The Jean Harlow Bombshell

by Mollie Cox Bryan

  “Holy shit,” Kate said. “Look at those lamps. Do you think those are original?”

  “Yes, they look art deco-ish, though I’m no expert. Very boxy and modern,” I said.

  Above each lamp were huge inlays into the wall—each held a huge, sleek, matching tall vase. Hanging lights added even more elegance to the room.

  “I think it’s cold,” Kate said. “I mean, it doesn’t seem comfortable at all.”

  “I disagree,” I said. “I love this room.”

  In the center, between the two huge inlays, was another one, exactly above the bed, which held a painting—an art deco version of a goddess? Nymph? Painted in tones of pink and flesh. Very feminine.

  “There’s something comforting about simplicity,” I said.

  “And easy to clean,” Kate replied as she flung open the closet door.

  “Now that’s a closet,” I said and grinned.

  “And not so easy to clean.” Kate whistled.

  Not only were there clothes, and purses and scarves and so on, but there were boxes of who-knew-what stacked under the clothes, and, on the shelves, big mounds of stuff. The stuff of life.

  Kate flapped open a garbage bag. “This is going to take longer than I expected.”

  “Days,” I said, with my chest squeezing. I recognized so much of the clothing. All of it too small for me, as Justine was a tiny bird of a woman. Her Chanel suits and handbags were not Kate’s size or style, but she adored the scarves and hats.

  After filling two huge trash bags with her clothes, with still more to go, I slid the boxes on the floor out and lined them up against the wall.

  “Good idea. We need to move some of this stuff out of the way so we can get further in,” Kate said.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a deep closet,” I said.

  “A few of the designers I know have similar closets, but not quite this big,” she said.

  As Kate pulled out the last box, I spotted a faint line in the wall. And another one. I blinked. “Is that a door?”

  I pointed to the seam in the wall. Kate and I ran our fingers along the edge of it. She pushed—and it opened.

  Kate’s eyes widened. “What the hell?”

  My heart flickered. “Another room.”

  Fifteen

  After you,” Kate said.

  I stepped through the door, half expecting to find Narnia or Wonderland, but what I found was a storage room full of more boxes, along with draped-over paintings and furniture. An odd, stale, but dark, soft, and powdery scent filled my nose.

  “Perfume,” Kate said as she followed close behind me.

  “I don’t know, maybe,” I said. “Not Justine’s perfume. She wore Cotillion.” Cotillion also bore a soft scent, but not like the one in this room.

  Even though there was absolutely nothing interesting about the room itself, it had an energy about it. I couldn’t quite describe it. Maybe it was because it was secret.

  “It looks like our workload may have just doubled,” Kate said, eyeballing the windowless walls. Was this a closet? A closet behind the closet?

  A bare light bulb lit the secret closet-room, which I noted because the rest of the apartment had gorgeous light fixtures. But this space? One light bulb. Crammed with oddly shaped boxes, the room barely had enough room to walk in.

  “I wonder what she had to go through to get this stuff in here. I mean, she would have had to almost tear apart her closet,” I said.

  “Yeah. I mean, she could have paid for a storage facility. Why bother with this?” Kate said and shrugged.

  One of those odd déjà vu feelings came over me, even though I’d never been in this space. But it was the only way I could describe the feeling. Maybe déjà vu was the wrong term. Maybe it was just that something about the space held an emotional resonance. If I dwelled on the feeling, I felt as if I were teetering on the edge of something, some unnameable thing of great importance, and it became overwhelming. It’s just a bunch of junk in a secret closet.

  “We’ll have to leave this to another day,” I said, turning to go. But a chill came over me and I dizzied. Probably all the damned dust, I told myself.

  Kate caught my sway. “This has been quite a day. Let’s rest a bit and decide what to do next. Are you taking your meds?”

  “Of course I am,” I said. It wasn’t just me who found my Lyme disease a force to be reckoned with. I’d lost friends, boyfriends, and even one fiancé who couldn’t deal with my bouts of it. “You dodged a bullet, if you ask me, sugar.”

  We shut the door behind us and made our way to the kitchen. A wave of exhaustion came over me. Maybe I really had overdone it. Lyme was an odd disease. I could push myself some days and be fine. Other days, if I did anything above and beyond the ordinary, I had to take a nap. Maybe I needed my meds adjusted. Maybe I was just tired because anybody would be. We’d been cleaning most of the day.

  Even though it frustrated me to hear people talk about Lyme disease as if it were fake, sometimes even I didn’t believe in it. But when I was down with it, I had no choice. I’m stubborn that way.

  “Let’s get something to eat,” Kate said.

  “Okay. I need to make a list of contractors to get in here and clean the drapes and carpets after we get her clothes out of here. I don’t know what else there is to go through.”

  We sat and ate the chicken salad sandwiches Kate had gotten on her way over.

  “Any word about scar face?” Kate asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Den called yesterday and left a message.”

  “Den,” Kate said and wriggled her eyebrows.

  I ignored her. But I told her what Den said to me that night in Charley’s. She chuckled and said, “I don’t care if you go out with him. But sleeping with him is a no-no until you’ve made it a month, right?”

  In the meantime, my usual casual-cop-lovers were still pinging me on Tinder. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep putting them off.

  Too much mayo in the chicken salad. But the bread was good. I took another bite.

  “How about that person you keep claiming to see? Aren’t there any famous Jean Harlow impersonators out there?” Kate asked, then popped a chip into her mouth.

  “None that I could find. It seems she was born looking like Jean Harlow,” I said.

  “Poor girl,” Kate said with sarcasm, then laughed. “Though I have to say, Harlow was not my idea of pretty.”

  I took a swig of my drink and set it down on the table. “I’d say ‘pretty’ is not the word.”

  “What would you call her?”

  “Sexy,” I replied. “Stunning. But not pretty.”

  “Was it the hair?” Kate asked. “I mean, what was it about her?’

  I’d had some time to think about the question. I sucked in air. “No,” I said, “it wasn’t her hair. When she was discovered, she was blonde but not platinum. Howard Hughes gave her that platinum blonde color. I mean, yeah, it was one of the things she was famous for, but she was so much more.”

  “So, famous for the hair.”

  “I know, right? But she had a great body, an interesting face, and the camera loved her,” I said. “Plus she was very comfortable in her skin and wasn’t afraid to use her body.”

  Kate snorted. “Must be nice.”

  “Indeed,” I quipped. “But remember, this was the thirties. Women weren’t supposed to feel comfortable in their own skin. They weren’t supposed to like sex or even think about it. So Jean’s open sexy nature was unusual, in a way.”

  “Well, there were other sexy movie stars.”

  “Yes, but she was a kind of enigma because she didn’t seem to be anything at all like what Hollywood portrayed. She was down to earth and kind of, I don’t know, a tomboy. She couldn’t understand the fuss,” I said.

  “I find that hard to be
lieve,” Kate said. “She was a sex symbol.”

  “Yes, but that was the image Hollywood gave her. It wasn’t who she was. She didn’t believe her press,” I said. The reality of the statement sunk in for a moment. I needed to write it down and follow through on this thread of a concept. “When I think about all these young celebs now, with the drugs and legal problems and so on, I often think, there goes someone who believes he or she is what the press tells them they are. They don’t have a backbone. Moral fiber. I think Jean knew who she was long before she came to Hollywood—and she never forgot it.”

  Sixteen

  Kate and I cleaned up from our meal.

  She held up the kitchen trash bag. “It’s so full already I can’t believe it. I’ll run the trash out. Where did you say the chute was again?”

  “I’ll show you,” I said, leading her to the back door of the apartment. We each clutched a bag of trash in our hands as we walked through the building’s dim hallway.

  The sound of heels clicking in the stairwell was not a normal sound here. Most people took the elevator. So, as the noise erupted, Kate gaped my way and shrugged. But when the stairwell door opened, it was the blonde Jean Harlow look-alike who appeared, wearing a shimmering pink dress and silver heels. She was out of breath and gasping for air.

  “Hey!” I said. “Stay right there, please!”

  She was surprised to see me. Her hands flew up as she shook her head and glanced around me before she turned back down the stairwell. What was she seeking? Was she searching for someone or something? Her lilac scent trailed after her.

  “I’ll take the stairs,” I said to Kate. “You take the elevator.”

  Kate nodded.

  “I think we’ve got her,” I said, pushing open the door.

  Kate rushed down the hallway to the elevator. She was muttering terms of disbelief as she went.

  I nearly flew down the stairs. Fourteen floors. What was fourteen floors?

  I stopped momentarily to see if I could hear the look-alike’s heels clicking. But it was silent. Had she slipped out onto another floor? How could she have gotten into the building?

  But then again, I’d gotten into the building for several days with no questions asked.

  But I had a key.

  Did she know someone in the building?

  Was she living here herself ?

  I tried to listen.

  Deadly silent. She was gone. There was no way to find her.

  But maybe Kate had better luck?

  I continued down the stairs, alert to sound, smell, anything pointing me in the look-alike’s direction.

  I was convinced she was stalking me. But why?

  And how did this all add up? Were there connections I wasn’t making? What had Justine been trying to tell me about the Jean Harlow kooks? I’d assumed she meant collectors like Chad Walters, and maybe some Hollywood types and even Severn Hartwell. It never entered my mind that she might have been talking about someone like my beautiful stalker.

  My thighs and calves were burning by the time I reached the small landing on the bottom floor. There was an open door leading outside, a different one than the back door I’d used. I poked my head out and strained my eyes. No blonde bombshell-types to be found.

  I walked around the building to the front entry way, where Kate stood chatting with the doorman. Her arms were flailing wildly as the man slowly shook his head. From this tableau, I gathered she hadn’t had any luck either.

  “What kind of a place is this, that someone could sneak in through the back door?” Kate said.

  “We don’t know that’s what happened,” I said as I approached her. “She could still be in the building. She could live here.”

  The doorman, nonplussed, shook his head. “I think I’d know if someone looking like Jean Harlow lived here.”

  “Let’s check with management. Maybe they can give us a list of names of people who live here,” I said.

  “Against policy,” the doorman said.

  “I should think it’s against policy to allow people to wander the stairwells in the middle of the day. The stairwell’s outside door was propped open. That’s a security breach,” I said.

  “Please,” the doorman said, “calm down.” He glanced behind me at a stiff-faced management-looking person. The irony of my situation was not lost on me even as I pursued this.

  “What seems to be the problem?” the manager asked, eyeballing us. Our clothes powdered in dust from cleaning.

  I explained what happened.

  “She most certainly must be a resident, or was here visiting,” he replied.

  “But the back door, you know, near the stairwell was open,” I said.

  He tilted his head. “Let me check into this further and get back to you. We sometimes have vendors who enter through that door. But they should be closing it behind them.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Kate and I turned toward the elevator. She pushed the button. We stood out in the beautiful lobby. But it wasn’t as if the residents all walked around in evening gowns, especially not on a Saturday afternoon. A few women walked by us wearing sundresses. Another group of women wore nice jeans and flowy shirts. But Kate and I wore old jeans and T-shirts—not Kate’s usual style at all. At least not since she’d made the change.

  I’d been staying here a week now and was beginning to get a feel for the general population—most of whom were like Justine, coming from old money and not interested in showing off.

  The elevator dinged when we reached the fourteenth floor. It opened to a foyer that was a part of Justine’s apartment, but there was another door to open to actually get inside.

  That door was wide open.

  “Did we leave the door open?” Kate asked.

  “We didn’t leave from this door.”

  “No, I mean earlier. Did we?” Her voice quivered.

  I’m sure she knew the answer. No. We’d not left the door open. Either someone was inside, or had been.

  I started to forge ahead to see what was going on, but Kate pulled me back. “Someone might be in there. I think we should call security. Or Den. Or both.”

  “And say what? The door is open and we think someone may be inside?” I asked. It sounded ridiculous. I walked forward, but Kate’s strong arms held me back.

  “I can’t let you do that, my friend.” She pulled out her cell phone from her back pocket. “Call security.”

  Seventeen

  The intruder was gone.

  But so was Justine’s computer and most of her files.

  “Now let me get this straight,” Den said, as he paced the floor of the library, with the head of L’Ombragé security standing at the corner of the desk, pale, bereft, embarrassed. “You two are cleaning. You went down the hall to empty trash and saw a suspicious person coming up the stairwell. You”—he lifted his chin toward Kate—“decided to go down the elevator to try to catch her. And Charlotte ran down the stairs. After chatting with the doorman and security officer, you both came back up, planning to come in through the front door, and it was open. Open,” he repeated. He turned to face the head of security.

  “This has never happened before. I don’t know how this happened.” The man had said this several times.

  “And the only thing missing is Justine’s computer and file folders.”

  “As far as I can tell,” I said. “I’ve not done a complete inventory of the place. So I have no idea if anything else is missing. But the boxes and bags of clothes we’ve been packing are still there. Everything in the bedroom and kitchen looks untouched.”

  “We’re going to need to get forensics in here,” Den said. “I understand you’re staying here?”

  “Yes, in this room,” I replied.

  “You’ll need to find another place to stay for a day or so.”

 
I’d not been back to Cloister Island since Justine’s death, and it seemed like a world away, not just a ferry ride. A simple world, where some days I’d take a break from my work and walk down to Sol’s for lunch, stopping in to see my grandmother at her antique shop. Those images poked at me. That was then; this was now.

  “You could stay with me,” Kate said. “I’ve cancelled my dinner engagement.”

  “Let me think about it.” Logically, I knew I should feel unsafe and frightened and want to get out. But instead, I was pissed. Someone was messing with me. Worse, I was certain this all linked back to Justine’s killer. What was going on?

  “I think it would be best,” Den said. Then his phone buzzed. He answered and said, “Send them up.”

  I gathered that forensics was here. I drew in air. “Can I get my laptop?”

  “Sorry,” Den said. “You’ll get access to it in a day or so.”

  A crew of about three people entered the apartment. They wore matching uniforms.

  “Get your things and come with me,” Kate said.

  “I really don’t want to leave,” I said.

  “Aren’t you afraid to stay here?” she asked.

  Right then, I couldn’t feel anything but anger. Moving out of Justine’s apartment felt like giving up. Maybe it was stupid. “I think the intruder got what they came for. They probably won’t be back.”

  “If they come back, we’ll be ready for them,” the security guy said. “We’ll watch this place. Believe me. We don’t wish to inconvenience you, Miss Donovan. Please stay here at L’Ombragé. We have a few apartments available for guests. One studio you might find convenient.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll take you up on that.”

  “Still, we’ve not caught the woman … you know … the Harlow look-alike,” Kate said. “This is starting to creep me out. I don’t feel right about you being alone.” She scrutinized me. “But I can see you’ve made up your mind. I suppose I can stay with you.”

  Den was otherwise engaged, speaking with the forensics team, which appeared incongruous with the decor. Suddenly the elegant library, my hideaway from the world, had been invaded by cops and shiny-shoed security people and management. My eyes traveled to the stained glass window. The rose.