Daniel Klein

by Blue Suede Clues: A Murder Mystery Featuring Elvis Presley

  Elvis continued up the staircase, Murphy a step behind him. At the landing, they tiptoed on the carpet runner toward the rear of the house.

  “I don’t know who you are anymore. Regis’s voice coming through the half-open door of the study. Or was it LeRoy’s? Their voices would be identical too, wouldn’t they? Everything the same.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about. I have remained the same, unlike you.”

  “The same? You mean you’ve always lived liked this? A double life? One holier-than-thou and the other in the gutter?”

  “The gutter?” An ugly laugh. “Do not speak to me of the gutter, Regis. I, at least, have never woken up in one.”

  Elvis pressed himself against the wall, slowly sidled up to the hinged side of the door jamb, signaling Murphy to halt behind him. From this angle, Elvis could only see one of the men; he was standing in profile against floor-to-ceiling brown velvet drapes, his arms straight at his sides. Feature by feature, it was Regis’s face—the jutting chin, the long straight nose, the ironically lifted eyebrow. But this man was wearing a well-tailored and well-pressed black suit, gold cuff-links, a red silk tie. LeRoy. The successful twin. The good twin. At that moment, LeRoy made a half-turn and Elvis jumped back, but not before he had seen the black eye patch and scar-rutted skin below it where LeRoy’s face went in where it should have gone out.

  “I can understand all of it, LeRoy. Really, I can. The women—”

  “Not women, Regis—woman. Just Holly. She was the only one.”

  “In all those years?”

  “In all those years, she was the only one I wanted.”

  “For God’s sake, she was just a child.”

  “Not in the way she made me feel.” A long pause. Elvis edged back to where he could peer inside the study. This time he could see only Regis. He was standing perfectly straight, but his hands were clenched. He was trembling. “That is one thing you could never understand, Regis. How that girl made me feel”.

  “You loved her.”

  “Yes. Not DOM or WHP after LeRoy’s name in Aronson’s black book; just LO—for “Love.”

  “I can understand that, LeRoy. I have loved a woman. I … I love one now.”

  “No! You do not understand what it is for me to love a woman. A beautiful woman. A sexy woman. That does not happen to me. For other men, yes. But not me. Not with this.”

  Elvis could not see LeRoy, but he realized he must have been pointing at his own face. Regis bowed his head, stuffed both his trembling hands into his jacket pockets. “But you loved Holly McDougal,” he said.

  “Yes. She did not love me, of course. But that did not matter. I didn’t need that too. Having her was enough. Even sharing her with God knows how many other men did not matter.”

  Another long pause. From downstairs, a sudden burst of tinny laughter. One of Judge Clifford’s dinner guests must have gotten off a witty one.

  “It was heaven, Regis.” LeRoy continued. “Heaven on earth for a few hours each week. But those few hours saturated me. It was like a transfusion. She changed me, changed me into another man. A whole man.”

  “You should have gone with her. Married her,” Regis said.

  “And then what, Regis?” That ugly laugh again. Bitter—the hollow sound of that sunken cheekbone. “Lived happily ever after? On what? I would have lost my seat on the court. Lost my house. Lost everything and everybody. The Cliffords have endured enough shame already.”

  Regis put a hand to his forehead, rubbed it. Of course he, himself, was the shame that the Cliffords had endured already.

  “But you loved her,” Regis said.

  “Yes. For a few hours every week. That was all I needed.”

  “And you had that.”

  “Yes, I had that.”

  “What went wrong, LeRoy?”

  “Holly. Holly went wrong.”

  LeRoy suddenly appeared in Elvis’s view, pacing deliberately toward Regis. His right elbow was crooked and in his right hand was a pistol, a World War One German Luger. He was pointing it at his twin brother. He must have been pointing the gun at him the entire time.

  Elvis sucked in his breath. There were a good twenty feet between him and LeRoy. If Elvis ran at him, dived and tackled him, LeRoy would easily have enough time to get off at least one shot at Regis. And one shot is all it would take.

  “How? How did she go wrong?” Regis asked.

  “She got greedy. She wanted more, always more. More money, more jewelry. Mother’s jewelry. Her necklaces.”

  “I wondered if those were Mother’s.”

  “What? If what were Mother’s?” LeRoy straightened his arm, jutting the pistol within inches of his brother’s chest. Regis stood perfectly straight, perfectly still. His trembling had stopped altogether. If he was fast, he could slap the gun to the side, then knee LeRoy in the groin and subdue him. But it was obvious that Regis was going to do no such thing. He was his brother’s captive, his victim, and Regis just stood there with defiant calm, as if he had been longing for this moment since the Clifford twins had been fooling around with a BB gun by the side of the lake, thirty years ago.

  “The jewelry in Holly’s bank box,” Regis said. “I thought it looked familiar, but it didn’t seem possible.”

  “Her bank box?”

  “Yes. Holly’s sister told me about it. And Elvis talked his way into access to it.”

  “Oh yes, your friend, Elvis!” LeRoy snarled, thumping the barrel of the Luger against Regis’s chest. “The pea-brain warbler. My brother’s big-time Hollywood pal!”

  “You have no idea who that man is, what is in his soul,” Regis said.

  The barrel of a loaded gun was pressed against his chest directly over his heart, and Regis was defending Elvis as if he were his brother. Elvis’s own heart swelled.

  “You must have run out of Mother’s jewelry eventually,” Regis went on.

  “Yes, I ran out, although Holly didn’t believe me at first. So I bought more jewelry new jewelry expensive jewelry.”

  “Because you loved her,” Regis said sympathetically.

  “Yes, because I loved her.” LeRoy took a long breath. “And then because she threatened me.”

  LeRoy’s misshapen face knotted into a grotesque grimace. For a moment, he absently spread his arms in a gesture of futility and defeat, and with this gesture the gun pointed away from Regis toward the ceiling. Elvis swung silently into the doorway, desperately trying to catch Regis’s eye. “Now!” he mouthed. “Grab the gun now!”

  But Regis did not see him. And he did not move. Instead, he gazed directly into his twin brother’s eye as if warning him, as if reminding LeRoy to point the gun back at him. Elvis pulled back out of sight again.

  “Did she threaten to expose you?” Regis asked. “To tell the world that Judge LeRoy Clifford was cheating on his wife with a teenage girl?”

  LeRoy nodded. He appeared to be struggling to control his arm, to aim the gun at Regis again.

  “And so when there was nothing else left, you had to kill her,” Regis said matter-of-factly.

  “Holly wanted to be a star,” LeRoy answered in a monotone. “A movie star. She knew about the new studio Maryjane Aronson was planning to start. Knew that I was part of it, that I was arranging the financing.”

  “With your friends,” Regis said.

  “With my colleagues.” LeRoy offered his brother a bitterly ironic, lopsided smile. “My colleagues on Maryjane’s client list.”

  “And Holly wanted to star in Aronson’s films.”

  “Yes,” LeRoy said. “She said that is how Marilyn Monroe got her start. That one day she was just a bit player, and the next she was a movie star. Holly didn’t see why it should be any different for her.”

  “But Aronson didn’t agree,” Regis said.

  “Aronson laughed in my face when I suggested it. She said Holly was a nothing. She couldn’t carry a film in a million years. That she simply did not have star power. That she had risen as high as she
would ever get professionally.

  “To the level of a call girl,” Regis said.

  LeRoy’s arm rose, stiffened. Now the gun was again pressing against his brother’s chest. Elvis cringed. He should have made a run at LeRoy when he had the chance.

  “I could have killed her,” LeRoy snarled. “Killed Aronson when she said that.”

  “But you didn’t. And when you told Holly that you were not going to be able to get her name in lights, she threatened you again.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that is when you killed her. Strangled her,” Regis said.

  LeRoy shoved hard with the gun barrel. Regis stumbled backward, but remained on his feet. He stood straight and immobile again, waiting for his brother.

  “It wasn’t even the threat of exposure at that point,” LeRoy said quietly. “She said she would never be with me again. Never make love to me again. She … she said that at least she would never have to see my disgusting face on top of her again.”

  And then Judge LeRoy Clifford closed his one eye, shut it tight against the humiliation of sight itself.

  Elvis jumped into the doorway and charged at LeRoy. “Grab the gun! Now, Regis!”

  Regis’s head spun around. He leapt between Elvis and his brother. “No!” he screamed savagely. “HE’S MY BROTHER!”

  LeRoy’s eye snapped open. He raised the pistol, then stuffed the barrel into his own mouth. Regis grabbed his arm, yanked it away. The gun fired and Regis fell backward, his knees crumbling under him.

  Elvis dove at LeRoy’s feet. But it was too late. LeRoy had crammed the barrel back into his mouth and the gun fired for a second time. LeRoy blew out the left side of his face, the “good” side, and catapulted backward onto his back, dead.

  Elvis crawled to Regis. Blood gushed from Regis’s chest, but he was conscious.

  “Leroy?” Regis whimpered.

  Tears flooded Elvis’s eyes as he gazed down at the surviving twin.

  “It’s your turn now,” Elvis whispered.

  26

  Too Human

  The sun was rising in Beverly Hills when Elvis and Murphy finally drove away from the Clifford estate.

  The police and an ambulance had arrived at the same time. Regis had been taken off to Cedars Hospital; the medic said that the bullet had missed his aorta by only inches, but his life was not in any danger. Elvis had been certain that the police would take him into custody and the prospect didn’t disturb him in the least. He had found out what he had set out to discover; he did not need to hide from anyone any longer. But it turned out that Jilly-Jo Cathcart had heard that the police were looking for Elvis in connection with Grieves’s murder. She had gone to the Maywood police station that afternoon to give a statement about everything that had happened in the stunt shack that morning. At the Clifford residence, the police said that they only wanted Elvis to drop by later and give his own statement to corroborate the circumstances of the freak accident that had cost Mickey Grieves his life.

  Miranda Clifford had remained eerily calm when informed that her husband was dead, his life taken by his own hand. Her guests were eager to leave her aborted dinner party as quickly as possible lest the press corps arrive and snap their pictures amid this messy scene. The police, ever sensitive to the wealthy’s needs, permitted them to do so, Miss Miranda courteously gathering their wraps for them.

  Murphy had done most of the talking to the police. In his fine reporter’s mind, he had recorded every word spoken, every movement, every shot fired. When he finished, he had implored the law officers to protect his statement from the eyes of any prying journalists, “For obvious legal reasons,” he had explained to them, although everyone knew full well that he was protecting his own scoop. And now he and Elvis were racing to the L.A. Times in Mike Murphy’s Corvair. There was still time to make the afternoon edition.

  Neither Elvis nor Murphy spoke. Elvis stared out the side window watching the mansions of the Hollywood elite slip by. There were still many unanswered questions—about Aronson and Grieves and Warden Reardon—but he was not thinking about any of these now. Elvis was thinking about LeRoy Clifford and Holly McDougal and the mysterious forces that joined a man and a woman, about the ballads of passionate love that never would be written and sung, that never could be written and sung because they were too true, too human.

  “Jesus! Behind us!” Murphy said.

  Elvis turned, gaped out through the car’s rear window. The blue Beetle. At not quite four in the morning on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills, the grizzled man in the nightwatch cap was a car’s length behind them, frantically waving his garish-colored box in the air outside the driver’s window.

  Murphy yanked the car to the shoulder, screeched to a halt. The Beetle tore by them on the left, then swerved onto the shoulder and stopped twenty feet ahead of them. Elvis and Murphy jumped out of their car and ran in tandem toward the Beetle.

  Elvis grabbed the door handle on the driver’s side, yanked it open, wrenched the driver out of his seat by the back of his neck, spun him around, and put him in a full-Nelson over the hood.

  “At last,” the old guy in the knit cap murmured, smiling painfully.

  “Who the devil are you?” Elvis barked.

  “Just a fisherman,” the man replied happily. “A fisherman with the best damned script you’ll ever read in your life!”

  He gestured at the cardboard box with the gleaming, blood-red skull and crossbones painted on its cover that sat on his car seat. Murphy reached in and picked it up. Elvis released his hold on the man, took the box from Murphy, and lifted off the cover. The title page read:

  Blue Suede Cruise

  by Captain Tim Timmons

  The True Story of the Singing Fisherman

  The only other vehicle on Santa Monica Boulevard at that hour was a farm truck carrying fifty crates of apricots up from Littlerock. Looking out his window, the driver of that pick-up would have seen three men standing by the side of the road, one bearded, one bald, and one who looked for all the world like Elvis Presley. And the bald one and the Elvis-looking fellow were laughing so uproariously, so crazily, so infectiously, that that farm truck driver couldn’t have helped bursting into laughter too.

  27

  Tickle Me

  Elvis was sleeping in his own bed for the first time in a week when the phone rang. He blinked open his eyes, raised himself onto his elbows, and squinted over at his bed-table clock. It was ten in the morning. He picked up the phone.

  “Yup,” he said into the mouthpiece.

  “Hey, Elvis. I just realized you might be still sleeping over there. Want me to ring back later?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Me, Squirm.”

  “Squirm?” Elvis finished waking up real fast. “Where the heck are you?”

  “Rome,” Squirm said. “Rome, Italy. It’s awful nice here too. Sunny, but not too sunny, you know?”

  “How the devil did you get to Rome?”

  “The long way,” Squirm said, chuckling. “By way of Costa Rica and Marakesh, actually. Gotta be a faster way, I’m sure.”

  Elvis sat up straight in his bed.

  “Slow down, Squirm,” he said. “I’m a few hours behind you.”

  “We got the International Herald this morning,” Littlejon said. “The whole story about Clifford’s brother and Holly and that Aronson woman. Nancy never trusted her, you know.”

  “Oh,” was all Elvis could manage at that particular moment.

  “Anyway,” Squirm went on, “We figured it was okay to call now, the coast being clear and all. I mean, I wanted to call earlier, but you never know who’s listening, do you?”

  “No,” Elvis said. He tried shaking his head vigorously to get his brain fully engaged.

  “Well, like they say, all’s well that ends well,” Squirm continued cheerfully. “I already landed a job here. Gernario Films. Spaghetti westerns. They need a little American know-how in the stunt department. And like I was just saying to
Nancy, I owe it all to you. Every bit of it. You gave me my life back, Elvis, and I will never forget that as long as I—”

  “Hold on, a minute. Nancy? You were just saying to Nancy? Nancy Pollard?”

  “Yeah, that’s the best part, Elvis. She’s here with me. Flew over yesterday. We got a lot of time to make up for.”

  “I, uh, I bet you do, Squirm,” Elvis said.

  “And listen, Elvis? How’s that ankle of yours doing? I felt real bad about that, you know.”

  “Just fine, Squirm. Healed itself.” It actually was healed, Elvis had realized the night before.

  “That’s terrific,” Squirm Littlejon said. “I got a few twists and bruises myself along the way. Man, I did some stunts out there, the stunts of a lifetime: Especially that one where I slid down the heating duct of the prison infirmary.”

  “What?”

  “The heating ducts. Narrow as a drain pipe, but that didn’t keep el bandito diminuto from squirming through.”

  “Reardon showed you—?”

  “Reardon didn’t show me dip for diddle. I’d been planning this escape for years. But seeing how much you believed in me finally gave me the gumption to do it. I had some real close calls, I’ll tell you, but you saved my ass when you put out the word for nobody to shoot at me.” Squirm laughed. “Well, Nancy’s waiting on me, so I got to go. You know how women are, Elvis.”

  Not really, Elvis thought. In fact, not at all.

  “You take care, Squirm,” Elvis said and he hung up. He got out of bed and headed down to the kitchen, his head spinning. Unbelievable. Neither Reardon nor LeRoy nor anybody else had set up Squirm’s escape; it was all his own doing. But even more incredible was the fact that Nancy Pollard, the woman who had helped put Squirm away for life, was now with him in Rome to pick up their romance where it had left off. No sense in Elvis even trying to get his mind around that one. He put up the kettle for coffee.

  Regis and Delores were a different story; their feelings of forgiveness and love made perfect sense to him. When Elvis had visited Regis at the hospital yesterday, Delores was at his side, lovingly stroking his head. His bullet wound was healing, but the wound in his heart over his late brother would never heal completely, Regis told Elvis. He was wrong about the gratifications of revenge, he said. Dead wrong. Revenge was puny stuff when compared to brotherly love.