I asked, “Are you all right, Mr. Stander?”
“Yes, I...” He broke off and looked up at me. “What is it you really want, Mr. Guerrero?”
“Please, call me Jimmy.” I told him everything then: about BobsConversionMagic.com, about my sad attempt at a Hollywood career, about how much I loved Lorna Winters, about what those few minutes of film meant to me.
When I finished, he nodded and rose. “Jimmy, my instincts tell me I can trust you. Besides, this has gone on long enough.”
“What has, Mr. Stander?”
He turned to leave. “Excuse me a moment.”
Stander was gone only a few seconds. I heard soft conversation from another part of the house; after a minute he returned with a woman. “Jimmy, I’d like you to meet my wife, Nora.”
I started to extend a hand — and froze, too shocked to move.
I was looking at Lorna Winters. Older, yes; aged, yes. But she was still beautiful, with those unmistakable high, broad cheekbones and chilled blue eyes. Her hair was silver, but she still wore it long. She reached out and grasped my hand, and when she spoke it was with Lorna Winters’s husky-around-the-edges voice. “Jimmy, I’m so pleased to meet you. David tells me you’ve brought us something quite special.”
I was speechless as David started the DVD again. She watched it silently until the onscreen Lorna flipped over the railing, and then she laughed. “I still remember how cold that water was.”
David said, “Probably my finest accomplishment as a filmmaker.”
“You made this...?”
Nodding, Stander said, “You see, Frank Linzetti had gotten his nasty hooks into Lorna. He was an evil, abusive son of a bitch — when she showed up for our first meeting on Midnight Gun, she had to wear oversized sunglasses because of a black eye.”
Lorna sat down nearby. “That was because I’d just tried to leave him.”
David sat on the arm of Lorna’s chair and took her hand; the way she smiled at this simple motion was testament to not just their love but their care for each other. “We fell for each other,” David said, “and Frank found out. He threatened me first, but I told him I didn’t care. That was when he sent Vincent Gazzo. Fortunately, Gazzo liked Lorna, so we were able to buy him off.”
I thought about that. “You bought him off...”
“Not with money — I didn’t have enough of that. But I had my family’s house. We got creative with some paperwork and made it look as if Vincent had inherited a house from an uncle, but really it was what I gave him to help us make that movie.”
“His daughter still lives in that house. So you convinced Linzetti that Lorna was dead.”
Stander nodded. “Then it was just a matter of getting her a new identity and keeping her out of the limelight.”
“Which,” Lorna said, “I was happy to do. I missed the acting, but not the rest of it.” She looked at me and frowned slightly, then handed me a tissue from a box on a nearby table.
I hadn’t even realized I was crying.
Because Linzetti was gone and it was safe at last, they let me reveal everything. Not long after the big news broke, the American Cinematheque held a tribute to Lorna, and she invited me as her special guest.
I know this will all fade soon, that Lorna will get her privacy back and I’ll be just a guy making old movies into DVDs again. Still no Hollywood breakthrough for me, but that’s okay, because I’ve got something better.
And I’ve got a three-minute movie to thank for that.
John Sandford
Girl with an Ax
from Sea to Stormy Sea
The girl with the ax got off the bus at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Gower Street and started walking the superheated eleven blocks down Gower to Waring Avenue, where she lived by herself in a four-hundred-square-foot bungalow with an air conditioner designed and manufactured by cretins.
The girl was slender, with wheat-colored hair cut close over high cheekbones and pale blue eyes, bony shoulders under an unfashionable blue shift from JCPenney. She had a nice, shy smile that could light her face when she let it out; she wore cross-training shoes chosen for their durability, and golf socks.
The ax was heavy in its hard case and banged against her leg as she carried it down the sidewalk. She’d spent all morning and half the afternoon at the Bridge recording studio in Glendale, and her amps were still there, along with two less valuable guitars.
Her name was Andi Holt.
The name, the pale eyes, the shy smile, and the wheat-colored hair were all relics of her Okie ancestors, who’d come to California out of the Dust Bowl. Andi knew that, but she didn’t care about it one way or another. They were all dead and long gone, buried in cemeteries that bordered trailer parks, along with that whole Grapes of Wrath gang.
Gower Street ran down the side of the Paramount Studios lot, but like most native Angelenos, she didn’t care about that either. To care about Paramount would be like caring about Walmart.
Waring made a T-intersection with Gower, and she took the right, tired with the day’s work and the bus ride, which had required three changes. She’d be riding the route in reverse the next morning, for the last session of this set. Her car’s transmission had gone out, and she was temporarily afoot in Los Angeles. She could have called an Uber for the ride, but money was money and the bus was cheap.
Andi lived a few houses down Waring, a neighborhood of tiny bungalows worth, now, absurd amounts of money. She didn’t own hers but rented it, for what was becoming an absurd amount of rent. Somebody once had told her that Waring Avenue was named after the inventor of the Waring blender and she’d believed it — why would anyone lie about something like that? — but when she’d repeated the story, she’d been ridiculed: the street was actually named after a long-dead band leader named Fred Waring, who had nothing to do with blenders.
But the guy who told her that story had been massively stoned on some primo Strawberry Cough, so she’d never repeated the Fred Waring story.
Andi’s house was gray.
The one just before it was a faded brick red and larger — six hundred and twenty-five square feet, or a perfect twenty-five by twenty-five. Andi’s was twenty by twenty. She obsessed over the numbers. Hers was like living in a closet; the red house, small by any sane standards, felt expansive by comparison.
Just the way it was, in L.A.
As she passed the red house, she stopped to peer at it. The house was partly owned by Helen McCall and partly by a rapacious reverse-mortgage company called Gray Aid, which hovered over McCall like a turkey vulture, waiting for her to die.
Andi was friends with the old woman. They’d share a joint or a margarita or even two on a warm evening, and Helen would tell her about Hollywood days, or, as she pronounced it — you could hear it in the words — Hollywood Daze.
Helen had been an actress, once... or almost an actress. She had the stories to prove it.
And it occurred to Andi that she hadn’t seen Helen for, what, three days? She thought three days. Helen was ninety-nine years old.
With the ax banging against her leg, Andi continued to her house, but the thought of Helen stuck like a tick on her scalp. Inside, where the ambient temperature was possibly 120 degrees, she turned on the air conditioner and took the ax out of the case — a 2007 Les Paul custom — and stuck it in a cabinet that maintained a temperature of 72 degrees and a relative humidity of 40 percent. Five other guitars resided in the cabinet, not counting the two of them still at the Bridge, with her Fender and Mesa amps.