Papa sighed. "It means, um, it means…Fuck if I know what it means. But I do know you owe me a substantial amount of money and it's time to stop digging."
"Are you sure? Maybe it's time to start digging harder. You know, if I'm in three holes."
"Shut the fuck up."
"You know, next week. I really like the Jets. I think the Patriots are due to have a bad game…"
"What'd I just say about being in a hole?"
"I'm not sure. I think you said something about being in three holes and how you should get yourself three shovels to keep digging. In the three holes. I think that was the gist of it."
Papa rolled his eyes.
"Never mind that thing about being in three holes."
"I was wondering about that. How would I get into three holes at the same time, and if I could, why should I keep digging? Shouldn't you stop digging and try to get out of the holes?"
"It's an expression."
"It's a really fucking stupid expression."
"It's a metaphor…
"It doesn't sound like any fucking metaphor…"
"OK, maybe it's an analogy."
"I don't think it is, and if it is, it's a pretty shitty one."
"Look. Forget the fucking holes."
"You brought them up..."
"Just listen, OK?"
Papa's face got hot. He had to mention the fucking holes.
"Look, Wiley, we might be able to work something out."
Shit, Wiley thought, it was always about working something out. He had been on Papa's hook for some years now. After a streak of bad luck, he'd been given the choice of working with Papa or spending some quality time with Fat Sam.
It wasn't much of a choice. Wiley had seen Fat Sam's work. Talking about digging yourself into a hole. He was in so deep he could barely see daylight. "Let's talk about Green Acres," Papa said.
"It's handled," Wiley said.
"Well, not exactly," Papa said. "You might have to help me out with something there."
Smith entered the church's back door just as Elvis was leaving the building. "Hey King, how's it going?"
"Fuck you."
"That good, huh?"
"Blow me."
The King really needed to work on his interpersonal skills, Smith thought. He walked down the hallway to Papa's office. The door was open and Papa was just hanging up the phone when he knocked on the jamb.
Papa waved him in and Smith sat in an overstuffed leather chair in front of Papa's massive mahogany desk. The ornate desk is where the Pentecostal minister was found speaking in tongues with a parishioner. It was said that the parishioner was also speaking in tongues and had seen the face of God at the precise moment her 12-year-old daughter entered the room.
Papa leaned back and asked, "Have you ever been to Memphis?"
Chapter Five
The truth of the matter, revealed as Papa reviewed Sunday's take, is that the church wasn't going to earn him anything near "fuck you" money. He would need things to turn around significantly just to be able to squeeze "don't be an asshole" money out of it. Hell, the midget whore he was running was making more than the church. To be fair, though, the midget whore was pretty popular.
The truth of the matter was Papa hadn't really put much thought into the religion. He settled on Elvis as the second and true savior of mankind because The King was able to make more money dead than alive. He figured that, alone, would be enough to attract the masses and convince them to empty their pockets into his collection plates.
It turned out that it wasn't.
He tried. He had hired a laid-off newspaper reporter to write "The Book of Elvis," thinking it could be modeled after "The Book of Mormon" with Col. Parker filling in for the Angel Moroni. But the reporter took the money and fled town, using the ten grand to start up a midget porn Web site that turned out to be fairly profitable. Papa should have known better. His midget hooker was the star of his top-selling videos.
The church attracted two kinds of crowds. One was composed of the curious, the tourists, the perpetually cynical who came to the church because they had heard about the giant Elvis on the golden toilet in the apse and wanted to take pictures of it to show their friends. The other was a small cadre of white trash who truly believed Elvis died for our sins. The problem with them was they had already sent all of their money to some televangelist who blew it all on tranny hookers. The only real profitable part of the operation was the gift shop, and even then, he had to send a large percentage of the proceeds to Elvis Presley Enterprises, the result of having The King's lawyers threatening to perform the legal equivalent of a colonoscopy when they learned of its existence.
Still, it was a going concern. He figured if he got some celebrity to convert to Elvisology, the money would roll in. If he could get someone like Nicolas Cage or Christian Slater or even Quentin Tarantino to sign on and start jabbering about it on "Entertainment Tonight" or "Oprah," he'd be ass deep in cash. He was still waiting for that to happen.
The best he ever did was Walter Nunn.
Nunn had stumbled into the church early one Sunday morning, fresh off a two day cocaine binge. He wasn't sure what attracted him to the church. He just knew that he was fucked up and wanted to get unfucked up. Church might do that.
He sank to his knees before Elvis on the golden toilet and asked The King for a sign. Just then, the reasonable facsimile of Elvis had walked in the front door, framed by bright sunlight, looking every part the savior of mankind. He saw the man kneeling before the altar and all he could think to say was "Don't be cruel."
Nunn wept.
He had known nothing but cruelty. He was cruel to people around him. He was cruel to himself. If he could stop being cruel, his addled mind told him, that was the key. He could live in peace.
Next thing he knew, he was in Papa's office. He told the gnome that he would do anything to seek salvation. Papa asked him some questions. At first, it seemed odd that the spiritual leader of Elvisology would be asking so many detailed questions about his finances and his business. Papa told him that divesting of his worldly possessions was the one true way to know Elvis.
Nunn's yearning for salvation was limited to getting rid of his blinding hangover, so instead of signing over the strip club to the gnome, he agreed to make the church a partner in The Happy Beaver.
What good was salvation if you didn't have any cash flow? Salvation didn't put gas in the Mercedes.
Smith was somewhere west of Nashville on Interstate 40 when Spew stirred from the comatose slumber he fell into shortly after leaving his grandma's house. Smith had been listening to the UFO guy on the radio talk about Mexicans.
"Why do you think they call them aliens? Think about it."
Smith was thinking about it, mostly how it was one of the dumbest things he'd ever heard a person utter, when Spew awoke with a start.
"You OK?" he asked.
Spew yawned and stretched. "Are we there yet?"
"No, not yet."
Spew rubbed his spiky hair and slapped his cheeks.
"You want me to drive? You can catch some Zs."
The last thing Smith wanted to do was let Spew behind the wheel. The way this kid was, they'd wind up in a ditch, or wreck into a Waffle House.
"I'm OK."
Smith thought it best to change the subject.
"Is your grandma going to be all right alone?"
"She'll be fine. She has Buster."
"Who's Buster?"
"Buster's her dog."
"I thought you said her dog was dead."
Spew had told Smith the story about the dog. He had been playing with Buster in the yard when he accidentally threw a tennis ball into the street and Buster met his end under a UPS truck.
"Yeah, but she doesn't know that."
It was a pretty good night for a Monday at The Happy Beaver. A large group of bankers had come in to celebrate their CEO being indicted on fraud charges. Another large group was made up of the entourage of a local
hero, the starting cornerback for the arena football team in Philadelphia, home for an aunt's funeral. Both groups were intoxicated on female flesh and cheap beer and watered down whiskey. And both groups had a deep appreciation of the investment bankers' dance interpretation of credit default swaps.
Papa heard the din from the confines of his office, where he was consulting with Kathy about business matters. He had altered the stage rental from a flat fee to a sliding percentage based on the take for the night and instituted a profit sharing scheme with the dancers. The investment bankers wanted a 3 percent match of a 401(k) and Papa agreed after it was made clear that the payments would help him avoid any problems with codes and health inspectors.
Now, it was time for Kathy to pay him back.
"I just need you to draw up some papers, nothing too complicated," he said.
Kathy had aced contracts and thought she could handle whatever the old guy had in mind. It was probably something simple, inserting a clause into his contract with the beer distributor to screw him out of delivery charges or something like that.
Papa produced some papers from his desk and handed them to Kathy. She skimmed them over. They were insurance policies, a limited version of business insurance that covered the untimely demise of a partner in a limited partnership, pretty standard.
One of the policies was for Walter Nunn. It insured his life for $2 million.
"Now, Walter's policy, as you can see, assigns the proceeds, should anything happen to Walter, to the business. What I want to know is can I draw up a contract or a partnership agreement that would give me access to that money and could I configure the payout to avoid paying taxes on it."
Kathy studied the policy for a moment and then read the one page partnership agreement that Nunn had signed with Papa.
"You really don't have to draw up another contract. If Nunn were to die, you would be sole proprietor of The Happy Beaver and as such, you could make any business decisions deemed necessary. That's not a problem. The tax thing, well, I don't think you have a way around that."
"Well," Papa said, "as it turns out, technically, the church is the partner in the business. Can I filter this money through the church to avoid taxes?"
Kathy thought about it briefly.
"I don't see how you could do that," she said. "At least, ethically."
Papa grinned a shark's grin. This was business, he thought, ethics have nothing to do with it.
He pulled some more papers from his desk and handed them to Kathy. They were similar policies and contracts for Ed Smith and Shane Spew. Kathy glanced at them and then read over the partnership agreement once again. "They aren't partners in the business so I'm not sure what you're asking."
"I want to make them partners in the First Church of Elvis, Scientist. Can I do that? Does it work the same with the business?"
It was a gray area, Kathy thought. As a law student, she shouldn't be giving anyone legal advice. And even if she were a lawyer, she didn't know whether it would be ethical to advise this old creep on this kind of thing. She knew what he was getting at.
"I guess it could," Kathy said. "To be honest with you, I don't know."
"Could you find out? I'd make it worth your while. No stage rental fees for a month. How's that sound?"
Nunn steered the giant RV onto Lonely Street, just off Elvis Presley Boulevard, and into the Graceland RV Park. It was just after dark and he could see Graceland's heavenly glow lighting up the sky. Papa had suggested the RV park, just as he suggested renting the RV for the trip. They were both good ideas. The RV park was on the edge of a large wooded park and was still convenient to Graceland. And the RV provided plenty of room for Traci to relax and recover from her two knee operations and emergency boob job. The boob job left her lopsided, as if one of her breasts was staring at the floor and the other was looking you in the eye. The doctor said the implant needed some time to settle.
Traci was sleeping on the foldout bed in the RV when Nunn pulled into the slot between a retired dentist from Michigan and a couple of senior citizens on their way to visit their grandchildren in Ohio.
He sat back in the captain's chair and sighed. It had been a long day. The insurance agent had come out to the house and asked him a lot of questions – a lot more questions than that cop asked. He thought it was just a little strange, two explosions in two days, and the cop investigating them didn't seem very surprised or concerned about them.
Weird, Nunn thought.
But now he was safe.
Nobody knew he was here.
Except Papa.
Chapter Six
When Wiley entered the police department's large conference room, the rest of the team was already seated around the table, chewing doughnuts and sipping coffee. His lieutenant glared at him. "Sorry I'm late," he said, as he sat and reached for a glazed doughnut. That's what he got for being late – all the good doughnuts were gone.
"Thanks for joining us Detective Wiley," the LT said.
The others at the table avoided looking at him. He recognized the fire marshal and the feds from the scene of the Green Acres explosion, or explosions. The rest of the seats at the big conference table were occupied by brass and some of his colleagues attached to the organized crime unit.
Chairing the meeting was a major named Seamus D'Onofrio. Word was D'Onofrio earned his job by getting the mayor out of a jam at The Happy Beaver.
That was true, but D'Onofrio didn't achieve his high rank simply by pacifying strippers and advising them that they may need rabies shots. He knew where the bodies were buried and when to exhume them and when to let them rot in their shallow graves.
D'Onofrio stood, not sure what he was going to say.
He cleared his throat and began, "Two explosions at the same house in two days. I'd say that's kind of suspicious. Raises some red flags."
He looked around the room, gauging the profound nature of what he had just uttered. Wiley thought, No shit, Sherlock. The others around the table concentrated on their doughnuts.
"I don't think I have to remind you that this is a big deal," D'Onofrio said. "The mayor himself is paying attention. He called this morning from Vegas, where he's attending a conference. It's so big the mayor dragged himself from his important work to call me to make sure I understood the magnitude of what's happening here. He is concerned because, as you know, he lives in that neighborhood and he is worried about his wife, home alone while some mad bomber is terrorizing the development."
The mayor hadn't really interrupted any important work. It was hard to see what important mayoral duties he was executing at the Moonlight Bunny Ranch. He was in the middle of polling a member of the electorate when his wife called him. It kind of put a damper on things so he was pretty pissed off when he called D'Onofrio and told him to handle it.
D'Onofrio didn't know how he was going to handle it. He reviewed the reports and talked to some of the investigators and did some preliminary work and determined the best thing to do would be to convene a meeting and try to pawn it off on the feds.
"I just wanted to assure the feds that we're here to help in any way as they work this case …"
"What?"
It was one of the feds. He had no interest in getting involved in this case. His boss gave him explicit instructions going into the meeting – keep us out of this cluster-fuck.
"Well," D'Onofrio continued, "it does involve the use of explosives and that's your area of expertise, isn't it? And we have reason to believe it's the work of Islamic terrorists."
"You do?" the fed asked.
"We got this letter from a group calling itself the Breath of Allah…"
"Never heard of it," the fed said.
"Well, just because you never heard of them doesn't mean we didn't receive this letter."
D'Onofrio was pleased with his impenetrable logic. He smiled and handed out copies of the letter.
"It says, as you can see, that the Breath of Allah has declared a jihad on this Walter Nunn because he owns T
he Happy Beaver…"
"Happy Beaver?" It was one of the feds. The feds didn't frequent strip joints. The local cops all knew it for its flexibility when it came to laws prohibiting contact between patrons and the dancers.
"It's a strip joint," D'Onofrio said.
"Well, I didn't think it was a day care center."
"Moving on," D'Onofrio said, only slightly annoyed, "this letter seems authentic. It says Nunn must die because he is representative of the decadent West and an affront to Islam and all of that. It says he must die because he runs a joint where women are, and I'm quoting here, 'shaking their lady parts for to engorge us with hard-ons.' "
"Hard-ons?"
"That's what it says. Apparently there's something in the Qur'an about engorging hard-ons. What the fuck do I know? This is your guys' area of expertise. It's your turf. We certainly don't want to step on your toes."
"All due respect," the fed began, "this is clearly your jurisdiction. We're available to offer any technical assistance you may need. But it's your case."
Technical assistance was the feds' way of saying "Good luck, you're on your own." D'Onofrio and the head fed had a staring contest.
D'Onofrio blinked first. He was going to be on his own.
The fire marshal remained quiet during the meeting. He knew the drill. You have the right to remain silent, usually, was pretty good advice. Unfortunately, he couldn't make himself invisible. D'Onofrio turned to him and asked, "Any headway on identifying any evidence, you know, bomb parts and stuff?"
The fire marshal was prepared for this question.
"We're still waiting for forensics to send over what they were able to collect. I believe Detective Wiley is in charge of that."
D'Onofrio turned his gaze to Wiley.
"We're working on it, sir. It's a complicated crime scene. Lots of trace evidence, pretty widely dispersed. For instance, we found an arm a few blocks away."
"An arm?"
Don't Be Cruel Page 4