I was awakened the next morning by a loud ringing that reverberated in my head like a drum solo by Gene Krupa as portrayed by Sal Mineo in The Gene Krupa Story. I reached over to turn off the alarm clock only to find that the ringing persisted even after I had pushed in the little white button. It was the phone that was ringing. I sat up quickly and the effects of the whack on the head I'd received the night before at the Elvis impersonator contest turned that drum solo into one by the actual Gene Krupa. I pressed the goose-egg on my forehead hoping to ease the pain. Big mistake. Instead, it turned the throbbing into a drum solo by Irving Kupner portraying Sal Mineo portraying Gene Krupa from The Sal Mineo Story, although technically it was Elvin Jones who actually did the drumming for Kupner in that movie, although Sal Mineo himself did the drumming in . . . well, anyway, I staggered to the phone.        It was Virgil calling. He hadn't wasted any time. He found out that the street was rife with rumors of the diaries. Word had it that the diaries, or what were purported to be the diaries, were back in the U.S., and that several parties were hot to get their hands on them.        Virgil said that two names kept coming up like a bad rash on a chipmunk: the Reverend Billy Sol Dickerson, a local evangelist; and Keltar Pertman, a rock-and-roll relics dealer out of Los Angeles. Virgil said he'd keep on the lookout and check back later.        "So, two more players in this little game,'' I thought. "Looks like it's time for a trip to the morgue--the newspaper morgue, that is.'' I put in a call to my old friend DeWayne Brown. He was in charge of the clippings morgue at the Globe.        "Billy Sol Dickerson? Yeah, I think we've got some stuff on the Good Reverend,'' DeWayne said over the phone. "Come on down.''        I threw on some clothes and grabbed a cup of coffee and a couple of donuts and headed down Union Avenue to the newspaper. I had to be careful though; I still didn't want the word to get out on what I was working on. Luckily, Elvis stories are pretty common around here, and when I arrived DeWayne didn't press me as to what exactly I was up to.        "Here ya go,'' DeWayne said as he plopped the fat brown folder on the morgue room table. Picking my way through the yellowed newspaper clippings, I managed to piece together a basic biography of the Dickerson character.        He was born William Solomon Dickerson in Klelmore, Indiana, a suburb, oddly enough, of Butte, Montana. He came from a religious--but eccentric--family. His father was a preacher and had formed the country's first reformed snake-handling sect--they used rubber snakes. In his early years, Billy Sol followed in his father's footsteps--literally. Tired of living in his father's shadow--again, literally--Billy Sol decided to leave home. A young man of limited ambition, he ran away to join the flea circus.        Sometime during his travels throughout the South, Billy Sol was drawn back to religion. At some point along the way he was ordained as a Pentecostal minister. In 1965, after years of touring the country in tent revivals and gospel shows, he settled in the small town of Horn Lake, Mississippi, right outside of Memphis, establishing his own church. In an interview at the time, Billy Sol described himself as a strict fundamentalist who believed absolutely in the literal word of the Bible except, as he said, "for that stuff about God creating the world in seven days, which is patently ridiculous.''        In 1969 Billy Sol moved his church to Memphis into a defunct car wash. (Billy Sol boasted that he was the only minister in the country who could not only baptize his entire congregation at once, but could also "air dry and hot wax the whole bunch at the same time.'') He created quite a bit of controversy the following year when he announced that he had developed a new form of faith-healing which combined the practice of "laying on hands'' with speaking in tongues--a technique he called "laying on tongues.''        Billy Sol was released from prison in 1978, just as the flood of Elvis pilgrims to Graceland was astonishing the world. Looking for a gimmick with which to revive his fallen ministry, and sensing the almost religious zeal of the Elvis fans, Billy Sol quickly rented an old movie theatre on Elvis Presley Boulevard and formed "Our Lady of the Perpetual Sideburns,'' the first church to serve the spiritual needs of the Elvis faithful.        As I closed the folder, I had a pretty good picture of what Billy Sol was up to. Of course he wanted the diaries. What better gimmick for his church than to possess the Elvis equivalent of the Holy Scripture--the King's version of his life story written in his own hand? The perfect way to attract thousands of Elvis pilgrims--and their money, of course. DeWayne didn't have any clippings on the relic dealer Pertman, so I decided to head in to the office. I made a mental note to check on the time of Rev. Dickerson's next church service, so I could get a first-hand look at this self-proclaimed "man of the cheesecloth.''        Glancing at my watch, I saw that it was time for the Globe's weekly editorial meeting. This was where all of the staff members would gather in the publisher's office to discuss future stories. I was more than a little apprehensive going into the meeting. Like it or not, this diary story had fallen right into my lap. I hadn't discussed it with anyone but Jasper Wilcox, and I didn't know if he had told anyone else on the staff what I was working on. It had the potential to be a blockbuster and I was praying that he wasn't going to hand it over to Hamilton Hodges, the Globe's crack investigative reporter.        Hodges was the glamour boy of the staff. He had recently racked up a bunch of awards for an expose he'd written that resulted in the mayor's daughter being zoned commercial.        So I was tense as I sat through the meeting but, to my surprise, Wilcox made no mention of the diaries, saying only that I was doing some background research on a story to commemorate Elvis' birthday. As Wilcox said the words "Elvis' birthday,'' out of the corner of my eye I saw the look on Hodges' face. He was sneering in that way that only people who are sneering can.        "Let him gloat,'' I thought. "I just may have the last laugh.''        As the meeting came to an end, Wilcox called me over. He closed the door to his office.        "Well, Parrish, what have you found out? What's the latest?'' he asked.        I sat down in a brown chair directly in front of his desk and related the bizarre events of the last 24 hours--Kartofel, the impersonator's convention, Virgil Fescue, and my trip to the clippings morgue.        "Still no idea who has the diaries?'' he asked.        "Not yet,'' I said. "But there's no shortage of people who want the diaries. And I still don't know who hit me on the head.''        "Well dig, man, dig!'' he barked.        Wilcox jumped up from his chair and started to pace. As he talked he jabbed the lit end of his cigar into the air as though he were punctuating his sentences by burning periods in the air.        "Hit the streets!'' he barked. "Lift that barge, tote that bale. . .''        "Get a little drunk and land in jail?'' I added.        "That's it, Parrish!'' he shouted. "You've done it before. You've snagged the big one. It's hard work. Damn hard work! But breaking the big story. . . that's a feeling that can't be matched. But you have to be bold. It's like my father used to say: 'The more starch you put in your pants, the more noise you'll make when you walk.'''        "Right,'' I said, sensing that this was a good time to exit. Wilcox was getting a tad worked up. "I'll keep you posted,'' I said, heading for the door and leaving him poking at the air with the hot red eye of his cigar.        I left Wilcox's office with decidedly mixed feelings. I was relieved that he was keeping me on the story. I would have bet a million bucks that he would have handed it over to Hodges. But he wanted a blockbuster story bad, and he was under a lot of pressure--maybe a little too much pressure. After all, he was trying to live up to the Wilcox name--one of the biggest in journalism.        His grandfather was the legendary newspaper magnate Charles Foster Wilcox--a larger-than-life character who, at one time, owned over 47 newspapers in the United States alone. In addition to his skills as a publisher, he was noted for his lavish lifestyle (he owned a palatial estate in California he called Chuck's Big Place) and he showered millions of dollars on his two passions: collecting statues and playing miniature golf (he actually built a miniature golf course on his estate so large that it had real windmills). His life came to a tragic end in 1948 when he died after a proofreading accident. Despite his flamboyance, he remained an enigmatic figure, even right down to his dying words: "flexible flyer.'' No one was ever able to figure out what he meant by that.        He left his empire to his son (Jasper's dad), Charles Foster Wilcox II, who carried the family business into the television age by starting one of the first stations in the country. He created such innovations as the multiple choice test pattern and coined the phrase, "Network difficulty. Not the fault of your set.''        Unfortunately, Jasper's dad was a tyrant and ruled his media empire with an iron fist. Jasper worked his way up through the business and became editor of the chain's flagship newspaper, but he and his father had a falling out when Jasper refused to honor his father's strict policy of airbrushing out the stubble on Sluggo's head in the Nancy comic strip. Jasper maintained that the public had a right to know, but his father refused to budge on the matter. Jasper resigned and the two have not spoken since.        In 1976, Jasper moved to Memphis and started the Globe to fill the void created by the presence of the Commercial Repeal, a paper that, not coincidentally, was part of his father's chain.        People who work at the Globe have always felt that, deep down, Jasper was trying to prove to his father that he could make it on his own, and staff members are always careful to avoid using the word "stubble'' in his presence.        The paper had met with some success, but it was still a pretty rocky road financially. That's why I was flattered--if somewhat baffled--that he would entrust a potential blockbuster story to me rather than Hodges. Well, it was reason enough for me to put up with some of the craziness that came with the Elvis beat.