nuts and wondering why he hadn’t moved to Malibu in 1949 and gone into real estate.
The next morning Stallings and Georgia Blue went down to the lobby for the inn’s complimentary buffet breakfast. Stallings’s breakfast was two cups of coffee. Georgia Blue had just finished two glasses of milk, whole- wheat toast and a mound of fruit when a tanned stocky man entered the lobby, looked around, saw Stallings and Blue, gave them a dazzling smile and walked toward them with quick small steps that scarcely seemed to touch the Mexican tiles. Those quick light steps nudged Stallings’s memory and he finally remembered who Phil Quill had once been.
The real estate man was wearing double-pleated gabardine slacks that were several shades paler than daisy yellow; sock-less thin-soled loafers, which Georgia Blue, if not Stallings, knew to be Ferragamos; a dark blue polo shirt, probably from the Gap, and five or six hundred dollars’ worth of light blue cashmere sweater that hung down his broad back, its sleeves crossed over his breastbone in the loosest of knots. Quill had just shoved a pair of sunglasses up into thick, still-blond hair, revealing a pair of blue eyes that nearly matched his sweater and the ocean.
When he reached their table, he used a soft southern voice to say,
“I’m Phil Quill, the real estate man. Betty at the bank said you all’d like to rent a beach place for a month or so.” He smiled again.
“Providing, of course, that you, ma’am, are Miss Blue and you, sir, are Mr. Stallings.”
Stallings rose, said, “We are indeed,” then shook the offered hand and invited him to join them for coffee or even breakfast.
“A cup of coffee would be nice and I’ll fetch it myself.”
As Quill quickstepped away, Georgia Blue watched him go and said,
“I wonder why he walks like that?”
“At one time he could do it backwards or sideways almost as fast.”
“When?”
“When he was quarterback for Arkansas in the early sixties. He even made UPI All-American his senior year.”
“You saw him play?”
“On TV.”
Quill returned, sat down, sipped his coffee, then asked a question.
The first half of it was directed to Georgia Blue, the second half to Stallings. “I wonder if you folks could give me some idea? Of just what kind of place you’re looking for?”
“We’d like something right on the beach with at least five bedrooms,” Stallings said.
“For how long?”
“One month—with an option to extend for another month.”
“You all want it close in, far out or sorta in between? Reason I ask is because Malibu’s about twenty-five miles long and a mile thick.”
“What about around in here?” Blue said.
“Well, around in here, Miss Blue, is practically Carbon Beach and that gets expensive now that it’s February and the snowbirds are flying down from Canada and the Europeans are swarming in to take advantage of the two-dollar pound, the sixty-nine-cent mark and the damn near twenty-cent franc.”
“What do you call expensive?” Stallings asked.
“Ten, fifteen, twenty thousand a month.”
“You have anything with five bedrooms in that price range?”
Quill gave his magnificent chin a quick brush with his left thumb, as if it helped him think. Stallings touched his own chin, almost by reflex, and said, “You used to do that just before you passed, didn’t you?”
It had been a long time since Stallings had seen a grown man blush, but Quill turned quite pink. He then tried a grin that was almost a grimace. “I keep hoping folks’ll say, ‘Hey, didn’t I see you in Bloody Valentine and also in that MOW turkey, Pickled Noon?” But none of
‘em ever remember the fourteen features and fifty-one series episodes I’ve been in. All they remember is football.”
“Sorry I mentioned it,” Stallings said.
“Well, it’s just that I’d rather be known for what I’ve done these last twenty-five years instead of for what I did between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. I could’ve turned pro but didn’t. Instead, I came out here right after college and thought of myself as an actor ever since—even though there was one month in nineteen eighty-eight when I made more in real estate commissions than I ever made acting
—and that includes all my TV residuals.”
“I’ll always think of you as an actor, Mr. Quill,” Blue said.
“Appreciate that, Miss Blue, but right now I gotta change back to Phil Quill, real estate man.”
He looked at Stallings again, then back at Georgia Blue, frowned a little, gave the great chin another quick thumb brush and said, “You all seem like sensible, sophisticated folks, and I’m not using
‘sophisticated’ in any pejorative sense. So that’s why I’m gonna ask you this question.” After an actor’s short beat, Quill said, “Would you consider renting a mighty fine six-bedroom house smack-dab on Carbon Beach for fifteen thousand a month even if its former owner got shot dead in it last New Year’s Eve or
