Daniel Klein (3 page)

Authors: Blue Suede Clues: A Murder Mystery Featuring Elvis Presley

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective

BOOK: Daniel Klein

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“Not a whole lot,” Elvis answered.

“Well, if you got yourself in a car this minute, you could be up here by ten. And I'd have Mr. Squirm Littlejon waiting for you in a clean shirt and pants.”

Elvis hesitated only a moment. “I'll be there,” he said.

Reardon gave him directions, then signed off with, “I've got a little surprise for you myself, Mr. Presley.”

Squirm

A
larger-than-life portrait of President Kennedy hung on the wall behind Warden Reardon's desk looking like one of those oversized pictures of Jesus with doleful eyes that followed you everywhere you went. Reardon, a red-haired man with a boxer's compact body, bounced out of his chair the moment Elvis entered and pumped his visitor's hand energetically.

“Have any trouble finding your way?” the warden asked.

“No, sir â¦ . No, Bob,” Elvis replied. “Went just fine.” In fact, the two-hour drive up Route 14 past Santa Clarita and Lancaster and into the mountains had put Elvis in a meditative mood. By the time he'd reached Tehachapi, he'd promised himself to take more long drives alone like this oneâit helped a man reconnect with himself.

“I've got Squirm waiting in the conference room,” Reardon said. “Is he a friend of yours?”

“We were in the army together,” Elvis said.

“Hot damn! That's what he's always saying. Says he spent Christmas with you over there in Germany.”

“That's right.”

“How about that?” Reardon said. “I guess the little man was telling the truth for once.”

“That something he's not in the habit of doing?”

“Truth is a real scarcity up here at CCI, Mr. Presley,” Reardon said. “There's not a man in here that doesn't tell at least one big
whopper a day, and it's usually the same damned one.” Grinning, the warden gave Elvis a mock punch in the biceps before going into a burlesque whine, “âI didn't do it! I swear, I didn't! I was home in bed the whole time!'”

Reardon let loose a surprisingly high-pitched laugh, watching Elvis's face expectantly, apparently looking for appreciation of his little performance. Like most everybody Elvis met in California, the man was auditioning.

“I see what you mean,” Elvis said.

Reardon pushed a buzzer on his desk and two muscular guards entered, one white and one colored. Then, walking in what was apparently standard formationâone guard ahead of them and one behind, Elvis and Reardon made their way down a long corridor, passing through three barred gates, until they arrived at the conference room. Reardon grasped Elvis's sleeve.

“Take as long as you want with him, Mr. Presley,” he said. “But when you're finished, don't forget I've got that surprise I promised you.” He signaled one of the guards to open the conference-room door.

Freddy Littlejon started to rise as Elvis entered, but immediately lost his footing and stumbled back into his metal chair, the leg irons on his ankles clanging against the chair legs.

“I can't believe this,” Littlejon said. “My prayers have been answered.”

“Good to see you,” Elvis said, then added for Reardon's benefit, “Again.”

Reardon left, leaving the two guards outside the door, but there were two more already inside the room, one behind Littlejon, the other behind the chair reserved for Elvis on the other side of a Formica-topped table. Both guards went bug eyed when they saw Elvis, but neither said a word.

Squirm Littlejon was even slighter and more boyish looking than Elvis had surmised from the photograph. The thick, iron manacles on his wristsâjoined together by no more than six links of chainâdwarfed his narrow wrists and spindly hands, making him look like
little Hansel in the witch's cage. The loopy grin and sleepy eyes were the same as in the photo though; he had the half-frightened, half-insolent smirk of the boy who the teacher always caught dozing in class. Heaven knows, he didn't look like a murderer but, then again, neither had that kid who'd murdered all those fan-club presidents in Tennessee three years back.

Elvis sat down. “Start at the beginning,” he said softly.

Littlejon cocked his head one way, then the other. “I been planning this for months, now here you are, and I can't figure where the beginning is. It's like every beginning has a beginning of its own.”

“Just jump in anywhere,” Elvis said. “Maybe at that Christmas party.”

“Okay, I'll start right there in Germany, Christmas Day, 1959,” Littlejon said. “You see, the âhome' I was missing while you were singing was just one person, my mother, Agnes. She'd brought me up by herself after my father took off. I was only two then and don't remember him, wouldn't know him if he was sitting next to me in a bar. Or in a cell, for that matter.”

Littlejon offered Elvis a cheesy grin before going on.

“Anyway, I wasn't much for school. Pretty awful, actually. They said I had an attitude problem, and they were right about that. Around about the time they got to long division, I didn't see the point anymore. I mean, I just knew that long division wouldn't be figuring too much in any kind of life I'd be leading. Anyhow, I dropped out soon as I could, knocked around a bit, and then joined the army, telling them I was eighteen when I was barely past sixteen.”

Elvis nodded encouragingly and Squirm went on.

“Well, overseas, I made friends with a guy named MacyâPhil Macyâand he told me I had a talent that could make me one heck of a good living when I got out. It was the way I could jump and twist and wiggle out of things, like the way I could slither through a drainpipe on bivouac.”

Here Squirm gave a little pantomime demonstration, twisting his head and shimmying his shoulders like a snake slithering through a
cotton field. It wasn't hard to figure where his nickname had come from. But there was also something about his little presentation that struck Elvis as familiar, although he couldn't remember where he'd seen it before.

“Macy said I could get a job doing the same thing he did back home,” Littlejon continued. “Said I could be a stuntman in the movie pictures.”

“So that's what you did?”

“That's right. I got into show business, just like you, Mr. Presley. Soon as I got out of the army, I made a beeline for Hollywood, looked up some people Macy told me about, and in one week's time I was working as a stuntman. Turns out I was a natural. It was like my mother always told me, everybody's got a God-given, special talent, but it's only the lucky ones who figure out what it is.”

“My mother told me the exact same thing,” Elvis said. He didn't add that, although he'd discovered his own God-given talent, lately he'd begun to wonder if he wasn't forsaking it.

“I could do it all,” Littlejon went on. “Even if it was something I'd never done before. Like, first gig, I jumped off a galloping horse onto a runaway stagecoach like I'd been doing it my whole life. Same for leaping off cliffs and bursting through glass windows and running around in circles with my clothes on fire. And the thing is, because of my size and all, I was perfect for doing women's pranks. Made me feel kind of peculiar at firstâdressing up in a ball gown to jump off a roof into a speeding convertible. But hell, I got twice the number of gigs as most of the other guys so I wasn't complaining. Fact is, I was king of the heap for a while there. Had myself a beautiful little house out by the beach. A brand new Oldsmobile. Even had myself a beautiful woman, an actress couple years older than me named Nanette Poulette, although that was just her madeup name. Nanette and me were going to get married.”

For the first time since he started talking, Littlejon averted his eyes from Elvis's.

“What happened, Freddy?” Elvis asked softly.

Squirm squirmed around in his chair for a bit before getting himself to look back at Elvis.

“Okay, here goes,” he said. “There was this little girl who played bit parts in pictures over at MGM. She'd have maybe one or two lines to speak, never anything more. Her name was Holly McDougal, and she'd pulled the same trick I had in the army, told everyone she was eighteen when she was really barely seventeen. Easy for her to pull off since she could have passed for twenty-one and then some if she wanted. She looked real grown-up, grown-up and sexy like a woman who'd been around the block a few times. And, the truth is, Holly may have been only seventeen, but she'd been around the block more times than most women twice her age.”

Littlejon raised his manacled hands to his face in order to scratch his ear. This operation involved scraping the chain roughly across his chinâit must have been one devil of an itch to be worth it.

“You know that joke about the starlet who was so dumb she slept with the scriptwriter?” Squirm continued. “Well, Holly was so dumb she slept with the stuntmen. Every one of us. She was kind of a nympho, I guess. She'd come out to the stunt shackâyou know, where we keep all our equipment and clothes and stuffâand take one of us off to this little curtained-off alcove in the back where we napped and, you know, she'd do us right there. Right there with everybody else smoking and joking and dressing up for a stunt only ten feet away.”

Elvis lowered his eyes uncomfortably. For the first time since he'd impulsively phoned the California Correctional Institution a few hours back, he found himself wondering if he shouldn't have tossed that Christmas photograph back in the trash and left it at that. He honestly didn't know if he wanted to hear the rest of this indecent story.

“Understand, I'm not proud of this part, not at all,” Squirm continued. “Actually, I'm real ashamed of it. Can't even say I didn't know what I was doing, although I really didn't know she was only seventeen. None of us did. But I did know there was something
warped about the whole business. And I did know I had a perfectly wonderful woman waiting for me at home every night. I swear to God, if I had it all to do over again â¦”

“Keep going,” Elvis prodded impatiently.

Littlejon shut his sleepy eyes for second, then opened them and went on.

“Well, on this particular day, I was the only one in the shack, so when Holly came by it was my turn. I went in the back with her and we made a quick business of it because I was due on the set in a few minutes. Anyhow, afterward, I left Holly back there and got dressed up to look like Paula Prentiss for a stunt in
The Honeymoon Machine
. The shoot went real late that night. The harness for my stunt kept getting stuck so it was almost midnight before we finished. And, when I got back to the shack, the police were there. Holly was dead, choked to death right in the cot where I'd left her. They arrested me right on the spot. And I've been behind bars one place or another ever since.”

Elvis gazed intently into Littlejon's eyes. “And you didn't do it,” he said.

“No, sir,” Squirm replied.

“Who did, then?”

“I wish I knew,” Squirm said. “I wish to God I knew.”

“Who do you
think
did it?”

“I really don't know, Mr. Presley. Sometimes I think it might've been one of the other guys, the other stuntmen. I mean, when the trial came up every one of them swore on the Bible that they never even had sex with her. Of course, most of them were married, so that was probably the reason they did that.”

Elvis drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “And what do you want me to do for you, Freddy?” he said wearily.

Squirm shrugged. “Get me out of here,” he said softly.

“Just like that.” Elvis smiled in spite of himself.

“Got to be some way,” Squirm murmured. “I mean, it wouldn't be right to keep an innocent man locked up for the rest of his life, would it?”

For a long moment, Elvis just gazed across the Formica-topped table at Littlejon. The man seemed to be shrinking before his eyes. Another minute and he'd be able to just slip out of those manacles and leg irons and walk right out of here, slinking between bars and through keyholes and disappearing into the Tehachapi Mountains.

“I keep having this feeling I've seen you before,” Elvis said finally. “Not just that Christmas Day.”

“You have,” Littlejon said quietly. “Just a little time after that. Out by your house on the Goethestrasse. It was a Sunday and one of the guys in my barrack brought me out for a football game. You and your friends from home against this pick-up team of GI's. We were both quarterbacksâme against you.”

Now Elvis remembered that day precisely, remembered the skinny kid who could slither like a snake right through his line and make one touchdown after another until the middle of the game, when he just walked off the field without even saying a good-bye or a thank-you.

“Yes, I remember that day,” Elvis said, smiling. “How come you left before the game was over?”

Squirm lowered his eyes.

“You get hurt?” Elvis asked.

“Not exactly,” Squirm said. “I was kinda told to leave.”

“Who told you that?”

“One of your friends,” Squirm said softly. “Red, I think his name was. He told me I wasn't playing by the rules.”

“Which rules?”