If Angels Fight (6 page)

And there stands Laura Chante, the first time the audience gets a good look at her. Laura is the girlfriend of a very wrong guy, hard but soft, bad but good. She wears high heels, a black sheath skirt and a jacket open to reveal a pale, shimmering blouse. A scarf with a streak of scarlet covers most of her blond hair. “You boys looking for someone?” she asks with an innocent expression.

Laura was played by the young London actress Moira Tell. Her posture, her accent, her attitude were impeccable.

Peggy McHugh still had a sassy smile. Back in the 1950s and ’60s she had made a career playing bright young girl friends and wise cracking best pals of too sweet heroines. She was the young detective’s fiancée in the
Naked City
TV series.

At eighty she played tough old broads with a regular role on
As the World Turns
and a girlfriend thirty years her junior. In a nod to nostalgia she’d been cast as Detective Pete McDevitt’s hip, utterly unsentimental grandmother in this movie.

It was her birthday and Mitchell Graham, the director, along with the movie’s producers threw a little party for her at Ormolu’s on Union Square and invited the press.

Ms. Hughes had already knocked back a Jameson’s on the rocks and was swirling champagne in her glass when Quinlan came up and hugged her.

“How are you doing, you old witch?” he asked.

“Sean! Thought I’d see more of you on this shoot. How’s your mother? Still living in New Mexico with what’s his name?”

Peggy McHugh and Quinlan’s mother, the former Julie Morris, had been pals back when his mother was acting, back when she married his father, Detective Jim Quinlan.

“Arizona. Lou Hagan is the current husband. Nice guy—retired broker. She’s fine. Sends her love.”

“Your mother was gorgeous. She and your father when they met were more like a movie than any movie I’ve been in.” And having taken the conversation to a place where Quinlan didn’t want to go, Peggy caught sight of someone else and said, “Bella! So wonderful of you to come!”

Quinlan stepped away, went to the bar, sipped a scotch, and looked around the room. Ormolu’s tin ceiling had been polished to a fine shine, the wood paneling looked rich as chocolate. The place had been a dump twenty years before when it was a rock club called Ladders. Long before that it had been an Italian wedding hall.

Sean’s parents were quite a story, the young actress and the young cop who got himself quite dirty trying to keep her in style. Jim Quinlan shot himself when the shit came down. Sean had been three when that happened and found it out in bits and pieces.

Once when he was small his grandfather had explained how it was growing up in the Irish New York of the ’20s and ’30s. “Kids who got in trouble, which was most of us, got let off with a warning if we had cops in the family. Those without a relative on the force got a criminal record. Simple justice and nothing less.”

Out of nowhere Quinlan asked about the father whom he barely remembered and knew almost nothing. “Did my dad get into trouble?”

He never forgot the grief on the old man’s face as he said, “Your father got more than a couple of warnings.”

Adie was across the room talking intently to a thin man wearing thousands of dollars worth of suit and a long, dark pony tail.

Where Quinlan was standing he could hear Mitchell Graham say, “Sometimes acting is beside the point and it’s the physical presence you want. Someone walks on camera unannounced and the audience knows he’s a killer.”

Quinlan shifted slightly and saw that the director was talking to Moira Tell and a reporter. “In America, real Mafiosi go to jail, get involved in the prison drama group, get out and go into business playing Mafiosi on stage and screen. When Friedkin shot
Sorcerer
down in Latin America he hired a couple of Sing Sing School of Drama graduates to play the thugs. The two stopped off on the way down there and helped pull a robbery. This delayed them and held up the shooting. When they showed up Roy Scheider, the star, said, ‘I was told we were waiting for actors—these are just gangsters.’ Supposedly, the two were deeply hurt that their artistic bone fides were being questioned.”

Moira Tell laughed and moved toward the bar. On her way she noticed Quinlan. “You are very good,” she told him.

“Sing Sing School of Drama.”

“Oh, he was
not
talking about you. Graham admires what you’re doing, the presence you bring. He believes all that nonsense about inner emotion American versus exterior detail English acting.”

“You were great this afternoon.”

“It’s wonderful to visit a past that has nothing to do with me at all.”

From across the room they heard Peggy McHugh in full voice speaking to a cable interviewer, “Back when the economy was first going down the toilet, someone asked me if I’d like to go back sixty years. I thought they meant would I like to be young again. Instead they just meant me going just as I was. ‘Before heart bypasses, before air conditioning?’ I asked them ‘You’re out of your mind,’ I said. Sweetheart, we lived like dogs back then.”

Adie said as they were leaving a bit later, “The one I was talking to is the Brazilian from this morning. He wants to buy a penthouse. He’s loaded.” Somehow money had not really come up in all the years they’d known each other.

*

The ferry boat called
The Queen of Union City
disembarks passengers onto a Hudson River pier in the West Twenties. A woman wearing a veiled hat leads a small boy in an Eton cap and a girl in a straw boater by their hands, a tall man in a three piece suit and a topcoat follows them. An old, slat sided truck piled with crates of live chickens rolls onto the pier past a large sign reading “Erie Lackawanna Ferry Company.”

Under that in smaller letters is, “Departures from Manhattan on the hour and the half hour. 4 a.m. to 8 p.m.”

Detectives Pete McDevitt and Pat Roark stand under a clock that says 2:25 poised, alert and ready to step out from behind the make-shift ferry shed. Then McDevitt says, “Now,” and moves to his right. Roark at the same moment moves to his left.

Roark served a year in Korea. Firemen are navy; cops are army. Quinlan knows this. The next line is his:

“
Ok Nails, freeze.
”

“Cut!”

The truck with the chickens went into reverse and parked next to a mint condition 1955 Oldsmobile and an old fashioned ambulance the size and shape of a station wagon.

Before the first take Mitchell Graham had said, “Sean, you’re so perfectly in period that I feel like I should film you in black and white.”

As McDevitt that day Zach Terry wore his hat at the same great angle as Quinlan. Graham noticed that. After the first take he told Quinlan, “It’s distracting to have both of you with your hats alike. Could you straighten yours?”

The game was called protecting the star. Sean knew that game. McDevitt’s hat was an important prop today. He shifted his own fedora.

“Perfect,” said the director.

A featured player yields gracefully in the hope that a director will remember when casting in the future. Quinlan wondered how many movies Graham would direct after this one. He wondered what his own career would look like if an indictment came down in California.

Crews were setting up for the next scene, which would be shot in front of an old three story building just across from the piers. For the movie a sign had been erected on the front that read, “Murphy’s Fine Food and Drink. Rooms by the Day or Week.”

Once this had actually been a waterfront tavern with rooms rented to sailors on the upper floors. For a while after the waterfront shut down it had been a notorious gay bar called The Wrong Box.

Carter Boyce, the actor playing Jimmy Nails, was in costume and taking a practice walk toward the ferry shed. Carter Boyce was a nice guy who happened to have a mug two feet wide with bad news written all over it.

In the next scene, Jimmy Nails was supposed to have just come down the wooden exterior stairs that led from the second floor of Murphy’s. He had an overcoat on his arm and carried a satchel.

The scene of Nails on those stairs had been completed the day before through the miracle of second unit work.

Detectives McDevitt and Roark stand exactly where they were at the end of the last shot. In the background as they start to move towards Murphy’s, the Oldsmobile and the chicken truck roll off the dock in one direction, a red Studebaker station wagon goes by in the other.

Twenty feet away from them Jimmy Nails drops his luggage and overcoat and swings a double barrel shotgun their way. McDevitt acting instinctively whips off his fedora and flings it at Nails’ face in one gesture. Jimmy, his eyes rolling like a trapped beast, is a creature of instinct and empties a barrel at the hat. Roark’s gun jumps into his hand and he fires three times. Jimmy Nails goes down firing the second barrel into the ground.

The hat flying through the air and getting blasted into felt confetti was being shot that same week by a special effects outfit in California.

“Thanks,” Roark says.

“That hat cost me seven bucks at Rothman’s,” says his partner, his buddy.

“Cut. Let’s put Zach and Sean about a foot further apart,” said Graham. “And Sean, slower on the reaction. Let the hat surprise you as much as it does Carter. Sean, are you with us?”

Quinlan nodded. For a moment he’d felt like the back draft of the antique vehicles was pulling him away from this time and place.

Over several takes the vintage Studebaker blew a tire and the wind and the sun played hell with Mr. Terry’s hair. Half a dozen people surrounded him, spraying his chestnut locks.

“Exposure to the elements . . .”

“It’s not, of course, but the light makes it look thin.”

“. . . lighting adjustment . . .”

This Quinlan knew was also about protecting the star as was the scene they kept enacting. McDevitt needed to save Roark’s life to mitigate, for the audience, the fact that his misjudgment was going to cost Roark his life.

As they prepared for what turned out to be the last take, Quinlan couldn’t stop thinking, each time he looked at Zach Terry, that this was the bastard who was going to get him killed.

At some point during the last couple of takes, Sean Quinlan became aware of a figure from his disreputable past. Rollins stood across the street dark and sharp in a navy blue suede jacket and soft leather shoes and watched everything that went on.

When they were finished with
Like ’60
for the day, he and Rollins went down the avenue to what had been a nouveau chic diner and now seemed to be slipping into just being a diner with a liquor license.

“We had some rare adventures, you and I,” Rollins remarked when they settled into a back booth, “a pair of theater students out looking for adventure.”

“And not caring where they found it.”

“Always on the right side of the law, though.”

“Not as I remember. There was the time we unloaded the Quaalude those crazy guys from NYU manufactured in their chemistry lab.”

“We weren’t caught. That’s being on the right side of the law as far as I’m concerned. Glad you got in touch. I’ve been following your career. Sorry about the divorce. Monica Celeste must be loaded.”

Quinlan shrugged. “I see you’re still the Well Dressed Passer-by,” he said. “That routine keeps working for you?”

“In any large city there are always the lost, the confused, and the lonely that need an assist from a passing stranger.” Rollins gave a charming smile. “Actually, though, I’ve gone legit. I’m in the tourist business—tours of various old New Yorks. You heard about that?

“We have people taking daytrips to 1890s New York. Out in Brooklyn in a couple of spots you can walk down a street and almost think it’s a hundred and twenty-five years ago. Any decade you can think of, people want to see the remains.”

Rollins smiled. “It’s an amazing confluence, you being back in town and making this movie.
Like ’60,
is on the cusp of the hottest boom in this tired town. Your movie is going to be porno for the ones who go for ’50s New York. That ferryboat sliding up to the dock and that truckload of chickens and you and your pal in those hats and padded shoulder suits will make them cum in their Dacron/rayon pants.”

Sean gave a grin. “In tough times people want to go elsewhere,” Rollins said. “With every corner of the planet going down the drain, the places they favor are in the past. Some lunatics even want to go back to the Great Depression. Like this one isn’t bad enough for them. But I don’t ask questions, I just set up the tours. Who would have guessed that a master’s degree in History from Columbia would stand me in such good stead?”

“Especially since you never went there.”

Rollins shrugged. “What makes it all weird and twisted and thus makes it my kind of enterprise is that some of the clients believe that if they can find a place with enough artifacts that evoke a certain time; they’ll get a jolt and wind up there.

“Most of them want to go back to the seventies, the sixties, the fifties. They figure things would be comfortable enough. I.D. requirements were still loose back then. Sliders know enough about those times that they could make a nice living betting on the World Series and buying Xerox stock. One said that if he could get back to 1950 he’d have almost sixty years before stuff got really screwy.”

“You’ve heard them talk all this out? Ever help any of them do it?”

“None of my clients and no one else I’ve ever known has actually managed the Slide. They’ve all heard about someone going back in time. They know someone who found a message from someone who disappeared saying he’s living like a king in 1946. Psychiatrists say it’s delusional. People can’t deal with bad times.”

“You believe the shrinks know what they’re talking about?”

“They diagnosed me as a sociopath back when I was in high school. It sounded good and I went with it. If you’re looking for a guide to the Slide you’re out of luck. If you want a job leading 1950s nostalgia tours I’d be happy to hire you.”

“Thanks, but I have other plans.” Quinlan rose and put a ten down on the table. “Nice talking to you Rollo.”