Authors: Wyborn Senna
“Did you have fun?”
Ryan got up to turn down the volume on the TV and paused, captivated by what he saw. Elvis and his boys did a choreographed dance, and Ryan marveled at The King’s fluid movements. “How does he stay up on his toes like that? I really need to practice my dancing more.”
“And if you can’t find a party, you’re gonna have to partner with a wooden chair.”
“What about you?”
Bea picked at her salad. “My dancing days might be over.”
Ryan was sorry he’d said anything. He sat down on the bed again and watched as she bit into a forkful of chicken. “Is it good?”
She nodded. “Thanks. Sorry I was sleeping. I didn’t know I was so tired.”
“It’s understandable.”
“You never answered my question. Did you have fun?”
Ryan thought about the business card from Barney Stern in his wallet and debated whether or not he should tell her about it. Realizing he never kept any secrets from her, he decided to pull out his billford and remove it from the slot he’d tucked it into.
“Met a guy about as old as Larry King. Kind of even looked like him.”
“Jeez. What did you have to talk about?”
“He had me sing for him in the bathroom and said I have the right stuff. Then he gave me this.”
He passed the card to her, and she squinted at it. “Bacchanalia Cruises? I don’t get it.”
Ryan thought he did. He knew cruise lines hired performers for their lounge acts, and for a split second, he imagined himself sailing away from the Port of Los Angeles off the San Pedro Pier. The breezes would invigorate him, the waters would dazzle him, and either direction he went—south to Baja or north to Vancouver—promised untold adventures. The deep purple lounge would be filled with thirty round tables, each seating four. There would be a Madonna impersonator strutting the stage in a conical bra, an old dude doing Frank Sinantra tunes, and himself, singing to a hound dog plushie.
He felt movement on the bed, and his reverie burst like a champagne bubble. Bea got up and rushed to the bathroom. He heard the toilet lid slam against the porcelain tank as she raised it. Then he heard violent retching.
Jumping up, he ran into the bathroom and knelt down beside her. She was on her knees with her head so far over the rim of the toilet her face was nearly in the vomit.
Gently, he lifted her long hair away from the bowl and held it back from her clammy neck.
When her stomach was empty, she turned to smile apologetically. “I took extra meds so I could keep up with you on this trip, but I think I took too many.”
Ryan kissed her forehead.
“You don’t need to keep up with me,” he told her. “I’m here for you.”
Violet Tearlach considered herself blessed. Her programmer boyfriend had found a backdoor into Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo so she could track what celebrities were saying in theoretically private correspondence and then sell the dirt to the tabloids. She was busy telling Marilyn how Kerr MacNaghten’s father was trying to convince his son to get rid of the five hundred live hand grenades he kept in his basement when Marilyn’s second line rang and a mysterious caller promised he’d tell her about Betrand’s plans to destroy her if she met him alone at a motel in Venice.
Though the place was called Penny’s Rose Garden, the place had less to do with scents than cents. The path from the sidewalk to the lobby was embellished with pennies set in concrete. Bored or greedy grubbers had pried a couple out, which Marilyn thought was a lot of work.
With floor to ceiling glass windows, the lobby also featured penny-embellished adornments from lamps to corner tables, from the front door to the check-in counter. Though the man at the desk wore a stovepipe hat, and his nameplate read “A. Lincoln,” he was overweight and blond.
At least he has a beard
. “Abe?” She tapped her nails, which she had painted Le Vernis Sky Line, on the counter.
The man looked embarrassed. “No. Andrew.”
“I’m supposed to get a key for 104. My named is Marilyn Coffey. Or Nicole. Depends on what he told you.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Right. Already pre-paid.”
He stood there, looking at her.
Come on, Abe, clock is ticking
.
He cleared his throat. “Do you like looking like Marilyn? That woman was so sad.”
“Marilyn was sad?”
“I just think a person should try to look like themselves, and especially not try to look like someone who was used by men, had virtually no talent, relied on her looks, and overdosed on pills.”
Marilyn gave Abe a strange look. She did have a few things in common with the real Marilyn, both in the being-used-by-men department and not being appreciated for her talent. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m trying to change that. Do you like looking like Abraham Lincoln?”
Abe avoided her eyes and gave her a room key and a map that showed the location of the room. “Doors face out, sliding glass doors face the inner courtyard. And we have a nice pool.”
Marilyn thanked him and followed the path of pennies around the corner. The hollow door opened with a key rather than a key card, another quaint but charming feature of the aging hostelry.
Inside, the room was as unpredictable as other aspects of the motel. A mass-produced reproduction of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s
The Slave Ship
, from 1840, hung over the bed, and Marilyn wondered if the image of slaves drowning in choppy waters while their ship sank was conducive to a guest’s restful stay. She imagined it was chosen for its abolitionist stance, since it tied in with the Lincoln era and the President’s eventual call to end slavery in 1864.
The Civil War era and thoughts of an artist considered “a painter of light” long before Thomas Kinkade protected that phrase through trademark and churned out self-proclaimed masterpieces of Hansel and Gretel cottages lit from within by cozy fires made Marilyn feel bone tired. She threw her handbag on the bed and stared at the bedside lamp-base busts of Mary Todd Lincoln and Honest Abe. She wondered which bedside drawer held Gideon’s Bible, wagered it would be the President rather than his wife, checked his drawer first, and she was right.
She retrieved her cell phone and dialed Graham because she knew he, of all her friends, would put her situation in perspective as only a Brit could. Someone should know where she was in case anything went wrong.
He picked up on the second ring and said hello just loud enough to be heard over the noisy street traffic.
“Where the hell are you, G?”
“Answering the phone while driving on the 5. Why, you—”
The door to the room clicked shut.
She turned to see who it was but didn’t recognize the man.
“Hang up now and turn your phone off,” he told her.
Marilyn pretended to punch the button that would terminate her connection with Graham and threw her cell phone into her bag.
A line for the shuttle bus to Graceland was forming as, off to the side, visitors were having their pictures taken in front of a pictoral backdrop depicting the famous Graceland gates and, beyond them, the tan limestone mansion. Ryan begged Bea for a souvenir shot of the two of them together, but Bea declined. She still wasn’t feeling well, was pale, and had only taken her meds after a breakfast of pancakes and eggs a half hour earlier.
The shuttle took less than half a minute to make its way across the street to the thirteen-acre estate. Herded off the shuttle bus, Ryan, Bea, and the other tourists swept past the four Temple of the Winds columns and the lions to the front door, where the guide kept everyone in suspense by drawing out the story of the home’s history.
Bea wanted to sit down but opted for leaning against Ryan, who held her steady. Inside, it was everything they expected. Facing the mirrored, white staircase, the guide called their attention to rooms on the right—the living room with a sofa that seemed unsually long and, beyond that, a doorway framed on both sides with stained-glass artwork depicting peacocks that led into the music room, where a mid-century television set and a black baby grand remained.
Ryan looked down at the guardrail preventing entry and grimaced.
“Look, but don’t touch,” he whispered to Bea.
She offered him a wan smile.
The tour continued with a look at Elvis’s parents’ bedroom, which was blindingly white from the walls to the carpet, except for the queen-size bed that was covered with a grape-colored velour spread. Bea pointed at the glassed-in closet where some of Gladys Presley’s dresses were displayed. Ryan nodded. He was focused on the pink bathroom off the bedroom that was cordoned off.
As the morning progressed, Bea showed increasing fatigue, and Ryan and she fell behind. A bald-headed man turned around not once, but twice, looking like he wanted to say something to Ryan.
Upstairs, where Elvis died in August 1977, was off-limits. Instead, they were taken through the bar and billiards and media rooms in the basement before heading up to the Jungle Room, where Ryan could easily picture Elvis kicking back and having fun.
Next, they headed across the backyard toward Vernon Presley’s office and made their way across the lawn to the trophy room. Bea tugged on Ryan’s arm and led him to a white fence that penned in grazing horses.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Bea sank down into the grass. “I feel a little faint. Maybe it’s the humidity.”
Ryan watched the group enter the trophy room where Elvis’s gold lame suit was on display. The bald-headed man who had given Ryan a second glance broke away from the pack and made his way across the lawn.
“Is something wrong?” he asked. “Do you guys need help?”
Bea tried to smile but failed. “I’m just lightheaded. I need to rest a moment.”
The man eyed Ryan. “Guess I don’t have to tell you who you look like.”
“Yes, I know, and no, I’m not an Elvis impersonator, and I don’t have a show in Vegas. Ryan Wyatt.”
He stuck out his hand, and the man clasped it with his own, his rings flashing.
“Ben Andover. But you can sing, right?”
Ryan debated whether or not he should issue an aw-shucks-maybe reply, then rethought things. He simply said yes.
“How do you feel about Hollywood?” Ben asked.
Ryan laughed. “Considering we’re from Beverly Hills?”
“Oh!” The man sounded surprised.
He pulled a business card from his billfold and handed it to Ryan.
“What’s this?”
“They’re having auditions for a new singing competition called
The It Factor
on the Lynx Network. The competition runs twelve weeks. It would give you a lot of exposure. Plus, if you win, you get a record contract. When are you going back?”
“We’re only in Memphis this weekend,” Ryan told him.
“Great,” Ben said. “Auditions are this coming Wednesday at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Think you can make it?”
Ryan looked at Bea, uncertain.
Bea rallied a real smile.
“You’ve got to try out,” she told him. “I’ll be mad at you if you don’t.”
Ben laughed and returned his billfold to his back pocket. “Guess you better listen to the little lady.”
Ryan helped Bea back to her feet.
“I always do.”
Ron Fletcher and Logan Lockhart sat in Peter Corcioni’s office on the sixtieth floor of one of the Marina City towers on Chicago’s State Street, waiting for the old man to conclude a meeting. Both wore plaid shirts, jeans, and sneakers. Ron had gelled his dark hair flat, combed straight back from his forehead, and Logan slightly modified his fauxhawk so that it spiked to the left. After Ron checked his iPhone for messages and logged into Gmail to find out if anyone had written, his attention turned to Corcioni’s trove of CIA spy gear, displayed in barrister cabinets throughout his thirty-foot-long executive suite carpeted in oatmeal berber. The tower his friend Phil’s father worked in was one of two corncob-shaped buildings that overlooked the main branch of the Chicago River to the south and, beyond that, the Chicago Loop. In the opposite direction, Wrigley Field was a short four-and-a-half-mile jaunt away, lit up for night games every spring and summer.
Ron wasn’t as enthusiastic about the views as he was about Corcioni’s gadgets, though, and there was always a new gizmo or two he wanted to ask him about. He knew about the shelf of fake calluses that were used to cover microfilm placed against the skin, and another shelf that contained men’s smoking pipes with cavities that had been hollowed out to hide information. There was a shelf filled with pens containing invisible ink so messages could be written on a spy’s skin, and beside them were a handful of false glass eyes, bleached and painted inside so they could hold information. Then there was a shelf filled with stacks of thick foreign currency that had been boiled apart so microdots of information could be put inside the bill, typically in a spot where the bill was darker, before it was glued back together. Beside the paper money, there were stacks of coins with tiny holes in them. If you put a needle into the hole in any coin, you could pop it open like a tin of Altoids.
Ron waved Logan over to join him before he lifted the glass door on the bill and coin cabinet and reached for a coin that sat apart from the neat stacks. He held it up to the light before he reached into his pocket to retrieve his bifocals. While Ron gazed at the coin, his concentration was so deep he didn’t hear his friend’s father enter the room.
“Going blind like me, I see?”
Ron gave a start and turned. “Still quiet as a fox, old man?”
They hugged and examined each other at arm’s length before Ron introduced him to Logan and explained Logan’s condition.
“Can’t talk?” the old man asked. “Wish the secretarial pool here had that problem.”
“He’s our graphics guy,” Ron explained, “so if he has any questions about the formats you provide, he has his iPad.”
Corcioni led them over to his desk, and Ron asked him how his son, Phil, was doing as they sat down.
The old man settled into a desk chair impressive enough for the Oval Office. “Are you done with the niceties? I spoke with him last night, and he mentioned you two talked only a few days ago.”