Free Daniel Klein by Blue Suede Clues: A Murder Mystery Featuring Elvis Presley Page A

fell to the ground. In his gut, Elvis’s anger was fighting with his fear, and his anger was winning hands down.
    â€œSet me down! Now, boy! Now!” Elvis bellowed.
    â€œSay ‘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.
    â€œGrieves, 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?”
    â€œYes, 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.
    â€œGot 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.”
    â€œGet 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.
    â€œMr. Presley, sir?” one of them said.
    â€œWe heard a scream,” said the other.
    â€œGet 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
    I t 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,