Daniel Klein

by Blue Suede Clues: A Murder Mystery Featuring Elvis Presley

  “We need to talk, Clifford,” Elvis said.

  “We are talking.”

  “In person,” Elvis blurted out. “Tonight.”

  “It’s eight o’clock.”

  “One of the advantages of doing business with you is you’re open night and day,” Elvis said.

  “Touché,” Clifford said. “I’ll leave a candle burning in the window for you.”

  “It’ll have to be at my place. I’ve got a little problem,” Elvis said. “Take a cab. You haven’t made a dent in today’s expenses yet. And Clifford?”

  “What, Mr. Presley?”

  “I keep a dry house here.”

  “I’ll manage,” Clifford replied. Elvis gave him the address and they hung up.

  Elvis’s head was spinning. That morning, Clifford had said that everybody has a twin out there doing the exact opposite of what he is doing. He’d added some poetry about “cosmic balance,” but he’d actually meant it as a matter of raw fact—he and his twin, LeRoy, had been out there on the exact opposite sides of the Littlejon case.

  Elvis popped the final two White Tower burgers into his mouth, one after another, and turned back to the trial transcript. First Assistant District Attorney LeRoy Clifford had laid out his case methodically, starting with the two cops who were the first at the scene of the crime after receiving a tip-off from an anonymous phone caller. The policemen not only described the crime scene, but produced several large glossy photographs of it that were passed to the jury and entered into evidence as exhibits.

  But no one had mentioned the phone tip to Elvis before. Had they tried to trace the call? Elvis flipped to Regis’s cross-examination of the two policemen. He did ask about the call, but no, they didn’t have a clue who it was from and they had not traced it. All they could say was that it was a woman’s voice. On redirect, LeRoy got the cops to recite some stock sermon about the importance of protecting anonymous informants lest they hold back information out of fear of reprisal. In other words, tracing the call wouldn’t have been the decent thing to do.

  Next came the prosecution’s three forensic specialists, a triple threat with triple evidence: Littlejon’s fingerprints were all over the girl’s belongings and there were some on her person; they’d also lifted clear prints from the rubber tubbing she’d been garroted with; and they had swabs that proved she had engaged in sexual intercourse shortly before her murder. On cross, Regis had asked the obvious question: Were there anyone else’s prints on McDougal’s possessions and body? The experts had replied almost off-handedly that, of course, there were other fingerprints, there are on almost everything and everybody at any given time, but most of those other prints were faint or smudged, suggesting that they had been imprinted less vigorously and undoubtedly earlier in the day.

  MR. R. CLIFFORD: Let me get this straight, Professor. What you are saying, essentially, is that the person who leaves the clearest fingerprints wins the prize—that prize being a murder indictment.

  PROFESSOR G. GILMARTIN: That is not what I am saying at all, Counselor.

  MR. R. CLIFFORD: Funny, that’s how it sounded to me.

  MR. L. CLIFFORD: Objection, Your Honor. Harassing the witness.

  JUDGE LOWENSTEIN: Sustained.

  Elvis smiled. He didn’t know whether or not Regis had been tanked at the trial, but right there he certainly sounded a whole lot more intelligent than anybody else did.

  Regis had then asked Professor Gilmartin if the swabs proved that it was definitely Littlejon who had engaged in intercourse with the victim. No, Gilmartin admitted, but there was other physical evidence that did, namely several strands of pubic hair that matched Littlejon’s.

  MR. R. CLIFFORD: Excuse me, Professor, but this is one of those many things I don’t know a thing about. How do you go about matching pubic hairs?

  PROFESSOR G. GILMARTIN: A series of tests for density, size, tensile strength, and color.

  MR. R. CLIFFORD: Really? And there’s that much difference between one person’s little pubic hair and another person’s?

  PROFESSOR G. GILMARTIN: There are significant differences, yes.

  MR. R. CLIFFORD: So, if we could pluck one pubic hair from each person in this courtroom—with their permission, of course—

  [Vocal Disruption: Laughter.]

  JUDGE LOWENSTEIN: Order. Order in the courtroom.

  MR. R. CLIFFORD: As I was saying, under those circumstances, would you be able to go around and match each hair to its original, uh, site?

  [Vocal Disruption: Laughter.]

  JUDGE LOWENSTEIN: Order, please.

  PROFESSOR G. GILMARTIN: We certainly would be able to make a match by groups.

  MR. R. CLIFFORD: Groups? How many groups would that be, Professor?

  PROFESSOR G. GILMARTIN: If one calculates all the permutations—as I say, for density, size, tensile strength, and color—that would come to twelve clearly discernable groups.

  MR. R. CLIFFORD: Twelve? You mean every twelfth person essentially has the same pubic hair?

  PROFESSOR G. GILMARTIN: You could put it that way if you like.

  MR. R. CLIFFORD: Gosh, Professor, that sure seems like a slender piece of hair to hang a man on.

  Man, that Regis had a mouth on him! But what was he getting at? Littlejon had admitted that he’d had sex with the McDougal girl that afternoon.

  LeRoy Clifford had then trotted out one character witness after another—half of them MGM employees and most of those Littlejon’s fellow stuntmen. All their stories were pretty much the same: Holly McDougal was the closest thing to an angel they’d ever met, and Fredrick “Squirm” Littlejon had all the markings of a creep and scoundrel, not to mention a pervert.

  Mickey Grieves had been the last called to the stand, and he was a real prize. The man probably took acting lessons—heck, everybody else out here did—because the words came out of him in dramatic, writerly sentences. Miss McDougal was “a tender soul, like a delicate flower.” And Littlejon was known as Squirm because of his sneakiness; he was “a snake in the grass with a venomous bite.” There was no way Mickey Grieves could have composed those lines, let alone composed them on the spot. Finally came Grieves’s corker: he figured Littlejon had raped the girl and then murdered her when she threatened to turn him in. Grieve’s evidence was a supposed conversation he had had with the accused in which Littlejon had bragged about raping several underage girls. Regis had objected on the grounds that this was only hearsay evidence and the judge concurred but, of course, the damage was done—done and dirty.

  On cross, Regis had started with, “Was it true that Grieves himself had engaged in sexual congress with the victim on numerous occasions?”

  M. GRIEVES: I deeply resent that question, Counselor. Holly was a child the age of my own daughter. I am not a child molester, sir.

  R. CLIFFORD: But, at the time, you didn’t know her true age, isn’t that a fact? She was passing herself as eighteen, wasn’t she?

  M. GRIEVES: Well, that’s pretty darn young in my book.

  R. CLIFFORD: What I don’t understand, Mr. Grieves, is how it is that every one of you stuntman knew Miss McDougal so well. I mean, she was just another bit player out of hundreds of bit players on the MGM lot.

  M. GRIEVES: Holly—Miss McDougal—just kinda took a shine to us. And us to her. Stunt people are a friendly bunch, for the most part. Mostly cowboys and rodeo folk, family people, don’t you know. And I know Holly didn’t have a daddy of her own, not living at home, at least. So I guess we were kind of family to her. Substitute daddies, you might say.

  The creep was going for an Oscar.

  Strangely, the prosecution had not called Nanette Poulette, aka Nancy Pollard, to the stand. How could that be? Regis had labeled her the most damning witness of them all, and considering Grieves’s choice testimony, she must of have been a humdinger.

  The answer was on the next page of the transcript. Poulette/Pollard was the first witness for the defense. But after a couple of exchanges with Littlejon’s belo
ved financée, Regis asked the judge to have her declared a hostile witness.

  Hostile was too kind a word for the job Poulette did on Squirm. According to her, Littlejon was a pervert of the lowest order. She immediately launched into a detailed description of his dress-up games and spankings, and then, for a capper, she said that during these sick encounters he had insisted on calling her “Holly.” Like Regis said, Poulette had handed the jury the keys to the California Correctional Institution on a silver platter.

  Regis’s next witness wasn’t hostile, just dense. His name was Jerry Griswold and he’d been the crane operator for Squirm’s stunt on The Honeymoon Machine on the day of the murder. Griswold confirmed that they’d had harness trouble on the set, which left Littlejon dangling at sixteen feet for several hours. Elvis had no trouble picturing that. Just reading about it made his ribs ache and his ankle throb even worse. Then, without being prompted, Griswold began rattling on about how weird Squirm had acted while he was hanging up there—doing circus tricks and cracking dumb jokes and telling everybody that he was Harry Houdini reincarnated.

  J. GRISWOLD: He said, like, Look at me everybody. I can slip out of anything.

  Little doubt that, at this point, the jury thought this was Littlejon’s way of saying he could even slip out of a murder wrap.

  Regis’s next witness was Dr. Hector Garcia of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de Mexico. The transcript recorded that the court stenographer had requested that the name of the instituto be spelled out letter by letter, a laborious process that consumed almost an entire page. It got worse. Garcia had to repeat every one of his responses four or five times because the judge insisted that his accent was impenetrable. Finally, a translator had been summoned, and Dr. Garcia was instructed to give his testimony in Spanish. That sure must have impressed the jury—an expert witness who couldn’t even speak English.

  But, in whatever language, Elvis found Dr. Hector Garcia’s testimony riveting. Regis did not ask Garcia anything about the murder itself, only about the evidence of Holly’s sexual activity. The Mexican doctor explained that he had been granted permission to take his own swabs of Miss McDougal’s vaginal canal, that he had then refrigerated the samples and transported them to his own laboratory in Santa Teresa. There, using a technique that he had recently developed, he suspended the samples in a neutral medium and spun the resulting mixture in a centrifuge. This process resulted in two samples, one slightly but distinctly denser than the other. Garcia had then spread a microthin layer of each of the new samples on glass slides, stained them, and then inspected each under an electron microscope. This, too, was a new technique of his own devising. What it revealed was that the victim had engaged in sexual intercourse with two different men within a period of five to seven hours.

  R. CLIFFORD: Dr. Garcia, in layman’s terms, can you tell the court how you were able to reach this conclusion?

  H. GARCIA (VIA INTERPRETER, M. SANCHEZ): Human spermatozoa contains one half of the blueprint of a potential embryo in the form of individual genes and chromosomes. Each set is different—which, of course, is why one man’s child looks different from another’s. We have no idea what particular chromosome results in what particular human characteristic or phenotype. But under an electron microscope, they certainly can look very different from one another. And that is what I saw: traces of chromosomes from two very different donors.

  R. CLIFFORD: Could it not have been chromosomes from two different emissions from the same man?

  H. GARCIA (VIA INTERPRETER, M. SANCHEZ): That’s highly unlikely. The markers I saw were remarkably different from one another.

  R. CLIFFORD: Dr. Garcia, again, in layman’s terms, can you tell the court how you ascertained that one of these emissions was deposited five to seven hours after the first?

  H. GARCIA (VIA INTERPRETER, M. SANCHEZ): Spermatozoa are like little tadpoles propelled by the movement of their tails. They begin to die almost immediately and this is reflected in their motility—how fast and vigorously they swim. In effect, I was able to determine that one set of sperm was approximately five to seven hours further along in this process than the other.

  Regis had then gotten Garcia to repeat the whole business in even simpler terms to make sure that the jury got the main point: On the day she was killed, Holly McDougal had had sexual relations with two different men at two different times.

  LeRoy Clifford had immediately asked for a short recess before he began his cross-examination of Garcia. From his questions that followed, it was clear that he spent that recess huddled with his own forensic team.

  L. CLIFFORD: Dr. Garcia, we have with us in this courtroom four of the most prominent forensic specialists in the United States. And yet not one of them has heard of the procedure you described. How would you account for that?

  H. GARCIA (VIA INTERPRETER, M. SANCHEZ): That is not for me to say, is it? But the procedure is very new, and perhaps my learned colleagues in the United States are not completely up to date on procedures developed in other countries. Perhaps they have not read my articles about it in Mexico’s Journal of Forensic Medicine.

  L. CLIFFORD: Excuse me, Dr. Garcia, but in what language is that journal written?

  H. GARCIA (VIA INTERPRETER, M. SANCHEZ): Spanish, of course. It is the language of my country. But I, myself, read all of the forensic journals in German, French, and English.

  L. CLIFFORD: English, eh? A language in which you appear to have severely limited proficiency.

  R. CLIFFORD: Objection, Your Honor. Harassing the witness. JUDGE LOWENSTEIN: Overruled.

  H. GARCIA (VIA INTERPRETER, M. SANCHEZ): Reading and speaking are two different skills, sir. I have no problem reading medical journals in English.

  L. CLIFFORD: Really? How would you ever be able to know that, Doctor?

  R. CLIFFORD: Objection, Your Honor. Harassing the witness. JUDGE LOWENSTEIN: Overruled.

  Elvis felt his blood boil. What Assistant District Attorney LeRoy Clifford was saying in no uncertain terms—and he was getting away with it—is that only a fool would take the word of a dumb Mexican who can barely speak English. And then LeRoy had gone in for the kill.

  L. CLIFFORD: Do you believe it is possible to match a particular sperm sample to a particular donor?

  H. GARCIA (VIA INTERPRETER, M. SANCHEZ): Yes, I do. But I am pretty much alone in this belief at this time. I have no doubt that in the future my findings will be borne out by other scientists.

  [Vocal Disruption: Laughter.]

  JUDGE LOWENSTEIN: Doctors, please.

  Apparently, it was the eminences from Harvard and UCLA who had cracked up at Garcia’s scientific prediction. Obviously, professional respect did not cross borders, particularly the one to the south.

  Regis’s final witness was the defendant himself, and it was a disaster from start to finish. It was not that Squirm did not give the right answers or that he was inconsistent on cross-examination, it was that the proceedings had to be halted seven separate times for the defendant to regain his composure. As the court stenographer deftly put it: “F Littlejon: [Inaudible; sobbing.]” It seems F. Littlejon weeped and wailed virtually every time Nanette Poulette’s name was mentioned. On the witness stand, Squirm was about the furthest thing there was from the slippery Harry Houdini.

  The jury deliberated for exactly one hour, the minimum set by Judge Lowenstein. Frederick Littlejon, Esquire, was found guilty of murder in the first degree.

  Elvis shuffled the pages of the transcript together and put them back in the folder. Only then did he realize just how much his ankle was killing him. He reached for the vial of painkillers on his bed table and popped one into his mouth.

  9

  The Universal Themes of Rock and Roll

  A faint rolling drumbeat. Or was it the summer rain pattering on the roof of his Tupelo bedroom? A soothing rhythm, like the bass and drum intro to an Italian ballad about love and loss and the hope for a new beginning. He could almost hear the lyric.

  “Elvis?
”

  Yes, the lyric was coming now, although it was not in English or Italian or Spanish or any other language he’d ever heard of. It was a lyric that rose above any manmade language into the universal language of the human soul. Words that were not about feelings, but were the feelings themselves—the aches and sweet yearnings of every man who ever longed to love with a pure heart.

  “Elvis?”

  He opened his eyes. Someone was rapping rhythmically on his bedroom door. He was still sitting up in bed, the transcript folder on one side of him and the empty White Tower bag on the other. He looked at his watch: 9:10. If he had slept, it could only have been for a few minutes, but he felt like he was coming out of a long, deep sleep.

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me, Elvis.” Joe’s voice. “Got a man here who said you sent for him. A Mr. Regis Clifford.”

  “Thanks, Joe. Let him in.”

  Clifford had dressed up for the occasion in a three-piece charcoal-gray suit, white shirt, and paisley silk tie, and he’d combed his sandy hair straight back with the benefit of Brylcreem.

  “Good evening, Mr. Presley,” he said, striding to the bed and shaking Elvis’s hand. “Sorry to hear about your mishap.”

  Except for the Scotch on his breath, you would have thought Regis was the Prince of Wales. Heck, for all Elvis knew, the Prince of Wales smelled of Scotch too.

  “Want me to bring you anything, Elvis?” Joe asked. “Joanie could fix you up some cocoa.”

  “No thanks, Joe,” Elvis said. He turned to Regis. “How about you, Mr. Clifford? Cocoa?”

  Clifford made a big show of considering the offer, then smiled and said, “It just doesn’t feel like a cocoa kind of evening, if you know what I mean.”

  As soon as Joe left, Regis pulled a chair up alongside Elvis’s bed and looked at him seriously. “How did it happen?” he asked, gesturing at Elvis’s ankle.