Harley Jean Davidson 03 - Evil Elvis (6 page)

His head lolled forward on his chest at a crooked angle, and that was when she saw the tiny object sticking out from his neck. It looked like a penknife that kids used to carry, but obviously it could be pretty lethal. A thin stream of blood trickled down his neck and under the collar of his white jumpsuit. Oh boy.

She turned to look at Lydia still hanging back in the doorway. Eyes as big as duck eggs looked back at her. Lydia’s lips worked, and then she whispered, “Is ... is he...?”

“Dead as last Sunday’s dinner.”

* * * *

“
Why
are you here? This isn’t even your jurisdiction.” Harley couldn’t believe Bobby had shown up. As if she wasn’t already feeling queasy and lightheaded. She’d never get used to death up close and fresh. Now he’d make it worse. “Isn’t Graceland in the South precinct?” she asked crankily.

“Yes. I’d ask why you’re here, but that’d be redundant. There’s a body here, so of course you’re here, too.”

“That’s not fair.”

“The list of unfair things is too long to contemplate right now. Who found the DB?”

“Lydia Free.”

“And again, why are you here?”

“I had a van full of tourists. They’re up at the mansion right now.”

“Where is this Lydia Free?”

“Follow the shrieks. The EMTs had to give her oxygen. They shouldn’t have. It’s only made her louder.”

For a moment, Bobby stood looking at her where she sat in the driver’s seat of her own van. He didn’t look angry, but sort of perplexed, like he was trying to figure out the square root of an isosceles triangle or some other complicated math problem.

Harley stared back at him warily since he got so testy whenever she was in the vicinity of a dead body. “Harley,” he finally said in a tone she recognized as bordering on the edge of angry, “are you trying to piss off everybody you know, or just me?”

“Just you, of course,” she snapped back, “no one else is as much fun.”

“One more reason you go through boyfriends so fast,” he observed. “You’ve never forgotten how to make men go crazy. Still trying to get over me?”

She glared at him. Apparently, he’d already talked to Morgan. How else would he know they’d split up? Not that she cared. It wasn’t like Bobby could brag about longevity in relationships. If it wasn’t for the fact they’d long ago decided platonic worked better than any of that physical stuff, he’d probably be just a faint memory anyway. At the tender age of sixteen, she’d spent a most interesting night on the backseat of Bobby’s car with Meatloaf playing Paradise By the Dashboard Lights on the radio. Not long after that they’d both come to the mutual conclusion they did a lot better as just friends. Bobby had that sexy Italian charm going on, but he tended to get a little too possessive, a trait that made her a little too homicidal.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Bobby,” she replied in reference to his conceited inference that she’d never gotten over him. When he kept looking at her, she said, “What? Do I have dirt on my nose?”

“I’m trying to decide if that’s hair gel or horns on top of your head.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m glad one of us is amused. How do you do it? How do you go nearly thirty years without getting anything worse than traffic tickets, and then in the space of three months run across five corpses?”

“Just lucky I guess. And this makes six. Don’t forget the guy in the warehouse.” This conversation was eerily similar to the one she’d had with Morgan, and she’d had enough. “Since I’m not really involved, I’m going to pick up my passengers and take them back to their hotel. Am I released?”

He snapped his notebook shut and jammed his pen in the breast pocket of his suit coat. He looked rumpled and tired. And pissed off. “I’ll need your official statement.”

“I can find my way to the precinct with my eyes closed by now.”

“Which explains the unusually high rate of traffic accidents lately.”

She didn’t dignify that with a reply. Haughty aloofness was a much better response.

Bobby stepped back as Harley got out of the van and headed for the shops to find her tour group. They were in one of the gift shops across from Graceland, mulling over ceramic replicas of the mansion mounted on top of music boxes, and discussing the exchange rate between pounds and dollars. She pulled out a calculator and helped them figure it out, then accompanied them to a store that specialized in Elvis CDs and tapes. Elvis videos played on one of the TV sets, a continuous stream of different songs. As much as she came here, Harley was always reminded anew of Elvis’s sheer talent. Dark walls in the small museum built behind Elvis’s house had rows upon rows of gold and platinum records to attest to that. There had never been anyone like him before he burst onto the music scene, and there would never be anyone else like him, a man recognized the world over the moment his distinctive voice was heard.

Finally they left the shops and headed for the van. Police tape stretched around the bus, and cruisers with lights still flashing barricaded it. Bobby was still there, talking with other officers. She’d been hoping they’d all be gone by now.

“Bloody hell,” one of the men in her group exclaimed, “what happened here?”

Not wanting to alarm the tourists, Harley just said that a passenger had died. Let the cops get them alarmed. They were better equipped to handle hysteria than she was. Of course, the police took down names, addresses, and any pertinent information from each one, and a statement as to what they saw or didn’t see. That took a while, so Harley got into her van and turned on the AC. Might as well be comfortable while waiting.

A familiar tingle in her right jeans pocket signaled an incoming call on her cell phone. She ignored it. Bobby had unnerved her. Dammit. Why did this keep happening to her? Okay, it was bad enough it seemed to be happening to Elvises, but it was beginning to look really bad that she always seemed to be around when it did. She rested her head against the steering wheel and closed her eyes, waiting for the police to finish taking statements and move some cruisers out of the way so she could leave. In a few minutes the cell phone vibrated again, humming against her hip.

Finally, giving in to the inevitable, she played back the messages. Tootsie. Three times. All sounding a little frantic.

“Harley,” he said on the last call, “Lydia’s tourists need a ride and all the other vans are too far out to get there quickly enough. Call me, girlfriend. I’m getting desperate here.”

She called him back to tell him she’d have to drop her group off first, and then she would have room to take some of Lydia’s tourists to their hotel.

“Thank God.” He sounded relieved. “Charlsie can pick up a few, but she’s in the small van. By the way, darling, I’m glad this body wasn’t found in your van. I don’t think the police would appreciate it right now.”

“Yeah, so I heard. Lydia didn’t like it too much either.”

“Let the group know that we’re sending vans for them, and that there’ll be no charge. We sure don’t need to scare away paying customers. Two dead guys in two days isn’t at all good for business.”

“Can’t say it’s done me any good either.”

Harley hung up and made sure the van’s air conditioner was full blast to cool off the group, then went to assure Lydia’s group, huddled close to the yellow crime scene tape, that they’d soon be returned to their hotel.

“Your day is comped for your inconvenience,” she added, “courtesy of Memphis Tour Tyme. Please wait for your ride to the hotel in the coffee shop, and we’ll get you safely back.”

By the time she got back to Graceland for them, Charlsie had picked up those she could. The ones left behind had indulged in a few beers and were feeling fine. One of them, a rather chunky guy who was obviously feeling no pain, sat up front with her since there was no more room in the back. She didn’t normally allow that, but this guy seemed genial enough, good-natured and not belligerent, and since there wasn’t room for him in the back, she was out of options anyway.

“I shoulda known something was wrong with that guy,” he said once the van was on the interstate headed for their hotel. “He acted kinda weird.”

“What guy? Oh, you mean the dead man? Most Elvis impersonators act a little weird.” My father not excluded, she thought wryly.

“Naw, it wasn’t that. Didn’t want to share his seat. Acted like he’d get robbed or hit in the head. Put up a little fuss until the other guy said something to him, and then he settled down all right.”

“Did you tell this to the police?”

“No, didn’t think about it. Maybe I should have, huh? Was the dead guy sick?”

Harley thought for a moment. Apparently he didn’t know that the dead Elvis had been stuck in the neck with a penknife. How had he been killed so quietly and without anyone noticing? It took a lot of nerve to do something like that in a bus full of tourists—nerve, or insanity. Or maybe a little bit of both.

“So he knew the other guy?” she asked, and the tourist shrugged. “Couldn’t tell. No one else knew him, but we didn’t know either of them anyway.”

“Wait—weren’t they part of your group?”

“Never saw ’em before. Figured they were just along for the ride.”

Just like the extra guy had been along for the ride in her van. That was very interesting.

“Can you give me a description?” she asked.

“Black hair, long sideburns, white jumpsuit—”

“No, not the dead man, a description of the other guy.”

“I just told you. Black hair, long sideburns, white jumpsuit, and gold chains.”

“Both of them were Elvis impersonators?”

“Yeah. Maybe that’s how they knew each other.”

Sounded logical.

“But what’s weirder,” he said in a bit of a slur, “is that only one of them was s’posed to be on the bus. If that twitchy gal’s right, that is.”

“Twitchy?”

“Yeah, the skinny little driver. She’s kinda excitable.”

Good description for Lydia.

“Did she say one of the Elvises wasn’t supposed to be on there?”

“Not exactly, but she kept reading over that list on her clipboard and doing a head count when we got to Graceland. Like it wasn’t coming out right.”

“Where was the other Elvis?”

“Don’t know. He got off the bus with the rest of us—except for the guy that died—but there were a lot of other Elvises around there, so I guess he just joined up with them. Some kind of concert under a tent.”

After a moment, Harley said, “You really need to tell all this to the police.”

“Sure. If you think it’s important. Can’t see why though.”

“It’s important.” Let someone else tell him the guy had been murdered. It sure wasn’t her job.

Tootsie met her at the garage when she returned the van. He looked frazzled. His hair was all loose around his face and straggling out of the ponytail he kept it in for work, and his silk shirt was half out of his pleated-front pants. Not at all normal. He was always immaculate.

“What’s up?” she asked in concern, and he gave her an open-mouthed stare.

“Two ... dead ... bodies. On our vans! When this gets out we’ll have cancellations all over the place.” He cupped a hand over his mouth, words coming out all muffled. “This is worse than being embezzled.”

“I’d think so. Although Sandler does look the type. It’s always the quiet, snarky ones.”

“Not always. Believe me, it can be someone you least expect. Anyway, I’d settle for that right now instead of this. At least it wouldn’t run off a lot of our clients.”