Mesopotamia

by Arthur Nersesian

“Fuckin’ hell! Shoot that bitch!” Snake groaned. One of the other barflies let loose a shot in her direction.

  “I’ve got seven children and no father thanks to you!” she shrieked, cowering to her knees.

  Two rifles were now trained on her. Each man seemed to be waiting for the other to pull the trigger.

  I jumped forward, grabbing at the nearest rifle, but was knocked to the ground by its barrel. A weapon was now trained at me. The second prick still held Vinetta in his sites.

  “Stay away from my mom!” It was Floyd Jr.’s squeaky little voice coming from behind a tree. The guy pointing his rifle at me suddenly took a shot at the eight-year-old. Vinetta screeched and, ignoring the guns, raced over to him.

  “I told you to stay in the truck, damnit!” she yelled as she grabbed him.

  “What are you waiting for!” Snake called out again, considerably weaker. He wasn’t exsanguinating quickly enough.

  “That’s enough,” a deep, stern voice somewhere above us rang out.

  One of the assholes dashed over to the Snake, who had finally passed into unconsciousness.

  “He did this to protect you,” the other one said to the mangled groundskeeper, not putting down his rifle.

  “I can goddamn well protect myself,” Jeeves growled back angrily. “I sure as hell never asked anyone to do anything, particularly kill on my behalf!”

  “He murdered my husband!” Vinetta shouted out, pointing at Snake. Floyd Jr. grabbed her hand.

  “All I know is that your husband tried to extort me. And you shot Snake, who might’ve been behind his killing, so at best we’re all even.” When Vinetta reached down to pick up her gun, the barfly who was still holding his weapon aimed it back at her.

  “You take your mama down to the parking lot, son,” Jeeves said calmly to Floyd Jr.

  “No sir, we ain’t leaving without Miss Bloomgarten,” the eight-year-old said boldly.

  “Well, she’s free to go, but I think we still have things to discuss.”

  “We certainly do.”

  “Then we’ll stick around too,” Vinetta said.

  “You guys go ahead,” I said. “I’m okay. I’ll meet you at home.”

  “She’s quite safe,” Jeeves assured them.

  Vinetta and her son turned and started down the dark, wooded slope.

  “You sure you want to handle it this way?” one of the old bastards quietly asked Jeeves.

  “You guys call Nick and get him back over here. Tell him there’s been a terrible accident.” It sounded like Nick was more of an employee than a law officer. “Oh, and do it from the bar. Keep me out of it.”

  “Will do,” one of them mumbled.

  The two old alcoholics trudged downhill and I followed Carpenter the other way, toward the old mansion.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEN

  Vinetta is now the sole provider for seven kids living in a broken-down trailer,” I explained as I caught up.

  “I’m sorry for her woes,” he said, “but contrary to popular belief, I’m not a rich man. And as a matter of principle, I refuse to pay off blackmailers or their survivors. Her husband shouldn’t’ve gone around extorting people.”

  “True, but he shouldn’t’ve had his shack booby-trapped either.”

  “Let me tell you something about Snake. If you say he shot this husband, I might believe you, but no one around here can so much as plug in a waffle iron without getting shocked. There’s no way he could’ve trip-wired someone’s house.”

  “How about Rod East?”

  “Who?” he said, snickering a bit.

  “The first Elvis impersonator who was killed outside the Blue Suede.”

  “I have no idea who you are talking about.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was just feigning ignorance, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and filled him in as we walked up to his mansion: About thirty years ago, two guys, Rod East and his brother Pappy, cowrote a book called Elvis, Why? about the King’s unknown drug problem. The book sold well, and a number of years ago Rod turned up here and tried to extort the owner of the Blue Suede. He was killed and buried on the hill. Then, more recently, a local private investigator named Floyd Loyd accidentally discovered the body. Shortly afterward, he tried to extort the owner of the Blue Suede and he was blown up along with his toolshed, allegedly the result of him making crystal meth, only there was no real evidence of this. Then, about two weeks ago, a guy was shot while allegedly trying to break into the Blue Suede. That was Pappy East, the brother of the first extortionist.

  “And that young mama was married to one of those brothers?”

  “No, she was married to Floyd, the investigator whose shack blew up, but she swears he had nothing to do with drugs. He was killed by someone here.”

  “How do you like that,” he said.

  “Well, I’m a little confused by something that I was hoping you could help me with.”

  “What’s that?”

  “First, why would you assume the name of someone you killed?”

  Jeeves stared and smiled. “For starters, I never killed anyone.”

  “Okay, but you can’t say you didn’t know who Rod East was. Why would you take the name of someone Elvis had despised?”

  “See, I was using the name Carpenter, but it wasn’t my legal name and I desperately needed a new identity—ideally someone real with a past, but no friends or family. Snake said no one even asked about the guy once he vanished. He was the one who suggested I take the name.”

  “So you knew the burglar?”

  “He woke me up one night, trying to kill me. Snake grabbed him, but I didn’t see what he did with the guy.”

  “But if you took his name …”

  “Yeah, I figured they killed him.”

  “So why would you take the name of a murder victim?”

  “I needed a legal nomenclature to establish ownership. People here usually just call me John. And I know it sounds odd, but I guess taking the name of the man who the King of Rock and Roll hated seemed like the best way to distance myself from Elvis.”

  “Wouldn’t taking his name make you the number one suspect?”

  “Yes, but a lot of time had passed without so much as a missing-person’s report. I mean, Snake described it best when he said it was like he was never born.”

  “Ever think that maybe Snake was trying to set you up?”

  “Wouldn’t put it past him,” he replied tensely. “Snake likes having his hooks in everyone. It makes them much more controllable, don’t it?”

  “So what exactly are you hiding from?” I asked meekly.

  “I guarantee I never killed or hurt anyone,” he said as he opened the door to the old mansion, wiping his feet on the doormat. “Also, there are no warrants out for my arrest, and that’s all I’ll say about that.”

  “Well, why did Rod East attack you in the first place?” I followed him in.

  “First, I just thought he was a burglar, but then I figured he was trying to extort me.”

  “Extort you with what?”

  “The same thing your friend Loyd was trying to extort from me.”

  “And do you know what that was?”

  “Just being who I am,” Jeeves said, then pursed his lips and sadly looked dead ahead.

  “And who are you?” He didn’t respond. Since I was more preoccupied with getting some settlement for Vinetta, I asked, “Snake and you own this place, right?”

  “Along with the liquor store and gas station. Why?”

  “Cause I can’t stop Vinetta from filing a wrongful-death suit against Snake’s estate.”

  “She’d have a hell of a time trying to convince a jury of all this.”

  “True, but considering the fact that you’re hiding your true identity, wouldn’t her naming you in a suit throw up a lot of unwanted publicity?”

  “That is true. On the other hand, I’d be very curious if she could even spell my name.”

  “Look, if you’d consider making an anonymous contributi
on,” I said, “I can probably get her down to thirty thousand—”

  “See, now, if I was in the business of killing extortionists, I’d shoot you right now,” he interrupted as he led me into the luxurious bathroom on the ground floor. “I suppose you’re doing all this for goodwill.”

  “I’m doing this now because my friend was just shot outside here a few weeks ago.”

  “I was here. And neither of you were supposed to be here.”

  “We were investigating the Missy Scrubbs kidnapping.”

  “Shit! That idiot son of his now gets all Snake’s property.”

  “Snake has a little snake?”

  “He sure does, and now I’m partnered up with his drugged-out, tattooed gangster ass.” Jeeves rolled his eyes and looked off, exasperated.

  “Where is he?”

  “He took off with your little piece of jailbait.”

  “What jailbait?”

  He turned on the lights around the bathroom mirror and poked through his medicine chest. “You just said you were investigating her.” He was referring to missing Missy Scrubbs!

  “Yeah, that’s why we came up here,” I said, not letting on that I didn’t know this crucial detail until he just spilled it—Snake’s son was Missy Scrubbs’s abductor.

  Silently, the older man spread some bacitracin on a cotton swab.

  “How about this,” he said softly as he dabbed my wounded scalp with the swab. “I’ll tell you where you can find Roscoe Major and Missy, which should pay you a pretty penny in your line of work, and we’ll forget all about this talk of lawsuits and anonymous donations.”

  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.”