Characters in Blind Willie

“Who was your CO?” “Captain Bob Brissum—with a u, not an o—and above him, Colonel Andrew Shelf, sir.” “I heard of Shelf,” says the man in the open coat. His face suddenly looks different.

First the phone rings while he’s in his office—good old Ed from NYNEX—and now this. “The boy who stole it from me wrote his name in it while he had it.

… just like George Raymer, the neighborhood beat-cop of Willie Shearman’s childhood, but easygoing Eric Hanratty’d still had Blind Willie up to two hundred a month by the time he retired in 1978. And the thing is—dig it, my brothers—Wheelock was angry …

There are lots of days when he thinks about how pleasant it would be to put a bullet in Jasper Wheelock’s head. It was the way things happened in the green, sometimes. The way things had to happen. That thing with Malenfant, for instance.

… ROADBLOCK SHOOTOUT “Big Fish” May Have Escaped by Minutes, Says FBI SAC Thurman The big fish were John and Sally McBride, Charlie “Duck” Golden, the elusive Raymond Fiegler . . . and Carol. The remaining members of the MSP, in other words.

… with Malenfant, but his shrill, grating voice is hard to forget, and he remembers something Malenfant would yell during his endless Hearts games if someone tried to take back a card after it was laid down: No way, fuckwad! Once it’s laid, it …

One of the other men from Delta Company two-two—Pagano, his name had been—grabbed this fellow around the middle and hustled him past the staggering Willie Shearman, who really couldn’t see very …

… On the following pages are pictures of him with his mother, pictures of him with his father (Pat Shearman smiling as if he had never pushed his son over in his high chair or hit his wife with a beer bottle), pictures of him with his friends.

Ralph Williamson probably likes having that key on a paddle, just like he likes having a soap on a rope in the shape of a bunny rabbit or a circus clown …

The janitor who saw them later identified the man as Raymond Fiegler, head of the MSP. He identified the young woman as Carol Gerber. At ten minutes to two that afternoon, the bomb finally went off.

… SHOOTOUT “Big Fish” May Have Escaped by Minutes, Says FBI SAC Thurman The big fish were John and Sally McBride, Charlie “Duck” Golden, the elusive Raymond Fiegler . . . and Carol. The remaining members of the MSP, in other words. The McBrides and …

His wife is the former Sharon Anne Donahue, St. Gabriel the Steadfast Secondary Parochial School, Class of 1964, but that’s something the scrawny, constantly grinning man will never …