Elvis and The Dearly Departed

by Peggy Webb

  Then the room explodes.

  “This will take two gallons of Prohibition punch.” Lovie hustles toward the kitchen with Kevin in her wake.

  While Uncle Charlie and Grover Grimsley form a flank between the Laton women and the outrageous beneficiary and I desperately search for ways to affect a truce, Bubbles Malone vanishes.

  Elvis’ Opinion # 2 on Las Vegas, French Poodles, and Taking Care of Business

  Iguess you’re wondering how I could walk out on Callie since she’s one of the truest hearts I know and I live by the creed don’t be cruel. I could tell you I took advantage of the wide-open back door in the hopes my human mom and dad would get back together, but the truth is, every now and then a dog has to take care of business.

  I’d planned on sniffing Ruby Nell’s tombstones, maybe marking a few, then ambling over to Gas, Grits, and Guts to see if anybody had left a half-empty box of fish bait. After that I was going back to the beauty shop before Callie missed me. But I got sidetracked by Bubbles Malone. I could smell big city all over her even before I sneaked in as she went inside to ask for directions to Eternal Rest. Fayrene quizzed her within an inch of her size 36-D push-up bra.

  Don’t ask how I know the size. Just trust me. And every bit of it was real.

  When Bubbles mentioned she used to perform at Caesar’s Palace, I sidled up hoping she’d recognize me and ask for my paw print. But she didn’t. I should have known a woman too vain to put on the reading glasses I saw when she dropped that little bitty purse would miss her golden opportunity.

  Now, I knew if she went strutting into Eternal Rest showing off those knockers, the Valentines would be all shook-up. I fully intended to mosey on back to the beauty parlor and warn Callie.

  But fate intervened. The prettiest little French poodle this side of Hollywood and Vine sashayed by exuding pheromones you could smell all the way to the Alabama state line. Well, bless’a my soul!

  I seized the first opportunity to dash out the door. Then I sucked in my paunch and marched right up to her.

  “I’m Elvis,” I drawled, “and I can fly you to moon.”

  A basset hound or even a Jack Russell terrier would have known I stole that line from another singer, but a French poodle in heat will believe anything you tell her.

  She blinked her big brown eyes at me and I was a goner. We trotted off to find some privacy and lost all track of time.

  Now I’m lying here behind the Mooreville Truck Stop with Ann Margret curled up beside me snoozing. Turns out she had the same opinion of me as John Lennon. “Before Elvis there was nothing.” I feel the urge to kick up my heels and howl at the full moon.

  But in spite of all the stories you’ve heard to the contrary, I’m smarter than that. Instead of giving away our love nest, I amble over to the back door of the kitchen and find some good scraps of country-fried steak, black-eyed peas and corn bread.

  It’s not the fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches I was so fond of before I fell from Graceland, but it’s still good Southern home cooking.

  Well, back to my foxy little poodle. TCB, baby!

  Elvis’ Recipe for Fried Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches

  First, watch Callie toast two pieces of white bread. I know whole wheat’s better for you, but a dog sweating under an August sun hotter than stage lights needs all the carbohydrates and sugar he can get.

  Sit there and drool while she melts about half a stick of butter (the real kind, not that cheap imitation stuff) in the bottom of a skillet. Next, howl “How Great Thou Art” while she spreads smooth peanut butter on one side of the toast, puts a bunch of sliced bananas in the middle, and fries the sandwich, turning it till it’s golden brown on both sides.

  Dig a nice cool hole under the oak tree and bury the sandwich until you can sneak off, dig it up, and enjoy it without being bothered by Callie’s silly stray cats and that dumb cocker spaniel she found in the Dumpster behind the video store.

  Chapter 3

  Feuds, Hot Fudge, and Moveable Corpses

  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 t
onight. 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 al
l 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.