19 Joanna

Peter had come to her flat that afternoon, Tippi out running errands, doing whatever it was that Tippi did during daylight hours, with strict instructions not to come home until after five. Joanna prepared a lovely meal of coq au vin in her Crock-Pot, along with a salade Ni?oise and a decadent bottle of red she'd bought with the paltry advance from Leslie Grimes. Grimes would've been horrified to know she'd spent his advance on the demon alcohol. Even at their Peabody lunch, he'd stared at every sip of her julep as it was one more step on the road to hell. As she prepped, she watched the telly about thirty-three men trapped in a mine in Chile. More than sixty days underground. Oh, well. Things could be much worse.

Joanna greeted Peter at the door in a pink silk kimono, a lovely gift from Richard Chamberlain after they'd become friends during Return of the Musketeers (long before his coming out), her first film in years after shooting one of those horrible Carry On films at Pinewood. Carry On Girls. Carry On Abroad. Carry On My Ass. The most miserable winter of her life, cast as a French maid who had a habit of tipping her bosoms down to horny old goats like Sid James and Bernard Bresslaw. Sugar or milk, monsieur? "Oh, Peter," she said. "You naughty, naughty little boy. Do you fancy a spanking?"

Peter had taken her into her bedroom where he'd made love to her for almost an entire hour. He did things to her in the first twenty minutes that she'd only imagined. His flexibility, delicate fingers, and knowing mouth. Later, both of them lying naked under her pink silk sheets, she'd asked him what on earth he had just done to her. Her ash blond hair over one eye, dizzy and wild from the whole experience, her breathing quick and her heart still racing. He leaned into her ear and whispered, Double-crested dragon. Oh god, she thought, blowing the hair from her eye. Double-crested dragon! This man in his midforties—nearly twenty years her junior!—might be the death of her yet. Where had he learned such a wonderful and impressive trick? It seemed like something one could only pick up in the Orient. A Shanghai whorehouse perhaps? She'd never ask.

Joanna slipped back into the kimono and set the table with antique silver and lace as if they were lunching at the Savoy instead of a shabby apartment with a view of the parking lot and expressway. She uncorked the bottle and poured a glass of the red as Peter appeared shirtless in only his trousers. He'd grown a slight beard since she'd last seen him, looking for all the world like a shipwrecked ruffian with his tousled blond hair and impish smile. Joanna heard her mother's Yorkshire accent in her head: such a charmer, that one.

They were both ravenous from the sex and barely spoke during the meal, Peter asking only once for a bit more wine. She knew he was married, but that didn't really bother her much. Darling Richard Harris had been married with three children, but the chemistry had been undeniable. Although Peter didn't offer Richard's considerable assets, he made up in enthusiasm and technique. Joan Collins always said a younger man was better than any colonic at Enton Hall.

"I really wish you hadn't gone to see Leslie Grimes."

"He called me, darling," she said. "He was an absolute wreck when you disappeared. We lunched at the Peabody and he told me about some arrangement you had. I was covering for you more than anything. More wine?"

"No, thank you."

"You're upset?"

Peter shook his head. Such a roguish and passionate man. She hoped that Tippi would find one like him for herself one day. There had to be someone much better than the Graceland tour guide she'd been seeing, with his horrible greasy hair and cuffed blue jeans, wallet chain, and tattoos up and down his arms.

"May I ask how you got shot?" she said, pointing to the wound along his right flank.

"There was a misunderstanding in Paris."

Joanna shrugged. Such things had happened in Paris.

"How is your family?" she asked.

Peter shook his head. Talk of his wife and his family were strictly off-limits. They'd first met back in January, a handsome American in a Savile Row suit working with Omar to unload four containers languishing at the Mississippi docks full of rugs, paintings, and ancient curiosities. Even before he mentioned that the antiques were from the Middle East, she knew he'd been a military man like her father. She'd been right, Peter making vague references to his time in the army and the Gulf War, maybe with a little hint that his work with the government hadn't ended. She made him for some type of spy with enormous worldwide contacts. He spoke passable French, decent German, and they both shared a passion for skiing in Switzerland, a love for winter sports in Interlaken.

"Are you in pain?" she asked.

Peter shook his head. What was going on in that handsome skull of his? She watched him scrape up a bit more salad and the rest of the coq au vin. He appeared to not have eaten for days, so scruffy and wild-eyed. She reached across the table to trace the cleft in his chin. He could've been an actor, so short, but with an enormous and handsome head on his shoulders.

"You've got to stay away from Leslie," he said. "He can be very temperamental."

She started to speak, but Peter gave her a look that would've wilted a hedgerow.

He held up his hand and shook his head. "That man, Jack Dumas?" Peter said, swallowing and wiping his lips with a napkin. "He came to Memphis to kill me and wouldn't think twice if you got in the way."

"Did he kill Omar?"

"Apparently."

"May I ask why?"

"Because he's pissed off and crazy," Peter said. "He believes I double-crossed him. In truth, he's the one who fucked up. And he nearly got himself killed back in Istanbul."

"And why would he kill Omar?"

Peter shrugged. He tossed back the rest of the wine and looked at his watch. "I need your help, Joanna."

"Well, you certainly didn't today," Joanna said, offering her wicked smile. The kind that brought Hal Wallis to his knees, panting like a frustrated old dog.

"Can you get me back into Omar's place?"

"Today?" she said. "Right now?"

"Tonight."

"I'm sure his family has changed the locks and the security code."

"I can take care of all that," he said. "I just need you to show me where you found him and help me look around his office."

"Omar didn't have much of an office," Joanna said, now knowing exactly why Peter Collinson had brought along his wonderful double-crested dragon from Paris. "Only two little desks, file cabinets, and some cubbyholes."

"A safe?"

"Yes," she said, tapping at her teeth with her index finger. "A very old one. I don't think you could get it open."

"We'll see about that," Peter said, getting up from the table and walking around behind her. He leaned down and kissed her cheek. "I'll pick you up at eight."

"So, Mother," Tippi said, "tell me about this mystery man of yours. What is this Peter Collinson really like? Who is he? What does he do? You're practically glowing."

"Only on the inside, darling," Joanna said, dipping her feet into her flat's community hot tub. She and Tippi were the only ones inside the pool area near the grills, Ping-Pong tables, and some game the younger people liked called cornhole. A banner spread across the fence read "Boo to You! Halloween 2010 Move-In Specials." The heavens wept that Joanna Grayson had to live in such a wretched place like The Village.

"I did have to wait in the car for nearly an hour," Tippi said, popping the cheap champagne Peter had left and filling a tall plastic cup. "I saw his poor shirttails flying during his escape, carrying his dress shoes. I know you're dying to tell me all about it."

"You saw him?"

"Of course, I saw him," Tippi said, gulping down the champagne. "Handsome. Although a little short for my taste."

"Tippi."

"Mother," Tippi said. The hot tub's water was foaming about her daughter's rather thick calves. "You're so wicked. He could be my brother."

"He's many years older than you, my dear."

"You've always called me a late and unexpected arrival."

"I was only twenty-eight."

Dear Tippi couldn't help herself, the theater in her blood, and she spat out a mouthful of the André Brut into the hot tub. "Twenty-eight?" Tippi said, laughing. "Mother. Are you trying to have some fun?"

Tippi was right, but Joanna so hated doing the math. There was her age during her coming out in London, and then her age when she arrived in Hollywood, and then take back two years for when she did press for the Hammer films, and then the period that her agent called her "return to normalcy," then moving ahead four years to when she did some erotica in Italy in the late '70s and early '80s with darling Sylvia Kristel. Soft focus, skinny dipping, untrimmed pubic hair that resembled a poodle caught in a headlock.

"Peter arrived with some wonderful news, Tippi."

"Let me guess," she said. "He's leaving his wife and I'm about to have the father I've always wanted. Goody. Even though he really could be my brother. If any of us were actually inclined to do the math."

Joanna snatched the cheap plastic cup from Tippi and poured it half full of the so-called champagne. "I never told you about finding poor Omar's body," she said. "Did I? And what he'd hidden away?"

Tippi shook her head.

"Omar made arrangements to bring over a new container from Istanbul," she said. "And only dear Omar knew those ten little numbers that would identify the right one. Without it, it would be a bit like looking for a grain of sand in the Sahara. Do you understand?"

"I know," she said. "The papers you found. But what's inside?"

"It must be something very big and very valuable to have been shipped halfway across the world and worth poor Omar's life."

"And Peter Collinson knows that you know how to find it."

"Of course not," Joanna said. "Not yet. I'd much rather play the heroine than the victim."

"Since when?" Tippi said. "You've always played the victim. Like when Elvis had to rescue you from those frogmen or pirates or whatever in Easy Come, Easy Go. I have to admit, you did look very scared. I believed you."

"This is our lucky ticket out of this god-awful purgatory," Joanna said, looking down at the gold watch Peter had given her earlier, its braided band glinting in the sunlight. Fake. A good fake, but not a true Cartier. "I won't trust our future to an extravagant lay, no matter how young and dashing he is."

Joanna wondered how long Peter would go on searching and searching for something that Joanna found so easily that first night. If he knew she had the shipping ID numbers, he'd just leave her in Memphis and take the truckload direct to Leslie Grimes for his Christian Crusade. Like the idiot former American president said: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me... you can't get fooled again. The very idea of Peter leapfrogging over her and using her long-cultivated relationship with Grimes to move his container of goddamn trinkets he'd found shooting about the sand dunes. Just what was Leslie into now besides rugs and magic golden lamps?

Peter's flashlight shone down the path and across love seats covered in moth-eaten velvet and hand carved wooden chairs pulled up to ornate dining tables, one with a little porcelain doll sitting at the head. The doll's empty black eyes and slack jaw nearly gave Joanna a fright.

"Can you really open a safe?" she asked.

"Of course I can."

"Are you going to use explosives?" she said. "Because if you are, I'd much rather wait in the car. They used so many explosives when I was working in Italy that my ears rang for years and years. After the Fox with Peter Sellers. It was my first picture and Peter was madly in love with me."

"You must have made that before I was born."

Peter Collinson.So very cruel tonight.

He turned on the lights in Omar's back office, and for the first time, she noticed Peter was wearing gloves. Of course, he was wearing gloves, skintight black leather, and Joanna worried perhaps she should have worn them, too. But then she remembered her prints must be all over the bloody antiques mall after working with Omar for the better part of the year. Omar's own personal "English Rose" with all her mysterious contacts in Hollywood. (Beverly Hills really, but she never corrected him.)

Peter handed her the flashlight and asked her to shine the beam on the dial as he donned a stethoscope. Within a few seconds, he popped the door to a safe so old that it could've been used in a Cagney film. He reached inside and began to toss the contents on the floor, stacks of money, handfuls of loose silver dollars, and some glittering diamond necklaces. She bent down and scooped up what she could in her arms, the flashlight wavering over the empty safe and Peter's reddened face.

"What are you doing?" he said. "Hold still. Hold still, goddamn it."

She pressed the jewels and a roll of cash into her pant pockets, doing her best to compose herself. Peter spread a big ledger onto the floor and flipped through it for what felt like an eternity. He finally got to his feet and walked over to Omar's desk and began emptying drawer after drawer until he punched at the wall and left fist-size holes in the sheetrock.

"Peter," she said. "Quit acting like a child. What on earth were you hoping to find?"

Peter gave one last swift kick to the desk as he snatched up Joanna's arm and marched her from Omar's office, the light of the flashlight bobbing up and down and along the walls and tile ceiling. Joanna wasn't able to catch a breath until they made it outside and Peter slammed the big metal door behind him.

He tossed her the car keys and said, "You drive."

"I don't see so well in the dark, darling."

"Don't worry," he said. "I'll tell you where to go."

When he brushed past her, she noticed he'd torn his wounds, the side of his shirt blackened with blood.

Peter's directions were complex and paranoid. He told her five times that they were being followed by a man in a silver Ford Taurus but not once did she see the car. They hopped on 240 and circled the city in an entire long lap before exiting and heading south on Germantown Road. Joanna had been behind the wheel quite some time, wearing her smart tortoiseshell glasses, waiting for Peter to compose himself and tell her exactly where they were going.

"What was he like?" Peter asked.

"Who?"

"Elvis."

"You've never asked me that."

"I'm asking now," he said. "I was always curious. Maybe I'd like to know if he and I shared a thing or two."

"Wondering how you might compare, Peter?"

"Just keep driving," he said. "I have to meet someone. Then I want you to take my car back with you. I'll call you when I get settled."

"Will I see you again?" Joanna asked. But truly not really caring either way.

"Son of a damn bitch," he said. "Why did Omar have to be so damn stupid and get himself killed like that?"

"How did he get himself killed?"

"Just drive, Joanna," he said. "Don't make trouble."

Joanna leaned forward, the night traffic a bit of a blur. She turned on the windshield wipers as a little rain started to sweep the road. "If you must know," she said, "I was never with Elvis. We were dear friends. More like brother and sister."

"Come on," he said, smirking. "You?"

"He did invite me to his home in Palm Springs one evening," she said. "We spoke of things a man like you could never understand."

It had all happened that way. Hadn't it?

The drive out to Palm Springs in '66 where Elvis had rented a home for the duration of the shoot. Easy Come, Easy Go. A perfectly dreadful film, one critic calling it "a tired little clinker that must've been shot during lunch hour." But the connection they'd had. That had been real. The all-night talk of destiny, the afterlife, reincarnation, and astrology.

There had been attraction without touching. Chemistry with only a good night kiss. You could see it all in the picture. So many fans had told her so. The way that Elvis so lovingly untied her from the mast of the ship and knocked out the frogmen who'd bounded onto the deck with spearguns. They trusted each other. Elvis believed they'd known each other in another life. If he hadn't been engaged to Priscilla, perhaps things would be different now. He held her hand and stared into her eyes as the sun came up across the desert. Just thinking of it now made her feel his strength.

She would get through this.

But that wasn't it, was it? Not all of it. There was their last meeting, the one she'd never talked about. Not a word about it in One Night with You: The Joanna Grayson Story. Three years after the picture bombed, after patching up the mess of her career and life back in London, she found herself back in the States with, of all people, her mother. You are not beautiful, Joanna. But you are striking...

Mum wanted to see Elvis. Your dear friend? And so they flew from New York to Las Vegas to watch him perform at the new International Hotel in the fall of 1970. Everyone was there. Sammy Davis Jr. Cary Grant. George Hamilton. Lovely Juliet Prowse. Mother had worn a blue gown to cover her expanding hips and hefty bosom. Joanna was resplendent in a white silk tunic, very Greek, her blond hair worn up, tendrils falling down her neck.

The show was transcendent. She'd never known Elvis as alive as he'd been onstage. (He'd been so sad back in Hollywood, a bored kid playing with motor scooters and water balloons.) Like her, Elvis wore all white, a contoured jumpsuit with conchos that were surely inspired by the necklace Joanna had once favored. Did he know she was coming? Was this a subtle message that she was the girl that could have been?

She could hardly breathe watching him, drenched with sweat, singing "Suspicious Minds," squatting into a side bend (muscles flexing in his legs, so very tan and limber), a move she knew he'd developed in yoga training for their film. His blue eyes set on her, snarling and smiling, so playful and so fun. Joanna could barely contain herself after the curtain fell as the casino manager took them through security and up through the tunnels behind the stage.

"He's quite handsome," Mum said. "Reminds me a bit of that fella Tom Jones."

"No, Mum," Joanna said. "Tom Jones reminds you of him."

A throng of fans surrounded Elvis. Elvis kissing and hugging them all. Touching hands, laying hands on shoulders. He patiently signed autographs and posed for photos. One of his Memphis Mafia boys handed him a white towel to dab his brow and a woman snatched it away and buried her face in it, inhaling his sweat. He and Joanna locked eyes. She had smiled at him.

And Elvis had smiled back.

"You always said we'd find each other again."

"Excuse me?" Elvis said.

"So many years," she said. "You were wonderful. Spectacular. God. You seem to have finally found your purpose."

"Yeah?" Elvis said. "Okay, baby. My purpose? You got something for me to sign? Or you want a picture or something?"

She'd never felt such humiliation. Made ever so the worse by the little smirk on Mum's disapproving Yorkshire face. Joanna couldn't speak or move. Elvis reached over her shoulder to snatch up a child's autograph book.

It was the worst kind of insult. To be forgotten. To be a nobody.

And now, so lost in her life, arriving to a destination of nowhere with a man she barely knew, she wondered if anyone would even know she had existed. We all have our purpose, Miss Joanna, Elvis said that night in Palm Springs. What's going to be yours?

"We're here," Peter said.

"Here?" she said. "We're nowhere."

It was a lonely service road somewhere in Shelby Farms, an endless stretch of power lines snaking between electric transformers across the hazy landscape. Peter was out of the car before she even turned off the ignition, a good distance away from a fall carnival lit up in neon and flashing lights, barely able to hear all those happy screams. "Why are we here?"

"I'm meeting someone," he said. "Then you can go."

"What's going on, Peter?"

Peter had his back to her, watching the carnival from under the huge transformers. When he turned around, a change had crossed his face. He no longer looked like Peter Collinson, dashing young man, but instead a stranger, a master stroke of acting as if he had picked up a reset scene, taking over for the stand-in and then coming on magically with the character. Peter's new character wasn't a hero. His eyes were dead and his mouth cruel. He reached out for Joanna's hair, twisted it roughly in his hands, and brought her down to her knees, pressing a gun to the side of her head. "What did Omar tell you?"

"My god," she said. "My god."

"What did he say, Joanna?"

"He was dead," she said. "He was dead. I swear to you."

He let go of her hair and dropped her in the dirt. She caught herself with her hands and turned to him to spit. He just shook his head and smiled at her, the headlights of another car bumping down the road. She stood up and ran to it, waving her hands and screaming for them to please stop. As the car slowed, she saw two figures emerge. Two large men who slammed the doors behind them and walked directly past her to Peter. They were dressed in dark stiff clothing like soldiers.

"She's a tough old bitch," Peter said. "Take her and see what you can get."