Three

A lexandra’s Eatery brimmed with the upscale homespun ambiance that grated on my nerves. But tonight, the doilies on the table didn’t offend me, and the bright floral tablecloths almost soothed my eye. I still must be in shock.

We found a table next to an outlet to charge my phone and it buzzed right away when I sat down. “Hello.”

“Charlotte Donovan?”

“Yes.”

“This is Sergeant Den Brophy of the NYPD, getting back to you about the security footage. It shows that a man did indeed sit at Justine’s table. When she looked away to speak with the server, he clearly dropped something in her tea.”

A server came up to our table and Kate ordered for us while I attempted to make sense of what Sergeant Brophy was saying.

“What? What did he put in her tea?”

Kate’s eyebrows arched.

“We don’t know that yet. We’ll be running a tox screen to find out. I’m sorry to inform you this way, but there’s a good possibility Justine’s death is suspicious.”

He didn’t say the word “murder,” but that’s exactly what he meant. Murdered? Justine? The country’s most beloved celebrity biographer? Flabbergasted, my mouth dropped open.

“We need you to come up with a list of possible enemies. We also need you to come down to the station to view the recording to see if you recognize the assailant. It’s not a great picture, but you may recognize him.”

“Okay,” I said. “I can do that. I’ll come to the station tomorrow afternoon.” It came out faster than usual. My nerves were not just frayed, they were ragged and splitting. Justine? Murdered?

I clicked off my cell phone.

“What’s wrong?”

The server brought my brandy and sat it in front of me. I took a long pull before I uttered the words.

“The police think Justine was murdered.” My voice trembled as I swallowed a sob. A sad end for Justine.

“What? That’s crazy. The cops just like to stir things up. Who’d want to kill Justine? Everybody loved her.”

I sipped my brandy, trying to will away the dread, wishing Kate was right. “Not true. She’s been through several lawsuits and has had plenty of hate mail.”

“Hate mail? What kind of hate mail?”

The brandy warmed me. “People who didn’t like what she wrote. Some fans feel an ownership over their favored star. Sometimes distantly related relatives of the stars wanting money or threatening a lawsuit.”

Kate sipped from her wine glass. “Why do they think she was murdered?”

I relayed what I’d learned and Kate was at a loss for words, which didn’t happen often.

About midway through my second brandy and our third order of boneless hot wings, I steadied. The fog was lifting.

Ideas crystallized as my head cleared. Justine’s words echoed: “This Harlow book has brought all the kooks out!” I willed away the blonde, brushing it off, telling myself I hadn’t been able to get a good view if her. Of course, Harlow was on my mind, and the woman was a platinum blonde. A trick of the mind.

But what exactly did Justine mean by Harlow kooks? Obsessed fans? Collectors?

As I considered it all, sitting at the bar, I hoped my exhaustion was from the shock of the day and not another bout of Lyme creeping up on me. I decided not to haul my weary body all the way to Chelsea, let alone Cloister Island—not a mere subway ride away, but also a ferry ride. I wondered if I could sneak my way into Justine’s place, which was a few blocks to the north. Would her cousin from Florida mind? Would the management? Did they even have to know?

I needed to find a place to lay my head. I’d never been inside Justine’s place and had no idea what to expect, but it seemed like the best option. I felt like a zombie, hollow and lifeless. I’d pushed myself too far.

I reached into my bag and found the glittering key chain. “Justine’s keys,” I said, holding them up. “Let’s stay at her place tonight. It’s right around the corner.”

“Are you crazy?” Kate asked. Her eyes were as wide as the moon. “You’re on your own,” she said, lowering her voice. “I’m not sleeping in a dead woman’s apartment.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

She shuddered. For all her wise-cracking ways, she was such a chicken sometimes. But then again, Kate was always a more stereotypical girl than I was.

“I don’t think it’s legal to camp out in a dead woman’s apartment,” she said in an almost-whisper.

“Probably not. But I’m her assistant and can claim ignorance if I’m caught. It’s just one night.” The key chain sparkled in my hand. One night in a luxurious apartment. Justine’s apartment. The idea of being surrounded by her things somehow comforted me. Besides, perhaps I’d find answers to this crazy day there.

“I’ll walk you to her place, but I’m not going inside,” Kate said and shivered.

∞

Opening the door into Justine’s home was like opening a crypt. A layer of dust covered everything with a gray, murky glow. The maid must be due to visit. Or Justine hadn’t actually been living there recently. Odd. But sometimes she escaped the city and wrote elsewhere. I made a mental note to check on it, along with the countless other details Justine’s death had undoubtedly left me with. Which didn’t completely surprise me.

Almost twelve years of fact-checking, researching, and tending to her schedule had left me nearly in charge of Justine’s day-to-day life. Why should it be different in her death? For the past three years, I’d also been writing more under Justine’s name. All hoping that someday, I’d write my own books—real biographies, not the pop biographies Justine wrote.

No, I wanted to write thick, wordy, almost academic tomes.

“Who the hell is going to read an eight-hundred-page biography of Hildegard Von Bingen?” Justine’s words rang in my ears.

“Who indeed?” I said out loud and walked over to the window.

A few minutes earlier, I had successfully entered through the back door of the apartment building. The security guard never glanced up from behind the desk. The doorman was busy with a crowd of rowdy partiers in the lobby.

The address: the exclusive L’Ombragé, which was in the same tony Upper East Side area where many celebrities lived, such as Madonna, Steve Martin, and the like. But, of course, Justine was one of them. She would never admit it. She liked to think she maintained a journalistic distance from these folks. But when you dined with Meryl Streep regularly, how could you be objective when writing about her? “Objectivity? Who has time for objectivity?”

While Justine’s specialty was the movie stars of the ’30s and ’40s, she released a contemporary biography every few years. Her biography of Meryl must have netted her somewhere in the millions. Rare among writers of any breed.

So I understood she was wealthy, but I had no idea how she lived her life. I’d only been as far as the grand marbled lobby, where I would drop research off for her. Contrary to what many people think, not all research is online, so I sometimes found myself in the stacks of some mildewed library, making copies of old books or checking out films and journals.

Now I wandered through Justine’s apartment, surprised by more than the fine layer of dust over the heavy drapes, bookcases, and furniture. Obviously, nobody had been here for a while. Where had Justine been the last few weeks of her life? Why didn’t she mention that to me? Or had she and I’d just forgotten? I struggled with memory at times—a fact of my Lyme disease.

The expansive apartment, which took up the entire fourteenth floor, made me feel like Alice in Wonderland, roaming halls and rooms, not quite knowing where to go next. The long, shiny tiled hallway seemed too vast to explore now as weariness overtook me. A floor-to-ceiling painting of Greta Garbo greeted me as I turned back. Satin glass sconces, with fine crystals dangling, set off the face of the woman who’d begun life as a pauper in Stockholm. Justine would not write about Garbo. She claimed she could not objectively write about her. “Or at least that’s what the press would say. She was a huge lesbian icon. Sort of like I am now.” Then uproarious, stomach-jiggling laughter.

I walked into a library and imagined Justine sitting behind the desk, gazing up at me from beneath her heavy, round, red-rimmed glasses. I moved toward the chaise longue in front of a floor-to-ceiling window with top panes of stained-glass pink roses—so delicate it almost made me cry. I’d barely explored the place, but this spot drew me in.

Could I get away with staying here? My heart thudded in my chest. I was too tired to worry about it. Tonight this overstuffed chaise was mine. Though I could muster the bravery to stay here, I didn’t think I could sleep in Justine’s bed and had no energy to find the guest room.

I undressed and lay on the chaise, pulled a soft throw over me, curled into a ball, and fell into a deep sleep. I dreamed of Justine and, of all people, Jean Harlow.

Jean Harlow’s life read like a shallow, tragic Cinderella story. She became a star, but not by hungering for it and clawing her way to the top. She was someone’s idea of beautiful and happened to be in the right place at the right time. But here’s where one of the few interesting personality traits of Jean came into play. She didn’t rest on her sexy laurels. She was aware of her lack of acting skill, and once she was a star, she worked hard at becoming a better one. Now, that interested me. The fact that her mother managed her career, and life up to a certain point, was commonplace. It was a cliché. Many young starlets’ mothers managed their careers. But what was it about Jean that prompted her to work so hard? Midwestern values? Overcompensation for guilt at being lucky? What?

When I awakened, thinking of my dream, Jean, and the blonde on the street, it reminded me that I hadn’t heard back from Maude Verez, the psychologist we sometimes worked with to help piece together personalities of our subjects. I was waiting on an email from her about some questions I had about Jean Harlow.

I stretched and reached for my phone, now charged and working. Unfortunately. Another missed call from my mom. I ignored it. I wasn’t up to her drunken tirades. Not today.

After I found the bathroom and the coffee and figured out how to work the fancy coffee maker, I took my daily elixir into her office.

My fingers pecked at Justine’s keyboard, and I felt thankful that we’d updated her passwords when we talked on the phone a week ago. I had more than every right and reason to be here. But my nerves were jumbled, sitting in my ex-boss’s home, in what was her private office on her private desktop computer. Where was her laptop? I shook off the chill moving along my spine, and the image of my grandmother crossing herself.

I drank my strong, black, soothing coffee.

As I jiggled the computer mouse, Justine’s screen filled with unanswered email. Most of which were typical junk messages, except the notes from her publisher. Sorting through her email would take hours. My lungs squeezed with a sudden lack of air. How would I handle everything?

First, I needed to inform her publisher and agent of her death. I hesitated. It seemed so final.

“The big D: nothing more final.”

Opening my laptop, I wrote and sent off the two emails, then continued scanning Justine’s inbox on her computer. Something odd caught my eye. A word—“kill.” Right in the subject line.

“I’ll kill you,” it said.

What was this? Who would write such a thing to Justine? My attention zoomed in on the email and my pulse quickened. I clicked on it. The date? Two days ago.

“I swear if you go public with this I’ll kill you,” it said.

I scanned further.

Justine had responded once. “You don’t scare me.” Typical of her.

I shuddered. Who was this? What was going on here? The rest of it had been encrypted. There was nothing left to read.

Why hadn’t Justine told me about this? Sure, she had gotten threats from people over the years, but not like this. This person was threatening to kill her, not sue her. And it was two days before she died.

Which subject was she being threatened about? Jean Harlow? What mattered so much in the Jean Harlow story that someone would threaten Justine’s life?

I mentally sorted through the past twenty-four hours. Justine had insisted I drop everything, meet her at Layla’s, and not tell anybody. When I arrived at the tea room, she was distraught. Despite what Kate said, I thought it was in fact possible that this mysterious man killed her. He’d sat at her table and placed something in her tea. She’d mentioned Jean Harlow kooks. Now, this. Someone had threatened her life. I understood now that Justine had been in trouble. Hard to ignore with the word “kill” on the dark blue computer screen.