men.
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