Without even waiting until I was out of jail or had mourned the death of my closest friend, the jerk was firing me. Instead of letting him get there, I hung up.
Led back to my lonely little cell—no other women were incarcerated on that stormy night—I laid down on the hard cot and thought about poor Gustavo and wondered how I would get by without him. I don’t think either of us ever felt discriminated against in a major way, but we initially bonded because we felt like two outsiders in a white male profession. Perhaps because he was gay, I always thought of him as my best girlfriend, and felt painfully at fault for his death. I shouldn’t have even gotten out of his car, but I certainly never envisioned anyone shooting him. Danger was where you least expected it. As I tried to keep my eyes dry, staring up at the ceiling of my smelly claustrophobic cell, I knew that this was undoubtedly the single worst day of my life.
Early the next morning, a paunchy, balding man introduced himself as Sheriff Nick politely through the bars. Fearful that he might already be suspicious of me, I decided not to let on that we had briefly spoken just a few days earlier regarding the Vinetta Compton Loyd case. He informed me that he had elected to drop the drunk and disorderly charge, but could not dismiss the trespassing charge. He asked if I wanted to call anyone before going before the judge at ten o’clock.
“For a misdemeanor, I imagine they’ll ask if I’m guilty and if I say yes, it goes right to sentencing, right?”
“Usually it’s pretty informal. He’ll give you either a fine or a short stretch of jail time.”
“What kind of fine?”
“Well, I’m not supposed to be advising you on account of the fact that our office is pressing the charges, but for a tresspassing charge with no priors that led to your friend’s unfortunate death …”
“I didn’t shoot anyone.”
“But whatever hanky-pank you two were up to cost him his life, didn’t it?” When tears came to my eyes, he softly asked, “What exactly were you doing up there anyhow?”
“It was cold, we were wet. We just figured we’d stop for a drink. I never imagined anyone would shoot us.”
“If you don’t piss off the judge, you’ll probably get three hundred bucks or three days. Something like that.”
“Shit.” I had given the last of my cash to the plumber. I asked him if I could use a phone.
“How ’bout that one.” He pointed to a public phone just outside the cell and started opening the door.
“I’m sort of broke, but it’s only a local call,” I replied. I had decided to try to reconcile with Rodmilla for the second time in three days.
He took out his own private cell phone and handed it to me. “Keep it short.”
I dialed her number. The phone rang continuously for about two minutes before it turned into a busy signal. Either she wasn’t home or she wasn’t picking up.
“Is there any way I could get my cell phone.”
“Not until you’re released.”
“Damn, I need a number on it.”
“A local number?”
“Yeah.”
“One sec.” He came back five minutes later with a skinny White Pages covering the five towns and surrounding area that made up Murphy County. I looked up Vinetta Compton’s number and dialed it.
After ten rings she picked up.
“Vinetta, this is Sandra Bloomgarten.”
“Hallelujah! You got my message!”
“Yeah, but—”
“It’s like Floyd saw you from heaven and sent me a telegram from beyond the grave.”
“That’s wonderful but—”
“Do you want to see it?”
“I do, but actually, and I know this is going to sound funny, I need your help.”
“You? What on God’s green earth can I do for you?”
“I got myself arrested and I’m going before a judge in about an hour. I was wondering if you could lend me three hundred dollars just for a few days to bail me out.”
“You kidding?”
“I wish. I’m right near you.”
“You going to the county courthouse?”
I checked with the sheriff who said I would indeed be there. She said she’d see me as soon as she got the older kids off to school. I thanked her, gave the cell phone back to the sheriff, thanked him for his kindness, and laid back on my hard cot for about an hour before a jailer finally opened my cell door. I was handcuffed and led me out to a van where six handcuffed and scary-looking men were waiting. Silently, we were all driven to the courthouse. There, I was singled out and led me into a small courtroom, a large cherry-paneled arena partitioned by waist-high wooden balusters. I was up first. Although a few men, women, and children were sitting in the back rows, presumably waiting for their unlucky loved ones, I didn’t see any trace of Vinetta.
A bald, wrinkly, square-headed judge who looked like a giant shar-pei barely looked up during the entire proceedings. He seemed to be reading a magazine as he mumbled, “The People of Tennessee versus Cassandra Bloomgarten, for trespassing, how do you plea?”
“Guilty, your honor,” I replied meekly.
“You and a Mr. Gustavo Benoit were frolicking around the Blue Suede Shoes Tavern intoxicated, which led to his accidental death. Is that right?”
“We weren’t frolicking,” I said softly.
“According to the results of your blood test,” he held up a form, “you were twice the legal limit for driving.”
“I wasn’t driving, your honor.”
“Well, either you or the deceased were,” he said accusingly.
“We didn’t start drinking until we had parked the car,” I said emphatically. They couldn’t prove otherwise.
“Well, what the hell were you doing up there?” He looked at me sternly.
If I said I was urinating, I’d be guilty of a crime; if I said I was searching for a shallow grave, I would sound just as crazy. I shrugged.
“Answer me!” he barked impatiently. “What were you doing while your friend was getting shot?”
“Regurgitating.” I didn’t think there was a law against that.
“We don’t have a lot of murders up here, accidental or otherwise,” he stated. I didn’t correct him by mentioning the two recent dead Elvis impersonators.
“Five hundred dollars or five days,” he said severely.
I let out a deep sigh. It was nearly twice the amount I had asked to borrow from Vinetta.
“Do you plan to pay?”
I thought mournfully about five more days in that cold tiny cell.
“She’s paying,” I heard a sharp voice ring out. The possible husband-murdering, would-be insurance cheat had entered the courtroom along with four of her clan.
“It’s five hundred,” I told her softly as she marched up the aisle.
“Got it,” she said, and handed me a roll of twenty-dollar bills with a rubber band wrapped around them. The bailiff brought me to a cashier and I paid. I signed some document and was free. In the hallway, I saw the arresting officer who said he was truly sorry about Mr. Benoit’s death. I asked how I could claim his body.
“He’ll have to be checked out by the M.E. first,” explained the cop. “Leave your number and we’ll notify you when he’s done.”
CHAPTER TEN
Since my car had been towed to an impound lot, Vinetta drove me back to the sheriff’s office and I claimed my personal effects. While the little mother went shopping, she left me at a small park where I checked my messages. Hearing an old one from Gustavo, it really hit home once again that he had been killed for nothing, for a bogus investigation that ended up costing me a job. Right then and there I thought life could get no worse. But then I suddenly knew what I had to do. I tracked down the phone number of Gustavo’s only living sibling, his poor sister Clementina, who had just lost a son. As I timidly introduced myself, I heard the trepidation in her voice. When I broke the news that her beloved older brother was gone too, I listened to her scream, “NO!!!”
She
wept so harshly I found myself shaking and had to hold the phone away from my ear. I quickly regretted not making sure someone was with her before I told her.
“I don’t know how I’m going to endure this,” she said through wails. “I’ve been leaning on Gus since I got the news of Earl’s death. Now I’m alone.” After another moment I explained that I could stay in Daumland until they released Gustavo’s body.
“Oh God! I can’t even afford to bury him …”
“I thought Gus has life insurance.”
“He told me he canceled it to pay for cable TV.”
“I suppose I can bury him down here,” I heard myself saying.
“That would actually be a big help,” she responded with obvious resignation.
We talked a bit longer and I promised I’d keep her notified of the funeral when plans were made. She started weeping again, and before I could say anything comforting, my cell phone lost its weak signal. I tried hitting redial a few times until Vinetta’s truck pulled up.
“It’s a miraculous gift from beyond the grave, and it fills in all the blanks. It’s about the guy who owns the Blue Suede,” the young mama said leaning out the window. “It even establishes Carpenter’s motivation in killing Floyd.” Before I could find some polite euphemism for Shut the fuck up! she added, “And I ain’t letting Minister Beaucheete come by no more neither.”
“That sounds very wise,” I said.
“Why don’t you get in here and I’ll show you what Floyd left us.”
I owed her that much for bailing me out and had absolutely nowhere to go, so I climbed in. She drove me to the county impound lot where I reclaimed my car and slowly followed her. Twenty minutes later we pulled into the Tornado Alley Trailer Park.
“After you left, I finally got around to fixing my septic tank and found out why it wasn’t draining,” Vinetta said as soon as I got out of my car. “And that’s where I got my divine message. It was stuck in the catch basin.”
“What kind of message?” I remembered the terrible smell of her front lawn.
“A small cardboard tube sealed in a heavy-duty plastic bag was blocking the intake valve.”
“You don’t say,” I tried to act interested.
“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.
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