by Blue Suede Clues: A Murder Mystery Featuring Elvis Presley
Elvis told him.
“Son of a bitch,” Regis said. “Grieves would string up his mother if it suited his purposes.”
For a brief moment, Elvis thought he heard that wordless lyric again. It was like a siren song in those Greek stories that Selma had read to him one evening. The song wanted to pull him away from this world.
“And what do you suppose his purposes are?” Elvis said finally.
“To scare you off, I imagine,” Regis said. “Although it seems like an awfully clumsy way to go about it. Especially considering your personal stature. You wouldn’t think a lowly stuntman would risk offending the most valuable star on the studio’s roster. Seems like a guaranteed way to lose his job.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Elvis said.
“So, are you going to tell MGM to fire him?”
“No,” Elvis said. “I think I want to keep Grieves right there, where I can keep an eye on him.”
“And where he can keep an eye on you,” Regis said. “Let’s hope it’s just an eye.”
Elvis nodded, then picked up the transcript folder and pulled out the pages.
“I read it through, Regis,” he said, “and I don’t know much about these things, but it seems to me you did a pretty decent job of defending Squirm, considering.”
“Thank you, Mr. Presley.” Clifford seemed a lot more gratified by this compliment than Elvis would have expected.
“Why don’t you call me, Elvis?”
“It certainly suits you better than ‘Jodie’ does,” Regis said, smiling.
“I’d like to talk to Dr. Hector Garcia,” Elvis said. “In person.”
“I think it can be arranged,” Regis replied.
“Down there in Mexico,” Elvis continued. “At his laboratory. See how he does his little procedure.”
“Okay, Elvis,” Regis said. He hesitated a second, then, “Would you want me to come with you? I, uh, I am fluent in Spanish.”
“Sounds like a good idea then,” Elvis said. “Make the date and I’ll have someone get us the plane tickets.”
“Maybe it would be best if I took care of that part too,” Regis said. “You probably don’t want the people around you knowing what you’re up to, at least until we know who you can trust in this enterprise.”
As if on cue, there was another knock at Elvis’s door.
“I’m kinda busy, Joe,” Elvis said.
“Not Joe—it’s me.” The dulcet tones of Colonel Thomas Parker.
Instinctively, Elvis shoved the trial transcript under a pillow. “Come on in, Colonel.”
Parker burst through the door like somebody had shoved him from behind. “Who the hell did this to you?” was his greeting.
“Did it to myself, Tom,” Elvis replied. “I should’ve heeded your warning about trying to do stunts myself.”
“What stunts, boy? We’re all done shooting that picture.”
“Just fooling around on the lot,” Elvis said. Man, he was getting awful tired of the Colonel treating him like some truant schoolboy, even if he was lying to him like a schoolboy just now.
“And who’s this? Your doctor?” Parker glared at Clifford.
“No, sir, I’m Mr. Presley’s—”
“My scriptwriter,” Elvis blurted, not knowing where that came from. Lately, he seemed to have developed a genuine talent for flip-flopping people’s identities. Maybe he had learned something after all from playing two roles in Kissin’ Cousins.
“Scriptwriter?” Parker bellowed.
“That’s right,” Regis jumped in. “We’re developing quite an interesting property for Mr. Presley. Something that touches on the universal themes of love and betrayal.”
Elvis struggled to keep from grinning. Man, that Regis had a mouth and a half on him.
“Well, I sure as hell hope it’s something he can play on crutches,” Parker snapped back.
“Now there’s a brilliant touch,” Regis replied sarcastically. Elvis was beginning to realize that one big problem with Regis Clifford is that he never knew when to stop.
“How long are you going to be laid up, son?” Parker said, suddenly sounding genuinely concerned—although his chief concern was undoubtedly Elvis’s schedule.
“Just a week,” Elvis answered.
“Well, that’s not too bad,” Parker said. “But maybe you should be in a hospital where they can look after you properly.”
“I’m fine here, Tom,” Elvis said.
“Well, since you’re going to have a little time on your hands, I brought you some reading matter.” Parker signaled to Joe in the doorway who promptly lugged in a peach crate full of scripts. And then another and another. After the final one had been set against the bedroom wall, the Colonel turned to Clifford and said, “No offense intended, of course, Mr. Screenwriter. But there just might be something in there with the universal themes of rock and roll.”
Parker touched Elvis in the middle of his forehead with his forefinger, like some kind of benediction, and started to leave, but then he abruptly turned to one of the crates and lifted off a small soft package covered with butcher’s paper and tied with string. He set it on Elvis’s bed.
“Almost forgot,” he said. “This came in for you just as I was leaving the studio. Has ‘personal’ written on it and you know how I respect those things.” Then he left, closing the door behind him.
Elvis held his hand over his mouth for as long as he could, but then he couldn’t hold it back any longer: he burst out laughing. Laughed so hard that he was popping up and down on the bedsprings. And pretty soon, Regis was laughing along with him just from the sheer infectiousness of it.
“Th … that man,” Elvis sputtered through his laughter. “If he ain’t the devil himself, he surely is his warm-up act. The devil’s own comedian.”
Regis took out his handkerchief and patted his mouth. “Perhaps I should be leaving now too,” he said.
“Not yet, Regis,” Elvis said. “There’s something I need to ask you about. It’s the reason I wanted to see you tonight—you know, face-to-face. You see, I’ve got this picture in my mind of you and your brother in that courtroom. You’re identical, right? Now how the heck did that look to everybody? I mean, it must’ve been confusing for the jury and all.”
Regis took his time doing more work on his face with the handkerchief. Finally, he said, “LeRoy and I don’t really look that much alike. Not since we were kids.”
“How’s that? The way you dress and wear your hair? That kind of thing?”
Regis walked over to the window opposite the bed and looked out. “I sure could use a little nip about now,” he said, his back turned.
“Sorry, Regis. Like I told you, I keep a dry house here,” Elvis said.
“I, uh, I brought a flask with me,” Regis murmured, his back still to Elvis.
“Do what you got to do, Regis,” Elvis said. “But it can’t be good for you.”
Regis swiftly withdrew a flat silver flask from the inside pocket of his suit jacket, screwed off the top, and drained the contents in two swallows. Again, he took out his handkerchief and mopped around his mouth, then returned to the side of Elvis’s bed and sat down.
“LeRoy’s face is deformed,” he said quietly. “Misshapen.”
“Born that way?”
“No,” Regis said. “He had an accident. When he was ten years old. BB gun accident that blew out his right eye and took a piece of his cheekbone with it.”
“God Almighty!”
“So people do not have any problem telling us apart,” Regis went on. “The left side of LeRoy’s face looks just like mine. But on the other, he’s a freak, a freak with a glass eye that wanders and a cheek that turns in where it should turn out.”
“That is an awful thing,” Elvis murmured.
“Indeed it is,” Regis said. “Especially considering the fact that I did it.”
“What?”
“I pulled the trigger,” Regis said evenly. “I shot my brother in the face.”
>
Elvis put both of his hands flat against his face. His fingers were trembling. “It … It was an accident, right?” he blurted out.
“Maybe.”
“What in God’s name do you mean, ‘maybe’?” Elvis stared at Regis.
Regis bowed his head. “It seemed like an accident at the time,” he said in a monotone. “And that is the way it was written up, of course. Couple kids fooling around with a BB gun, shooting at pop bottles out by the lake, taking turns, passing the gun back and forth. And then, this one time, LeRoy passes it to me and—Pop!—it goes off in his face just as I grab it.”
“Then it was an accident,” Elvis said.
Regis raised his head and looked solemnly into Elvis’s eyes. “Have you ever read any Sigmund Freud?” he asked.
“Heard of him, never read him,” Elvis answered.
“Well, Dr. Freud says that there are no accidents. Things may seem like an accident, but there is always a human motive hidden there somewhere. An unconscious motive—the kind that secretly wants to blow your brother’s head off.”
“That’s crazy,” Elvis said.
“It sounds that way, doesn’t it?” Regis said. “But it’s funny the way people just naturally find their way around to that point of view. Maybe that part is unconscious too.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“My parents, for one,” Regis said. “They kept assuring me it was just an accident and that I shouldn’t feel guilty about it. But the more they said that to me, the more I knew that they were thinking just the opposite. That I had ruined my brother’s life because I was careless. And, little by little, it wasn’t because I was careless—it was because I was bad.”
“They said that?”
“Of course not. They never said anything like that. They just lived it. And so that’s how I became Bad Regis, the proverbial evil twin,” Clifford went on with a grim smile. “You know how you never want to disappoint your parents’ expectations of you? Well, I didn’t want to disappoint mine. No, sir, from that day on I fulfilled their’s. Got expelled from school that year. The first of many schools, I might add. Arrested for shoplifting at the age of twelve. Off to military academy where they threw me out for shouting obscenities in chapel. Ran away to Mexico when I was fifteen. Worked in a furniture factory there for close to a year. My little twist on migrant labor.”
“But you went to college. Became a lawyer,” Elvis said.
“After a fashion,” Regis replied. “That part still amazes me. Maybe it’s genetic. My father was a lawyer and a judge, and his father before him. Naturally, they went to Stanford and Harvard Law. I, myself, took a slightly different route. Sent myself through night school by tending bar. Took me almost ten years, but here I am, Counselor Regis Clifford, Attorney at Law.”
“And LeRoy?”
“It took over a year for LeRoy to heal,” Regis said. “They did some reconstructive surgery on him, put in the glass eye, but it never completely worked. He’d look fairly decent for a few months, but then the right side of his face would simply cave in.”
“Awful.”
“Yes, awful,” Regis said. “That’s what LeRoy sees every day when he looks in the mirror. And, when he looks at me, he sees the face he should have had.”
“But he became a lawyer too,” Elvis said.
“That’s right. Stanford, Harvard, Assistant District Attorney, and now he’s got the family seat on the state supreme court. I saved the powers that be a lot of trouble by eliminating myself from the competition for the Clifford judgeship.”
Elvis shook his head slowly. “So, when you look at LeRoy, you see the man you could have been.”
Regis chortled. “You know, Elvis, for a rock and roll singer, you have one hell of a dangerous mind.”
“Maybe that’s what it takes,” Elvis answered, smiling. “Danger is one of the universal themes of rock and roll, don’t ya know?”
Both men laughed, then Regis stood, yawning.
“We’ll have to continue this seminar some other time, Elvis,” he said. “Unless you feel like having me for a bedmate.”
“You’re not my type, Regis,” Elvis said, grinning.
“Well, you sure are a good-looking fella, but you’re not mine either.” Regis started to extend his hand to Elvis, but then his hand abruptly took a detour and picked up the bottle of painkillers off of the bed table. He brought it up to his eyes. “Codeine, eh? Marvelous stuff.”
“It’s for my ankle,” Elvis said.
“Oh, it kills the pain all right. All of it. Now there’s an idea for a song, Elvis—what a man’s willing to do to feel no pain.” Regis set the bottle back down and straightened up. He looked solemnly at Elvis for a moment before he went on. “You know that business about there not being any accidents?”
Elvis nodded.
“I believe it,” Regis said quietly. “Deep down, I believe it.”
After Regis had gone, Elvis sat very still in his bed for several minutes. A distressing thought was tugging at his consciousness—not a fully-formed thought, just the embryo of one. He reached for the bottle of painkillers and popped another tablet in his mouth. It was not long before he heard that siren song again.
10
Blue Suede Schmooze
The sleep of the blessed—that’s what Mamma used to call it. One of those deep-down slumbers that is not even interrupted by a dream. It was almost eleven when Elvis woke, and his first thought was that there was something to be said for sleeping alone. This had been the first night that week that he hadn’t slept with Priscilla at his side. Even in his sleep, he had known she was there, tempting him, troubling him.
Instead of Priscilla, on the pillow next to his was that paper-wrapped package Colonel had left for him. The string slipped off easily. Inside was the Jodie Tatum blond wig and a piece of notepaper. Elvis unfolded it:
Dear Mr. Presley,
I kannut tell you how bad I feel about today. I respek you more than any other man and I shuda known better. I got things to tell you, important things. Doin a rodeo out near Reno tomorow and the nex day. But maybe we kin talk after.
Respekly, Will Cathcart
P.S. You dropt this.
P.P.S. It weren’t no accident.
Elvis tossed the wig to the end of his bed. No, Will, it wasn’t an accident. There are no accidents.
Elvis swung his legs over the side of the bed, setting his left foot down lightly. The ankle still hurt plenty, a tingling sensation now added to the throbbing. For a moment, he considered taking another one of the painkillers, but that wouldn’t do. He had places to go and things to do.
He rang up Joanie on the intercom and asked her to bring up some coffee and a piece of toast. He didn’t have much of a hunger this morning—maybe because those White Tower two-bites were still taking up so much space. He also asked Joanie if she could bring up those crutches that the MGM doctor had given him.
“You aren’t getting up today?” Joanie said. It was more of a statement than a question.
“Just a little,” Elvis replied.
“I don’t think that’s wise, Elvis.”
“Probably not,” Elvis said. “Put a little jam on that toast, would you, Joanie?”
Elvis ate and dressed quickly. He tried to put a shoe on his left foot, but between the swelling and the bandaging it wouldn’t go on, so he just slipped a second sock over the first. Then he called Joe and asked him to bring the car around front—he had a meeting at MGM in twenty minutes. The crutches were more hindrance than help negotiating the stairs, so Elvis just hung on to the banister with both hands and hopped down sideways. Joanie watched him, wagging her head like a Tennessee nanny.
“No need to look so grim, girl,” Elvis said, smiling. “Just call me Hopalong Presley.”
Their car had scarcely made the turn onto Sepulveda Boulevard when Elvis saw a blue Volkswagen Beetle cut in just behind them. He had first spotted that Beetle in his side mirror back by Holmby Park, weaving in and out
behind them. Now he turned in his seat and looked back through the rear window at the car. A gaunt man with a gray beard and a black knit cap was driving, and he glared back at Elvis with a mean-looking squint.
“Think we’re being followed,” Elvis said, turning forward again.
“Autograph seeker?” Joe said, glancing in his rearview mirror.
“Don’t think so.”
“What then?”
“Don’t know, Joe. But let’s lose him, okay?”
Joe screwed up his face. “What the heck for, Elvis?”
“Just do it!” Elvis snapped.
Joe shook his head a couple of times, then gunned it. He jerked the Eldorado into the left lane, then gunned it more. They were flying. A mile later, Joe slipped back into the right lane, then cut off sharply onto the access road to the Mountaingate Country Club. There, he slowed down to thirty. Elvis looked in the side mirror. No Beetle in sight. He reached over and touched Joe’s sleeve.
“Sorry I spoke harshly,” he said.
“You’re just twitchy from your accident,” Joe said.
“That’s right, Joey.”
Elvis hobbled on his crutches into Nancy Pollard’s office almost an hour late. Her assistant, Miss Aronson, a petite bleached blonde of indeterminate age—somewhere between twenty-five and forty—greeted him at the door with a bubbly, “I put the ribs on the hot plate to keep them warm.”
“Forgive me for being so late, ma’am,” Elvis said.
“We’re glad you made it at all, considering your awful accident.” This from a willowy redhead in a tailored pink silk pants suit as she strode from her office with her hand extended. “Nancy Pollard. It’s a great honor to meet you, Mr. Presley.”
Elvis managed to shake her hand with the crutch still tucked under his right shoulder. “So you heard about my little fall,” Elvis said.
“Of course, Mr. Presley,” Pollard said. “It’s the talk of the campus.” She leaned her pert face close to his and smiled coquettishly. “There’s even talk that you are going to sue us for gazillions of dollars for neglect or something.”
