“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.”
For a moment Rollins looked hurt. Then he said, “Sorry to break your heart, Quinlan. It’s nice that you figured if anyone in New York knew how to Slide it would be me. You’ve been in and out of the city over the years without ever trying to get in contact, so I wondered what you wanted. Somehow I didn’t think of this. Either you got stupid out in California or you got very desperate.”
In the early morning light, stepping carefully along a tenement fire escape just off Tenth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, Detective Roark edges forward, revolver in hand. Up ahead is Figs Figueroa’s window. In another moment his partner will knock on the door of the apartment and Figueroa will be on the move. Roark curses the stupidity that led him into this. Backup is on its way and they could have waited. But the lieutenant is not happy with the way they’d bobbled Jimmy Nails’s arrest the other morning or the way they’d then made him too dead to talk. McDevitt thinks the two of them need some redemption.
As Roark inches forward, the window right behind him opens. He drops to a crouch, revolver at the ready, turns, and sees the terrified face of an old woman about to hang a basket of wet laundry on her wash line. When Roark turns back, Figueroa stands on the fire escape with an automatic leveled on him.
“Cut.”
On the roof just above Quinlan were an assistant director, the script girl, the cameraman, and the director himself. “We need this one more time,” said Graham. “Just do what you’ve done before.” He looked closely at Quinlan and said, “Get this man some coffee.”
It was late in the morning and Quinlan had already gone up this fire escape six times. He guessed this particular building got cast for the part because of this fire escape, which was as black and labyrinthine as the stairways of a Piranesi prison. People fussed with his clothes and his makeup. He’d lain awake all night next to Adie, who slept soundly. Somebody brought him coffee.
This scene was his best moment in
If someone asked him what
Again he climbs the stairs and inches forward. Again the window opens and, revolver at the ready, he stares into the terrified face and looks up too late to see his killer.
This morning, it seemed as if Rollins was right about the Slide being a delusion. Quinlan felt no distant hum of past times. His stomach was tight, his shoulders tense.
In his dressing room he looked at his messages. Adie had called from her office to say she had a meeting with a client and would have to miss the wrap party. This morning she had asked him—gently, indirectly, not like he was being evicted yet—if everything was OK for him back in LA. She hadn’t mentioned the Brazilian, but he was an invisible presence.
As Quinlan sat absorbing this, Arroyo, the lawyer, called. “My associate in San Bernardino says the grand jury will hand down indictments in an intimidation/extortion scheme this afternoon at around six P.M. New York time. You’re accused of impersonating a law officer. One alleged victim says you showed him a badge, threatened to run him in on false charges if he didn’t come up with his payment.”
“That’s a lie.” Sean said that automatically, but the only memory the accusation evoked was an appearance he’d made as a rogue cop on
“Sean, they’re not interested in you. They want the ones who hired you.”
“Speaking those names means I’ll be dead or in witness protection,” he said. “I’ll get back to you.”
Quinlan remembered when he turned thirteen and decided that instead of becoming a cop, which was all he’d wanted up until then, he was going to be an actor. His grandfather had said, “Tough luck, kid; you drew your father’s face and your mother’s brains.”
He jumped when a woman from props knocked on the door and came in to put him into a bloody shirt.
Pat Roark lies sprawled face up in the alley with the gun still clasped in his lifeless hand, his hat beside his head, his dead eyes staring at the sky.
The scene is shot from above. The camera looks down as a dozen extras—kids carrying schoolbooks, women in curlers and housedresses, guys in work clothes, idlers, and honest citizens—suddenly converge from all directions to see the dead man who has fallen from the sky.
The computer imaging of Roark falling backward off the fire escape and slamming into the asphalt had been completed before he left Los Angeles.
“What was he doing up there?” a woman with a Spanish accent wanted to know.
“He’s a cop,” said a wise-ass kid. “See that police special.”
As the sirens wail and echo off the alley walls, Pete McDevitt runs down the fire escape, yelling, “Pat! Jesus, no!” His voice breaks into a sob.
Quinlan couldn’t tell if he used the dippy smile. The shot of Pat Roark dead in the alley would be used repeatedly in the film as a motive for Zach Terry’s Peter McDevitt in his quest for the killer and the ones behind the killer, who, it turned out, reached all the way to the commissioner’s office.
The old stage actor Denny Wallace, whose father was a Polish Jew and whose mother was a French ballet dancer, played Lieutenant O’Grady.
Standing over the corpse, he delivers Roark’s epitaph. “He was worth twenty of you. I’ll have your badge and your gun for this, boyo.”
Quinlan heard applause on the set, which meant this was probably the last take. There was comfort in lying dead in an alleyway, killed in the line of duty in a time when that meant something. This was the part of his life that actually made sense.
The applause faded and died. Smell was the first thing he noticed, tobacco smoke and garbage and exhaust. Sirens sounded on the avenue. Quinlan focused his eyes on a kid with bat-wing ears, a crew cut, and jeans so stiff they could stand up by themselves. A bunch of scruffy street rats stared down at him.
“It’s a cop!”
“How’d he get here?” The city accents were thick enough to cut.
He closed his hand on his prop gun, and they all stepped back. “You been shot, mister. You need a doctor?” Quinlan remembered the prop blood on his shirt front. No one, he noticed, talked about calling the cops.
“He’s a fuckin’ actor. Look at the makeup,” said an old lady with way too much lipstick, peering into the alley.
All Sean wondered as he got up was how long it would take Graham and the rest to notice he was gone. He dusted himself off, buttoned his jacket to hide the dye on his shirt front, and wiped his face clean with a pocket handkerchief.
It was a five-story city, and the sun shone directly from across the Hudson. Everyone got out of his way as he walked down the alley. He stuffed the gun in his pocket.
“Anyone follows me…” He gestured to it. He doubted that anyone in Hell’s Kitchen was going to call the police. But he moved quickly, got on Tenth Avenue, and started walking.
Cars and clothes gave only a hint of the year. A corner newsstand had a big display of papers dated May 19, 1957.
His father would be about half his age and still in the army in Germany. His mother would not have moved here from Buffalo. His grandfather and grandmother lived up on Fordham Road in the Bronx. The avenue was lined with pawnshops. The gun was a prop, but he figured it would be worth a buck or two.
