Officer Elvis

by Gary Gusick

  No problem. He had the dough. Thanks to years of penny-pinching. Riding around in an old beat-the-hell-up car, and living in a cramped studio apartment in the white-trash part of town, his wardrobe bought at Target. And when he traveled, it was always on the cheap. Saving, saving, saving. Then his mother passed, and there was the house and some life insurance. So when the doctor laid the actual price on him, he didn’t balk. “I can do it. I’ll give you cash. Greenbacks,” he said, and saw the doctor’s eyes light up.

  “Cash,” the doctor repeated. He suspected the doctor saw where he was going.

  “But the deal is, I was never here,” he said. “None of this ever happened. I don’t want to see this on YouTube or Facebook, or Twitter or any other Internet bullshit.”

  The doctor nodded. They were on the same page. The procedures and the fee would be off the books. There would be no records. And there would be the strictest confidentiality. That was the Swiss for you, as long as you paid up.

  “Wit zee utmost discretion,” the doctor said, sounding like a James Bond villain.

  It took four operations, just on his face. One for the cheekbones. Another to reconstruct his nose: lengthening it, and narrowing the bridge. The third operation was a chin implant. The fourth surgery reshaped his eyelids. Six months, spent mostly in bandages. Like a giant Q-tip.

  This was followed by the dental work. He had veneers specially designed to make sure his smile was the right smile. He had the dental work done in Switzerland, too. Easier that way. He supplied the reconstructive dentist with a photo, covering up everything but the smile. Same deal. Cash up front. No records.

  Getting the hair just right was almost as challenging and almost as expensive. The old him had straight, thinning red hair. His new self would need something totally different. It took three procedures and nearly forty grand to get the desired result. He did this to keep from having to wear a hairpiece. People could always spot those as fakes. Worse, he would have known it was fake. Now, a year later, his hair was dark brown and wavy.

  It was amazing to him that all these very respectable members of the medical community were willing to work off the books. No matter how much money somebody had they were always looking for a tax dodge, legal or otherwise.

  By the time the transformation was finished he’d spent almost every dollar he had, nearly four hundred grand. But it was worth it. The end result was as near to perfection as you could get.

  Now there was another project that consumed him, one only he could do. He’d made the plan. Soon, very soon, when the preparation was complete, the world would know that he was not a thing of the past, that he was here and now.

  As far as the clothing and the other finishing touches—he’d found all the right stuff—he’d save the last part of the makeover for the big reveal.

  Leaving the bathroom, he walked into his bedroom and stood in front of his bureau. He bowed his head before the shrine he had created. He raised his gaze adoringly to the face staring back at him from the mirror above the bureau. “It won’t be long,” he said. The face in the mirror smiled back, pleased with his efforts.

  Chapter 7

  The Sanctuary

  You didn’t need a road map or a GPS to find Mississippi’s most notorious meth dealer. “Go ten miles past Flowood on Highway 25. It’ll be on your right,” Shelby told Darla. “A white house. Three stories, six columns, and a five-acre fishing hole for a front yard. If there’s a pontoon boat out in the water, Hardy Lang will be the one that’s in it. Otherwise, knock on the front door hard as you can. Hardy has an aversion to bells. He lives alone and he sleeps odd hours.”

  The pontoon was on the water when Darla arrived and she saw Hardy was aboard, surrounded by a dozen water buckets. The buckets were filled with fish, which Hardy was dumping, a bucket at a time, into the muddy water.

  Darla parked her Prius at the bottom of the circular gravel driveway and walked to the landing in time to meet Hardy as he docked the pontoon.

  The drug kingpin was on the short side. Less than five five, Darla guessed. He was dressed in coveralls and had on a baseball hat with the initials HCH on the front. “Hardy’s a great one for self-promotion,” Shelby had told her. Hardy, whose actual age was sixty-one, appeared to be forty-five or seventy-five, depending on what part of him you looked at. His face was grizzled, deep-lined, and covered with white stubble. By contrast, his body was lean and sinewy, with wiry muscles and little body fat.

  Darla showed Hardy her badge as he stepped off the pontoon.

  “I’ve seen one like this before, but I don’t recall the circumstances,” said Hardy. “Nice design. A lot nicer than them tin-looking badges the county and city cops carry. You were a county dick a while back, right?”

  Darla decided she’d indulge Hardy while he went through the usual round of small talk that all Southerners, even criminals, do without thinking about it.

  “I was with Shelby at Hinds County,” she said. “He sends his regards.”

  “He had me by the short hairs a few times, ole Shelby did,” said Hardy. “But I wiggled loose. I always do.” He offered Darla a grin with three teeth missing, typical of tweakers. It looked like, at one time or another, Hinds County Hardy had been his own best customer.

  He removed a handkerchief from the front pocket of his overalls, dusted off a section of the dock, and sat down. Settled in, he dusted off a spot next to him. “Sit down here and join me while I wipe my face in the Mississippi sun,” he said.

  Darla sat down on the place Hardy had dusted off for her. The two of them dangled their feet over the water.

  “You know what you’re looking at?” Hardy asked, pointing to the pond. “It’s okay if you don’t.”

  “A giant mud hole,” said Darla.

  “This is a wildlife sanctuary for catfish,” said Hardy, his eyes lighting up, a man with a story to tell and a captive audience. “Every week or so, I take me on up to one of those catfish slaughterhouses in Belzoni.”

  “The farm-raised catfish businesses,” said Darla.

  “Those places, you know what they do to the poor catfish?” asked Hardy and didn’t wait for an answer. “They force-breed the creatures, feed them a diet of ground-up God-knows-what, knock ’em on the head, and sell them for profit. Some of them, they even slice and dice before they get out the door.”

  “That sounds about right,” said Darla. “Not that different from cattle.”

  “You eat catfish?” asked Hardy.

  “I had it once.”

  “I’ll bet you regretted the experience,” said Hardy.

  “Fried catfish,” said Darla. “Aside from the breading, it didn’t taste like much. An all-you-could-eat place. I didn’t go back for seconds. But are you saying you don’t eat the catfish in your pond?”

  “I don’t feed them, either,” said Hardy. “I rescue them from the slaughterhouses, right out of those overcrowded catfish slums they call ponds. I take as many as I can and I bring them here to catfish heaven. I give them refuge, and let them eat what they find. Nature’s way.”

  “For my edification, if you’re not feeding the fish, what does their diet consist of in this man-made pond?”

  “Each other, mostly, I’m guessing,” said Hardy. “You know the saying about the big fish eating the little fish. It seems to be working. Every once in a while I’ll scoop one out with a net, just to see how it’s doing. Forty, fifty pounds, easy.”

  Darla took out the recorder and sat it on the dock between them. “I’m here about your tormentor,” she said.

  “Officer Elvis.” Hardy curled his lip the way Tommy used to, gave her another one of his toothless smiles, and slapped his knee.

  “Somebody firebombed his car last night,” said Darla.

  “You’re thinking I didn’t know that? That I’m in a news blackout out here? Like the guy on that commercial, a while back, walking around everywhere with a cellphone to his ear, saying ‘Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?’ ”

  �
�Actually, I’m thinking that you might have been the one who took Tommy out. What do you know about explosives?”

  “They go boom, don’t they?”

  “Where were you last night, Hardy, from say around seven to nine p.m.?”

  “I was on my Tempur-Pedic, sleeping. You got one of those? They really do make a difference. You sleep like you was in the arms of the dear sweet savior.”

  “Anybody with you?”

  “You want me to kiss and tell?” asked Hardy. “I wasn’t raised that way.”

  “It’s a matter of record that you threatened to kill Detective Reylander when he shut down your meth lab,” said Darla. “I believe your exact words were ‘you put me out of my business, I’ll put you out of my misery.’ ”

  “I don’t recall saying that, but it does sound like yours truly,” said Hardy.

  “You’re going to need a better alibi,” said Darla.

  “Well,” said Hardy, “when I need one, I’ll find one.” He stood up, “Now, unless you insist on exploring your skills as a fisherwoman, allow me to accompany you to your car, Detective.”

  “We’re not finished,” she said, still dangling her feet over the side.

  “This is where a polite guest would take their cue and leave.”

  Darla looked up at Hardy, shielding her eyes from the afternoon sun. “Unless you’re looking for a ride to the MBI office, where you can swap fish stories with the staties for the next twenty-four hours, you better sit back down.”

  Hardy put his hands on his hips, stretched to one side, and then to the other—like he was in gym class. “One can expect only so much in the manners department from a Yankee,” he said to himself, and reclaimed his spot on the dock, adjusting his bony butt this way and that, an old man trying to get comfortable.

  “Why don’t we start here?” said Darla. “Tommy put you out of business. He raided your lab, busted you, and closed your meth operation. Your mobile home was impounded in the process and hasn’t been released.”

  Hardy removed his hat and wiped his brow. “If we’re going to continue conversing about this matter, I’ll need to add one or two or three caveats,” he said.

  “Number one,” he continued. “That business you said I was in, the illegal one, I don’t admit to being in that business. Number two, Officer Elvis—who, by the way, insisted at gunpoint that he be called Detective Elvis, didn’t raid anything. What the dumb redneck did was knock on the door of my recreational vehicle, which I had parked on recreational land I own for the purpose of well, recreation. His intrusion was not a raid, because the nature of his words and phrases were not along those lines. By which I mean, he did not say, ‘Open up. Sheriff’s Department. This is a raid.’ Nor anything of a similar nature. What he said was ‘Is somebody in there? I gotta go. Can I use your toilet?’ ” Hardy was imitating Tommy imitating Elvis.

  He cleared his throat and continued. “The necessary background to the story being that Reylander had gone hunting that day on land I guess he owned, land which ironically was adjacent to my land. The dunce failed to remember to bring a roll of toilet paper with him when he went out in the woods hunting for poor unsuspecting Bambi-like creatures. That kind of forgetfulness in a law enforcement official should be regarded as a sign of feeblemindedness, if you ask me. But I digress. Who’s asking? When nature called and Reylander wasn’t prepared, he saw my trailer on my land, private property, with signs all over that says so. ‘Keep Out.’ ‘Trespassers Beware.’ ‘This Land Ain’t Your Land. This Land Is My Land. So Get.’ Despite such warnings, Officer Elvis come right up unannounced and knocked on my trailer door. When I didn’t respond, which was my right not to, he came through the door, an uninvited guest. Now I am fully aware that when nature calls, a man may act in an irrational manner. However, having unlawfully entered my vehicle, Officer Elvis proceeded to the restroom without so much as a howdy-do or a by-your-leave. He did not seek my permission; which is not only illegal but also goddamn bad manners. Later, having finished his business, he exited the restroom, saw me, and recognized me as being someone whom he had tried to arrest on numerous other occasions, without success. At which point he thought he smelled something odious and unpleasant emitting from the kitchen part of my vehicle.”

  “What he smelled was meth residue,” said Darla.

  “Ammonia and vinegar are common household chemicals. One used for reviving the unconscious, the other as an ingredient in salad dressing.”

  “The report also says Detective Reylander saw what he believed to be equipment used in cooking meth,” said Darla.

  “What he saw was a few empty pickle jars, some coffee filters, and a couple of propane tanks. Lots of people has stuff like that in a trailer.”

  “Also plastic tubing, a large bottle of hydrogen peroxide, empty pill bottles,” said Darla. “Every one of these items is used in the manufacture of crystal meth.”

  “Okay,” said Hardy. “So maybe a potion of those items were used for chemistry experiments—which I explained to the intruder Reylander was a hobby of mine.”

  “Moving right along, you were arrested.”

  “I was falsely charged,” said Hardy, “but not by the Elvis wannabe. He did, however, hold me at gunpoint against my will until the state narcs arrived. I was charged, with intent to manufacture an illegal substance for the purpose of selling said substance. The matter is still pending. I think you can make an educated guess as to my defense, should the matter come before the court, which my attorney assures me will never happen. As to the so-called verbal threat, I attribute those words to a distressed state of mind.”

  “Tommy did put you out of business. This business you say you were never in, the one involving the sale of little one gram bags of crystal meth with the initials HCH printed on them. The same initials you have on your baseball hat. Now HCH meth is off the market.”

  “As I said earlier in our conversation, I don’t admit to having been in that illegal business, but if I were, it would take more than Tommy Reylander to put Hardy Lang out of business. Did you ever think maybe the lack of availability for the products you mention might be the result of the new pseudo-law?”

  The Mississippi legislature had, in fact, recently passed a bill making it illegal to purchase cold and allergy medicines with pseudoephedrine, the prime ingredient in meth, without a prescription. Prior to the new law, people like Hardy would send out scores of people to buy as many bottles of pseudoephedrine over-the-counter cold remedies as they could find.

  “I know some legislators down at the capitol who would be glad to hear that,” said Darla.

  “Then again,” said Hardy, “maybe Hinds County Hardy has seen the error of his sinful ways, and is turning over a new leaf.”

  “Come to Jesus, have you?”

  “Why not? The Good Book says He died for our sins,” said Hardy. “That ought to include mine.”

  “What do you plan on using for money, now that you’re out of the business that you were never in? Or have you taken a vow of poverty?”

  “Who knows? Maybe I’ll just live off the fat of the land,” he said, a twinkle in his eye.

  Darla got to her feet. “Tell you what. You supply me with the name of someone who can alibi you right now, and I’ll spare you the long ride downtown.”

  “On what charge?” asked Hardy. “You ain’t got nearly enough to arrest me for murder.”

  “Wait here,” said Darla, “I’ve got the bracelets in my car.” She turned and walked toward her Prius.

  “Victoria Rutherford is the lady’s name,” said Hardy. “Aka ‘Vicksburg Vickie.’ ”

  “One of Conway’s strippers,” said Darla.

  “She was here on a social visit. So don’t go turning vice on the lady. We may have exchanged bodily fluids, but there wasn’t any cash involved.”

  “We’ll check her out,” said Darla, ready to go. “If she alibis you, there’s not much I can do. But if she’s skipped town or doesn’t corroborate your story, I’ll come back
here with a county crew and a pump, and drain your pond. And that will be just for starters.”

  “You’re welcome to stay for supper,” said Hardy, calling after Darla.

  “Thanks for the offer, but you’re a murder suspect,” said Darla, continuing toward the Prius without looking back.

  “I’m a vegan, is what I am!” yelled Hardy.

  Chapter 8

  Bobble, Bobble

  The next morning, Darla phoned Vicksburg Vickie at her apartment in Madison and clearly woke the stripper up.

  “I know why you’re calling,” said Vickie, sounding groggy. “Hold on.”

  A few seconds later, she was back on the line. “I arrived at Mr. Lang’s house at approximately six o’clock last night,” she said, sounding very much like she was reading a prepared statement. “I was in Mr. Lang’s presence at all times until eleven o’clock, whereupon I drove myself back to my apartment in Madison.”

  “Whereupon?” asked Darla. “Really, Vickie? When was the last time you used that word? Have you been reading the dictionary?”

  “Listen, I was there, okay?” said Vickie. “And I wasn’t tricking. It was a date thing. Hardy made me dinner. A big slew of vegetables. Don’t tell Conway. He don’t allow us to fraternize.”

  “I doubt the subject will come up.”

  “I got something else to say,” said Vickie. “I’m sorry Officer Elvis got his, even though he never did sound like Elvis. And then there was that one time he did try to get out of paying the full fee for a lap dance in the Champagne Room. That redneck shorted me twenty bucks ’cause he didn’t like my technique. But I let that go a long time back.”

  “Yeah, it sounds like you moved on.”

  “I ain’t killed Tommy, as Jesus is my savior.”

  “You’re not a suspect,” said Darla.