by Wyborn Senna
“I’m not so sure. What if Fletcher is a friend of Cecil’s, and he’s here to spy on us? In fact, what if Dan and he are both spying on us?”
Marilyn knew Pia didn’t like Dan, so by default, she wouldn’t like his cousin. Pia was suspicious of how Dan got sensational stories she never managed to score, and Marilyn wrote it off to professional jealousy.
Pia was insistent. “Something fishy is going on.”
Dan walked up behind them, and Pia jumped. “What are you girls whispering about over here, and what do I have to do to get a piece of cake?”
Belle finished unwrapping gifts from Dan and his cousin. Each box held a medium-sized cashmere sweater—a solid blue one from Dan and an argyle print in olive, white, and gold from Ron.
“So, we’ve got a problem,” Marilyn announced. “PPP refused to do a full print run, but Chester Mowbrey gave me a contact in San Francisco.”
Ron stepped forward. “I know I’m the new guy, but my old college roommate’s dad owns a press in Chicago. Have you heard of Insert Press and Distribution?”
Marilyn’s jaw dropped, and the ferret cousins chuckled.
Chapter 45
Before Ryan could take a bite into his Hard Rock, legendary ten-ounce burger, a tiny, humpbacked man who looked past ninety made his way across the restaurant and stood before him.
“Pardon me for interrupting,” he said, “but I knew Elvis back in the day, and you’re his spitting image.”
Ryan pushed his chair back and rose up in greeting. “Have a seat.”
The man pulled out a chair and settled into it. He had a smallish head, a beak-like nose, and coffee-bean-colored eyes that looked alert and curious. What hair remained on his head was gauzy grey. “Last thing I worked on was his Live on Stage in Memphis album. I’m just a behind-the-scenes guy, but I was there for a lot of important moments. My name’s Barney Stern.”
Ryan still had his burger in his hands. He hadn’t taken a bite. “Ryan Wyatt.”
“Go ahead and eat, kid. You’re a growing boy.”
Ryan bit into the burger, then placed it on his plate and removed the top bun, scraping the fried onion ring off but leaving the lettuce, tomato, pickles, cheddar, and bacon. He replaced the bun top and took a second bite.
“You’re not from here. You on vacation?”
Ryan spoke through his mouthful. “Los Angeles. Here to see Graceland with my girlfriend.”
Barney rubbed his hands together. They were large, but the rest of him was spindly and thin. “Good, good. How old are you?”
“Eighteen. Just graduated.”
“Got any plans?”
“College, eventually.”
The old man smiled. “Bet you can sing.”
“A little bit.”
“Give me a few bars of a song.”
A bit of sliced tomato fell out of Ryan’s mouth. Was this guy serious?
“What? You’re shy? Let’s go to the john.”
Ryan was still staring at him.
Barney broke into a crafty smile. “Don’t worry, kid. I’m not some old perv. Consider it an audition.”
Ryan put his burger back on his plate, wiped his hands, and followed the old man to the restroom, where the old man leaned against the wall and waited. With Blue Hawaii fresh in his mind, Ryan began to sing “Can’t Help Falling in Love”.
A toilet flushed, and a man came out of a stall. He gave them both a look, washed his hands, and left, but Ryan didn’t stop singing. Barney’s attention was rapt, his sharp eyes gleaming.
At song’s end, the old man applauded and grinned, his teeth as yellow as hundred-year-old piano ivories. “Rock-A-Hula, Baby!”
“Rock-A-Hula,” Ryan replied, taking a slight bow.
The old man fumbled in his pocket. He pulled out a wilted wallet and removed a business card, extending it toward Ryan with an unsteady hand.
“If you ever feel like seeing the world, call this guy. He’d hire you in a second. Tell him Barney recommended you. I don’t say that to all the kids. You gotta have charisma and talent and, buddy, you’ve got it, without a speck of doubt.”
Ryan accepted the card without looking at it.
Barney wasn’t done. “Talent like yours is authentic, and to me, anything authentic is the truth. You know what The King said about the truth?”
Ryan shook his head and held the bathroom door for the old man, allowing him to totter ahead of him.
Barney stopped outside the restroom and rested his ancient claw on Ryan’s arm. “Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out, but it ain’t going away.”
Chapter 46
Dan and Ron escorted Marilyn out to her topless MG, squeezed into half a space near the elevator on the third floor of the hospital parking structure.
On the way, she told the cousins about her return trip from PPP that morning. A bright yellow Ford Focus ST followed her onto the northbound 101, so she kept an eye on her rearview mirror as she merged from the slow lane to the far left and fastest one, next to the carpoolers. After a mile of industrial buildings, Section 8 housing developments, factories, fields, cement walls, overpasses, and on-ramps, the Focus joined her in the fast lane, two cars back. After another mile passed, and she slid across the lanes back into the slow lane to see if he’d follow her. After half a mile, he crept in next to her and then scooted directly behind her. Startled, she moved into the middle lane, and he followed. Cutting back, he followed again. There was a break in the glut of traffic, so she careened all the way from the slow lane into the fast lane, then back again, and the Focus followed.
The sound of a police siren pierced the noise of the traffic. Blue lights strobed in her rearview mirror, and the officer used his loudspeaker to command her to pull over. Chastened, Marilyn slid over to the guardrail on the shoulder and waited. The door on the driver’s side of the police car slammed, and she watched in her side mirror as a beefy, African-American cop made his way toward her car, pausing at her rear bumper, bending down as if to inspect something. It took half a minute for him to rise to his full height of six-foot-six and approach the driver’s side. “License and registration.”
She grabbed her pocketbook. Past the tissues, gum, makeup, scraps of paper, loose coins, and Bic pens, she found the pouch she kept her identification in. Unzipping it, she flipped past her credit cards until she came to her license.
“And registration.”
With a sigh, she leaned over to open her glove box.
“Slowly,” he warned.
She pulled out the paperwork and handed it to him.
“I’ll be right back.”
“Can I just ask—” she began.
His response was a glance over his shoulder. She pushed the eject button on her CD player, removed Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto, and put the disc back into its case. Ahead, up the freeway, the Focus was parked on the shoulder beneath an underpass.
A chill ran through her. Who is that?
The officer returned to her window and handed back her license and registration. His nametag said “Griffin”. He took two steps back and began writing a ticket.
Marilyn was aghast. “What did I do?”
“Failure to signal when changing lanes.”
“What? No one does that.”
“Then they should all be fined. Including you.”
“Someone was chasing me. They’re driving a yellow Focus.”
Griffin stopped writing on his pad. “Oh?”
“They’re right up—” Marilyn searched the shadows beneath the underpass.
“Right up where?”
“Up there. They were parked and waiting.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“No. I’m telling you the truth.”
Griffin surveyed the empty stretch of shoulder, then tore the ticket off his pad and handed it to her. Marilyn felt like crumpling the ticket and throwing it at him.
“What do I do if they come back? Maybe it’s road rage. Maybe I accidentally cut them off and they’re g
oing to shoot me.”
The cop almost cracked a smile. “If you see your imaginary yellow Focus again, here’s my card.” He passed it to her and began to walk away.
Marilyn studied it. Alan Griffin was a sergeant with the LAPD.
Dan and Ron stood by the trunk of Marilyn’s car and listened to her story. When she was done, Dan hunkered down and felt beneath her bumper. “You say the cop bent down around here?”
Marilyn nodded. “But I don’t think he put anything under there. He’s a cop.”
When Dan stood up, he held a tiny black device in his hand. “You don’t, huh?”
Ron was excited. “Let me see that.”
Ron examined the device while Dan grinned at Marilyn.
Even though she knew the answer, she asked, “Is that like one of ours?”
Ron pointed to a serial number alongside the magnetic strip. “LAPD.”
Dan chuckled. “Deep.”
Marilyn asked another question she knew the answer to. “Why track me?”
Dan ran his fingers along his thumb, suggesting money was at play. “I think at least a cop or two are in Bertrand’s pocket.”
Ron walked three cars down and stuck the tracking device beneath the bumper of an off-duty United taxi cab. “This should keep them running all over town.”
Chapter 47
There was no need to enter the room quietly when Ryan made it back to the hotel. Bea was sitting up in bed, watching Elvis sing about the warden throwing a party in the county jail.
Ryan held up the container, announced he’d brought her food, and then proceeded to come over to her bed and open the Styrofoam box so she could see what was inside. Her eyes lit up. He’d brought her a honey citrus grilled chicken salad topped with all kinds of goodies from blue cheese to spiced pecans to orange slices to red pepper strips to dried cranberries. She picked at the lid on the four-ounce cup of dressing and poured it liberally across the top of the bed of grilled Cajun chicken and greens. Ryan dug inside the white bag and came up with a plastic fork and three napkins. After handing them to her, he went and sat down at the end of her bed to watch her eat. Her hair was damp with sweat, hanging in droopy hanks that now appeared light brown. Her eyes looked tired, but she was smiling. She didn’t need to ask where he’d been. The bag had the Hard Rock Café logo on it.
“Did you have fun?”
Ryan got up to turn down the volume on the TV and paused, captivated by what he saw. Elvis and his boys did a choreographed dance, and Ryan marveled at The King’s fluid movements. “How does he stay up on his toes like that? I really need to practice my dancing more.”
“And if you can’t find a party, you’re gonna have to partner with a wooden chair.”
“What about you?”
Bea picked at her salad. “My dancing days might be over.”
Ryan was sorry he’d said anything. He sat down on the bed again and watched as she bit into a forkful of chicken. “Is it good?”
She nodded. “Thanks. Sorry I was sleeping. I didn’t know I was so tired.”
“It’s understandable.”
“You never answered my question. Did you have fun?”
Ryan thought about the business card from Barney Stern in his wallet and debated whether or not he should tell her about it. Realizing he never kept any secrets from her, he decided to pull out his billford and remove it from the slot he’d tucked it into.
“Met a guy about as old as Larry King. Kind of even looked like him.”
“Jeez. What did you have to talk about?”
“He had me sing for him in the bathroom and said I have the right stuff. Then he gave me this.”
He passed the card to her, and she squinted at it. “Bacchanalia Cruises? I don’t get it.”
Ryan thought he did. He knew cruise lines hired performers for their lounge acts, and for a split second, he imagined himself sailing away from the Port of Los Angeles off the San Pedro Pier. The breezes would invigorate him, the waters would dazzle him, and either direction he went—south to Baja or north to Vancouver—promised untold adventures. The deep purple lounge would be filled with thirty round tables, each seating four. There would be a Madonna impersonator strutting the stage in a conical bra, an old dude doing Frank Sinantra tunes, and himself, singing to a hound dog plushie.
He felt movement on the bed, and his reverie burst like a champagne bubble. Bea got up and rushed to the bathroom. He heard the toilet lid slam against the porcelain tank as she raised it. Then he heard violent retching.
Jumping up, he ran into the bathroom and knelt down beside her. She was on her knees with her head so far over the rim of the toilet her face was nearly in the vomit.
Gently, he lifted her long hair away from the bowl and held it back from her clammy neck.
When her stomach was empty, she turned to smile apologetically. “I took extra meds so I could keep up with you on this trip, but I think I took too many.”
Ryan kissed her forehead.
“You don’t need to keep up with me,” he told her. “I’m here for you.”
Chapter 48
Violet Tearlach considered herself blessed. Her programmer boyfriend had found a backdoor into Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo so she could track what celebrities were saying in theoretically private correspondence and then sell the dirt to the tabloids. She was busy telling Marilyn how Kerr MacNaghten’s father was trying to convince his son to get rid of the five hundred live hand grenades he kept in his basement when Marilyn’s second line rang and a mysterious caller promised he’d tell her about Betrand’s plans to destroy her if she met him alone at a motel in Venice.
Though the place was called Penny’s Rose Garden, the place had less to do with scents than cents. The path from the sidewalk to the lobby was embellished with pennies set in concrete. Bored or greedy grubbers had pried a couple out, which Marilyn thought was a lot of work.
With floor to ceiling glass windows, the lobby also featured penny-embellished adornments from lamps to corner tables, from the front door to the check-in counter. Though the man at the desk wore a stovepipe hat, and his nameplate read “A. Lincoln,” he was overweight and blond.
At least he has a beard. “Abe?” She tapped her nails, which she had painted Le Vernis Sky Line, on the counter.
The man looked embarrassed. “No. Andrew.”
“I’m supposed to get a key for 104. My named is Marilyn Coffey. Or Nicole. Depends on what he told you.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Right. Already pre-paid.”
He stood there, looking at her.
Come on, Abe, clock is ticking.
He cleared his throat. “Do you like looking like Marilyn? That woman was so sad.”
“Marilyn was sad?”
“I just think a person should try to look like themselves, and especially not try to look like someone who was used by men, had virtually no talent, relied on her looks, and overdosed on pills.”
Marilyn gave Abe a strange look. She did have a few things in common with the real Marilyn, both in the being-used-by-men department and not being appreciated for her talent. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m trying to change that. Do you like looking like Abraham Lincoln?”
Abe avoided her eyes and gave her a room key and a map that showed the location of the room. “Doors face out, sliding glass doors face the inner courtyard. And we have a nice pool.”
Marilyn thanked him and followed the path of pennies around the corner. The hollow door opened with a key rather than a key card, another quaint but charming feature of the aging hostelry.
Inside, the room was as unpredictable as other aspects of the motel. A mass-produced reproduction of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s The Slave Ship, from 1840, hung over the bed, and Marilyn wondered if the image of slaves drowning in choppy waters while their ship sank was conducive to a guest’s restful stay. She imagined it was chosen for its abolitionist stance, since it tied in with the Lincoln era and the President’s eventual call to end slaver
y in 1864.
The Civil War era and thoughts of an artist considered “a painter of light” long before Thomas Kinkade protected that phrase through trademark and churned out self-proclaimed masterpieces of Hansel and Gretel cottages lit from within by cozy fires made Marilyn feel bone tired. She threw her handbag on the bed and stared at the bedside lamp-base busts of Mary Todd Lincoln and Honest Abe. She wondered which bedside drawer held Gideon’s Bible, wagered it would be the President rather than his wife, checked his drawer first, and she was right.
She retrieved her cell phone and dialed Graham because she knew he, of all her friends, would put her situation in perspective as only a Brit could. Someone should know where she was in case anything went wrong.
He picked up on the second ring and said hello just loud enough to be heard over the noisy street traffic.
“Where the hell are you, G?”
“Answering the phone while driving on the 5. Why, you—”
The door to the room clicked shut.
She turned to see who it was but didn’t recognize the man.
“Hang up now and turn your phone off,” he told her.
Marilyn pretended to punch the button that would terminate her connection with Graham and threw her cell phone into her bag.
Chapter 49
A line for the shuttle bus to Graceland was forming as, off to the side, visitors were having their pictures taken in front of a pictoral backdrop depicting the famous Graceland gates and, beyond them, the tan limestone mansion. Ryan begged Bea for a souvenir shot of the two of them together, but Bea declined. She still wasn’t feeling well, was pale, and had only taken her meds after a breakfast of pancakes and eggs a half hour earlier.
The shuttle took less than half a minute to make its way across the street to the thirteen-acre estate. Herded off the shuttle bus, Ryan, Bea, and the other tourists swept past the four Temple of the Winds columns and the lions to the front door, where the guide kept everyone in suspense by drawing out the story of the home’s history.