by Blue Suede Clues: A Murder Mystery Featuring Elvis Presley
“Yes, sir, it’s a real original,” Elvis said. “Of course, I’ll have to show it to a few folks before we can get started on it.”
“Hey, that’s show business,” Reardon chirped. “But I’ve got a feeling you and I are going to be seeing a whole lot of each other.”
“You bet,” Elvis said. “How about tonight?” He told Reardon that he needed another few minutes with Fredrick Littlejon. It was, of course, no problem at all for the Singing Warden.
As he got into his car, Elvis’s ankle began to throb again, throb and burn like crazy, as if the jalapenos in the barbecue sauce had coasted down his leg and taken up a command post in his foot. He reached into his jacket pocket for his pills.
“There is no way I am going to ride in this car if you take one of those,” Regis blurted out, next to him.
“Just a half,” Elvis said. “I drove over here on a half and I was clear as a whistle.”
“That’s what they all say, Elvis,” Regis said.
“You drive then!” Elvis snapped.
“Wish I could. But I was relieved of my driving privileges a few years back. Drunk driving.” Regis laughed. “You and I are quite a pair, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Elvis said irritably.
“I’m sure you don’t,” Regis said softly. “But just do me a favor, will you? No pill, not now. Please.”
Elvis stuffed the bottle back into his pocket. Damn, for a fella with the health habits of a sewer rat, Regis sure was a prickly son of a gun about his driving conditions. Neither of them said another word until Elvis turned on to Route 14.
“Regis, there’s something I been meaning to ask you about,” Elvis said finally.
“Shoot,” Regis said.
“It’s this Dr. Freud you were talking about. He’s got theories about sex, doesn’t he?”
“A whole shelf full of them,” Regis said.
“So what do you suppose he would make of this business Miss Spinelli told me about? Men getting a special kick out of doing it in the stunt shack?”
“Damn good question, Elvis,” Regis said. “I imagine old Sigmund would have had a heyday with that one. It probably has to do with the danger factor—the risk of getting caught. Freud says that sex is both the strongest human drive and the biggest human taboo. You want to do it all the time, but you know you shouldn’t. And somewhere along the way, the two get mixed up in your unconscious—the drive and the taboo—so that the bigger the taboo, the more exciting the sex. Kind of like the stunts themselves—the riskier they are, the more exciting they are to behold.”
“Well, a scared dog’ll get a hard-on—I have noticed that,” Elvis said.
“Good point,” Regis said. “Freud could have used that for a footnote. When it comes to sex, we all ain’t nothin’ but hounddogs.”
Elvis had to smile. He hadn’t thought old Regis was the type to know his songs. “We men sure are a sorry lot, aren’t we, Regis?” he said.
“Dr. Freud certainly thought so,” Regis said, all seriousness again. “He says it all starts with our mothers. We love them so much that we want to marry them. But, of course, we can’t and that’s where all our problems begin. He says that’s why we all end up with a Madonna-whore complex. We either treat women like our mothers—sainted ladies we wouldn’t think of sleeping with. Or we treat them like whores. Nothing in between. That doesn’t leave a whole lot of options for us, does it? Or for the women in our lives, for that matter.”
“Baloney,” Elvis said. “I think your Dr. Freud had sex on the brain.”
Regis smiled. “He’d call that a defense. A defense for something that’s troubling you.”
“Well, maybe that’s his defense for having sex on the brain,” Elvis snapped.
Regis laughed. “Elvis, you would have made one hell of a lawyer!”
“Yup, that’s my problem all right,” Elvis said. “I missed my calling.”
Both men laughed, and then fell quiet again.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Elvis,” Regis said after a few minutes. “Freud or no Freud, Holly McDougal was a victim long before she was murdered. Men forced her into whatever kind of life she led because men make the rules. Men run the show.”
Elvis nodded. They had just passed the Lancaster town line and would be at the prison in less than ten minutes.
“How about you, Regis?” Elvis said, staring straight ahead. “You got woman problems?”
“I did,” Regis said. “But I gave them up for Lent. Or maybe they gave up on me. Whichever, I’ve kept pretty much to myself for four or five years now.”
“Don’t you miss ’em?”
“Every minute of the day,” Regis said.
They had to spend a good ten minutes with Warden Reardon before they got to see Squirm. Reardon wanted to talk about casting. Elvis, of course, would play Reardon himself. But how about Grace Kelly for his wife? A lot of people said Phoebe Reardon was the spitting image of Grace Kelly. But most important, he had this really crazy idea for Bobo Boyle, the goofy character doing time for passing bad checks. Jerry Lewis! Brilliant, wasn’t it? Jerry Lewis as a con! Elvis agreed with everything.
When Squirm Littlejon saw Regis trail Elvis into the conference room, his face fell. He gave Elvis an enthusiastic hello, but only flicked an eye at Regis and then looked back to Elvis again. Elvis told Squirm that they had already made some progress in the case, but he didn’t give any details. Then he said that they had to go over a part of Squirm’s testimony at the trial that didn’t jell with other evidence.
“You said those dress-up games with Miss Nancy never happened,” Elvis said. “That she made the whole thing up.”
Squirm did his shrinking thing again.
“Look me in the eye, Squirm,” Elvis said. “You did play those games, didn’t you?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Mr. Presley,” Littlejon murmured.
Elvis smacked the metal table between them. “What the hell is wrong with you, boy? Would you rather spend your life in here than talk about—you know, talk about—”
“Sex,” Regis chimed in.
“Right, sex,” Elvis said quietly.
Squirm raised his manacled hands to his face, then leaned as far as he could across the table. “Can’t talk with them around,” he whispered, gesturing with his eyes toward the guards on either side of him.
Elvis looked at the guards, both of them burly men in short-sleeved shirts that revealed tattoos on their biceps—one celebrating the U.S. Marine Corps, the other celebrating someone named Lily.
“Gentleman, I’d be much obliged if I could have a couple of minutes of privacy with my client here,” Elvis said.
“Can’t do it, Elvis,” the ex-marine said. “Regulations.”
“Is it against regulations to accept my personal autograph?”
The guards conferred for a moment then headed for the door. “We’ll be right outside,” Lily’s admirer said.
Littlejon squirmed around in his chair, his eyes cast down, and then began. “We’d been together about two years, living out at the beach house, and things started to cool down between us,” he said quietly. “It’s natural, I suppose. You still love each other, but the bed thing kind of loses its kick, if you know what I mean. So, after a while, you’re doing it less and less. Kinda putting it off, like a chore. Well, that started to put Nanette in the dumps. She’d carry on about how I didn’t find her attractive any more and I’d tell her I did, but, you know, actions speak louder than words.”
Squirm stole a quick glance at Elvis then lowered his eyes again.
“Anyhow, she got ahold of this book called Making Whoopie by some sex doctor. And it was full of all kinds of tricks for what he called, ‘rekindling the sexual fire.’ Games and things. And one of them was this dress-up business—pretending you are somebody else to make it feel fresh.”
“So that’s when you suggested she dress up like Holly?” Elvis said.
“No,” Squir
m said. “I didn’t even know who Holly was at that point. Never even seen her. But one day Nanette comes home with this schoolgirl get-up—little blouse and kilt and Mary Jane shoes. And to tell you the truth, it did turn me on. The sex doc was right, I guess.”
It was the same kind of outfit that Nanette had seen Holly wear at the screen test—the screen test where Nanette was caught on film plainly seething with envy over the young girl’s body.
“And who’s idea was it to call her ‘Holly’ while you were—”
“Nanette’s,” Squirm said. “Like I said, I didn’t even meet Holly until months after Nanette brought home that schoolgirl get-up.”
“And when you did meet Holly … ?”
“She wasn’t wearing anything like that when I met her, that’s for sure,” Squirm said. “First time she came out to the shack she was wearing some clingy thing that didn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination. Tell you the truth, I never did think it was strange that her name was ‘Holly,’ like what Nanette wanted me to call her. It’s a pretty common name. Just thought it was a coincidence.”
“You’re telling the truth now, Squirm,” Elvis said softly.
“I swear,” Littlejon said.
“And why didn’t you tell the truth on the stand?”
Squirm shrugged. “It just didn’t seem like, you know, the gentlemanly thing to do.”
“Even after Nanette had told the whole court that the games were your idea?”
“That’s right, Mr. Presley,” Littlejon whispered.
“Well, you certainly are a gentleman, Squirm,” Regis said. “One hell of a gentleman.” These were the first words Regis had spoken since they entered the conference room, and there was not a trace of irony in his voice.
“One last thing,” Elvis said. “Did you know that Holly McDougal was carrying on business in the stunt shack-call-girl business?”
Squirm raised his head, a tiny smirk playing on his lips. “You got to be kidding. That girl was giving it away.”
“Only to special people,” Regis said.
It was almost eleven o’clock before Elvis and Regis were back on the road again, heading for L.A. Elvis had signed his autograph for each of the guards—the ex-marine actually produced a little red autograph book—and then spent a few more minutes with Reardon discussing the possibility of casting Sidney Poitier as a death-row inmate. Elvis told him it was a fabulous idea, although this little charade was starting to make him feel kind of guilty.
Squirm’s confession had given Elvis a strange feeling, part puzzlement, part disgust. God knows, there weren’t any love songs out there about losing the desire to make love to the one you loved. No ballads about “rekindling the sexual fire,” no “Dress-up Game Rock.” Even if there were, he couldn’t see himself singing them. Love was a pure and beautiful thing, not a psychological problem some sex doctor fixed up with a bag of tricks.
“So tell me, Regis, what was Nanette to Squirm—Madonna or whore?” Elvis kept his eyes on the road.
“Sounds like he tried to make her into both for a while there,” Regis replied. “He wasn’t turned on by this person he’d grown to love as a genuine woman, so she had to pretend to be somebody else for that part. At least until he found himself Holly to be his concubine.”
Elvis shook his head. He wasn’t buying it.
“In Europe, it’s a way of life, at least for those who can afford it,” Regis went on. “A Frenchman has his wife for raising his family and going to church with. And then he’s got his mistress for the other. It’s the accepted thing.”
“Sounds like a lot of lying and cheating to me,” Elvis said.
“I know what you mean,” Regis said. “And that’s why I dropped out of the whole game.”
Elvis drove in silence for several minutes.
“How come you know so much about Dr. Freud?” Elvis said finally.
“At one point in my life I was trying to cure myself,” Regis said.
“Of what?”
“Confusion,” Regis replied.
15
An Attraction of Genes
Elvis slept for virtually the entire seven hours to Santa Teresa, only waking briefly to change from the commercial jet to a six-seater prop in Durango, then to a taxi and a bus in Tuxpap. Even though his ankle was no longer throbbing, he had taken an entire tablet of painkiller in Los Angeles Airport just in case it flared up again. In any event, the pill made the time pass pleasantly enough. It carried him off to a country of the mind where the landscape was unobstructed and there were no choices to be made.
Dr. Hector Garcia was waiting for them at the Santa Teresa bus stop with a cup of piping hot café con leche in each hand, an amazing feat considering that the bus had arrived over an hour late. Garcia was a slight man with a graying goatee and glittering black eyes. His English was heavily accented, but perfectly understandable, Judge Lowenstein’s ruling to the contrary. Elvis liked Garcia immediately.
The instituto was only a short walk away. You could see it from the bus stop, a complex of pink missionary-style buildings in the midst of tin shacks, all surrounded by towering tropical mountains. Regis and Garcia walked ahead, talking animatedly in Spanish, while Elvis lingered behind, sipping his coffee and breathing in the fragrant jungle air. He felt like he had awakened from one dream into another. It was a bit like Hawaii here, but a whole lot wilder. He had never seen such starkly vibrant colors as in these tropical flowers and trees, never moved through air so light and invisible, or experienced such profound silence. The faint sputter of the bus, now a good mile away, sounded grotesquely artificial, an affront to nature. For one delirious moment, Elvis could not remember exactly what had brought him here, but it did not matter in the least. He felt free and at peace. Why would a man want anything more than that?
He followed Garcia and Regis into a building where the temperature immediately dropped and the noise level rose. Intense-looking young men and women in laboratory coats were scurrying through the corridors, clipboards and notebooks in hand. Some looked up and smiled, but most remained hunched over, jabbering to one another in Spanish at warp speed. Near the end of the corridor, Garcia stopped and pushed open a door, holding it for his guests.
If Santa Teresa was an explosion of nature in the raw, Dr. Hector Garcia’s laboratory was a monument to the clean lines and sterile spaces wrought by the hand of man. Another world within a world, Elvis thought. Which one is real? Selma had once read him a Japanese fable about a man who dreams that he is a butterfly; when he awakes, he wonders if he is a butterfly dreaming that he is a man.
“Mr. Clifford, I wish you to meet my colleague, Dr. Suarez,” Garcia was saying.
A dark-haired woman in a lab coat offered her hand to Regis. Dr. Suarez was in her late thirties, olive-skinned, with an oval face and pronounced cheekbones. Elvis looked at Regis. The man looked positively stunned, as if he had just been stung by some narcotic jungle flower. The expression on the woman’s face immediately changed too, softening and brightening at the same time. They took one another’s hands and for one suspended moment, just stood there, looking at one another in nothing short of wonderment.
There was not a doubt in Elvis’s mind about what was happening right in front of his eyes. By God, he was witnessing a man and a woman falling in love on the spot. It was a phenomenon that was exalted in hundreds of songs—he’d sung a fair share of them himself—but he had never actually seen it happen before. The truth was, he had always thought it was just another songwriter’s fantasy, a dream to give the listeners hope, although Elvis believed that it actually made most listeners feel cheated by life. I never fell in love like that, they thought. And I never will.
But just a minute here—Regis? The man who had sworn off women? The man who seemed to hope for nothing more than a few hundred dollars and a bottle of Scotch? What the devil was going on here? Was it something in the tropical air? Had Dr. Garcia slipped Regis some potion he had concocted in his jungle laboratory? Elvis looked over at Gar
cia—he looked just as startled and enchanted as Elvis was. Elvis felt his heart swell. Life seemed full of possibilities.
“I am all set up for you, Mr. Presley,” Garcia said, gesturing toward a large stainless-steel apparatus at the far end of the laboratory.
Leaving Regis and Dr. Suarez talking softly to one another, Elvis followed Garcia to what turned out to be a high-intensity microscope. Garcia presented Elvis with a diagram that laid out his findings: not only had he separated the two emission samples from the victim’s swab, but later—after the trial—he had taken a third sample directly from Frederick Littlejon in prison. Garcia had done this on his own, not even telling Clifford about it. Dyed and magnified, Littlejon’s sample matched one of those from the swab—the more degraded emission; in other words, the earlier one. Garcia’s conclusion was clear: Holly McDougal definitely had had sexual intercourse with the second man four to six hours after she had been with Littlejon.
“Please. I wish you to see with your own eyes,” Garcia said as he placed two glass slides onto the microscope stage. He guided Elvis to the binocular eyepieces. “On the left is Mr. Littlejon, on the right, the other man. The mystery man. Without doubt, the murderer.”
As Elvis gazed at the two circles filled with wormlike squiggles, he felt pleasantly dizzy. Here was yet another world within a world. If Man had been born with lenses like these for his eyes, this would be his real world and the other—faces and mountains and trees—would be the invisible world that only the scientists could see with their powerful tools.
“Notice the length of the tails,” Garcia was saying. “Shorter, stubbier on the left. That is from age. These cells age by minutes and hours, not by years.”
One slide slipped away and another slid into view.
“DNA,” Garcia said. “The blueprint of all the cells in a body. These are Mr. Littlejon’s. There is not another in the entire world of three billion people that is exactly like his.”
Elvis pulled back from the eyepieces and looked at Garcia. “Are you sure about all this, Doctor?”
