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 believe,” 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.”