If Angels Fight

by Richard Bowes

  “Yes please.” She made her way to the bathroom saying, “When we were kids, I remember guys backing off from confronting you because they just knew you were the law.”

  Adrianne La Farice had been Adie Jacobson when they were in their early twenties and she waited tables while he took care of the door at Club Red Light over in the Meat Packing District back in the now legendary early-nineties.

  She returned saying, “I don’t need to be up this early. I don’t need to be up at all. With business the way it is, I could spend the day in bed and I think I will.” She uttered some variation on that every morning and never followed through.

  His divorce had left him broke. Adie’s divorce from Henry La Farice, the designer, was much more successful, leaving her with this renovated condo and a partnership in a prosperous real estate business. Sadly, like everything else in New York, that was now in the tank.

  Over the last several years they’d made it their pleasant habit to get together like this each time he’d been in New York on a job. And it was in Quinlan’s mind to see if they could turn this into something more permanent.

  When he brought Adie the coffee and half a bialy, she was sitting up in bed reading email on her laptop. “No apartment in Manhattan’s going to be sold today. Everybody who owns one remembers when it was worth two million dollars. Anyone who wants one will offer a quarter of that and then either can’t get financing or can’t explain where they got the cash.”

  Quinlan took a jacket and slacks out of the corner of the closet that he’d been assigned, got socks and underwear from the rolling suitcase in which he’d brought them.

  In the bathroom he stared through the steam at the serviceable face he was shaving, the short hair with almost no gray. “The family face, anonymous and perfect for stakeout work,” his grandfather “Black Jack” Quinlan had said. Jack Quinlan had made detective lieutenant on the job. He’d died almost thirty years back when Sean was barely thirteen. He thought about the old man almost every day.

  Sean looked in the mirror and smiled just a bit. Lately he’d had occasion to notice that the Quinlan face was also perfect for a man on the run. He put on a jacket and shirt but no tie because suddenly there wasn’t time. On the way to the bedroom he picked up the brown snap brim that he’d been wearing for practice and put it on his head with just enough tilt.

  When he kissed her Adie said, “Brazil! I’ve got a Brazilian with money interested in a penthouse and with that trade agreement he doesn’t even have to explain where he got the cash.”

  Then she looked up and said, “You are beyond retro, Mister. You disappear and I’ll start believing in Sliders.”

  “People talk about Sliders. Have you ever known one?”

  “It’s escapism not reality. I think they took the name from some old TV show nobody watched. I know a woman who described her teenage son as a perfect 1969 hippie. He had the clothes and the hair; his room was papered with old posters and he hardly ever left it. One morning he disappeared and she thinks he slid back there, claims she found notes from him written on old yellow paper and telling her he was okay. Of course she’s also delusional enough to think the Dow will hit 16,000 some fine day.”

  Turning to go he said, “Remember the Peggy Hughes party tonight.”

  Adie nodded and pointed to a set of handcuffs attached to one of the brass rods on the headboard. “Can you hide those before you go? The cleaning lady’s coming today.”

  Outside on Rivington Street, it was still early enough that Quinlan got a cab with no problem. This Lower East Side drug pit of his youth had gotten gentrified and hip beyond measure. But times like this, on mornings with bright, merciless sun shining on empty shop windows, it had started to look a bit shabby again.

  As the cab rolled across Houston Street into the East Village, he noticed people setting up folding tables on the widened sidewalks, opening for business in the big informal flea market that had grown up there.

  Portable dressing rooms lined Avenue B. On Tenth Street police barricades blocked traffic onto that side street. Miss Rheingold posters and ads for Pall Malls covered over the Mexican restaurant and reflexology parlor signs. Extras were ready to stand on the corner in greaser haircuts or lean out of first floor windows in housecoats and hairnets. Down the block, lights brighter than the sun illuminated a tenement.

  Getting out of the cab Quinlan was spotted by a couple of the film crew. “Morning officer,” one said and they all laughed.

  For their amusement and his own he did an imitation of the old cop he’d heard on TV. “This is my once and future city. My life consists of long periods of waiting and brief, flashes of action and violence. My name’s Sean Quinlan. And when I can get the work, I’m an actor.”

  Big parts of Quinlan’s life were in a condition he didn’t want to think about. But he had a good part in a medium-sized film. Nothing else would matter for the next few hours.

  At 9:22 one day in the spring of 1960, New York Police Detective Pete McDevitt climbs out of an unmarked Buick, flicks his half smoked cigarette away, and steps into East Tenth Street. His suit is gray and his shirt is blue to match his eyes. His tie is blood red and his hat is tilted back a tad to give full value to his face. Detective Pat Roark exits from the driver’s side wearing brown with a white shirt and blue tie as befits a steady back up man and faithful partner.

  McDevitt was played by Zach Terry, star of Like ’60, a Hollywood production currently shooting exteriors on the streets of NYC. Detective Roark was Sean Quinlan’s role. As a featured player it was his duty to exit on the far side of the car and step smoothly into his proper place one pace behind and two feet to the left of the star.

  Pete McDevitt keeps his eyes fastened on an upper floor of the tenement opposite. But Pat Roark gives a quick scan over his shoulder, to see if anyone is watching them.

  Quinlan planted that gesture in rehearsal and put it in each of the takes, wanting it there to emphasize that his character was the competent by-the-book cop. No one has commented one way or the other.

  What he kept in his mind was a street full of guys and women setting out dressed for work, kids going to school on a spring day over fifty years before. He blocked out what he actually saw, the trucks, the crew, the commissary table, the lights and the crowd of gawkers.

  Sean Quinlan felt a bit dizzy, like he was about to fall or maybe fly and wondered if this was how the start of a Slide felt. He had created a background for his character. Roark and McDevitt were supposed to pick up Jimmy Nails, a two bit thug suspected of having ambitions above his station, for questioning. Roark was a ten year veteran of the force, a guy with a wife and two kids who was talking about moving to the suburbs. He would not be bouncing on his toes on an ordinary morning on a routine assignment.

  A sound crew moved with them just out of camera range as the two cops continued a conversation that the audience would just have heard them have in the car. That scene got filmed in California a couple of weeks back.

  “Definitely it’s spring, Pat my boy,” says McDevitt and comes to a halt. Roark’s expression is mildly amused, a bit bored until he follows the other’s gaze.

  Without looking, Quinlan knew Terry was wearing the trademark same half bemused, half aroused little grin he had used at least once in every episode of Angel House.

  Then Roark sees what McDevitt sees and his jaw drops just a bit. They hold the pose.

  “Cut!” said Mitchell Graham, the director. “I think we may have it.” Crew members moved; traffic began to flow. Zach Terry looked Sean Quinlan up and down for a moment before the two of them stepped apart.

  The actors had worked together once a couple of years before when Quinlan appeared in an episode of Angel House. That’s the HBO series featuring a law office whose partners are angels but not necessarily good ones—an amusing show Quinlan thought, once you accepted the premise. Terry was one of the stars.

  Quinlan had played a quirky hit man who didn’t happen to be guilty of the killing with which
he’d been charged. Their two scenes together had gone well and Quinlan hoped the look just then didn’t mean some kind of tension.

  On the way back to his dressing room he passed a girl, maybe twenty, in peddle pushers, teased hair and pumps. She smiled and he turned to watch her walk away.

  A production assistant saw him look and said, “That kid has all the moves. This location is a magnet for Sliders. They think if they dress in period and hang around sites like this they’ll wake up in 1960. One told me that the trick was NOT to think about Sliding back while you did all that.”

  The kid had a nice ass but not nice enough to make his head spin like it did. In his dressing room Quinlan did relaxation exercises, sipped ice tea, sat silently for a few minutes, and finally listened to his calls. Arroyo, the lawyer was first.

  “Sean. I assume everything you wanted to keep is already out of the condo. As of today it’s repossessed. Second, my colleague who’s handling your case up in San Bernardino says there’s no word from the DA’s office. We don’t know if an indictment is coming down. But as we discussed, an indictment is just their way of getting you to testify. I’m wondering if you got my bill.”

  Quinlan had gotten the bill. The condo was one more casualty of his divorce and bankruptcy. When he could 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 cable. 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 Like ’60 pay.

  Adie was at the office and in full business mode when she left a message. “For the Peggy Hughes 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 was due on the set, 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 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 sh
e 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.