Daniel Klein

by Blue Suede Clues: A Murder Mystery Featuring Elvis Presley

  “Not likely,” Elvis said.

  Pollard led Elvis into her office where Aronson was already busily portioning out baby back ribs, little squares of corn bread, and mounds of coleslaw onto gold-flecked French bone china. The ribs looked like beef jerky. The china looked downright embarrassed.

  “Well, I cannot tell you how privileged I feel,” Pollard said, tucking a linen napkin onto her lap. “It isn’t often we’re able to go right to the source. Skip the middlemen with all their preconceived ideas and work with the one person who knows what’s best for him. For you, Mr. Presley.”

  It was obviously a prepared little speech, but Pollard delivered it well, complete with sincere nods and a modest smile. Then again, she had put in time as an actress, including one consummate performance on the witness stand.

  Elvis poked at a rib with his fork. If it had been at all moist before being rewarmed on the hot plate, it now had the consistency of a horse whip. He moved his fork over to the coleslaw. What in tarnation were those ant-looking things swimming around in it?

  “Caraway seeds,” Aronson piped up behind him. She had remained standing, the attentive waitress anticipating his every question. “It’s a California touch.”

  Elvis nodded. He set down his fork.

  “Let me tell you what I’ve been thinking about, Miss Pollard,” he began. “I want to dig into a drama that has universal themes. Say, love and betrayal.”

  “Interesting,” Pollard said.

  “Yes, very,” Aronson echoed.

  “Like, what if I was this fella who was happily married,” Elvis continued. “A regular guy with a regular job. And a nice-looking woman for a wife, but regular too.”

  “Tuesday Weld,” Aronson murmured.

  “Perhaps,” Pollard said.

  “Well, a Tuesday Weld type,” Aronson countered.

  “And then, one day, I—this fella—gets into some kind of trouble,” Elvis went on. “Maybe with the law or something like that. But my wife, this woman I have loved and cherished with all my heart, she suddenly turns against me.”

  Pollard set down her fork and dabbed at her mouth with her napkin.

  “How?” she asked. “How does she turn against you?”

  “Well, maybe she decides on her own that I am guilty of this trouble I got into, whatever it is,” Elvis said, looking directly into Pollard’s pale eyes. “And not only that, she, like, goes to the police and tells them she’s got evidence to prove I’m guilty.”

  “Classic,” Aronson said, breathlessly. “Really, it’s like a Greek drama.”

  Pollard pushed her plate away and busied herself for several seconds with meticulously folding up her napkin.

  “And are you guilty?” she asked finally, looking steadily back at Elvis.

  “No,” Elvis said. “I am not.”

  Pollard leaned across the table toward Elvis, those sincere nods and modest smiles in action again.

  “But wouldn’t it be more dramatically interesting if you were guilty,” she said. “Then your wife would be caught in a fascinating moral dilemma. Should she go with her loyalty to you, the man she loves? Or should she go with honesty? She really struggles with it. I mean, she loves you dearly, but she’s a good Christian woman who truly believes in right and wrong. And, in the end, she decides to sacrifice her love for you to this higher good.”

  “I like that,” Aronson said emphatically. “Lots of texture there.” She had begun clearing the plates off the table; neither Elvis nor Pollard had taken a bite.

  “But let’s say I’m not guilty,” Elvis said flatly. “And then we’ve got ourselves a real mystery story—who did commit this crime I’m accused of?”

  Pollard sat up straight and leaned her head way back, her long red hair hanging dramatically behind her. She was a good-looking woman all right, but Elvis could see why she’d never made it big as an actress: she had a real affinity for the overplayed gesture.

  “Motive,” Pollard said softly, staring at the ceiling. “What could your wife’s motive possibly be if you actually are innocent?”

  “I don’t know,” Elvis said. “Maybe she never really loved me. Maybe she was in love with somebody else the whole time and I just didn’t realize it, seeing as I was blinded by my own love for her.”

  Pollard shook her head, a simper curling her thin lips. “Forgive me, Mr. Presley, but that sounds a bit trite. More like an afternoon soap opera than a major motion picture.”

  “Wait a sec,” Aronson said, halting at the door with the full plates balanced in both hands. “Let’s stick with that a moment. Say the wife’s in love with somebody else, and she and this guy want to get rid of the husband. So they set him up—frame him for some crime. And that’s why she goes to the police with the damning evidence.”

  “That’s only been done about a gazillion times,” Pollard said wearily. Then, “But, thank you, Maryjane. Please close the door after you.”

  The moment Aronson shut the door, Pollard rose and strode around the table until she was standing next to Elvis’s chair. She grasped one of the crutches he had leaned against the table and balanced it on its tip between the two of them, playfully catching it every time it started to topple, then balancing it again.

  “I get the impression that there is something you want to say to me, Mr. Presley,” she said finally. “Perhaps of a personal nature.”

  Elvis gazed up at Nancy Pollard. “I’m a friend of Freddy Littlejon’s,” he said quietly.

  Pollard burst into laughter—louder and more raucously than Elvis could imagine anything that he said deserved. That over-the-top performance again; even Gene Nelson would have reigned that one in.

  “I’ll be damned,” she said. “So for once Squirm was telling the truth.”

  Funny, those were pretty much the same words Warden Reardon had used.

  “You broke his heart, you know,” Elvis said, not taking his eyes off her.

  “Well, he broke mine!” Pollard snapped back.

  “By carrying on with that girl?”

  “No!” Pollard howled. “By killing that girl!”

  “And what makes you so sure he did that, Miss Pollard?”

  “The same thing that makes everybody else so sure,” Pollard said. “Absolutely everything. For godssake, the man has admitted to being a rapist. A rapist of underage girls.”

  “Who did he admit that to?”

  “His friends,” Pollard said.

  “You mean Mr. Grieves.”

  “For one,” Pollard said.

  “For one and only, as far as I can tell,” Elvis said. “And what makes you so sure that Grieves is telling the truth?”

  Pollard turned, walked slowly back to her chair, and sat down again.

  “Look, Mr. Presley,” she said softly. “I cannot tell you how impressed I am with your loyalty to Squirm. It’s not often that a man of your—your stature—takes an interest in someone like him. I mean, it’s really quite touching. But I think your concern is misplaced. Squirm is a murderer and he only got what he deserved.”

  For the first time since he’d limped into Pollard’s office, Elvis heard what sounded like genuine sincerity in her voice.

  “So what you said at the trial is all true,” Elvis said gently. “About Squirm’s, you know, his dress-up games with you at home.”

  Nancy Pollard’s face blushed that shade of flaming crimson which is reserved for redheads.

  “There … There are all kinds of truth, Mr. Presley,” she said.

  Elvis stared back at Nancy Pollard, struggling actress turned big-time MGM executive.

  “Ma’am, I think you’ve been in the moving picture business too long. Way too long,” he said. “There’s only one kind of truth I know of—the true kind. Now did you play those dress-up games with Squirm or didn’t you?”

  Pollard’s blush deepened several more degrees to an unhealthy-looking purple. This surely wasn’t acting; maybe even her natural responses were over the top.

  “We played those gam
es,” she whispered.

  The moment Pollard said this, there was a peppy knock on the office door and Aronson’s perky voice gurgled, “Ready for the surprise?”

  “Yes, yes, ready, Maryjane,” Pollard answered, her blush miraculously vanishing.

  Aronson came sailing in with a tan cardboard box in her hands. She set it down with a flourish in the middle of the table. Elvis expected the worst—maybe a Hollywood chef’s rendition of sweet potato pie. Aronson lifted off the box top and pulled out a pair of men’s shoes—suede shoes of a luminous shade of blue. She set these on the table too.

  “Do you know what this is?” Aronson trilled.

  “Fifty thousand dollars!” Pollard chimed back in a heartbeat.

  “All you have to do is wear them in your next picture,” Aronson said. “Just wear them, nothing else. It doesn’t matter what kind of story it is. And the Bonavita Shoe Company forks over fifty grand.”

  Elvis cupped a hand across his eyes. At that moment, he would have given just about anything to be back in Memphis, sitting at the counter of Floyd’s Diner and drinking a cup of coffee with the boys.

  “Product placement,” Pollard said. “It’s a gold mine.”

  “Like every time someone drinks a Coke in a picture—and you can see the label—the cash register rings,” Aronson went on breathlessly. “But this is much bigger. Much. Fifty thousand is unheard of.”

  “Colonel Parker is all for it,” Pollard said. “But, of course, he wanted us to run it by you first.”

  Elvis reached for his crutches and pulled himself up onto them. He started immediately for the door. Aronson raced after him, catching up with him as he swung into the hallway. She smiled prettily up at him.

  “Let’s stay in touch, Mr. Presley. I like your ideas very much,” Aronson said softly. “I’m working on some projects of my own, and very soon I’m going to be in a position to do pictures Nancy couldn’t dream of making.”

  Elvis gaped at Aronson quizzically and hobbled the heck out of there.

  11

  Deliver Me from Evil

  The sign on the door said ARCHIVES. The door was half open and had enough tobacco smoke wafting out of it to send an entire encyclopedia in smoke signals. Elvis poked at the door with the tip of a crutch and it swung open to reveal two men, one middle aged, bald, and wearing rimless glasses, the other in his twenties with too much hair. Both were puffing putrid-smelling cigars. They were sitting in the dark splicing film on a Moviola, and when they saw Elvis in the doorway, the young one gasped, “Carumba!” and the other, “Unbelievable!”

  “This the movie library?” Elvis asked. A go-fer upstairs had directed him down to the second basement of the main MGM building.

  Both men sprang to their feet and gaped at Elvis. It was the kind of reaction that Elvis was used to in public, but not here in the palace of stars. Probably not that many luminaries got this far underground.

  “Library, archives. Right, Mr. Presley,” the bald one sputtered.

  “Anything we can do for you, sir?” asked the long-haired one.

  “Hope so,” Elvis said, leaning against the doorjamb to ease the strain under his arms. “I wanted to see clips of a particular actress.”

  “Not a problem,” the older man said.

  “Would you like to sit down, Mr. Presley?” the younger one said, gesturing to the seat he had just vacated.

  “Thank you,” Elvis said. He hobbled around the Moviola and sat down heavily.

  “May I just say one thing?” the younger man asked excitedly. His partner frowned disapprovingly.

  “Go ahead,” Elvis said.

  “I just have to say that you were fabulous in Jailhouse Rock. So sensitive. So vulnerable. We watch it all the time down here.”

  “That’s kind of you to say,” Elvis said.

  “I mean it sincerely,” the man went on excitedly. “As an actor, I put you right up there with James Dean and Marlon Brando.”

  Elvis studied his face for hints of toadyism or sarcasm, but the man actually seemed to mean what he was saying.

  “How about Richard Burton or Peter O’Toole?” The question popped out of Elvis’s mouth before he could think the better of it.

  “Are you kidding?” the young man replied emphatically. “Those two are actor’s actors, not real actors. Every little thing they do is so deliberate, like they always want you to see all the technique and effort they’re putting in it. Really, you can’t see the characters for the acting.”

  “Absolutely true,” his partner echoed. “Neither of them can touch you or Dean.”

  Elvis felt embarrassed by how much pleasure he took from the pair’s professional analysis.

  “The name of the actress I want to see is McDougal, Holly McDougal,” Elvis said. “She was just a bit player.”

  The two men looked at one another warily.

  “She was murdered, you know,” the young one said.

  “So I understand,” Elvis replied. “Can you help me out?”

  “Of course, Mr. Presley.”

  The older man flipped on the overhead florescent lights. The room was far larger than Elvis had thought. In fact, it was cavernous, nut and bolt metal shelves going off in every direction almost as far as the eye could see, every one of them loaded with film reels. The two men raced off in opposite directions, cigar smoke trailing behind them. Less than five minutes later, they returned with a total of five reels. Four were B pictures, three of them musicals, one a circus picture. The fifth was an uncovered reel with less than a one-inch depth of film on it. The label read MCDOUGAL, HOLLY—SCREEN TEST. Elvis reached for it.

  “Want me to see what screening rooms are available?” the younger man asked.

  Elvis hesitated.

  “Or we could thread it up right here,” the older man said, gesturing toward the Moviola.

  “Let’s do it that way,” Elvis said.

  The pair set to work immediately, removing the film they had been splicing—apparently they had been repairing a brittle old master—and threading in McDougal’s screen test. When they had finished, they remained standing on either side of Elvis. The opaque glass monitor on the Moviola was only a three-inch square. Elvis crouched over it. “Let’s go,” he said.

  First, a slate: MCDOUGAL, HOLLY. SCREEN TEST. 9.12.59. TAKE: #1. And then there she was, a wavy-haired blonde with blue saucer eyes and a turned-up nose wearing a pleated white blouse, short plaid kilt, ankle socks, and patent-leather Mary Janes. She was sitting on a high stool in front of a pale blue backdrop, and she was giggling. An off-screen male voice said, “We’re rolling,” and Holly straightened up, smoothed her blouse, and looked excitedly into the camera.

  “Hi,” she said. “My name is Holly McDougal and I am eighteen years old and I have just always, always, wanted to be an actress.”

  She paused, looking expectantly off to one side. “Your audition piece,” the off-screen voice said.

  “Can I get off the stool?” Holly asked.

  “Sure,” replied the off-screen voice.

  Holly slipped off the stool, turned her back to the camera, then faced it again with her eyebrows now puckered and her mouth slightly open, her lower lip dangling. Or was it quivering? Abruptly, she began darting about, waving her hands around wildly. Swatting flies? Playing tennis? Whatever it was, Miss McDougal was clearly acting.

  “‘These are love letters, yellowing with antiquity, all from one boy,’” she recited with what might have been an Italian accent—or possibly it was Negro dialect. “‘Give them back to me! … The touch of your hand insults them … . Now that you’ve touched them I’ll burn them … . Poems a dead boy wrote.’”

  On either side of Elvis, the two archivists tittered.

  “God help us, it’s Streetcar,” the older one said.

  “A Streetcar Named Perspire,” the other said archly.

  Holly McDougal got to the line, “‘I’m not young and vulnerable any more,’” when the off-screen voice interrupted with, “Tha
nk you, Miss McDougal. That should be enough.”

  The girl froze. She looked crestfallen. Her eyes started to tear up.

  “Do you dance, Holly?” another off-screen male voice asked. This voice was cheery and sounded vaguely familiar.

  “Oh, yes!” the girl answered brightly. “I’ve taken ballet for five years. Tap for three.”

  Some muffled off-screen discussion, the screen went blank for a moment, then another slate appeared: MCDOUGAL, HOLLY. SCREEN TEST. 9.12.59. TAKE: #2. The stool had been removed and Holly stood expectantly in front of the camera, her hands on her hips. Suddenly, the music blasted on: Elvis’s 1956 recording of “Blue Suede Shoes.” Holly McDougal began to dance.

  No awkward fly swatting this time. Instantly, the young woman was rocking and rolling with abandon, her slender arms swinging, her head bobbing. Now she was spinning, kicking her bare legs to the height of her shoulders, her kilt rising, then twirling up to her waist exposing red-satin panties. And then her hips began to go, at first in a kind of parody of Elvis’s own moves, rhythmic staccato shifts from left to right on the offbeat, a visual syncopation with a sly twist. But then Holly’s hips went off on their own, grinding slowly in a wide arc, the rhythm gradually picking up as the music rose in volume, now gyrating faster and faster, the kilt fluttering up and down over flashes of red satin. At some point, the top button of the girl’s blouse had come undone; at another, the second and the third. As she gyrated, the blouse flapped open and closed over her high, shapely breasts. Apparently, Holly McDougal was not wearing anything under her prim schoolgirl blouse.

  Throughout the performance, the second off-screen voice could be heard urging Holly on with, “That’s it, baby!” and “Show us what you’ve got!” and “You’re killing me, sweetheart!” When the music ended, the girl twirled to a stop, then sashayed with an insolent smile right up to the camera and planted a wet kiss on the lens. The screen went blank again.

  “Deliver me from evil,” the middle-aged man said, hitting the stop button on the Moviola.

  “Turns out she was only seventeen when they shot that,” the younger man said.