Читать книгу Elvis and The Dearly Departed - Peggy Webb - Страница 13

The funeral home is a war zone. Mellie’s not speaking to Janice, Janice is not speaking to Bradford, the teenagers are not speaking to anybody but their newly rich uncle, Kevin’s not speaking to Lovie (who turned down a proposal while she was backed up against the refrigerator in Eternal Rest), and nobody in the Laton family is speaking to Uncle Charlie.

All he said was, “You probably want to see your daddy before you leave the funeral home.”

“You can hang his sorry carcass out for the birds,” Janice said, then drove her Avis rental car off and left Bradford and the boys to hitchhike back to Mooreville.

I was getting ready to offer a ride, but thank goodness Mellie said she’d drive them back.

Frankly, I’m tired of the Latons. All I want to do is find Elvis and a quiet place to curl up and repent my latest transgression with my ex. I always do this, say I’m not going to feel the least bit guilty, then have second thoughts and figure a woman headed to battle in the divorce court ought to know better than to sleep with the enemy.

After the warring camps leave, I grab my purse. “Uncle Charlie, is there anything I can do before I go?”

“No, dear heart. I’m going by Grover’s office to discuss the progress he’s made on finding Bevvie Laton. Then I’m driving out to the farm to fix Ruby Nell’s front porch glider.”

Mama will be sorry she missed him. It serves her right for gambling away my money.

Uncle Charlie locks up and we walk into the full blast of hundred-degree August heat. All I can say is it’s good for business. Nobody can keep a hairdo more than two hours in this humidity. Except me. I’m proud to say my slick brown bob can withstand tornadoes and still look like I stepped out of Vogue.

“Lovie, leave your van here and ride with me. Elvis is missing, and I want to find him.”

Without a single question, Lovie hefts herself into my maroon four-wheel-drive pickup, which is my alter ego. If I could be a truck I’d want to be a take-charge Dodge Ram with a kick-ass Hemi engine. Nobody messes with this sucker.

I pull out of the parking lot and head to the east side of town toward the King’s birthplace.

Every time we pass by, Elvis howls. Tupelo Hardware, too, for that matter. On the corner of Front Street and Main, it still looks very much the way it did when Gladys Presley bought her son’s first guitar. The owners have marked a big X on the spot where he stood and love to claim credit for starting him on the road to fame. As a tribute to the King, the store keeps a fading cardboard poster in the window of a young, skinny Elvis caught in swivel-hipped splendor.

They sell Elvis guitars, too, and I’m not ashamed to admit I have one. Jack was going to teach me to play it, but we all know how that turned out.

Lovie and I are bumping across the railroad tracks east of the hardware store when my cell phone rings. She digs it out of my purse.

“It’s Jack.”

“Tell him I’m not talking to him. Permanently.”

She hands me the phone.

“Hello, Jack. Why aren’t you out chasing women?” Mama’s innuendo at work.

“You’re the only woman I want to chase and I’m still looking for Elvis. Where are you? I’m picking you up.”

“Do me and the world a favor. Go by yourself. Save condoms.” I hang up.

One of Tupelo’s landmarks rises in the distance—a water tower the city no longer uses that’s shaped like a golf ball on a tee. I hang a left, then wheel into the parking lot beside the shotgun house where Elvis (the icon, not my dog) was born. It’s two rooms with front and back doors aligned so you can shoot through the front and out the back.

Suddenly I’m out of steam. I just sit in the Dodge Ram gripping the steering wheel.

“That does it,” Lovie says. “You’re spending the night with me.”

She rummages for her cell phone. This could take two weeks: she has a purse the size of Texas. I hand her mine and she calls Janice Laton.

“Callie won’t be home tonight. I trust everybody can get along fine without her…. Great. Oh, if her basset hound shows up, give us a call.”

She gives Janice both our numbers. “Let’s get out of here, Callie. We need hot fudge.”

It’s getting too dark to see, anyway, and I’ve never known a problem that couldn’t be made better with chocolate. I head back west in the gathering gloom. We nab her van at the funeral home, then end up on Robins Street.

You’d expect somebody Lovie’s size to have a house like mine—ten-foot ceilings, big rooms, massive closets. She lives in a doll’s house, a little pink cottage on a postage-stamp, magnolia studded lot a few blocks from the heart of downtown Tupelo. The only spacious room in her house is the kitchen.

She makes two hot fudge sundaes, then rifles through her CDs and selects Pachelbel’s Canon in D. We sprawl on her blue velvet sofa with our feet on the coffee table, needing no communication except music and chocolate.

Lovie’s penchant for highbrow music surprises most people.

When she was sixteen, she wanted to be a classical pianist. She’s a genius at the keyboard and could easily have been a professional musician, but after Aunt Minrose choked to death on a chicken bone at the Sunday dinner table, Lovie gave up lofty aspirations in favor of ice cream and boys. But even so, she still looks like a plus-sized Rita Hayworth.

After dinner I borrow one of her one-size-fits-all nightshirts with a slogan that says Hero Wanted, Apply Here, and we settle in for a marathon of watching old cowboy movies.

“The great thing about westerns is that you can always tell the bad guys by their black hats.” Lovie says this in a way that makes me wonder if she’s just searching through all those men till she finds one with a white hat.

The thing is, Jack wears black all the time, but deep down if I thought that made him one of the really bad guys I wouldn’t let him touch me with a ten-foot pole. Or any other size, for that matter. But that man has settled into my heart and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get him out.

The miniature Big Ben on Lovie’s TV chimes half past midnight. I head to bed while Lovie stays behind to watch The Lone Ranger.

“I never could resist a man in tight pants and a mask,” she says.

She loves to leave you laughing.

Lovie’s phone wakes me up at the crack of eight. In my opinion the day shouldn’t start till ten o’clock. I luxuriate in my cousin’s single bed. The tiny guest room has rose-sprigged wallpaper that makes me think of being in the middle of my gardens.

The phone keeps ringing.

“Lovie, do you want me to get that?”

I take her silence as either a yes or an indication that she’s going deaf. I pick up the bedside phone and say, “Hello.”

“Callie, is that you?” It’s Uncle Charlie. “You and Lovie have to get over to the funeral home. Quick. Leonard Laton’s gone.”

“Where did he go?”

“Are you awake, dear heart? His body’s missing.”

After I roust Lovie out of bed, we climb into my Dodge Ram and hotfoot it to the funeral home.

The only other times I’ve seen Uncle Charlie this upset were when Aunt Minrose passed away and when he lost his favorite fishing pole in the Tennessee/Tombigbee Waterway.

“What happened?” I ask, and he leads us into the viewing room where we get a shocking view of Leonard Laton’s empty casket. “Who would want to steal the doctor’s body?”

“Not Janice or Mellie,” Lovie says, “unless Janice wants to leave him in a field for the vultures.”

“Besides,” I say, “neither one of them looks stout enough to tote a dead body. Unless they were in cahoots.”

“Those two?” Lovie says. “If they were Siamese twins they’d try to live in different states.”

“How do you know?” I ask.

“Yesterday before Janice stormed off in her rental car I overheard her telling Mellie she’d fly her lawyer out from California. Mellie said she’d eat arsenic before she’d trust anybody with an earring in the wrong ear.”

“My question is how?” Uncle Charlie closes and locks the casket. “I have a security system. It would take an expert to crack it, but apparently that’s what happened. There was no sign of forced entry.”

“Uncle Charlie, what did Grover Grimsley say about Bevvie?”

“Nobody’s seen her since last Tuesday when she left the Serengeti.”

“Look on the bright side,” I tell him. “Nobody knows when we can bury the doctor. And his children certainly aren’t going to waste their time standing around viewing the body of a man who cut them out of his will.”

“I’ve never lost a body. You and Lovie have to help me find it before anybody knows it’s missing.”

Good grief. Lovie can barely find her car keys and I can’t even find my dog. How does Uncle Charlie expect us to find a missing corpse? Still, I can’t disappoint my favorite—and only—uncle.

Mama sweeps in looking like the empress of a small county in a purple tunic embroidered with gold and green dragons, black toreador pants, and cute wedge-heeled espadrilles I covet.

“You’re late.” Uncle Charlie kisses her on the cheek. “How are you, Ruby Nell?”

Richer, I’m hoping, but now is not the time and place to ask.

“How’d that old codger escape, Charlie? Knowing him, I thought he might have come back from the dead, but I didn’t see any resurrected rakes driving a black Mercedes on Highway 78.”

The four of us go into his office for a family summit. The gist of it all is that although the doctor’s public viewing won’t be held till Bevvie turns up, everybody in town who read the obituary knows he’s dead and anybody could have done the dastardly deed. (Mama’s term for the body snatching.)

The bottom line: Lovie and I will search for the wandering corpse while Mama and Uncle Charlie stall the Latons on the remote chance any of them will find the milk of human forgiveness in their souls (another of Mama’s terms) and want to see their dead daddy.

“Daddy, we can’t just go barging around town asking if anybody’s seen a corpse.”

“Go about your ordinary business, Lovie. Between you and Callie, you see just about everybody in Lee County on a daily basis. And, sweetheart, be discreet.”

He might as well tell a brass band to tone down.

In the parking lot, Lovie and I devise a plan.

“What are we going to do first, Lovie?”

“Eat cake. My house.”

Back in her glorious rose-colored kitchen with the shiny green-tiled countertops, she heats a frozen cinnamon/pecan coffee cake and pours rich Colombian coffee into two china cups.

“I wonder if the doctor had enemies?” I dig into the coffee cake.

“What doctor doesn’t? I’d like to kill mine every time he does a pap smear.”

“Any one of his disgruntled patients could have stolen him. This is depressing.”

“Have another piece of cake.”

“Maybe we ought to start with the obvious suspect.”

“Who would that be, Callie?”

“Bubbles Malone. One, she’s the wild card in this Laton farce, and two, she’s big enough to move the body.”

“Don’t forget three. She inherited all the money. She and the doctor had to be tight.”

“My point, exactly,” I tell Lovie.

“But why would she want a corpse? And how in the heck would she get it home, wherever that is?”

“Maybe she didn’t fly in. Maybe she drove. Anyhow, we don’t have to figure out why. Or even how. Just who.”

“Got any bright ideas, Sherlock?”

“We could just march up and ask Grover where she lives, but he’d never betray attorney/client privilege. And if he would, I wouldn’t have him for a lawyer. Besides, he might have contacted her through her lawyer.”

“Maybe I can pump the information out of him.”

I swat her with my napkin. “I’ll put Bubbles’ name on the beauty parlor grapevine while you check out all the motels.”

“Been there, done that.”

“Smart aleck. Let’s just see if we can find her.”

“Then what? Tie her to a tree with my bra and torture her with hot fudge till she confesses?”

“I’ll think of something.”

After I leave Lovie’s I barely have time to whiz by my house to check on the California Latons, feed the menagerie of homeless pets I’m trying to decide whether to keep, and see if Elvis is back. As I dump cat food into seven separate dishes and feed the bottomless pit cocker spaniel, I figure that if I keep rescuing stray animals my pet food bill will exceed my mortgage.

Elvis is still missing, much to my dismay, and the Laton gang is nowhere to be found, much to my wicked glee. I briefly consider calling Jack for a missing dog bulletin, but I’m in no mood to bite off more than I can chew, so I change clothes and head to Hair.Net.

My first customer is already there, waiting outside in the 1967 funeral hearse she bought and converted to her personal limousine by painting it neon green with Gas, Grits, and Guts in hot pink on the side.

We go inside and I set about mixing the strong ammonia solution for Fayrene’s permanent wave.

The last time I did a perm Elvis deliberately found a dried-up, flattened frog and left it on my front porch with the morning paper.

I start rolling Fayrene’s hair in tissue paper and random-sized rods, and casually drop Bubbles Malone into the beauty parlor grapevine.

“She came by the store yesterday,” Fayrene says, then proceeds to give me a blow-by-blow account.

The minute she leaves I rush to my office to call Lovie. All I get is her voice mail.

“Lovie, call me the minute you get this message.”

My next appointment is not till three o’clock, so I call to see if Mama is back from the funeral home.

When I lock up, it’s starting to rain. Elvis hates getting wet. Wherever he is, I hope he’s found a dry spot.

By the time I get to the farm, it’s pouring.

My hair’s the good, thick straight kind I could put through a typhoon and it would still fall back into place. I don’t have to worry about makeup, either. With my brown eyes and olive skin I could go without a smidge and you’d hardly notice. It’s my Juicy Couture sandals with the turquoise and rhinestone straps I’m worried about.

I kick them off in the truck, then race into Mama’s brick bungalow barefoot.

“I doubled your money.” Mama hands me a towel to dry off. “But the roulette wheel double-crossed me.”

“Which means you lost my money.”

“Well, not all of it.”

She fishes in her purse and hands me ten dollars, which I won’t even dignify with a comment. Instead I tell her about Elvis’ disappearance.

“I thought I saw him a little while ago,” she says. “I went out back to pick some fresh basil for soup and I thought that was Elvis and another dog streaking across the pasture.”

I jump up and rummage in Mama’s closet till I find her raincoat and boots.

“Where are you going?”

“To see if that was my dog.”

“You’ll catch cold and die of double pneumonia, and I don’t even have any more Italian marble monuments.”

“Good grief, Mama.”

Thank goodness the rain has slacked. I slosh across the pasture yelling, “Elvis. Come here, boy.”

“He ain’t here.”

Holy cow! At first I think I’m looking at an apparition, and then I realize it’s a strange man wearing a black slicker and rain hat and carrying a fishing pole. He looks shady to me.

I’m torn between running and asking how he knows my dog. Elvis wins.

“You’ve seen Elvis?” I ask.

“No, but my wife did. Over at the Piggly Wiggly in Fulton. She said he’d lost about fifty pounds and was wearing one of them tight blue suits with all them rhinestones on it. Of course, you might not want to believe her. She’s gone mental.”

Maybe he has, too, and maybe I’m fixing to stand here and get my throat cut. What’s he doing in Mama’s pasture, anyhow?

“You’re on Valentine property.”

“Yep, I knew your daddy. He used to let me come here all the time. I guess you don’t remember.”

He’s right about that. But I do remember that Daddy would never say no when a stranger showed up on the farm with his fishing pole and a yen to try for the catfish bottom-feeding in our two-acre lake.

“You’re fishing?”

“Yep. Fish bite in weather like this. Hope you don’t mind. Name’s Buck Witherspoon.”

“You’d better take that up with Uncle Charlie. Charles Sebastian Valentine. He’s listed in the phone book.”

When he leaves I make a mental note to ask Uncle Charlie about him. I believe in fate, not coincidence. You never can tell who might want to steal a body. Maybe he’s checking to see what else he can steal from the Valentines.

Mama would call my encounter in the pasture a brush with death, but I’m not about to tell her and give her one more reason to tell me I should go back to Jack Jones.

“For protection,” she’d say. I know her like a book.

She has hot soup and corn bread waiting, and we have a late lunch before I head back to the beauty parlor. On the way, my cell phone rings.

“I have news,” Lovie says. “Bubbles Malone checked into the Holiday Inn.”

“Great.”

“Not so great. She’s checked out. There’s no telling where she is now.”

“Las Vegas.” I tell her about Fayrene’s Bubble sighting at Gas, Grits, and Guts. “Fayrene even remembers the car she was driving. A ninety-eight Honda hatchback. With Nevada license plates.”

“That still doesn’t mean she’s on the lam with a stolen corpse.”

“I know, but why did she leave Tupelo in such a hurry? If she was close enough to inherit all his money, wouldn’t you think she’d want to stick around for the funeral?”

“Yeah, unless she’s afraid one of the disinherited will do her in. And how would she get a stiff in that little bitty car?”

Good grief. Now that we’re part-time sleuths (more or less), Lovie’s started talking like Humphrey Bogart doing film noir.

“Lovie, she’s the only lead we have.”

“I guess that means we’re taking a road trip out West.”

“Don’t mention Las Vegas to Mama or she’ll want to go. I can’t afford for her to lose another spin of the roulette wheel.”

“I’m very good at creative truth.”

Of course, this means I’m fixing to have to tell a few lies, myself, because how I can go off on a road trip when I have a house full of Latons who don’t know their daddy’s missing, a missing dog who thinks he’s a rock ’n’ roll legend, and an almost-ex who’s just itching for me to prove myself an unfit pet mother?