There in the dark he fell in love all over again with the incendiary blonde who had won the heart of America’s Rhett Butler and hundreds of thousands of moviegoers in New York and San Francisco, Terre Haute and Cincinnati. He had always found her unsympathetic in Century, and so had most of middle America during its first run, but now he appreciated the breezy skill with which she met every challenge from John Barrymore, the prince of players. Her ditzy debutante in Godfrey charmed him as it had William Powell, who despite their real-life divorce had insisted upon casting her opposite his socialite-turned-tramp-turned-butler (and netting her an Academy Award nomination), and although little of the chemistry between her and Gable showed in No Man, it comforted Valentino to see them together again, in a medium where no catastrophe, natural or man-made, could separate them. From her golden hair to her shimmering gowns she glowed, and there was more erotic tension in the arch of her brow and the hollow of her cheek than in the most explicit NC-17 ever shot.
Gable had known that. Valentino rejected out of hand the notion that the spark between them had been just another invention of the flacks in the MGM publicity department. What if all the legends were fake? If someone else had been at the wheel of James Dean’s wrecked Porsche? If Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn had secretly loathed each other? If a stunt double had hung off the high clock in Harold Lloyd’s place? An industry without a healthy mythos might as well churn out bottle caps.
When the last frame flapped through the gate he rewound the final reel and retired to bed and his Deco dreams.
“Well?”
Two days had passed since their conference in the projection room. Broadhead had entered Valentino’s memorabilia-cluttered office in his usual fashion, without knocking, swept a stack of French film journals off a chair, and sat scraping out the bowl of his pipe with a Tom Mix penknife he found on the desk.
“Edith Jenkins,” he said.
“What about her, whoever she is?”
“Was. She enlisted as a nurse just after Pearl Harbor, to escape her abusive husband. When she’d been AWOL six weeks, the husband was arrested for questioning, but without a body or any other evidence he was released. The papers lost interest after a while, as they will when the story has no conclusion. She never turned up.”
Valentino started to rise. “Then that means—”
“Don’t get excited. This isn’t a movie, where everything ties together just before the fade-out. She was a brunette. She wouldn’t have left any blond hair in any broken airplane.”
“She might’ve dyed it when she ran away from her husband. Lombard dyed hers.”
“I’m not through.”
Valentino sat.
“This kid’s a freshman, but Bill Gates better watch his back. He dug up a dozen unexplained disappearances involving young women within two weeks of the accident. Two showed up alive later, three dead. No information on whether any of the others were in the army, although two were nurses, a vulnerable occupation then as now. One of them might have signed up under a nom de guerre. Point is the results are inconclusive.”
“Huh.”
“Eloquently put.” Broadhead found high C on his stem.
“We could use that.”
“You could. I’m a publish-or-perish academic. If I start endorsing Elvis and Bigfoot, this institution will retire me on my over-upholstered laurels and I’ll wind up writing paperbacks about alien autopsies and weapons of mass destruction.”
“Your liberal bias is showing.”
“You’re right. Scratch the alien autopsies. So what are you going to do?”
“There’s always DNA.”
“You said the old lady turned you down flat on that.”
“She wouldn’t have to take part. If we found a cousin or something of Lombard’s — a ‘shirttail blood relative,’ as she put it — exhumed the body from Forest Lawn, and compared samples, we could either settle the question or make her claim credible.”
“Even if you could do that, say you proved the corpse is Lombard’s, which of course would be the result. She might destroy the other three reels of A Perfect Crime out of spite.”
“Not if she relinquishes possession first. We could stall for time, go ahead with the publicity arrangements as promised. No one could expect us to follow through with them once she’s exposed as a pretender.”
Broadhead put away the pipe. “Where’d you tell me you were from originally?”
“A little town called Fox Forage, Indiana. I saw my first movie there in a stuffy little box made of concrete.”
“I think you should go back there for a vacation. You’ve been out here so long you’re beginning to think like a grifter.”
Valentino sat back, deflated. “I didn’t like it when I heard myself saying it.”
“Don’t feel bad. I said, ‘Even if you could’ get Lombard’s body exhumed. You can’t. You’d need that theoretical cousin’s permission or a court order, which you won’t get because there’s no probable cause for a search, and then you’d have to pay for it. Digging corpses out of mausoleums is ten times more expensive than putting them in. Then you have to pay to put them back. UCLA won’t foot the bill; we’re lucky it keeps us in paper clips. How’s your cash?”
“Ask my contractor. He’s seen it more recently.”
“Well, there it is. You’ve got one reel of a film you can’t exploit and a crazy old bat who thinks she’s the Queen Mother of Hollywood.”
“I liked her, though. If she isn’t who she says she is, she oughta be.”
Valentino was having a familiar dream. In it, he was standing on a thousand-foot cliff overlooking the ocean, arranging lemmings into an orderly herd to drive inland to safety. Suddenly a storm broke out. Thunder and lightning and lashing winds panicked the lemmings, who stampeded between his feet, dodging his grasping hands, and plunged over the edge of the cliff and down into the pitching waves, which swept them out to sea and out of sight.
He was grateful when the telephone woke him. The lemmings were a unique breed, black and glistening as the bits of film he gathered from both hemispheres to assemble and save from obscurity. Too often he failed just when success seemed at hand.
“I’m not getting any younger,” said a cigarette-hoarse voice. “None of us is, but I’m moving faster than most. Do we have a deal or what?”
“I’m sorry, Miss Peters.”
“I’m sorry, too, if ‘Miss Peters’ means what I think it means.”
“It’s just too risky without proof you’re Carole Lombard. My reputation’s one thing, but the preservation program’s is another. A lot of important work has been destroyed in the past because someone failed to check his facts, deliberately or by accident.”
“In other words, I’m a damn liar.”
“There’s just nothing to show the world you’re telling the truth.”
“What’s A Perfect Crime, chopped liver?”
“The argument could be made that you don’t have to have been in it to acquire a print. You said yourself the studios were careless in those days. You know a lot about Lombard, but she’s been written about a lot. I’m sorry.”