by Gary Gusick
“There are two other performers set to appear before the contest in Tupelo,” said Uther. “Monday afternoon, there’s a gentleman who calls himself Cowboy Elvis MacDonald. Mr. MacDonald dresses like Elvis, but doesn’t actually sing. His talent is yodeling. He claims to be able to execute a yodeling accompaniment to every song Elvis ever recorded. He’ll be appearing at the Atlantis bookstore in Jackson between two and three in the afternoon. I’m not certain if he’ll be yodeling or doing a book signing, for his new release, Yodeling Like the King.”
“I heard him do his thing once,” said Rita. “He doesn’t look like Elvis, and he sure doesn’t sound like Elvis. So what’d be the point of shooting such a person, if you were of a mind to kill Elvis?”
“Rita’s got a point, at least as far as prioritizing security personnel,” Darla said.
Rita smiled and nodded her head to the group like she was receiving a round of applause.
“The final appearance by an Elvis artist,” said Uther, “is by Russell Hartford, the CEO of Magnolia Manufactured Housing. Mr. Hartford will be performing at his own birthday party next Thursday night at the Manship Mansion in Natchez. He has rented the entire plantation for a private party.”
“We’re going to need to inform the venue operators and give them the opportunity to cancel any concerts,” said Darla. “If they elect to hold the concert anyway, we’ll need to provide them with increased security. More important, we’ll need to get hold of the performers. You have a cellphone number for Mr. Everson?” she asked Uther.
“I do, but he’s out of range,” said Uther. “The area where Mr. Everson is working in is in the middle of a dead zone.”
“I know the Winston County sheriff,” said Shelby. “You want me to call him? He could send someone out there.”
“Can the Winston County sheriff keep his mouth shut if you explain what’s going on?” asked Darla.
“Not if there’s a chance he could get his picture in the paper,” said Shelby. “He’s running for reelection next year.”
“We’ll handle this ourselves,” said Darla. “How long a drive to Mr. Everson’s?”
Uther looked at his iPad. “An hour and thirty-seven minutes.”
“I’ll head up to Winston County tomorrow,” said Darla, “and track down Mr. Everson. I’ll try to talk him into coming back to Jackson, where we can place him under protection. If the killer strikes again, we may be forced to place all the potential targets under police protection. It would nice if they weren’t strung out all over the state.”
“I know Reverend Walters over at the Southern Church of the Holy Redeemer,” said Shelby. “I’ll advise him to cancel the service. And put the gospel-singing Elvis under protective custody when he shows up.”
“We have contacts with the people at the casino,” said Jendlin. “I’ll talk to Chief Deerinwater about the situation. The casino is on tribal land and I try not to interfere, but the chief is a smart man. He’ll want to cooperate.”
“We’ve got a little over a week before Tupelo,” said Darla. “Hopefully they won’t have to cancel the contest.” She scanned the room. “Okay, we all know what we’ve got to do.”
“What about me?” asked Rita. “I’d like to help.”
“She does appear to have considerable expertise in the matter at hand, Miss Darla,” said Shelby.
“I ain’t going to be no trouble,” Rita said to Darla. “I’ll only speak when spoken to. Like I was a ten-year-old at a grown-up restaurant.”
Darla still preferred to work alone, but didn’t want to embarrass Rita. “It’s up to Shelby,” she said, and saw a twinkle in his eye.
Despite his gruff manner, Shelby had a soft spot for the women who worked for him. “You still got your firearm?” Shelby asked.
“I had to surrender it,” said Rita, “after my little fender-bender.”
“Pick yourself up a handgun on the way out,” said Shelby.
“Can I have one like hers?” asked Rita, pointing to the .380 Taurus on Darla’s ankle.
“Best not to push your luck on your first assignment back,” said Shelby.
Chapter 14
Playing Tourist
GRACELAND PARKING LOT, MEMPHIS
8:30 A.M. THE NEXT DAY
Daniels parked his car a half hour before the first tour. The line for the bus had already formed. He did a head count. Not a problem. He would still be part of the first group. He needed to be in and out of Graceland by 10 a.m.
When he boarded the bus, the only seat left was toward the back, across the aisle from a Japanese family: a husband, his wife, and their sweet-faced toddler, all of them dressed in identical Elvis getups. Half the people on the bus had on some sort of Elvis merchandise: T-shirts, belts, sunglasses, Elvis buttons, most of it bought in the Elvis gift shop next to the parking lot.
There was a mirror over the seats, in the rear of the bus, the kind that let the driver see what was going on behind him. Daniels looked up at his reflection. With the Ole Miss baseball hat and a pair of glasses, hell, even he didn’t recognize his new self.
Just to be polite, he smiled at the Japanese couple. They smiled back. He said hello. They said hello. Then silence. Feeling uncomfortable, he asked the Japanese man, “This your first time here?”
“The dream of a lifetime,” the Japanese man said in flawed English, but clear enough.
“Mine, too.” He smiled again, thinking that he was here for very different reasons than they were.
At 9 a.m., the minibus, the kind you see taking old people to shopping malls, pulled out of the parking lot, crossed Elvis Presley Boulevard, then drove through Graceland’s gates with the music notes on them, and up the driveway.
As Daniels entered the front door, a fresh-faced young woman, dressed in a plain blue shirt and black slacks, welcomed him to Graceland and handed him an audio headset. She was pretty enough, what they used to call the girl-next-door type. Not in the same class as his Ginger, though.
“This is a self-guided tour through Elvis Presley’s personal residence,” she said. “You’ll hear the voices of Elvis, his daughter Lisa Marie, and various others as you move from room to room, and I’ll be on hand to answer any questions you might have.” She sounded all bubbly and excited, like most tour guide types. He couldn’t tell if she was a real fan or just being nice because it was part of her job.
He put on the headset like everyone else and half-listened as Elvis’s daughter reminisced about the home life of the King of Rock and Roll.
The tour began in the foyer. A velvet rope cordoned off the white-carpeted stairs where a peacock-blue curtain trimmed in gold had been drawn to obscure the entrance to the second floor. “Elvis loved to entertain,” said the narrator on the audio, “but he always kept the second floor private. And to this day we honor Elvis’s wishes on all our tours of Graceland.”
Daniels knew the real reason why they wouldn’t allow anyone on the second floor. It was because the Graceland people didn’t want the tourists making smart-alecky remarks, or worse, snapping pictures of the commode where Elvis was sitting when he was supposed to have had his drug overdose.
“Are the rooms upstairs still the same as they were when Elvis lived here?” Daniels asked the attendant, keeping his tone curious, not desperate for the answer.
“Exactly the same,” she said, offering him a practiced smile. “That’s what I’ve been told.”
Even the upstairs bathroom? Daniels wanted to ask, but didn’t. That was the room that counted. He tried and failed for weeks to find photos of the bathroom on the Internet.
The living room, the first room on the tour, wasn’t much bigger than the living room at his apartment, but that’s where the similarities ended. The Graceland living room held a long white sofa—fifteen feet, according to the audiotape—and a ten-foot custom-made coffee table. At the end of the room was a doorway leading to the music room. The doorway featured two full-length panels with stained glass peacocks. The music room, on the other side
of the stained glass doorway, had a baby grand piano, a TV set, and some other furniture he couldn’t see.
The tour moved past the dining room and through the kitchen, which, sure enough, reminded Daniels of a kitchen he’d seen recently in a double-wide mobile home, nothing like the fancy kitchens you see today, but probably pretty impressive in its day.
Whether he was or wasn’t interested in a particular room, he made a point of lingering in each one until the guide made the group move on. He wanted to make sure that he came off as your average awestruck tourist, nobody that anybody would notice or remember.
The attendant led the group down a narrow flight of stairs to the basement. Daniels let the other tourists in his group go ahead of him, making sure he was last. Making it look like he was just being polite. He paused at the top of the stairs, looked behind him, and saw that he was alone at last. He removed a small plastic device about the size of a package of chewing gum from his front pocket. The device had an adhesive strip on one side of it. He peeled back the strip and wedged the device at the left-hand corner where the wall met the stair ceiling. After he’d secured it in place, he bounded down the steps two at a time to join the rest of the group.
“Everything okay?” asked an attendant at the bottom of the steps, more concerned than suspicious.
“I’m just fine,” he said. “I got distracted. There’s just so much to see.” He shook his head, as though he were in wonder at all the grandness.
“It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it?” said the attendant.
In the basement, first was the media room. The whole room, done up in yellow and black, with mirrors on the ceiling and walls. A black velvet sectional couch faced a bunch of TV sets from the seventies. Along one of the walls was a bar and four round bar stools that had yellow Naugahyde seats.
This was followed by the game room, containing a pool table topped by two stained glass shades and a couple of couches. The couches, the four walls, and the ceiling were all covered in a multicolored fabric that looked like it might have come from India.
Once again he was the last of his group to leave the room. On the way out of the room he reached into his coat pocket and palmed the second plastic device. He’d studied the layout of the room and the fabric pattern from photos he’d seen online, and he had the device covered in the same fabric that was used on the walls and ceiling. The match was perfect. He bent down like he was tightening the laces in his left shoe, hiding the device with his body. He stripped the adhesive and stuck the device to the inside of the door panel.
His group passed a second staircase, this one leading to the main level and the “Jungle Room,” the former porch. This room was one of Elvis’s favorites, with green shag carpeting on the floor and ceiling, and a dozen or more statues and carvings of various wild animals. There was also a couple of Hawaiian-type chairs and a sofa covered in imitation fur upholstery. Daniels paused at the staircase, just as he had at the first staircase, and put a third device in place.
The remaining rooms in the main house had nothing to do with his plans, and he breezed through them, moving to the front of the group.
He skipped the trophy building altogether, which included costumes and gold albums.
He also skipped the meditation garden, where Elvis was supposedly buried, along with his mother, father, and grandmother. He knew better. The parents and the grandmother may have been laid to rest there, but Elvis was all too alive, practically everywhere you looked!
The last stop was at the wall next to the wrought iron gates. This was the place where tourists went to write notes of thanks to Elvis. He strolled to the far end of the wall, reading inscriptions as he went. “Jesus at the right hand of God, Elvis at the left” and “I want your Pelvis, Elvis.” The final one Daniels saw said, “Elvis will outlive all the people who think he’s dead.” He bent down and tucked the final device into place at the corner of the wall.
What happened next wasn’t part of the plan, but he had a felt tip pen in his pocket and figured why not? He wrote on the wall, “See you soon!”
Before 10 a.m., he was back in his car and headed for the tall pines.
Mission accomplished.
Chapter 15
Road Trip
THAT AFTERNOON
Darla and Rita were in the Prius, driving northeast up Highway 25, on their way to see Roger Everson. Darla hoped to talk him into canceling or at least postponing his casino engagement. Chief Deerinwater had told the FBI that it was Everson’s call. If Everson wanted to go ahead with the concert, Chief Deerinwater would stack the concert hall with tribal police. Darla was hoping none of that would be necessary, that Everson would back out on his own.
They rode along the deserted four-lane highway in silence, Darla behind the wheel, Rita keeping her promise to speak only when spoken to. Darla let her mind turn to her coming trip to Italy with her husband. When would they go? Getting away from the clinic was never easy for Stephen. Would they spend the entire three weeks in Tuscany, the area where Stephen had been born and raised? Or maybe they would take the train south from Florence to Rome for a few days, and then over to the Amalfi Coast. Being on the water, that would be nice.
They needed this time away. Job demands, his and hers, had kept them from taking a real vacation for the last two years.
After forty-five minutes Darla saw an off-ramp with a sign that said Philadelphia.
Rita looked over at her. “Of course, it ain’t the real Philadelphia, like where you’re from.”
Darla answered back with a small smile. She got the joke.
“Now the people here, they think it’s the real one,” said Rita.
It’s real enough, thought Darla, remembering that Philadelphia, Mississippi, was where three civil rights leaders were slain in the early sixties. It took almost forty years to prosecute one of the main perpetrators, a guy called Preacher Killen.
Another minute passed in silence.
“Where are you from?” Darla finally asked Rita, to be polite.
“Louisville,” Rita said, pronouncing it Louisville, not Louieville, “Mississippi, not Kentucky. We say it different. And we don’t have a racetrack, either.”
“Somehow I didn’t think so,” said Darla.
Both women half-laughed, Darla finding it odd but somehow comforting that she and the young wannabe detective could laugh at the same things.
“There’s some horses, though,” said Rita. “Well, a few.”
This time it was a real laugh.
They rode without saying anything for another minute, with Rita shifting side to side in her seat, like the silence was killing her. Finally she said, “I read about you in that People magazine article a few years back. About how you were a detective up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that is, and you was a cheerleader for the Philadelphia Eagles, too, and you were going out with Hugh. And how you shot that terrorist with that little gun of yours.”
“That was over ten years ago,” said Darla. She glanced over and caught Rita staring at her like she was an exhibit in a museum. “What?” she asked.
“I was just wondering. I mean, did it feel funny being famous, like that? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” said Rita.
What was the use? The young woman was going to have her way. Whether Darla liked it or not, they were going to talk. “The People article was really about Hugh,” said Darla, “the catch he made in the Super Bowl.”
“Hugh the Glue,” said Rita. “I remember the catch.”
“Me, too,” said Darla, thinking that the spectacular one-handed grab that won the Super Bowl was the last catch Hugh Cavannah made in his career. The following year in practice he tore his ACL and his life as an all-pro wide receiver was over.
Rita nodded like she understood, looked out the window, and then seemed to realize that she had been given the green light to talk. “Your people were police, weren’t they? I got that from the article, too.”
“You have a good memory,” said Darla. �
�That can be useful in this line of work.”
“Thank you, Detective.”
Rita’s earnestness, her eagerness, was beginning to get to Darla. “Police work was the family business,” she said.
“What did they all do?” asked Rita. “God awful, look at me. I’m sure the nosy kind, ain’t I? Mama used to say curiosity killed the cat, and Daddy would say, but satisfaction brought him back.”
Darla pictured her childhood in South Philly, the weekends surrounded by family, their home filled with police talk. “My dad was a beat cop, my mother worked in records,” she said. “My uncle was part of the mounted patrol. I have a cousin that’s an instructor at the police academy.”
“I figured you come by your talents honestly.” Rita looked over at Darla. “I guess I’ll shut up now.”
“What about you? What did your father do?” asked Darla, her recently acquired Southern courtesy all but requiring her to ask.
“Daddy was a clown,” said Rita.
“That could be said about a lot of men,” said Darla.
“No, ma’am, not that way,” said Rita, laughing. “Daddy was a rodeo clown, until he hurt his back. He was a young man when it happened. The poor man, most of his life on disability. We didn’t have a lot of material things. We were trailer park, but we weren’t trash.”
Southern women all know how to turn a phrase, thought Darla.
“Can I ask you something personal?” asked Rita.
“I don’t think I know how to stop you.”
“You ever think about going back to Philadelphia? Getting out of—what is it Shelby said you called it?”
“Bum-fuck, Mississippi,” said Darla. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’ve met a lot of good people here. It’s just I’ve never quite felt I fit in.”
“No need to apologize,” said Rita. “I don’t take no offense. I feel the same way myself sometimes.”
“Stephen is the one that wants to stay in Mississippi,” said Darla.
“It’s because of the clinic, ain’t it?” said Rita. “ ‘The Last Clinic,’ they called it in that article in the Jackson Crier. All them church bunch trying to shut it down.”
