The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,124
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 TV 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 masterminded 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.”