by Peggy Webb
“Let’s look at the river, Elvis.”
Apparently everybody else has the same idea because we can’t even get close to the ornate, Italian-style concrete balustrade. Still, the view of the Mississippi is magnificent.
“Isn’t this peaceful?”
The words are no sooner out of my mouth than there’s an explosion of flapping wings. Feathers fly, ducks squawk, and a high-pitched scream rips the air. Crowd control vanishes.
While I drag Elvis out of the melee, I glance around to see if I can locate the source of this near riot.
When I do, my stomach turns. I open my mouth to yell, but somebody beats me to it.
“It’s Babs Mabry Mims!”
Not anymore. What’s left of her is plastered on the sidewalk thirteen stories below.
Elvis’ Opinion #2 on Lies, Limelight, and Duck Soup
There hasn’t been this much excitement in Memphis since I started a musical revolution with “That’s All Right.”
Sirens blare and the cops arrive while feathers and tempers fly all over the place. Nearly everybody on the rooftop has a different story. Some swear they saw Babs jump while some vow she was drunk and fell, though how you’d accidentally fall over a substantial concrete parapet is a mystery to me.
They’re all wrong. Babs Mabry Mims’ death was neither an accident nor suicide. I know what I know. Something foul’s afoot, and I’m not talking about the Peabody ducks.
If Callie would turn me loose, I’d find out a thing or two. In spite of my attempts to drag her toward the action, she’s got me on a short leash.
Listen, if she thinks I’m going to apologize for getting in the Peabody fountain, she’s barking up the wrong tree. I was putting on the best show this joint has seen since my heyday at Graceland. I didn’t even get to finish my act. She’s the one who ought to be apologizing.
As it is, I’m stuck with nothing but my radar ears.
What’s this I hear?
Ruby Nell grabs ahold of a cop and jumps right in the middle of things.
“It was murder,” she says.
“Back up, lady. I’m busy trying to contain this crowd.”
You don’t give Ruby Nell orders. Especially not in that tone of voice.
“She was pushed.”
You can hear Ruby Nell all the way to the Mississippi River. This is a woman used to taking command. She draws the attention of another of Memphis’ finest.
“Wait a minute, Bert,” he says. “Let’s hear what the lady has to say.”
Bert hustles off while the second cop draws Ruby Nell aside. Determined to sleuth on the sly, I wiggle between the legs of a woman the size of a Toyota truck. If she decides to move, I’m sausage.
“Now, ma’am, why do you think Ms. Mims was pushed?” the cop asks Ruby Nell.
“Because somebody tried to push me off the roof, too. If I weren’t so graceful and agile, I’d be lying down there on the sidewalk.”
“Did you see who pushed you?”
“Of course not. If I had, he’d be walking around minus a few body parts.”
The crowd laughs in the nervous way of people horrified by what happened but grateful it happened to somebody else.
I get distracted by a ruckus over by the glorified duck pen everybody around here insists on calling a duck palace. Duck palace, my hind foot. You have to be royalty to live in a palace. Which, of course, I am. But what did I call my home? Graceland, which says it all.
Peering from under the skirts of Toyota Truck Lady, I glance at the duck pen to see what’s going on. The duck master is trying to round up his infamous fowl, but they’re too dumb to get back in their pen. They’re flapping around the heads of three policemen who are trying to question a suspect.
He’s none other than the guy who asked my human mom to dance earlier in the evening. And he has the look of a man on the hot seat.
Fortunately, I don’t even have to leave my hiding place (and risk bodily injury in this melee) to see what’s going on. I have a mismatched ear for trouble, and I’ve already caught this guy’s act. He is H. Grayson Mims III—Babs Mabry Mims’ current husband.
H. Grayson is twisting and turning in the wind because of Babs’ first husband, Victor Mabry, who is also talking to the police and has their full attention.
“I tell you, Grayson Mims pushed her off the roof,” the deposed first husband is shouting. “I saw him.”
The crowd perks up and everybody looks surprised except the eyewitness and yours truly. Judging by the fracas I heard between H. Grayson, Victor, and Babs earlier in the evening when I slipped my leash and sneaked out to find a little smackerel of something good, I’d say both husbands had plenty of motives to do her in. Extramarital shenanigans, if you believe the accusations they were hurling around.
I don’t have enough evidence to convict either of them yet, but I’m hot on the trail and I have a plan. Being a dog of superior intelligence, I’m an expert planner.
Ask Trey. If it weren’t for my masterly machinations, he’d be long gone from Mooreville. After that big fight Jarvetis and Fayrene had this summer over building a séance room at the back of Gas, Grits, and Guts, Jarvetis would have snatched him up and left the country. As it is, Trey is down on Ruby Nell’s farm living off fat rabbits and the fat of the land while Jarvetis, unaware of his whereabouts, cools his heels. His bags are all packed, but he’s not about to leave Fayrene without his favorite redbone hound.
Tonight after everything quiets down, I’ll roust Callie out of bed so I can heed the call of nature. I can hold my bladder all night if I want to, but it has come in handy more than once when I wanted to get outside and mark a bush or two and howl at the moon.
What’s the use of being in a hotel where one of my personal heroes (General Robert E. Lee) once roamed if I can’t get out and sniff out his scent? Mess with me and I’m liable to even mark the spot.
While I’m taking care of business, I’ll do a little doggie detection. And if I see any of those dumb ducks wandering about, tomorrow’s menu will feature duck soup.
Toyota shifts and I come within a gnat’s hair of biting her bulging ankle. Listen lady, that’s my tail you’re stepping on. I may have to take another dip in the fountain to get the kinks out.
Chapter 3
Messages, Mallards, and Gloria Divine
I’d be worried to death that somebody really did try to kill Mama if I didn’t know she’s a drama queen. Everybody in the Valentine family knows it. Just let some big event occur, and she jumps right into the middle of it.
If I don’t get her off this roof I’m going to be up to my neck in murder again (a prospect I don’t plan to repeat after this summer’s fiasco with the Elvis impersonators).
I tug the leash and my dog appears from underneath the skirts of a woman who shouldn’t be wearing horizontal red and white stripes. She looks like a circus tent.
See, I’m too upset to even think of anything nice to say like She makes you long for pink cotton candy and Lipizzaner stallions in the center ring.
“Come on, boy. Let’s get Mama.”
Lovie has already found her and is trying to talk some sense into her.
“You were probably just jostled, Aunt Ruby Nell.”
“I know jostling from pushing. I was pushed.”
Bobby Huckabee materializes. “There’s danger all around you, Ruby Nell. Danger from a dark-eyed stranger.” If I weren’t such a lady, I’d say a word. One of Lovie’s. Instead I content myself with giving him a scowl. But only a small one. He’s so timid I don’t want to scare him and hurt his feelings.
“Let’s go downstairs, Mama. All of us could use a drink.”
“Stop treating me like I’m senile. I know what happened and what didn’t happen. And I’ll leave when I’m good and ready.”
Where’s Fayrene when you need her? Right now I’d even be glad to see Mr. Whitenton. But he’s still strangely absent. Personally, I think that’s a good thing.
Unless he’s waiting in Mam
a’s room with a bottle of champagne and some bad intentions.
“Where’s Mr. Whitenton?” I ask.
Mama narrows her eyes. “Why do you ask?”
Fayrene appears, saving me from thinking up a lie. Though I’m not above an occasional prevarication, I don’t like it, even if it’s just a little white one.
“I could use a shot of Wild Turkey.” Fayrene puts her hand over her heart. “Somebody nearly pushed me off the roof.”
Mama shoots me this See, I told you look.
“Let’s all go to Mallards,” I say.
It’s a charming pub in the Peabody, and frankly I’ll be glad to get away from tonight’s uncivilized business. If you are of weak character (which I definitely am not), this kind of evening could make you take up civilized drinking.
I head toward the elevator and, thank goodness, they all pile in behind me. I punch the button for the lobby.
“Wait for me in the pub,” I tell them. “I have to take Elvis outside, and then put him in the room.”
Even if my basset does have special permission to be in the hotel, I don’t think that extends to the restaurants. After the incident in the fountain, I’m not about to call attention to him again.
Though I’d love to pass unnoticed through the Grand Lobby, Elvis has other ideas. He preens and prances and shakes his ample self every which way. He draws a crowd as easily as the King. Children and adults alike surround us, asking if they can pet him.
Sometimes I actually believe my dog is a reincarnation of the singer Bruce Springsteen called his religion. If this kind of public adoration keeps up, I can forget hiring a manicurist. I’m going to have to hire a bodyguard. For my dog.
Fortunately my cell phone rings, and the crowd disperses to give me some privacy. Unfortunately, it’s Jack.
“Where are you?” I ask. With his mysterious Company fresh on my mind, I want to know. No. I’m desperate to know.
“Changing planes.”
“Where?”
“A long way from home.”
“We don’t have a home, Jack.”
I hear nothing but long-distance static and the scream of silence. I’m getting ready to hang up when he says, “Cal?”
There’s longing in his voice, nostalgia for those sweet moments on the porch swing where the scent of jasmine hung heavy on the air and our future was an endless, shining road. My grip on the phone tightens and so does my throat.
What’s he going to say? I’m sorry? Let’s start over?
I hang on to Elvis’ leash, my heart full of hope.
“Be careful in Memphis.”
Vain hope, it turns out. I should have known better. I know Jack. I know him well.
“I wish you’d stop keeping tabs on my whereabouts.”
“I will always know where you are, Cal.”
That’s it. Nothing more. Just the huge silence of a broken connection.
I burst through the doors of the Peabody and suck in the sultry night air. Wouldn’t you know? A horse-drawn wedding carriage sits under the maroon Peabody Hotel canopy appliquéd with white ducks, the bride and groom in a huddle on the high leather seat.
I want to rush up, grab them by the coattails and say, “Wait.” Just that. Wait.
Instead I rush into the dusk with Elvis, who makes a beeline for the red and green caladiums. I drag him away from the flowerbeds and into the parking lot where he lifts his leg on a tire. A Cadillac, naturally. Except it’s not pink.
I can’t face my family right now. Mama would see right through me, ply me with questions. I take off down the sidewalk in a fast trot. With the crowds coming out for a night of barbecued ribs and gut-bucket blues, I can’t take the kind of run I do back home in my own neighborhood, but it’s enough to clear my head.
When Elvis and I get back to the room, the message light is blinking, but the front desk says there’s a telegram for Lovie. I’m glad it’s not for me. Really. With Jack off heaven knows where doing no telling what, I can do without the suspense of getting a telegram.
It would be just like Jack Jones to be up to his neck in deep-cover skullduggery. He could have already been shot in the airport, for all I know.
The Company sounds clandestine to me. When I get home I’m going to ask Uncle Charlie. The two of them are thick. He’ll know.
Whether he’ll tell me is another matter. He’s the kind of man who keeps secrets and makes you think it’s for your own good.
“If you could talk, I’ll bet you’d tell me what Jack does, wouldn’t you, boy?”
Elvis comes over to be petted and then I get his guitar-shaped pillow out of the suitcase. I’d never make him sleep on the floor, even if it does have carpeting.
I’m just getting him settled beside my bed when my cell phone rings. It’s Champ, saying he’s planning to drive to Memphis tomorrow to see about me.
That’s the last thing I need—a man who wants to hover around protecting me. As far as I can tell, Champ’s over-protective attitude is his only fault. Jack may break and enter and do all manner of wicked things, but he understands my need for independence.
Of course, he bends the truth to suit himself, while Champ would never do such a thing.
See, that’s what I mean about needing a relaxing weekend. All this comparative thinking is giving me a headache.
“I’m fine, Champ. Really. Everything’s fine.”
Aside from a little murder and Elvis’ caper in the fountain and Bobby’s depressing predictions and Mr. Whitenton’s connecting door and Jack’s disturbing phone call. I wish I’d wake up in my own bed and discover all this was a bad dream.
“Are you sure, Callie? Your voice sounds strained.”
“It’s been a long day.” I tell him about the dance competition so I won’t sound abrupt and hurt his feelings.
“Sounds like fun. Are you sure you don’t want me to come?”
“Positive. ’Night, Champ.”
Elvis gives me this look, and I’d swear he heard both ends of the conversation and understood every word.
“Don’t look at me like that. At least Champ asks, which is more than Jack does. He just barges around doing whatever he pleases.”
Some people might feel silly talking to a dog, but I don’t. I believe every living thing on this earth is interconnected, and I treat my dogs and cats with courtesy and kindness. Even my philodendrons.
Everybody is waiting for me in Mallards. Lovie pushes a big strawberry daiquiri my way. She knows me well.
While Fayrene holds forth on her narrow escape from the grim reaper (her words, not mine), I tell Lovie about the telegram.
“Who from?”
“I didn’t ask. It’s for you, not me.”
Mama and Bobby are too busy listening to Fayrene to hear our exchange.
“If it hadn’t been for the sirens,” she’s saying, “I’d be dead. I was just about to tip over the edge of the roof when they started wailing and whoever wanted me to die ran off. I tell you, it was divine invention.”
I could use a little of that myself, both intervention and invention. If I want to spend my evening talking about something besides murder, I’m going to have to think of a clever way to steer the conversation elsewhere.
“Bobby, who was that very attractive woman you were with earlier?” I ask.
“Gloria Divine. She’s a peach.”
“Her face looked familiar,” Mama says. “What does she do?”
“She didn’t say.”
“You mean she just picked you up and you don’t know a thing about her?” Mama can get by with asking Bobby questions like that. He thinks she and Fayrene walk on water, mainly because they believe in his psychic eye. To be fair, though, he’s also captivated by their joie de vivre, especially Mama’s. She always has that effect on people.
“She has an uncle with uneven eyes,” Bobby says. “She recognized my abilities right off.”
“I’ve been married to Jarvetis forty years and he still hasn’t recognized my abilities.�
� Fayrene slugs back her Vodka Collins. “Don’t get me started. My acid reflex will start acting up.”
“How old was she, Bobby?” Mama is shameless. “I’m all for older women with younger men, but she looked a little long in the tooth for you.”
Fayrene nods. “She looked like she’d had a face lift to me. Probably breast entrancement surgery, too.”
Acid reflex was bad enough, but breast entrancement nearly cracks me up. Lovie’s about to lose it, too. She kicks me under the table, a signal we developed in high school when one of us wanted to escape and needed the other to provide a good excuse.
“Lovie, I need to check on Elvis. You want to go up with me?”
I tell Mama to put the tab on my room. Listen, I know my soft-touch ways are dragging me toward the brink of financial ruin, but I’m too busy trying to untangle my messy marital status to attempt a major self-improvement course. My goal is to change myself into a woman of means and resolve before I’m forty, so I still have three years. Of course, my most pressing goal is to start a family before then, but the way things are going, my eggs will be atrophied before I ever get the chance.
As soon as we’re out of earshot, Lovie says, “Maybe there is something to Aunt Ruby Nell’s and Fayrene’s stories about being pushed.”
“I doubt it, and I’m not fixing to borrow that trouble.” I punch the elevator button harder than I have to, and we get in.
“But Callie, don’t you think it’s odd that Grayson Mims’ accuser was Victor Mabry?”
“I’m certainly not going to get in the middle of that.”
“Both have been her husbands. That’s suspicious.”
“Let it alone, Lovie.”
“I can’t help it if I have a talent for detective work.”
“What you have is a talent for trouble.”
The door slides open and she flounces out. I’m not a natural like her, but I can flounce, too. It hampers my progress but I soon catch up.
