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

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

BOOK: Daniel Klein
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M. GRIEVES: I deeply resent that question, Counselor. Holly was a child the age of my own daughter. I am not a child molester, sir.
R. CLIFFORD: But, at the time, you didn't know her true age, isn't that a fact? She was passing herself as eighteen, wasn't she?
M. GRIEVES: Well, that's pretty darn young in my book.
R. CLIFFORD: What I don't understand, Mr. Grieves, is how it is that every one of you stuntman knew Miss McDougal so well. I mean, she was just another bit player out of hundreds of bit players on the MGM lot.
M. GRIEVES: Holly—Miss McDougal—just kinda took a shine to us. And us to her. Stunt people are a friendly bunch, for the most part. Mostly cowboys and rodeo folk, family people, don't you know. And I know Holly didn't have a daddy of her own, not living at home, at least. So I guess we were kind of family to her. Substitute daddies, you might say.
The creep was going for an Oscar.
Strangely, the prosecution had not called Nanette Poulette, aka Nancy Pollard, to the stand. How could that be? Regis had labeled her the most damning witness of them all, and considering Grieves's choice testimony, she must of have been a humdinger.
The answer was on the next page of the transcript. Poulette/Pollard was the first witness for the
defense
. But after a couple of exchanges
with Littlejon's beloved financée, Regis asked the judge to have her declared a hostile witness.
Hostile
was too kind a word for the job Poulette did on Squirm. According to her, Littlejon was a pervert of the lowest order. She immediately launched into a detailed description of his dress-up games and spankings, and then, for a capper, she said that during these sick encounters he had insisted on calling her “Holly.” Like Regis said, Poulette had handed the jury the keys to the California Correctional Institution on a silver platter.
Regis's next witness wasn't hostile, just dense. His name was Jerry Griswold and he'd been the crane operator for Squirm's stunt on
The Honeymoon Machine
on the day of the murder. Griswold confirmed that they'd had harness trouble on the set, which left Littlejon dangling at sixteen feet for several hours. Elvis had no trouble picturing that. Just reading about it made his ribs ache and his ankle throb even worse. Then, without being prompted, Griswold began rattling on about how weird Squirm had acted while he was hanging up there—doing circus tricks and cracking dumb jokes and telling everybody that he was Harry Houdini reincarnated.
J. GRISWOLD: He said, like,
Look at me everybody. I can slip out of anything.
Little doubt that, at this point, the jury thought this was Littlejon's way of saying he could even slip out of a murder wrap.
Regis's next witness was Dr. Hector Garcia of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de Mexico. The transcript recorded that the court stenographer had requested that the name of the instituto be spelled out letter by letter, a laborious process that consumed almost an entire page. It got worse. Garcia had to repeat every one of his responses four or five times because the judge insisted that his accent was impenetrable. Finally, a translator had been summoned, and Dr. Garcia was instructed to give his testimony in Spanish. That sure must have impressed the jury—an expert witness who couldn't even speak English.
But, in whatever language, Elvis found Dr. Hector Garcia's testimony riveting. Regis did not ask Garcia anything about the murder itself, only about the evidence of Holly's sexual activity. The Mexican doctor explained that he had been granted permission to take his own swabs of Miss McDougal's vaginal canal, that he had then refrigerated the samples and transported them to his own laboratory in Santa Teresa. There, using a technique that he had recently developed, he suspended the samples in a neutral medium and spun the resulting mixture in a centrifuge. This process resulted in two samples, one slightly but distinctly denser than the other. Garcia had then spread a microthin layer of each of the new samples on glass slides, stained them, and then inspected each under an electron microscope. This, too, was a new technique of his own devising. What it revealed was that the victim had engaged in sexual intercourse with
two different men
within a period of five to seven hours.
R. CLIFFORD: Dr. Garcia, in layman's terms, can you tell the court how you were able to reach this conclusion?
H. GARCIA (VIA INTERPRETER, M. SANCHEZ): Human spermatozoa contains one half of the blueprint of a potential embryo in the form of individual genes and chromosomes. Each set is different—which, of course, is why one man's child looks different from another's. We have no idea what particular chromosome results in what particular human characteristic or phenotype. But under an electron microscope, they certainly can look very different from one another. And that is what I saw: traces of chromosomes from two very different donors.
R. CLIFFORD: Could it not have been chromosomes from two different emissions from the same man?
H. GARCIA (VIA INTERPRETER, M. SANCHEZ): That's highly unlikely. The markers I saw were remarkably different from one another.
R. CLIFFORD: Dr. Garcia, again, in layman's terms, can you tell the court how you ascertained that one of these
emissions was deposited five to seven hours after the first?
H. GARCIA (VIA INTERPRETER, M. SANCHEZ): Spermatozoa are like little tadpoles propelled by the movement of their tails. They begin to die almost immediately and this is reflected in their motility—how fast and vigorously they swim. In effect, I was able to determine that one set of sperm was approximately five to seven hours further along in this process than the other.
Regis had then gotten Garcia to repeat the whole business in even simpler terms to make sure that the jury got the main point:
On the
day she was killed, Holly McDougal had had sexual relations with two different men at two different times.
LeRoy Clifford had immediately asked for a short recess before he began his cross-examination of Garcia. From his questions that followed, it was clear that he spent that recess huddled with his own forensic team.
L. CLIFFORD: Dr. Garcia, we have with us in this courtroom four of the most prominent forensic specialists in the United States. And yet not one of them has heard of the procedure you described. How would you account for that?
H. GARCIA (VIA INTERPRETER, M. SANCHEZ): That is not for me to say, is it? But the procedure is very new, and perhaps my learned colleagues in the United States are not completely up to date on procedures developed in other countries. Perhaps they have not read my articles about it in Mexico's
Journal of Forensic Medicine
.
L. CLIFFORD: Excuse me, Dr. Garcia, but in what language is that journal written?
H. GARCIA (VIA INTERPRETER, M. SANCHEZ): Spanish, of course. It is the language of my country. But I, myself, read all of the forensic journals in German, French, and English.
L. CLIFFORD: English, eh? A language in which you appear to have severely limited proficiency.
R. CLIFFORD: Objection, Your Honor. Harassing the witness. JUDGE LOWENSTEIN: Overruled.
H. GARCIA (VIA INTERPRETER, M. SANCHEZ): Reading and speaking are two different skills, sir. I have no problem reading medical journals in English.
L. CLIFFORD: Really? How would you ever be able to know that, Doctor?
R. CLIFFORD: Objection, Your Honor. Harassing the witness. JUDGE LOWENSTEIN: Overruled.
Elvis felt his blood boil. What Assistant District Attorney LeRoy Clifford was saying in no uncertain terms—and he was getting away with it—is that only a fool would take the word of a dumb Mexican who can barely speak English. And then LeRoy had gone in for the kill.
L. CLIFFORD: Do you believe it is possible to match a particular sperm sample to a particular donor?
H. GARCIA (VIA INTERPRETER, M. SANCHEZ): Yes, I do. But I am pretty much alone in this belief at this time. I have no doubt that in the future my findings will be borne out by other scientists.
[Vocal Disruption: Laughter.]
JUDGE LOWENSTEIN: Doctors, please.
Apparently, it was the eminences from Harvard and UCLA who had cracked up at Garcia's scientific prediction. Obviously, professional respect did not cross borders, particularly the one to the south.
Regis's final witness was the defendant himself, and it was a disaster from start to finish. It was not that Squirm did not give the right answers or that he was inconsistent on cross-examination, it was that the proceedings had to be halted seven separate times for the defendant to regain his composure. As the court stenographer
deftly put it:
“F Littlejon:
[Inaudible; sobbing.]” It seems F. Littlejon weeped and wailed virtually every time Nanette Poulette's name was mentioned. On the witness stand, Squirm was about the furthest thing there was from the slippery Harry Houdini.
The jury deliberated for exactly one hour, the minimum set by Judge Lowenstein. Frederick Littlejon, Esquire, was found guilty of murder in the first degree.
Elvis shuffled the pages of the transcript together and put them back in the folder. Only then did he realize just how much his ankle was killing him. He reached for the vial of painkillers on his bed table and popped one into his mouth.
The Universal Themes of Rock and Roll
A
faint rolling drumbeat. Or was it the summer rain pattering on the roof of his Tupelo bedroom? A soothing rhythm, like the bass and drum intro to an Italian ballad about love and loss and the hope for a new beginning. He could almost hear the lyric.
“
Elvis?
”
Yes, the lyric was coming now, although it was not in English or Italian or Spanish or any other language he'd ever heard of. It was a lyric that rose above any manmade language into the universal language of the human soul. Words that were not
about
feelings, but were the feelings themselves—the aches and sweet yearnings of every man who ever longed to love with a pure heart.
“
Elvis?”
He opened his eyes. Someone was rapping rhythmically on his bedroom door. He was still sitting up in bed, the transcript folder on one side of him and the empty White Tower bag on the other. He looked at his watch: 9:10. If he had slept, it could only have been for a few minutes, but he felt like he was coming out of a long, deep sleep.
“Who's there?”
“It's me, Elvis.” Joe's voice. “Got a man here who said you sent for him. A Mr. Regis Clifford.”
“Thanks, Joe. Let him in.”
Clifford had dressed up for the occasion in a three-piece charcoal-gray
suit, white shirt, and paisley silk tie, and he'd combed his sandy hair straight back with the benefit of Brylcreem.
“Good evening, Mr. Presley,” he said, striding to the bed and shaking Elvis's hand. “Sorry to hear about your mishap.”
Except for the Scotch on his breath, you would have thought Regis was the Prince of Wales. Heck, for all Elvis knew, the Prince of Wales smelled of Scotch too.
“Want me to bring you anything, Elvis?” Joe asked. “Joanie could fix you up some cocoa.”
“No thanks, Joe,” Elvis said. He turned to Regis. “How about you, Mr. Clifford? Cocoa?”
Clifford made a big show of considering the offer, then smiled and said, “It just doesn't feel like a cocoa kind of evening, if you know what I mean.”
As soon as Joe left, Regis pulled a chair up alongside Elvis's bed and looked at him seriously. “How did it happen?” he asked, gesturing at Elvis's ankle.
Elvis told him.
“Son of a bitch,” Regis said. “Grieves would string up his mother if it suited his purposes.”
For a brief moment, Elvis thought he heard that wordless lyric again. It was like a siren song in those Greek stories that Selma had read to him one evening. The song wanted to pull him away from this world.
“And what do you suppose his purposes are?” Elvis said finally.
“To scare you off, I imagine,” Regis said. “Although it seems like an awfully clumsy way to go about it. Especially considering your personal stature. You wouldn't think a lowly stuntman would risk offending the most valuable star on the studio's roster. Seems like a guaranteed way to lose his job.”
“I hadn't thought of that,” Elvis said.
“So,
are
you going to tell MGM to fire him?”
“No,” Elvis said. “I think I want to keep Grieves right there, where I can keep an eye on him.”
“And where he can keep an eye on you,” Regis said. “Let's hope it's just an eye.”
Elvis nodded, then picked up the transcript folder and pulled out the pages.
“I read it through, Regis,” he said, “and I don't know much about these things, but it seems to me you did a pretty decent job of defending Squirm, considering.”
“Thank you, Mr. Presley.” Clifford seemed a lot more gratified by this compliment than Elvis would have expected.
“Why don't you call me, Elvis?”
“It certainly suits you better than ‘Jodie' does,” Regis said, smiling.
“I'd like to talk to Dr. Hector Garcia,” Elvis said. “In person.”
“I think it can be arranged,” Regis replied.
“Down there in Mexico,” Elvis continued. “At his laboratory. See how he does his little procedure.”
“Okay, Elvis,” Regis said. He hesitated a second, then, “Would you want me to come with you? I, uh, I
am
fluent in Spanish.”
“Sounds like a good idea then,” Elvis said. “Make the date and I'll have someone get us the plane tickets.”
“Maybe it would be best if I took care of that part too,” Regis said. “You probably don't want the people around you knowing what you're up to, at least until we know who you can trust in this enterprise.”
As if on cue, there was another knock at Elvis's door.
“I'm kinda busy, Joe,” Elvis said.
“Not Joe—it's me.” The dulcet tones of Colonel Thomas Parker.
Instinctively, Elvis shoved the trial transcript under a pillow. “Come on in, Colonel.”
Parker burst through the door like somebody had shoved him from behind. “Who the hell did this to you?” was his greeting.
“Did it to myself, Tom,” Elvis replied. “I should've heeded your warning about trying to do stunts myself.”
“What stunts, boy? We're all done shooting that picture.”
“Just fooling around on the lot,” Elvis said. Man, he was getting
awful tired of the Colonel treating him like some truant schoolboy, even if he was lying to him like a schoolboy just now.
“And who's this? Your doctor?” Parker glared at Clifford.
“No, sir, I'm Mr. Presley's—”
“My scriptwriter,” Elvis blurted, not knowing where that came from. Lately, he seemed to have developed a genuine talent for flip-flopping people's identities. Maybe he had learned something after all from playing two roles in
Kissin' Cousins.
“
Scriptwriter?”
Parker bellowed.
“That's right,” Regis jumped in. “We're developing quite an interesting property for Mr. Presley. Something that touches on the universal themes of love and betrayal.”
Elvis struggled to keep from grinning. Man, that Regis had a mouth and a half on him.
“Well, I sure as hell hope it's something he can play on crutches,” Parker snapped back.
“Now there's a brilliant touch,” Regis replied sarcastically. Elvis was beginning to realize that one big problem with Regis Clifford is that he never knew when to stop.
“How long are you going to be laid up, son?” Parker said, suddenly sounding genuinely concerned—although his chief concern was undoubtedly Elvis's schedule.
“Just a week,” Elvis answered.
“Well, that's not too bad,” Parker said. “But maybe you should be in a hospital where they can look after you properly.”
“I'm fine here, Tom,” Elvis said.
“Well, since you're going to have a little time on your hands, I brought you some reading matter.” Parker signaled to Joe in the doorway who promptly lugged in a peach crate full of scripts. And then another and another. After the final one had been set against the bedroom wall, the Colonel turned to Clifford and said, “No offense intended, of course, Mr. Screenwriter. But there just might be something in there with the universal themes of rock and roll.”
Parker touched Elvis in the middle of his forehead with his forefinger, like some kind of benediction, and started to leave, but then
he abruptly turned to one of the crates and lifted off a small soft package covered with butcher's paper and tied with string. He set it on Elvis's bed.
“Almost forgot,” he said. “This came in for you just as I was leaving the studio. Has ‘personal' written on it and you know how I respect those things.” Then he left, closing the door behind him.
Elvis held his hand over his mouth for as long as he could, but then he couldn't hold it back any longer: he burst out laughing. Laughed so hard that he was popping up and down on the bedsprings. And pretty soon, Regis was laughing along with him just from the sheer infectiousness of it.
“Th … that man,” Elvis sputtered through his laughter. “If he ain't the devil himself, he surely is his warm-up act. The devil's own comedian.”
Regis took out his handkerchief and patted his mouth. “Perhaps I should be leaving now too,” he said.
“Not yet, Regis,” Elvis said. “There's something I need to ask you about. It's the reason I wanted to see you tonight—you know, face-to-face. You see, I've got this picture in my mind of you and your brother in that courtroom. You're identical, right? Now how the heck did that look to everybody? I mean, it must've been confusing for the jury and all.”
Regis took his time doing more work on his face with the handkerchief. Finally, he said, “LeRoy and I don't really look that much alike. Not since we were kids.”
“How's that? The way you dress and wear your hair? That kind of thing?”
Regis walked over to the window opposite the bed and looked out. “I sure could use a little nip about now,” he said, his back turned.
“Sorry, Regis. Like I told you, I keep a dry house here,” Elvis said.
“I, uh, I brought a flask with me,” Regis murmured, his back still to Elvis.
“Do what you got to do, Regis,” Elvis said. “But it can't be good for you.”
Regis swiftly withdrew a flat silver flask from the inside pocket of his suit jacket, screwed off the top, and drained the contents in two swallows. Again, he took out his handkerchief and mopped around his mouth, then returned to the side of Elvis's bed and sat down.
“LeRoy's face is deformed,” he said quietly. “Misshapen.”
“Born that way?”
“No,” Regis said. “He had an accident. When he was ten years old. BB gun accident that blew out his right eye and took a piece of his cheekbone with it.”
“God Almighty!”
“So people do not have any problem telling us apart,” Regis went on. “The left side of LeRoy's face looks just like mine. But on the other, he's a freak, a freak with a glass eye that wanders and a cheek that turns in where it should turn out.”
“That is an awful thing,” Elvis murmured.
“Indeed it is,” Regis said. “Especially considering the fact that I did it.”
“
What?”
“I pulled the trigger,” Regis said evenly. “I shot my brother in the face.”
Elvis put both of his hands flat against his face. His fingers were trembling. “It … It was an accident, right?” he blurted out.
“Maybe.”
“What in God's name do you mean, ‘
maybe'
?” Elvis stared at Regis.
Regis bowed his head. “It seemed like an accident at the time,” he said in a monotone. “And that is the way it was written up, of course. Couple kids fooling around with a BB gun, shooting at pop bottles out by the lake, taking turns, passing the gun back and forth. And then, this one time, LeRoy passes it to me and—
Pop!
—it goes off in his face just as I grab it.”
“Then it
was
an accident,” Elvis said.
Regis raised his head and looked solemnly into Elvis's eyes. “Have you ever read any Sigmund Freud?” he asked.
“Heard of him, never read him,” Elvis answered.
“Well, Dr. Freud says that there are no accidents. Things may seem like an accident, but there is always a human motive hidden there somewhere. An unconscious motive—the kind that secretly wants to blow your brother's head off.”
“That's crazy,” Elvis said.
“It sounds that way, doesn't it?” Regis said. “But it's funny the way people just naturally find their way around to that point of view. Maybe that part is unconscious too.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“My parents, for one,” Regis said. “They kept assuring me it was just an accident and that I shouldn't feel guilty about it. But the more they said that to me, the more I knew that they were thinking just the opposite. That I had ruined my brother's life because I was careless. And, little by little, it wasn't because I was careless—it was because I was
bad
.”
“They said that?”
“Of course not. They never said anything like that. They just lived it. And so that's how I became Bad Regis, the proverbial evil twin,” Clifford went on with a grim smile. “You know how you never want to disappoint your parents' expectations of you? Well, I didn't want to disappoint mine. No, sir, from that day on I fulfilled their's. Got expelled from school that year. The first of many schools, I might add. Arrested for shoplifting at the age of twelve. Off to military academy where they threw me out for shouting obscenities in chapel. Ran away to Mexico when I was fifteen. Worked in a furniture factory there for close to a year. My little twist on migrant labor.”

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