have sold, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. When he had to sell, there were no buyers.
Everyone had consoled him about the divorce, like he’d suffered a death in the family or been laid off from work. Monica Celeste had the better career, was a major presence on daytime TV. Quinlan told himself that if the situation had been reversed he wouldn’t have dumped her. But all that was in the past.
The San Bernardino matter was current. A runaway grand jury led by a self-righteous young DA was investigating collection-agency practices. Some debtors apparently testified that a few years before, Quinlan had led them to believe he was a cop. So far nothing had gotten out to the media.
That time just after the divorce was still a jumble in his mind. One thing he was sure of was that testifying meant implicating his former employers, which would be very unwise. Another thing about which he was positive was that lawyers had eaten up his
Adie was at the office and in full business mode when she left a message. “For the Peggy McHugh thing, we can meet at Ormolu at eight. I mentioned that to a prospective client and he knew all about it. So we may meet him there.”
The last call was a voice from deep in a disreputable past. Rollins said, “You asked around about me. Here I am. I know where to find you.” Quinlan was a bit amused.
When they knocked on his door to say he had ten minutes, Quinlan thought about his character for a few moments. Roark had the usual problems trying to raise a family on a cop’s salary. His wife and he had disagreements. But she was a cop’s wife and understood what that meant. A steady guy was Roark, a good partner.
Detectives McDevitt and Roark hold the same poses as at the end of the previous scene. The audience has just watched a sequence shot two weeks before on a sound stage in California. It shows what the two cops are watching—a nude woman standing behind gauze curtains.
The viewers see a reverse strip, as she hooks her bra, pulls up her panties, draws on nylons, wriggles into a slip, a blouse, and a skirt. She bends slowly to put on her shoes.
Suddenly McDevitt shakes himself awake. “Decoy!” he says. “She’s letting him get away.” The pair of them run for the front door of the building.
Locations had found an untouched and ungentrified tenement. Props had filled the dented cans in front with in-period trash—a partly crushed Wheaties box, a broken Coke bottle, a striped pillow leaking feathers.
A little old lady with a wheeled shopping cart gets in their way. The stoop is worn and paint is peeling on the railing. As they run up the steps the front door opens.
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 girlfriends and wisecracking best pals of too-sweet heroines. She was the young detective’s fiancée in the
At eighty she played tough old broads with a regular role on
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. McHugh had already knocked back a Jameson 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 twenties and thirties. “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 had 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 ponytail.
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
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
“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
