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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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“Whatever you please, Elvis,” the boy said. “You could act like you're climbing up George Washington's face if you wanted. Nellie will do all the real work.”
The boy vanished from Elvis's sight. “Here goes!” he called.
Elvis was yanked up so fast his head snapped forward and his insides churned. The straps under his shoulders pinched his skin so viciously that his eyes smarted. But the worst part was the dizziness—the dizziness and the feeling of vulnerability. He felt like a puppet. And that was surely a feeling he did not like at all.
“Sure hope you know what you're doing, Will,” Elvis said, forcing a little laugh.
“Oh, I know what I'm doing, all right,” Cathcart chimed back. “I learned from the master.”
“The master?”
Abruptly, Elvis was hoisted up another five feet. He was now more than halfway to the ceiling, and he started to spin and sway like a dead-weight pendulum. Automatically, he extended his hands in front of him.
“That'd be me, Pelvis,” a voice below him cracked. “The stuntmaster supreme.” Somebody else was down there.
Elvis craned his head down to try to see who it was, but suddenly he was swinging so wildly and twirling so fast that his hands were no help in preventing him from colliding with the wall. First his right shoulder hit, then, careening back, his buttocks took a smack from the opposite wall, and spinning back again, his left hand scraped against a wood strut, grazing the skin on his knuckles. Along the way, the blond wig tumbled off his head and fell to the ground. In his gut, Elvis's anger was fighting with his fear, and his anger was winning hands down.
“Set me down! Now, boy!
Now!”
Elvis bellowed.
“Say ‘please,'” the new voice laughed.
The spinning started to slow, then the arc of the sway too, so that now Elvis was no longer bouncing against the walls. But he remained suspended a good six feet off the ground. He looked down. A muscular man in a black T-shirt and silky boxing trunks was gazing up at him with a supercilious grin on his face.
“Grieves, Mickey Grieves,” the man said. “Pleasure to meet you, King.”
Mickey Grieves, Squirm's good buddy who had advised him to use that stellar defense attorney, Regis Clifford. The man who then took the stand and accused Littlejon of not only being a murderer, but a rapist too. As Vernon liked to say, “With friends like these, who needs enemas?”
“Yes, I've heard about you, Grieves,” Elvis said stonily. He felt like a real idiot still hanging up there—an idiot with enough fury in him to give Grieves a karate chop to the neck that would leave him with only one stunt left in his repertoire: drinking through a straw.
“Got a question for you, Pelvis,” Grieves said in a mocking voice, scratching his head like he had a real stumper. “See, I can't carry a
tune for the life of me, so I wouldn't think a minute of getting in front of a camera and wiggling my hips and singing about a hound dog. So what I'm wondering is, what in tarnation are you doing up there, Pelvis? I mean, I can't sing and you can't swing. See what I'm saying? You gotta stick to what you know and leave the rest alone, or you get yourself all tied up and hanging by your toes.”
“Get me down now, Cathcart
!” Elvis screamed.
In an instant, Elvis plummeted to the floor in a free fall, his legs splaying as he hit the gym mats, his left ankle twisting badly. He gained his footing and was seriously considering giving Grieves that chop he had promised himself when the ankle painfully buckled under him, dropping him to one knee. Grieves cackled like a coydog. Elvis lunged, grabbing the master stuntman just below the knees and throttling him hard to the ground. Grieves lay there stunned, the breath knocked out of him. And it was at that moment that two MGM security guards came dashing in through the stunt-shack door, one of them with his black baton raised, ready to knock heads. The two stood over Elvis and Grieves, staring down at them in utter bafflement.
“Mr. Presley, sir?” one of them said.
“We heard a scream,” said the other.
“Get me out of here,” Elvis barked. “I think I broke something.”
His arms braced around the shoulders of the two security men, Elvis hopped out of the stunt shack on his right foot. He was fuming. But underneath his rage another feeling was emerging, a feeling that felt strangely consoling. For the first time in a long while, Elvis felt
one
pure emotion: hatred for Mickey Grieves.
A Slender Hair
I
t wasn't a break, but it was a bad sprain. Bad enough to keep Elvis's ankle bound up and him on crutches for a week, the doctor at the MGM infirmary had said. But break or sprain, it wasn't any accident. Grieves had known exactly what he was doing. He must have been outside the shack the whole time Elvis was in there, must have heard Elvis quizzing Cathcart about Holly McDougal. No, it wasn't an accident, it was Grieves's threat:
Keep your nose out of this, Pelvis, or I'll leave you hanging by your toes!
God knows, Grieves wouldn't be threatening Elvis if he wasn't somehow connected to the McDougal girl's murder. Maybe Grieves hadn't strangled the girl himself, but he surely knew who had. And the master stuntman wouldn't be messing with Elvis Presley if that person was only Squirm Littlejon. Man, it was a good thing the security guards had shown up when they did. One more minute and Elvis would have throttled Grieves by the neck and not let go until his hairy legs stopped twitching.
Joe and Joanie picked Elvis up at the studio and brought him back to Perugia Way and up to bed. He was spread out there now, Frederick Littlejon's trial transcript on one side of him and, on the other, a bag of White Tower two-bite burgers that they had picked up on the way home. The doctor had recommended a high-protein diet to help with the healing. Elvis popped an entire two-bite into his mouth
and shifted onto his side. Man, that ankle ached. The doc had given him some pills for the pain, but Elvis decided to hold off for a while. He wanted to read with a clear head:
The State of California v. Frederick Littlejon, Esquire
Elvis had to smile at that. It was probably the one and only time in his life that Squirm had an “Esquire” appended to his name.
The charge was first-degree murder, nothing about rape in the indictment. A total of twenty-two witnesses were listed on the first page, all but three of them for the prosecution. Four of the prosecution witnesses were forensic experts, three of them professors at UCLA, the fourth imported from Harvard Law School. Only one of the defense witnesses was a forensic expert: a man named Hector Garcia from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de Mexico. That Regis Clifford sure knew how to pick them.
Elvis turned to the prosecution's opening statement:
MR. L. CLIFFORD: Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury. We have the unpleasant task today of contemplating the murder of a beautiful young woman, ruthlessly strangled in the prime of her life by a vicious and cowardly man, Fred Littlejon … .
Mr. L.
Clifford?
Elvis flipped back to the first page of the transcript and looked at the bottom:
FOR THE PROSECUTION: Mr. LeRoy Clifford, Esquire, First Assistant District Attorney.
FOR THE DEFENSE: Mr. Regis Clifford, Esquire, Attorney at Law.
Elvis picked up the phone off the bed table and dialed Regis's number. This time it only rang twice before he picked up.
“The offices of Regis Clifford,” the attorney said brightly. What
a difference ten hours and six hundred dollars made.
“It's Tatum,” Elvis said.
“Oh, Tatum,” Clifford said. Elvis could literally hear the air of deflation gush out of him. “I'm sorry, Mr. Tatum, but I never got out to East L.A. today. Prior commitments. But I'm only charging you for a half day … . Listen, could you hold the wire a second? I've got something on the stove.”
There was no stove in Clifford's office.
“No, I can't hold,” Elvis said curtly. “I need to know something right now. Who was the prosecutor in the Littlejon case?”
“Let me see,” the attorney mumbled. “It's been a while, uh—”
“Clifford,” Elvis snapped. “LeRoy Clifford.”
“Right.”
“Like your name.”
“It's a common name,” Regis said. “Irish, you know. We're all over the place.”
“Is he any relation to you?” Elvis asked.
“Who?”
“For godssake,
LeRoy Clifford
. Is he any relation to you?”
No response while the attorney for the defense lit a cigarette and noisily inhaled several times.
“He was,” Regis said finally.
“
Was?
”
“We've been estranged for years, Mr. Tatum,” Clifford said, once again attempting to hide behind a voice loaded with upper-class cadences.
“
Who is he, Clifford?
” Elvis barked into the phone.
“My brother,” he answered quietly. “My twin brother.”
“God Almighty! Isn't that illegal or something? The two of you on opposite sides of the same case?”
“Nothing illegal about it,” Clifford answered. “As long as we didn't share any privileged information. And there was no danger of that. We don't even speak to each other, not even at discovery.”
Elvis shook his head incredulously. “Why didn't you tell me that this morning, Clifford?”
“It didn't seem relevant.”
“Not relevant to tell me that you lost this case to your own kin? Your own
twin
brother?”
“It wasn't the first time I lost to him, Mr. Presley,” Regis Clifford said.
Elvis shot straight up in his bed. “What did you just call me?”
“Mr. Presley,” Clifford said. “I don't know you well enough to call you Elvis.”
“You know who I am.”
“I may have the occasional drink, Mr. Presley, but I am not unconscious,” Clifford said.
“Why didn't you mention
that
before?” Elvis asked.
“You introduced yourself as Tatum, I called you Tatum,” Clifford replied. Not a bad answer, actually. “In other words, it didn't seem relevant, Mr. Presley,” he went on airily, clearly pleased with himself.
“We need to talk, Clifford,” Elvis said.
“We are talking.”
“In person,” Elvis blurted out. “Tonight.”
“It's eight o'clock.”
“One of the advantages of doing business with you is you're open night and day,” Elvis said.
“Touché,” Clifford said. “I'll leave a candle burning in the window for you.”
“It'll have to be at my place. I've got a little problem,” Elvis said. “Take a cab. You haven't made a dent in today's expenses yet. And Clifford?”
“What, Mr. Presley?”
“I keep a dry house here.”
“I'll manage,” Clifford replied. Elvis gave him the address and they hung up.
Elvis's head was spinning. That morning, Clifford had said that everybody has a twin out there doing the exact opposite of what he is doing. He'd added some poetry about “cosmic balance,” but he'd actually meant it as a matter of raw fact—he and his twin, LeRoy,
had been out there on the exact opposite sides of the Littlejon case.
Elvis popped the final two White Tower burgers into his mouth, one after another, and turned back to the trial transcript. First Assistant District Attorney LeRoy Clifford had laid out his case methodically, starting with the two cops who were the first at the scene of the crime after receiving a tip-off from an anonymous phone caller. The policemen not only described the crime scene, but produced several large glossy photographs of it that were passed to the jury and entered into evidence as exhibits.
But no one had mentioned the phone tip to Elvis before. Had they tried to trace the call? Elvis flipped to Regis's cross-examination of the two policemen. He did ask about the call, but no, they didn't have a clue who it was from and they had not traced it. All they could say was that it was a woman's voice. On redirect, LeRoy got the cops to recite some stock sermon about the importance of protecting anonymous informants lest they hold back information out of fear of reprisal. In other words, tracing the call wouldn't have been the decent thing to do.
Next came the prosecution's three forensic specialists, a triple threat with triple evidence: Littlejon's fingerprints were all over the girl's belongings and there were some on her person; they'd also lifted clear prints from the rubber tubbing she'd been garroted with; and they had swabs that proved she had engaged in sexual intercourse shortly before her murder. On cross, Regis had asked the obvious question: Were there anyone else's prints on McDougal's possessions and body? The experts had replied almost off-handedly that, of course, there were other fingerprints, there are on almost everything and everybody at any given time, but most of those other prints were faint or smudged, suggesting that they had been imprinted less vigorously and undoubtedly earlier in the day.
MR. R. CLIFFORD: Let me get this straight, Professor. What you are saying, essentially, is that the person who leaves the clearest fingerprints wins the prize—that prize being a murder indictment.
PROFESSOR G. GILMARTIN: That is not what I am saying at all, Counselor.
MR. R. CLIFFORD: Funny, that's how it sounded to me.
MR. L. CLIFFORD: Objection, Your Honor. Harassing the witness.
JUDGE LOWENSTEIN: Sustained.
Elvis smiled. He didn't know whether or not Regis had been tanked at the trial, but right there he certainly sounded a whole lot more intelligent than anybody else did.
Regis had then asked Professor Gilmartin if the swabs proved that it was definitely Littlejon who had engaged in intercourse with the victim. No, Gilmartin admitted, but there was other physical evidence that did, namely several strands of pubic hair that matched Littlejon's.
MR. R. CLIFFORD: Excuse me, Professor, but this is one of those many things I don't know a thing about. How do you go about matching pubic hairs?
PROFESSOR G. GILMARTIN: A series of tests for density, size, tensile strength, and color.
MR. R. CLIFFORD: Really? And there's that much difference between one person's little pubic hair and another person's?
PROFESSOR G. GILMARTIN: There are significant differences, yes.
MR. R. CLIFFORD: So, if we could pluck one pubic hair from each person in this courtroom—with their permission, of course—
[Vocal Disruption: Laughter.]
JUDGE LOWENSTEIN: Order. Order in the courtroom.
MR. R. CLIFFORD: As I was saying, under those circumstances, would you be able to go around and match each hair to its original, uh, site?
[Vocal Disruption: Laughter.]
JUDGE LOWENSTEIN: Order, please.
PROFESSOR G. GILMARTIN: We certainly would be able to make a match by groups.
MR. R. CLIFFORD: Groups? How many groups would that be, Professor?
PROFESSOR G. GILMARTIN: If one calculates all the permutations—as I say, for density, size, tensile strength, and color—that would come to twelve clearly discernable groups.
MR. R. CLIFFORD: Twelve? You mean every twelfth person essentially has the same pubic hair?
PROFESSOR G. GILMARTIN: You could put it that way if you like.
MR. R. CLIFFORD: Gosh, Professor, that sure seems like a slender piece of hair to hang a man on.
Man, that Regis had a mouth on him! But what was he getting at? Littlejon had admitted that he'd had sex with the McDougal girl that afternoon.
LeRoy Clifford had then trotted out one character witness after another—half of them MGM employees and most of those Littlejon's fellow stuntmen. All their stories were pretty much the same: Holly McDougal was the closest thing to an angel they'd ever met, and Fredrick “Squirm” Littlejon had all the markings of a creep and scoundrel, not to mention a pervert.
Mickey Grieves had been the last called to the stand, and he was a real prize. The man probably took acting lessons—heck, everybody else out here did—because the words came out of him in dramatic, writerly sentences. Miss McDougal was “a tender soul, like a delicate flower.” And Littlejon was known as Squirm because of his sneakiness; he was “a snake in the grass with a venomous bite.” There was no way Mickey Grieves could have composed those lines, let alone composed them on the spot. Finally came Grieves's corker: he figured Littlejon had raped the girl and then murdered her when she threatened to turn him in. Grieve's evidence was a supposed conversation
he had had with the accused in which Littlejon had bragged about raping several underage girls. Regis had objected on the grounds that this was only hearsay evidence and the judge concurred but, of course, the damage was done—done and dirty.
On cross, Regis had started with, “Was it true that Grieves himself had engaged in sexual congress with the victim on numerous occasions?”

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