Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola: A Novel by Kinky Friedman

Author:Kinky Friedman [Friedman, Kinky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Amateur Sleuth, Thrillers, Suspense, Traditional
ISBN: 9780553568912
Google: 8-tFb08raxcC
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1994-07-31T12:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

That night, with Uptown Judy’s red boots still standing on the kitchen counter and Tom Baker’s final cinematic effort still safely ensconced in the pizza box on my desk, the loft seemed to be taking on all the warmth and humanity of a wax museum. Somewhere between the boots of a dead lover and the last crazy creation of a dead best friend, on some metaphysical surveyor’s fragile, unworldly plumb line, as yet invisible and unintelligible to mortal man, lay the point called the truth.

I was sitting, smoking a resurrected cigar, roughly between the boots and the pizza box, hoping that by mere physical positioning some cosmic awareness might accrue to my weatherbeaten spirit. There had to be a connection somewhere. When I did find it, I had the clear and disturbing feeling it was not going to be the kind of thing you’d want to plug a blow-dryer into.

I turned my attention away from the boots toward the Bakerman’s film. I was glad I’d decided to keep it in the pizza box. Stays warm that way.

I had lots of things I needed to do, but now that I had the Elvis impersonator documentary in my possession I felt a subtle sense of focus and control asserting itself. I needed to keep calm now and think and act rationally.

In the manner of Agatha Christie’s great detective, Hercule Poirot, I began straightening objects on the desk, beginning with the pizza box. I worked on that box like Jesse James fastidiously hanging a picture on a wall. It was the last thing Jesse ever did. That dirty little coward Robert Ford shot him in the back just as Jesse’s wife was saying “A little to the right.”

It was as I was straightening other objects on the desk to precise horizontal and vertical positions that I made a rather disconcerting discovery. The cat had vomited in my pipe.

It was an unpleasant thing to deal with but it was an easy thing to forgive. No doubt, with all the mordant vibes in the loft lately, the cat had become a little nervous, too. I carried the pipe carefully over to the sink, knocked out the vomitus, and splashed some hot water into the little meerschaum bowl that was in all respects an exact replica of the head of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Unfortunately, the hole in the pipe where you placed the tobacco was almost precisely in the location of the hole in the President’s head created in Dallas, Texas. I finished cleaning the pipe and brought it back to the desk. I didn’t agonize over it. I wasn’t a conspiracy theorist.

The pipe episode notwithstanding, it was time for one man to act alone. Namely myself. I had to call Tom Baker’s dad. I had to find out any information I could from the place where Uptown Judy had bought the boots. I had to set a bonfire under Brennan’s arse to find a photo of Uptown Judy. And lastly, and no doubt most important, I had to arrange for a private screening of Baker’s Elvis documentary.

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