Copyright © 2004 by Max Phillips
Cover painting copyright © 2004 by Gregory Manchess
All rights reserved.
Well, maybe she wasn’t all that blonde, but it’d be a crime to call hair like that light brown. It was more sort of lion-colored. Lioness. It was heavy, shiny hair, and it fell straight down to her shoulders from a central part. She hadn’t done much to it. She didn’t have to. She got out of the big Studebaker convertible and walked across the red dirt where someday there was supposed to be a front lawn. I was up on the roof, laying tile for one of those little hacienda-looking breadboxes. The whole street was full of them, all half-built. She wore a pale blue dress with cream piping, a dark blue belt, and a silly little schoolgirlish collar. She had nice straight shoulders. There was nothing wrong between them and her open-toed shoes, so I guess the trouble must have been somewhere behind those blue-gray eyes. There’d be trouble, of course. She looked up and called, “Is your name Corson?”
I said it was.
“Are you busy?”
I didn’t think she could be an actual movie star. She didn’t walk right, and she was too thin for the work, with two notable exceptions. She looked up at me, shading her eyes. “I’d like to talk to you.”
“You are,” I said.
“I might have some work for you.”
“What kind?”
She just stood there, looking up at me. “Well, you’re big enough,” she said at last.
I kept waiting.
“I hear you did some boxing,” she said.
I kept waiting.
“It looks like you got hit.”
“Not really,” I said. “I went nine and two. I broke the nose falling out of a tree in third grade. The rest of the face has just always been that way.”
I was annoyed with myself. No one needed to hear any of that.
“I still think you’ve been hit a few times,” she said, smiling faintly.
It was actually a pretty nice smile.
I walked over toward the carport to where the roof swooped down low, and sat myself down on the edge. She came and stood below me, between my feet. She was a tall one, all right.
“I’ve been hit a few times,” I said.
“Nine and two’s not bad. Why’d you stop?”
I shrugged. “They started to match me with guys who knew how to box. And it wasn’t what I came here to do.”
“What did you come here to do?”
“Why don’t you keep telling it?”
“You came here to write. For pictures. But you didn’t have any luck. You did a few treatments for Republic and Severin gave you a few scripts to read. He liked you, there were a few of them who did, but he didn’t know quite what to do with you. He gave you extra work and a few bit parts. You even had a line in one. You were the palooka the promising young boxer knocked out in the first reel. What was your line, by the way? If you don’t mind my asking?”
After a minute, I said, “z’So you’re the Kid. They tell me you’re pretty good.’z”
She smiled again, still faintly. She was still looking up from between my feet, shading her eyes. When one arm got tired, she’d use the other hand. “I’m getting a crick in my neck.”
“I’m comfortable.”
She patted my boot. “I just don’t want you to kick me in the face. At least not until we’ve been properly introduced.”
I slowly pushed my boot out toward her chin, and she walked backward to keep ahead of it, her hands clasped behind her hips, smiling faintly up at me the whole while. When she was back far enough, I jumped down. “Thanks,” she said. “Can we talk somewhere private?”
“This is private,” I said.
She looked up the street. “Yes. I guess it is. You seem to be the only one working this morning.”
“The contractor’s going bust. Our pay’s been late.”
“But you’re still here.”
“I like to keep busy. Who’s been singing my praises?”
“A man named Reece who does security at Republic.”
“How do you come to know Mattie?”
“He’s not difficult for a girl to know,” she said. “When the acting didn’t work out, you tried a little bodyguarding.”
“If you want to call it that. I put on a suit and stood around behind some guys. Every once in a while I’d lay my hand on someone’s shoulder and give him the look.”
“Show me,” she said.
The hell, if that’s what she wanted. I reached out and let my hand fall on her shoulder. I gave her the look.
She clasped her hands together and laughed delightedly. “I take it all back. You
“Not until we’ve been properly introduced,” I said. “Anyway, that’s not what the look says. The look says, Are you sure you want me to kill you with a pipe wrench and dump you in a ravine? Because I’d really rather not be bothered.”
“Yes. You’re right. That’s what the look says.”
“What’s your name?”
“Rebecca LaFontaine.”
“What’s your real name?”
“It’s not very pretty.”
“Yeah, well. Still.”
“Out here, I go by Rebecca LaFontaine.”
“Where are you from? Middle West someplace?”
“That’s close enough.”
“Why’d you come here?”
“Why does anybody come here?” She shrugged. “It didn’t work out. I can’t act. I got some offers. Of a certain kind.”
“But not for movies.”
“I got offers for movies of a certain kind.”
“But none you wanted to do.”
“No,” she said steadily. “I did a couple. I don’t want to do that again.”
I looked up the street. It was still just a dirt track. You could hear the whisper of the cars from the freeway across the valley. It was one of those bone-dry days when sound travels. There were big rolls of cyclone fencing lying around, I don’t know what for. No one had bothered to put them up. I looked back at her and said, “That’s terrible. You know where they’re showing any of them?”
“You wouldn’t recognize me,” she said. “I parted my hair differently back then. Look, let’s not keep standing
