“It was heaven, Regis.” LeRoy continued. “Heaven on earth for a few hours each week. But those few hours saturated me. It was like a transfusion. She changed me, changed me into another man. A whole man.”
“You should have gone with her. Married her,
” Regis said.
“And then what, Regis?
” That ugly laugh again. Bitterâthe hollow sound of that sunken cheekbone.
“Lived happily ever after? On what? I would have lost my seat on the court. Lost my house. Lost everything and everybody. The Cliffords have endured enough shame already.”
Regis put a hand to his forehead, rubbed it. Of course he, himself, was the shame that the Cliffords had endured already.
“But you loved her,” Regis said.
“Yes. For a few hours every week. That was all I needed.”
“And you had that.”
“Yes, I had that.”
“What went wrong, LeRoy?”
“Holly. Holly went wrong.”
LeRoy suddenly appeared in Elvis's view, pacing deliberately toward Regis. His right elbow was crooked and in his right hand was a pistol, a World War One German Luger. He was pointing it at his twin brother. He must have been pointing the gun at him the entire time.
Elvis sucked in his breath. There were a good twenty feet between him and LeRoy. If Elvis ran at him, dived and tackled him, LeRoy would easily have enough time to get off at least one shot at Regis. And one shot is all it would take.
“How? How did she go wrong?” Regis asked.
“She got greedy. She wanted more, always more. More money, more jewelry. Mother's jewelry. Her necklaces.”
“I wondered if those were Mother's.”
“What? If what were Mother's?”
LeRoy straightened his arm, jutting the pistol within inches of his brother's chest. Regis stood perfectly straight, perfectly still. His trembling had stopped altogether. If he was fast, he could slap the gun to the side, then knee LeRoy in the groin and subdue him. But it was obvious that Regis was going to do no such thing. He was his brother's captive, his victim, and Regis just stood there with defiant calm, as if he had been longing for this moment since the Clifford twins had been fooling around with a BB gun by the side of the lake, thirty years ago.
“
The jewelry in Holly's bank box,
” Regis said. “
I thought it looked familiar, but it didn't seem possible.
”
“Her bank box?”
“Yes. Holly's sister told me about it. And Elvis talked his way into access to it.”
“
Oh yes, your friend, Elvis!
” LeRoy snarled, thumping the barrel of the Luger against Regis's chest. “
The pea-brain warbler. My
brother's big-time Hollywood pal!
”
“
You have no idea who that man is, what is in his soul,
” Regis said.
The barrel of a loaded gun was pressed against his chest directly over his heart, and Regis was defending Elvis as if he were his brother. Elvis's own heart swelled.
“You must have
run out
of Mother's jewelry
eventually,”
Regis went on.
“Yes, I ran out, although Holly didn't believe me at first. So I bought more jewelry new jewelry expensive jewelry.”
“Because you loved her,”
Regis said
sympathetically.
“Yes, because I loved her.”
LeRoy took a long breath. “
And then because she threatened me.”
LeRoy's misshapen face knotted into a grotesque grimace. For a moment, he absently spread his arms in a gesture of futility and defeat, and with this gesture the gun pointed away from Regis toward the ceiling. Elvis swung silently into the doorway, desperately trying to catch Regis's eye.
“Now!”
he mouthed.
“Grab the gun now!”
But Regis did not see him. And he did not move. Instead, he gazed directly into his twin brother's eye as if warning him, as if reminding LeRoy to point the gun back at him. Elvis pulled back out of sight again.
“
Did she threaten to expose you?” Regis asked. “To tell the world that Judge LeRoy Clifford was cheating on his wife with a teenage girl?”
LeRoy nodded. He appeared to be struggling to control his arm, to aim the gun at Regis again.
“And so when there was nothing else left, you had to kill her,”
Regis said matter-of-factly.
“Holly wanted to be a star,”
LeRoy
answered in a monotone. “A movie star. She knew about the new studio Maryjane Aronson was planning to start. Knew that I was part of it, that I was arranging the financing.”
“With your friends,” Regis said.
“
With my colleagues.
” LeRoy offered his brother a bitterly ironic, lopsided smile. “
My colleagues on Maryjane's client list.
”
“And Holly wanted to star in Aronson's films.”
“
Yes,
” LeRoy said. “
She said that is how Marilyn Monroe got her start. That one day she was just a bit player, and the next she was a movie star. Holly didn't see why it should be any different for her.
”
“But Aronson didn't agree,
” Regis said.
“Aronson laughed in my face when I suggested it. She said Holly was a nothing. She couldn't carry a film in a million years. That she simply did not have star power. That she had risen as high as she would ever get professionally.
“To the level of a call girl,”
Regis said.
LeRoy's arm rose, stiffened. Now the gun was again pressing against his brother's chest. Elvis cringed. He should have made a run at LeRoy when he had the chance.
“I could have killed her,”
LeRoy snarled.
“Killed Aronson when she said that.”
“But you didn't. And when you told Holly that you were not going to be able to get her name in lights, she threatened you again.”
“Yes.”
“And that is when you killed her. Strangled her,”
Regis said.
LeRoy shoved hard with the gun barrel. Regis stumbled backward, but remained on his feet. He stood straight and immobile again, waiting for his brother.
“
It wasn't even the threat of exposure at that point,
” LeRoy said quietly. “
She said she would never be with me again. Never make love to me again. She ⦠she said that at least she would never have to see my disgusting face on top of her again.
”
And then Judge LeRoy Clifford closed his one eye, shut it tight against the humiliation of sight itself.
Elvis jumped into the doorway and charged at LeRoy. “Grab the gun!
Now
, Regis!”
Regis's head spun around. He leapt between Elvis and his brother.
“No!”
he screamed savagely.
“HE'S MY BROTHER!”
LeRoy's eye snapped open. He raised the pistol, then stuffed the barrel into his own mouth. Regis grabbed his arm, yanked it away. The gun fired and Regis fell backward, his knees crumbling under him.
Elvis dove at LeRoy's feet. But it was too late. LeRoy had crammed the barrel back into his mouth and the gun fired for a second time. LeRoy blew out the left side of his face, the “good” side, and catapulted backward onto his back, dead.
Elvis crawled to Regis. Blood gushed from Regis's chest, but he was conscious.
“Leroy?”
Regis whimpered.
Tears flooded Elvis's eyes as he gazed down at the surviving twin.
“It's your turn now,
” Elvis whispered.
Too Human
T
he sun was rising in Beverly Hills when Elvis and Murphy finally drove away from the Clifford estate.
The police and an ambulance had arrived at the same time. Regis had been taken off to Cedars Hospital; the medic said that the bullet had missed his aorta by only inches, but his life was not in any danger. Elvis had been certain that the police would take him into custody and the prospect didn't disturb him in the least. He had found out what he had set out to discover; he did not need to hide from anyone any longer. But it turned out that Jilly-Jo Cathcart had heard that the police were looking for Elvis in connection with Grieves's murder. She had gone to the Maywood police station that afternoon to give a statement about everything that had happened in the stunt shack that morning. At the Clifford residence, the police said that they only wanted Elvis to drop by later and give his own statement to corroborate the circumstances of the freak accident that had cost Mickey Grieves his life.
Miranda Clifford had remained eerily calm when informed that her husband was dead, his life taken by his own hand. Her guests were eager to leave her aborted dinner party as quickly as possible lest the press corps arrive and snap their pictures amid this messy scene. The police, ever sensitive to the wealthy's needs, permitted them to do so, Miss Miranda courteously gathering their wraps for them.
Murphy had done most of the talking to the police. In his fine reporter's mind, he had recorded every word spoken, every movement, every shot fired. When he finished, he had implored the law officers to protect his statement from the eyes of any prying journalists, “For obvious legal reasons,” he had explained to them, although everyone knew full well that he was protecting his own scoop. And now he and Elvis were racing to the
L.A. Times
in Mike Murphy's Corvair. There was still time to make the afternoon edition.
Neither Elvis nor Murphy spoke. Elvis stared out the side window watching the mansions of the Hollywood elite slip by. There were still many unanswered questionsâabout Aronson and Grieves and Warden Reardonâbut he was not thinking about any of these now. Elvis was thinking about LeRoy Clifford and Holly McDougal and the mysterious forces that joined a man and a woman, about the ballads of passionate love that never would be written and sung, that never
could
be written and sung because they were too true, too
human.
“Jesus! Behind us!” Murphy said.
Elvis turned, gaped out through the car's rear window. The blue Beetle. At not quite four in the morning on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills, the grizzled man in the nightwatch cap was a car's length behind them, frantically waving his garish-colored box in the air outside the driver's window.
Murphy yanked the car to the shoulder, screeched to a halt. The Beetle tore by them on the left, then swerved onto the shoulder and stopped twenty feet ahead of them. Elvis and Murphy jumped out of their car and ran in tandem toward the Beetle.
Elvis grabbed the door handle on the driver's side, yanked it open, wrenched the driver out of his seat by the back of his neck, spun him around, and put him in a full-Nelson over the hood.
“At last,” the old guy in the knit cap murmured, smiling painfully.
“Who the devil are you?” Elvis barked.
“Just a fisherman,” the man replied happily. “A fisherman with the best damned script you'll ever read in your life!”
He gestured at the cardboard box with the gleaming, blood-red skull and crossbones painted on its cover that sat on his car seat. Murphy reached in and picked it up. Elvis released his hold on the man, took the box from Murphy, and lifted off the cover. The title page read:
Blue Suede Cruise
by Captain Tim Timmons
The True Story of the Singing Fisherman
The only other vehicle on Santa Monica Boulevard at that hour was a farm truck carrying fifty crates of apricots up from Littlerock. Looking out his window, the driver of that pick-up would have seen three men standing by the side of the road, one bearded, one bald, and one who looked for all the world like Elvis Presley. And the bald one and the Elvis-looking fellow were laughing so uproariously, so crazily, so infectiously, that that farm truck driver couldn't have helped bursting into laughter too.
Tickle Me
E
lvis was sleeping in his own bed for the first time in a week when the phone rang. He blinked open his eyes, raised himself onto his elbows, and squinted over at his bed-table clock. It was ten in the morning. He picked up the phone.
“Yup,” he said into the mouthpiece.
“Hey, Elvis. I just realized you might be still sleeping over there. Want me to ring back later?”
“Who is this?”
“Me, Squirm.”
“Squirm?”
Elvis finished waking up real fast. “Where the heck are you?”
“Rome,” Squirm said. “Rome, Italy. It's awful nice here too. Sunny, but not
too
sunny, you know?”
“How the devil did you get to Rome?”
“The long way,” Squirm said, chuckling. “By way of Costa Rica and Marakesh, actually. Gotta be a faster way, I'm sure.”
Elvis sat up straight in his bed.
“Slow down, Squirm,” he said. “I'm a few hours behind you.”
“We got the
International Herald
this morning,” Littlejon said. “The whole story about Clifford's brother and Holly and that Aronson woman. Nancy never trusted her, you know.”
“Oh,” was all Elvis could manage at that particular moment.
“Anyway,” Squirm went on, “We figured it was okay to call now,
the coast being clear and all. I mean, I wanted to call earlier, but you never know who's listening, do you?”
“No,” Elvis said. He tried shaking his head vigorously to get his brain fully engaged.
“Well, like they say, all's well that ends well,” Squirm continued cheerfully. “I already landed a job here. Gernario Films. Spaghetti westerns. They need a little American know-how in the stunt department. And like I was just saying to Nancy, I owe it all to you. Every bit of it. You gave me my life back, Elvis, and I will never forget that as long as Iâ”
“Hold on, a minute.
Nancy?
You were just saying to
Nancy
? Nancy Pollard?”
“Yeah, that's the best part, Elvis. She's here with me. Flew over yesterday. We got a lot of time to make up for.”
“I, uh, I bet you do, Squirm,” Elvis said.
“And listen, Elvis? How's that ankle of yours doing? I felt real bad about that, you know.”
“Just fine, Squirm. Healed itself.” It actually was healed, Elvis had realized the night before.
“That's terrific,” Squirm Littlejon said. “I got a few twists and bruises myself along the way. Man, I did some stunts out there, the stunts of a lifetime: Especially that one where I slid down the heating duct of the prison infirmary.”
“What?”
“The heating ducts. Narrow as a drain pipe, but that didn't keep
el bandito diminuto
from squirming through.”
“Reardon showed youâ?”
“Reardon didn't show me dip for diddle. I'd been planning this escape for years. But seeing how much you believed in me finally gave me the gumption to do it. I had some real close calls, I'll tell you, but you saved my ass when you put out the word for nobody to shoot at me.” Squirm laughed. “Well, Nancy's waiting on me, so I got to go. You know how women are, Elvis.”
Not really, Elvis thought. In fact, not at all.
“You take care, Squirm,” Elvis said and he hung up. He got out
of bed and headed down to the kitchen, his head spinning. Unbelievable. Neither Reardon nor LeRoy nor anybody else had set up Squirm's escape; it was all his own doing. But even more incredible was the fact that Nancy Pollard, the woman who had helped put Squirm away for life, was now with him in Rome to pick up their romance where it had left off. No sense in Elvis even
trying
to get his mind around that one. He put up the kettle for coffee.
Regis and Delores were a different story; their feelings of forgiveness and love made perfect sense to him. When Elvis had visited Regis at the hospital yesterday, Delores was at his side, lovingly stroking his head. His bullet wound was healing, but the wound in his heart over his late brother would never heal completely, Regis told Elvis. He was wrong about the gratifications of revenge, he said. Dead wrong. Revenge was puny stuff when compared to brotherly love.
Delores was going to wait for Regis to get out of the hospital, and then the two of them would fly to Santa Teresa together, Regis to remain there. He was thinking of studying up on Mexican patent law so he could patent the discoveries that Hector and Delores were making in their laboratory. Regis and Delores planned to get married down there as soon as possible and hoped that Elvis would come for the ceremony. “No excuses,” Regis had said, managing a smile. “After all, you've got a fresh passport.”
Delores had accompanied Elvis out to the hospital corridor. There, she had suddenly presented him with a record album, the Spanish one he'd seen in El Disco Norde's window entitled,
Rubias
,
Morenas Y Pelirrojas
. Delores wanted him to autograph it for her mother. Elvis obliged, writing to Senora Suarez that her daughter was going to make his friend, Regis, one fine wife. Handing the album back, Elvis confessed that he didn't really know what “Rubias, Morenas Y Pelirrojas” meant.
Delores had laughed. “It means, âBlondes, Brunettes, and Redheads,'” she said.
Elvis looked at her quizzically.
“It's the name we gave to your movie,
It Happened at the World's Fair,”
she said.
Maybe once in a while, a title gained something in translation. There was only one decent song in
World's Fair
that Elvis could remember, the one called “Happy Ending.”
The kettle was boiling. Elvis made himself a mug of Maxwell House instant, ladling in four spoonfuls of sugar, and then sat down at the kitchen table. Yesterday's
Los Angeles Times
still lay there with Mike Murphy's front-page article as the second lead. This was the article that had found its way into the
International Herald Tribune,
along with hundreds of other newspapers across the country. It picked up where Murphy's scoop in the afternoon edition had left off, with the story of Justice LeRoy Clifford's suicide. Elvis glanced down at it.
Judge's Suicide Linked to Murder Cover-Up
Studio Head and Stuntman Incriminated
Studio City, Nov. 21
. When State Supreme Court Justice LeRoy Clifford took his own life at his estate yesterday, he not only left behind a tangled web of love, betrayal, and murder, but a cover-up of that murder which involved Miss Maryjane Aronson, CEO of the newly incorporated, Timeless Films, and Mr. Michael Grieves, a former MGM stuntman who coincidently died in a freak accident on the MGM lot on Tuesday ⦠.
Murphy had gathered the material for this follow-up story yesterday after dropping Elvis off at his house on Perugia Way. From Elvis's, Murphy had driven directly to the makeshift offices of Timeless Films in Studio City where he found the fledgling studio's CEO still enthroned on her open bronze safe swaddled in duct tape, wild eyed and reeking of fear and bodily fluids. Murphy had struck a deal with her:
Tell all and I will set you free
. Murphy had unwound the
tape to Maryjane Aronson's neck, leaving the rest of her bound like a mummy as he sat down in front of her with his open notebook.
According to the
Times'
anonymous source, after Judge Clifford left the murder victim on the evening of March 20, 1960, he went directly to the office of Miss Aronson in the project development department of MGM. At this time, Clifford was still wearing the World War One army uniform that Aronson had procured for him from the studio wardrobe for his assignations with Miss McDougal. The outfit served as a disguise for Clifford; he always looked like just another extra on the studio lot, a gas mask completing his camouflage ⦠.
Elvis realized that it must have been the same outfit LeRoy wore when he had threatened Connie Spinelli.
Miss Aronson waited until Judge Clifford had sufficient time to get home, then anonymously phoned the police, claiming that she had witnessed the stuntman, Fredrick Littlejon, leaving the scene of the crime ⦠.
According to Aronson, it was just the luck of the draw that LeRoy had been selected by the chief DA to prosecute the case. Similarly, it had been only happenchance that Mickey Grieves recommended Regis as Littlejon's lawyer; Grieves had heard through the grapevine that Regis had a reputation for losing a high percentage of his cases.
As to Grieves's own role in the cover-up, from his lying testimony to his threat on Elvis to his cleverly contrived murder of Will Cathcart, Maryjane Aronson said that it was motivated by nothing less pathetic and banal than Aronson's promise to upgrade him from stuntman to speaking parts in Timeless Films's motion pictures. Like everyone else, Mickey Grieves had dreamed of making it big in Hollywood.
The other stuntmen who testified that they had never had sex with Holly McDougal were simply protecting themselves from recriminations
by their wives and girlfriends. Grieves had convinced them that Squirm was unquestionably the murderer and that they had nothing to gain by sullying their own good names. This, it seems, was the insignificant piece of information that Will Cathcart had heard from his colleagues and that had ultimately cost him his life.
Finally, it turned out that Supreme Court Justice Clifford had not confessed the entire truth to his brother. Holly McDougal may have been the only woman in Aronson's stable of call girls who he ever loved, but not the only one he'd ever slept with. Judge LeRoy had been a steady customer of Aronson's for years, which accounted for his long-standing position as the behind-the-scenes financial consultant and deal-maker for Aronson's film ambitions.
At the time of Clifford's suicide, Maryjane Aronson was president and chief executive officer of a new studio, Timeless Films, Inc., whose first film, a remake of Rebel Without
a
Cause, was expected to lens early next year. Judge Clifford was a silent partner with twenty-five percent equity in Timeless.
After Mike Murphy had taken down every word, he had left Maryjane Aronson bound and perched on the safe while he phoned Elvis. He told Elvis the whole story, then asked if he actually should let her go.
“Your call, Elvis,” Murphy had said.
Elvis had not answered for several minutes. LeRoy Clifford was dead, Mickey Grieves also, both of their debts to society paid up in full, if such a transaction was actually possible. Squirm Littlejon was exonerated and free, which is really all Elvis had wanted in the first place.
But there was something else to consider: Murphy had made no mention of Aronson's blackmail photographs of Elvis and Ann-Margret. Apparently, she had said nothing about them. At this point, it was the only secret left unexposed.
“Let her go,” Elvis had said.
Maryjane Aronson was on a plane for foreign parts unknown by
the time Murphy's story hit the newsstands in that evening's
Times
.
Elvis took his coffee out onto the patio and was slowly sipping it when the phone rang again. It was the Colonel.
“Pick you up for the press conference in half an hour,” Parker said.
“I'll be ready,” Elvis answered. There wasn't really much to say to the press now that Murphy's story was out, but Parker had convinced Elvis that it would be a good idea to make a public appearance after all the rumors that had been circulating about him this past week. “Just to reassure your fans,” Parker had said.
“Listen, I've got a little surprise cooked up for our pals in the press corps,” Parker was now saying excitedly. “Our new picture. Allied Artists. Seven hundred and fifty thousand up front and fifty percent of profits. Incredible deal, Elvis. Unheard of. Nobody makes deals like I do.”
“What kind of picture, Tom?”
“Wonderful script, son. You're going to love it,” Parker said. “Listen to this: it's called
Tickle Me
. And it's got âElvis' written all over it.”
Elvis flinched, but at this moment he was too weary to argue about anything. He went back upstairs, dressed for the press conference, came back down again, and then stood motionlessly at the front window, gazing out at the palm-lined avenue. It looked so peaceful out there, peaceful and domestic. It made Elvis long for home, his real home. Elvis hadn't spoken to Priscilla since she'd returned to Graceland. She had phoned several times this past week, Joanie had told him. He really ought to call her. Maybe after the press conference, call her up and tell her he was coming right home.
Suddenly, a bright-yellow Oldsmobile convertible came into view and lurched to a stop in front of his house. A young woman jumped out of the car and came running toward his front door, her flaming red hair streaming behind her. It was Ann-Margret and she was bawling. Man, he was definitely not in the mood for a hysterical woman just now. He reluctantly opened the door and looked at her. Golly, Miss Ann surely was one fine-looking woman.