Thirty

I plotted out Justine’s life, as I did for any biography, on a timeline. It took several hours. There were gaping holes in it. For example, her apartment—when did she get it? This line of thinking reminded me I needed to check in with the lawyer again about Justine’s will. Surely they’d found the updates by now? Surely her cousin Judith had gone back to Florida?

I now plotted out the Jean Harlow look-alike’s life. Not much there. She was in her mid-thirties, so she’d been born in the 1980s. She’d lived in New York for the past few weeks, coming here from Hollywood. That’s all we understood. How long had she been here?

I listed my questions, which, once the police investigated further, might be easy to answer:

Had she connected with Justine while she was here?

When, exactly, did she come here from Hollywood?

Where was she before she lived in Hollywood?

What did she do to make a living?

Family?

Boyfriends?

Girlfriends?

Where had Justine and the look-alike crossed paths? They must have. What did they have in common? The ring? Or was it something else?

I almost didn’t hear my cell phone beep. It jarred me back into the real world.

“The IRS has no recent Jean Harlow on record,” Den said when I answered the phone.

“If the IRS doesn’t know about her, who would?” I stared at the computer screen. I’d just written a few chapters. I wanted to write at least one more before the day was over.

“I don’t see where the investigation is heading. We’re meeting about it today. Justine’s case may go cold,” Den said.

“Why?” I asked.

“We’ve not gotten any real leads yet. We have the killer’s DNA. A grainy picture. But nothing after that. You realize we don’t have those kinda resources.”

“Yeah, but the look-alike? Her case is new, right? Perhaps the two of them link? Have you gotten the result of the tox tests for her? “

“No, not yet,” Den said. “But yeah, the woman in the morgue, she freaks me out. I was looking at some pictures of Harlow, and I gotta say I don’t think I could tell ’em apart.”

“I hear you.” The image of the perfect corpse etched in my mind, I shivered. “What’s going to happen to her if nobody claims her?”

“Do you really want to know?’

“Yes,” I said.

“The city will take care of her body. She’ll be buried over on Hart Island. You know about that place?”

“Sort of,” I said. It was where the indigents and other unclaimed people were buried. The notion of the Jean Harlow look-alike over there set my teeth on edge. Not right. Somebody had to claim her.

“It’s all respectfully done,” he said. “Sometimes they even have funerals.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I’m not sure, but I’ve been to a few of them. It’s not required, but a lot of us go to pay respects,” he explained. “Just seems like the right thing to do, especially if it’s a body you found or something. Pay your respects. Every person’s life matters. They deserve a little respect when they die.”

A growing twinge of awe for this guy settled in my center. There was so much more to Den than his looks. Longing tugged at me.

I struggled with how to react.

Den broke the silence. “I can’t imagine our Jean Harlow there.”

Our Jean Harlow.

When the real Jean Harlow died, it was more of a spectacle than Justine’s star-studded memorial service had been. I’d read in detail how Harlow’s funeral had all the trappings of a Hollywood movie. At nine that morning—June 9, 1937—all the Hollywood studios observed a moment of silence. Louis B. Mayer made sure the service, held in the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather Chapel at Forest Lawn, Glendale, was a grand event. Fans clamored at the gates of the cemetery and photographers scaled fences. Flowers overflowed onto the lawn from inside the chapel. None other than Clark Gable served as a pallbearer and usher, with Carole Lombard saving him a seat in a pew. All of Hollywood turned out to say goodbye to Jean, two hundred and fifty mourners packing into the small chapel. Jeanette MacDonald sang Jean’s favorite song, “Indian Love Call,” and then joined Nelson Eddy in a duet, “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.” Afterward, hordes of fans swarmed in and stripped away every flower and personal memento.

One of the real mysteries in Jean’s life, of course, was the death of her second husband, Paul Bern. Rumors ran amuck.

The most interesting rumor was that Jean herself had killed him after finding out about a woman who claimed to be his common-law wife. Could sweet-faced, well-loved, newly married Jean Harlow have taken a gun and, in a fit of mad jealousy, shot her husband? Call me crass, but I liked to think so.

But his death was just one of the unsolved mysteries of the day. One challenge in writing about any star of this period was that the studios spun their actors’ life stories, making it difficult to get at the root of any star’s personality. Also, it made it possible for many of them to get away with many things—yes, even murder.

It’s not so easy these days to get away with murder, kidnappings, and so on. Cameras are all around us. Big Brother is watching. If you run a red light, the cops trace it and send you a ticket. Tracing people online is easy. Which is why thoughts of the Jean Harlow look-alike held firm in my mind. There were so few traces of her life—at least, none that we could find. That had to be deliberate.

∞

My cell phone buzzing awakened me at three a.m. Who the hell would be calling? I blinked away the blur. No number. I rolled over and let it ring.

The damn thing buzzed again.

“Hello!”

Heavy breathing.

“Hello? Who is this?” I sat up on the chaise. It wasn’t as if I’d never had a heavy breather on the other end of the line. But things in my life had gotten so strange that this call freaked me out.

A sob. Female.

“Can I help you?”

“She’s dead,” the voice said between sobs.

“Who?”

“Harlow,” the garbled voice said.

“Yes,” I replied. Keep her on the phone. Didn’t they always say that on TV? Why? “Do you know anything that could help us find who killed her?”

Silence. Then muffled sobs. “I should never have called.”

Which one was this? Marilyn? Madonna? Her voice was too soft and muffled, like an old-fashioned radio losing its signal.

“It’s okay. We’ll protect you.” I somehow found words between the thoughts circling in my brain. “We’ll do everything we can.”

“Her father,” the voice whispered. “Her father.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know.” She hung up.

“Wait!” But it was too late.

I examined my phone like it held the secrets of the universe. But the number was “unrecognized.” Still, maybe the police could trace it and we could compel the person to tell us more. If she knew more.

Wide awake, skin prickling, I stood and paced around the library. Her father. Her father. Why would a father kill his child? How naïve was that question? It probably happened a lot.

But wait. Was I going to believe an anonymous caller in the middle of the night? It could have been someone wanting to throw me off the trail. We didn’t know the look-alike’s real name—let alone her dad’s.

And, what’s more, we were uncertain if her murder had anything to do with Justine’s. We needed hard evidence.

Evidence. Den’s face sprang in mind.

It was three fifteen a.m. Could I call him? He was a cop, used to getting calls in the wee hours.

My phone was burning in my hand. I pressed Den’s name.

Ring. Ring. Ring. Pick up Den.

“Yeah.” A gravelly, sleepy voice came over the phone.

“It’s me, Charlotte.”

“Yeah. What’s up?” A smoky image of him in bed swirled around in my mind. I shoved it out.

“I just got a call from someone about our Jean Harlow.”

“And?” He yawned.

“She said her father killed her.”

“Yeah? Did she give you a name?”

“No.”

Disappointment vibrated in the air between us.

“Will you be able to trace the call?”

“We can try. Let’s hope she’s not using a burner phone. Then there’s not much we can do.”

“Sorry to call you in the middle of the night.”

“Come down to the station tomorrow and I’ll have the guys look at your phone. Around ten.”

“Okay. See you then. Good night.”

I lay back down, tossed and turned. I couldn’t find peace. Who was I kidding? I lifted myself from the chaise and padded into the kitchen, where I brewed a big pot of coffee. I expected this to be a break in the case and not just some Jean Harlow fan fruitcake. I hoped the phone call would lead us down the path to answers.

When I walked into the station, a kind of buzz was happening. Something electric and untouchable, but exciting.

Den met me at the front desk with a grin. “We’ve got a break. C’mon. C’mon back.”

I followed him through the snaking hallways and cubicles.

“This is Joe Delvechio. He’ll take your phone and get it back to you before you leave.”

I smiled at Joe and handed him my phone.

“Please sit down,” Den said, gesturing at a chair across from a small, plain desk.

“What’s up?”

“We’ve found out exactly how Justine was killed.” His cheeks were flushed and the veins in his neck throbbed. “All we have to do is uncover a trace of it in Harlow to link these two murders.”

As I couldn’t seem to locate any words in my brain, Den continued.

“He injected her with potassium chloride. That was the other drug, the lethal one.”

“What? We witnessed him slip something into her tea.”

“That was the Valium. But on closer examination of the security footage, we could see him quickly inject her right after he dropped the pill in her tea. The ME confirms it.”

I remembered viewing that on the recording—the quick pat on Justine’s shoulder. That must have been when he did it.

“So, how it works is an overdose of potassium causes severe heart arrhythmias and mimics a heart attack. In a matter of minutes, the heart spasms and then stops. The ME says huge amounts of potassium goes into the blood whenever any muscle tissue is damaged. The heart is a muscle, right? So it would look like a fatal heart attack. Unless there were more tests.”

I felt a loosening in my lungs. An unraveling. A release of tensions, as if I’d been holding my breath for all this time. My hands glommed onto my burning face. Unwanted tears splashed over my cheeks in a waterfall of emotions. Was I crying in front of Den?

He leaned over. “Are you okay?” Placed his hands on my shoulder. “Take a deep breath for me?”

I tried. Breath came in heaving stutters.

“I assumed you’d be thrilled about this,” he said softly. That voice. That soothing voice of his spread through the center of me. I nodded.

Sorting my emotions was beyond me. Conclusive evidence. A half-resolution sat in my chest as I attempted to gain composure, but it ripped and tore at me. This wasn’t the closure I’d anticipated. It was empty. Justine was still gone, and we still had no idea who killed her. The same with the Jean Harlow look-alike.

Joe came back into the room. “Sorry to interrupt.”

“What do you have for us?” Den stiffened, now alert, sounding official and not sympathetic at all.

“Nothing. Not one damn thing.” He handed Den my phone.