What Happens in Vegas

by Halliday, Gemma

I feel sick, nauseous. My world is crumbling around me. The accusing detectives smile wickedly and shine a powerful desk lamp directly into my eyes. Cigarette smoke fills the air, hanging there like a roiling gray curtain, filling my nostrils and stinging my eyes. One of the officers blows more of the stuff directly into my face.

  “What’s your real name?” he asks me.

  “Elvis Presley.”

  “Bullshit.” More smoke, more lamps, more light. “What’s your full name, goddammit?”

  “Elvis Aaron Presley.”

  “He’s dead!” screams the detective.

  “No,” I say carefully. “I’m not.”

  From behind the one-way mirror, which looks, in fact, more like a window, someone suddenly bursts into tears. It’s my daughter, and she buries her face in her mother’s shoulder. I’m not supposed to be able to see this display through the one-way mirror, but I can. I always can. Apparently, in my dreams, I have X-ray vision.

  I’m still staring at my weeping daughter when a hand turns me violently around, forcing me to look up into a glaring light. I can’t see who’s silhouetted before me.

  “You killed him,” says the voice. The voice sounds like it could be my own.

  “No, I didn’t,” I say. “It was a hoax.”

  “A hoax?” The voice grows enraged. Now it sounds like a multitude of voices, a cacophony erupting from my legions of fans. A universal outlet for all those I had let down, hurt, or disappointed.

  “I needed out,” I say, babbling, nearly incoherent. “I needed to start over. Everything...everything was so crazy.”

  I hear more weeping. I turn my head around. It’s still my daughter. Always my daughter. Always weeping. And it kills me. She won’t look at me, and it breaks my heart more than you know.

  “Look at what you’ve done to her,” says the voice, and now I’m sure it’s my own voice.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Say it to her.”

  I look over at my baby, my mouth open to speak, but no words come out. Someone smacks me hard across the face, rocking me. I nearly topple out of the chair. My hands, I realize, are tied behind me, as if I had been kidnapped.

  “Who are you?” screams the voice.

  “Elvis—”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I don’t know. Not anymore....”

  “Who are you?”

  And here is when I always wake up, tears streaming down my cheeks, always alone in my tiny single apartment in Los Angeles, just down the road from the various studios where I had made so many of my early films. My blankets are often on the floor and I’m usually covered in sweat. My head often pounds from the usual hangover. I usually never go back to sleep. I don’t want to dream the dream again. I don’t want to see my daughter’s pain.

  * * *

  This morning was no different.

  I awoke with a start, bolting upright, momentarily disoriented. My blankets were on the floor again, as if I had been fighting a monster in my sleep. I could still hear the accusing voice in my head, but this time it belonged to my twin brother—my dead twin brother who had died at birth. I heard his voice now, clearly, eerily, reaching up through the depths of my subconscious and down through the ages, spoken in a voice that sounded remarkably like my own.

  “Today is our birthday, Elvis. But, of course, since I was born dead, today is also my deathday. Ironic isn’t it?”

  Yes, I thought, ironic.

  I sat back in bed, closed my eyes, ran my fingers through my thick hair. Tomorrow I see my shrink.

  Thank God.

  Chapter One

  This is going to hurt.

  My apartment was empty. I was standing in my bathroom, dressed in boxers and nothing else. I was about to look very foolish and I was glad there was no one else here to witness it.

  Hell, I was almost embarrassed for myself.

  With one of my own songs playing in the background, I slowly started gyrating my hips. Just a little. Nothing too wild. Nothing like I used to do. And already I could feel a tingle of pain going up my back.

  Yeah, this is going to hurt.

  But I wanted to do it. I had to do it. For quite some time now I had felt the itch.

  And it was a hell of an itch.

  I picked up the pace a little. I felt clumsy and out of sync. I stumbled once or twice as my bare feet slapped against the cold linoleum floor. One of my swaying hips nailed the bathroom door knob, sending the door itself slamming back into the bathroom wall. I think the drywall might have cracked.

  But I continued doing my thing. My crazy thing.

  Mercifully, the clumsiness quickly faded. Amazingly, wonderfully, flashes of my old self came back. I quickly worked up a sweat. My belly, round and full, pulled on my lower back. The strain was nearly unbearable.

  God, I needed to lose weight. So easy to let yourself go when you don’t care.

  But, lately, I had started caring. And slowly but surely I had started changing my diet. A salad here. A banana there. Venti mochas reluctantly switched to grande mochas.

  I tried another move. A patented move. One that had driven the women of the world crazy—

  I swung my leg and hip out, and screamed in pain. I lurched over the bathroom sink, gasping. Something pulled. I hunched there over the bathroom sink, gasping, sweating, staring at myself in the mirror. Gray hair. Custom-built face. Wrinkles.

  God, the wrinkles....

  It’s hell getting old.

  A loud knock on my front door. I sucked in some air, willed myself to stand upright. On knees that were already stiffening, I made my way to the front door, limping slightly, knuckling my lower back.

  I checked the peephole. It was my eighty-year-old downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Haynesworth. I opened the door.

  “Sorry for the noise, Mrs. Haynesworth.”

  “Well, my granddaughter’s asleep. And all that banging up here.” She squinted at me, peering through her remarkably thick glasses. Sometimes I thought she knew my super-secret identity. Then again, with her eyesight, I always shrugged off the feeling. “What are you doing up here, anyway?”

  “Trying out my dance moves.”

  “Dance moves? Mr. King, you’re far too old to be dancing. You might hurt yourself.”

  I smiled. “I’ll keep the noise down, Mrs. Haynesworth. Have a good day.”

  She continued peering at me as I closed the door. I hobbled into the kitchen—and popped a Vicodin or two.

  Or three.

  Chapter Two

  The doorbell rang.

  I was sitting in a comfortable loveseat I had scavenged for free from Craigslist.com, watching a TV that I had recently found on the side of the road, surrounded by tables and lamps and artwork that I had purchased for cheap from local garage sales.

  Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

  It was the middle of a bright winter day and I was watching Oprah, of course. What else was there to do? I liked Oprah. I think she and I would have gotten along just fine. Anyway, she was having a special tribute to the King, being that it was his birthday.

  That it was my birthday.

  Sitting beside her were two women: Elvis Presley’s ex-wife and his daughter. Both looking radiant. Both looking breath-takingly beautiful, especially his daughter. My daughter. Of course, my daughter also looked sad and lost and heartbroken. Always sad. Always lost. Always heart broken.

  Damn.

  The doorbell rang again.

  I ignored it and, entranced, continued watching Oprah’s special tribute to the King, and when the show was finally over, when I had seen enough commercials for feminine hygiene products to last a life time, I was a total emotional wreck. Hell, the collar to my polo shirt was even wet with my tears. Oddly, my knuckles hurt as well—and not just from my arthritis. Apparently, while watching the show, I had been clawing the hell out of the armrest of my recently acquired love seat. In fact, I had torn the seam of it a little. Damn. Then again, perhaps it was a
lready torn? Hard to tell with free furniture.

  Oprah waved goodbye to the camera, and as she did so I watched my daughter look away and bite her lower lip, seemingly stifling a sob.

  Damn.

  As the show went to commercial, I heaved myself up from the sunken love seat, somehow straining my right knee in the process. The roadside TV didn’t come with a remote, so I manually clicked the thing off the old fashioned way. As I did so, high on a bookshelf next to the TV, I found myself staring at a picture of the very same girl who had just been sitting next to Oprah. Except the girl in the picture was a little girl and she was sitting high on her tiny pony, smiling the world’s biggest smile. A girl and her pony, it’s a beautiful thing. She had loved that pony and she had loved me. She looked so happy back then, so alive and happy.

  So how could I break her heart?

  Therein lies the rub.

  She hasn’t looked happy in some time. Trust me, I know this. I study every picture I can get my hands on, minutely, agonizing over the details. Was she healthy? (Yes, from all indications.) Was she happy? (No, not for a long time, but I’ve been wrong before.) And today she had looked utterly and completely miserable. The sadness in her distant, round eyes ran as deep as wells.

  Outside, someone started a lawnmower. I sighed and stepped over to the living room window. Outside, a small Hispanic man was pushing a lawnmower across a swath of grass that ran in front of my apartment complex. Sweat streamed down his caramel-colored skin. The lawnmower was almost as big as he was.

  Up the street, double-parked, was a UPS truck. A bum was currently urinating on its right rear tire. The bum had just managed to stumble away before a fit young man with hairy legs trotted out of a nearby apartment complex and hopped up into the truck and sped away.

  And that’s when I remembered the doorbell.

  Ah, yes, all that damn ringing.

  I moved away from the window, past Kendra the Wonder Kat, who currently lay sleeping in a furry striped ball in the center of my reading chair—no doubt dreaming of mice and toys and things that go squeak in the night—and opened my front door.

  Bright sunshine poured in. Painfully bright sunshine. I shielded my eyes, blinking hard, and there, sitting on the little-used welcome mat, was a thick envelope.

  The package was addressed to E.P.

  Chapter Three

  I sat at my kitchen table with the package. The small hairs at the back of my neck were standing on end, as if a goose had walked across my grave.

  Or perhaps across my brother’s grave.

  Despite myself, I looked over my shoulder, peering down the short hallway to my bedroom. I was alone, of course. Still, I had a sense that I was being watched, and I hate that sense.

  I turned back to the package, a package that was addressed to one E.P.

  Hands shaking, heart hammering, I tore through the padded envelope with a thick and slightly broken fingernail, and removed a clear plastic box containing a watch. On the face of it was Elvis Presley dancing, doing that crazy thing he does with his legs. The watch even showed the correct time. Inside the padded envelope was also a tightly folded piece of paper. I took it out and, with increasingly unsteady fingers, unfolded it.

  It was hotel stationery from the Embassy Suites here in Los Angeles. Just two words were written across the middle of it in small, neat cursive: Happy Birthday.

  I stared at the letter for some time, my mind running through a possible list of stalking candidates, and came up with nothing. Finally, I opened the plastic case and put the watch on—and kinda liked it. It would go well with my already sizable collection of Elvis memorabilia. I’m a nerd like that.

  My cover was blown, that much was for sure. By whom I did not know, and how long before Access Hollywood came knocking at my door, I didn’t know, either.

  Numb and sick to my stomach, I pushed away from the table and went over and sat at my desk in the far corner of the living room. I found a plain manila case folder and wrote “Stalker” on the tab. There, now it was official. I had me a stalker. I slipped the note inside, along with the padded envelope, and filed the whole thing away in my dilapidated filing cabinet that I had gotten for free from a retired doctor.

  In my bathroom, from the medicine cabinet, I found my little bottle of pick-me-up pills. Vicodin. My preferred drug of the day. I tapped out three fat pills, poured myself a cup of sink water and knocked them back one at a time like a whooping crane downing sardines.

  In the kitchen, from a cupboard above the sink, I found my not-so-hidden bottle of Jack Daniels. I unscrewed the cap and drank it straight, and I kept on drinking until I finally felt better.

  Chapter Four

  We were at a Starbucks in Silver Lake, which is a hilly district east of Hollywood. Yes, there was even a lake here. Granted, it was a reservoir surrounded by an eight-foot high chain-linked fence topped with barbed wire, but, hey, that’s L.A. for you.

  I was eating a $1.60 old-fashioned chocolate donut that tasted remarkably like a .60 cent old-fashioned chocolate donut. Across from me, drinking a mocha something-or-other, was an old friend. A very trusted old friend. Clarke McGuire was a defense attorney here in L.A. Five years ago, Clarke hired me to help clear one of his clients of murder. The case started simple, but ended bad. Very bad. Someone had ended up dead, and Clarke and I had been at the wrong place at the wrong time, and suddenly we had a body to dump. And so we did, together, in the desert, in a grave we dug together. Call it a bonding experience. Now we shared a secret that we would take to our own graves, and since we were sharing secrets, I had let him in on a big one of my own.

  Now Clarke McGuire, defense attorney, with his perfectly bald head and too big hands, was one of only three people on Earth who knew that Elvis Presley was living in obscurity in L.A. and working secretly as a private investigator.

  Unless you counted the stalker.

  Without looking up from his newspaper, Clarke said, “Happy birthday, by the way.”

  “Is that why you splurged for the donut?” I asked.

  “That, and because you’re broke again.”

  “Well, you’re a day late,” I said. “My birthday was yesterday.”

  “I’m a day late, and you’re a dollar short.”

  “Oh, brother,” I said.

  Clarke chuckled to himself, turned the page, snapped the paper taut.

  Starbucks was filled nearly to capacity. We sat alone in a corner, near the front entrance, at the only rectangular table the place offered, a table which was designated for the handicapped. I knew this because a little yellow wheelchair was routed into the wooden surface. I wasn’t handicapped, and neither was Clarke. By all rights, this was an illegal coffee affair.

  “We’re sitting at the handicap table,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Neither of us is handicapped,” I said, “unless we count your baldness.”

  “Baldness isn’t a handicap.”

  “Should be.”

  He shook his head. His bald head, that is. “I tried calling you yesterday,” he said. “Your phone was off. Wanted to wish you a happy birthday.”

  “I hate my birthday.”

  “I know.”

  I was quiet. Clarke was reading the L.A. Times, or at least pretending to. More often than not, I caught him watching me. Clarke was a good friend, my only friend, but he was also infatuated with me. Sometimes I wished I had never divulged my secret to him. Surprise, it turned out he was quite the Elvis fan. Lucky me.

  “She was on TV yesterday,” I said. “Oprah.”

  Clarke nodded; he knew who she was. “How’d she look?”

  “Beautiful,” I said. “And sad. Always sad.”

  I was tracing the engraving of the wheelchair with my finger, listening to the chatter of orders at the nearby counter, everyone speaking a secret Starbucks language, meaningless to the uninitiated. I was suddenly wishing my drink had something stronger in it than just a shot or two of espresso.

  “I’d do
anything to see her again, Clarke.”

  “I know.”

  “Just one minute. One hug.”

  “Dead men don’t give hugs.”

  “Thank you, Davy Jones.”

  He chuckled and turned back to his paper. We were silent some more. Starbucks was alive and well and running on caffeine. A few minutes later, without looking up, Clarke said, “I have a job for you if you’re interested. Missing person case.”

  Working was good for me. It kept me sane. Kept my thoughts in check, my mind in check. It was damn easy for my life to spiral out of control if I let it. Working hard and helping others kept me grounded, alive. It also put food on my table.

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “Missing female. Twenty-two, an actress. Missing now for three days.”

  “Haven’t heard about it.”

  “And you won’t. The mother wants to keep this quiet, if possible. Her daughter has a movie coming out this fall, and the mother doesn’t want the bad publicity.”

  “Nice to see her priorities are in order.”

  Clarke shrugged. “Not my business,” he said. “Ideally the girl is found safe and sound and the public is none the wiser.”

  “Except the public might have leads to her whereabouts.”

  “What can I say,” he said. “I’m just their attorney.”

  “Fine,” I said, “What does the LAPD have so far?”

  “So far nothing, which is why the mother is hiring every available PI she can find.”

  “Even old ones?” I asked.

  “Even old ones,” said Clarke. “I told her that you’re the best in the business at finding the missing, that, in fact, it’s your specialty.”

  I finished the last of the donut. “Sometimes they’re found dead, Clarke,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “I left that part out.”

  Chapter Five

  She was an Elvis Presley fan and she was dying.

  I knew this because the L.A. Times did a write up on her in the Community section of the paper. I had been flipping through the paper after Clarke left Starbucks. It’s hard to miss a color photo of a little girl with an Elvis wig and sideburns and dressed in rhinestones and wearing my aviator glasses. Well, hard to miss for me, at least. I stopped turning the pages and read the article. She was in the final stages of leukemia, and her prognosis was not good. Although not stated directly, the impression I got from the article was that she should have been dead months ago. Miraculously, she hung on, and on the days when she was feeling better, she would entertain the other kids with her Elvis impersonation. Apparently, she was pretty good. Most striking was that she was a foster child, having spent her life predominately in the California foster program, having never found a home. She was only seven and my heart broke for her.