Free Harley Jean Davidson 03 - Evil Elvis by Virginia Brown

change the subject to cheer him up. “Hey, want to go to McDonald’s while Diva isn’t here?”
     
    That did the trick. As a closet carnivore living in a vegetarian household, the occasional cheeseburger or Big Mac was a guilty pleasure for Yogi. No doubt Diva knew about his lapses, but chose not to make an issue of it.
     
    So Yogi, Harley, and despite her halfhearted protests, King, got into her car and drove to the McDonald’s on Highland, only a few blocks away. She bought her father a Big Mac and King a cheeseburger, and herself a fried pie. All three of them were blissful with grease.
     
    “You know you’re going to have to do extra jogging to work that off,” she said to Yogi as they left the parking lot, and he nodded.
     
    “It’s worth it. Got any breath mints? I don’t want your mother to smell McDonald’s on my breath.”
     
    “For you, but King will have to wing it. You can always claim he got in the neighbor’s garbage again. That’s usually true anyway.”
     
    “He’s been doing much better. Except for yesterday, when he got in Sadie’s flowerbeds. I have to replace two azalea bushes and some kind of orangey flowers. He was digging for moles. I told Sadie those humps in her lawn were mole trails, but she didn’t listen.”
     
    “How did he dig up two bushes? Those were pretty big.”
     
    “Oh, he didn’t dig those up, he ate them. Or chewed on them, anyway.”
     
    Harley glanced in her rearview mirror. The culprit didn’t look at all ashamed. He had his nose pressed against the back window as he surveyed the passing panorama of neat houses, the neighborhood head shop that sold bongs and other drug paraphernalia, a tattoo parlor, the St. Ann’s Catholic school Harley had attended, and a music store.
     
    Businesses and residents changed through the years, but some things always remained the same.
     
    “Well,” Harley said, “Mrs. Shipley doesn’t get mad about that sort of thing as long as you replace them. For a busybody and neighborhood gossip, she’s really pretty nice.”
     
    “She’s been a good neighbor,” Yogi agreed, and wiped his mouth with a napkin to scrub away any remaining traces of McDonald’s as they got close to home. Eating meat was his biggest crime to date lately, and he and Diva hadn’t been arrested for protests in a while. Maybe they were growing out of that stage at last.
     
    Really, as frustrating as they could be at times, Harley decided, she needed to stop complaining about her parents. She could have been stuck with a horror of a mother like that Patty Jenkins. No wonder Leroy left her. Too bad he didn’t take the kids with him.
     
    “Hey,” she said as an idea occurred to her, “when is your next Elvis-fest?”
     
    “A concert Friday night at Dad’s Place on Brooks. Why?”
     
    “I thought I’d tag along if you don’t mind.”
     
    “Mind?” Yogi grinned so big his eyes looked like slits. “I’d love it. You can give me a few pointers, maybe. The big competition is way too soon and I want to be at my best.”
     
    “I’ll be there.” It would give her an excellent chance to scope out the contestants and see which one of them might be a killer.
     

Chapter Five
     
    “ Why are we here again?” Cami looked around the huge room filled with Elvises and noise.
     
    “To find a killer.”
     
    Cami winced. “Arrest that guy over there. He’s killing Don’t Be Cruel.”
     
    “I can’t make an arrest, Cami. Even for murdering a song. The judges will have to do that. I just want to scope out these guys and see if any of them look familiar. The killer was on my van, so I should be able to spot him.”
     
    “Wasn’t he dressed as Elvis?”
     
    She sighed. “Yeah. That might make it a little more difficult.”
     
    “I’ll say. And anyway, even if you see the guy who killed the Elvis on your van, there’s no guarantee he’s the same guy who killed the Elvis on the other bus.”
     
    “That may be true, but there’s