Mesopotamia (22 page)

The man wasn’t dumb: viced in by two annoying forces—me and the prospect of partnering up with Roscoe Major—he knew how to use one against the other. “Let me get this straight, you’re going to tell me where Missy Scrubbs is?” Dollar signs suddenly lit up in my eyes.

“I hate ratting folks out,” Jeeves continued, “but he didn’t have the good sense to run, even after I gave him my car,
my own car!
And there’s just no way I’m going to be able to work with someone that stupid.”

“You gave him your pink Cadillac?”

“I had just bought a new one.” That explained the two different pink Cadillacs.

There was an awkward pause, so it seemed like a good moment to explain why I was giving him preferential treatment.

“There’s something I should tell you.”

“I’m listening.”

“Remember that strange night when we slept together?”

“If I didn’t, you wouldn’t be here now.”

“I’m presently carrying your baby.”

He stared hard at me, then gasped for air. “Oh shit! You’re not going to say I raped you or file for child support, are you?”

“Hell no. I’m a forty-five-year-old burn-out. In my position, if you’re childless and pregnant, you have to keep the kid.”

“Nothing quite like a mother’s love,” he replied, then abruptly changed the subject and said that he was starving. When I confessed that I hadn’t eaten all day and was hungry as well, he led me into his large kitchen.

“You don’t have to worry about anything,” I assured him while he prepared snacks. “I’ve got resources. Hell, I’m even married.”

“Won’t your husband mind you carrying another man’s seed?”

“He spent four years trying to impregnate me. We’re in the process of getting divorced.”

“Well, I sure ain’t marrying again,” He took a large cast-iron pot out of the fridge and put it on the stove.

“In the event that I do have this baby, can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Who can I say is the father?”

He halted his food preparations and just smiled.

“I guess I can say it was someone I met one drunken night in the parking lot of a backwoods bar, but I’d rather give him a name.”

“See now, this is why I let old Snake run the front of the house all these years. This is why I want my name kept out of things …” This was also why Rod East tried extorting him in the first place, unleashing a massive tangle of murders, extortions, and retributions—all to keep his identity secret.

“You’re secret’s safe with me … Mr. Presley.”

“I thought I read somewhere that Elvis Presley died.”

“Then why does your DNA match his?” According to the tubular letter Floyd had left Vinetta in the septic tank, he had taken the tuft of white hair from Rod East’s pocket and matched it against a single strand of Elvis’s hair that he had purchased on eBay, thus launching his failed career as a blackmailer.

“My DNA matches his, huh?”

“There were gray hairs in Rod East’s wallet.” I bluffed since I never actually saw them.

Jeeves started laughing. “That explains why the son of a bitch yanked out a handful of my hair before Snake got to him. Holy shit! So that guy wasn’t after
me
at all—he thought I was Elvis!”

“He’s not the only one.”

“Come on, quit kidding.”

“At the state fair, you let slip that you were born around the same time as Elvis.”

“A child is born every six seconds …”

“And someone dies every thirteen seconds,” I completed.

“Do you think Elvis was the only kid born in Tupelo, Mississippi, that day?” he asked as he filled two big bowls of soup. He took out a thick loaf of multigrain bread and sawed off several slices.

“I guess the only thing left for me to do is poison you,” he said, leading me to his beautiful mosaic dining room table.

“So if you’re not the King, what’s with the identity theft? Are you wanted by the law?”

“No, just a small syndicate of very large Italian American men. I had a major gambling debt that I could never hope to repay. When my face and body got scrambled in the car crash, I knew they couldn’t ID me, so I took on the name Carpenter. But it wasn’t permanent; I needed to slip into someone else’s identity.”

“You know, there isn’t a law against being Elvis Presley.”

“That’s true. Hell, I know a bunch of people who want to be him. Look, if I was Elvis do you think I’d let my daughter marry that pedophile?” I guessed he was referring to Michael Jackson.

“Maybe you still secretly see her,” I countered. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you stole his DNA.”

“I’ll admit it, we do have a few things in common. I was born on his birthday.”

“And you have his
same
DNA,” I kept pushing.

“Maybe so.”

“Cause you’re him.”

“That’s where it stops.”

“How can you have the same DNA and not be him?”

“You have to be monozygotic.”

It took me a moment to realize what he was saying. “You’re his twin!”

“On January 8, 1935, Gladys Love Presley gave birth to two boys at a free clinic in Tupelo, Mississippi. What she didn’t know was that just minutes earlier, another woman named Caroline Lee had just given birth to her third stillborn before passing out. Caroline was suicidal about having that boy. Her younger sister, Enid, just happened to be the birthing nurse—the only one on duty that day.

“After sedating her beloved sister, she came in and handled Gladys’s labor all by her lonesome. When she saw my mother punch two healthy boys out of her belly, she grabbed me and rushed into Caroline’s room, tossing me into her bassinet. Then she rushed back into Gladys’s room with Caroline’s stillborn and claimed it was me. All babies look alike, don’t they?”

“Is this a joke?” My soup spoon no longer worked.

“I wish it was,” said the man I called Jeeves. “In fairness, I really don’t think my aunt intended it to be a permanent crime. I think she expected that when her sister calmed down, she’d return me or something, but that’s not what happened.”

“I never heard that Elvis had a twin.”

“Then you didn’t do your homework, cause Elvis’s twin is public record. Instead of me, though, my biological ma unwittingly named that poor stillborn Jesse Garon and planted it in the ground.”

“You’re kidding me, aren’t you?” There was one simple way to determine this: locate the twin’s seventy-year-old grave, exhume the fetus, and perform a DNA test. But that was simply too gruesome.

“Look, people snatch babies all the time. And if you check, you’ll see many of them are women who repeatedly try and fail to have their own kids. Your tabloids are always writing about it. There’s even a word for someone like me: a changeling. But this time Caroline Lee’s sister just didn’t know she was stealing the twin of the great Elvis Presley.”

I thought about it a moment. As someone who had lost a child after going to full-term, I was easily able to identify with Enid. A spare baby at that moment when Paul was about to walk into my hospital room would’ve saved my life.

“What was your adopted mother like?”

“Caroline Lee was a loving, capable mom, but I always knew something was wrong. She used to cry at night, hugging me close to her. I remember her saying things like, ‘I did an awful thing, but I ain’t never giving you back.’”

“You must resent what happened to you.”

“At first I did, but the more I learned about Elvis’s upbringing, the luckier I felt. This was near the end of the Great Depression and the woman who stole me had a much nicer house. Her husband made a decent salary.”

“So what was your given name?” I pressed.

“None of your business,” he answered with a smile. “But if your son or daughter asks who their daddy is, you can say he started out as Jesse but was renamed Langford Lee. And because I looked and sounded like Elvis Presley, once I got out of college back in the ’50s, I immediately got a gig to sing the King when he was still in his twenties. Hell, I honestly think I was the very first Elvis impersonator back then.”

“All those years and you didn’t think it was odd that he looked like you and was born in the same time and place as you?”

“Course I did, I even wrote him a letter. But if even
I
didn’t even believe it, why the hell should he?” Pausing a moment, he added, “I didn’t learn the truth till after my parents died. My aunt told me in 1968, just before she passed away.”

“So how’d you hook up with Snake?”

“Well, by the winter of ’75 I owed a hundred grand.”

“That’s some debt.”

“Oh yeah, it was a fortune back then. Hell, I had a hit put on me,” he said with a swell of pride. “My wife took our little girl and left me.”

“So what happened?”

“I went on the run is what happened. Then one night I was passing through Vegas and saw that Elvis was supposed to perform at the Sands. I had lost my last fifty bucks at the blackjack table, when some guy comes up to me and says, ‘Whatchu doing here, boss?’ That was the first time I met Snake Major. He said, ‘Shit, anyone ever tell you you look like Elvis?’ I told him what I had learned, that he was my identical twin brother. After I told him the whole story, he said, ‘How’d you like to tell Elvis that yourself?’ When I said I’d love to, he led me upstairs. Five minutes later I’m walking into a hotel room and shaking hands with the King of Rock and Roll.”

“Wow!”

“By that time, the poor man was a total mess—bloated, sweaty, lying on his bed having difficulty breathing.”

“Did you tell him you were his twin?”

“I took out my driver’s license and showed him my date of birth. We talked and just compared notes. He was impressed about all the details, but …”

“Didn’t you offer to submit to a test?”

“They didn’t really have DNA tests back then. I mean, we looked alike, but so what? I couldn’t exactly sue him for twin support. People were always trying to scam him. For my part, in addition to being grateful that he’d even meet with me, I was just amazed by all our similarities.”

“Like what?”

“My wife had divorced me. I had a little girl. I wasn’t doing great, being on the lam and all. I even had a substance abuse problem, but nothing like his.”

“Then what?”

“Well, he still had some time left on his tour, which wasn’t going very well, in terms of his health. Supposedly he got so tired he laid down on the stage during his previous show. So when Snake asked me if I could carry a tune, I belted out a couple bars of “Don’t Be Cruel” and even the King thought it was good. It was funny cause he actually stood alongside me giving directions about how to hold the mic and other little secrets about singing.”

“Wow, you got notes from the King himself.”

“About an hour later Colonel Parker came into the room and auditioned me. I actually thought I did a crappy job, but he was just tickled pink. I was probably about fifty pounds lighter than Elvis. Even he said I looked and sounded better. I mean the poor son of a bitch had just been used up.”

“So you toured in his place?”

“You heard of lip syncing, well I did body syncing. Ended up doing two of his shows.”

“Then what?”

“Then I got two grand, which was the most I ever got paid per hour. Unfortunately, it wasn’t nearly enough to get me out of debt, but it was a real blast. Elvis thanked me and said he’d call if he ever needed me again, but you could see he didn’t like it. He loved his public and he wasn’t trying to con anyone. He was stuck in a jam and I helped him out. I wish I had given him his cash back.”

“And that’s it.”

“That’s everything. Two years later, in August, I was working at an auto plant in Detroit when it came over the radio that he had died.”

“How did you wind up looking like … you do now?” If Elvis Presley had looked into a mirror that was shattered into a million pieces and reglued upside down and backward—that’s how Jeeves looked.

“On August 29, 1979, about two years after the King’s death, I was speeding drunk as a skunk when I slammed my Chrysler LeBaron into a retaining wall. I was going about a hundred miles an hour. The accident burned over 90 percent of my body, and shattered many of my bones including my lower spine and skull. I died on the operating table and was brought back. That’s when I realized there really is a God.”

“I guess something like that would make a believer out of anyone,” I replied, not meaning to sound disparaging.

“It was more than that. While lying in recovery, I was told that my heart had also stopped. The doctors worked and worked, and I came back at the last moment. See, that’s what I realized. God took the both of us, my twin and me, but for some reason he returned only me. God gave
me
the second chance.”

“Sounds like Elvis died for your sins.”

“In a way he did, and since I got out of that hospital, I pray to God and my brother by taking care of myself—no drink, no drugs, no fatty foods. I walk thirty-three minutes a day.”

“You still have drunken sex with strangers,” I pointed out.

“Hey, darling, every Christian is a hypocrite. Besides, womanizing was never an affliction for me. I just didn’t get any.”

“How’d you get involved with Snake again and open the Blue Suede?”

“I bumped into him just after I got out of the hospital. He had a small bar in Memphis. When I told him that we met once, years ago in Vegas, he just said he didn’t know me. Then when I said I was Elvis’s twin, his jaw dropped. He said he didn’t believe me. I looked … well, like I do now. But he saw that I was down on my luck, and apparently not many people knew about that event, so he gave me a mop and bucket and told me if I wanted to clean up the bathrooms at night, no one else would touch them. I did that for a few months, and then he let me clean up the bar. I couldn’t work behind the counter cause no one would order drinks from this face. Gradually, though, it became clear that he believed me. I think it was my voice. That didn’t change and I still did the best Elvis covers.” In perfect Elvis pitch to the tune of “Suspicious Minds,” he sang,
“I’m Elvis’s twin, I can’t change that, I was born with his baby …”

“Wow.”

“Anyway, after about five years, he took me aside one day and handed me a check and a proposal. It was for twenty grand. He said that he knew Elvis would want me to have it. Elvis was always about family.”