Twenty-Four

Muffled voices and shifting sounds filled the apartment outside of the tiny room where Kate and I stood, arm in arm, breathing. I wished I could make out what the voices were saying. But all I heard was my blood rushing and my racing heartbeat.

Were they cops? Management? Criminals revisiting the scene of the crime? In any case, Kate and I were not supposed to be here.

Kate’s eyes glistened in the dark, wide and frightened. I was no mind reader, but I could guess her thoughts.

There we stood in a secret room in an apartment we’d been given strict orders to stay out of because it was a crime scene, holding a ring some people would kill for.

We remained still. Breathing as shallowly as possible while the noise in the other rooms escalated. Then nothing. No sound. A door closing. Were they gone?

We stood a few more beats, listening. Finally, feeling it was safe, I switched on the light.

“Christ,” Kate whispered. “We need to get out of here. We’ve got what we came for.”

“But what are we going to do with it? If we’re right about this, people are getting killed over this thing.”

“Take it to the cops,” Kate said, opening the door.

“Are you kidding? Some lackey cop gets their hands on it and we never see it again. Den is too busy to be watching over a priceless ring for me.” The NYPD was the worst at keeping track of valuables.

“What do you care?”

We were standing in Justine’s bedroom now. What did I care?

I mulled over everything I understood about the ring. “There’s something more to this ring than what we know. Justine was keeping it for a reason—or else she’d have sold it to Chad Walters. I need to figure out why.”

“Why? It’s not your concern. Like, just get rid of it. Then it’s out of your life, along with all of this crazy shit.”

Kate had a point.

But then again, I was writing the definitive biography of Jean Harlow.

The ring was an item that held meaning for Harlow. And it had taken on almost mythic qualities over the years. Who could I trust with it? Who could I trust to even tell about it?

Den, of course, seemed to be the person. And yet I didn’t feel like I could burden him with it. Shit was going to hit the fan if this news came out. Den needed to stay focused.

If I was going to include the ring in the biography—and I should—I needed to figure some stuff out about it before I turned it over to the authorities. Once I gave the ring to them, I’d probably never see it again. And who knew what would happen to it? The ring had been so important to Justine that she’d kept it hidden, even from me. What secrets was it keeping, or pointing me toward? If only I could see.

“I’m going to have to write about the ring in the biography,” I said, almost to myself, as we made our way through the kitchen.

“You don’t need it on your person to write about it,” Kate pointed out.

“I just have a feeling about it. Like there’s an important reason Justine kept it. Something very important, yet to be revealed.”

“She was going to sell it and make a shit-ton of money.”

I gestured to the apartment we were standing in. “Nah. Money wasn’t a huge motivator for her. I mean, she liked money, but she wasn’t going to do anything risky or illegal for it. She didn’t need to.”

We walked into the library-office and surmised it was the cops who’d been in the apartment because all the crime scene tape was now taken down.

“Thank God,” Kate said. “It wasn’t your beautiful stalker. Just the cops.”

“Wonder what would happen if they caught us here.”

Kate shrugged. “We better get going. We don’t want to find out, do we?”

As we walked out the door and stood at the elevator, my attention focused on the ring. The fact that it had been found was big news and most assuredly would need to be in the book. It was a new development in the Harlow story. She hadn’t been buried with it. Justine and I had been certain she was.

But evidently Mama Jean’s word was the last.

Mama Jean’s word was the final command on most decisions regarding her daughter. You could say what you wanted about Jean’s mother, but she rightfully swindled William Powell into buying the crypt in Forest Lawn where her daughter’s remains still lie. Jean’s elaborate marble crypt in the Sanctuary of Benediction, inside the Great Mausoleum, Forest Lawn, Glendale, cost William Powell a reported $25,000. Jean’s mother sent him the bill. Jean was buried in the gown she wore in Libeled Lady with a single gardenia in her hands, and a note from William Powell: “Good night my dearest darling.”

The gesture seemed really sweet until you grasped what a prick he’d been to her—a flower and a note was the least the man could do. Powell probably wouldn’t have paid for Harlow’s crypt, either, had Mama Jean not seized the opportunity.

What was $25,000 to Powell?

Nobody ever knew for sure whether Harlow and Powell were officially engaged—their relationship had been on again, off again for a few years. She’d worn the huge star sapphire ring on different fingers at various times. She wanted to be married to Powell—but his failed marriage to Carole Lombard prevented him from going into the relationship full force. He’d been called “Mr. Lombard” one too many times. And, after all, he was a star in his own right.

Ah, men. Such fragile creatures, I mused. “He could screw her, but he couldn’t marry her. Imagine that,” Justine had said with a snort. And back then, marriage was everything for most women. I wondered about Jean—was it everything for her?

I’d read about other women divorcing in the 1930s, and it was a big deal. Women were often shunned in small communities. Children sometimes were given to orphanages and mothers shuffled to the poorhouse. Even if the results were not quite so dramatic, a divorced woman in the 1930s dealt with a whole other set of problems—things like women not even being allowed to have their own bank accounts, let alone their own property. Even a married woman would have to get her husband’s permission to do anything official. Yet Jean Harlow, at the age of twenty-six, had been married three times and divorced twice. All accounts agree she was an old-fashioned woman who wanted to settle down with a man and “be happy.”

Could something as deceptively simple as a good relationship have been all Harlow desired, even as she strutted around on camera?

But then again, why couldn’t she have had both? Was it possible in the ’30s? I grunted.

Was it possible today?

Hunger pangs brought my mind back to the present. “Let’s get something to eat,” I said to Kate as we entered our guest studio.

“Sounds good to me,” she said.

While she slipped into the bathroom, I slipped the ring in my purse.

This was a bit chancy, I admit. But then again, who’d think to look for a valuable ring in an ordinary handbag?