Now I was watching this same man pull a gun out of his jacket and level it at Lorna Winters.
Her chilled façade nearly cracked, but she forced a smile and a nod toward the gun. I didn’t need sound to know she was saying, “You’re not really going to use that.”
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 disk 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 disk 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 disk, 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 were 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 disk from her machine. “This is a copy we can keep?”
“Yes.”
She spoke as she slid the disk 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 nine thousand of those murders had never been solved. I got to my feet, trying to sound sympathetic. “I understand. Thank you for your time.”