Daniel Klein Read online

  Elvis saw that there was a faint pencil line circling the head of one of the soldiers at the edge of the photo and next to it the word “me.” He leaned his head closer. It was a baby-faced soldier with sleepy eyes and a loopy smile. Elvis had no idea who he was. Just another GI keeping up a brave face far from home. But why had he sent the photo? And why the heck was the Colonel throwing it out without showing it to him first? Colonel knew this was just the kind of photograph that Elvis saved for his personal photo album.

  Elvis walked back to the wastepaper basket and squatted next to it. It stank of cigars and spit and fermenting pizza crusts. He poked around with one finger. Another photo, this one of a pretty young woman with bare shoulders and short curly hair. It had writing on it too in ink: “Elvis, I’ll do anything you want me to. ANYTHING! I love you, Doris Frimel. Telephone 555-3298.” That’s what passed for fan mail these days. Elvis pushed it off to the side next to a cigar stub. And there he saw a crimped-up piece of blue-lined notebook paper with something written on it in pencil. He brought it back to the desk and ironed it flat with his fist.

  Dear Mr. Presley,

  No reason for you to remember me, but this little photograph holds one of the happiest memories of my young life. It’s a memory of a Christmas carol that raised up my spirits at a time when they were kind of sagging.

  Let me be honest with you, Mr. Presley, I’m just another guy down on his luck who is reaching out to you. I bet you get letters like this all the time, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you just crumpled this up and threw it away along about right now.

  Elvis smiled to himself—Colonel had already taken care of that part. He read on:

  Thing is, I’m in prison, California Correctional Institution up in Tehachapi, and I’m not just doing time, I’m doing the rest of my life. Murder, first degree, of a young girl. But you see, I didn’t do it. I swear I didn’t on the grave of my mother, Agnes P. Littlejon, may she rest in peace.

  So here goes: I need someone to stand up for me. Stand up and prove they got the wrong man. It’s gotta be somebody folks would really listen to. And you’re the only person in the world I ever met who fits that bill. You don’t owe me nothing, Mr. Presley, I know that. I’m just asking.

  Gratefully yours for that long ago “Silent Night,” Freddy “Squirm” Littlejon

  Elvis looked again at the photograph. No, he didn’t remember Squirm Littlejon, just as he didn’t recognize the hundreds of other faces he saw every day of people who surely knew who he was, people who had even convinced themselves that they knew what was hidden in his heart, God love them. And heaven knows this man was right, Elvis didn’t owe him a single thing.

  Suddenly, there was a tap at the open office door. Elvis looked up. Silhouetted against the corridor lights were Gene Nelson and the Colonel.

  “Busy?” Gene asked.

  “Kind of,” Elvis said.

  “Just wanted to tell you I checked the dailies and there’s a little problem—we keep seeing Wayne’s face in the hoedown. Can’t cut around it, so we’ll have to reshoot tomorrow morning. Only a half day, okay?”

  Elvis clasped a hand to his forehead. At this particular moment, the prospect of prancing around hay bales for even one more minute felt like a twenty-year sentence on a chain gang.

  “I told Gene we don’t having anything else scheduled for tomorrow,” Colonel Parker said brightly, sauntering toward his desk.

  Reflexively, Elvis spread his hands over Littlejon’s letter, but it was too late—Barker’s eagle eyes saw it, and he was already shooting Elvis one of his scolding stares, the kind that said, “Don’t get distracted by that nonsense, son. Keep your eyes on the prize!”

  “No problem at all, Gene. I’ll be there bright and early,” Elvis said evenly, averting his eyes from Parker’s. “But if you gentlemen will excuse me now, I got some personal business needs taking care of.”

  Colonel Parker fired off another admonishing glare but Elvis glared right back at him, and this time it was Parker who looked away. He must have seen the venom in Elvis’s eyes, a look that said, “Don’t push me, Colonel, or I’ll throw this damned desk lamp right in your face!”

  The moment the two men left, Elvis lifted the phone on Parker’s desk and asked the MGM switchboard operator to connect him with the California Correction Institution in Tehachapi.

  “I’d be happy to, Mr. Presley,” the operator said. “Is there anyone in particular you wish to speak to?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Elvis replied. “Man named Freddy Littlejon. He’s doing time out there.”

  Elvis snapped off the lamp and put his feet up on the desk. Priscilla and the gang would be waiting for him at home. There had been talk of a wrap party out at the house to celebrate the completion of Kissin’ Cousins. Of course, Priscilla would have heard about the Ann-Margret interview by now. He definitely wasn’t looking forward to the conversation they would be having about that. It was hard enough having two opposite feelings about everything without a woman with tears in her eyes begging you to have one pure heart.

  The operator said, “Go ahead,” and a man’s voice said, “Mr. Presley?”

  “Yes, this is Elvis.”

  “My Lord, what a fine surprise this is,” the man on the phone said. “I’m Bob Reardon, warden of CCI. Funny thing is, I just this minute heard them talking on the radio about you. About an interview you gave this afternoon.”

  “How about that?” Elvis said. Trifling news traveled fast out here in California.

  “I hear you want to talk to one of our residents,” the warden said. “Squirm Littlejon.”

  “That’s right, sir,” Elvis said.

  “Call me Bob, please,” the warden said.

  “Okay, Bob.”

  “Did you want to meet with Squirm in person?”

  “Just on the phone should do it,” Elvis said.

  “Between you and me, Mr. Presley, you can’t tell much from a phone call with a con. Gotta see their eyes, you know?”

  Elvis rubbed his jaw. What was this Reardon fella getting at?

  “Normally, setting up a face-to-face is no easy thing,” Warden Reardon went on. “Takes a load of paperwork. But I’ve been known to make exceptions under special circumstances.”

  “That’s encouraging to hear,” Elvis said.

  “What are you doing right now, Mr. Presley?” the warden blurted out abruptly, with a self-conscious laugh.

  Elvis gazed out the picture window of the Colonel’s office. It was completely dark on the lot now, probably past eight o’clock already. What was Mr. Presley doing right now? He was sitting alone in a dark room in a movie studio trying like crazy to put off going home.

  “Not a whole lot,” Elvis answered.

  “Well, if you got yourself in a car this minute, you could be up here by ten. And I’d have Mr. Squirm Littlejon waiting for you in a clean shirt and pants.”

  Elvis hesitated only a moment. “I’ll be there,” he said.

  Reardon gave him directions, then signed off with, “I’ve got a little surprise for you myself, Mr. Presley.”

  3

  Squirm

  A larger-than-life portrait of President Kennedy hung on the wall behind Warden Reardon’s desk looking like one of those oversized pictures of Jesus with doleful eyes that followed you everywhere you went. Reardon, a red-haired man with a boxer’s compact body, bounced out of his chair the moment Elvis entered and pumped his visitor’s hand energetically.

  “Have any trouble finding your way?” the warden asked.

  “No, sir … . No, Bob,” Elvis replied. “Went just fine.” In fact, the two-hour drive up Route 14 past Santa Clarita and Lancaster and into the mountains had put Elvis in a meditative mood. By the time he’d reached Tehachapi, he’d promised himself to take more long drives alone like this one—it helped a man reconnect with himself.

  “I’ve got Squirm waiting in the conference room,” Reardon said. “Is he a friend of yours?”

  “We were in the
army together,” Elvis said.

  “Hot damn! That’s what he’s always saying. Says he spent Christmas with you over there in Germany.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How about that?” Reardon said. “I guess the little man was telling the truth for once.”

  “That something he’s not in the habit of doing?”

  “Truth is a real scarcity up here at CCI, Mr. Presley,” Reardon said. “There’s not a man in here that doesn’t tell at least one big whopper a day, and it’s usually the same damned one.” Grinning, the warden gave Elvis a mock punch in the biceps before going into a burlesque whine, “‘I didn’t do it! I swear, I didn’t! I was home in bed the whole time!’”

  Reardon let loose a surprisingly high-pitched laugh, watching Elvis’s face expectantly, apparently looking for appreciation of his little performance. Like most everybody Elvis met in California, the man was auditioning.

  “I see what you mean,” Elvis said.

  Reardon pushed a buzzer on his desk and two muscular guards entered, one white and one colored. Then, walking in what was apparently standard formation—one guard ahead of them and one behind, Elvis and Reardon made their way down a long corridor, passing through three barred gates, until they arrived at the conference room. Reardon grasped Elvis’s sleeve.

  “Take as long as you want with him, Mr. Presley,” he said. “But when you’re finished, don’t forget I’ve got that surprise I promised you.” He signaled one of the guards to open the conference-room door.

  Freddy Littlejon started to rise as Elvis entered, but immediately lost his footing and stumbled back into his metal chair, the leg irons on his ankles clanging against the chair legs.

  “I can’t believe this,” Littlejon said. “My prayers have been answered.”

  “Good to see you,” Elvis said, then added for Reardon’s benefit, “Again.”

  Reardon left, leaving the two guards outside the door, but there were two more already inside the room, one behind Littlejon, the other behind the chair reserved for Elvis on the other side of a Formica-topped table. Both guards went bug eyed when they saw Elvis, but neither said a word.

  Squirm Littlejon was even slighter and more boyish looking than Elvis had surmised from the photograph. The thick, iron manacles on his wrists—joined together by no more than six links of chain—dwarfed his narrow wrists and spindly hands, making him look like little Hansel in the witch’s cage. The loopy grin and sleepy eyes were the same as in the photo though; he had the half-frightened, half-insolent smirk of the boy who the teacher always caught dozing in class. Heaven knows, he didn’t look like a murderer but, then again, neither had that kid who’d murdered all those fan-club presidents in Tennessee three years back.

  Elvis sat down. “Start at the beginning,” he said softly.

  Littlejon cocked his head one way, then the other. “I been planning this for months, now here you are, and I can’t figure where the beginning is. It’s like every beginning has a beginning of its own.”

  “Just jump in anywhere,” Elvis said. “Maybe at that Christmas party.”

  “Okay, I’ll start right there in Germany, Christmas Day, 1959,” Littlejon said. “You see, the ‘home’ I was missing while you were singing was just one person, my mother, Agnes. She’d brought me up by herself after my father took off. I was only two then and don’t remember him, wouldn’t know him if he was sitting next to me in a bar. Or in a cell, for that matter.”

  Littlejon offered Elvis a cheesy grin before going on.

  “Anyway, I wasn’t much for school. Pretty awful, actually. They said I had an attitude problem, and they were right about that. Around about the time they got to long division, I didn’t see the point anymore. I mean, I just knew that long division wouldn’t be figuring too much in any kind of life I’d be leading. Anyhow, I dropped out soon as I could, knocked around a bit, and then joined the army, telling them I was eighteen when I was barely past sixteen.”

  Elvis nodded encouragingly and Squirm went on.

  “Well, overseas, I made friends with a guy named Macy—Phil Macy—and he told me I had a talent that could make me one heck of a good living when I got out. It was the way I could jump and twist and wiggle out of things, like the way I could slither through a drainpipe on bivouac.”

  Here Squirm gave a little pantomime demonstration, twisting his head and shimmying his shoulders like a snake slithering through a cotton field. It wasn’t hard to figure where his nickname had come from. But there was also something about his little presentation that struck Elvis as familiar, although he couldn’t remember where he’d seen it before.

  “Macy said I could get a job doing the same thing he did back home,” Littlejon continued. “Said I could be a stuntman in the movie pictures.”

  “So that’s what you did?”

  “That’s right. I got into show business, just like you, Mr. Presley. Soon as I got out of the army, I made a beeline for Hollywood, looked up some people Macy told me about, and in one week’s time I was working as a stuntman. Turns out I was a natural. It was like my mother always told me, everybody’s got a God-given, special talent, but it’s only the lucky ones who figure out what it is.”

  “My mother told me the exact same thing,” Elvis said. He didn’t add that, although he’d discovered his own God-given talent, lately he’d begun to wonder if he wasn’t forsaking it.

  “I could do it all,” Littlejon went on. “Even if it was something I’d never done before. Like, first gig, I jumped off a galloping horse onto a runaway stagecoach like I’d been doing it my whole life. Same for leaping off cliffs and bursting through glass windows and running around in circles with my clothes on fire. And the thing is, because of my size and all, I was perfect for doing women’s pranks. Made me feel kind of peculiar at first—dressing up in a ball gown to jump off a roof into a speeding convertible. But hell, I got twice the number of gigs as most of the other guys so I wasn’t complaining. Fact is, I was king of the heap for a while there. Had myself a beautiful little house out by the beach. A brand new Oldsmobile. Even had myself a beautiful woman, an actress couple years older than me named Nanette Poulette, although that was just her madeup name. Nanette and me were going to get married.”

  For the first time since he started talking, Littlejon averted his eyes from Elvis’s.

  “What happened, Freddy?” Elvis asked softly.

  Squirm squirmed around in his chair for a bit before getting himself to look back at Elvis.

  “Okay, here goes,” he said. “There was this little girl who played bit parts in pictures over at MGM. She’d have maybe one or two lines to speak, never anything more. Her name was Holly McDougal, and she’d pulled the same trick I had in the army, told everyone she was eighteen when she was really barely seventeen. Easy for her to pull off since she could have passed for twenty-one and then some if she wanted. She looked real grown-up, grown-up and sexy like a woman who’d been around the block a few times. And, the truth is, Holly may have been only seventeen, but she’d been around the block more times than most women twice her age.”

  Littlejon raised his manacled hands to his face in order to scratch his ear. This operation involved scraping the chain roughly across his chin—it must have been one devil of an itch to be worth it.

  “You know that joke about the starlet who was so dumb she slept with the scriptwriter?” Squirm continued. “Well, Holly was so dumb she slept with the stuntmen. Every one of us. She was kind of a nympho, I guess. She’d come out to the stunt shack—you know, where we keep all our equipment and clothes and stuff—and take one of us off to this little curtained-off alcove in the back where we napped and, you know, she’d do us right there. Right there with everybody else smoking and joking and dressing up for a stunt only ten feet away.”

  Elvis lowered his eyes uncomfortably. For the first time since he’d impulsively phoned the California Correctional Institution a few hours back, he found himself wondering if he shouldn’t have tossed th
at Christmas photograph back in the trash and left it at that. He honestly didn’t know if he wanted to hear the rest of this indecent story.

  “Understand, I’m not proud of this part, not at all,” Squirm continued. “Actually, I’m real ashamed of it. Can’t even say I didn’t know what I was doing, although I really didn’t know she was only seventeen. None of us did. But I did know there was something warped about the whole business. And I did know I had a perfectly wonderful woman waiting for me at home every night. I swear to God, if I had it all to do over again …”

  “Keep going,” Elvis prodded impatiently.

  Littlejon shut his sleepy eyes for second, then opened them and went on.

  “Well, on this particular day, I was the only one in the shack, so when Holly came by it was my turn. I went in the back with her and we made a quick business of it because I was due on the set in a few minutes. Anyhow, afterward, I left Holly back there and got dressed up to look like Paula Prentiss for a stunt in The Honeymoon Machine. The shoot went real late that night. The harness for my stunt kept getting stuck so it was almost midnight before we finished. And, when I got back to the shack, the police were there. Holly was dead, choked to death right in the cot where I’d left her. They arrested me right on the spot. And I’ve been behind bars one place or another ever since.”