by Blue Suede Clues: A Murder Mystery Featuring Elvis Presley
“You’ve got yourself a real talent there,” Elvis said.
“I’ve heard the same about you, Mr. Presley,” the man replied with a sly grin. He holstered both guns and extended his hand. “Name’s Cathcart. Will Cathcart.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Will,” Elvis said, shaking his hand.
“Pleasures all mine,” Cathcart said. “You just poking around or is there something I can do you for?”
Up close, Cathcart looked no more than nineteen or twenty. He had only appeared older because his skin had taken a real beating from the sun, but underneath the leathery tan and the stubble was a lingering case of acne that neither could camouflage. He was not a good-looking boy, but it didn’t much matter in his line of work—you were never supposed to see the stuntman’s face.
“Just poking,” Elvis replied. “I’ve never been out this way before. I always wondered where you guys hung out.”
“Want me to show you around?”
“I’d be obliged.”
Elvis had to stoop to follow the young stuntman through the door into the low end of the shack. Save for the daylight streaming in through the open door, it remained dark as a cellar in there until Cathcart snapped on the overhead lights. The place looked like a toy and sport store gone crazy, every inch of space covered with beach balls, harnesses, lariats, padded vests, padded overalls, Stetson hats, horse whips, snorkeling gear, a staircase that went up four steps then stopped in mid-air, boots with rappelling cleats, ropes, hooks, a couple of fire extinguishers, and clothes racks loaded down with everything from togas to astronaut suits to fancy ball gowns. There were at least a dozen other items that Elvis could not identify—a rubber bodysuit with feathers fastened to the front and back like some kind of giant sea bird, long-handled objects with loops or hooks or long steel blades at their ends, Rube Goldberg—like hook and pulley apparatuses. The tools of the stunt trade. Rubber tubing was an integral part of at least half of these items.
Directly to Elvis’s right was an interior curtain that was drawn closed. “Storage?” he said, pointing to it.
“Bunk room,” Cathcart replied. “Just a couple of cots.”
“Mind if I take a gander?”
“Not much to see,” the young man said, pulling back the curtain.
Elvis gazed inside. The scene of Holly McDougal’s murder looked like nothing so much as a high school kid’s slovenly bedroom—two unmade cots, clothing and shoes strewn all over the floor, girly calendars on the wall, and here and there plaques and chrome-plated cups that appeared to be varsity football awards but on closer inspection turned out to be rodeo trophies. From his experience with the fan club murders, Elvis knew that the scene of a horrendous crime usually turned out to be the most ordinary of places—a bedroom, a kitchen—but nonetheless he was struck by the sheer innocence of this little coop.
Elvis stepped into the room. According to Clifford, one of the pieces of circumstantial evidence that had convicted Littlejon was the fact that his street clothes were found on the floor next to McDougal’s body. That surely had to be pretty slim evidence if the floor looked anything like this on a regular basis. On the other hand, the eyewitness who had declared that Littlejon and McDougal were alone in here that afternoon only needed to have a clear view of the front door to make his claim—it was the sole entrance and exit and there were no windows.
Elvis gazed at the young man’s face. Cathcart had not seemed at all nervous about showing him the bunk room. “You been at this work for long?” Elvis asked.
“Not very,” Cathcart said. “I’m rodeo, you know. But that doesn’t put much food on the table, and I’ve got three and a half mouths to feed. Wife’s got a little one cooking in the oven right now.”
Elvis smiled. He had noticed that the boy had the bowed legs and curved spine of a veteran rodeo rider. “So you just do this parttime?”
“I do whatever comes up,” Cathcart said. “But these days if I gotta choose between a rodeo gig and a stunt gig, I go for the stunt. Three times the money. And most folks don’t believe it, but it’s a whole lot safer jumping off a trampoline with your clothes on fire than being thrown by a bull who’s got his balls in a slipknot.”
“So when’d you start stunt work?” Elvis asked.
“Last year,” the boy said. “Had to wait until I turned eighteen. Otherwise the insurance don’t cover you.”
That put Cathcart here well after the murder.
“Ever hear about a girl named Holly McDougal?” Elvis asked.
“Nope,” the boy said. “She a singer?”
“Actress,” Elvis said. “At least she was. She’s dead.”
“Sorry to hear that. She a friend of yours?”
“Kind of,” Elvis said.
“Well, the good Lord takes ’em all, don’t He? I lost my best buddy just this year. Kicked in the head by a crazy pony and never came to.”
“I’m sorry,” Elvis said.
Cathcart shrugged. “Over here’s the fun house,” he said, gesturing to the end of the shack where the ceiling abruptly shot up another ten or twelve feet. “Want to take a look-see?”
“Sure do,” Elvis said.
This end of the shack was as clean and uncluttered as the other side was a pig sty. Not a thing on the floor except wall-to-wall gym mats which extended a couple of yards up the wall as well. The centerpiece was a nylon cable which hung down from a beam at the apex of the A-frame ceiling. Swaying from the bottom of the cable was a leather chest and shoulder harness, a formidable-looking crosshatch of belts and buckles that laced up in the back like an old-fashioned corset.
“This here’s Nelly, the stuntman’s mistress,” Cathcart laughed, giving the harness a push that sent it in a wide arc which grazed the wall. “Gotta treat her sweet or she’ll drop you faster than a lead balloon.”
Elvis grabbed the harness as it swung toward him. “Use it for jumping?”
“Mostly for climbing,” Cathcart said. “Say you’re scaling the side of a building or up a stony ledge. Like one of the old-timers was in a picture where this guy had to climb up George Washington’s face on Mount Rushmore. They brought a crane up there, hung a cable from the end, and attached it to old Nelly strapped under his shirt. I seen the movie. You can spot the cable if you know where to look, even though they tried to fool you by painting it sky blue.” He grinned at Elvis. “Want to take her for a spin?”
Elvis hesitated. Only a few weeks back he’d told the Colonel that he’d like to do some of his own stunts in his next picture. He thought it might help keep his interest up if he was going to do anymore sleepwalkers like Kissin’ Cousins. Of course, the Colonel had said absolutely not. “Son, you’ve got a face like a Botticelli angel,” Parker had said. “We can’t be jeopardizing a thing like that.”
“Sure, why not?” Elvis said to Will Cathcart.
Elvis removed his shirt and put on a T-shirt that Cathcart picked randomly off the floor on the other side of the shack. It was a bit snug, especially across his mid-section, but Elvis barely noticed after the kid buckled and laced him into the stuntman’s mistress; the harness itself was so tight it chafed against his ribs with every inhale.
“I’m going to take you up a couple feet, okay, Mr. Presley?”
“What do I do?”
“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.
8
A Slender Hair
It 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.