The Jean Harlow Bombshell

by Mollie Cox Bryan

  But I was carrying on Justine’s legacy with this book. Wasn’t I?

  My cell phone buzzed.

  I recognized the number. It was Lucille, the editor. Calling to check on the manuscript. I’d gotten a lot of work done. But what to say about the revelations nagging at me? Again, I let the phone go to voicemail.

  I stood and stretched and walked out onto the apartment balcony. The day had warmed, shifting to more summer than spring. The sky was as blue as I’d ever seen, with big puffy white clouds floating by. Maybe I should finish the book, hang onto the ring until I could hand it over to the proper person, and then put all this behind me. After all, I needed to find a job.

  My cell beckoned me back inside the apartment.

  Den’s number blinked onto my screen.

  “Hello, Den,” I said. “Any news?”

  A long pause. Then, “Yes, I’m sorry. I’ve got bad news for you.”

  A rushing, sinking feeling came over me. What could be that bad? Here I was with a ring in my purse that people were killing for, a woman resembling Jean Harlow had been stalking me, and death threats were appearing on the computer screen. Not to mention my boss had been murdered.

  How could it possibly get worse?

  Twenty-Eight

  Come by the medical examiner’s office,” he said with an edge in his voice. “We’ll talk in person.”

  “What?”

  “I need you to come here as soon as you can.”

  My pulse quickened. His voice commanded me, and I had no choice. This was Den. Sergeant Den Brophy. Tendrils of fear, tinged with lust for him, circled through me as I readied to go to the morgue.

  Nothing could prepare me for what I saw when I arrived.

  Shimmering platinum-blonde hair curled on the metal table. A dainty upturned nose sprang from the pretty face. My gaze traveled along a bisque-white, perfectly proportioned body: breasts, flat stomach—and a slight scar on the pubic mound.

  “So, what do you think, Charlotte?” Den said “Is this your Jean Harlow?

  He obviously believed it was her. How many could there be? He’d warned me it would be bad, asking if I would be okay viewing the body. I said sure. And now here I stood, unable to speak. Finally, words formed in my mouth.

  “It certainly looks like her. And like the real Jean Harlow,” I said. “Right down to the fake mole on her face.”

  “Fake?”

  “Yeah. Jean’s mole changed locations a few times.” I hovered my finger over the mole. “Can I?”

  “Yep,” he said.

  I lifted it. Sure enough, it was fake.

  “That’s kinda strange.”

  “This impersonator was trying to be really authentic, even down to the fake mole,” I said. “Interesting.”

  I snapped a few photos with my phone, feeling sick but thinking that I might need them someday.

  “I think this scar means, well, that we’re looking at a transgender individual,” Den said.

  I took another picture, for future reference, and swallowed another wave of nausea. There was a further tale here. Between the already written lines of Harlow’s life story, here was this person, this beautiful person who’d been following me. Had she wanted the ring? If so, how did she know Justine had it? Or was there something else she’d wanted?

  I breathed in deeply. No, I refused to let the sickening formaldehyde stench make me heave.

  I remembered an old journalism professor of mine. He used to say it was fine to throw up because of being sickened by a corpse or gruesome crime scene—but never in front of a cop.

  But then again, I was no journalist. I didn’t even harbor those inclinations anymore. I was a lackey and a hack—and I was feeling every bit of it in that moment. Had my meeting with the other impersonators placed Jean Harlow in danger?

  “Do you have an ID on her?” I asked, my voice a whisper.

  “Nothing. Has anything in your research led you to other impersonators of Harlow?”

  “I looked up impersonators online and found little. And the agency gave us nothing, remember?”

  If I’d had more time, it might have been interesting to explore impersonators to the stars. But as Justine used to say, “We don’t have time for deep thought and years of research. We’re writing pop biography. Our readers want the drama.” There’d been no point in deviating from this approach, especially because Justine was one of only a few writers who made a living with writing. She’d developed a system—a formula, if you will—and readers responded to it. They adored her.

  I’d often wanted to go a little deeper into our subjects, particularly Clara Bow. But Justine had thwarted me by giving me even more research on clothing, makeup, and Clara’s many affairs. So I hadn’t had the chance to go into depth, given publishing deadlines. The deadlines always pressed, one right after the other.

  “Probably a waste of time anyway,” Den said, shrugging, tucking his chin slightly in.

  I loved that gesture. He was the cutest damn cop I’d ever seen. When he smiled at me, I tingled. I figured it wouldn’t last. It never did. But then again, I hadn’t even slept with him yet.

  “I want to point out this may have nothing to do with Justine’s murder,” he added.

  “Of course it does. Why would you say that?”

  “Transgender people as a group are one of the highest in murder rates.”

  Weight pressed on me. I had no idea. I immediately thought of Kate.

  “It may be a hate crime.”

  “Or my talking with Marilyn Monroe and Madonna set something off,” I could barely say.

  “A possibility—but remote.” Den spoke with empathy, reminding me again of the day Justine passed away and how he’d soothed me, his voice reaching out and wrapping itself around me. His arm went around me, rubbing my shoulder. “It will be okay.”

  I wanted to believe him. But things appeared worse now than they were when I walked in the door. Now there was another dead body. She was linked to the Harlow story. But exactly how? And was she associated with Justine’s murder? Den must have considered these same facts.

  “Okay,” I said, taking one last look at the corpse on the table in front of me. She resembled Jean Harlow so much that it chilled me. And she must have had a hell of a plastic surgeon. It looked as if she would open her eyes and lift herself from the table at any moment. This creature was more beautiful in death than most of us ever are in life.

  “Please tell me what you find out. Cause of death and so on,” I said. “I’m curious.”

  “We all are, “ Den said as he opened the door. I walked through, brushing up against him, enjoying his breath on my neck.

  As we moved into the main office, a group of cops gathered around a desk. They were watching us. I wondered what Den had told them about me and hoped none of them were my Tinder friends.

  “You okay? Where you off to?” he said, pulling me into him in a warm rush after we exited the building. “I have about half an hour. There’s a great coffee shop around the corner. Old school. Ya know what I mean? What do you say?”

  I say my work can wait.

  Twenty-Nine

  Two more weeks until I’d make my move. Or allow him to make his. As long as it was made. Though I had to say, the way this was unfolding was interesting. It had been a few years since a man was interested in learning about me, asking my opinion and advice, caring about my mind. I’d been focused on the rush of need and burn. The warm simmering broth of a relationship had been beyond me.

  Was Kate right? Did I have a problem?

  I did like cops. Hell, I loved them. Lusted after them. But they weren’t the only men I lusted after, were they?

  Before I became even more distracted, I forced myself to get back to work. I clicked away at the keyboard. One word after the next.

  My cell phone rang. It was Den.


  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey yourself,” he said in a breathy voice.

  “What’s up?” I stood and walked around the library glancing over the floor to ceiling built in bookcases. The kind my dreams were made of. I could live in this room, just this room, and be happy among the books.

  “Other than the fact that I had coffee with the most amazing woman?”

  “Den! You didn’t call to tell me that, did you.” I ran my fingers along Justine’s collection of first editions—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner. “But thanks for the compliment,” I said with a laugh.

  “Are you in Justine’s apartment?” he asked.

  “Yes, in her library. It’s still so … amazing.”

  “I was calling to let you know we’ve got a name on our Jane Doe, and you’re not going to freaking believe this.”

  “Okay,” I said with an inflection in my voice. “Get to it, Den.”

  “She’s Jean Harlow.”

  “She is not Jean Harlow,” I said.

  “No, I mean that all of her ID and everything says she’s Jean Harlow,” Den replied.

  “But even Jean Harlow wasn’t Jean Harlow. She was Harlean Carpenter. Jean Harlow was a stage name,” I said. “Actually it was her mother’s name.”

  “I figured that. I remember you saying something about it,” Den said. “But I’m telling you, all the records say she’s Jean Harlow.”

  “Well, obviously, she changed her name.”

  “But there’s no record of it,” Den said. “Name changes are documented.”

  “What about family? Does she have any family? Someone must know why she was walking around looking like a movie star and taking her name.”

  “So far, we’ve found no family,” he said. “She was alone here in the city.”

  The idea of that beautiful person alone in New York City overwhelmed me with some unnameable emotion, forcing a tear to spring to my eye. Hard to believe the look-alike hadn’t had men, at least, clamoring around her. If she hadn’t, there must have been a reason.

  Jean Harlow herself always had men flitting around her. She enjoyed the attention. But she never quite found happiness in the arms of a man. There was nothing unusual about that, I mused. The big irony in her life was that she found love with her last lover—William Powell. But he was a raging alcoholic, which strained their relationship. And then she died. At twenty-six.

  “How could the impersonator be alone? You saw her,” I said. I walked into the room off the library, a formal dining room with a huge chandelier hanging from the ceiling. I switched on the light and watched the crystal reflect onto the ceiling. Marvelous.

  “Yeah, man, I don’t know,” Den said. “But it looks like she just moved here.”

  “From Hollywood?” I said, joking.

  He laughed. “How did you know?”

  My mouth dropped. “Seriously?”

  “Yep,” he said. “But she’s been everywhere. Paris. Munich. Vegas.”

  “Was she an entertainer?” I asked. She must have made a living as a Jean Harlow impersonator, even though the agency claimed otherwise. Of course, there were other agencies.

  “We have no record of her working at all,” Den said.

  “Have you checked with the IRS?”

  “We’re in the process. Once I hear, I’ll call you. But the mystery of our Jane Doe slash Jean Harlow deepens. Wouldn’t you say?”

  How could a world traveler, looking like Jean Harlow and using her name, not attract attention? Why hadn’t she come up on our radar before now?

  I made my way back into the library, sat down at Justine’s desk, and opened my laptop. I was hoping to get another extension on the biography from Lucille. The story of Harlow’s life might have just deepened, warranting a tangent. Perhaps it would lead me nowhere. But it was worth at least two hours of research.

  Truth be told, Jean Harlow’s life was not that interesting to me at first. But as with all of my subjects, as I moved forward in the research and writing, she grabbed hold of my imagination. There were nuggets about the actress that I chewed on and found inspiring—which was just sufficient to keep me going—and they made her feel alive to me. But the Jean Harlow look-alike? She’d already reached out to me in a way that the real Jean Harlow never had.

  “Any idea how she was killed?”

  “No yet,” Den replied. “We’re rushing on the tox reports. So far, heart attack is the cause of death. She was in her mid-thirties, so I’m thinking a heart attack’s not quite right.”

  Shards of excitement zoomed through me. “Heart attack? Like Justine’s? Is it possible she was poisoned?”

  “I’m trying not to project on this situation, but I’d say it’s possible. If that’s the case, we have a very valuable connection.” Den paused and sighed. “A connection leading nowhere at this point.”

  I didn’t accept it. I wouldn’t. If they were connected, there had to be a reason. I’d find that reason. Or die trying.

  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.