Harley Jean Davidson 03 - Evil Elvis (8 page)

And it was much harder than she’d imagined interviewing the grieving parents. She had to remind herself it was for a good cause, finding his killer, but she still found it difficult to deal with their pain. It put real faces to the victim’s family, something she’d never had to deal with before. Statistics were cold. Grief was not. How did the police do it day after day? How did they deliver such terrible news after seeing broken and bloody bodies? No wonder so many officers retreated to emotional apathy while performing their jobs. It’d be suicide to empathize with all the victims and families they must encounter on a routine basis, and lessen their competency and effectiveness.

The interview with the Wades yielded little information she didn’t already know, and she considered avoiding her visit with the Jenkins family. But that wouldn’t get the job done.

So she steeled herself for another emotional hour and drove to the North Memphis address. It was in a shabby area of the city, the houses smaller and rundown, litter in many yards, not to mention the broken trees from the storm two years before. The media had dubbed it Hurricane Elvis, the straight-line winds fierce enough to knock down old oaks and keep electricity off for weeks in many neighborhoods. Just a few streets over in the same part of Memphis, houses were compact but neat, with fenced yards and obvious pride in ownership. Houses here still had tree rubbish piled up.

She parked at the curb in front of the house and checked the house number twice on her list. Could it be wrong? This couldn’t be the house of the recently bereaved. The front door stood wide open, and laughter and music drifted out. Maybe they hadn’t been notified yet. That thought made her queasy.

While she sat there indecisively as the sun beat down ferociously on the windshield, one of the kids running in and out of the house hollered that another cop was sitting out front. Okay, she could at least figure out if they’d been told, and if they hadn’t, make up some excuse and come back later.

A woman came to the front door and leaned against the frame. Skinny, with dirty blond hair piled on top of her head like some kind of bizarre bird’s nest, she squinted across the yard littered with broken toys and trash, a lit cigarette hanging from one corner of her mouth.

“You the cops?”

Harley got out of the car and approached the house. “No. Are you Mrs. Jenkins?”

“When it suits.” She laughed at her own joke. “Who are you?”

“Ms. Davidson. With Memphis Tour Tyme. I wonder if I could ask you a few questions.”

“This about Leroy? He’s dead.”

So she knew. And apparently hid her grief well.

“Yes,” Harley said, “I know. Please let me offer my condolences and assure you that the company is cooperating fully with the police to find his murderer.”

“Yeah, yeah. So how much money are you offering?”

Harley blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Money. A settlement. You’re with the insurance company, right?”

“No, with the tour bus company. Your husband was on our bus.”

“In that stupid Elvis getup, I guess.” She blew a stream of cigarette smoke in Harley’s face and snorted. “Dumb bastard. Leroy never had a lick of sense anyway. Always off spending good money on shit like that instead of groceries. That’s why I threw his ass out last year. Not good for nothin’ around here.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “But he left me with his kids, so maybe I need to sue the tour bus company for letting that good-for-nothing idiot get killed.”

A little boy peeked at Harley from behind Mrs. Jenkins, big brown eyes wide and his hair hanging over his eyebrows. All he wore was a pair of ragged blue shorts. Behind him, bare floors were littered with empty cereal boxes and discarded clothes. Flies buzzed and a window air conditioner competed with the heat. Home sweet home. It made Harley greatly appreciate her parents, for all their flaws.

“Mr. Jenkins didn’t live here? I was given this address—”

“Just told you. Threw his ass out last year. Why are you here if not to offer money?”

“I’m gathering any information that might assist the police in apprehending his killer. As I said—”

“I don’t care nothin’ about that. He probably got what he deserved. All I’m interested in is how much money I’m gonna get to support his kids. It’ll be the first time he’s ever helped out, that’s for damn sure.”

The little boy clinging to his mother made a sniffling sound, and Harley saw his lips quiver and his eyes fill with tears. That made her mad.

“You know, Mrs. Jenkins, whatever your problems with your late husband, I’m sure his children loved him, so maybe we can discuss this in private.”

“Hell, his kids know what a rotten bastard he was, so no point in—”

“Step outside and close the damn door,” Harley snapped, “or I’ll report to the insurance adjusters that you’re uncooperative.” She had no idea if she could do anything of the kind or if it’d matter anyway, but this troll of a woman obviously needed to be dealt with in language she’d understand.

It must have worked, because she shoved the little boy back into the house and closed the door. Then she turned to look at Harley, arms crossed over her chest and her eyes narrowed. She had an expression like a thwarted weasel.

Well, that didn’t matter, because Harley had experience with weasels, too, and she intended to get the information she needed.

By the time she left, she’d learned that Leroy Jenkins had moved in with a roommate in Frayser, that he worked erratically as a mechanic at a repair shop on Watkins, and that he’d been attending Elvis competitions for five years. He’d been a favorite last year, making the finals.

It wasn’t much, but it was a start. As far as she’d learned, neither man knew each other, at least not well, but must have been acquainted with one another at the competitions. Maybe she needed to investigate the competitions next, how they were conducted, prizes offered, etcetera.

Yogi should be able to help with that.

* * * *

“
There’s
a Super Bowl competition for Elvis impersonators?” Harley had to keep from rolling her eyes, speaking loudly to be heard over the whine of Yogi’s electric treadmill.

“Yep,” her father replied, puffing a little as he tried to keep up with the treadmill, “it’s called an ETA Super Bowl and it’s held in Memphis at the Images of the King competition. This year it’s August eleventh through the sixteenth, right up until the candlelight vigil.”

“Why is it called ETA? Shouldn’t that be EP something?”

“Elvis Tribute Artists.” Yogi missed a step and slid backward on the treadmill, barely catching himself before he fell. King watched intently from under the dining room table, muscles quivering as if he intended to jump on it, too. Maybe that was a good idea, in light of the fact the dog was so high-energy.

Harley turned her attention back to her father. “So what does the winner get? A lifetime supply of fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches?”

Yogi gave her a reproachful look. “There’s a cash prize as well as the prestige of being the grand champion.”

Aha. Motive. “A big cash prize?”

“It’s not the cash prize that’s the most important. If he wants, the grand champion gets a lot of gigs during the next year, and appears at the annual ceremonies the next year to present the trophy. It’s a big honor. And I intend to win.”

“Just because you feel the money isn’t important doesn’t mean everyone does. Y’all hide your money in pickle jars instead of keeping it safely in a bank. You’re just asking for trouble.”

Yogi stopped to look at her but the treadmill kept going. He fell forward, caught himself, then went backward, staggering as his arms pinwheeled. Harley tried to catch him but missed. He landed on his butt with a heavy “whoof!” The empty treadmill kept going, and King took advantage to jump on the moving black band. While the dog kept pace with the treadmill, Harley helped Yogi to his feet.

“Are you all right?” she asked when she got him upright again. He looked dazed. His eyes were the bright green of a traffic light, and he kept blinking them.

“I think so...” he finally got out, sounding breathless.

“You need to work on your dismount technique. You’re supposed to turn the machine off first, and then stop walking. It’s much easier that way.”

“Maybe so.”

“Well, at least you now know how to exercise King on rainy days. He thinks he’s a race horse.”

Yogi sat down on a dining room chair and wiped his brow with a paper towel he pulled from his pocket. “King gets on it more than I do. He loves it. I hate it. But I don’t want to insult Elvis’s memory by being too fat or busting out of my jumpsuit. If I could lose enough weight, I’d wear the same black leather he wore at his comeback in sixty-eight.”

Harley sighed. It was beyond her comprehension. Not even in her days of intense worship of Steve Perry from Journey had she idolized a singer as much as her father worshiped Elvis. Of course, she recalled dressing up like Stevie Nicks once, layered dress and boots, long hair loose around her face, singing Stand Back while Cami used her parents’ Super 8 camera to film it. All traces of that humiliation had since been destroyed, she hoped. So maybe Yogi wasn’t so alone in his rock star adulation after all. He’d just kept at it too long after adolescence.

“I understand,” Harley said to her father when they both knew she really didn’t.

He smiled. “Thanks.”

She smiled back at him. He really was a great father, even with this insanity he indulged in every year. And really, everybody had their quirks, didn’t they? It just seemed that her family was a bit more blessed with them than most, or maybe it was just that they didn’t mind keeping them unapologetically out in the open.

“So tell me what goes on at these competitions,” she said. “Like how many contestants there are and who the judges are, that sort of thing.”

“It varies from year to year by how many contestants show up, but only twenty-four are in the finals.” Yogi got up and turned off the treadmill. Sweet silence filled the dining room. King hopped off the treadmill when it stopped and went into the kitchen, presumably to get a drink of water. Yogi wasn’t far behind him. “Sometimes the judges are other contestants from previous years, but occasionally we get a celebrity or two as judges.”

She followed him into the kitchen. As she’d suspected, King lay on the kitchen floor with his head in his water bowl. Just his ears and eyes showed above the deep bowl, reminding her of a flop-eared crocodile, and slurping sounds came from his vicinity.

“Like who as celebrities?”

“TV people, news columnists, those kind. Did you drink my root beer?” he asked with his head stuck inside the refrigerator.

“You know I don’t like that organic stuff Diva buys. Where is she, by the way? Burying the pickle jars?”

Yogi shut the refrigerator and twisted open a bottle of peach flavored water. “I think she went to pick up some more supplies. We’ve got a big flea market coming up soon.”

Their main source of revenue. After inheriting his parents’ house when Harley was only fourteen, they’d moved back to Memphis from a California commune. Diva read tarot cards and sold crystal jewelry and dream catchers, and Yogi made metal garden trolls and windmills to sell at local flea markets. They made enough money to buy food and pay utilities and taxes, though Yogi always had to make his annual protest over the latter. Government conspiracy was a familiar theme. He’d never quite recovered from the mindset of the sixties. Not that Harley didn’t sometimes agree with him, but she stopped short of picketing the Federal Building or protesting for animal rights outside the meat packing plants. More than once she’d had to provide her parents bail money and a ride home from the police station.

Since Yogi chose to ignore her references to their banking system of pickle jars buried in the back yard, she gave up for now. It would come up again. She’d make sure of that.