by Ben Adams
“I need to do this.”
“This is not what we do. We take photographs. That’s it. Got it?”
“That kid, he was me, doing a job he hated until something better came along.”
“That’s everybody!”
“And he got killed for what? a photo? When he could have been…” John thought about the unfinished puzzle that awaited him. “I need to do this.”
“Goddamnit, John.”
“That kid was me,” John said, pointing to the computer where he constructed his puzzles when Rooftop was out of the office.
“This is not what we do.” Rooftop looked out the window, toward a mountain range half-forested by black and needle-bare trees, victims of a parasitic relationship with rice-sized insects.
“Don’t worry. The minute I find anything, I’ll call the police.” John pressed the hold button. “Alright, Rex, I’m in.”
“Great. We’ll e-mail you everything, a digital copy of the photograph and the photographer’s address.”
“And our usual retainer, five thousand dollars,” John said. Rooftop grinned, then quickly scowled, his anger at John being only temporarily satiated by the money.
“Of course,” Rex said.
“Alright, I’ll head out as soon as I get everything. Where am I going?”
“A little town in New Mexico called Las Vegas.”
That night, John sat at the kitchen table in his apartment sipping a PBR Tall Boy, looking at the Elvis picture. He had reprinted it several times and uploaded it to his phone. Something wasn’t right about the picture, something that struck John as odd, bothered him, made him feel uneasy. Whoever had taken it didn’t know how to use a camera and hadn’t focused the lens, leaving the image blurred, just an impression of the moment. And John’s eyes glazed over trying to make out the details, the big hair, a bloated belly. He couldn’t tell if it really was Elvis or just some guy with the misfortune of having a pompadour, but through the haze of magnification and an unfocused lens, a man stood on a deck, legs shoulder width apart. One arm in the air, slightly blurred in captured motion.
“Is he waving?”
John spent the next several hours researching Elvis conspiracies. As expected, the internet proved to be a reliable resource for contradictory and unbelievable information. There were conspiracy theories connecting Elvis to organized crime, Richard Nixon, the DEA, theories about extraterrestrials being present at Elvis’s birth, Elvis helping Michael Jackson fake his death, Elvis and Michael Jackson living in Ecuador with new identities courtesy of the Illuminati. Having studied puzzles, their logical design and rules, John saw the loose connections forming these beliefs. He also recognized the places where those connections frayed and split from reality. The National Enquirer had a reputation for attracting believers of all ilk, people who accepted modern myths like boy bands praying to the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot having a Dallas Cowboys themed mancave, or Elvis being alive. John flipped the photo several times, deciding not to get caught in someone’s fantasy.
He let the photo fall through his fingers. It landed on the table, mingling with a thick copy of Merriam-Webster’s Colligate Dictionary, Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary, a copy of Word Squares. The books were some of the tools John used to build his crosswords, although since graduation, they’d sat on the table, stacked and stockpiled.
The screen of John’s laptop glowed. He sighed when the empty crossword puzzle grid appeared. The computer program he used, Crossword Compiler, had suggested several filler words, erne, Ursa, olio, all crossword clichés. And he’d deleted them.
Written along the top was his theme, ‘Moving Day’. That’s all John had been able to write since graduating from The Boulder School of Esoteric Art and Impractical Design. A theme. No words. No clues.
John had discovered puzzles the way most young boys do, by reading the funnies. They were the graphics-less boxes beneath Family Circus. He wasn’t interested in Bil Keane’s pudgy children and their labyrinthine routes home, or the inner demons making them break or steal. To John, their idealized family was a farce and could never exist outside of the printed world. He was drawn to the jumbled letters needing arrangement, the empty spaces needing words.
Puzzles gave him the order, logic, and stability he was missing. His father had just disappeared, leaving him and his mother with unanswered questions. But puzzles always had an answer. He just had to figure them out.
As a child, John had spent his spare time studying and solving puzzles, filling in boxes in every newspaper he found, buying puzzle books at gas stations and truck stops when they traveled, trying to finish the book before they reached the landmark or national monument or highway oddity that comprised their summer vacations.
And when it came time for him to go to college, choose a major, he only wanted to do one thing, become an enigmatologist, someone who designed puzzles. While in college, he experienced the excitement of immersion, the thrill of being completely absorbed in his education. However, since graduation, he’d only been able to stare at the screen and question why his creativity and passion were absent, whether he had traded them in for an overpriced degree or they’d been burned away by years of study. And in his darker moments, when he’d lie in bed half-drunk on cheap beer, staring at the ceiling, questioning his choices and how they’d shaped the flow of his life, he wondered if designing puzzles was something he was supposed to do, and if not, maybe it was time to do something else. But he never shared this doubt. He just kept working.
He put his fingers on the keys and tapped them like someone pretending to type on a television show, hoping movement would spur thought. When nothing came, John leaned back and put his hands in his hair. Grunting in frustration, he closed the file, asked himself why the imaginative spirit he possessed in college had abandoned him, only to be replaced by uncertainties.
* * * *
The next morning, John packed for the trip. It didn’t take long. He threw three days worth of vintage sci-fi and comic book t-shirts, plaid shirts, mismatched socks, and zip-up hoodies next to his tooth brush and razor in an old hardcover suitcase he’d bought at a garage sale.
John cradled the gun in his hands. Rooftop had insisted that he take it, reminding John of the hours they spent at the shooting range when John was younger, then the Oreo Cookie Blizzards they’d have afterward. John was still reluctant to take the gun with him, but knew it would make Rooftop feel better knowing he had it. John sighed, and put it in his suitcase.
“You have everything you need?” Kristen Abernathy, John’s mom, asked, sticking her head into his room. Her brown hair was starting to turn gray, and she had pulled it into a ponytail.
“Mom, knock first. I could’ve been, I don’t know, doing something.” He moved quickly and closed the suitcase so she couldn’t see the gun sitting on his rocket ship patterned boxer shorts.
“Sorry. I’m still getting used to you being back. I packed a cooler with some sandwiches.” She crossed her arms over her blue and faded Denver Broncos sweatshirt. She smiled, her face compressing like a concertina, folksy but dignified.
“Thanks. Oh, hey…” John pulled some cash out of his pocket. “Here, this is for you, for rent.”
“No, no, no. This is your money. You save it for something.” She tried pushing the money away, but John grabbed her hand and forced the cash into it.
“This is why I moved back, to help you out.”
“When you said that, I thought you meant laundry or cleaning,” she said, looking at the clothes on the floor.
“To help you pay down some bills. Eventually get you outta here, into a nicer place.”
“John, I don’t need a nicer place. I just need you to be happy.”
“Then take the money.”
Kristen folded the bills and put them in her wallet, next to a family photo. In the photo, John is three. He is sitting on her lap and makes a face at the camera. John’s dad has seen it and is trying not to laugh, while Kristen is smiling like a proud wife and mother, unaware of th
e transformations in her husband and son. Kristen loved the photograph. Every time she saw it she sighed.
“You were so little,” she said. “You missed out on so much with him not being here.” Her eyes swelled like overstuffed grocery bags ready to break.
“Fuck him.”
“John!” She looked up from the photo, her eyes wide and wet. Since adolescence, John had expressed his animosity for his father daily. After eighteen years, Kristen was used to it, but it still disturbed her.
“I was five, Mom. You know how much that messes with a kid’s head? I thought he left ‘cause I broke that stupid Cape Canaveral glass he got at Burger King.”
“He got that because it’s your favorite show.”
“I cried for weeks, swearing I’d be good if he came home.”
“If you’d only known him…”
“I know he didn’t come home from work. I know the police stopped looking for him when they found his car at his job, his wallet and credit cards still in the glove box. Christ…”
“John. Language,” Kristen said, faking shock.
“You asked Rooftop to look for him and even he gave up after a while. When does Roof ever give up on anything?”
“He loved you so much. I saw it on his face every time he held you.”
“Well, that must have changed.”
“Something else must have happened. He wouldn’t leave us.”
“That’s what happened. For whatever reason, he left us. And you did the best you could. No, you did a great job. Because of you, we didn’t need him.” A flap of t-shirt was sticking out of the suitcase and John stuffed it inside. “Still don’t.”
John despised his mother’s infatuation with his father, her forgiving him for leaving and ruining their lives. He wished she could see his father for what he was, the type of person John was hired to photograph.
“Mom, I gotta go,” John said, tired of always having the same conversation. He grabbed the suitcase off the bed and kissed her on the cheek as he left.
The suitcase sat in the trunk of his ’98 Saturn sedan, the cooler filled with sandwiches in the back. John put the gun under the driver’s seat. He flipped through the radio until he found a song that wasn’t sung by teenagers with expensive haircuts. He backed out of their assigned parking space, started to leave the parking lot of the apartment complex, the six buildings conforming to the beige and yellow look of the outlet mall and surrounding sub-divisions, and headed for Las Vegas, New Mexico.
John pulled into Las Vegas, New Mexico around 2:00 p.m. He took his time driving down, hoping the guy in the picture had already left town and he could turn everything over to the local sheriff’s department, let them deal with it. He knew the only reason The National Enquirer hadn’t relinquished their evidence was so they could still run their story. A ‘Killer Elvis’ would generate headlines for years.
As he turned off the highway, his stomach tightened and twisted, like the cheese and mayonnaise sandwich he ate around Walsenberg had been a little sour. But the pain didn’t last long, subsiding as he drove through town.
Las Vegas, New Mexico was a mix of old brick buildings, prefab homes, stucco covered bungalows, ranch style houses. All of them looked like they were held together by rubber cement and thumb tacks. The town was old and rough, the opposite of an expanding Denver. It was the inspiration for paintings of a fading America, or the setting for modern Westerns where the family farm is jeopardized by industrialization. It was the subject of lectures from Intro to Rural Imagery and Its Use in Word Scramble Design.
Several motels punctuated Grand Avenue, many of them newer, built as the town stretched. John ignored them, looking for something that met his art school sensibilities. Then, on the corner of Baca Avenue and Grand Avenue, a galloping centaur repeatedly shot arrows at Earth, all in neon. The sign for The Sagittarius Inn. It was a nostalgic beacon that had flashed the same message for sixty years. Charged by vintage neon, John pulled into the parking lot and checked into the pink desert motel.
* * * *
The photographer’s name was Mrs. Elizabeth Morris. John had asked the hotel manager for directions to her house. She lived on the west side of town, on the corner of Socorro Street and Montezuma Street, buried in an old residential neighborhood. Addresses had faded from mailboxes like dates on weathered tombstones.
John parked in front of a small brick house with a front addition that looked like it had been done by family. Faded vinyl siding contrasted brown brick. A fallen air conditioner rested under a lopsided window. Patches of dead, brittle grass, fitful tufts on bald earth, were the leftovers of a lawn that had died years ago.
He walked up the gravel driveway, past a brown ’74 Pinto and a trailer on blocks.
At the door, he heard music playing inside. ‘(You’re the) Devil in Disguise’. A minor hit for the unmistakable voice that changed the world.
After a couple of knocks, a woman in a white blouse and tan skirt answered. She was older, aged by the desert’s unforgiving sun and dirt-flavored air.
“Mrs. Morris?” he asked.
“Yes?”
“My name’s John Abernathy. I’m a private investigator.” He said this almost like a question, as if asking for confirmation, then handed her his card.
“You don’t look like a private investigator,” she said, arms crossed, looking at his dark green zip-up hoodie, its ratted cuffs stained brown from lack of washings, his faded jeans, vintage Cape Canaveral t-shirt, the iron-on decal of the show’s cast peeling on blue cotton.
“Yeah, I get that a lot,” he said, adjusting his glasses. “I’m here on behalf of The National Enquirer. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”
Her eyes widened and mouth opened. She flung her hands over her mouth, trapping her excitement. But the seal broke. She squealed. John flinched and stepped away from the door.
“I knew it! I knew you’d come!” She screamed, grabbing John’s arms, jumping like a lottery winner. “This is about my photo, isn’t it? Oh, please tell me it’s about my photo! Please tell me it’s about my photo!”
“That’s right,” John said.
“Oh, goodie, goodie, goodie!” She jumped, clinging to John’s elbows, shaking him. He clutched her shoulders to stop her and moved his hands down, dislodging himself.
“The Enquirer hired me to authenticate it, see if it’s legit. Now, has anyone else come around asking about the picture? any other reporters?”
“I didn’t send my picture to anyone else. I’ve been reading the Enquirer for thirty years. I know it’s the only paper qualified to handle this story.”
“Okay, good,” John said, relieved. The intern never interviewed Mrs. Morris, had never made it to town, had died before he could talk to her. His death had nothing to do with the photo. He was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or saw something he shouldn’t have seen. Either way, it was someone else’s problem. And John relaxed a little. The tension of investigating a murder was released, replaced with the prospect of a simple case. All he’d have to do was find the guy in the photo and prove he wasn’t Elvis. Easy. But John knew better. He’d worked for Rooftop long enough to know that nothing was ever easy. The kid might have died before he could make it to town, but that didn’t mean the guy in the photo wasn’t involved somehow, making it crucial that John find him, ask him some questions.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and flipped through the pictures saved in it.
“Now, just for verification, is this the picture you took?” He showed her the picture of the overweight man.
“That’s my picture. Do you think it’s really him?” Mrs. Morris asked, trying to contain her excitement.
“You know,” as John spoke, he felt greasy, like someone who sold used cell phones at the carwash, but he thought he still needed to earn her trust, “I’m not supposed to say this, but I’ve done a number of these investigations, and I’ve got to say, your photo is the best documentation of an Elvis sighting I’ve seen.
A once-in-a-lifetime find.”
“I knew it! I knew it!” She screamed.
“I do have a few more questions I’d like to ask you.”
“Of course. Please come inside.”
John followed Mrs. Morris inside, but stopped at the door. The sight of the walls of her living room caused him to drop his phone.
On the wall next to him hung movie posters, Elvis in colorful shirts being rugged, a clock where Elvis’s arms pointed to the hour and minute and his hips swayed to the pulse of sixty beats per minute. Against the far wall, a display case contained autographs, promotional photos, concert programs, hair clippings tied with a bow resting on a small, satin pillow. Magazines with Elvis’s faded face, from the different stages of his career, weighed down the second shelf. The overburdened shelf sagged like an older Elvis waistline. Porcelain busts, large and small, some formed into salt and pepper shakers or figurines depicting movie scenes, lined the fireplace mantle. On another wall hung a series of toy guitars decorated with images of young Elvis encouraging children to learn his songs. Plates hung above the guitars, showing highlights from Elvis’s life, the scene from Jailhouse Rock, or Elvis surfing, scenes portraying him as vibrant. On a table next to the couch was something resembling a Fabergè egg on a stand, adding an implied class to the room. The egg was open, split down the middle, revealing a tiny Elvis in a Vegas jumpsuit, like he had just hatched and was ready to do two shows a night and matinees on weekends. And of course there were recordings, shelves of 45s and 33s in plastic sleeves.
John had expected a normal southwestern home, with ceramic cacti and purple and turquoise art like the houses depicted in his Regional Home Décor 202 textbook. Unlike those homes, Mrs. Morris’s place wasn’t dedicated to the desert’s color scheme. It was a shrine to the fallen King.
“Your home is amazing,” John said, in awe of her idolatry. She was the type of person John and his art school friends would simultaneously mock and revere for the sincerity of her devotion to kitsch. He picked up his phone and walked around her living room, looking at her collection. He reached out, jerked his hand back, then gave into temptation, picking up memorabilia. He fondled a porcelain figurine, Elvis in a racecar from Viva Las Vegas. He ran his finger over a gold ring with a diamond-studded horseshoe and horse head. But stopped at a faded dental mold. A human incisor had been placed in the mold. Next to it, a framed letter of authenticity. John knelt to get a closer look at the tartar-covered relic. He shook his head, doubting that a modern day grave robber had ripped out Elvis’s tooth, then mounted and sold it. Then again, he couldn’t believe someone would buy half the memorabilia in Mrs. Morris’s home, like the sombrero stitched with Elvis eating a fish taco that hung on the wall next to the window.
