Mesopotamia (21 page)
“Just what the fuck do you think you’re pulling?” the Elvis wrangler yelled at me as he followed me down the corridor echoing with applause. “If I didn’t know you lost, I’d have you disqualified right then and there. And fuck if you’re getting a consolation gift!”
“I don’t want any bullshit gifts!”
“Fine, you head on back now. Some of them boys want a word with you.” That was when I remembered that I had parted with my fellow tribute singers rather abruptly.
Rather than pass through the gauntlet of angry Elvises, I turned left and exited through the kitchen. Heading out to my car, I tugged off the sideburns and caught my breath. I knew I had lost, but I also knew I couldn’t just leave. I had to go back inside that bar and still try to locate that goddamn phantom Carpenter. The only problem was, I was truly exhausted. Not only was my mojo low, I now doubted that the man actually existed. And I was certain Snake was a killer. I felt bad for Vinetta and the kids, but I had a strong urge to drive back to New York, even if it meant moving to goddamn Brooklyn.
I decided to turn around and pay my final respects to Gustavo at that spot where he had been shot. Instead of stopping there, though, I kept walking up to the little clearing at the top of the hill. With the old mansion behind me and the Blue Suede before me, I looked down over its roof and could see one of the two narrow rivers that defined distant Mesopotamia. Five minutes turned to ten before my cell phone rang.
“Cassandra, is that you?”
It was Paul, my soon-to-be-ex-husband, returning my call. Feeling incredibly isolated, I took a deep breath and said, “Yeah, how are you?”
“Where are you?”
“About an hour and a half northeast of Memphis, stuck on a dead-end story.”
He said he had heard Gustavo died and that he was very sorry. We talked awhile, tiptoeing awkwardly around a minefield of sensitive topics, until a big cheer went up from the old roadhouse. They had undoubtedly announced the King of the Sing. Paul mentioned how his new job was sapping up all his time. He was now sleeping, shaving, and eating in the studio.
“I tried to get some coverage for your FEMA story,” he said, “but you know how the news works. It’s only news after a disaster happens.”
While we talked for several more minutes, I watched waves of people getting in their cars and zooming off.
“So what are you covering down there anyway?” he asked.
“The Scrubbs case,” I explained. I mentioned that I would’ve been home by now but my building had been condemned and I was temporarily homeless. As our conversation unraveled, the last of the dented jalopies that had created such an acute traffic jam finally broke up and drove off. That year’s Sing the King festival was officially over.
“So are you seeing anyone?” he asked.
“No. Are you still sleeping with your interns?”
“It was just once, and believe me, I wish I didn’t—”
Wham!
An instant later, when I came to, I was on the ground. My skull hurt and my cell phone was nowhere to be found. Snake Major was standing over me with three other assholes.
“Where the fuck is it?” he hissed.
“Where is Carpenter?” I replied. Despite my throbbing head, I rose to my feet.
“You don’t know shit, now give me the hand!”
“I know that Rod East and his brother Pappy wrote that book about Elvis and you killed them.”
He grabbed me by the throat and pinned me back to the ground. “I will fucking kill you quick if I don’t get that hand back.”
“Special Agent Ron Wallace of the Memphis field office of the FBI has possession of the hand.”
Snake smacked me across my mouth, then shouted back behind him, “Instead of fucking that half-wit widow, you were supposed to get it.”
“Sorry,” I heard, and realized he was talking to Minister Beaucheete. I also saw that the other two of his beer-bellied scumbags were holding rifles. Snake suddenly pulled a hatchet out from his belt.
“Hold on there.” The minister began backing away.
“I need a hand,” Snake said to me, “and if you don’t have it, I’ll take yours—and throw the rest of you away.” He dramatically lifted the small axe above his head.
“There’s three of you here,” I warned. “One of you will talk and the others will spend the rest of your lives in jail. It always works out that way.”
“She’s right,” Beaucheete affirmed.
“That’s a risk we’ll just have to take.” Snake grinned at me.
“I sure as hell ain’t taking part in this,” the minister said, and started walking down the hill.
Ignoring him, Snake barked, “This is your last chance, where’s the fucking hand!”
“I don’t think so, you son of a bitch!” came a shrill female voice in the distance. Vinetta dashed forward, pointing Floyd’s old hunting rifle before her.
Snake calmly set the axe on the ground. While turning to look her square in the eyes, he pulled a pistol from a shoulder holster. She shot him squarely in the chest, knocking him down with a load of buckshot in his lungs. In terror she dropped the rifle.
“Fuckin’ hell! Shoot that bitch!” Snake groaned. One of the other barflies let loose a shot in her direction.
“I’ve got seven children and no father thanks to you!” she shrieked, cowering to her knees.
Two rifles were now trained on her. Each man seemed to be waiting for the other to pull the trigger.
I jumped forward, grabbing at the nearest rifle, but was knocked to the ground by its barrel. A weapon was now trained at me. The second prick still held Vinetta in his sites.
“Stay away from my mom!” It was Floyd Jr.’s squeaky little voice coming from behind a tree. The guy pointing his rifle at me suddenly took a shot at the eight-year-old. Vinetta screeched and, ignoring the guns, raced over to him.
“I told you to stay in the truck, damnit!” she yelled as she grabbed him.
“What are you waiting for!” Snake called out again, considerably weaker. He wasn’t exsanguinating quickly enough.
“That’s enough,” a deep, stern voice somewhere above us rang out.
One of the assholes dashed over to the Snake, who had finally passed into unconsciousness.
“He did this to protect you,” the other one said to the mangled groundskeeper, not putting down his rifle.
“I can goddamn well protect
myself
,” Jeeves growled back angrily. “I sure as hell never asked anyone to do anything, particularly kill on my behalf!”
“He murdered my husband!” Vinetta shouted out, pointing at Snake. Floyd Jr. grabbed her hand.
“All I know is that your husband tried to extort me. And you shot Snake, who might’ve been behind his killing, so at best we’re all even.” When Vinetta reached down to pick up her gun, the barfly who was still holding his weapon aimed it back at her.
“You take your mama down to the parking lot, son,” Jeeves said calmly to Floyd Jr.
“No sir, we ain’t leaving without Miss Bloomgarten,” the eight-year-old said boldly.
“Well, she’s free to go, but I think we still have things to discuss.”
“We certainly do.”
“Then we’ll stick around too,” Vinetta said.
“You guys go ahead,” I said. “I’m okay. I’ll meet you at home.”
“She’s quite safe,” Jeeves assured them.
Vinetta and her son turned and started down the dark, wooded slope.
“You sure you want to handle it this way?” one of the old bastards quietly asked Jeeves.
“You guys call Nick and get him back over here. Tell him there’s been a terrible accident.” It sounded like Nick was more of an employee than a law officer. “Oh, and do it from the bar. Keep me out of it.”
“Will do,” one of them mumbled.
The two old alcoholics trudged downhill and I followed Carpenter the other way, toward the old mansion.
V
inetta is now the sole provider for seven kids living in a broken-down trailer,” I explained as I caught up.
“I’m sorry for her woes,” he said, “but contrary to popular belief, I’m not a rich man. And as a matter of principle, I refuse to pay off blackmailers or their survivors. Her husband shouldn’t’ve gone around extorting people.”
“True, but he shouldn’t’ve had his shack booby-trapped either.”
“Let me tell you something about Snake. If you say he shot this husband, I might believe you, but no one around here can so much as plug in a waffle iron without getting shocked. There’s no way he could’ve trip-wired someone’s house.”
“How about Rod East?”
“Who?” he said, snickering a bit.
“The first Elvis impersonator who was killed outside the Blue Suede.”
“I have no idea who you are talking about.”
I wasn’t sure if he was just feigning ignorance, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and filled him in as we walked up to his mansion: About thirty years ago, two guys, Rod East and his brother Pappy, cowrote a book called
Elvis, Why?
about the King’s unknown drug problem. The book sold well, and a number of years ago Rod turned up here and tried to extort the owner of the Blue Suede. He was killed and buried on the hill. Then, more recently, a local private investigator named Floyd Loyd accidentally discovered the body. Shortly afterward, he tried to extort the owner of the Blue Suede and he was blown up along with his toolshed, allegedly the result of him making crystal meth, only there was no real evidence of this. Then, about two weeks ago, a guy was shot while allegedly trying to break into the Blue Suede. That was Pappy East, the brother of the first extortionist.
“And that young mama was married to one of those brothers?”
“No, she was married to Floyd, the investigator whose shack blew up, but she swears he had nothing to do with drugs. He was killed by someone here.”
“How do you like that,” he said.
“Well, I’m a little confused by something that I was hoping you could help me with.”
“What’s that?”
“First, why would you assume the name of someone you killed?”
Jeeves stared and smiled. “For starters, I never killed anyone.”
“Okay, but you can’t say you didn’t know who Rod East was. Why would you take the name of someone Elvis had despised?”
“See, I was using the name Carpenter, but it wasn’t my legal name and I desperately needed a new identity—ideally someone real with a past, but no friends or family. Snake said no one even asked about the guy once he vanished. He was the one who suggested I take the name.”
“So you knew the burglar?”
“He woke me up one night, trying to kill me. Snake grabbed him, but I didn’t see what he did with the guy.”
“But if you took his name …”
“Yeah, I figured they killed him.”
“So why would you take the name of a murder victim?”
“I needed a legal nomenclature to establish ownership. People here usually just call me John. And I know it sounds odd, but I guess taking the name of the man who the King of Rock and Roll hated seemed like the best way to distance myself from Elvis.”
“Wouldn’t taking his name make you the number one suspect?”
“Yes, but a lot of time had passed without so much as a missing-person’s report. I mean, Snake described it best when he said it was like he was never born.”
“Ever think that maybe Snake was trying to set you up?”
“Wouldn’t put it past him,” he replied tensely. “Snake likes having his hooks in everyone. It makes them much more controllable, don’t it?”
“So what exactly are you hiding from?” I asked meekly.
“I guarantee I never killed or hurt anyone,” he said as he opened the door to the old mansion, wiping his feet on the doormat. “Also, there are no warrants out for my arrest, and that’s all I’ll say about that.”
“Well, why did Rod East attack you in the first place?” I followed him in.
“First, I just thought he was a burglar, but then I figured he was trying to extort me.”
“Extort you with what?”
“The same thing your friend Loyd was trying to extort from me.”
“And do you know what that was?”
“Just being who I am,” Jeeves said, then pursed his lips and sadly looked dead ahead.
“And who are you?” He didn’t respond. Since I was more preoccupied with getting some settlement for Vinetta, I asked, “Snake and you own this place, right?”
“Along with the liquor store and gas station. Why?”
“Cause I can’t stop Vinetta from filing a wrongful-death suit against Snake’s estate.”
“She’d have a hell of a time trying to convince a jury of all this.”
“True, but considering the fact that you’re hiding your true identity, wouldn’t her naming you in a suit throw up a lot of unwanted publicity?”
“That is true. On the other hand, I’d be very curious if she could even spell my name.”
“Look, if you’d consider making an anonymous contribution,” I said, “I can probably get her down to thirty thousand—”
“See, now, if I
was
in the business of killing extortionists, I’d shoot you right now,” he interrupted as he led me into the luxurious bathroom on the ground floor. “I suppose you’re doing all this for goodwill.”
“I’m doing this now because my friend was just shot outside here a few weeks ago.”
“I was here. And neither of you were supposed to be here.”
“We were investigating the Missy Scrubbs kidnapping.”
“Shit! That idiot son of his now gets all Snake’s property.”
“Snake has a little snake?”
“He sure does, and now I’m partnered up with his drugged-out, tattooed gangster ass.” Jeeves rolled his eyes and looked off, exasperated.
“Where is he?”
“He took off with your little piece of jailbait.”
“What jailbait?”
He turned on the lights around the bathroom mirror and poked through his medicine chest. “You just said you were investigating her.” He was referring to missing Missy Scrubbs!
“Yeah, that’s why we came up here,” I said, not letting on that I didn’t know this crucial detail until he just spilled it—Snake’s son was Missy Scrubbs’s abductor.
Silently, the older man spread some bacitracin on a cotton swab.
“How about this,” he said softly as he dabbed my wounded scalp with the swab. “I’ll tell you where you can find Roscoe Major and Missy, which should pay you a pretty penny in your line of work, and we’ll forget all about this talk of lawsuits and anonymous donations.”