Murder Boogies With Elvis Read Online Free Page A

be.”
    Surely she didn’t believe that.
    “Anyway,” she continued, “Tammy Sue is going to sit with us tonight because her husband’s performing, too. And then we’re all going out for dinner. Okay?”
    “Fred can’t eat dinner at ten o’clock because of his reflux. He’d be up all night hurting and making me think he was having a heart attack.”
    “Well, he can have a piece of pie or something.”
    “That wouldn’t work, either. You’ve never seen him having one of his spells.”
    “And for that, I’m eternally grateful. But this is a big deal, meeting Tammy Fay and her husband. And we’re telling them tonight that we’re getting married. Y’all come with us, Mouse. Fred doesn’t have to eat.”
    “I thought you said her name was Tammy Sue.”
    “It is.”
    “You just called her Tammy Fay.”
    “I’m sure she’ll answer to either one.”
    “Well, look. When you tell her about the sunflower-colored bridesmaid dress, you’d better call her Tammy Sue. Okay?”
    “Sure. Why?”
    “Because it’s her name.”
    “And you’re being tacky. But we’ll meet you in front of the Alabama at quarter to eight.”
    After I hung up, I remembered that I hadn’t told her that Mitzi had dirty-boogied with Elvis. It was going to boggle her mind.

Three
    T he Alabama Theater is one of the great old movie palaces built in the 1920s. To enter it is to enter a Moorish castle, Alabama style. Every inch of the wall is decorated with plaster moldings of curlicues and flowers and gilded lattice grillwork entwined with lacy vines that look suspiciously like kudzu. Electric candles flicker in niches and when the lights dim, the gilded sky still glows with a pinkish light. Red carpeted stairs like those Rhett carried Scarlett O’Hara up soar from the Hall of Mirrors (the lobby included a concession stand with the best popcorn in the world). Rhett would surely have dropped her halfway up or had a heart attack, though. People huff and puff just getting themselves up those steps. But the principal attraction for Mary Alice and me, when we were children and Mama would take us to movies there, had been the lounge in the basement that had been decorated in someone’s idea of a harem. We spent more time in the lounge perched on the round, red velvet seats inhaling secondhand smoke than we did watching the movies. A lot of times the show was more interesting there. And the dialogue, too.
    One thing we never missed, though, was the Mighty Wurlitzer. The lights would dim, a spotlight would come on, and the organ would rise like a red-and-gold calliope on great chords of music and applause. One o’clock in the afternoon, but Mr. Wurlitzer (we really thought that was his name) would have on a tux and would even invite us to sing along with the bouncing ball on the screen. Pure joy.
    Like Vulcan, the Alabama fell on hard times. Fortunately it’s in the process of being restored. It’s not quite as bright as it once was, but the Mighty Wurlitzer once again rises in the spotlight and everyone’s hearts beat a little faster.
    Mary Alice and Virgil were waiting for us under an old movie poster advertising Love Letters, starring Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotton. Beside them stood a buxom young blond woman wearing a green jacket and white flannel slacks.
    “That’s got to be Tammy Sue,” I said to Fred.
    “Tammy Sue looks corn-fed.”
    “She’s pretty.”
    “I didn’t say she wasn’t. I said she looks corn-fed.”
    I gave him my schoolteacher look that, after forty years, bounces right off.
    “What?” he asked. “What’s wrong with being corn-fed?”
    One more schoolteacher look and then we were smiling and shaking hands with Virgil, who looks like both General Norman Schwarzkopf and Willard Scott.A few tendrils of hair still cling to the top of his scalp; his face is etched with years of military service, including two wars and several awards that Mary Alice says he won’t talk about, as well as almost twenty years as