Mesopotamia (12 page)

“Floyd musta dropped it in the tank thinking no one in their right mind would search there. He knew that if he didn’t pull it out in a week or so, it’d start clogging the pipe and eventually the crap would rupture up through the earth. He also knew I’d be the one to have to fish it out. Course, I shoulda done it months ago.”

“It would’ve been a lot easier if he just mailed it to you,” I said as we entered her immobile home. “What was in this tube?”

She pointed to a bulging folder on her tabletop. Scrawled on the outside in black magic marker were the words
: IF ANYTHING SHOULD HAPPEN TO ME, READ CONTENTS
. I opened the folder and found an old leather wallet and read a carefully handwritten statement:

My Dear Vinny
,

If you are reading this it probably means something awful happened to me & I’m so sorry if that’s the case cause I know I acted a little nutsy for the past year or so, but there was a reason. I was trying to do right by you and the kids. See I stumbled on something awhile back, when I first started doing all the Elvis stuff. It was long after I kicked drugs and was clean and sober so I don’t want you thinking I was tweaking again.

Last year, in August 2004, I got an assignment to check out a cheating husband who used to meet his girlfriend in the Blue Suede. I hung out in the woods just above the parking lot during a stakeout, watching the dude’s car. Night after night, he left there drunk and alone, but she kept paying me, so I hung out up there for about a week. I passed the time leaning up against an old tree facing a big stump that I was kicking on. By the end of that week that damn stump broke free and tumbled down the hill. That’s when I spotted something hard in the earth below. I got a stick and started digging and realized it was the sole of an old cowboy boot, and when I tried to pull it out, I realized there was a foot inside. So I kept digging. That’s when I saw there was a body caked deep in there, an older male. It had gotten dark so I spent about two hours carefully excavating it out.

He must of been buried there years ago. Once out, I saw a large entrance wound in the back of his skull. I would of called the police, but being a PI myself, I went through his pockets and that’s where I found the rotted wallet, along with the strands of hair and a ring. His driver’s license had the man’s name: Rod East. When I got home, I checked the name on the Internet and found out that he was the guy who along with his brother, Pappy East, wrote that book, “Elvis, Why?” Anyway, I discovered Pappy lived over in Knoxville, so I called him up and asked him if he had a brother named Rod.

“Sure do,” he said. “The sonofabitch stole ten thousand bucks from me and disappeared a number of years back.” I told him I knew where he was. When he asked where, I asked what it was worth to him.

“I’m broke since he robbed me dry, so it’s worth me cutting off one of your nuts if you don’t tell me.”

So I slammed down the phone and was going to just call the police, but the next day, since I was heading down to the county courthouse working on another case, I ran Rod East’s name thru their computer and guess what I came up with? Other than a Rodney H. East in Harrison County, I discovered that John Carpenter, the secretive owner of the Blue Suede, had legally changed his name to Rod East seven years back!

I initially thought the body was Rod East, but after reading that I was confused. I wondered if the dead guy had burgled the Daumland mansion and took Carpenter’s (who changed his name to Rod East) wallet. Carpenter must of put the bullet in this guy’s head instead of calling the police. I figured he probably buried the body out there himself. Then I did something kind of gross, Vinetta. Since he was dead anyways and I couldn’t exactly store the whole rotting corpse, I went back the next night with a shovel and chopped off one of his hands. Doing a little more math here, I figured Carpenter is loaded. He must of stole ten grand years ago from his own brother, then partnered up with Snake Major and opened the Blue Suede Shoes. If that weren’t enough, what kind of roadside tavern did he have? An Elvis bar. And who was he, the guy who wrote the big exposé on Elvis Presley, causing the King a lot of heartache during the last months of his life. So I added one plus one and thought, okay, there’s no reason I can’t cut myself a slice out of this little pie, but (here’s the weird part) in Rod East’s stolen wallet, I found this tiny envelope and written on it in faint pencil were the words “Elvis’s Hair.” This was the thing that got me going crazy into Elvis with the Sing the King and all. Inside that little envelope was a clump of hair, but it was white as snow! Yet Elvis never lived to see his hair turn white, did he? That means either this was someone else’s hair (which seemed most likely), or someone robbed Elvis’s grave and peroxided his hair white, or Elvis Presley, the King of Rock & Roll, is still alive somewhere. Now I don’t believe in UFOs, Santa Claus, or Elvis being alive, and I was content to leave well enough alone, but that brings us to that crazy day earlier this year, when I saw that strand of Elvis’s hair on eBay for eight hundred dollars. I figured it was worth the gamble and bought it. What you don’t know is I spent another five hundred having it tested against the white hairs in the old wallet. Sure enough, there was a 97 percent match! So I figured this was the real reason why the burglar had broken into John Carpenter’s house. Carpenter must know where the King is, right?

Anyway, I heard that Carpenter is only around during Sing the King, and even then, he only comes out to shake hands with the winner. There isn’t even a photo of the guy. So that’s why I was practicing on becoming an Elvis impersonator. But then we suddenly inherited two more kids when your poor sister passed, so I figured that instead of waiting three more months I’d speed things up a bit. So what I did was I anonymously contacted the coowner of the Blue Suede, Snake Major, and said I found Rod East’s old wallet with gray strands of Elvis hair. (I didn’t say anything about the burglar’s body, let alone that I chopped off his hand for safe keeping.) I offered to give Major the wallet and hairs for a bargain price of fifty thousand dollars. Now if you’re reading this, things didn’t go exactly as I had hoped, but I want you to know I did this for us, Vinny, so we could get a big old place somewhere for the kids to get them out of this toy house we live in. Anyway, you’re sleeping as I’m writing this. But tomorrow, if Major leaves the money, I’ll tear this letter up and all you’ll know is that life will be a whole lot easier. I’ll give him the wallet fair and square.

If, however, you’re reading this and something awful has happened to me, I wanted you to have some idea of what went on. But just to be on the safe side, I still left the burglar’s hand in a box of frozen vegetables in the back of the fridge for evidence. (I figure they’ve probably already disposed of the rest of his body.)

So that’s about it. If John Carpenter did turn out to be Rod East and he knows where Elvis is, and if it turns out he did something awful to the King, well then I’m glad I died trying to extort the old bastard. I figured this is our one big shot at getting out of the trailer park before the next big twister blows us all to kingdom come. Anyhow, if this whole thing turns up snake eyes, I don’t want you doing nothing cause Carpenter has Sheriff Nick in his pocket and he could flip around and bite you like an old water moccasin. I just didn’t want you spending your entire life wondering, and I know you know I love you & all our babes.

I’ll be waiting for you on the softest cloud up in heaven, Floyd

As I finished this sad yet moronic letter, I heard Vinetta silently weeping into a hanky. I opened the decayed leather wallet that accompanied it and looked inside. Other than thirty-two bucks laced with crud and algae, I saw only one rotten piece of ID—a driver’s license. The photo was almost entirely blackened, only revealing the outline of a man’s head. The name, however, read,
Rodney East
. His birthday was listed as May 2, 1943.

“Where exactly are these gray hairs that supposedly belong to Elvis Presley?” I asked Vin. Still weeping, she simply shook her head, then said she hadn’t found any gray strands. This was unfortunate as that would probably have made the biggest story of the new century.

Recovered methhead Floyd Loyd had launched an interesting little investigation. His biggest flaw was getting himself killed while trying to extort John Carpenter (now Rod East?). The other mistake Floyd made had cost the life of the recent Elvis impersonator, Pappy East, who I witnessed when I first stumbled across this damn case. Pappy had probably star-sixty-nined Floyd’s phone call inquiring about his brother Rod, and subsequently tracked him down to this area. From here, it was just a short hop over to the Elvis cover bar. Pappy must’ve come face-to-face with his elusive brother, the Cain to his Abel, who had run off with the money the two had made on their best-selling Elvis tell-all. I vaguely remembered the peaceful expression on the dead man’s face. It did not convey the shock that most would’ve expected when getting a shotgun blast from one’s own brother.

“Is there a severed hand in your fridge?” I asked Vin.

“I saw the top of a mysterious box of corn buried in the bottom of my icebox. For the life of me, I couldn’t pry it out.” Looking out the window at the dark silhouette of a small church missing its steeple, she added, “Shit, that must’ve been what he was looking for.”

“What are you talking about?”

“One night after we … I saw Reverend Mo digging holes out back. When I asked what was up, he asked if Loyd had buried a cat or something cause its scent was driving his dog nuts. But I was suspicious cause the smell out there was so bad already.”

“When did you first start sleeping with him?”

“If you’re suggesting that I cheated on Floyd …”

“We know that he hangs out with those guys at the Blue Suede, and we know that
they
know that Floyd had that hand, and they want it back.”

“We never did nothing while Floyd was alive.”

“When did it start?”

“I guess we first … dated about two months after Floyd died.” It appeared to finally be sinking in that the minister could be involved in her husband’s murder. “Shit, he lived nearby and he’d always be helping me around the house with the children and all. How can I be so stupid!”

“So he did chores for you?”

“Yeah,” she said with a quiet disdain.

I remembered that empty bottom drawer in the storm cellar office and wondered if the minister or someone from the Blue Suede had removed the Elvis gray hairs? For the first time, I also wondered about that last rusting filing cabinet pushed all the way up against the wall, the one I never reached.

“If that bastard did anything to my Floyd, I mean, God!”

“Let me ask you something,” I said tensely. “How much is the policy for?”

“What policy?”

“Floyd’s life insurance policy.”

“What insurance policy?” she shot back.

“Sheriff Nick said he had a policy.”

“That’s a bold-faced lie!”

“How about the crystal meth lab, is that also a lie?”

“Yes! He never had no lab!” she shouted back. I stared at her silently until she added, “I mean, he did once. Years ago, before I knew him. But he was done with all that when we hooked up. They knew all about it and decided to try to frame him with the explosion. But I was in that shed every day and I know for a fact that since we were together, Floyd never cooked up nothing. Never used nothing! Never sold nothing! And he coulda too. He kept saying that if he started manufacturing and selling narcotics again, he coulda got us outta this place in a flash, but he wasn’t going to do that to us. You’ve gotta believe me.”

“You could have told me this before.”

“I swear on the lives of my little ones, Sandy. He didn’t cook no drugs.”

Although I initially doubted her, Floyd’s letter looked credible. Still, cynic that I am, I would’ve probably wished her good luck, then paid her back the five hundred bucks with a generous gratuity as soon as I could. But Gustavo’s big face rose in my mind like a full moon. He would’ve looked into this—particularly when he was self-righteously intoxicated.

Additionally, I recalled how suspicious and menacing Snake was about what I might’ve seen that very first day I stepped into the Blue Suede. I also recalled how delicately Sheriff Nick had questioned me before releasing me that morning. Something was definitely up.

They must have received the extortion letter from Floyd and dug up the corpse buried in the back. That would explain the large rectangle of tilled soil where I had fruitlessly searched for Missy’s body. It was right below a large oak tree.

By now, they had probably incinerated the burglar’s body. Though the hand in the freezer was evidence of possible foul play, it alone proved nothing.

“Can the Elvis connection help?” Vin added.

“Only if you can find Elvis’s gray hairs that Floyd mentioned.”

She looked helplessly around the unswept floor of the little kitchen.

“Let me ask you another question,” I said, shifting back to my original mission. “You don’t know if your husband worked for a man or woman named Scrubbs, do you?”

“You mean like Missy Scrubs, that child killed by that black guy down in Memphis?”

“Yeah, but there’s no evidence he killed her.” Suspicion was too frequently equated with guilt in the press.

“Floyd never mentioned her to me, but he rarely talked about his cases at all.”

So I had a decomposed hand, a rotten wallet, two dead Elvis impersonators (actually, Pappy was only loosely dressed like the King), and an unsubstantiated claim of Elvis’s gray hairs suggesting the King of Rock was still alive out there somewhere. I might be able to spin out a couple tabloid pieces, but as far as justice for Floyd—no way. It was difficult to believe Vinetta’s husband tried extorting Carpenter with such scant evidence. The only thing that really gave credence to Floyd’s story was the fact that he had been killed. That’s when the answer came to me: “The only chance we have of seeing any money or, for that matter, getting any justice for Floyd is picking up where he left off. But we have to do it right this time.”