Harley Jean Davidson 03 - Evil Elvis

by Virginia Brown

  She parked at the curb in front of the house and checked the house number twice on her list. Could it be wrong? This couldn’t be the house of the recently bereaved. The front door stood wide open, and laughter and music drifted out. Maybe they hadn’t been notified yet. That thought made her queasy.

  While she sat there indecisively as the sun beat down ferociously on the windshield, one of the kids running in and out of the house hollered that another cop was sitting out front. Okay, she could at least figure out if they’d been told, and if they hadn’t, make up some excuse and come back later.

  A woman came to the front door and leaned against the frame. Skinny, with dirty blond hair piled on top of her head like some kind of bizarre bird’s nest, she squinted across the yard littered with broken toys and trash, a lit cigarette hanging from one corner of her mouth.

  “You the cops?”

  Harley got out of the car and approached the house. “No. Are you Mrs. Jenkins?”

  “When it suits.” She laughed at her own joke. “Who are you?”

  “Ms. Davidson. With Memphis Tour Tyme. I wonder if I could ask you a few questions.”

  “This about Leroy? He’s dead.”

  So she knew. And apparently hid her grief well.

  “Yes,” Harley said, “I know. Please let me offer my condolences and assure you that the company is cooperating fully with the police to find his murderer.”

  “Yeah, yeah. So how much money are you offering?”

  Harley blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Money. A settlement. You’re with the insurance company, right?”

  “No, with the tour bus company. Your husband was on our bus.”

  “In that stupid Elvis getup, I guess.” She blew a stream of cigarette smoke in Harley’s face and snorted. “Dumb bastard. Leroy never had a lick of sense anyway. Always off spending good money on shit like that instead of groceries. That’s why I threw his ass out last year. Not good for nothin’ around here.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “But he left me with his kids, so maybe I need to sue the tour bus company for letting that good-for-nothing idiot get killed.”

  A little boy peeked at Harley from behind Mrs. Jenkins, big brown eyes wide and his hair hanging over his eyebrows. All he wore was a pair of ragged blue shorts. Behind him, bare floors were littered with empty cereal boxes and discarded clothes. Flies buzzed and a window air conditioner competed with the heat. Home sweet home. It made Harley greatly appreciate her parents, for all their flaws.

  “Mr. Jenkins didn’t live here? I was given this address—”

  “Just told you. Threw his ass out last year. Why are you here if not to offer money?”

  “I’m gathering any information that might assist the police in apprehending his killer. As I said—”

  “I don’t care nothin’ about that. He probably got what he deserved. All I’m interested in is how much money I’m gonna get to support his kids. It’ll be the first time he’s ever helped out, that’s for damn sure.”

  The little boy clinging to his mother made a sniffling sound, and Harley saw his lips quiver and his eyes fill with tears. That made her mad.

  “You know, Mrs. Jenkins, whatever your problems with your late husband, I’m sure his children loved him, so maybe we can discuss this in private.”

  “Hell, his kids know what a rotten bastard he was, so no point in—”

  “Step outside and close the damn door,” Harley snapped, “or I’ll report to the insurance adjusters that you’re uncooperative.” She had no idea if she could do anything of the kind or if it’d matter anyway, but this troll of a woman obviously needed to be dealt with in language she’d understand.

  It must have worked, because she shoved the little boy back into the house and closed the door. Then she turned to look at Harley, arms crossed over her chest and her eyes narrowed. She had an expression like a thwarted weasel.

  Well, that didn’t matter, because Harley had experience with weasels, too, and she intended to get the information she needed.

  By the time she left, she’d learned that Leroy Jenkins had moved in with a roommate in Frayser, that he worked erratically as a mechanic at a repair shop on Watkins, and that he’d been attending Elvis competitions for five years. He’d been a favorite last year, making the finals.

  It wasn’t much, but it was a start. As far as she’d learned, neither man knew each other, at least not well, but must have been acquainted with one another at the competitions. Maybe she needed to investigate the competitions next, how they were conducted, prizes offered, etcetera.

  Yogi should be able to help with that.

  * * * *

  “There’s a Super Bowl competition for Elvis impersonators?” Harley had to keep from rolling her eyes, speaking loudly to be heard over the whine of Yogi’s electric treadmill.

  “Yep,” her father replied, puffing a little as he tried to keep up with the treadmill, “it’s called an ETA Super Bowl and it’s held in Memphis at the Images of the King competition. This year it’s August eleventh through the sixteenth, right up until the candlelight vigil.”

  “Why is it called ETA? Shouldn’t that be EP something?”

  “Elvis Tribute Artists.” Yogi missed a step and slid backward on the treadmill, barely catching himself before he fell. King watched intently from under the dining room table, muscles quivering as if he intended to jump on it, too. Maybe that was a good idea, in light of the fact the dog was so high-energy.

  Harley turned her attention back to her father. “So what does the winner get? A lifetime supply of fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches?”

  Yogi gave her a reproachful look. “There’s a cash prize as well as the prestige of being the grand champion.”

  Aha. Motive. “A big cash prize?”

  “It’s not the cash prize that’s the most important. If he wants, the grand champion gets a lot of gigs during the next year, and appears at the annual ceremonies the next year to present the trophy. It’s a big honor. And I intend to win.”

  “Just because you feel the money isn’t important doesn’t mean everyone does. Y’all hide your money in pickle jars instead of keeping it safely in a bank. You’re just asking for trouble.”

  Yogi stopped to look at her but the treadmill kept going. He fell forward, caught himself, then went backward, staggering as his arms pinwheeled. Harley tried to catch him but missed. He landed on his butt with a heavy “whoof!” The empty treadmill kept going, and King took advantage to jump on the moving black band. While the dog kept pace with the treadmill, Harley helped Yogi to his feet.

  “Are you all right?” she asked when she got him upright again. He looked dazed. His eyes were the bright green of a traffic light, and he kept blinking them.

  “I think so...” he finally got out, sounding breathless.

  “You need to work on your dismount technique. You’re supposed to turn the machine off first, and then stop walking. It’s much easier that way.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Well, at least you now know how to exercise King on rainy days. He thinks he’s a race horse.”

  Yogi sat down on a dining room chair and wiped his brow with a paper towel he pulled from his pocket. “King gets on it more than I do. He loves it. I hate it. But I don’t want to insult Elvis’s memory by being too fat or busting out of my jumpsuit. If I could lose enough weight, I’d wear the same black leather he wore at his comeback in sixty-eight.”

  Harley sighed. It was beyond her comprehension. Not even in her days of intense worship of Steve Perry from Journey had she idolized a singer as much as her father worshiped Elvis. Of course, she recalled dressing up like Stevie Nicks once, layered dress and boots, long hair loose around her face, singing Stand Back while Cami used her parents’ Super 8 camera to film it. All traces of that humiliation had since been destroyed, she hoped. So maybe Yogi wasn’t so alone in his rock star adulation after all. He’d just kept at it too long after adolescence.

  “I understand,”
Harley said to her father when they both knew she really didn’t.

  He smiled. “Thanks.”

  She smiled back at him. He really was a great father, even with this insanity he indulged in every year. And really, everybody had their quirks, didn’t they? It just seemed that her family was a bit more blessed with them than most, or maybe it was just that they didn’t mind keeping them unapologetically out in the open.

  “So tell me what goes on at these competitions,” she said. “Like how many contestants there are and who the judges are, that sort of thing.”

  “It varies from year to year by how many contestants show up, but only twenty-four are in the finals.” Yogi got up and turned off the treadmill. Sweet silence filled the dining room. King hopped off the treadmill when it stopped and went into the kitchen, presumably to get a drink of water. Yogi wasn’t far behind him. “Sometimes the judges are other contestants from previous years, but occasionally we get a celebrity or two as judges.”

  She followed him into the kitchen. As she’d suspected, King lay on the kitchen floor with his head in his water bowl. Just his ears and eyes showed above the deep bowl, reminding her of a flop-eared crocodile, and slurping sounds came from his vicinity.

  “Like who as celebrities?”

  “TV people, news columnists, those kind. Did you drink my root beer?” he asked with his head stuck inside the refrigerator.

  “You know I don’t like that organic stuff Diva buys. Where is she, by the way? Burying the pickle jars?”

  Yogi shut the refrigerator and twisted open a bottle of peach flavored water. “I think she went to pick up some more supplies. We’ve got a big flea market coming up soon.”

  Their main source of revenue. After inheriting his parents’ house when Harley was only fourteen, they’d moved back to Memphis from a California commune. Diva read tarot cards and sold crystal jewelry and dream catchers, and Yogi made metal garden trolls and windmills to sell at local flea markets. They made enough money to buy food and pay utilities and taxes, though Yogi always had to make his annual protest over the latter. Government conspiracy was a familiar theme. He’d never quite recovered from the mindset of the sixties. Not that Harley didn’t sometimes agree with him, but she stopped short of picketing the Federal Building or protesting for animal rights outside the meat packing plants. More than once she’d had to provide her parents bail money and a ride home from the police station.

  Since Yogi chose to ignore her references to their banking system of pickle jars buried in the back yard, she gave up for now. It would come up again. She’d make sure of that.

  “So is that it? That’s all the Elvis tributes are, just contests and a little prize money?”

  Yogi sighed. “After all these years, you’d think you’d have paid more attention.”

  “You would, wouldn’t you? It’s not that I’m not interested in you. It’s just that I’ve never been that interested in all the fuss made about Elvis every year. Sorry.”

  Yogi looked sad. “There’s never been another one like him, never will be. He created an era all on his own, a poor boy from Mississippi with only his talent and determination. Now he’s known worldwide, and most of the rock music today is here only because of him. I don’t mean that stuff your brother plays, that’s just noise. A waste of talent.”

  “We certainly agree on that. And it’s not that I don’t admire Elvis, because how could I not? Every week I tell tourists about how he started out in a two room house in Tupelo before his talent got him to Graceland. And sometimes I tell them that because of my father, I’ve listened to Elvis’s music all my life.”

  That pleased Yogi. “You do?”

  “Sure. And sometimes I tell tourists about one of the times Diva met Elvis, and how he often got so lonely he’d walk down the highway from Graceland to visit with the night attendant at the Shell gas station. Almost everybody knows about how he had to rent amusement parks and movie theaters to be able to go out and not be mobbed by fans, but not many realize just how lonely he got at times.”

  Yogi nodded. “There’s a muffler shop at that Shell station now. My dad worked there a long time ago, when it was still a Shell station. He was a mechanic. The night attendant, Clyde, would tell him how he and Elvis talked sometimes, maybe shared a nip or two, and told dirty jokes. People forget that at heart Elvis was still a small-town boy from Tupelo stuck in a big-time world with too many boundaries. Talent made him, but it ruined him, too. Nobody ever thinks about how much he gave up sharing that talent.”

  Now her father looked so sad Harley had to change the subject to cheer him up. “Hey, want to go to McDonald’s while Diva isn’t here?”

  That did the trick. As a closet carnivore living in a vegetarian household, the occasional cheeseburger or Big Mac was a guilty pleasure for Yogi. No doubt Diva knew about his lapses, but chose not to make an issue of it.

  So Yogi, Harley, and despite her halfhearted protests, King, got into her car and drove to the McDonald’s on Highland, only a few blocks away. She bought her father a Big Mac and King a cheeseburger, and herself a fried pie. All three of them were blissful with grease.

  “You know you’re going to have to do extra jogging to work that off,” she said to Yogi as they left the parking lot, and he nodded.

  “It’s worth it. Got any breath mints? I don’t want your mother to smell McDonald’s on my breath.”

  “For you, but King will have to wing it. You can always claim he got in the neighbor’s garbage again. That’s usually true anyway.”

  “He’s been doing much better. Except for yesterday, when he got in Sadie’s flowerbeds. I have to replace two azalea bushes and some kind of orangey flowers. He was digging for moles. I told Sadie those humps in her lawn were mole trails, but she didn’t listen.”

  “How did he dig up two bushes? Those were pretty big.”

  “Oh, he didn’t dig those up, he ate them. Or chewed on them, anyway.”

  Harley glanced in her rearview mirror. The culprit didn’t look at all ashamed. He had his nose pressed against the back window as he surveyed the passing panorama of neat houses, the neighborhood head shop that sold bongs and other drug paraphernalia, a tattoo parlor, the St. Ann’s Catholic school Harley had attended, and a music store.

  Businesses and residents changed through the years, but some things always remained the same.

  “Well,” Harley said, “Mrs. Shipley doesn’t get mad about that sort of thing as long as you replace them. For a busybody and neighborhood gossip, she’s really pretty nice.”

  “She’s been a good neighbor,” Yogi agreed, and wiped his mouth with a napkin to scrub away any remaining traces of McDonald’s as they got close to home. Eating meat was his biggest crime to date lately, and he and Diva hadn’t been arrested for protests in a while. Maybe they were growing out of that stage at last.

  Really, as frustrating as they could be at times, Harley decided, she needed to stop complaining about her parents. She could have been stuck with a horror of a mother like that Patty Jenkins. No wonder Leroy left her. Too bad he didn’t take the kids with him.

  “Hey,” she said as an idea occurred to her, “when is your next Elvis-fest?”

  “A concert Friday night at Dad’s Place on Brooks. Why?”

  “I thought I’d tag along if you don’t mind.”

  “Mind?” Yogi grinned so big his eyes looked like slits. “I’d love it. You can give me a few pointers, maybe. The big competition is way too soon and I want to be at my best.”

  “I’ll be there.” It would give her an excellent chance to scope out the contestants and see which one of them might be a killer.

  Chapter Five

  “Why are we here again?” Cami looked around the huge room filled with Elvises and noise.

  “To find a killer.”

  Cami winced. “Arrest that guy over there. He’s killing Don’t Be Cruel.”

  “I can’t make an arrest, Cami. Even for murdering a song. The judges will have to do that
. I just want to scope out these guys and see if any of them look familiar. The killer was on my van, so I should be able to spot him.”

  “Wasn’t he dressed as Elvis?”

  She sighed. “Yeah. That might make it a little more difficult.”