The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

by C. J. Box

I’m here to tell you, them Creeches are the baddest outlaws alive.

  LISA MORTON

  What Ever Happened to Lorna Winters?

  FROM Odd Partners

  For some it’s the handshake at the end of the meeting. The smile at the restaurant table that tells you the answer is yes before you even ask. The email that makes you laugh. The sure knowledge—​the kind that’s so sure you feel it in every fiber—​that the person next to you will do something great, but only when they work with you.

  For me it was that moment when I realized the blonde getting murdered in the old 16mm film was Lorna Winters. I knew then that those three minutes of black-and-white footage were going to become an important scene in the story of my life.

  * * *

  The battered old steel reel holding the nearly sixty-year-old footage arrived at my workstation the way most movies arrived there: in a box with other films and the accompanying paperwork.

  I’d worked for BobsConversionMagic.com for two years and an odd number of days. When I’d taken the job, I’d been stupid enough to think it was a temporary fix for my unemployment problem. Since graduating with a film degree, I’d somehow failed to set Hollywood on fire. I’d tried all the usual approaches to getting a foot in the film industry door: I’d made two short films that I’d entered into festivals (the second one, Raw Material, had won a runner-up prize somewhere in Michigan), I’d written three feature screenplays that I kept in the trunk of my car at all times, I’d joined a writers’ group that gathered once a week for breakfast at a Westside eatery, but everyone I’d met had been other writers as desperate as I was. I wrote a blog on the history of film noir that had a few dozen followers but had yet to lead to anything else.

  And I was flat broke. I was a terrible waiter, an even worse burger-flipper, and my car was so badly in need of a paint job that signing up for some driving app just seemed useless.

  So the day my old college buddy Elliott called and said he could get me a film job, I jumped at the chance.

  It turned out the “film job” was actually working for a place that converted old home movies into DVDs. And the company was in San Bernardino. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of leaving Hollywood behind for the Inland Empire, but I was even less thrilled at the thought of living on ramen and friends’ futons forever. The pay was decent, I figured apartments in that area would be cheaper than L.A., and maybe six months of transferring Uncle Harold’s old Christmas movies to digital would be enough to finance one more short film that I thought had a great script.

  And two years later I was still pulling battered reels out of boxes and threading them through Bob’s old telecine.

  Bob Zale, who owned the company, had turned out to be a damned decent boss to work for. He was a guy in his forties who, like me, had walked away from a Hollywood crash-and-burn, and, also like me, he loved old movies. My college bud Elliott may have left the company not long after setting me up there (he moved back home to South Dakota, where his parents’ basement beckoned to him with its siren song), but Bob and I bonded over many late-night beers and Robert Mitchum, Gloria Grahame, and Humphrey Bogart. We knew every bit player, the location of every rain-soaked street, the title of every forgotten gem.

  Here’s how my days usually went: I’d arrive at work around 9 a.m. (Bob didn’t freak out if I was late, so long as I got through the day’s work). There’d be a few boxes of movies waiting for me; they’d already been received and checked in by Joanne, who ran both receiving and reception at Bob’s (we didn’t get much walk-in; most of the business came via the website). I’d pull out a reel, load it onto spindles on a flatbed, add a take-up reel, and crank through it by hand just to inspect the film. I could do basic fixes—​repair splices, simple cleaning. Then, once I’d made notes about problem areas and solved what I could, the reel was loaded onto the telecine machine. Bob had two of them, both old Marconis that were probably far from the high-tech devices most customers imagine, especially if they’d watched Blu-ray supplements about digital remastering. We weren’t sitting in front of a bank of computer screens carefully watching a transfer to color-correct and paint out imperfections; instead I perched on a wobbly wooden stool peering into a screen the size of a paperback novel, just making sure the digitization was really happening.

  That day’s first two transfers were typical stuff: faded footage of a backyard barbecue, and a family of wife and two girls horsing around on a deserted beach (Dad was presumably the cinematographer). In my two years working for Bob, I’d seen this stuff hundreds of times.

  The next movie I threaded onto the machine from the same box was black-and-white. It seemed to be shot at night, on the back of a yacht. It opened on an empty deck surrounded by a low metal railing. In the background, light glimmered on moving water.

  After a few seconds a woman entered the frame. Her back was to the camera, but she carried herself with such natural poise that I guessed she was beautiful before she turned. She walked to the edge, leaned on the railing, bent down to look into the water. Her long blond hair blew in the breeze caused by the boat’s cruising. She wore an elegant sleeveless black dress; it must have been a warm night, because her exposed shoulders didn’t huddle against any cold.

  She turned to face the camera at last. It was a full shot, but even on the small telecine screen I could see I’d guessed right: she was beautiful.

  I squinted and leaned in, trying to get a better look. Just then a man walked into the shot. The woman reacted with surprise—​not the good kind—​at seeing him. In fact, she backed toward the railing, her eyes narrowing.

  It was that expression—​the calculating coolness hiding the alarm—​that confirmed who she was. It was one of her trademarks, a look that had made her one of film noir’s greatest icons.

  She was Lorna Winters.

  I nearly stopped the transfer in disbelief. Lorna Winters! I watched a few more seconds to be sure, but there was no doubt. Her tall, lean figure, the long blond hair with a few streaks of light brown, and that face . . . Lorna Winters, who had slapped Richard Conte in Rat Trap. Lorna Winters, who had raised male temperatures across the country when she’d flirted with Sterling Hayden in Bullet’s Kiss.

  Lorna Winters, who’d made seven low-budget film noir gems, one last expensive studio production (Midnight Gun), and vanished without a trace in 1960.

  I watched, breathless, as she argued with the man who’d entered the scene. He was a big man, wearing a suit with no tie. Lorna tried to walk around him, but he turned to block her, facing the camera. He had a classic thug’s face, heavy features, slicked-back dark hair, white scar over one eye.

  I’d seen him before. There’d been one shot of Dad in the backyard barbecue movie. He’d grinned, lifted his long fork, waved it in a jaunty way when a little girl ran up to him.

  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.”

  “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 disks 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 s
peaking.

  “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.”