The Burglar in Short Order Read online

  “At the Weekly Galaxy,” Holly said, sipping an after-dinner something-or-other, “everything’s first class. Except the paper itself, of course.”

  We got our luggage, and a hotel courtesy car whisked us to the Howard Johnson’s on Elvis Presley Boulevard, where we had adjoining rooms reserved. I was just about unpacked when Holly knocked on the door separating the two rooms. I unlocked it for her and she came in carrying a bottle of scotch and a full ice bucket.

  “I wanted to stay at the Peabody,” she said. “That’s the great old downtown hotel and it’s supposed to be wonderful, but here we’re only a couple of blocks from Graceland, and I thought it would be more convenient.”

  “Makes sense,” I agreed.

  “But I wanted to see the ducks,” she said. She explained that ducks were the symbol of the Peabody, or the mascots, or something. Every day the hotel’s guests could watch the hotel’s ducks waddle across the red carpet to the fountain in the middle of the lobby.

  “Tell me something,” she said. “How does a guy like you get into a business like this?”

  “Bookselling?”

  “Get real, honey. How’d you get to be a burglar? Not for the edification of our readers, because they couldn’t care less. But to satisfy my own curiosity.”

  I sipped a drink while I told her the story of my misspent life, or as much of it as I felt like telling. She heard me out and put away four stiff scotches in the process, but if they had any effect on her I couldn’t see it.

  “And how about you?” I said after a while. “How did a nice girl like you—”

  “Oh, Gawd,” she said. “We’ll save that for another evening, okay?” And then she was in my arms, smelling and feeling better than a body had a right to, and just as quickly she was out of them again and on her way to the door.

  “You don’t have to go,” I said.

  “Ah, but I do, Bernie. We’ve got a big day tomorrow. We’re going to see Elvis, remember?”

  She took the scotch with her. I poured out what remained of my own drink, finished unpacking, took a shower. I got into bed, and after fifteen or twenty minutes I got up and tried the door between our two rooms, but she had locked it on her side. I went back to bed.

  Our tour guide’s name was Stacy. She wore the standard Graceland uniform, a blue-and-white-striped shirt over navy chinos, and she looked like someone who’d been unable to decide whether to become a stewardess or a cheerleader. Cleverly, she’d chosen a job that combined both professions.

  “There were generally a dozen guests crowded around this dining table,” she told us. “Dinner was served nightly between nine and ten P.M., and Elvis always sat right there at the head of the table. Not because he was head of the family but because it gave him the best view of the big color TV. Now that’s one of fourteen sets here at Graceland, so you know how much Elvis liked to watch TV.”

  “Was that the regular china?” someone wanted to know.

  “Yes, ma’am, and the name of the pattern is Buckingham. Isn’t it pretty?”

  I could run down the whole tour for you, but what’s the point? Either you’ve been there yourself or you’re planning to go or you don’t care, and at the rate people are signing up for the tours, I don’t think there are many of you in the last group. Elvis was a good pool player, and his favorite game was rotation. Elvis ate his breakfast in the Jungle Room, off a cypress coffee table. Elvis’s own favorite singer was Dean Martin. Elvis liked peacocks, and at one time over a dozen of them roamed the grounds of Graceland. Then they started eating the paint off the cars, which Elvis liked even more than he liked peacocks, so he donated them to the Memphis Zoo. The peacocks, not the cars.

  There was a gold rope across the mirrored staircase, and what looked like an electric eye a couple of stairs up. “We don’t allow tourists into the upstairs,” our guide chirped. “Remember, Graceland is a private home and Elvis’s aunt Miss Delta Biggs still lives here. Now I can tell you what’s upstairs. Elvis’s bedroom is located directly above the living room and music room. His office is also upstairs, and there’s Lisa Marie’s bedroom, and dressing rooms and bathrooms as well.”

  “And does his aunt live up there?” someone asked.

  “No, sir. She lives downstairs, through that door over to your left. None of us have ever been upstairs. Nobody goes there anymore.”

  “I bet he’s up there now,” Holly said. “In a La-Z-Boy with his feet up, eating one of his famous peanut butter and banana sandwiches and watching three television sets at once.”

  “And listening to Dean Martin,” I said. “What do you really think?”

  “What do I really think? I think he’s down in Paraguay playing three-handed pinochle with James Dean and Adolf Hitler. Did you know that Hitler master-minded Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands? We ran that story but it didn’t do as well as we hoped.”

  “Your readers didn’t remember Hitler?”

  “Hitler was no problem for them. But they didn’t know what the Falklands were. Seriously, where do I think Elvis is? I think he’s in the grave we just looked at, surrounded by his nearest and dearest. Unfortunately, ‘Elvis Still Dead’ is not a headline that sells papers.”

  “I guess not.”

  We were back in my room at the HoJo, eating a lunch Holly had ordered from room service. It reminded me of our in-flight meal the day before, luxurious but not terribly good.

  “Well,” she said brightly, “have you figured out how we’re going to get in?”

  “You saw the place,” I said. “They’ve got gates and guards and alarm systems everywhere. I don’t know what’s upstairs, but it’s a more closely guarded secret than Zsa Zsa Gabor’s true age.”

  “That’d be easy to find,” Holly said. “We could just hire somebody to marry her.”

  “Graceland is impregnable,” I went on, hoping we could drop the analogy right there. “It’s almost as bad as Fort Knox.”

  Her face fell. “I was sure you could find a way in.”

  “Maybe I can.”

  “But—”

  “For one. Not for two. It’d be too risky for you, and you don’t have the skills for it. Could you shinny down a gutterspout?”

  “If I had to.”

  “Well, you won’t have to, because you won’t be going in.” I paused for thought. “You’d have a lot of work to do,” I said. “On the outside, coordinating things.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “And there would be expenses, plenty of them.”

  “No problem.”

  “I’d need a camera that can take pictures in full dark. I can’t risk a flash.”

  “That’s easy. We can handle that.”

  “I’ll need to rent a helicopter, and I’ll have to pay the pilot enough to guarantee his silence.”

  “A cinch.”

  “I’ll need a diversion. Something fairly dramatic.”

  “I can create a diversion. With all the resources of the Galaxy at my disposal, I could divert a river.”

  “That shouldn’t be necessary. But all of this is going to cost money.”

  “Money,” she said, “is no object.”

  “So you’re a friend of Carolyn’s,” Lucian Leeds said. “She’s wonderful, isn’t she? You know, she and I are the next closest thing to blood kin.”

  “Oh?”

  “A former lover of hers and a former lover of mine were brother and sister. Well, sister and brother, actually. So that makes Carolyn my something-in-law, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess it must.”

  “Of course,” he said, “by the same token, I must be related to half the known world. Still, I’m real fond of our Carolyn. If I can help you—”

  I told him what I needed. Lucian Leeds was an interior decorator and a dealer in art and antiques. “Of course I’ve been to Graceland,” he said. “Probably a dozen times, because whenever a friend or relative visits that’s where one has to take them. It’s an experience that somehow never palls.”
/>   “I don’t suppose you’ve ever been on the second floor.”

  “No, nor have I been presented at court. Of the two, I suppose I’d prefer the second floor at Graceland. One can’t help wondering, can one?” He closed his eyes, concentrating. “My imagination is beginning to work,” he announced.

  “Give it free rein.”

  “I know just the house, too. It’s off Route 51 across the Mississippi state line, just this side of Hernando. Oh, and I know someone with an Egyptian piece that would be perfect. How soon would everything have to be ready?”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  “Impossible. The day after tomorrow is barely possible. Just barely. I really ought to have a week to do it right.”

  “Well, do it as right as you can.”

  “I’ll need trucks and schleppers, of course. I’ll have rental charges to pay, needless to say, and I’ll have to give something to the old girl who owns the house. First I’ll need to sweet-talk her, but there’ll have to be something tangible in it for her as well, I’m afraid. But all of this is going to cost you money.”

  That had a familiar ring to it. I almost got caught up in the rhythm of it and told him money was no object, but I managed to restrain myself. If money wasn’t the object, what was I doing in Memphis?

  “Here’s the camera,” Holly said. “It’s all loaded with infrared film. No flash, and you can take pictures with it at the bottom of a coal mine.”

  “That’s good,” I said, “because that’s probably where I’ll wind up if they catch me. We’ll do it the day after tomorrow. Today’s what, Wednesday? I’ll go in Friday.”

  “I should be able to give you a terrific diversion.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I’ll probably need it.”

  Thursday morning I found my helicopter pilot. “Yeah, I could do it,” he said. “Cost you two hundred dollars, though.”

  “I’ll give you five hundred.”

  He shook his head. “One thing I never do,” he said, “is get to haggling over prices. I said two hundred, and—wait a darn minute.”

  “Take all the time you need.”

  “You weren’t haggling me down,” he said. ‘You were haggling me up. I never heard tell of such a thing.”

  “I’m willing to pay extra,” I said, “so that you’ll tell people the right story afterward. If anybody asks.”

  “What do you want me to tell ’em?”

  “That somebody you never met before in your life paid you to fly over Graceland, hover over the mansion, lower your rope ladder, raise the ladder, and then fly away.”

  He thought about this for a full minute. “But that’s what you said you wanted me to do,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “So you’re fixing to pay me an extra three hundred dollars just to tell people the truth.”

  “If anybody should ask.”

  “You figure they will?”

  “They might,” I said. “It would be best if you said it in such a way that they thought you were lying.”

  “Nothing to it,” he said. “Nobody ever believes a word I say. I’m a pretty honest guy, but I guess I don’t look it.”

  “You don’t,” I said. “That’s why I picked you.”

  That night Holly and I dressed up and took a cab downtown to the Peabody. The restaurant there was named Dux, and they had canard aux cerises on the menu, but it seemed curiously sacrilegious to have it there. We both ordered the blackened redfish. She had two dry Rob Roys first, most of the dinner wine, and a Stinger afterward. I had a Bloody Mary for openers, and my after-dinner drink was a cup of coffee. I felt like a cheap date.

  Afterward we went back to my room and she worked on the scotch while we discussed strategy. From time to time she would put her drink down and kiss me, but as soon as things threatened to get interesting she’d draw away and cross her legs and pick up her pencil and reach for her drink.

  “You’re a tease,” I said.

  “I am not,” she insisted. “But I want to, you know, save it.”

  “For the wedding?”

  “For the celebration. After we get the pictures, after we carry the day. You’ll be the conquering hero and I’ll throw roses at your feet.”

  “Roses?”

  “And myself. I figured we could take a suite at the Peabody and never leave the room except to see the ducks. You know, we never did watch the ducks do their famous walk. Can’t you just picture them waddling across the red carpet and quacking their heads off?”

  “Can’t you just picture what they go through cleaning that carpet?”

  She pretended not to have heard me. “I’m glad we didn’t have duckling,” she said. “It would have seemed cannibalistic.” She fixed her eyes on me. She’d had enough booze to induce coma in a six-hundred-pound gorilla, but her eyes looked as clear as ever. “Actually,” she said, “I’m very strongly attracted to you, Bernie. But I want to wait. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “I could,” I said gravely, “if I knew I was coming back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It would be great to be the conquering hero,” I said, “and find you and the roses at my feet, but suppose I come home on my shield instead? I could get killed out there.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Think of me as a kid who enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor, Holly. And you’re his girlfriend, asking him to wait until the war’s over. Holly, what if that kid doesn’t come home? What if he leaves his bones bleaching on some little hellhole in the South Pacific?”

  “Oh my God,” she said. “I never thought of that.” She put down her pencil and notebook. “You’re right, dammit. I am a tease. I’m worse than that.” She uncrossed her legs. “I’m thoughtless and heartless. Oh, Bernie!”

  “There, there,” I said.

  Graceland closes every evening at six. At precisely five-thirty Friday afternoon, a girl named Moira Beth Calloway detached herself from her tour group. “I’m coming, Elvis!” she cried, and she lowered her head and ran full speed for the staircase. She was over the gold rope and on the sixth step before the first guard laid a hand on her.

  Bells rang, sirens squealed, and all hell broke loose. “Elvis is calling me,” Moira Beth insisted, her eyes rolling wildly. “He needs me, he wants me, he loves me tender. Get your hands off me. Elvis! I’m coming, Elvis!”

  I.D. in Moira Beth’s purse supplied her name and indicated that she was seventeen years old, and a student at Mount St. Joseph Academy in Millington, Tennessee. This was not strictly true, in that she was actually twenty-two years old, a member of Actors Equity, and a resident of Brooklyn Heights. Her name was not Moira Beth Calloway, either. It was (and still is) Rona Jellicoe. I think it may have been something else in the dim dark past before it became Rona Jellicoe, but who cares?

  While a variety of people, many of them wearing navy chinos and blue-and-white-striped shirts, did what they could to calm down Moira Beth, a middle-aged couple in the Pool Room went into their act. “Air!” the man cried, clutching at his throat. “Air! I can’t breathe!” And he fell down, flailing at the wall, where Stacy had told us some 750 yards of pleated fabric had been installed.

  “Help him,” cried his wife. “He can’t breathe! He’s dying! He needs air!” And she ran to the nearest window and heaved it open, setting off whatever alarms hadn’t already been shrieking over Moira Beth’s assault on the staircase.

  Meanwhile, in the TV room, done in the exact shades of yellow and blue used in Cub Scout uniforms, a gray squirrel had raced across the rug and was now perched on top of the jukebox. “Look at that awful squirrel!” a woman was screaming. “Somebody get that squirrel! He’s gonna kill us all!”

  Her fear would have been harder to credit if people had known that the poor rodent had entered Graceland in her handbag, and that she’d been able to release it without being seen because of the commotion in the other room. Her fear was contagious, though, and the people who caught it weren’t putting
on an act.

  In the Jungle Room, where Elvis’s Moody Blue album had actually been recorded, a woman fainted. She’d been hired to do just that, but other unpaid fainters were dropping like flies all over the mansion. And, while all of this activity was hitting its absolute peak, a helicopter made its noisy way through the sky over Graceland, hovering for several long minutes over the roof.

  The security staff at Graceland couldn’t have been better. Almost immediately two men emerged from a shed carrying an extension ladder, and in no time at all they had it propped against the side of the building. One of them held it while the other scrambled up it to the roof.

  By the time he got there, the helicopter was going pocketa-pocketa-pocketa, and disappearing off to the west. The security man raced around the roof but didn’t see anyone. Within the next ten minutes, two others joined him on the roof and searched it thoroughly. They found a tennis sneaker, but that was all they found.

  At a quarter to five the next morning I let myself into my room at the Howard Johnson’s and knocked on the door to Holly’s room. There was no response. I knocked again, louder, then gave up and used the phone. I could hear it ringing in her room, but evidently she couldn’t.

  So I used the skills God gave me and opened her door. She was sprawled out on the bed, with her clothes scattered where she had flung them. The trail of clothing began at the scotch bottle on top of the television set. The set was on, and some guy with a sport jacket and an Ipana smile was explaining how you could get cash advances on your credit cards and buy penny stocks, an enterprise that struck me as a lot riskier than burglarizing mansions by helicopter.

  Holly didn’t want to wake up, but when I got past the veil of sleep she came to as if transistorized. One moment she was comatose and the next she was sitting up, eyes bright, an expectant look on her face. “Well?” she demanded.

  “I shot the whole roll.”

  “You got in.”