by Blue Suede Clues: A Murder Mystery Featuring Elvis Presley
Elvis dug into his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. He peeled off six hundred dollars in fifties and handed them to Clifford, saying, “Three days in advance with full expenses.”
“I appreciate that, Mr. Tatum,” Clifford said.
“Just call me, Jodie,” Elvis said inexplicably, and feeling inexplicably amused for saying it.
“All right, Jodie,” Clifford said, sitting behind his desk. “Let me give you my entire history with this case.”
Elvis sat down across from him and listened. Littlejon had phoned Clifford from the L.A. county jail the day after his arrest, having gotten his name and number from a fellow stuntman named Mickey Grieves. Clifford had no idea who Grieves was at that point or why he’d recommended him, but one thing he did know was that once Grieves took the witness stand at the trial, he acted as if it was a forgone conclusion that Littlejon was guilty of the murder. He had even offered the court his theory of why Littlejon did it: because, in fact, Squirm had raped poor Holly McDougal, and when she threatened to go to the police, he killed her to shut her up.
“Is there any chance that’s true?” Elvis asked.
“That’s not for me to say, Mr. Tatum,” Clifford replied coolly. “As Mr. Littlejon’s attorney, I am not permitted to even entertain thoughts of his guilt.”
Clifford delivered this line in clipped tones with an edge of haughtiness. Evidently, the six hundred dollars that had recently taken up residence in the pocket of his frayed pinstripe suit were prompting delusions of grandeur.
“Look, Mr. Clifford,” Elvis said brusquely. “Littlejon’s in jail doing life and I’m your client now. So I’d appreciate it if you’d just answer my question.”
Clifford massaged his forehead a moment, as if trying to assuage a sudden migraine. “Yes, yes, of course, Mr. Tatum … Uh, what was the question again?”
“Is it possible that Littlejon did rape and kill the girl?” Elvis said.
“Yes, it’s possible,” Clifford replied. “Just about anything is possible in this case. You see, there weren’t any witnesses, at least that we know of. Other than the perpetrator and the victim herself, of course. That Miss McDougal had recently engaged in sexual intercourse was never a question. Littlejon never denied that he’d, uh, had his way with her that day. There were bruises on Miss McDougal’s body, especially around her neck, of course. She’d been choked to death with rubber tubing, something from one of the stunt apparatuses. So rape and murder certainly cannot be ruled out.”
Elvis nodded. “Go on,” he said.
Clifford said that he had taken Littlejon’s statement right in his cell at the county lock-up. His story was basically the same as what he’d told Elvis last night: He and McDougal had had sex on the cot with no one around; he’d left her to go to work on a stunt for The Honeymoon Machine; when he returned to the stunt shack six hours later, the girl was dead and he was handcuffed and arrested immediately.
“Littlejon was convicted on circumstantial evidence, all of it, but there certainly was a mountain of it,” Clifford said. “His fingerprints were all over the place—on Holly’s belt buckle, her shoes, they even lifted one off her thumbnail. His day clothes were on the floor next to the cot. Someone had seen McDougal enter the shack late that afternoon when only Littlejon was in there. The fact is, Mr. Tatum, the only defense open to me was Littlejon’s contention that this young woman was sleeping with virtually every stuntman in MGM’s employ. Proving that would have at least taken some of the air out of the rape theory. But I couldn’t prove that without witnesses, and I put one man after another on the stand—every stuntman who Littlejon said had slept with her—and one after another they denied it.”
“Do you think someone set it up to look like Littlejon did it?” Elvis asked.
“That’s a possibility,” Clifford said. “Or it could have been a cover story that just happened to land in the murderer’s lap after the fact. My guess is that it was a rage killing, not premeditated. Most killers don’t plan a murder like that one—strangling a naked young woman in a bed. That says passion, not plan. So I don’t imagine whoever did it was thinking about his alibi at the time. In fact, I don’t imagine he was thinking at all. And that would include Littlejon himself if he was the murderer.”
Suddenly, Clifford began vigorously rubbing his temples, apparently whacked by his migraine again. The lawyer’s eyes darted around the room, then he jumped out of his chair and scooted behind Elvis to a bookcase where he immediately began rooting around. He was clearly not searching for a citation in a law text.
Elvis waited. He’d once had a drummer with this affliction, a curly-headed kid who drank a bottle of bourbon every day before noon to chase away his hangover from the night before. They had finally let him go after one performance when he slid off his stool and crashed into his standing cymbals in the middle of a ballad. It wasn’t too hard to picture Regis Clifford sliding off his chair in the middle of a cross-examination.
Hanging on the wall behind Clifford’s desk were several diplomas in cheap plastic frames. One was from a community college called Baywater. Elvis didn’t know much about colleges, especially on the West Coast, but somehow that name did not sound promising. Another was a doctorate of law from a place called McGeorge Law School, and another was Clifford’s certification that he had passed the California Law Boards in 1953. There were two more, both in Spanish. Above these, partly obscured by a calendar, was a small photograph in a gilt frame. Elvis squinted. A tall, white-haired man in judge’s robes stood next to a fine-featured, smart-looking woman in a ball gown with a big hunk of jewelry around her neck. Standing in front of them were two boys, both in coats and ties and knickers, their hair slickly parted, looking like posh English schoolboys. Elvis stood and leaned over the desk to get a closer look. The boys were the same height and the same stringy build and their little jackets and ties were the same too. Fact was, except for the parts in their hair—one on the left, the other on the right—the two boys looked identical. Twins.
Elvis felt that familiar twist in his gut he experienced whenever he spotted twins. His own twin, Jesse Garon, had died the day they were born, yet there was not a day that went by that he didn’t find himself thinking about him. Thoughts like, Where would Jesse be now if he had lived? And what would he be doing? Sometimes Elvis imagined the two of them singing together like the Everly Brothers, traveling from gig to gig in an open convertible, harmonizing country songs, joking with each other, reading each other’s thoughts.
Clifford returned to his seat, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his suit. “So, where were we?” he said earnestly, as if he had been interrupted by an important phone call.
“That you up there?” Elvis said, pointing at the photograph.
“One of them is,” Clifford said.
“Identical, right?” Elvis said.
Clifford sighed, then offered Elvis an indulgent smile. “It’s like the man said—one of us is identical, but the other one doesn’t look like anybody.” Clifford shuffled some papers on his desk. “We were talking about Littlejon’s defense,” he went on quickly, “at least, what little of it there was, considering what we had to go on.”
Elvis would have liked to talk more about Clifford’s twin, but it was clear that Clifford did not. No matter, that’s not what he was here for.
“What did you find out about Holly McDougal from other folks?” Elvis asked. “Other actresses, her family, neighbors and the like.”
“Not much,” Clifford said. “All she had for family was a mother and a sister. The mother hung up on me whenever I phoned. Finally, I went out to their place, an apartment in a run-down neighborhood in East L.A., and got pretty much the same treatment there. She screamed at me through a crack in the door, saying she would not have me sullying the good name of her poor, dead, God-fearing daughter. She must have heard that I was trying to establish that her daughter had a weakness for stuntmen. Anyhow, I took the same kind of abuse from the neighbors. And I’ve told you abo
ut the other stuntmen. They’d go on and on about what a sweet kid Holly had been, so adorable and sincere, the kind of kid you’d want for a daughter.”
“How about other people at MGM?” Elvis asked.
“I didn’t get much from them either,” Clifford said. “Not a very forthcoming bunch, considering the way those people will talk ad nauseam about just about anything once they get on the Jack Parr Show. Half the movies they do over there have somebody getting shot in the head or stabbed in the guts, but God forbid anybody should actually talk about a real murder. Not the polite thing to do. Which roughly translated means it would be bad publicity.
“But there was one exception, a makeup artist named Connie Spinelli. I got her on the phone at her home and she said that Holly McDougal was the wildest kid she ever knew. That she did all kinds of crazy things and told Connie all about them. She said that she had stories about Holly that would make a stripper blush to her ankles.” Clifford’s sallow face momentarily brightened. “Those were her exact words—‘make a stripper blush to her ankles.’ Droll image, eh, Jodie?”
“What exactly did she tell you about Holly?” Elvis asked.
“Not a thing, as it turned out,” Clifford said. “We made a date to meet the next morning at a coffee shop near the studio. I waited two hours for her, then went over to MGM and asked if she’d come in yet. She hadn’t. In fact, they said Miss Spinelli’s employment with them had been terminated the day before. I called her at her home again, but there was no answer. And when I went out there later that day, a neighbor said that she had gone out the night before and not come back. She didn’t come back the next day either. Or the next. And the day after that, we went to trial without the benefit of Miss Connie Spinelli’s testimony.”
“Have you tried to find her since then?” Elvis asked.
“It was a little late for that, don’t you think?” Clifford shrugged defensively. “Look, Jodie, I don’t know what your relationship with Mr. Littlejon is. And God knows, I appreciate the way you do business.” Here, he patted his money-bulging pocket. “But I’d be misleading you if I told you we had a prayer of reopening this case, let alone of exonerating Littlejon.”
“How come?”
“Because you haven’t heard the worst of it,” Clifford said. “Like about Miss Nanette Poulette, Littlejon’s so-called girlfriend. If there were ever any doubts in the jury’s mind before she took the stand, they were gone afterward. That woman handed them the keys to the California Correctional Institution and told them to lock Littlejon up and throw them away.”
“What did she say?” Elvis asked.
“She said in no uncertain terms that her boyfriend was a sexual pervert. She said he liked to play sick little games at home with her. Dress-up games. He’d bring home costumes from the wardrobe room for her to wear, Little Bo Peep outfits and little schoolgirl outfits. Those were his favorites, she said, the schoolgirl outfits with short short kilts and pleated white blouses. She’d put them on and then he would chase her around the house, calling, ‘Oh, little girl? Where are you? I’m going to get you, little girl.’ And then when he caught her, he’d get rough with her. A good spanking for openers.”
Elvis put his hand to his forehead. If there was one thing about human nature that he would never understand, it was why people were always trying to turn sex into something that it wasn’t. They took this God-given beautiful thing and turned it into scum. It was a psychological problem, he’d read, but that didn’t keep Elvis from feeling utter disgust when he heard stories like this one. And he didn’t think he could stomach many more like it. Maybe it was time to bail out of this whole business. Call the six hundred dollars in Clifford’s pocket an act of charity and get back to his real life.
“Littlejon denied the whole thing,” Clifford abruptly went on. “He told me she made the whole thing up, and the truth is, I tended to believe him. Because Nanette’s little courtroom performance seemed to break his heart more that anything else that happened to him. He said that he’d never had a more tender love in his whole life than the one he had for her. Of course, Littlejon blamed himself for Nanette’s lie. He said she was probably so hurt to find out that he’d been playing around with Holly that she wanted to get back at him. Sometimes, he even said that he deserved to spend the rest of his life in prison just for that, just for cheating on the love of his life.”
Once again, Elvis found himself feeling for that poor soul, Squirm Littlejon. “I don’t suppose he has seen her since then,” he said. “No visits.”
“Not likely,” Clifford replied. “From what I hear, she’s been doing very well in the movie business. She changed her name back to Nancy Pollard and went into some kind of production work.”
“Where?”
“MGM.”
Elvis impulsively reached for the phone on Clifford’s desk. “Mind if I make a call?”
“Depends on where to.”
“Take it out of your expenses,” Elvis snapped, dialing the studio and telling the switchboard operator that he wanted to speak with Tom Parker.
“Who should I say is calling?” the operator asked.
Elvis eyed Clifford. “Jodie,” he said to the operator, “Jodie Tatum.”
Parker picked up himself. “Where the hell are you?” was his greeting.
“Sorry I’m late,” Elvis said. “Something came up.”
“Damn it, Elvis, do you know what it costs to keep twenty-five people standing around on a movie set? And all of them union, right down to the second gaffer?”
“I’ll cover it. Be there in an hour.” Elvis hung up and nodded to Clifford. “Listen, I’ve got to be somewhere, Mr. Clifford. I’ll see if I can find that stuntman, Grieves. Miss Pollard too. And if anybody knows what became of the Spinelli woman. Meantime, why don’t you go out to Miss McDougal’s neighborhood again and root around. I’d skip her mother and neighbors this time, but maybe you can find where she went to school and her church and people she knew there.”
Clifford’s eyes belied a flicker of anxiety. It probably wasn’t simply the prospect of roaming around East L.A. that worried him—it was the prospect of having to leave his office at all.
“One last thing,” Elvis said, standing and gesturing to Clifford’s desk. “I’d like to take the transcript of Littlejon’s trial with me. Bedtime reading.”
Now Clifford looked seriously alarmed. “I, uh, I don’t think that would be such a good idea,” he stammered.
“Why not?”
“You see, there’s only one copy, Mr. Tatum, and-”
“I’ll take good care of it.”
“It will just seem like a lot of mumbo-jumbo to you,” Clifford persisted.
“You get a lot of experience with mumbo-jumbo in my business,” Elvis replied, extending his hand across the desk. “Let’s not waste time, Mr. Clifford.”
Clifford reluctantly gathered up several sheaves of paper, stuck them helter-skelter into a file folder, and handed them to Elvis. He followed Elvis to the office door.
“Some people say that everybody has a twin,” Clifford blurted out as Elvis was about to leave.
“What do they mean by that?”
Clifford shrugged, smiling grimly. “That whatever you do, there’s somebody out there—your twin—doing the exact opposite thing at the same time.”
“What the devil for?”
“Balance,” Clifford said. “Cosmic balance.”
6
O Shine On Me!
Elvis came trotting into Colonel Parker’s office at one-fifteen, one hour to the minute after he’d phoned.
“Do me a favor, Colonel,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt. “Call down to makeup and say I’m on my way. Likewise to wardrobe. I’ll be on the set in thirty minutes flat. You tell Gene I’m just aching to dance the hoedown.”
Colonel glanced up at him from his desk, a disdainful expression on his face. “You seem awful cheerful for a man who just skimmed four thousand dollars off our profits,” he said.
&n
bsp; “Got to be,” Elvis replied, slipping out of his shirt and tossing it on a chair. “There’s a lot of sorrowful people out there. Got to keep the balance.”
“Well, while you’re feeling so chipper, you might want to take a look at this morning’s mail.” Parker wagged his head toward the corner. Two more peach crates had been added, both of them brimming with film scripts. “Sixty-five so far, and that’s before the morning papers came out,” Parker said. “But you’ll be pleased to hear that at least three of them are by truck drivers. Didn’t see any by fishermen though.”
“Actually, it’s sixty-six,” Elvis said blithely, already on his way out the door. “I got one hand delivered to me last night.”
Madge Dickerson greeted him at the makeup department door with, “So, who are you today, Elvis?”
“Jodie,” Elvis replied, settling into the leather-padded chair.
“Well, then it’s a good thing I snatched that wig back from Mr. Parker,” she laughed. “That man was growing attached to it.”
“He always wanted to be a blond,” Elvis said, closing his eyes tight as Madge began lathering on the tawny foundation that was supposed to give Jodie Tatum a woodsy appearance to contrast with the soft, pale face of his look-alike cousin, Lieutenant Josh Morgan. “You’ve been here quite some time, haven’t you, Miss Madge?”
“Too long.” Madge intoned. Elvis could picture the expression of mock despair on Madge’s face as she said this. She was a hefty woman in her late forties who dyed her hair a different color every week “just to keep the mirror from getting bored” she explained. Madge encouraged the impression that she’d seen it all in her day and was not about to get excited by finding any celebrity perched in her makeup chair, not even Elvis Presley.
