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. “Goddamnit! You were fake all along! And I went along with you!”
I stopped the player, slid the tray open, grabbed the disk, 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.
I turned off the water, wrapped a towel around myself, and practically ran to get my phone. A few seconds later I had the facts about Stander: He’d made a few more movies for Columbia but had never really hit it big. He found more success in television and had directed every show from Bonanza to MacGyver before retiring in 2008. He’d married his secretary, Nora Chilton, in 1962, and they lived now in the Cheviot Hills area of Los Angeles.
Bob had a friend who worked in the office at the Directors Guild; one little white lie to his friend about wanting to film an interview with David Stander got us his phone number. I called it that afternoon.
When a man answered on the first ring, I asked, “Is this David Stander?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Mr. Stander,” I began, hoping I sounded convincing, “my name is Jimmy Guerrero. I’m working on a documentary about Lorna Winters, and I was wondering if it might be possible to meet for a brief interview?”
“I’m sorry, no.”
No explanation, no excuse... but he also didn’t hang up, so I pressed on. “Oh, that’s too bad, because we’ve got some newly discovered footage of Miss Winters that we were hoping you could shed some light on.”
“What kind of footage?”
“Something filmed privately. It shows Ms. Winters on a boat, and... well, it looks like she gets shot.”
There was a pause. Then Stander said, “Where did you find this footage?”
“It belonged to a man named Vincent Gazzo.”
Another long beat. When Stander finally spoke again, he said, “I can meet you at five p.m. today.”
He gave me his address. I told him I’d be there and hung up.
I got dressed, went into work, and asked Bob for the rest of the day off. When I told him why, he closed the door to his office, sat down behind his desk again, and said, “Jimmy, what if Stander watches the film and then tells you he doesn’t know anything about it?”
I started to say, “So what if he does?” but I realized it would be a lie. Bob was right; David Stander was the dead end. If he couldn’t — or wouldn’t — supply an answer, it would hurt. Bad. “I don’t know,” I answered.
“I think...” Bob trailed off, trying to find the words. “I think you might be counting on this too much.”
It was true. The film was like a living thing for me, a partner who whispered promises, who offered the reward of giving me that shot in film history I hadn’t earned otherwise. I could be the one who brought one of Hollywood’s greatest secrets into the light. If my own talents — or lack thereof — as a filmmaker couldn’t give me fame, maybe this could.
“Maybe,” I said to Bob, a guy who was me with twenty years added. “But don’t tell me you don’t want to know too.”
He shrugged. “’Course I do.”
I left early, given traffic on the 10, and made Cheviot Hills by 4 p.m. I killed time just driving — past the massive 20th Century Fox lot, past what had once been the MGM lot, past the Westwood cemetery. I figured the last was the only one I might ever have a shot at getting into.
Finally 5 p.m. approached, and I headed to the address David Stander had provided. I negotiated my way past manicured lawns and houses that had once been middle-class but were now homes to millionaires. I pulled up and parked before a lovely two-story Tudor-style, with a rose garden leading up to the front door. It was 4:55 p.m. I took my iPad and a copy of the disk — in case he wanted to see the film on his own TV — and walked up to the door.
“Don’t let me down,” I whispered to the disk.
My knock was met a few seconds later by a man in his eighties who was still straight and trim, wearing casual slacks and a polo shirt. Even with thin gray hair and lines in his face, I recognized him from the tabloid photos, when he’d been holding Lorna Winters’s hand.
“Mr. Stander,” I said, extending a hand. “I’m Jimmy Guerrero.”
He took the hand but released it too quickly — he wasn’t comfortable with any of this. “Yes, Mr. Guerrero. Come in.”
David Stander had kept himself in good shape; he still moved well, with only a slight slowness to his gait as he led us to an entertainment room. But he was tense — too tense for this to be a casual interview. He turned to me before a large television screen and said, “May I see the footage you mentioned?”
I handed him the DVD. He put it into a player, turned it on, and stayed standing to watch.
As the scene played out, his expression changed, or should I say opened — he moved from anxious and guarded to noticeably shaken. As Lorna Winters fell into the sea, he collapsed into a padded armchair.