The Angel of Death
I
t was unlike any dream he'd ever had. Crystal clear. No shadows. No one thing turning into another thing without rhyme or reason. Everything was exactly what it was and nothing else. Elvis was Elvis. And Jesse Garon was Jesse Garon.
Jesse sat across from Elvis at the Formica-topped table, his hands in manacles.
“Greedy bastard!” Jesse snarled, rattling his chains. “One life to a customer. You wanted to have it all. Two of everything. Two homes. Two careers. Two women. Two feelings about every little thing. Fame and solitude. Sex
and
saintliness. Madonnas
and
whores.”
“I'm working it out, Jesse. It ain't easy living for the two of us.”
“My turn now. You had your chance and you blew it.”
“I blew it?” Elvis hissed. “You couldn't even get yourself born!”
“Like I had a chance. You tried to kill me from the git go. Choke the life out of me before I took my first breath.”
“Not possible,” Elvis said. “Dr. Garcia says thatâ”
“Dr. Garcia?”
Jesse snapped back. “Where the hell was he when you strung that umbilical cord around my neck? Counting specks in the jungle?”
“I wouldn't kill you, Jesse,” Elvis pleaded. “I swear on Momma's grave.”
“You're killing me now, Elvis,” Jesse Garon said softly. “Killing me with shame.”
“I'm sorry, Jesse. You don't know how sorry. But sometimes you got to choose between one shame and the other.”
“My turn, Elvis,” Jesse repeated in a whisper. “You blew it.”
Elvis's eyes snapped open. His face and chest were sopped with sweat. His head ached. A cramp in his neck.
Blue neon light flashed on and off in Regis's window from Rodriguez's sign in the next window over. In the far corner, Regis was sprawled on his back on a fold-out army cot, wheezing and snoring alternately. No sign of Murphy. Elvis looked at his watchâ6:10.
The photographs! Where were the photographs?
Elvis lurched out of his chair in a panic. The manila envelope skittered off his lap onto the floor. He picked it up, opened it, felt inside without looking. Two sheets, one thick, one thin. Still there.
Elvis crept out of the office without waking Regis, leaving his crutches leaning against the wall. He limped down the stairs to the street and made his way to La Cucina, which was either already open or still open from the previous night. He downed two quick
cafés con leche
at the bar, then headed for his car.
It was not quite seven o'clock when Elvis pulled up to the MGM gates. The guard studied him for a good thirty seconds before waving him through. Looking in his rearview mirror, Elvis could see why: the patchwork of stubble, the bloodshot eyes, the matted hair. He looked more like a stuntman than a movie star.
He parked at the north end of the lot, stuffing the manila envelope under his seat before locking the doors. Not another car within a hundred yards. He picked up the walkway behind Sound Studio G and turned left toward the outer campus. His left ankle sent a jolt of pain straight up to his hip every time he put his weight on it. Not a good time to take a pill, even though Regis made way too much of a fuss over the darned things. They were a doctor's prescription, for godssake.
Sighting the stunt shack, Elvis was reminded again of a Tennessee moonshine hut. One time Scotty had made a stop at one he knew
near Brownsville after they'd played a high school jamboree over there. Elvis hadn't taken a drink, of course, but he remembered liking the smell of the place, kind of like wilted roses on a compost heap.
No action anywhere near the shack. Same stuff as before leaning against the wallâmuskets, lances, Samurai swords. Somebody had taken the mini trampoline in for the night. Elvis approached the shack slowly, looking from side to side. He didn't see a soul.
The door was unlocked. Elvis slipped in quickly and closed the door behind him. Pitch black in here save for one thin line of morning sunlight cutting through a crack in the wall. Elvis stumbled over somethingâsnorkeling gear, maybeâthen felt his way along the wall until he touched the curtain to the bunk room. He stood perfectly still, listening. Nothing. Nobody home.
Inside the bunk room, Elvis edged to the closest cot and let himself down on it. His shirt was sticky from sweat, his face hot and prickly. His three days in the same clothes odor was wicked, but got lost in the smell of the dirty laundry scattered on the bunk-room floor. Elvis leaned back against the wall and waited.
This is where it all began. Where Holly set up her little operation, her hedge against the precariousness of show business. And this is where she had been strangled to death with a strip of rubber tubing. Done in by a guilt-crazed customer, if Mike Murphy's theory was rightâa guilt-crazed customer with powerful connections. That's what it all came down to, didn't it? Sex and power. Madonnas and whores.
A tremor twisted down Elvis's spine. They wouldn't have any trouble getting a newspaper to run the photographs of him and Ann-Margret. Maybe not the
L.A. Times
or the
Hollywood Reporter
, but the
National Enquirer
would grab them in a minute.
Silver Screen
too. Sure, they'd discreetly blot out their privatesâafter all, they're responsible periodicals, not pornographic publications. But then what? The church folk would be all over the story, wagging their fingers and smugly saying, “I told you so. Elvis is the devil himself, incarnate.” Then the studios would fall in line, dissolving their contracts with him in the name of human decency.
Hollywood
decency.
RCA might hang in for a while. The Colonel would convince them that the whole business would increase record sales, and he'd probably be right at that. Kids would be listening to “Big Hunk o' Love” with visions of Elvis and Ann-Margret dancing in their heads. The very thought made him want to break his record contract himself.
And then? What do you do with the rest of your life after you've been Elvis Presley? Go back to driving a truck in West Tennessee, singing to yourself in the cabin? Would that be so bad? Just a few days back he'd been musing wistfully about that writer who faked his death and changed his name so he could get his real life back.
He heard whistling outside. “If You Knew Suzie.” Closer, louder, now footsteps too. Elvis stood, crept toward the curtain. The whistler broke into song, “Oh, Oh, Oh what a gal!”
Grieves
.
Elvis sucked in his breath, pressed himself against the wall to the right of the curtain. The shack door opened, a shaft of bright sunlight appeared on the curtain, then squeezed down to a stripe, and then it was dark again.
“There's none so classy, as this fair lassy. Oh, Ohâ”
Click. On the other side of the curtain the overhead lights snapped on. Whistling again. Cheery, oh so cheery. “Oh, what a gal.”
Elvis's eyes darted around the now dimly illuminated bunk room. In the corner, out of reach, a horsewhip. He lowered himself onto his knees, crawled soundlessly over a carpet of discarded T-shirts to the corner, grasped the whip, then crawled back to the curtain. At the bottom edge, there was a tiny break between curtain and wall. Still on his knees, Elvis craned down his head, his chin touching the floor, and positioned a single eye at the break. He could only see Grieves from the waist down.
I am a camera, Elvis thought, spying through a crack in the curtain.
Grieves was pulling down his pants, singing aloud again. “Holy Moses, what a chassis!”
I am a film maker,
Elvis thought,
making a pornographic movie
.
Grieves was now pulling on some kind of skin-tight leggings. Wisps of feathers floating down to his ankles. It was that rubber
body suit Elvis had seen when Will Cathcart brought him in here, the one with feathers fastened to the front and back like some kind of giant seabird. The monster movie.
Grieves abruptly disappeared from view. Elvis raised himself onto his feet, bracing himself with the horsewhip. He placed a finger at the edge of the curtain, creating a tiny new opening at eye level. Grieves was paddling in the bird suit to where the roof shot up a dozen feet to accommodate the nylon cable that supported the leather chest-and-shoulder harness. Nelly, the stuntman's mistress.
Grieves was singing to himself again, “We went riding/She didn't balk/ Back from Yonkers/ I'm the one who had to walk.” He backed into the harness as if a valet was holding his coat for him, then quickly attached the buckles and skillfully tied the corsetlike laces in back by reaching both hands behind him. He was, after all, the master stuntman.
Elvis now saw that Grieves had knotted the pull end of the cable to his ankle. Grieves untied it, wrapped it around his left hand, then began drawing against the pulley with both hands, lifting himself off of the ground. Hand over hand, he elevated himself more than halfway to the ceiling, a good eight feet up. Then, slinging his legs forward like a child on a playground swing, he swung forward, folded his legs and swung back, then forward again to the wall where he grabbed a beam. With a single graceful toss, he looped the end of the cable around a hook on the wall, secured it with a slipknot, released both cable and beam, and swung back. Grieves was flying solo now. He spread his feathered arms, swooping in a circle like an enormous falcon scouting for prey, ready to pounce with its lethal talons.
Elvis slipped furtively through the curtain, made his way into the harness room without being seen or heard. He was now standing directly under Grieves.
“Fine day for flying, isn't it, Mickey?” Elvis called up to him.
Grieves spun around, gaped down, then immediately started pumping his legs, swinging himself toward the hook where the cable was tied. He reached out with his right hand, grasping for the
slipknot. But just as he touched the cable, Elvis raised the horsewhip and snapped it, the tip lashing against the back of Grieves's outstretched hand, instantly drawing blood. Grieves reflexively pulled back his hand, spun in a half turn, then smacked against the wall, the hook tearing through his rubber suit at the shoulder and cutting into his skin. A handful of feathers wafted down like autumn leaves.
“I know you killed Will,” Elvis called up to him. “Know all about the bull and the pork insulin. Got proof. Got witnesses.”
Grieves said nothing. He suddenly started to swing back toward the hook, but Elvis shot out the whip again, lashed it around one of Grieves's ankles and held tight. It arrested Grieves in mid-swing, far short of the hook.
“The question is, did you kill Holly too?” Elvis went on. “Or are you just doing someone's bidding? Covering somebody else's mess?”
“Who the hell do you think you are, Pelvis?” Grieves shouted back. “You're just a one-note warbler that got lucky. But it can all come tumbling down in a minute. Just like that, and you're a nobody again.”
“That's true,” Elvis said evenly. “Never been more aware of that in my life. But the thing is, Mickey, I'd rather be a nobody than turn my eyes away from evil. I know that for sure now.”
Grieves cackled.
“Oh, they're going to get you good, Pelvis,” he snarled. “You're going to be worse than a nobody. Worse than a has-been. You're going to be scum.”
“You talking about the pictures, right?” Elvis said. “The photographs?”
“Yeh, the pictures. You and your movie star playing pattycake in the trailer.” Grieves cackled again. “Trailer trash!”
Elvis snapped the whip, catching Grieves just below the harness on his rump. It made him spin like a Christmas-tree ornament on a ribbon. Grieves grimaced with pain.
“Who are
they,
Mickey?” Elvis said. “Who's trying to stop me?”
“It doesn't matter
who
,” Grieves called back. “It's
what
they can
do. And that's just about anything they feel like doing.”
“I know what Holly was doing out here,” Elvis said. “And I know it's one of her johns who's behind all this. Give me his name, Grieves. Give me the name or I'm going to call the police right now and have them come get you for Will's murder.”
“They won't believe you, Pelvis,” Grieves said. “Hell, they never believe a drug addict.”
Elvis swallowed hard. “They'll believe the vet who did the autopsy on the bull,” he said. “And they'll believe Binxter Bartley who saw you give it that shot.” That wasn't exactly the truth, but for emphasis Elvis snapped the whip under Grieve's chin.
For a long moment, Grieves said nothing. Then, “Okay. Let me down and I'll tell you. I'll tell you who killed Holly. But then you got to let me run. Get a running start before you call the police.”
“Deal,” Elvis said.