Throwback Thursday: ‘Frankie Ray Goes to Hollywood’ by Mel Anastasiou

May 7, 1934
Paradise Gardens Villas, Sunset Boulevard
Hollywood

The young woman buttoned her shirt up to her neck. She checked the clock beside her bed again. The long afternoon was at last wearing on toward evening. Her lover’s murder had not, after all, stopped time.

What would the police think when they saw the orange clasped in his dead hand?

When she’d placed the orange there, it had seemed an almost random addition to the scene, but now she saw that, like the orange, this man was a symbol of Hollywood’s beauty and transience.

She tucked the gun into her pocket, turned to the window, and listened for sirens.

Chapter One
Six days earlier
On the thousand-mile drive from Vancouver, BC, to Hollywood, CA

Frankie Ray hunched over the wheel of the Model A. The early morning light made it much easier to see the turns in the road ahead. She ground her gears a little as she took the next rise. 

Over the past two days, driving southward, the countryside had looked like the world they’d left behind in Vancouver, with clouds fanning out across the sky and conifers lining both sides of the road. Frankie wondered when the world would begin to look really different. She shivered, thankful she’d brought her squashy hat, pinned tight with her departed mother’s hatpin. She’d hauled the scratchy brown blanket out of the rumble seat hours ago, while it was still Connie Mooney’s turn to drive. Now it lay bunched around Connie’s slumped form beside her, the ends tucked around Frankie’s lap. The gas cans strapped to the running boards were full, and so was the Thermos Connie’s mother had sent, along with a paper sack of tea bags, to fill up for free with hot water whenever they stopped at a gas station. 

“Your shaving brush has had its day,” Frankie murmured in her radio announcer’s voice as the little red Burma-Shave signs by the side of the road flashed past, each one providing the reader with a line of agreeable verse. “So why not shave the modern way?”

“Burma-Shave!” Connie blinked, sat up, and put her stocking feet up on the dashboard. She looked back at Frankie from under her own squashy hat. “Are we really on the road to California?”

“If I haven’t lost track, it’s Wednesday morning. We’ve been on the road since Saturday night. I think we should have taken Route 99 at Blaine, but it’s too late to turn back now.”

“Wet your whistle?”

“Sure. Let’s have that Thermos.” 

Frankie kept her eyes on the road while Connie unscrewed the Thermos top, which served as a teacup. After drinking from her side of the cup, Connie turned it round for Frankie, who sipped at the bitter, most welcome tea. She steered with one hand and took another sip while Connie dragged out from behind her seat the box of goodies her mother had sent along with them. 

Frankie geared down, thought better of it, and geared back up. The Model A bucked and soldiered on.