Page 126 of Mazywood

Lorenzo had heard enough. Had seen enough in her eyes. He took a step away from her. “Maybe… this was a mistake.”

“I’m really hoping you’ll let me show you my ski trail,” she said. She produced a smile, but from Lorenzo’s face it wasn’t the pleasant smile she was trying for.

“Why—so you can push me off?”

“I won’t lay a hand on you,” she said. “Promise.”

Lorenzo studied her, trying to read her intentions. He didn’t like what he saw.

“Sweetheart, I think I need to go get your driver… Unless you want me to call a cab.”

“I don’t have a phone here,” she said. “Not anymore.”

Lorenzo’s fear excited something in Mazelle she had never experienced, except that one day on Li’l Gumshoes when she defied the Sharpes and performed her ladder stunt, watching their terror that she would fall. Now her flurrying heart and curling toes had nothing to do with nerves. His fear was a sweet syrup on her tongue.

Lorenzo took more uncertain steps away. He noted that she wasn’t carrying a weapon in her robe, but he also didn’t want to stick too close. He went to the hooks by the front door and slipped his hat on. Next, deliberately not rushing, he put on his coat.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “These apologies… they don’t do anything for you. I’m sorry I wasted your time. Maybe this program’s just a crutch…”

“Is fucking around on your wife one of the Twelve Steps?”

The old Lorenzo flashed in his eyes, the Lorenzo who had looked like he might hit her in the limousine on the way to the Ambassador Hotel. But he was also figuring out that her invitation had never been a seduction. That only left her given reason. That’s right. Be scared. Mazelle’s smile spread more widely across her lips, showing her teeth.

The chimes outside jangled again.

“It’s a real shame, what’s going to happen to that coat,” she said.

Lorenzo’s last look was a thousand pleas. Please—whatever you’re doing—stop it. Then he opened the living room door. As cold air seeped into the house, skating across Mazelle’s cheeks, her smile died. She felt exhausted, suddenly. And sad.

“Jerry, wait,” she said. He was so surprised by the urgency in her voice, the tenderness of hearing his first name, that he turned to look at her over his shoulder. “Don’t go out there.” Her voice didn’t sound like her own—she sounded like she was seven again, her buried little girl finally fighting through her ruination.

Lorenzo pinned his lips ruefully, probably restraining the final apology that was spilling from his eyes.

Then he left and closed the door. Mazelle’s inner seven-year-old might have wanted to go after him, but the adult she had grown into only made it as far as the window to watch his gorgeous suede coat moving down the porch steps.

Giovanni Mateo Lorenzo, known by friends and enemies alike as “Jerry” since he left New York’s Little Italy at fifteen to be an actor (or so he thought), stood in the sharp cold of the Mount Shasta lodge’s courtyard and tried to calm his thoughts with slow breaths. His bare hand clung to the back of a whitewashed wooden beach chair near the frozen duck pond, partially holding him upright. This tightness usually only seized his chest during budget meetings, overtime shoots, or reading box office reports, and his doctor had warned him to avoid stress if he didn’t want to inherit the massive heart attack that had killed his father when he was only a few years older than Jerry’s fifty-nine.

He’d known his visit with Mazelle could go south after he said what he needed to say, but the meeting had gone worse than he imagined. Not only hadn’t Mazelle been willing to forgive him, but now the routine of “making amends” felt like a pile of horseshit he had dumped on her, wrenching open wounds. He wondered if he’d just been spreading a plague all over town with his letters and phone calls to people he had wronged, like digging up dead bodies for display.

At least this hadn’t been as bad as Lisa Baxter, whose mother had told him the young actress committed suicide after Jerry never hired her even though she “had relations” with him on his office sofa. He hadn’t known that kid was only seventeen, since her agent claimed she was twenty-one. He never fucked kids, and not just because he didn’t want to end up on trial like Errol Flynn—teenagers had breath like bubble gum and only wanted to talk about Elvis Presley (who, from what he’d heard, was fine with taking his teenage fans to bed). But he’d never forgotten Lisa’s pure, trusting face, although he hadn’t bothered to find her even a bit part like he’d promised, refusing to see her again. Her mother had cussed him out and hung up on him when he reached out to her, so he should have learned his lesson about apologies then.

Since he had sobered up, the faces were like a parade when he tried to sleep at night, too many to count. Especially Mazelle’s.

Jerry consoled himself with the beauty of the lodge she had built up here. The fifty-foot pines on these snow-dotted grounds, untouched by loggers, surrounded him with regal order. And the mountain! He hadn’t noticed when the car first drove up, but the view of the mountain’s white peak was worth millions. Her property looked like a boutique resort in Aspen, and she’d built it herself.

He’d helped her earn this money, and she’d done more with hers than he had with his. All he had to show for his time on this earth was the designer clothes stuffing his wife’s closet, a couple of vacation homes, and a failed Italian restaurant chain back home in New York. He had his movies, but although the Lazy Mazy franchise had been his most successful, it wouldn’t leave a lasting mark. He wasn’t exactly considered a visionary. He’d squeezed every dime out of the old Negro-picture model, trying to beat the changing times, not realizing how much the backlash in the press had muddied his name, and Sharpe’s.

And Mazelle’s. Especially Mazelle’s.

Sharpe was writing for television, and Lorenzo could still pull together enough backing for a couple movies every year, and more since he’d merged with Destiny Pictures. But Mazelle’s career, as she’d just confirmed, had never recovered. He’d kept expecting to see her rise with Horne and Dandridge—she had the looks, God knew—but that Lazy Mazy shtick had been kryptonite in the New Hollywood. And he had lied to get her to do it. He had disrespected her marriage, pretending he was Darryl Zanuck taking his pick of every girl who walked into his office with a dream. Five abortions, one girl dead. He’d gone too far with Mazelle too.

Mazelle must hate his guts, so what had he expected today? Even if she had only wanted to scare him when she said she invited him here to kill him, he should have known they would never end up in bed. And that look in her eyes…

After he first got engaged to Maria, a woman he’d been seeing on the side had pulled a gun on him, and he recognized that maniac look on Mazelle’s face. She wanted him dead even if she didn’t have the nerve to pull it off.

Jerry shivered, buttoning his coat, pulling his lapels higher across his cool cheeks. He hadn’t been religious since he was a kid—until he watched those bus headlights barreling toward him in blinding white cones like the chariot of the Angel of Death, only to evade him after he closed his eyes. For a full minute, he’d thought he was dead, his brain still swimming in the booze. But now he pulled out the crucifix he wore on a gold chain nestled under his turtleneck. He pressed it hard between his thumb and index finger, feeling the indentation of Christ’s figure on the cross against his skin. The uncomfortable pressure soothed him.

“Forgive me,” he whispered. Jerry didn’t know much about praying, but from now on he would ask God for forgiveness and forget about the rest.