Odd Partners

by Mystery Writers of America

  His jaw clenched, he pulled the trigger. The gun went off. Lorna staggered back, grasping her chest, her mouth open in shock.

  She came up against the railing, and he fired again. Her feet went out from under her on the slick deck, causing her to flip right back off the end of the boat into the sea. He calmly walked forward, leaned over the railing to search the night waves, then holstered the gun.

  The film ended.

  I was so stunned that I dropped the reel getting it out of the telecine. I got it wound up nice and neat again, checked the digital file, burned it to a DVD, and rushed off to my workstation. I had to see it on a decent-sized monitor. I had to be sure.

  The DVD started playing. I held my breath as the woman walked into the shot, finally turning.

  No question—it was Lorna Winters.

  What was I watching?

  It seemed logical to assume it was a scene from a movie…but if it was, it was a Lorna Winters movie no one had ever seen, because I’d seen her eight films enough times to know every shot, and this was definitely not in any of them. An unfinished film, maybe? It couldn’t be a deleted scene, because her character hadn’t died by being shot on a boat in any of her existing movies. And the man who shot her…he wasn’t an actor in any of the movies. In fact, if he was an actor at all, I’d never seen him in anything.

  And what studio would’ve let Lorna Winters flip off the back of a moving boat like that? They would’ve saved that for a stuntwoman, adroitly substituted for Lorna after a cut.

  The knot in my gut told me what I’d just seen was real. The answer to one of Hollywood’s greatest real mysteries: What ever happened to Lorna Winters?

  I stopped the playback, yanked the disc out of my computer, and went to Bob’s office. He was there, seated behind a desk piled high with papers and movies, the walls around him lined with crowded shelves and boxes.

  He was on the phone, saying something about how “the transfers looked great” and he’d make sure we “sent a tracking number.” He saw me, waved a hand indicating that I should wait, and finished the conversation. When he finally ended the call (“No problem, Mrs. Simmons, always nice to hear from you.”), he shook his balding head. “That is one bored old woman. Jesus, she does this with every order—”

  Bob must’ve seen something in my expression, because he broke off, concerned. “Hey, what’s up?”

  I handed him the DVD. “This.”

  “What is it?”

  “An order I just completed. You need to see it.”

  “Why?”

  “Just watch it.”

  He eyed me uncertainly for a second before sliding the DVD into his own computer. I didn’t even bend over to watch it with him; instead, I watched his expression. When his mouth fell open, I knew he’d gotten it. “Is that…?”

  “Lorna Winters. Keep watching.”

  He did. The film finished. Bob continued to stare at the screen. “Jesus H. Christ. Is that real?”

  “You tell me.”

  He considered for a few seconds, staring at the frozen last frame on his monitor. “It’s gotta be a scene from a movie—”

  “The man is no actor. He’s Mr. Family Guy in the other movies included with this lot.”

  Bob leaned forward to bring something up on his computer. I waited as he read through some text. “I’m looking at her Wikipedia entry, says she disappeared in 1960, just after finishing Midnight Gun. She’d been dating some mobster named Frank Linzetti, but they could never tie him to anything.” He stopped reading and looked up at me. “You think that guy in the movie is Linzetti?”

  I shook my head. “Google Linzetti—he was a good-looking guy. But maybe this dude worked for him.”

  After a long exhale, Bob pulled the DVD out of his computer. “Christ. We’ve got to hand this over to the police. And we’ll need to talk to the customer. Who is it?”

  I’d brought the order with me. “Name’s Victoria Maddrey. She has an Encino address, so she probably has money.” I saw Bob squirming at the thought of all this, so I added, “Let me do it.”

  He looked at me, surprised. “Really? Dealing with the cops?”

  “I don’t mind. I want to do it. I mean, think about it, Bob: We could be the ones to figure out what happened to Lorna Winters.”

  Bob smirked. “I love you, Jimmy, but you know that doesn’t belong to us. We can’t make a bundle selling it, at least not legally.”

  “I don’t want to sell it. I want to work with it. I want to know.”

  Bob tossed the disc to me. “Knock yourself out, amigo.”

  * * *

  —

  The next day I headed west on the 10 freeway. I had an 11 A.M. appointment with the Cold Case Homicide Special Section of LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division, and a 3 P.M. with Victoria Maddrey at her home.

  Despite traffic (how does it keep getting worse?), I made it to downtown L.A. in time, paid a ridiculous amount to park, and was waiting for Detective Dorothy Johnson at 10:55 A.M.

  The detective assigned to talk to me turned out to be a tired-looking middle-aged African American. I told her who I worked for, handed her the disc, gave her the CliffsNotes version of The Lorna Winters Story, and let her take a look.

  If you base your notion of cops on movies and television, you probably think they all dress in tailored suits, work closely with forensics teams in glistening blue-lit labs, and are obsessed with every case they get. But, as I waited for Detective Johnson to finish watching the movie, I realized nothing could be further from that. The truth was that her desk was a cluttered little island in a sea of other cluttered little islands, that her pantsuit was old enough to be seriously out of style, and that she was underwhelmed by what I’d brought her.

  She finished watching and turned to me. “So first off, Mr. Guerrero,” she said, in a tone that told me this wasn’t going to go well, “we’re actually talking a missing persons case, right?”

  “Before yesterday, I would’ve agreed. But then I saw this.”

  “And what makes you think this is real?”

  I squirmed, suddenly—irrationally—feeling as if that movie was a friend who’d just been insulted. “I know Lorna Winters’s work inside and out, and that’s definitely not a scene from any of her movies. And no studio would’ve let a star take a dive off a moving powerboat like that.”

  Johnson looked at me a few more seconds. In her eyes I saw a lifetime of disappointment—with people, with what they were capable of, and with what she’d never unravel. “You say this Lorna Winters disappeared in…what, 1960?”

  I knew where this was headed. I just wanted to be out of there. “Right.”

  She pulled the disc from her machine. “This is a copy we can keep?”

  “Yes.”

  She spoke as she slid the disc back into its little glassine envelope. “You have to understand that there’s not much here. See these?” She tapped a stack of folders on her desk. “These are all the cases I’ve got actual evidence on, mostly DNA. With this case…”

  “But you get a good look at the guy who shot her.”

  “And maybe he really shot her, or maybe that’s just practice for a movie, or somebody’s gag reel. Otherwise…look, if I get a break from the other cases, I’ll see what I can do.”

  Detective Johnson would never get a break, because people had been killing one another in this city from Day One, and around 9,000 of those murders had never been solved. I got to my feet, trying to sound sympathetic. “I understand. Thank you for your time.”

  “We’ll be in touch if we need anything.”

  I knew I’d never hear from her.

  * * *

  —

  Fortunately, my second appointment of the day was far more productive.

  Victoria Maddrey was a slim, attractive woman in her late fifties. Her house was
in the foothills at the southwest end of the San Fernando Valley; even though the house was older, it was immaculate, and I could only imagine what the property taxes must’ve been. It was surrounded by a lush garden of hibiscus and bougainvillea, with a tall old magnolia tree dominating the front yard. Victoria was simply but tastefully dressed, with the air of a proud woman who’d put a lot of work into her life.

  She took the box of films and discs that I handed her, set it aside, and invited me into a comfortable living room. I wasn’t used to this kind of money, even as I realized this wasn’t the high end of the wealth scale in L.A. She brought me a cup of coffee, and then we got down to business.

  “Ms. Maddrey, I’d like to show you something that was on one of the films you sent us.”

  “Please, call me Vick.”

  I pulled out my iPad, which I’d already loaded with the film. I brought it up, hit Play, and passed it to her.

  I have to say, she impressed me. Her face remained implacable as she watched, not a flicker of emotion. When it was done, she handed the iPad back to me without speaking.

  “The woman,” I said, “is an actress named Lorna Winters, who disappeared in 1960. Can you tell me anything about the man?”

  She took a sip from her own cup, and then said, “The man is my father. Vincent Gazzo.”

  I had to set my coffee down before I choked. “Your father?”

  For the first time her elegant surface cracked, but it was a hairline crack—all she did was look down. “My father liked to call himself a ‘security consultant,’ but he really worked for the Mafia. Do you know the name Frank Linzetti?”

  “Yes. He was dating Lorna Winters—the woman in that film.”

  Another hairline crack, but this time of curiosity. “Was he? How interesting. My father worked for him.”

  “And your father is…?”

  “Dead. He died in 1990, of a heart attack. Ironic, isn’t it, that he spent a lifetime hurting others and making enemies, but ended up dying because he’d eaten too many cannoli.” She gestured around the perfect room. “He left me this house. I know I should’ve sold it at some point, but my husband and I are really quite fond of it.”

  “It’s a beautiful house.” Secretly, I wondered how much the Mafia’s equivalent of a grunt made. Even sixty years ago, this would’ve been an expensive house.

  An uncomfortable silence passed. I knew she wanted me to go, that she just wanted this painful reminder of the father she was ashamed of to be gone. “There’s something you should know: We had to report this to the police. I don’t think they have any intention of following up on it, but…”

  “Of course. I understand. I’m still amazed that Father never did time for anything worse than tax evasion.”

  I finished the coffee—possibly the best I’d ever had—and stood. “I won’t trouble you anymore. I know this must be difficult.”

  She stood, offering me a hand and a small smile. “You’d think I’d be used to it by now. Thank you, Jimmy. You’ve been very kind.”

  I wondered, then, what her life had been like. I realized she must have been one of the little girls I’d seen romping on the beach in one of the other movies, or the one laughing as she bit into the hot dog her daddy had just grilled for her. I imagined her growing up, as she realized who her father had really been, how she’d built a wall to protect herself from either loving him or hating him too much. And I thought about the film I’d just shown her; if it had been human, it would’ve just told her that Pop was a killer while we both watched her, waiting to see how she’d take it.

  She and the house both looked good, but I was glad to get back onto the crowded freeway and head home.

  * * *

  —

  Back in San Bernardino, I filled Bob in on both meetings. He listened, then gave me the best news I’d had all day. “Dug this stuff out of some old boxes for you.”

  He tossed a stack of yellowing, brittle old magazines at me. I picked up the top one: It was a 1959 movie star tabloid called Confidential, one of the real sleazebag rag sheets from the time. The cover had photos of celebrities looking drunk or bewildered, plastered against bright red and yellow backgrounds, while the nearby text shrieked something like “Why Sinatra is the Tarzan of the Boudoir” or “James Dean Knew He Had a Date With Death!”

  In one corner was a photo of Lorna Winters, holding the hand of a young man in a suit, both looking like they wished they were anywhere else but near that camera lens. “Lorna Winters Steps Out with Director!” bellowed the text.

  “I bookmarked the article,” said Bob.

  I flipped to the piece of paper he’d stuck in. It was a one-page piece on Lorna Winters and David Stander, director of Midnight Gun. There were two photos: the same photo of Lorna and David Stander, holding hands, turning their heads away from the photographer, and a smaller inset of Lorna and a different man—dark, handsome, with a toothy grin, who looked like a shark about to chomp. They were seated in an extravagant restaurant booth; the caption read “Lorna and Frank Linzetti, together in happier times.”

  The accompanying text speculated that Lorna had fallen for her director on Midnight Gun and had two-timed Linzetti, who she’d been involved with for a year.

  My gut performed an acrobatic flip. “Oh my God…”

  “Yeah,” Bob said, “so she dumps her mobster beau for this director, Linzetti flips out, and sends his hired gun to take her out.”

  I thought for a second. “And the hired gun has to film it to prove to the boss that the job’s been done.”

  Bob nodded.

  I went home after that. Bob suggested we hit our favorite margarita joint, but I told him I was tired from the day of driving.

  That was a small lie. All I really wanted to do was go home and watch the film (my film) again. And again.

  I put it up on my television. The image quality wasn’t great blown up that big—grainy, high-contrast, the result of a cheap transfer—but it made details clearer. Now I could see a life jacket hanging on the railing at the left of the frame. A white blob at the right I knew had to be the moon, probably covered by a light fog. There was Lorna…

  I hit the DVD Pause when she came on so I could get up, come back with a bottle of tequila, then hit Play again. “What are you trying to tell me?” I muttered. “You’re hiding something from me. C’mon, partners don’t keep secrets from each other…”

  Lorna…beautiful, young Lorna. What could she have been if she hadn’t had the bad luck to hook up with a bad-tempered gangster? She’d just made her first big studio picture, and she was good in it—damn good. She could’ve been the next Kim Novak or Lauren Bacall. Hell, she was young enough that she could’ve been the next Jane Fonda or Faye Dunaway. She died at twenty just as the wildest decade in movie history was in pre-production.

  I watched the film two, three, four times, getting progressively drunker. I watched over and over as she was shot—that look on her face, that instant of shock, that spasmodic clutch at the lethal wound, that tumble over the decking. With enough tequila in me, I kept talking to the film, urging it to spill its secrets, to stop teasing me with the promise of revelations. “You gotta tell. C’mon, baby, spill…”

  I think I was on the fifth viewing when something pinged off the back of my sodden brain. Something wrong.

  I wound the scene back a few seconds, to the moment when Vincent Gazzo pulled out the gun. I got off the couch, not even caring that I spilled the half-inch left in the tequila bottle, and walked up to stand closer to the television.

  “Yeah, that’s it…give it up…” I muttered as I hit Play again.

  There was the shot. There was Lorna grabbing at her chest—

  There was no blood.

  I paused the image, trying to peer through the heavy digitized grain. Lorna’s hand looked pale, spotless. She was wearing a black dress, so with
the poor quality I shouldn’t expect to see anything there, but…wouldn’t her fingers have been at least a little splattered? Wouldn’t blood have seeped through them?

  There was something else, though, and it wasn’t until I watched the movie again, from the start, at half speed, that I got it: In the beginning, the boat left a clear wake, a V of white water.

  When Lorna was shot, the water behind the boat was still.

  The boat wasn’t moving.

  I fell back on my ass, then, too drunk and too stunned to get to my feet. “You fake,” I snarled at the frozen picture on my screen, stopped at the point where Lorna was halfway over the rail, her delicate high-heeled feet no longer on the deck. “Goddamn it! You were fake all along! And I went along with you!”

  I stopped the player, slid the tray open, grabbed the disc, and hurled it across the room. It collided with a wall, bounced off, and hit the floor. I collapsed on the rug, wanting to howl over the betrayal. “Son of a bitch! How could you do this? I thought we were in this together.”

  I felt like the noir hero who gets set up and knocked down by a dirty partner. I almost called Bob to tell him, but instead I passed out.

  * * *

  —

  I woke up in bed the next morning with no memory of having dragged myself there. My head throbbed with the agony of a thousand exploded blood vessels, although three glasses of water and two cups of coffee helped. A little.

  I did call in, then, to tell Bob I was running late. “It’s a fake,” I told him, “a goddamn fake. She’s not really shot, and she flips into calm water. The boat’s not even moving.”

  “Well,” Bob said, “it’s still a newly discovered piece of Lorna Winters film. I say we talk to the owner again, see if she’ll consider selling it.”

  I got into the shower after that. As warm water sluiced over me, easing the pain in my head, I thought. I still wanted to know what the film represented—a promo reel for a new movie? A gag? Vincent Gazzo had died a while back, so we couldn’t ask him, and his daughter knew nada. Frank Linzetti had also died, in 2009, in a federal prison where he’d been serving time for money laundering. Wherever Lorna Winters was—dead or alive—remained unanswered. That left one person who’d been involved with the whole thing back in 1960: the director David Stander.