Suspicious Mimes

by Virginia Brown

  Except Eric’s eyes were blue, hers were green, and he had chameleon-color hair while hers usually stayed light blonde with a few darker streaks.

  By the time she had to leave to pick up the van for her run to Graceland, she still hadn’t figured out who was who. She’d only matched four names with Elvis faces, and that was because she figured out the tallest, shortest, fattest, thinnest. Maybe she couldn’t help out after all. Not a bad thing. Her efforts at help in the past had only led to disaster anyway. This had to be a karmic sign. She needed to think about something else for a change, so she picked up her van and headed out.

  One good thing about driving in Memphis—it required the concentration of a NASCAR driver to get to a destination without playing bumper cars. An excellent distraction.

  Poplar Avenue traffic was always heavy. Today, as always, there were Memphis drivers who celebrated sunshine with their usual disregard for courtesy or traffic lights. A driver with Tennessee plates on his rusty El Camino leaned on his horn and yelled “Mississippi driver!” at a transgressor, and the driver in the shiny new SUV from DeSoto County, just across the Mississippi state line south of Memphis, returned the welcome greeting with a snappy one-finger salute. Tourism at its best. West Tennessee, North Mississippi, and a wide strip of eastern Arkansas formed the Mid-South, or Tri- State area. Memphis was the crossroads for trucks, trains, and planes delivering merchandise in the Southeast and up the Eastern Seaboard. Home of Federal Express, Nike, a Northwest Airlines hub, Elvis Presley, BB King, and the Grizzlies basketball team—all lucrative enterprises—Memphis was the last stop before I-55 dipped into the Deep South. It also made quite a handy route for drug traffickers transporting their products out of Mexico to customers up north.

  Changes in the past three decades included a lot more than integrated schools and a black mayor. Martin Luther King had died in a shabby motel downtown, bringing Memphis infamy back in the sixties, but Elvis had already integrated music with his love of Negro gospel and the blues. Once known as just a “big country town,” Memphis had imported more than its share of residents from as far away as China, and quite a few from places like New Jersey and Michigan. Chinese restaurants and Sharp manufacturing employees were welcomed, and longtime residents greeted them with friendly curiosity.

  For all its veneer of recent sophistication, many old-time Memphians had never forgotten Union occupation during the Civil War and considered Southern general Nathan Bedford Forrest a war hero. A statue of Forrest stood tall and proud in a small park on Union Avenue in the heart of the medical district, marking his and his wife’s graves. On the river bluffs downtown, despite some efforts to rename it, Confederate Park overlooked the Mississippi, its cannons aimed at invisible enemies. Tom Lee Park celebrated the heroics of a black citizen who’d pulled people to safety after a horrific boiler explosion on a riverboat, and the site hosted the annual worldwide barbecue every May. Riverboats docked at the river daily, and it was a big deal when a passenger paddle-wheeler stopped on its way downriver to New Orleans. Nineteenth-century bricks made walking to the boats rough, barges slogged down the middle of the river dragging wide wakes, and smaller paddle-wheelers made daily trips along the riverbanks for tourists. The city skyline had the glass Pyramid at one end, and President’s Island with a toxic waste dump and dusty concrete plant at the other. Sandbars and wide expanses of muddy water lay on the southern horizon. Despite—or maybe because of—all its diversity, Memphis had a reputation for Southern hospitality.

  Born in California and transplanted in Memphis fifteen years before, Harley was glad to do her part at welcoming paying tourists. It beat dealing with former bosses at a banking corporation.

  The group she picked up at their hotel was pretty sedate. They were English, and not only excited to be here, but polite. The excitement in the van increased as the tourists saw the billboard and Graceland exit signs when she got off the Interstate at Brooks and Elvis Presley.

  “Has it always been named Elvis Presley Boulevard,” one of the ladies asked, “or was it named that after he died?”

  “After he died. Before then, it was called Highway 51 on this end, and Bellevue inside the city limits,” Harley replied. “My mother met Elvis back in the sixties. Ann-Margret and some other celebrities were there, riding motorcycles in the horse pasture. She hung over the stone fence to get his autograph.”

  It was just a little tidbit of personal information that Elvis fans usually liked to hear, as well as the regular spiel.

  “Did he act like just a regular bloke,” one of the men asked, “or was he shirty?”

  Harley grinned. She loved the way the English talked. “Elvis was always courteous. He really appreciated his fans, even though it meant he was almost a prisoner in his own house.”

  “Sad, the way Elvis died. Too bad he couldn’t have the street named after him before he went. Guess that’s the way it is, right? Most people aren’t truly appreciated until they’re gone,” the lady commented rather sadly.

  Harley thought about that after she let them out behind the tourist shops to get on the EPE—Elvis Presley Enterprises— van that’d take them across the busy street to the Graceland mansion. The tourist was right. People took others for granted far too often, and she’d been just as guilty of that as anyone else.

  Mike came to mind. It wasn’t that she hadn’t appreciated him, because she had, but she hadn’t thought about how her actions affected him or his job. She felt a little guilty. It was a lot different than with Bobby because, after all, he was just her friend, not her boyfriend. Besides the ribbing he took from cohorts, Mike had to be put in an awkward position every time she stumbled across another body.

  But damn, it wasn’t like she was trying to infiltrate undercover operations or anything. He had to know that. Didn’t he? Maybe he’d just been looking for an excuse to cut out. Her finding bodies may have been the excuse he’d needed to move on. It was possible. She’d done the same thing herself a few times—grab at the first thing she could to make a graceful exit from a relationship that wasn’t working. Sometimes her tongue outpaced her brain, but being unkind wasn’t her style. Not like that. Hurting others was unnecessary. Most of the time.

  Harley had a brief guilty pang about her caustic relationship with her cousins, but that was the way they’d always communicated. Though after risking her own life helping them out of a tight spot with a smuggler, murderer, and possible prison terms, their relationships had greatly improved in the last couple of months. It’d certainly make future family reunions more pleasant.

  Anyway, now that she was on the receiving end of the “take a break” letdown, it still stung, no matter how nicely it was meant. A lesson for the future. An honest “this isn’t working” was better than waiting for a phone call that would never come.

  Diva was right. As usual. Karma had a way of biting you in the butt just when things seemed to be best.

  As she was contemplating past sins and thinking about a cold Coke, a scream came from one of the other tour vans parked nearby. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and she stuck her head out her still open van window to see what was going on. It was another Memphis Tour Tyme van, one of the larger ones that held two dozen people. Once it had been a Head Start school bus, but that was before the renovation of white paint and fancy blue lettering.

  She didn’t get out of the van because, after all, it was probably just a scream of frustration after listening to two dozen Elvises all singing at the same time. But then it came again in a shriller tone. Damn. She recognized that high pitch—Lydia Free.

  Sighing, she got out of her van and crossed the parking lot. Waves of heat came up from the asphalt, shimmering. A canvas canopy covering steps leading to the shops and ticket booths flapped in an erratic breeze. The MTT bus door was open, and she saw Lydia standing on the second step, craning her neck to peer inside. Lydia had brown frizzy hair that Memphis hu
midity didn’t improve, pale skin dotted with freckles, and a nervous tic under one eye most of the time. Her skinny frame looked frozen in place, one foot on the top step, and one foot on the second, white-knuckled fingers clutching the sides of the open door. Wheezing sounds came from her open mouth.

  “Hey Lydia,” Harley began, but Lydia turned and launched her body outward like an Air Force rocket. She landed on Harley. Immediately engulfed in a babbling, hysterical grip, Harley made some wheezing noises of her own before she got out, “Let go!”

  When Lydia didn’t release her strangling hold, Harley used a move she’d learned in a recent course on driver safety and self-protection, and twisted free. Mr. Penney’s money had not been spent in vain. There was no need to use a stun gun at all.

  “Jeez, you’ve got a grip like a python,” she said when she could breathe. She firmly held Lydia at arm’s length in case she coiled around her again. “What happened?”

  “B-b-b-obby,” Lydia got out, and Harley frowned. “Bobby? Bobby who?”

  “No!” Lydia took a deep breath and said clearly, “Body!”

  “As in—dead?”

  Lydia’s head bobbed energetically up and down.

  Oh no. “Are you sure the person isn’t just napping?”

  Now Lydia’s teeth were chattering. “Pretty s-s-sure. But maybe . . . he is?”

  Probably not. Lydia would have scared him awake by now.

  Harley felt queasy. She didn’t want to deal with this. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe the man was deaf. A lot of old geezers got all dressed up every year and wiggled their drooping butts, remembering a better time. That had to be it. She looked at Lydia.

  “I’ll check.” She stepped up into the bus. Lydia was known to overreact. Why Mr. Penney allowed her to take a vehicle onto the Memphis streets was beyond comprehension, but apparently Lydia was his niece or cousin, or something like that.

  Sitting in the fifth row by the window, an Elvis impersonator sprawled halfway off the seat. Harley’s heart thudded into overdrive. Her stomach twisted when she got close. He certainly looked dead. His mouth hung open and his eyes were half-closed. She leaned closer.

  “Sir? Elvis?” Nothing.

  She didn’t want to touch him. You’d think she could tell a dead person from a live one by now, but apparently it didn’t work that way. He could just be asleep. Her cousin Maddie slept with one or both eyes open, a really freakish thing to see in the middle of the night.

  Finally, she squelched her squeamishness and put out a hand to give him a slight shake. It didn’t help that Lydia screeched from the bus door, “Don’t touch him!”

  “If that voice doesn’t wake the dead, he’s past help,” Harley muttered, but determinedly gave Elvis a gentle shake.

  His head lolled forward on his chest at a crooked angle, and that was when she saw the tiny object sticking out from his neck. It looked like a penknife that kids used to carry, but obviously it could be pretty lethal. A thin stream of blood trickled down his neck and under the collar of his white jumpsuit. Oh boy.

  She turned to look at Lydia still hanging back in the doorway.

  Eyes as big as duck eggs looked back at her. Lydia’s lips worked, and then she whispered, “Is . . . is he . . . ?”

  “Dead as last Sunday’s dinner.”

  “Why are you here? This isn’t even your jurisdiction.” Harley couldn’t believe Bobby had shown up. As if she wasn’t already feeling queasy and lightheaded. She’d never get used to death up close and fresh. Now he’d make it worse. “Isn’t Graceland in the South precinct?” she asked crankily.

  “Yes. I’d ask why you’re here, but that’d be redundant. There’s a body here, so of course you’re here, too.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “The list of unfair things is too long to contemplate right now. Who found the DB?”

  “Lydia Free.”

  “And again, why are you here?”

  “I had a van full of tourists. They’re up at the mansion right now.”

  “Where is this Lydia Free?”

  “Follow the shrieks. The EMT’s had to give her oxygen. They shouldn’t have. It’s only made her louder.”

  For a moment, Bobby stood looking at her where she sat in the driver’s seat of her own van. He didn’t look angry, but sort of perplexed, like he was trying to figure out the square root of an isosceles triangle or some other complicated math problem.

  Harley stared back at him warily since he got so testy whenever she was in the vicinity of a dead body. “Harley,” he finally said in a tone she recognized as bordering on the edge of angry, “are you trying to piss off everybody you know, or just me?”

  “Just you, of course,” she snapped back, “no one else is as much fun.”

  “One more reason you go through boyfriends so fast,” he observed. “You’ve never forgotten how to make men go crazy. Still trying to get over me?”

  She glared at him. Apparently, he’d already talked to Morgan. How else would he know they’d split up? Not that she cared. It wasn’t like Bobby could brag about longevity in relationships. If it wasn’t for the fact they’d long ago decided platonic worked better than any of that physical stuff, he’d probably be just a faint memory anyway. At the tender age of sixteen, she’d spent a most interesting night on the backseat of Bobby’s car with Meatloaf playing Paradise By the Dashboard Lights on the radio. Not long after that they’d both come to the mutual conclusion they did a lot better as just friends. Bobby had that sexy Italian charm going on, but he tended to get a little too possessive, a trait that made her a little too homicidal.

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Bobby,” she replied in reference to his conceited inference that she’d never gotten over him. When he kept looking at her, she said, “What? Do I have dirt on my nose?”

  “I’m trying to decide if that’s hair gel or horns on top of your head.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m glad one of us is amused. How do you do it? How do you go nearly thirty years without getting anything worse than traffic tickets, and then in the space of three months run across five corpses?”

  “Just lucky I guess. And this makes six. Don’t forget the guy in the warehouse.” This conversation was eerily similar to the one she’d had with Morgan, and she’d had enough. “Since I’m not really involved, I’m going to pick up my passengers and take them back to their hotel. Am I released?”

  He snapped his notebook shut and jammed his pen in the breast pocket of his suit coat. He looked rumpled and tired. And pissed off. “I’ll need your official statement.”

  “I can find my way to the precinct with my eyes closed by now.”

  “Which explains the unusually high rate of traffic accidents lately.”

  She didn’t dignify that with a reply. Haughty aloofness was a much better response.

  Bobby stepped back as Harley got out of the van and headed for the shops to find her tour group. They were in one of the gift shops across from Graceland, mulling over ceramic replicas of the mansion mounted on top of music boxes, and discussing the exchange rate between pounds and dollars. She pulled out a calculator and helped them figure it out, then accompanied them to a store that specialized in Elvis CDs and tapes. Elvis videos played on one of the TV sets, a continuous stream of different songs. As much as she came here, Harley was always reminded anew of Elvis’s sheer talent. Dark walls in the small museum built behind Elvis’s house had rows upon rows of gold and platinum records to attest to that. There had never been anyone like him before he burst onto the music scene, and there would never be anyone else like him, a man recognized the world over the moment his distinctive voice was heard.

  Finally they left the shops and headed for the van. Police tape stretched around the bus, and cruisers with lights still flashing barricaded it. Bobby was still
there, talking with other officers. She’d been hoping they’d all be gone by now.

  “Bloody hell,” one of the men in her group exclaimed, “what happened here?”

  Not wanting to alarm the tourists, Harley just said that a passenger had died. Let the cops get them alarmed. They were better equipped to handle hysteria than she was. Of course, the police took down names, addresses, and any pertinent information from each one, and a statement as to what they saw or didn’t see. That took a while, so Harley got into her van and turned on the AC. Might as well be comfortable while waiting.

  A familiar tingle in her right jeans pocket signaled an incoming call on her cell phone. She ignored it. Bobby had unnerved her. Dammit. Why did this keep happening to her?

  Okay, it was bad enough it seemed to be happening to Elvises, but it was beginning to look really bad that she always seemed to be around when it did. She rested her head against the steering wheel and closed her eyes, waiting for the police to finish taking statements and move some cruisers out of the way so she could leave. In a few minutes the cell phone vibrated again, humming against her hip.

  Finally, giving in to the inevitable, she played back the messages. Tootsie. Three times. All sounding a little frantic. “Harley,” he said on the last call, “Lydia’s tourists need a ride and all the other vans are too far out to get there quickly enough. Call me, girlfriend. I’m getting desperate here.”

  She called him back to tell him she’d have to drop her group off first, and then she would have room to take some of Lydia’s tourists to their hotel.

  “Thank God.” He sounded relieved. “Charlsie can pick up a few, but she’s in the small van. By the way, darling, I’m glad this body wasn’t found in your van. I don’t think the police would appreciate it right now.”

  “Yeah, so I heard. Lydia didn’t like it too much either.”

  “Let the group know that we’re sending vans for them, and that there’ll be no charge. We sure don’t need to scare away paying customers. Two dead guys in two days isn’t at all good for business.”