by Blue Suede Clues: A Murder Mystery Featuring Elvis Presley
“Very,” Garcia replied. “What you are looking at is infinitely more exact than a fingerprint. A strand of hair, a speck of tissue, a teardrop—any one of these is enough to match with one human being and one only.”
Elvis felt his heart accelerate.
“So it’s a done deal, Doc!” he blurted. “We got it all right here—proof positive that Littlejon is innocent. Let’s just pack it up and take it to a judge!”
Garcia responded with a rueful smile. “It is proof to us, but it is nothing in a court of law,” he said. “Not in any country. It seems my little laboratory in the middle of the jungle is, how you say, ahead of its time. But in our work, we learn patience. Perhaps in forty years, our findings will be acceptable as evidence.”
“In forty years Squirm will be an old man, Doctor.”
“That is true, Mr. Presley,” Garcia said. “It is also true that there are thousands of other people in prison for crimes they did not commit. And I could prove it so right now, but no one would believe me.”
“Guess we’ll just have to set up our own little country then.” It was Regis speaking. He and Dr. Suarez had quietly stepped behind Elvis, and now Dr. Suarez was laughing softly at Regis’s little witticism, the generous laugh of the devoted.
“Hold on,” Elvis said. “Does all this mean that you could match the second emission with just one person, Doctor? With the murderer?”
“Yes, I could do that right now if I had a cell of the murderer. But I do not, of course. And, anyway, as I say, that would not mean anything in a court of law.
“But suppose we did get cells from other folks,” Elvis said. “You know, people we suspected. If you could make a match with the last person Miss McDougal was with, we’d know we had our man. Wouldn’t stand up in court, but at least we’d know exactly where to look real careful for something that did.”
“That is an excellent thought, Mr. Presley,” Garcia said.
“But how, pray tell, do you go about getting people’s cells?” Regis said. “Follow them around with a scalpel and nick off a little chunk of their earlobes when they aren’t looking?”
“Well, you could make them cry and catch their teardrops,” Elvis said.
Dr. Garcia beamed at Elvis. “Mr. Presley, have you ever considered going into forensic medicine? You have a natural talent for it.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Elvis said.
Garcia led Elvis to a laboratory bench where he showed him how to take and preserve cell samples without corrupting them. He put together a little kit for him of eyedroppers, tweezers, blotting paper, vials, and suspensory fluid. Regis watched for most of the demonstration then wandered off with Dr. Suarez to the other side of the laboratory. Elvis looked after them. He winked at Garcia.
“Does Dr. Suarez have this effect on a lot of men?” he asked quietly.
“I have known Dolores—Dr. Suarez—for fifteen years and I have never seen anything like this. She is all work and no play, which is good for the laboratory, of course,” Garcia said, smiling. “And Mr. Clifford? Is he a—”
“The man just told me yesterday that he swore off women five years ago.”
“This is a beautiful thing to behold, is it not?” Garcia said, looking at the couple.
“Does make a man wonder,” Elvis said, grinning.
“Perhaps it is encoded in their DNA,” Garcia said. “An attraction of genes.”
“They could’ve gone their whole lives never meeting each other.”
“Or perhaps it had to happen,” Garcia said. “Perhaps the attraction in their genes is so strong that it drew them together across thousands of miles.”
The four of them made arrangements to meet for dinner at Santa Teresa’s one and only restaurant at eight that evening. In the meantime, Dr. Suarez said she would show Regis around the campus, and Dr. Garcia apologized for having to return to an experiment in progress. He gave Elvis directions to the instituto’s botanical gardens, the best in all of Central America, he said.
The gardens were a marvel, all right, an entire walled-in acre of tropical vegetation so lush and vibrant that it gave Elvis a raw feeling, like his skin was too pale and thin to abide with it. He limped over to a white iron bench and let himself down gently. His ankle had started up again; it seemed to get worse when he was alone. He broke off half a painkiller and chewed it down. In front of him, a brilliant red blossom the size of a man’s head wagged back and forth in a nonexistent breeze. Elvis had the distinct feeling that it was trying to tell him something … .
It was ten minutes to eight when Elvis awoke. As he opened his eyes, the red flower head was still swaying in front of him, but something about it had changed. Its outer petals had begun to curl inward toward the center, giving it a contented, sleepy-eyed look. Little wonder—it had been chatting to Elvis nonstop while he slept.
Regis and Delores Suarez were waltzing cheek to cheek to the strains of a marimba band on the jukebox as Elvis limped into the Cafe con Pep Moso. Dr. Garcia waved to him from a table by the wall. It was already covered with little serving plates of food—guacamole, refried beans, yellow rice with bits of red pepper and pork in it, bright green peas, barbecued ribs, slices of mango—along with a pitcher of sangria. By the time Elvis had made his way to the table, Garcia had ladled small portions of each food in a colorful circle on Elvis’s plate like a painter’s palette.
“Did you enjoy the gardens?” Garcia asked as Elvis sat down.
“I surely did,” Elvis said. “One of them flowers talked my ear off.”
Garcia smiled. “They get lonely for human company,” he said.
Elvis absently dipped a slice of mango into the guacamole and stuck it in his mouth. The meat of the fruit had a soft, silky texture that slipped languidly on his tongue, coasting on the slick of the avocado dip. Now there was something he’d never thought about before: how food feels in his mouth. It was a whole other thing, separate from taste or hunger. And it was a glorious thing for sure. You just had to pay attention to it. How many other things in life had he missed just for lack of paying attention?
One juke box song ended, another began, and Regis and Delores were still dancing. They were in love all right; you didn’t have to pay too much attention to see that. There was nothing elegant about the way they moved, nothing that dazzled the eye, but they danced totally together—two people, one motion. Just the opposite of the way most people danced these days, which was two people, two totally different performances. That’s just what it was now, wasn’t it? Performances. Two people strutting their stuff for each other like dancing was an advertisement for themselves. That’s what Holly McDougal’s dance on the screen test had been all about. Look at me! Desire me! Yearn for me! Heck, wasn’t that what Elvis’s own gyrating performances were really all about too?
But, at this moment, sitting in the Cafe con Pep Moso in the middle of the Mexican tropics, the last thing in the world that Elvis wanted to do was perform. No, right now, listening to the Spanish music, breathing in the flower- and food-scented air, watching the two lovers meld into one another’s arms, Elvis was simply a Watcher and a Listener. Not putting anything out, just taking everything in. And, O Lord, what a pleasure that was.
“Mr. Clifford tells me that you are a twin also,” Garcia was saying.
“That’s right,” Elvis replied, turning to his table mate. “But my twin, Jesse Garon, he died when we were born.”
“Yes, I understand,” Garcia said. “You are the exceptions, you know. Identical twins have exactly the same DNA. The same genetic blueprint, the same genetic fingerprint.”
Elvis nodded and looked back at the dancers, but something was tugging at his mind, that half-formed embryo of a question that had skittered across his consciousness just before he fell asleep the other night.
“Dr. Garcia, how much do twins have to do with each other when—you know—when they are still inside their mom?”
“A great deal, in my opinion,” Garcia said seriously. “Especiall
y in the third trimester when they are very close to being fully-formed human beings. They are locked together in the same little space for every second of every day. Always touching. When one moves, the other must move also. It would be impossible for them not to be aware of each other. In fact, I would say that there is nothing else that they are aware of.”
“So I knew Jesse,” Elvis said, looking deeply into Garcia’s eyes. “I knew he was there.”
“In some way, yes,” Garcia said. “But we cannot begin to understand what that way could be. What an unborn child’s consciousness is like. I imagine it is a murky thing, that he does not really know where his body ends and the other body begins. Perhaps the unborn child has that consciousness that holy men seek—where all things are one thing.”
“But I knew he was there,” Elvis repeated anxiously. “I probably even had feelings about him.”
“Perhaps,” Garcia said.
“Unconscious feelings?” Elvis asked softly, his heart beating rapidly.
Hector Garcia studied Elvis with his shinning black eyes for several moments before he responded.
“You had absolutely nothing to do with your twin’s premature death, Mr. Presley,” he said quietly. “I can assure you of that.”
“But there are no accidents, are there?” Elvis said.
“I am a scientist,” Garcia said. “And in my opinion, there is nothing in the universe but accidents.”
16
Peace in the Valley
They were in the air, jetting out of Durango the next morning, before Elvis brought up the subject of Dr. Dolores Suarez.
“You serious about this woman, Regis?”
Regis gazed out at the clouds for a moment.
“Or it’s just a dream,” he said.
“Well, I was there and it didn’t look like a dream to me,” Elvis said, grinning. “I never seen anything quite like it. You were dancing to the same music the minute you laid eyes on each other.”
“That’s the truth,” Regis said. “It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s the truth.”
“I’m real happy for you, Regis,” Elvis said.
“Thank you, Elvis,” Regis said. He again looked out the airplane window for a moment, then, “I owe it all to you, you know. My whole life seems to have spun around a hundred and eighty degrees since you walked into my office.”
Just another accident, Elvis thought, but he didn’t say anything. A stewardess leaned over their seats. “May I get you something to drink, senors?” she asked.
“No, thank you, ma’am,” Elvis said.
Regis hesitated, biting down on his lip. “Okay,” he said finally. “A tequila sunrise, if you don’t mind.” But as the stewardess walked on, he looked earnestly into Elvis’s face and said, “It’s my last drink, you know. That part of my life is over too.”
“Glad to hear that, Regis.”
Elvis didn’t stay awake long enough to see if Regis actually did limit himself to a single tequila sunrise; he slipped the other half of the painkiller into his mouth and slept all the way to L.A. At the airport, Elvis stuffed another three-day advance into Regis’s pocket and gave him Dr. Garcia’s cell-gathering kit for safekeeping. Regis said he would get to work on the Holly McDougal safety deposit box problem immediately, then jumped into a cab. Elvis got behind the wheel of his Eldorado and headed west for Nevada.
The Sparks Harvest Festival and Rodeo was winding down its last day by the time Elvis arrived that evening. In the parking area, trailers were loading up with horses and cattle, and men and women in coveralls were wrestling game stalls and dismantled fair rides onto flatbeds. All the carnival gizmos and rodeo paraphernalia and wiry bodies reminded Elvis of the stunt shack on the MGM lot; it sure seemed a natural thing to pop back and forth between those two worlds.
But busy as everybody at the Sparks Rodeo was, they all stopped and stared the moment Elvis got out of his car and braced his crutches under his shoulders. For a long moment, the parking lot went hushed as a prairie, and then one of the young men in overalls yodeled out, “Whoopee! It’s Elvis!” and soon they were all cheering and yelling and surging toward him with big happy grins on their faces. Elvis smiled back at them, feeling gratified and more than a little wistful. Man, he hadn’t been at a rodeo or county fair since the old days when he did fairground shows with Jimmie Rogers Snow in Lubbock and Rosewell and Bastrop. This here was a long way from Hollywood—or Vegas, for that matter. Elvis felt a real and instant connection with these folks.
“What brings you to Sparks, Elvis?” the yodeler asked, slapping Elvis on the shoulder.
“I come to pay my respects to Will Cathcart,” Elvis replied. His response filtered back through the crowd in a rolling murmur.
“Awful thing,” one of the coveralled young women said. “’Specially for his widow and young ’uns.”
“That it is,” Elvis said. “She here?”
“Yup, that’s her over by the bandstand,” the young woman said, pointing. “They’re puttin’ together a benefit, you know. A little butter and egg money to get ’em started on their own.”
Squinting, Elvis saw a sandy-haired girl in a white cotton dress that bulged out at the belly. She didn’t look more than seventeen or eighteen. On either side of her, grasping at her skirts, were towheaded toddlers.
“That why you’re here, Elvis?” someone asked. “For the benefit?”
Elvis looked out at the crowd that now completely encircled him, and they looked back at him with one bright and honest expectant face. It was only an accident that he was here at this exact moment, but maybe that was the deal with accidents: you had to know what to do with them.
“Yes,” Elvis said. “That’s why I’m here.”
The entire group streamed toward the bandstand with Elvis limping at its center. Along the way, others attached themselves in twos and threes, and by the time they reached Will’s widow, Jilly-Jo Cathcart, their number had doubled. The swarm parted to let Jilly-Jo and her two children in. All three of them looked as if they had been doing more crying than breathing in the last couple of days.
“I’m very sorry for you, ma’am,” Elvis said, offering Jilly-Jo his hand.
“Kind of you,” the young woman answered in a whisper, her eyes cast down. She only touched Elvis’s hand for a second, then pulled it away and set it back on the shoulder of her youngest.
“I just made Will’s acquaintance a few days back,” Elvis went on. “But he struck me as a fine young man.”
“Will told me ’bout that,” Jilly-Jo said. “He was sorry, you know—” She gestured with her head at Elvis’s ankle.
“No matter at all,” Elvis said. “He was not to blame.”
“’Course not,” she said. “It was Mickey. He runs the show.”
“Mickey Grieves?”
Jilly-Jo leaned her head close to Elvis’s ear. “He’s a bad man, Mr. Presley, and I done told him so to his face. Day before yesterday.”
“He was here, at Sparks?”
The young woman nodded.
“Ma’am, was he here before Will’s accident?” Elvis asked urgently.
“Yes,” she whispered, looking as if she was about to cry again.
Above them, on the bandstand, two young men were tuning up their electric guitars. Between them, an older guy with a bandana wrapped around his head was adjusting his electric fiddle and behind him was a rail-thin girl in a denim shirt and overalls bracing a standing bass against her shoulder. At the edge of the crowd, a cheer went up. Cars and pickups and even one big old school bus were suddenly streaming in from every which direction, kicking up clouds of dust, their windows open and people shouting out through them. “Elvis!” echoed from the vehicles to the bandstand crowd and back again. The word was out in Sparks, Nevada.
Elvis asked Jilly-Jo if they could talk again later, then limped his way to the bandstand steps. Two young roustabouts appeared on either side of Elvis; someone took his crutches and then the two young men made a four-handed seat, ca
rried him to center stage, and set him down on a high-standing stool behind a microphone. The roar that greeted him was about as thunderous and joyful as any he’d heard. Elvis bowed his head and held it down for several minutes.
When the din finally quieted, Elvis raised his head, looked out and smiled. The entire fairgrounds was packed, virtually all the people standing, their faces turned up to him. Behind him, the fiddle player murmured, “More folks than we’ve had here three days runnin’.” Elvis motioned to him, whispered something in his ear, then turned back to the audience.
“This here is for Will and Jilly-Jo,” he said into the microphone.
The fiddler sawed off a plaintive introduction and then Elvis stood up straight and began to sing “Love Me Tender.” Behind him, the bass joined in on the beat after “Never let me go,” followed by the two guitars at the end of the first verse.
It had been awhile since Elvis had sung the song, but it came out of him with more genuine feeling than he could remember ever giving it. Something was stirring inside of him—an awful ache for this dear young widow child and the awkward young man who was lost to her forever—and it found its way into the heart of his voice. By the time he reached, “I’ll be yours through all the years, till the end of time,” there were tears rolling down Elvis’s cheeks. The fiddler closed with a minor-key reprise of his intro and then, for several seconds, the only sound that could be heard at the Sparks Harvest Festival and Rodeo were the sniffles and swallows of the assembled guests. Someone finally broke the silence with a soft hand clap, another joined in, then another, and finally the whole field from the bandstand to the stables to the empty, revolving Ferris wheel was clapping loud and long and steady. Not a voice was raised; this was the applause of deep and humble respect.
“There are going to be hats passing among you,” Elvis finally said into the microphone. “You know what to do, folks.”
Immediately, upturned Stetson hats began radiating from the front row out into the crowd. Elvis conferred with the fiddler again, then asked one of the guitarists if he could borrow his Fender for the next number.
