The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,126

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 notepad 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 see 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