Fast Eddie B.
The gentleman thief and society cat burglar who once stole a state-dinner tablecloth without anyone noticing until dessert.
Fast Eddie B. is a V.I.L.E. operative who mixes easily with the jet set, turning up, per his dossier, at “one of PEOPLE Magazine’s top 10 playgrounds for the rich.” He is impeccably groomed at all times — groomed enough to once fight a duel with a waiter who spilled a drop of hot sauce on his white linen suit in his favourite Mexican restaurant. The dossier plays him as a gentleman-crook type in the Raffles mould: charming enough to talk his way into high society, and skilled enough to rob it blind once he’s in the room.
His most famous job
Eddie’s signature theft was a damask tablecloth, lifted during a state dinner held for “the Ambassador.” Posing as a waiter, he slid it off the table without spilling a drop or breaking a plate; the theft wasn’t even noticed until dessert was served. He is a world-class croquet player who carries a custom-made set of mallets in the trunk of his convertible, and he always leaves a diamond stickpin at the scene as a calling card.
In the games
Fast Eddie is one of the fixed ten suspects of the 1985 original, and he carried over unchanged into the twenty-strong Deluxe Edition roster. His dossier lists black hair, brown eyes and a convertible as his getaway vehicle — exactly the sort of detail a witness would let slip and a player would log while building a warrant.
The croquet circuit
Fast Eddie’s custom mallets are not a one-off detail. Croquet turns up again and again in the Deluxe Edition’s dossiers — Rosa Sarrosas-Arroz joined the gang during the “1986 World Cup Croquet Matches,” Scar Graynolt “plays killer croquet for money,” and Li Non Mee carries a spare mallet and a dozen wickets in her handbag — enough repetition across otherwise unrelated files to read as a running joke the manual’s writers kept coming back to.
A name that survived the remake
Eddie is a useful test case for how much Brøderbund actually rewrote when it rebuilt the original game for the Deluxe Edition five years later. His name and several distinctive phrases — the tablecloth, the trunk full of mallets, the diamond stickpin — hold steady between the two printings of his file, the same continuity found in fellow 1985 holdovers like Nick Brunch. Where 1985 gave a detective a hand-drawn crime file to flip through, the Deluxe printing turned the same biography into an on-screen dossier a player could call up from the Dataminder — see how suspect files were presented for the full picture of that shift.