Cat In A Jeweled Jumpsuit

Foreword

Dead Man Walking

He was born during the Depression in a two-room shack, in Tupelo, Mississippi, a surviving twin and a hillbilly, into a family lineage of poverty, alcoholism, and little more than barely getting by.

He became the world’s most well-known, wealthy, and successful entertainer.

An eternal adolescent reared by a passive father and a mother both doting and domineering, he was a lonely mama’s boy who believed in work and the golden rule, who dreamed of performing but had been conditioned to expect pampering.

He was the first in his family to graduate from high school, a hyperactive, nervous outsider, a boy whose love of religion and music would lead him to identify with black culture in a segregated South before the sixties’ Civil Rights movement.

He was a shrewd, intelligent, magnetic performer, who created his own image as an international singing star and sex symbol by blending two socially segregated traditions of music, black and white, into the worldwide phenomenon of rock ‘n’ roll.

He was modest, polite, generous, and even tender, a young man who won the eternal loyalty of men and women who knew him, and millions who didn’t.

From the outset, his meteoric career defied all odds, and accelerated his utter destruction on all fronts.

From the outset, the seeds of addiction were sown in his dysfunctional upbringing and a borrowed fistful of his mother’s diet pills, then a handful of Dexedrine tablets in the Army, then the live performer’s night-is-day Draculian lifestyle, and finally pills by the literal gallon from an array of “feel-good” doctors.

In his early twenties, death would separate him from his adored mother Gladys, leaving in her place Colonel Tom Parker, the controlling personal manager and ex-carnival hustler who would indenture his young property into servitude in low-grade films, confine him to songs that enriched the pockets but not the soul, and finally send him sick and sick at heart into years of relentless touring, all to underwrite the Colonel’s elephantine ego and eventual million-dollar gambling debts.

His performing career became a manic-depressive’s endurance contest as his obsessive personality dove into toys, girls, and pills in the face of boredom and fatigue. The Colonel quashed all attempts by him and others to revitalize his career. After the entertainer’s death, estate lawyers would strip Parker of control, but the estate didn’t have the deep pockets to reclaim millions from a manager who shamelessly took the lion’s share of his financially unsophisticated sole client’s enormous income.

Dogged by Parker’s soulless management, drugged by the side-effects of fame and prescribed uppers and downers, pursued and isolated by fans, he became an egocentric monster who indulged in spasms of compulsive generosity and grandiose mysticism behind a protective circle of flunkies and thugs, within a rotating harem of dozens of young, pliable women from whom he craved cuddles rather than sex.

By many accounts, he was the most charismatic performer ever to take the stage, a singer whose moves to the music mesmerized his audiences into an orgasmic love feast. By all accounts, during the last two of his forty-two years on earth, he was a dead man walking, self-medicated into a stumbling parody of himself, lost in a self-destructive stupor.

Finally, shortly after three of his once-loyal inner cir¬cle published a tell-all book revealing his eccentricities and drug abuse, enter ignominious death. He was found dead in 1977, age forty-two, in his bathroom, autopsied (drug abuse was denied as a cause of death then), and buried in Cadillac state amid a fan outpouring of hysterical grief.

He left everything to his only daughter, but on his father’s death two years later, his ex-wife became executor and tried to redeem the careless losses of the past with post-mortem merchandising. Under her management team, the home he’d bought in the first fever of success, Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee, became a mélange of unofficial national monument, tourist Mecca, and shrine that attracted fans from all over the world. Disneyland for a dead rock star.

His fans never deserted him. His genuine talent, charisma, and generosity outweighed his tragic flaws. The contradictions he embodied in larger-than-life fashion are the common mysteries of life, death, and human personality, but to conventional society, he had always been a threat and a joke, from his rural rocker beginnings to his overblown Las Vegas lounge-act end. Big names in music like Bob Dylan and John Lennon had always credited him for the birth of rock ‘n’ roll even while many black musical artists accused him of co-opting their musical thunder. Now revisionist rock history has enhanced his performing reputation. A video and book industry memorializes him to this day, for good or ill. Supermarket tabloids report people sighting him here and there. His songs have sold millions and millions and continue to sell.

Exit the man who was born to be Fate’s most famous dead man walking. Still walking.

Enter the fabulously flawed legend that won’t die. Enter the King.

Prologue

The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll

The King was getting a bad feeling, the way his mama used to sometimes.

She’d been right about the Colonel.

Beware the blue-eyed woman.

Huh! She’d been damn right about that one.

Look at Cilla, running the whole shootin’ match at Graceland now. Who’da thought that pretty little thing would turn out to be tougher than ‘em all, in the end? ‘Course, he’d raised her up. And if there was a lot he’d sheltered her from bein’, there was a lot he didn’t shelter her from seein’, maybe just to learn what not to do.

Taking Care of Business was an okay motto, but all Cilla had wanted then was TLC. That’s what all the King’s men and women got: gold bracelets and necklaces reading TCB for the guys, TLC for the girls. He was good at handing out the trinkets. But the fact was he’d never been any damn good at TCB, anyway. He just let his father Vernon run things, or not run things, and let the Colonel take over. Anybody walking in off the street wantin’ to do-for him was welcome, then they’d take-from … hell, if he’da known, he should have given Cilla the TCB job. Woulda given her something to do at Graceland’sides bitchin’ about his boys … and his girls.

‘Course she had something to work with when she took over. Bein’ dead does a lot to raise certain people’s stock. Look at JFK. Or Marilyn. Man, he never met her, and she was a little old for him and a little fat (look who’s talkin’). Didja see her in Let’s Make Love, where they were spoofing his sudden fame in a musical routine? One hot number. Not the delicate, dark-haired type he loved. Still, that woulda been something. But it ain’t over till it’s over, you know? Lookin’ back does no damn good. The tell-all books and coffee-table picture books and the movies and videotapes and miniseries and the special edition watches and the pink, white, and blue trinkets; they do the talkin’ nowadays. TCB.

Only one who hasn’t been heard from on the grand glory days and sad last nights of Elvis Aaron Presley is the King his own self. And even that isn’t impossible. Heck, all the King’s men had mostly used ghost writers to get their side of things down on paper.

And here he was one.

The King laughed, staring at the two silent-running TV sets tilted like gaming consoles into the green Naugahyde ceiling above him in the blacked-out bedroom. He shot the remote at them in turn, revving up the sound, speeding through channels, past reruns of old movies featuring dead pals and girlfriends. But some of them were still alive and kicking, his ex-buddies, ex-babes, ex-hangers-on.

Just like him.

The King is dead. Long live the King. Live and in person! News flash: It lives! Even the word “lives” is just a mixed-up Elvis.

He laughed, and hummed a few bars of “It’s Now or Never”while surfing the babbling channels over and over and over. The place was dark as a tomb, and freezing cold. He couldn’t tell day from night.

He had always liked it that way.

Chapter 1

The King of Rock and Roll ‘em!

I am taking my ease in the living room of Miss Temple Barr’s flat at the Circle Ritz apartments and condominiums, a snazzy fifties joint built like a four-story black-marble hockey puck. In other words, it is round, and therefore definitely not square.

You could say the same about me.

Miss Temple has shut all the miniblinds to dim the chamber, and is now cursing the darkness because the VCR is not working and she cannot see to correct the problem.

I myself have never troubled to keep up with these new-(angled devices. Remote controls and answering machines are as much as I care to deal with. So although she is invoking my name—along with those of others often employed in such circumstances, such as “for Pete’s sake, for the love of Mike” etc.—I know that she expectsno more help from my quarter than she does from the ever-absent Pete and Mike.

“Two stars in the building is one too many,” she grumbles, punching buttons that punch right back by refusing to stay depressed. “The Mystifying Max’s greatest sleight-of-hand trick on or off stage was making this zippety-doodah machine work! Where is the man of the house when you really need him?”

I am right here, where I always am—when I am not off on my investigations—ready to absorb all gripes. But operating VCRs is not in my contract, not even when I am the partial reason for the technological trials I see unfolding before me.

`There!” MissTemple sits back on the parquet floor with a satisfied sigh. “Better watch, Louie. You are up first!”

That is only the natural order of things, so I stretch, yawn, manicure my nails, and scratch behind my ears.

“Do not turn your head away,” she beseeches. “Your segment is coming up.”

Yes, I see that my rear appendage is lofting to great advantage… .

“Louie! You are on!”

I am forced at last to play couch potato and turn to view the television screen. It is rerunning the ending of my least favorite show, Sabrina. I have nothing against teenage witches, although I have never consorted with them, but that black, mothball-mouthed feline supporting puppet is one bad actor. I could chew the scenery with far more effectiveness.

In fact, a demonstration of this is coming up, as I come on. Eat your heart out, Salem. And then lend it to me for a snack.

In a moment aperky voice-over chorus pipes into the room: Ooo-Ia-la. A la Cat! We see white-gloved hands removing a crystal dish from a cupboard. A silver spoon deposits some wet glop the color of Silly Putty into the dish’s pristine center. The entire mess (I am speaking metaphorically here of a product I dearly love, of course) is gently laid on a high-gloss white floor.

“Dinner is served,” announces Jeeves Black-sleeves the butler. A pale, patrician pussycat ankles over to inspect the offering and begin eating with dainty abandon. Mon amour, the Divine Yvette, draped in silver foxiness.

The camera pulls back to reveal a Big White Set from the Hollywood musical heyday of the thirties and a flight of stairs to cat heaven, lined by dancing dudes in jellybean-colored zoot suits. Down the center aisle, floating like a butterfly, windmilling his limbs like an aerialist, hustles yours truly in full black formal attire, crowned by a flamingo-pink fedora that perches precariously over one ear and eye.

I four-step from left to right in the wide center aisle, gaining momentum as the music swells into a full orchestration. Suddenly, I do a Fred Astaire drag to the left, ratchet up the mandarine-orange leg and torso of a chorus boy, and end up balanced on his shoulder like an epaulette with the black spot.

The guy’s grinning face assumes an even more frozen expression as all sixteen of my extended shivs sink through fabric into flesh.

After flourishing my only unclawed member, I leap down to the white stairs again and continue my descent.

While watching my acrobatics, I squint at the small screen, hoping to see the noose of twine that a rival has slipped into my path to trip me up. Alas, apparently the evidence has ended up on the cutting room floor, just like my competition for the job of A La Cat spokesdude, the yellow-bellied Maurice.

“You certainly are quite the high-stepper,” my MissTemple comments. “I wonder what made you improvise a straight-up two-yard dash? That poor dancer looks like he’s been spindled, stapled, and mutilated. But he kept a game smile on his face. What a pro!”

Hey! I am the pro here. It is not every day one has tododge a bullet, so to speak, on camera without mussing a hair.

And I certainly am slick and sleek as I finish my descent by nosing up to the Divine Yvette and sharing her repast of A La Cat on Baccarat crystal.

“Ooo-la-la. A la Cat! Ooo-la-la. A la Cat!” the offscreen kitty chorus trills while I preen and lick my chops and the Divine Yvette lowers her smoky eyelashes to snick a crumb from my chin.

“What a natural,” MissTemple declares, stealing the words from my mind. She ought to know, being an ace freelance public relations lady, and now manager of my sudden performing career. Considering my real profession is private dick, I am doing all right as a TV star.

She rewinds the bit, so we can play it again, Sam Spade.

We are no less impressed on second sight.

“Well,” she says, “if they do not get a good response from that commercial, there is something very wrong with the American viewing public.”

This disturbs me. Of course there is something very wrong with the American viewing public! They are only human. I had no idea that my media fate would depend on them. I can only hope that cats everywhere know where the remote control is, and use it.

But MissTemple is never content to let me rest upon my laurels, as firm and fluffy as they may be.

She is fooling with the VCR again, her curly red head shaking in disgust as it snaps and whirls its defiance at her manipulations. I do think these particular devices have been planted among humans by subversive alien visitors. I have never known a household appliance more capable of driving people to extreme measures.

“I know I got it,” MissTemple is muttering, whether to herself or to me it makes no difference. She is clearly out of control in either case. “I double-checked the time and channel … do not tell me—! Ah.”

I watch some dopey introductory shots filled with nothing but close-ups of people’s faces. They are all grinning like pumpkins, and it is not even Halloween, except for the faces that are grimacing as if they had just eaten fermented Free-to-Be-Feline, my least favorite health food.

Thinking of which, I burp.

Miss Temple is oblivious to my digestive distress, absorbed instead by the whirring sound the tape player makes as it reels and unreels until she has the exact place she wanted.

“Now.” She rises, aims the remote at the machine, and zaps it into loud life.

I flatten my ears. These afternoon talk shows are filled with yowling, keening people lined up to engage in hissy fits and claws-out fist-fights, making a spectacle of themselves. If I had a shoe, I would heave it at them. in fact, I watch with interest as MissTemple comes to curl up beside me on the couch, kicking off her navy-andburgundy high heels with the leather rosettes on the toes so delectable for chewing.

She settles in, absently patting my head off-center. I hate that! I observe the scene on the screen: the usual lineup, the usual host pacing like a major cat behind bars, the usual zoo of exotic guests, the usual peanut gallery of a growling and spitting audience. Miss Temple leans forward when our upstairs neighbor, Mr. Matt Devine, walks on, and from then on I do not even get my head patted off-center. Not only is this show interminable—unlike my snappy sixty second commercial debut—but MissTemple keeps rewinding the tape to run Mr. Matt’s segments over again. It is like watching an entire television program with a bad case of the stutters.

I cannot take it, and soon drift off to LullabyLand, where cat food commercials are the main event, and people are confined to sixty second cameos. In my dreams, the Divine Yvette, shaded-silver queen of the screen, is joined by her glorious shaded-golden sister, the Sublime Solange. I feel my whiskers twitch with bliss. I am not only skimming down the endless flight of steps to their supple Persian sides, but I manage to give the evil Maurice a karate kick on the way down. He flies into the air and disappears in the dark wings of the stage set.

My triumph is complete … until the buzzer rings and hauls us all offstage.

I wake up punch-drunk and blinking, to find MissTempleon the telephone and the VCR tape on permanent hold. Mr. Matt Devine’s earnest face is frozen on the screen, but Miss Temple has finally turned her back on it.

“What?” she is saying. “That cannot be. It is ridiculous.” She pauses. “Of course I can come over, but I hardly expect to be able to do anything about it, other than to talk some sense into the workmen, and they are not the type to listen to me … no! I really do not need any more ‘backup,’ thank you very much, Aldo. I can handle this, solo.”

My ears perk up. If there is something to be “handled,” and if Miss Temple Barr is insisting to someone else that she can do it “solo,” my special skills will definitely be needed.

It sniffs as if something is up at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino, where Miss Temple’s grand plan of renovation is even now coming to fulfillment, now that the classiest little hotel and casino in Las Vegas is her biggest client. I have a major stake in the Crystal Phoenix from the old days. Back before it was remodeled into the elegant joint it is today, it was a derelict hotel along the Strip, like the Aladdin was now and then for years until it finally fell like the walls of Jericho a few months ago. The Crystal Phoenix is where I began my career as dudeabout-town and unofficial house dick. That was before I met MissTemple and we decided to share digs here at the Circle Ritz apartments and condominiums.

I glance at the television screen and wrinkle my nose. That was before Mr. Matt Devine came into the picture, or even before MissTemple came to Las Vegas in the mysterious company of Mr. Tall, Dark, and Debonair: Max Kinsella, a magician known as the Mystifying Max. He lived up to his billing by vanishing without a trace for several months, leaving a vacancy with MissTemple at the Circle Ritz that I slipped into like an eel on ice. But now Mr. Max is back, an ex-magician, but not ex-enough in other departments, which both Mr. Matt Devine and yours truly are not exactly gleeful about, if you get my drift.

But why should anybody get my drift? I know enough to keep my ears open and my lips buttoned. What they do not know that I know will not hurt me. If you can follow that, you are welcome to assume you have gotten my drift as much as anybody ever will.

Chapter 2

(You Were) Always on My Mine

(“You Were Always on My Mind” was written for Elvis and he recorded it in 1972. Willie Nelson’s hit 1982 version was named song of the year in both ‘82 and ‘83)

“I’m sorry to have bothered you,” Aldo Fontana greeted Temple in the bustling lobby of the Crystal Phoenix Hotel.

“It’s no bother; it’s my job. And I’ve been a little delinquent of late,” she admitted.

Aldo, tall, dark and deadpan, took the opportunity to look her up and down, all five feet of her, appreciatively. “I have always considered you a little delinquent, MissTemple. But I wouldn’t have said it.”

“I meant that I’ve been busy and have neglected the hotel project.”

“That is why I hesitated to disturb you.” He shook the sleeves of his chablis-colored designer suit until the left cuff brushed the face of his Piaget watch.

What did the Fontana brothers, all nine of them-excluding Nicky, who didn’t run with the pack—do for a living anyway? Temple wondered. After all, the long, Liquid lines of Aldo’s suit proclaimed it an Ermenegildo Zegna.

Las Vegas was packed with pricey boutiques carrying such exotic and costly goods. Temple, a confirmed window shopper, had long before learned what was affordable and what was stratospheric.

Aldo was likely packing something even more impressive than an invisible high price tag. She eyed the impeccable flow of his wool-silk blend for a bulkier accoutrement beneath the Dairy Queen–smooth exterior. Like a Beretta.

Aldo fidgeted as much as his tailoring allowed. “I called you because I knew the boss lady wouldn’t want to deal with this. Not that you’re not a very boss lady, only you’re not the boss lady, if you get my drift.”

The only drifts in Las Vegas were sand, so Templedidn’t let any grit lodge in her shoes at the notion that she was a mere second banana.

Van von Rhine, who managed the Crystal Phoenix with elegant ease, was also married to its owner, Nicky Fontana, Aldo’s “little” brother. Since all the Fontanabrood stood around six feet tall, such distinctions were pretty moot outside the family.

“What wouldn’t Van like?” Temple asked.

“The, er, nature of the crisis. For one thing, she would have to wear a hard hat that would muss up that neat French roll on the back of her head.”

“And you figure I can’t muss.” Temple ruefully ran a hand over waves of unabashedly undisciplined red hair.

“No muss, no fuss with TempleBarr, PR,” Aldo grinned as he parroted the name and title on her business card. “Besides, I need to check this out with a cool head before I report to the management. They tend not to believe me because I’m family, you know.”

“I know. My big brothers never did believe me about anything either, but you are the big brother here, Aldo.”

“And I am up to the job.” Aldo patted his breast pocket. Temple suspected he was referring to a hidden vein of lead and steel. “I see you have been eyeing my suit, which shows that you have not lost your impeccable taste since last we met. I wish to assure you that not only my software is first class, but my hardware also.”

This statement had a certain sexual connotation neither she nor Aldo chose to notice. One thing about the brothers Fontana, attractive and single though they might be: they always treated Temple with the benign unpredatory tolerance of Great Danes babysitting a Yorkshire terrier. Of course, in the dog world, the tiny Yorkie dominated anything bigger than itself when whatever breed it was … wasn’t looking.

“So you think there might be dirty work in the mine?” Temple led the way through the maze of moats, fountains, and crystal objects that comprised the hotel lobby.

“Mines are always dirty work.” Aldo sighed and looked down. “Your footwear is most attractive, but I fear it wasn’t made for underground exploration.”

“Listen, these high heels aren’t just for looks. They give me terrific traction. You ever heard of pitons?”

“But we will not be climbing, MissTemple, we will be descending.”

“The story of our lives and all human striving, right?” Temple stopped as they moved into the open area around the huge emerald-cut-shape of pool-blue water. Scaffolding draped in dusty plastic hid the entrance to the vast reconstruction project underway below.

“Lucky that all those tunnels from Jersey Joe Jackson’s heyday allow the Phoenixto expand below the surface,” Aldo mused. “Land along the Strip is going for a hundred grand a square foot these days.”

Temple gazed down at the burgundy leather toes of her shoes. According to Aldo’s latest statistics, just standing here was awfully expensive.

Aldo offered her a hand, while his other hand swept back a dusty swath of plastic. Temple ducked under it.

They suddenly stood in a shrouded world of long iron rods and lumber stacked around an elevator that was little more than a skeletal crate on pulleys.

Temple stepped aboard the wooden floor and tried not to watch while Aldo lowered the boom, so to speak.

Rays from underground work lights seeped through the cracks in the elevator floor. Soon they were bumping to a stop in a cavernous space housing generators and worktables and machines that resembled sluggish giant wasps, so streaked with black grease were their yellow-painted casings.

The scene was indeed no place for high-rise heels. “It’s time to exchange my hardware for softwear,” Temple announced.

She tugged Aldo’s sleeve to stop him while she sat down on what passed for a tuffet down here, a newspaper-strewn bench. She slung her ever-present tote bag to the ground. No spiders for Miss Muffet. Unless you considered Aldo….

“I can’t imagine what you’re packing in that major knapsack,” Aldo said, more than somewhat in awe.

“For one thing, tennis shoes.” From the wide mouth of her tote bag she delivered a mushroom-pale pair of high-topped sneakers, the massive galoshes that passed for leisure footwear nowadays, and began fighting the laces open.

“These things make my shoe size look like ‘number nine,’ which is what the miner’s daughter Clementine wore in the old song,” she grunted as she bent over to lace them up.

“I would assist you,” Aldo said, “but I might crease the suit.”

Temple waved away his semioffer. “You’re the one at real risk down here. That suit couldn’t take one amok dust mote, and this place is a sawdust factory.” She sneezed in coincidental testimony to her comment.

Aldo whipped a silk square of exquisite design from his breast pocket.

“Save it. You may need it to sit on later, and my handy tote bag has plenty of tissues.”

Aldo gazed in admiration as Temple extracted an aloe-soaked rectangle of white and blew her nose. “You are like Indiana Jones; you always have the right tool with you.”

In a couple of minutes she was smaller in stature, but better outfitted for mine shaft exploration. Standing, Temple stamped her mushy flat feet on the rough terrain. “They certainly made it seem like an excavation for a mine, so far. But where are the workmen?”

Aldo shrugged as he lifted two yellow hard hats off a rack and handed her one.

“This is gonna fit like an open umbrella,” she predicted, and despite the smaller inner lining, it did indeed sink down on her head almost to her nose.

Aldo paused, smoothed back his patent leather hair and subjected it to the encompassing indignity of yellow plastic.

“These dome lights are neat.” Temple snapped on the headlamp and waggled her head to watch the beam slash through the dusty dimness like a light-sword blade.

Man-made constellations on the rocky walls flashed in phosphorescent spurts.

“This really feels authentic,” Temple marveled. “But where are the workmen?”

“That’s just it.” Aldo shook his head mournfully, the light atop his hard hat casting a beam that swayed like a rope bridge over the fake rocks. “They’re not working much since the … incident.”

A raised voice down the empty tunnel interrupted them.

Temple couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was clear: admonition.

She mushed along on her marshmallow-soled shoes, consoled that at least now they could pussyfoot onto the scene unheard.

The man who was speaking obviously felt no fear of being overheard.

“You gutless wonders,” he was railing. “You call yourselves a work crew? This here’s supposed to be an attraction, guys. It’s supposed to be scary, huh? That’s what we’re here for. So why’re you all shakin’ like a set a gag teeth? Light shows are what made Vegas famous.”

Temple and Aldo rounded a bend to find the tunnel had broadened into a cavern. Heavy-duty machinery, use-scuffed, sat idle.

So did the workmen in their yellow hard hats, beams from the built-in lights cast on the ground. Temple had never seen such a hang-dog crew, obviously in need of an “Avast, me hearties” speech.

Which they were now getting from the foreman. One by one, the hard hats lifted and their beams focused on the newcomers.

The foreman turned, for a moment looking worried. But his expression soon hardened into contempt. “And who are you two? Dorothy and the Straw Man?”

Aldo stepped forward as if posing for an Esquire ad in a soldier of fortune magazine. “That’s `scarecrow’ to you. We are representatives of the management. What’s the holdup down here? Still seeing things?”

The workmen stirred. Some spat. All of them grumbled uneasily.

Temple realized that she and Aldo looked like dudes on a mustang ranch. She eyed the foreman, one of those salt-of-the-earth, sweat-of-the-brow types who wore a tool belt like it sported six-guns. Someone who inspired confidence, and a wide berth.

He was tall, burly, big-bellied, hairy, and grizzled, like a teddy bear gone ballistic.

She decided not to beat around the bushiness. “We heard there was trouble down here.” It was hard not to add “in RiverCity.”

Everyone shifted his weight, but no one spoke. “Everything’s obviously been going great,” Templewent on. “The mine shafts are a work of art, I see the ride tracks are laid, the phosphorescent walls are as creepy as you could hope—”

All motion, even spitting, stopped on the word “phosphorescent.”

Maybe it had too many syllables.

“You know, the eerie, glowing … whatever … you painted on the walls.”

A silence. Then Teddy Foreman spoke with the grumble of a wakening volcano. “That’s just it, Miss. We got too much phosphorescence for our own good.” “It’s not like, a chemical reaction? An allergy?”

A workman laughed. “That’s it. An allergy. We need shots.”

“I know the kinda shots we need,” another man shouted.

But they were guffawing instead of growling under their breaths and spitting, and Temple counted that a victory. Of sorts.

“So what’s wrong?” she asked, straight up.

The foreman removed his hard hat to scratch his bald spot. “It’s like this. The set dressers come down after us to paint up the rocks. Like you said, real nice job. Except the phosphorescence detail comes behind us. And we suddenly got a little swamp gas ahead of us.”

Temple advanced into their midst, aware of Aldo like a reversed shadow on her heels. Such as those heels were. “What’s ahead of you?” She peered into the tunnel’s continuation on the cavern’s other side.

Teddy shrugged. “Doesn’t show up right now.” “Maybe the light’s bad,” she suggested.

Hard hats shook.

“Lights are what made us see it,” Teddy the Foreman said.

“It was weird,” another voice volunteered. “It moved.” “These beams of light are always moving.” Templelooked to Aldo for agreement. His nod demonstrated how wavery a hard hat beam could be. “Even breathing makes them tremble a little, you know how it is when you look through binoculars.”

A man stood up, his beam a tremor in the dimness, like his voice.

“We saw it. We shouldn’ta seen it. It was brighter than those paintings behind us. It was moving. Away.”

“Cold lightning.” Aldo’s voice sounded firm as a firearm.

“Naw. We’ve seen cold lighting. We’ve seen blue light arcing. Spark showers. Electricity on a bad trip.”

A third man’s voice joined the chorus. “This was .. . thin light, but shaped, like those tunnels people who are dying see. Only the light wasn’t the tunnel, the light was the man in it.”

“Man?” Temple asked sharply.

“Or a woman in pants, or an ape in chaps,” an anonymous voice snapped from the dark. “Jeez, lady, I guess we know what a man or a woman looks like in the dark, even when they’re gussied up in some strange-fangled halo—”

“Or an aura?” Temple wondered.

“Coulda been this guy here in the ice-cream suit, if it glowed. You know, pale with the pinched-in waist. Don’t care what you call it—halo, aura, Day-Glo gasoline, it was weird.”

“You think you saw a ghost,” Temple concluded. They were silent.

Temple realized it was more serious than that. “An … alien?”

Another silence.

“Know what I think? I don’t think it was really anything weird like that.” The foreman nodded, a Daniel come to judgment. “It was Elvis.”

The silence went unbroken for a long, long time. The simple rightness of the suggestion had struck everyone dumb.

At last, a consensus.

Like the apparition itself, the inescapable conclusion was very, very weird.

Chapter 3

Blue Suede Blues

(Elvis recorded “Blue Suede Shoes” in 1956, and sang it at his screen test on April Fools Day that year)

“Elvis … Presley?”

Van von Rhine, an elegant taffy-haired woman in an Escada sueded-silk suit, lifted nearly invisible eyebrows with her voice.

That she should even have to use the last name indicated how bizarre she found the problem that Templeand Aldo had duly brought to her ultramodern office.

Then she laughed. “Really. This is … incredible. We’ll be accused of angling for publicity if this gets out. Elvis. Presley. Please! That’s another hotel. Better that the … visitant should be Howard Hughes. Or one of those X-Files creatures.”

“Aliens,” Aldo put in.

Van nodded absently, staring at the transparent surface of her glass desktop as if it were a wishing well. Temple realized that she had never seen anyone who kept an office so neat that a glass desktop remained empty except for its carefully placed accoutrements.

Van’s fingers tapped the end of a fountain pen on the glass. She looked worried when she glanced back up at them. “Glowing, they say. A man’s figure. You don’t suppose it could be the—the—”

“The ghost of Jersey Joe Jackson is too much to hope for,” Temple interjected. “There hasn’t been any .. . unauthorized activity in the Ghost Suite lately, has there?”

“Nothing anyone has had the nerve to tell me.” Van threw down the pen with a discordant click. “You do understand that if there is any subject on which the staff would spare my feelings—?”

“Van, your superstitious ways are legendary,” Templesaid. “But other people eat up the odd, the weird, the eerie. Jersey Joe Jackson is a fabulous legend to build the theme ride around: a poor person’s Howard Hughes, a desert pack-rat and miner-nineteen-forty-niner with stashes of hidden assets all over the place, who built this hotel in the old days, went broke, and died here. Anybody that interesting was bound to leave a little eau de ectoplasm behind. I wish I’d seen him hanging around his old suite, seven thirteen, instead of you. I’d have asked him for personal appearances.” Temple laughed as Van looked horrified. “But I know you don’t want to hear that because you believe in ghosts and other superstitious sightings. I’m amazed you let a black cat like Midnight Louie hang around out back before he migrated down the Strip to the Circle Ritz.”

“As long as he didn’t cross my path. And his successor, Midnight Louise, is especially good at avoiding me. I wish I could say as much for the ghost,” she finished with a mutter.

“You know, a ghostly visitation is not necessarily a bad thing. From a marketing standpoint.”

“You’re the public relations whiz. Is it possible you arranged for this apparition to make a small stir?”

“If I had, I’d be plenty disappointed. I’d much rather have the spirit of Jersey Joe Jackson show up than Elvis Presley.”

Aldo interjected himself into their conversation. “You got something against Elvis, MissTemple?”

“Well, other than the fact that he’s irrelevant to the theme of our hotel—”

“Elvis? ‘Irrelevant’ to Vegas? Hey, he made this town.”

Van joined Temple in staring at Aldo. Neither had seen a Fontana brother in such a state of enthusiasm, with the sole exception of Nicky, Van’s husband.

“Are you a fan, Aldo?” Van asked in polite amazement.

“Aren’t you? Isn’t everybody?”

“No!” Temple responded.

“What’s the matter? You don’t like rock ‘n’ roll?” “No,” Van said much more calmly.

Aldo looked as if he had been shot in the heart. “This is serious. I can understand the boss lady not liking Elvis. She grew up over there in Europe. But, MissTemple, you do not look like someone who would not like Elvis.”

Under Aldo’s wounded gaze, Temple found herself flailing for words, a novelty.

“Well, these things are very personal, Aldo. I never thought that much about why I don’t like Elvis… . For one thing, he was pretty much a dead issue when I was a teenager.”

“And he became so overblown in his later years,” Van put in, “so—”

“Fat?” Aldo suggested pugnaciously.

Van remained as cool as crème de menthe. “I was referring to his bejeweled jumpsuits, those World Wrestling champion-sized belts, those sideburns bushy enough to have made a grizzly bear blush.”

“I think Van is describing a general air of … tacky,” Temple added.

“Aw, ladies. You just do not get it. Elvis had to be bigger than life. His fans expected it. He was the King.” “The king of codeine,” Van put in.

“The king of groupies,” Temple added.

Aldo shook his head. “That’s just bad press. He was really, underneath it all, a nice, simple, misunderstood guy.”

Temple and Van exchanged a glance.

“I’ll say this,” Van said, ending all further discussion. “He better not be haunting my construction site, or he’ll be the king of dying twice.”

Chapter 4

I Need Somebody to Lean On

(The first song by Elvis associate Red West to appear in a movie, Viva Las Vegas with Elvis and Ann-Margret)

“M-miss Barr? I doubt you remember me, but this is Merle Conrad. I, ah, really need to talk to you about my daughter. I don’t have an answering machine, so I’ll keep trying to call you.”

Temple stared at her own answering machine. She couldn’t imagine someone existing without this essential artifact of new-Millennium life. Even Matt Devine, Mr. Non-high-tech Living, had bought one.

Merle Conrad? The woman had sounded upset, but hesitant. Temple, as a public relations freelancer, seldom dealt with people who found her—or a mere machine—intimidating. Yet Temple, who could read stress in voices like an earthquake meter could detect inner-core tremors, would have sworn the caller was anxious. Anxious about calling little ole her, who was about as imposing as Jiminy Cricket? She puzzled over the call for a moment, agonizing over her in-and-out schedule. The poor woman would miss more often than not, and Temple couldn’t do a thing about it, since the caller had left no phone number. Why not? Then speculation faded before the nearer stimulus of anticipation. Matt was coming down from his apartment to review his recent national talk show tape with her. Presto! From PR gal to media consultant. At least on a small, personal scale.

She left the spare bedroom that served as her office and skated across the polished parquet floor to the living area, massing magazines and papers into tidier piles as she passed. Piles were still piles. She really had to find some domestic time-out one of these days, whistle while you work and all that. Imagine that the broom …

A knock on the door stopped her in mid-tidy and mid-Disney animation nostalgia. Matt never bothered to ring her many-noted doorbell nowadays, and Max always entered without knocking, born second-story man that he was. At least she could always guess who was not coming to dinner! She opened the door, surprised to experience a frisson of anxiety herself. Why did seeing someone you knew on national television seem to make him more of a stranger than before?

“How’d it go?” she asked as she swung the door wide. Temple would never make it in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” world.

“You tell me.” Matt smiled ruefully and walked in, apparently looking around for Midnight Louie. “You’re the one who saw it.”

“Not the only one. Hundreds of thousands, millions of people saw the show.”

He winced, standing in the middle of the living room and taking inventory of its furnishings as if to ensure they were still there. “I feel like I’ve been in another world, even though L.A. is less than three hundred miles away.”

“Listen, compared to the rest of the country, L.A. is three hundred light-years away. Scared you off with their manically laid-back ways, huh?”

He shrugged, still looking around.

“Louie’s lounging in the other room, and nobody else is here, or has been recently, if that’s what you’re looking for signs of.”

“I’m not looking for anybody,” he said quickly. “I’m just trying to make sure I’m on terra firma again. That whole lifestyle there makes you feel as if you’re standing on a fault line. The costly clothes, the sleek convertibles, the head-turning blonds—”

“Hey, don’t put them down: you are one.”

“Toys R Us, huh?”

He sat on the sofa suddenly, and eyed the VCR as if it were a spy machine.

Maybe it was Temple’s imagination, but just a few days on the fabled coast seemed to have sun-streaked his blond hair to a beachy sheen. Matt favored clothes in modest shades of beige and sand and khaki, but they just enhanced his brown-eyed, blond good looks.

“So what’s the verdict on the home screens?” he asked.

She sat beside him and picked up the remote control. “Obviously the camera loves you to pieces.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re ultra-telegenic. Don’t have a bad angle. Voice is pleasant. Since this was a panel discussion show, you were in competition with a whole lineup of guests. Interesting.”

“I didn’t consider this a competition.”

“No, but some of the other guests did. They want their moment in the spotlight, their fair share of airtime, which means more than anybody else. You were just there to talk about the issue of the day, and it shows. Shows them up. I’m going to run it, and you look at it like you were the other guests’ agent, wanting your client to shine. See what you think of yourself as the competition.”

He frowned. “We were there to communicate on a hot-button issue: unwed teens, and kids desperate enough to abandon or even kill their own newborns. I wouldn’t have gone on if it was some shallow media feeding frenzy. You told me the Amanda show was respectable.”

“It is, as talk shows go. Not quite the cachet of Oprah, but not everybody can be number one, A. S. After Springer. I’ll roll the tape. Just relax and watch. And then we’ll discuss it.”

This time Matt frowned at his wristwatch, the more formal model his mother had given him for Christmas instead of the drugstore variety he usually wore. He was still dressed for stardom. “That’ll take a whole hour.”

“No, it won’t. I’ll fast-forward through commercials, and there are a lot of ‘em.”

“This will feel silly. Watching myself. I was hoping you could summarize everything. You know, tell me: talk slower or faster, or quit looking at the floor, or whatever.”

“Quit looking at the floor and watch the tape,” she mock-ordered. Essentially private people could be very obstinate about public appearances. At thirty-three, Matt had the reserve of a man twice his age. Not so surprising. In a few months he had catapulted from newly ex-Roman Catholic priest working as an anonymous local hotline counselor to radio shrink to a national hot property because of one fateful phone call only days ago.

On the other hand, maybe nowadays his diffidence had a different cause: Temple’s vanished live-in lover, Max Kinsella the magician, had reappeared to resume their relationship just as Matt was making tentative goo-goo eyes at her. Temple admittedly had goo-goo-eyed back, or probably first. So now that she and Max were again a matched pair, Matt made the awkward hypote-nuse of a triangle etched in dotted lines. Darn! Templecouldn’t have a lover who wasn’t a friend, but it could be hard to have a male friend who wasn’t a lover.

She finally hit the right buttons on the remote. AMANDA, a graphic announced over the theme music. Suddenly, a recorded telephone conversation—an interrogation, actually—crackled over close-ups of the hostess clutching a mike, listening intently against a background of sober audience members.

The girl’s voice was a numb mumble, quietly hysterical. The man’s voice was Matt’s, sounding calm, but deeply concerned.

As the shocking sentences faded, Amanda eyed the camera. “Actual audiotape of an almost-tragedy, folks: a teenager having a baby in a motel room called a late-night radio psychologist, convinced the infant was an alien she had to destroy. Only the man on the other end of the line could talk her out of it. And here he is.”

Matt entered from stage right, wearing pretty much what he wore now, except for the addition of a blazer and muted tie. Amanda climbed the shallow steps to the stage and joined him in sitting dead center in a row of empty chairs.

“Matt Devine works for WCOO-AM in Las Vegas. When did this happen, Matt?”

“Ten days ago. And I’m not a radio psychologist, just a counselor.”

“More than ‘just a counselor,’ I think. You used to be a Catholic priest.”

“Yes, I was.” Temple could tell he was unhappy about publicly confessing that ex-identity, but fame demands all the information that’s fit to mention, and more, if it can get it.

“So it must have appalled you, this young girl so distraught that she viewed her own newborn as an alien being that needed to be destroyed.”

“Most people toss around the word ‘denial,’ but they don’t truly understand it. Denial is an emotional version of hysterical blindness. The consequences of her situation were so unthinkable, she couldn’t see them as real. In her case, imagining some X-Files type of alien-baby substitution played into her need to deny her condition, to keep it secret at all costs.”

“And she was willing to drown her baby in the bathtub?”

“Who can say? She sounded like she might.”

“Given your religious background, you show a lot of compassion for her on the tape.”

“There’s no contradiction. A religious background should evoke compassion. Condemnation never helped anyone.”

“Well, Dr. Laurel might disagree.”

“Dr. Laurel wasn’t there.”

“No, but she is here. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Laurel Lawson.”

Temple hit the mute and pause buttons. “That must have been a bad moment. Didn’t you see her in the greenroom backstage?”

“No.” Matt stared ahead at the freeze-frame screen. “She was a surprise.”

“They call it confrontational television.”

“I thought you said this was a decent talk show.” “Well, no talk show is really decent, is it?”

“But she’s a veteran. Been at it much longer than I.” “And takes a much tougher stance.”

“Tougher? Or just less tolerant?”

Temple rolled some more tape to follow the slim, suited figure as she entered and took a chair on the moderator’s right. “Very symbolic placement. You on the left, her on the right. What a media vixen. Spouting holier-than-thou inflexible Ten Commandments stuff, and she had an affair with a married man years ago; even has some undraped photos zipping around on the Internet.”

“They ambushed me,” Matt agreed, refusing to rise to the bait of his rival’s ancient shenanigans. “So I ended up defending myself and my caller.”

“I thought it was pretty brilliant when you accused Dr. Laurel of being willing to throw the mother out with the bathwater.”

“I was getting angry.”

“It didn’t show.”

“That’s when I’m angriest. I never would have gone on if I thought that confused child was going to be used as a bad example. She was simply stressed beyond her fragile defenses. And that dysfunctional family … What you’re saying, Temple, is that I was out of my league.”

“Oh, yes, definitely.”

“A good lesson. Don’t do this again.”

“Oh, no. Not at all.”

“What?”

“You’re out of your league because you’re not playing to the lowest common denominator. That’s just what talk TV needs, so I think you should do as much of it as they ask you to.”

Matt did not look encouraged.

Chapter 5

Help Me

(Larry Gatlin wrote this for Elvis in 1973; his recording peaked at

6 on the country chart in 1974)

The knock on Temple’s door that evening caught her trying to do something that seldom turned out well: cook.

She turned the heat down to simmer under a frying pan choked with softening vegetables and tough shrimp. If time could heal all wounds maybe it could mend a stir-fry that was too fried to stir.

She wondered what Matt might have to tell her now. His life had become a whirligig of news updates, spinning to the tune of a media frenzy.

She opened the door, stunned to find a strange woman waiting on the other side.

Temple stood there, spatula lifted as high as a homely wand, one curl of overcooked onion clinging like a comma to its nonstick surface.

“I’m sorry to bother you.” The woman shuffled hershoes, reminding Temple of a door-to-door solicitor who had suddenly developed cold feet. “You’re making dinner.”

“That’s debatable,” Temple said wryly, The woman’s voice sounded familiar. Even the face seemed familiar.

Or maybeTemple had just seen too many women like this when she had been a TV news reporter. The expressionless faces of women who were victims of whatever car-jacking/rape-drug/lost child/domestic violence case caught the public’s attention for the blink of a battered eye.

“It’s … I’m Merle.”

“Merle!” That rang a bell, even if Merle herself had eschewed using Temple’s doorbell. The telephone callsTemple kept missing. Merle Who? Merle What. Above all, Merle Why.

“Sorry.” The woman was turning to retrace her steps down the short neck of hallway that led to the circular building’s curving central area.

“Wait!” Temple edged into the hall. “I remember now. You wanted to talk to me. So come on in. Talk. Share the spatter.”

“Spatter?”

“I’m trying to stir-fry.”

Merle’s noncommittal face twitched a little. It might have been an infant smile. “Smells more like smoked barbeque.”

“Omigosh! That darn controller knob. I can never tell which way is hotter or cooler.”

Temple rushed back into the kitchen, where smoke was now billowing righteously to the ceiling. She swatted at it with the slotted spatula, managing only to flip the slimy onion slice onto her cheek.

“Here.” Merle marched in, snatched a length of paper towels to use as a makeshift hot pad and transferred the smoking fry pan to an unheated burner. “Do you do this often?” she asked.

“Burn or cook? Obviously not, either one.” Templewatched closely as Merle turned the control a tiny bit to the right.

“You just went past ‘Low’ to the highest setting,” Merle said.

Temple peered at the still-sizzling contents of the pan. “The black charring kind of underlines the faded color of the vegetables. Maybe char-stir-fried is an innovation.”

“Whew. Have you got a venting fan in this place?” “This building is a little old.”

Merle leaned over the smoky stove top to press a switch on the charming little copper canopy overhead. With a whirring roar, smoke was suctioned up into it like magic.

“I never knew that was there,” Temple admitted.

Merle, speechless again, stood under the glaringly unkind kitchen light, uneasily dusting her palms together as if the crisis, being over, had left her with a case of the willies.

The last few moments had given Temple a chance to sum up her visitor. Besides lank dishwater-brown hair, Merle had nearly invisible eyebrows, wore lipstick in an unflattering shade of coral, and her oversized beige sweater had the same pulled-out-of-shape droop as her shoulders and her spirit.

“Come on,” Temple said, “sit down in the living room and enjoy the haze.”

“You don’t remember who I am,” Merle noted as she padded after Temple like a lost puppy.

“Gee. No. I’m sorry.”

“We only met for a moment, and I wasn’t the main event.”

“What was the main event?”

“Not what. Who.”

“Well?”

“Crawford.”

Temple’s face must have betrayed her estimation of the hearer of that name. because Merle hastened on, tripping over her own words like a nervous teenager.

“It was at the hospital. When he was in for that hear trouble. And you took over handling some event for him I don’t remember what.”

“You’re his . ..” Oops, Temple didn’t have a quick descriptive phrase at her fingertips. She should never have started such a clumsy sentence.

“Girlfriend, I guess you’d call it. Insignificant other.’ Merle’s laugh tried for self-deprecating and—like Temple’s stir-fry dish—fell far short of expectations.

“I was going to say, Quincey’s mother!” Templecoasted on a saving burst of memory, trying to lend the woman a more glorious role than unsanctioned consort to Temple’s least-favorite male in the entire world. Accentuate the positive. “How’s Quincey doing?”

Merle’s crumpled doily of a face collapsed into shattered silk.

“Sit down,” Temple insisted, finally hitting her stride, Solving face-shattering problems was a PR woman’s specialty, even if stir-fry was not. “I’ll whip up what I’m really good at, instant anything, and you can tell me all about it.”

“This is really good tea,” Merle said enthusiastically about eight minutes later.

“It ought to be. The hot water’s the only thing I contributed to it”

“The, ah, lime slices are an original touch.”

Temple decided it was better to accept undeserved praise than to give it. “Thank you.”

Now that Merle Conrad had shed her shapeless cardigan sweater and had settled into the sofa, she looked more relaxed and less harassed. Maybe it was the comforting pillow of Midnight Louie that had curled up next to her, gazing up at her pale face as if he were all ears.

“What a pretty cat,” Merle said, patting his head.

“Pretty cat” did not exactly describe twenty pounds of muscular, vasectomized tomcat, but Temple was just glad Louie was on his best behavior. He apparently got along best with the female of the species, any species.

Having given Louie his due, Merle turned sad hazel eyes back to Temple. “Crawford keeps saying that you should come to work with him at the Scoop.”

“I left journalism a long time ago,” Temple said, politely refraining from mentioning that the Las Vegas Scoop was to journalism what lumps of coal are to diamonds.

“It’s just a joke. Then, he says, you could have a column called ‘Scoop Snoop Sister.’ “

Temple was not amused. “Merle, is this about a .. . criminal matter?”

Merle put her mug atop the morning paper on the coffee table.

“It’s about a worrywart mother, I suppose. But Crawford’s dragged Quincey into another one of his crazy schemes, and I’m worried about her.”

Temple had been worried about Quincey too. The sixteen-year-old had a diffident mother who was under the thumb of a pseudo-stepfather she loathed. Naturally, she retaliated by acting like Biker Chick.

“I got to know her a little,” Temple said, “when we were working in the pageant together last fall.”

Merle nodded, frowning. “As ‘pose-down models.’ That doesn’t sound too savory, but I supposed if an adult woman like yourself was doing it—”

“You didn’t see the pageant?”

“No. Quincey said it wasn’t much of anything.” Temple nodded, more to indicate information absorbed than agreement.

The romance cover-hunk contest had been something, all right, even without murder on the menu, which there had been. The pose-downs involved steamy simulated embraces with ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredth percent impurely unclad male cover models. Templehad wondered why any mother would let her teenagedaughter participate. As for herself, well, she had been undercover at the time.

“But this new thing Crawford’s got her into—” Merle was saying.

Temple jerked her memory back from that close encounter with actual death as well as virtual desire. “What new thing?”

“With the new hotel-casino. Of course they’re making ‘ a big to-do about it, but Crawford’s roped Quincey into playing a ‘role’ at the opening, and I’m afraid it could be … dangerous.”

“Wait. What new hotel-casino? There are so many right now, the Belladonna, otherwise known as the Beluga, for one.”

“Oh, the really big one.”

“There are so many really big ones, as the late Ed Sullivan would point out.”

“Huh? Oh, the `reeely big shew’ man from early TV. But haven’t you seen the signs?”

“In the heavens?”

“No. On the streets. They’re all over town: The Kingdome is Coming. The Kingdome is Coming.”

“Oh, those! I thought they were religious billboards.” “Not ‘Kingdom.’ Kingdome.”

“A new sports stadium? At a hotel-casino? Makes sense. The town hasn’t fully tapped the sports theme.”

“A new arena, all right. But for the King.” When Temple looked blank, Merle added, a bit testily, “Elvis.”

“Elvis?” That name kept turning up in her life with uneasy frequency.

“Yes. Everybody’s been going on about it.”

“Well, I was a little distracted, by some other things.” Like a few murders and a private life. “So it’s an Elvis hotel. High time, sounds like.”

“Anyway, Crawford is emceeing the Elvis imitator contest.”

Temple nodded. She could picture that. She could hardly picture it without laughing, but she could picture it.

“And he’s talked Quincey into dressing up like Priscilla Presley back in the sixties. The winner of the contest gets a championship belt from the hands of `Priscilla’ and gets a date with her. Except it’s Quincey.”

Temple kept nodding, although the gesture had started feeling mechanical. She could picture Quincey with Young Priscilla’s sky-high-teased dark tresses, wearing enough eye makeup to weigh a Las Vegas hooker down to her knees. Actually, Quincey was a natural for the role.

“And they want to kill her,” Merle added.

“What? Kill Quincey?”

“No, Priscilla!”

“But she lives in a Los Angeles suburb, doesn’t she?”

“Maybe. I don’t know where she lives! And they don’t want to kill that Priscilla anyway. Maybe just mutilate her a little.”

“But—”

“They want to kill the Priscilla who married Elvis in 1967 and divorced him in 1973. I guess they’ve always wanted to kill her.”

“Wait a minute! I don’t know much about Elvis, but who wants to kill her?”

“Everybody who loved Elvis hated Priscilla, Quincey says. Either because they envied her when she married him, or they blamed her for his downfall and death after she left him.”

“Talk about a no-win situation. Then female fans are the threat?”

“Sure. And some of the men, too. There was always a power struggle between Priscilla and the Mafia, you know.”

“The Mafia’s involved in this?”

“Not the plain Mafia. The Memphis Mafia, the guys who were Elvis’s bodyguards and gofers, who Priscilla was fighting for Elvis’s time and attention.”

“You talk like all this was just yesterday, Merle. It was over thirty years ago.”

Merle picked up the cooling tea and drank deeply. “I’ve been listening to Quincey chatter about it night and day. She’s gone ga-ga over the whole Elvis mania. She calls it digging deeply into her role. I call it obsession.” “Well, Elvis was an obsessive kind of guy, to hear tell. It’s only fitting his fans should follow suit.”

“Suit! And that’s another thing. This is a very costly show. Those stupid jumpsuits all the imitators wear cost a small fortune. And then the hotel invited all sorts of internationally famous designers to design new fantasy jumpsuits for Elvis, some with real gems on them, and those are on exhibit. I tell you, Miss Barr, the whole Kingdome is a festering circus of the seven deadly sins: avarice and gluttony and pride and envy and lust and—what else was there?”

“Sloth,” Temple answered absently.

“That’s why I thought of you,” Merle said, punctuating this interesting statement with a last swallow of cold peppermint tea.

“Just how concrete are these seven deadly sins getting?”

Merle leaned back to pet Midnight Louie again. He had been as quiet and attentive as Temple had ever seen him. Perhaps he was interested in Elvis lore.

“Well,” Merle said, “I don’t want to be an alarmist, but Quincey is getting death threats.”

“How. Telephoned? Written?”

“Both. And yesterday, when she was in the dressing room alone putting on all that false Priscilla hair and couldn’t see, someone sneaked up behind her, grabbed her around the throat, and cut an ‘E’ into her with a razor blade, right where her neck and shoulder meet.”

“Merle, this is a job for the police!”

“They think it’s just some Elvis nut.”

“Nuts are called nuts because they’re dangerous. What do you think I can do?”

“The police are ‘keeping an eye on things,’ and hotel security swears it’s going to be all over the place, but there are so many people in costume and weird getups … anybody could get around all that officialdom. I thought it’d be natural for a PR woman to be on the site, and you could, you know, snoop.”

“This doesn’t sound like a snooping job. This sounds like a bodyguarding job.” Temple’s eyes opened wide. Merle leaned forward, hopeful at last. “And that I might be able to arrange.”

“Thank you so much. You’re such a good example for Quincey.”

“I am?”

“Oh, yes. She said you really got down and boogied at that romance cover-hunk pageant. She thinks you’re way cool for an old person.”

Chapter 6

Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain

(Recorded at Graceland in 1976, the last song Elvis ever sang the day he died, August 16, 1977)

The King eyed himself in the mirror.

His hair. Finally showing the bends from dyin’ all these years. Hair’s only human. You bend it enough, it’ll break. It’ll just die.

His eyebrows were refusing to grow, like a cotton crop that had been water-starved too often. Had to paint ‘em on now. Mascara on his baby-blond lashes, dye on his head and his eyebrows, and even on his chest hairs now that he was older and those born-waxed-smooth boyish pecs were growin’ moss. He’d gone white when they weren’t lookin’. When he wasn’t lookin’.

But he hadn’t been lookin’ for a long time. Too long.

The King blinked. At least his eyelashes weren’t fallin’ out, but they weren’t the thickets he was born with. Born blond. Blue-eyed blond. Wishy-washy. Momma’s boy.

Fixed that.

Black. Boot-black dyed hair, eyebrows, lashes. Black ‘cycle cap. Black like Brando. Wild Ones. Wild Thing. Wild in the Country. One of those damn movies when he’d tried to get serious about bein’ an actor.

The King frowned at his reflection. He was an actor now, by God. Actin’ like he was alive, still the King.

As long as he could animate this ole bod, he was.

The heart of rock ‘n’ roll wasn’t in no damn Cleveland. Or in Motown, and damn sure not in Nashville. Ever. lt was in Memphis. On Beale Street. Always had been, even before he got there. No kings in Memphis, though.

That’s why he’d always liked the Luxor Hotel, when they put that puppy up. Even downtown Memphis had its fake pyramid now, a big bow to the Egyptian forerunner.

He liked those Egyptians. Life after death and all that. Very mystical. Sometimes he suspected he was one of them. Death was just crossin’ that river. Over Jordan, over Nile. Let my people go. Did the Egyptians have music? Must have. You can’t have death or a civilization without music.

Book of the Dead. Hah! He was bigger than any ole Pharaoh. He had collected whole Books of the Dead, mystical books on eastern religions and numerology and all sorts of intriguing things, mountains and mountains of them. Whole pyramids. His entire friggin’ life had been a Book of the Dead. Only no one knew it.

Except maybe mama.

Mama.

Without her, nothin’. With her, nothin’ and everythin’ pulling back and forth until he was a piece of taffy. Blond taffy in a black wrapper; you know, the shiny little papers with the twisty ends. So tasty-sweet, like Krispy Kreme donuts, like young girls. Addictive. Gotta eat more and more of ‘em, until you burst.

Guess his end had been twisty enough. Twisted gut, damn near drove him nuts the last few years. Distending his stomach, making his throne room the bathroom, his crown of thorns a chronic case of constipation. His insides kinking up on him, just like his outsides had. And couldn’t say it, breathe it. Hewas the King. No weaknesses. Nothin’ snapped, ‘cept the halr on his head.

Nothin’ snapped in public at least, until two of his oldest friends and a new guy pulled the plug on his peace of mind with their tell-all book. Elvis, What Happened? they called it. The Memphis Mafia reveals everything but what really happened to start it all. What happened was that the weight of everyone on hls back had finally gotten too much.

Back can snap too, just like overworked hair.

Chapter 7

King of the Whole Wide World

(Elvis sang this over the credits of Kid Galahad, his 1962 film)

Before Temple would recruit even Boss Banana’s boys as bodyguards, she felt honor-bound to check out the scene of the forthcoming crime. Before she did that, she felt obligated to check in with her most gainful employer of the moment.

Being a freelance public relations person allowed Temple to handle a variety of special events, bouncing in and out of projects like a dancing ball on a slide-projection set of sing-along lyrics. She loved moving into whitewater-rafting mode for concentrated periods of time, followed by the lull of tranquil waters. It suited her employment background: TV news and repertory theater. Rush and then rest.

Now, though, for the first time she had a permanent, floating client. The Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino was “the classiest little hotel in Vegas,” and it behoovedher to alert the management that their maybe-Elvis sighting had eerie links to another Las Vegas hotel. Temple took the phrase “conflict of interest” very seriously. Aldo had phoned to report that the workmen were settling down now that they had decided their iridescent apparition had been only Elvis. Elvis, it seems, was the ghost most likely to be welcomed anywhere.

When Temple arrived at Van von Rhine’s ultramodern office, Nicky Fontana, the other half of the marriage and management team, was lounging in a massive leather executive chair that Van allowed to spoil her Euro-sleek decor because he liked it.

Nicky was as darkly delicious to behold as his suite of brothers, but was a hair shorter and much less laid back.

“What’s this about the King?” he asked the minute Temple arrived. “Has our underground Jersey Joe Jackson mine ride really got an unearthly infestation?” “I seriously doubt it.” Temple perched on a chromeand-leather chair. “But Elvis is in the air right now, with the imminent opening of the Kingdome.”

Nicky nodded sagaciously. That’` what one got to do when one ran a major Las Vegas resort destination. Temple squirmed in the hard-edged chair. “Odd things are happening at the Kingdome itself. An acquaintance of mine says her daughter, who’s playing Priscilla Presley for the Elvis impersonator opening competition, has been getting threats, possibly from Elvis-loving Priscilla-haters.”

“What can you do about it?” Van wanted to know. “Me, not much. But”—she glanced at Nicky—“I was hoping to borrow your brothers. Quincey is only sixteen, and her sort-of stepfather is that ‘Buchanan’s Broadside’ reporter for the Las Vegas Scoop. He’ll emcee the Elvis competition, and is the same creep who involved the girl as a pose-down model in the romance cover hunk competition last fall.”

“Sixteen? A ‘pose-down’ model? Sounds sleazy,” Van commented with the indignation of the relatively new mother of a baby girl.

“Quincey was actually just fifteen then—”

“Of course you can have Nicky’s brothers!” Van was bristling now.

Nicky just toyed with the Rolex watch that kept catching on his wrist hairs as he spun the band.

“Nicky?” Van asked.

“I’m sure they’ll be game.” He frowned. “And I don’t like an icon from their hotel showing up at our hotel just as things are getting hinky at the Kingdome.” He eyed Temple. “You could check out this hot new jumpsuit joint. See if there’s a reason an Elvis apparition is turning up in our basement.”

“That might be dangerous,” Van objected.

“Not with Fontana, Inc., on the job.” Nicky grinned.

“I do worry about Quincey,” Temple admitted. “I got to know her at that romance convention. Her sleazeball stepfather is always using her in his crazy schemes, and her mother isn’t the type to stand up to him.”

“I bet you are,” Nicky said. “We should study the competition anyway.”

“The opening Elvis competition isn’t for a couple weeks. This Elvis sighting at the Jersey Joe site reminded me that I need to keep an eye on things here now that the construction is underway.”

“Aldo said that now the workmen think their haunting is just Elvis, they’re flattered. They’re working up a storm to impress the King.”

Temple shook her head. “I doubt I can take the undiluted Elvis idolatry I’ll find at the Kingdome. Besides, I owe the Phoenix so much. That retainer you’ve put me on is my first steady salary in three years. I could get lazy.”

“Forget it.” Nicky waved his Rolex wrist. “You aren’t consulting just on PR stuff, you dreamed up the whole recreational re-do.”

“And,” Van added, leaning across her clear glass desktop, “you inspired that international conceptual artist, Domingo, to design a very arty children’s area for us. I’ve gotten inquiries about the project from Art Forum. We’re reaching an entirely new and upscale audience, thanks to you and your eclectic friends. Nicky’s right. If you feel this poor little Quincey needs a chaperone, you run right over to the Kingdome for as long as necessary. We wouldn’t want a daughter of ours in such a high-stress environment at that tender age.”

Temple refrained from explaining that there was nothing tender about Quincey but her age.

“I’ve never really liked Elvis,” she confessed in a last-ditch effort to stick to duty and sacrifice satisfying her always-insatiable curiosity.

“You’re in good company,” Van said, sitting back. “This is business,” Nicky noted. ” ‘Like’ has nothing to do with it.”

Putt-putting along the Strip in her aging aqua Storm, Temple drove like the legendary little old lady from Pasadena (even though she was cool for an old person; see what turning thirty does for you!), peering at all the “Kingdome is Coming” signs she’d ignored for so long. They were everywhere. Obviously, her head had been in the clouds, probably looking for the single billboard advertising Matt Devine’s midnight radio advice show. Meanwhile, on ground level, Elvis had been stepping on everybody’s blue suede shoes in an attempt to get a little attention for a dead guy.

Temple marveled that the Strip always offered enough empty acreage to support another monument to the Theme-of-the-Moment. The trend had been Euro lately: the suave Monte Carlo, Steve Wynn’s artsy Bellagio, and the equally lavish Belladonna, which Temple had nicknamed the Beluga (after the small white whale) for its vast expanses of white marble, not to mention a collection of European masterwork paintings and sculptures, all of buxom, white-skinned naked ladies. Instead of the Naked Maja, Temple thought of the ambiance as the Naked Moby.

But she had never seen the Kingdome coming. How had she missed this Eighth Wonder of the World building? Blink in Las Vegas nowadays, and you missed the Second Coming. Come to think of it, an Elvis Presley hotel and casino in Las Vegas was a sort of Second Coming.

Temple pulled into the Kingdome’s parking lot and let the Storm throb on idle. Appropriately. This was now the home of rock ‘n’ roll, wasn’t it? Feel the beat? She felt an involuntary frisson of excitement.

Whoever had designed this place, or palace, had not been gun-shy. The Kingdome was a slick, pompadour-sculpted swoop of architecture, mindful of the low, long lines of fifties and sixties cars, and the kinky excesses of seventies fashion. The titular dome squatted like an alien vessel from which Michael Rennie would soon emerge, wearing an industrial-strength silver jumpsuit. Then he would turn into a guitar-licking, foot-stomping, pelvis-swiveling Elvis.

Don’t step on my silver-Mylar space boots.

Still, the all-white compound also radiated an air of antebellum gentility that brought Graceland—and particularly dignified funeral parlors—to mind. How appropriately Elvis. Temple remembered reading that he had visited morgues with his entourage, as fascinated by still-life death as he was by death-defying sports like fast cars, ‘cycles, go-carts, and hot-and-cold-running girls.

She was amazed, sitting here gawking past her windshield visor, liberated nineties woman that she was, by how much she had unconsciously absorbed of the Elvis legend.

The Kingdome itself implied the wide-legged stance of the King, its nervous pulsing neon reminiscent of his hyperactive left leg. The dazzling white structure even seemed to sweat in the wintery Las Vegas sun and togain an otherworldly aura from that very human failing. Blood, sweat, and tears.

Like the birth of the blues, the King had suffered them all.

Oh, come on! She didn’t even like his music. Or his looks. Or his lifestyle. Or his legend.

Still. They’d built a hell of a hotel in his name. The King is dead. Long live the King.

Viva Las Vegas.

I guess now, Temple thought, they can call it the Valley of the King.

Naturally, you had to pass through the pearly gates to get in.

The huge gates that split in the middle were covered in pearlescent paint, with notes and staffs written in wrought iron.

Walking in as a PR person, Temple was immediately struck by the immense obstacles to such an enterprise. EPE (Elvis Presley Enterprises, aka “the estate”) must control the commercial marketing of every item and image connected to the late, much lamented King. No wonder no one had dared to do the obvious and create an Elvisland in Las Vegas. Graceland had a corner on the market.

That was why, she discovered, nodding sagely to herself, an interior attraction was called “Raceland,” featuring bumper car rides and exhibits of the kind of cycles and cars the King had collected. The real things remained on display at Graceland in Memphis. Everything here was ersatz Elvis.

But … Elvis himself was ersatz culture, so in a sense, this place was even truer to the King than real life had been.

Temple found that sad. All legends eventually become the living sarcophagus in which their original inspiration is entombed.

Death Valley of the King. Not a bad way to put it.

She struck out across the valley floor (a custom carpet littered with images of fifties guitars, cars, and ‘cycles) for what lay under the dome.

The casino’s slot machines chimed with the melodies from a dozen Elvis hits, and Temple spotted blue suede shoes and pink Cadillac convertibles spinning past.

Nowhere, however, was the face of Elvis visible.

While no one could copyright a person’s life, or the artifacts he had surrounded himself with, any representation of a likeness that could be sold for a profit would have to be authorized.

So here in the Kingdome, Elvis himself was like an invisible, entombed pharaoh surrounded by all the pomp and circumstance of his life, except his own image.

While Temple was mulling over the symbolism of the Absent Elvis effect, who should come walking toward her but … Elvis.

He was wearing a white jumpsuit punctuated with gold metallic studs and gleaming gemstones of ruby, sapphire, and emerald.

Temple had seen a lot of extravagant, outré, bizarre, and dazzling effects in Las Vegas. She had always seen the man behind the curtain: the special-effects wizard who pulled the strings and set off the fireworks and who murmured, constantly, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” Colonel Tom Parker, if you will.

But there was no curtain here.

There was only Elvis, finally, in the flesh-and-blood form.

Walking toward her.

A movement to the side caught her eye.

There was Elvis, sleek in hair cream and black ‘cycle leathers.

Walking toward her.

She blinked.

Another Elvis at three o’clock high, this one attired in a martial arts gi—white pjs, really—banded here, there,and everywhere in red satin and sashed in black satin at the waist.

On they came, like a mirror image trio of gunslingers: three incarnations of Elvis, the hair and sideburns all of one piece, like a gleaming dark helmet, the garb light and dark, like hero and villain in one and the same form. Then came the fourth Elvis.

He carried an ornate cane and a flashlight (of all things). His belt and his cloak clasp were swagged in chains of gold, his dress vaguely Regency style, the Emperor Elvis. I, Dracula meets the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Temple had prided herself on never actually stopping and gawking at anything or anybody in Las Vegas. But now she did both.

She suddenly understood the utter genius of the Kingdome: no image of the King himself was allowed, so the place was crawling with imitators. If No One could be Elvis, Everybody Else was.

While she stood there trying to absorb the existential implications of being, and not being, Elvis, someone had approached her from behind and now spoke.

“Awesome, isn’t it, T.B.?”

She whirled. Facing her was someone far more familiar, but a sad let-down from the high-camp presence of the Magnificent Four Elvi.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me.” Crawford Buchanan sounded peeved.

Let-down could hardly describe the anticlimax that Crawford Buchanan embodied. He was a short, slight man, neat as some scavenger carnivore. His full head of hair, last she had seen it, had been a silver waterfall that curled into froth at his nape. Now it was dyed jet black with moussey aspirations to a pompadour. Not to mention sideburns.

His voice was the same night-radio baritone, oily and suggestive.

His attitude was dyed to match his hair, or maybe it had always matched his current style: preening sexist smirk.

Temple suddenly remembered why she had never liked Elvis, impressive though his persona could be. She also realized why she felt obligated to help Merle with Quincey. Crawford Buchanan wasn’t warped enough to molest a girl, but he wasn’t above using Quincey as a nubile draw in his selfish schemes. What an unspeakable pseudo-stepfather for a teenage girl!

“So the place is thronging with ersatz Elvi,” she said. “Is that just for the contest, or will they be a regular feature?”

“Oh, the contest is just the opening salvo. The impersonators will be fixtures, a doorman here, a croupier there. That way the customers can get up close and personal with Elvis.”

“You actually think a Las Vegas hotel-casino can succeed without anything genuine to its real theme on the premises?”

Buchanan’s shrug drew attention to his black mohair suit, white shirt, and narrow black sixties tie.

“Since when did you start dressing like a Jehovah’s Witness?” she asked.

“This isn’t that look! This is the Memphis Mafia look. Maybe this will give you the right idea.” He whipped a pair of ultradark sunglasses with heavy black plastic frames from his breast pocket to his face.

“You still look more like Men in Black than Mafia from Memphis.”

“And you still look like a million dollars, T. B.” Crawford flipped up his shades to leer. “What are you doing over here anyway?”

Temple ignored the leer; it came with the territory when one ventured into Crawford Buchanan Country. “Just checking out the new game in town.”

“Then stick around a few days. I’ll be emceeing the world’s biggest Elvis Presley imitator contest. Well, some call themselves ‘impressionists,’ and some callthemselves impersonators, or even actors, but imitators seems the most honest description.”

Temple let her head swivel to survey various passing Elvi from the rear. “Looks like you’ve got every stage of Elvis from debut to death around here.”

Buchanan followed her glance with a sneer. That was C.B.: always a leer for the ladies and a sneer for the guys. She hadn’t seen him for so long she’d forgotten how despicable he was.

“There are only Three Stages of Elvis,” he was saying—pontificating. “Young Elvis, suits and guitars and pompadour hair; Comeback Elvis, the Man in the Black Leather Suit; and Touring Elvis, otherwise known as Vegas Elvis, the big galoot in the glitter jumpsuits and hernia-truss belts. Nobody much cares about movie Elvis, and neither did E.P. himself when he was alive.” “That’s right.” Temple frowned as she teased her memory. “I’ve seen a lot of fifties Elvis, and a lot of seventies Elvis, but what did he do during the sixties?” “Ran for cover like everybody else in American music when the Beatles came over and usurped Ed Sullivan from our barefoot boy with cheek of sideburn. You know why he’s called Comeback Elvis?”

“No, and the answer better not be a dirty punchline.” “T.B.! Would I inflict blue material on a class act like you?”

“Any time you thought you could get away with it.” That earned another leer, and an explanation.

“See, the Colonel—Colonel Parker, Elvis’s manager and, some would say, Svengali—sold Elvis to the movies for that whole decade. No tours, no live music, just rinky-dink rock ‘n’ roll romance movies. Travelogues, Presley himself called ‘em. Then Elvis went and got himself into the hands of a really good director for a TV special in 1968 that was supposed to revive his singing career. He was poured into this black leather biker suit and really poured on the performance power. That’s what launched all those tours in the seventies. ‘Course the Colonel soon squeezed the juice out of the comeback kid and got him on the treadmill of a stock touring show again. What a guy! You could always count on the Colonel to give an audience as little as he could get away with.”

“I’m impressed. How did you learn all this stuff about Elvis and the Colonel? You must have boned up for the emcee job.”

“Naw. I used to be a deejay back when music was on vinyl and only musicians were on drugs.”

“A disk jockey? That far back?”

“Ah … I worked in small towns, behind the times. Why, how old did you think I was?” Buchanan’s crooked smile grew crookeder under his black-dyed hair. Merle Conrad hadn’t mentioned Vanity as a deadly sin, but she should have.

“Gee. I dunno. As old as Dick Clark?”

Buchanan paled.

“Isn’t that a compliment?” Temple asked innocently. “Isn’t he supposed to be extraordinarily youthful-looking?”

“For the mummy of King Tut-tut!” Buchanan’s trademark snirk (what Temple called his patented combination of sneer and smirk) was fighting not to become a snarl. “That guy’s generation and mine are not even kissing cousins. So don’t worry, T.B. I’m young enough for you.” He leaned so close she could inhale the noxious scent of whatever goop was making his hair look both stiffened and greasy.

“Well, I’m too old for you.” Temple said in farewell, turning and hiking away before he could offer one last parting snirk. Poor Quincey! Someone had to help that girl, and her mother was too much of a victim herself to do it.

She was facing into another trio of oncoming Elvis imitators, and they were eyeing her like she was a fifteen-year-old fan.

Better to face dead men walking than Crawford Buchanan any day.

Chapter 8

Working on the Building

(A rousing gospel song Elvis recorded in 1960)

Temple finally decided that the Kingdome itself was a cross between the Coliseum in Rome and an Opryland Hotel.

She wandered through a semitropical Southern garden, past pillared gazebos, yet remained beneath an overarching glass dome. On the dome’s perimeter, in niches high above the milling crowds, stood white marble statues of Elvis, attired like collector Barbie dolls in bejeweled jumpsuits concocted by the world’s most famous designers. The neon role call of names above the designer-doll Elvi read like a mall sign in shoppers’ paradise: Donatella Versace, Calvin Klein, Bill Blass, Bob Mackie, Gucci, Dior.

The circle of elevated Elvi regarded the vastness erected in their honor with cataract gazes: the blank white eyeballs of classic Greek statuary. The face of Apollo (he wasn’t copyrighted) stood in for Elvis’s. Actually, the time-tested, white-marble medium used to memorialize long-gone gods such as Apollo and Pan fit Elvis’s full-lipped, Roman-nosed profile like an Attic glove, although the ghostly yet solid chorus line of Elvi also (and rather wickedly) reminded Temple of Pillsbury doughboys in candy-decorated astronauts’ suits.

Just when Temple thought that Las Vegas had pulled out all of the stops, shown its best hand, exceeded the spectacle speed limit, outgrossed and grossed out, say, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it would concoct another baked Alaska of entertainment: an overdone confection of fire and ice, a high-calorie extravaganza of fairy dust and fever like the Kingdome.

The real wonder was that the Kingdome had managed to evoke Elvis in all his incarnations without presenting one genuine artifact of Elvis Presley’s roots, history, performing career, or personal life.

He might as well have been a dead god for anything material of him that survived in this mausoleum of ersatz mementos.

Above the roar of moving, talking people, a sound expanded like an invisible cloud over all their heads. It was not rock ‘n’ roll, although it was as hard to ignore.

High, piercing female shrieks.

Holy Hunk-a Burning Love! The hotel designers had even imported Elvis’s screaming fans! Temple clapped hands to ears. In this vast, marble-lined stadium, shrieks bounced off every hard surface, and the only softening surfaces here were the plants and the people.

The hubbub troubled no one else. Las Vegas tourists had long since learned to tune out programmed sights and sounds if they were discussing vital issues like the locations of loose slot machines, or looser women.

Temple hurried toward the stage where the sound probably originated, on the theory that it could only be better close up.

But when she arrived at what would be the mosh pit nowadays, she looked up at a dark and empty stage. No show at the moment, no screeching fans.

She released hands from ears. The screams had subsided.

Just when she thought it was safe to breathe normally again, shrieks resumed, so loud that the set of cymbals near the unattended drums vibrated in sympathy.

The sounds were coming from behind, and below, the stage.

Temple knew theatrical geography. She darted up the dark stairs at stage right, then dodged walls of ponderous velvet curtains and the toe-stubbing array of fly anchors in the wings behind them. She flailed in the dark until she found a stairwell leading to the dressing rooms below.

In that narrow, dark passage the screams turned positively painful. Temple burst into the bright light of a deserted hallway and followed the sounds to a dressing room.

And there, dead ahead of her, she found him dead: Jumpsuit Elvis, face down on the bare cement, a rampant rhinestone stallion on his back stabbed through the shoulder with a gold-studded dagger haft.

The screamer was reflected in the dressing table mirrors opposite Temple: a white-garbed Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, whose midnight tresses writhed like Medusa snakes against her long, flowing temple-virgin gown as she continued screaming.

Temple had either stumbled onto the set of a Roger Corman horror flick, or the scene of a crime. Given her past performance record, she’d opt for the scene of a crime.

Chapter 9

Paralyzed

(Otis Blackwell wrote the song for Elvis, and it was recorded in 1956)

“Thank God you’re here!”

Temple had no idea she was expected.

The white witch in the corner stared at Temple through the black holes of her makeup-charred eyes. Splayed fingers behind her hugged the wall as if it were the gates to Hades and the fallen figure on the floor were King Kong.

Come to think of it, the parallel to Elvis was not farfetched.

Temple did not like the way the fallen man’s limbs lay. Living flesh would not tolerate those straw-man angles of muscle and bone.

She stared at the viscous red liquid pooling between the winking rhinestones of the horse’s bejeweled trappings. Red blood. Fresh.

Then she reached into her tote bag for her cell phone.

This was a job for Crimes Against Persons, not PR persons on holiday.

“What’s going on here?”

The newcomer was male, middle-aged, and dressed in faded work-shirt blues. Stage hand or maintenance man.

“Nothing we should mess with,” Temple mumbled, scrolling through her computerized directory of key phone numbers, which just happened to include that of a certain homicide lieutenant.

The guy eyed the body, not moving. Then he took a step toward it.

“I’m not kidding,” Temple warned. “You could contaminate the crime scene.”

He glanced at her, baby-blue eyes puzzled under a worry-corrugated forehead that extended into thinning silver-blond hair. “It’s just that I recognize something.”

“The dead man?”

“No—”

Before Temple could issue another warning to leave the scene untouched, he darted forward, bent down and snatched something from the end of one twisted arm.

In fact, he snatched a forearm from the end of one twisted sleeve, now an empty twisted sleeve.

“Groossss!” wailed the vixen impaled against the wall.

Temple couldn’t decide whether to (a) scream too, (b) lose her Oreos or (c) jerk the idiot back with a well-executed martial arts move, of which she had mastered very few.

Then he held up his trophy: a long rolled oblong. Bone … ? Yuck. Or …

“That’s nothing but a roll of paper towels,” she said.

“Yeah.” The guy’s voice was taut with anger. “My cart got ripped off yesterday. A whole twelve-pack of goddammed paper towels.”

Temple stared down at the spread-eagle Elvis suit. “He’s just a straw man? Pardon me”—she glanced at the textured paper cylinder in the man’s huge hand—“a Brawny-brand paper-towel man? And the blood?““You tell me, lady. Paper products is my job. Blood’s another ball of wax.”

Temple edged forward, squatted, and dipped a hesitant forefinger into the puddling red. “Fingernail polish!” “Oh.” The girl on the opposite wall waved a bouquet of scarlet-lacquered nails on long, pale-stemmed fingers. “A brand-new bottle of my favorite color, Vamp Tramp, was missing yesterday.”

Temple’s cell phone received a quiet and dignified interment in her tote bag. She was most thankful that she had not reached her party. “Is this someone’s real costume, or what?”

Paper-towel man was shaking his head on the way out. “Don’t ask me, lady. Ladies. I’ll let maintenance know to clean up.”

“No. Wait! This may not be a murder scene, but it is a malicious mischief scene. At the least, hotel security should be notified. And the … tableau should be photographed. And probably the components should be preserved.”

“Who the heck are you?”

“I handle public relations for the Crystal Phoenix. I know what precautions to take.”

“Okay. I’ll tell someone who can make decisions. Me, I’m outa here. And … if this roll of paper towels might be evidence, keep it. I got plenty more where that came from.”

He dropped the roll on the dressing table top and bowed out, quite literally.

“Really?” the woman in white asked in a small, wee voice. “It’s just a dead … dummy?”

“Nothing but a deck of cards, honest.”

The reference to Alice in Wonderland was lost on this Babe in Elvis land. Beneath the heavy swags of dark hair, her alabaster brow may have frowned, infinitesimally, as she spoke. “They play cards upstairs. Not down here. This is a dressing room.”

“And what were you doing here?”

“Dressing.”

“For what?” Temple asked. “And you act as if you know me.”

The girl finally pushed off the wall and stepped forward. “Of course I do.” She parted the river of long hair that made her face a pale stepping stone almost lost in its rippling brunette flow. “It’s me.”“

‘Me’ ?”

“Your posing partner! Well, not your partner. I mean, that would have been a little kinky, even for the cover-hunk pageant.”

Temple grabbed the parted hair and separated it more. “Priscilla! I mean, Quincey. Of course! I forgot about you being here during the excitement. Wow. You look … unreal. Did Priscilla Presley really look like this?”

“Absolutely.” Quincey Conrad patted her borrowed tresses into place again. “I have researched every detail of this role. I’m even wearing the required five pair of false eyelashes.”

“Is that why your eyes are at half-mast?”

“I don’t have half-mascara on! I have on half a bottle of Daddy Longlegs’ s Centipede Sweetie from the discount drug store. It’s probably a lot more advanced than the stuff poor Cilla had to use, like, in the Stone Age, thirty years ago. It’s got little ceramide microns in it. Thousands and thousands.”

“I know. Billions and billions. Well. I’m sure the ceramide microns are delighted to be serving on your false eyelashes. You certainly don’t look like yourself.”

“Oh, honestly. Get with it, girlfriend. I have never looked like myself. What’s the point?”

Temple nodded. “You may be strangely right. So. Tell me what happened here.”

“You’re so good at this … you know, calm and collected stuff. Can I sit down?”

Temple eyed the get-up. “That depends on your outfit, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, everything was polyester then. Didn’t wrinkle,wears like diamond-dust nail polish. I got it at a funky little shop called Leopard Alley.”

“Ah, yes. I remember it well.”

“Hey! You know the place. Wild.” Quincey pulled out a wooden ice-cream-style chair and stared down at the paper-towel-stuffed costume corpse. “That’s probably one of the Elvis imitators’ costumes. Poor thing. They pay a fortune for those corny, custom-made pjs, you know.”

“I know Elvis must have, but even the imitators?”

“Oh, yeah. Unlike the cover hunks, their job isn’t taking it off. Their job is putting it on. The whole schmeer. Suit, shoes, belt, hair, sideburns. Even a girdle, if necessary. People think women are phony when they dress up. Hah! No, those guys pay bunches and bunches to look like a has-been.”

“So you don’t get the Elvis mania.”

“Oh, I get it. I mean, when he was young he knew how to be one foxy dude, once he got over having been a total groadie nerd in high school, but that’s no reason to hold anything against him. I mean, a lot of surprising people were total groadie nerds in high school.”

“All surprising people were total groadie nerds in high school.”

“Really?”

“Haven’t you ever felt like a total groadie nerd?” Quincey curled the end of a false tress around a forefinger. “Maybe. Once. For a few seconds. But I got over it.”

“Hmmm. Anyway, you came in here to make up, and that’s when you found him?”

“I came in here to check on my makeup bag.” She nodded at a quart-size quilted fuchsia zipper bag on the otherwise empty length of communal dressing table. “Sometimes those Elvis boys borrow my stuff, you know? Especially my Daddy Longleg’s Centipede Sweetie mascara.”

“They use mascara?”

“Oh, girl. He did. Why shouldn’t they?”

“No reason. I mean, men in theater use makeup: foundation, eyeliner, but mascara—?”

“Well, what’s a poor guy to do when his eyelashes fade?”

“But Elvis was dark-haired.”

“Only after a good dose of Lady Clairol. That’s why he had to mascara his lashes and dye his eyebrows. I’ve researched these things. That’s why Priscilla dyed her hair jet-black. Elvis wanted her that way too. Her real hair was, you know. Dishwater brown. Yuck.”

“What color is your hair?”

“I don’t know. Maybe brown or something, but not often. Well, you must know; you do your hair red.” “No, I don’t ‘do’ it. It grows in that way.”

“You mean you look like this naturally? Way cool. Some people are born lucky.”

“Not many. And none of them like their original hair, believe me. Why was Elvis hung up on dark hair?”

“He decided that dark-haired actors had better movie careers, that they came off better on the screen.”

“You have researched this.” Temple couldn’t help sounding impressed.

“Oh, yeah. I even had to go in and apply for a library card so I could take out all the books on Elvis. No way am I being paid enough to buy them. Did you know there were places that had all these books on people’s lives, with all the dirty parts left in? Free? Weird. And Elvis was one of the weirdest.”

“So I’ve heard tell.” Temple turned to regard the construction on the floor. “It’s the wig that fools you into thinking it’s a real body at first glance. Somebody worked overtime to fashion this makeshift Elvis. Any idea why?”

Quincey interlaced her dagger-tipped fingers. “Yeah. They all hate me. They want to get me. This was just another warning.”

Temple pulled out a wooden chair and sat on it. “1 know about that.”

“Is that why you’re here?” Quincey’s posture perked up. She looked like an overdressed puppet whose invisible strings had just been pulled taut.

“Yup. Your mother called me in.”

Quincey deflated into a scornful sixteen-year-old. “My mother.”

“She’s really concerned about you. Okay, that’s an old story and you’re tired of it. But after what I’ve seen here, I’m concerned about you too.”

Quincey slumped, lipsticked bottom lip swollen with rebellion. “You’re not my mother.”

“Darn right, I’m not. So I can walk right out on you, and this murdered scarecrow, and my conscience won’t bother me one little teeny bit.”

“Good!”

“Just what I think.”

“Then why aren’t you walking?”

“And leave the scene of a crime unguarded? You go ahead.”

“Right.” Quincey jumped up, shaking out her Priscilla tresses like a spoiled preschooler. “I know what I’m doing, I’m getting paid for it. I’m good at it. I’ll be all right.”

“Right.”

“Okay.” Quincey swept—and in a floor-length pink polyester dress with girlish ties at the back it’s hard to “sweep”—to the dressing room door.

“Not only that,” Temple added grudgingly. “You’ve even got the screams down real good.”

Quincey’s back stiffened. Then she turned. “You really think someone wants to kill me? I mean, Priscilla?” “I don’t know yet. Do you?”

Quincey shook her head, no small achievement with about twelve pounds of borrowed hair on her head. “Did you hear about the … tattoo?”

“I heard about a razor attack.”

“Oh, Mom loves to exaggerate! It was just four little slashes. Really, all the girls at school are so jealous. It’s so cool, and I didn’t even have to pay for it. And no one can blame me for getting it, like a real tattoo. ‘E’ as in Elvis. The girls at school are beginning to think even Elvis might be cool. So I didn’t tell them the really bad parts about his life.”

“I’m sure he appreciates your discretion, wherever he is.”

“He really, you know, liked girls my age. Or younger. Even when he was really old, like forty.”

“Really?” Despite her acceptably cool tone, Temple felt a stab of what could only be borrowed maternal outrage.

“That’s why I’m so perfect to play Priscilla. I’m just like her.” She moved to the mirror, stared at her false image. “I even look like her.”

Temple didn’t tell her that Priscilla in this form was an icon, just as Elvis in his many incarnations was always an icon. That these carefully created images could be assumed by anybody who cared enough to try reasonably hard. Archetypes. Sixties Priscilla the virgin-whore. Elvis … the what? Temple could tell by taking one look at Quincey’s Priscilla what the image conveyed. She didn’t know enough about Elvis to do other than guess. Rebel, maybe, like James Dean. But that had to have been fifties Elvis. What would explain seventies Elvis?

“How did you get this gig?” Temple asked. Merle had told her, but she wanted to hear Quincey’s version. Mother and daughter were each at an age, and a stage in their relationship, where the chances of anything about them jibing were nil.

Quincey sighed. “Crawf, who else?”

“ `Crawf?’ That’s what you call him?”

“Yeah. What’s it to you?”

“I call him ‘Awful Crawford’ myself.”

“ `Crawf’ sort of sounds like barfing.““Especially if you have a cat.”

“You have a cat?”

“As much as anyone ever does.”

“Crawf hates cats.”

“I’m not surprised. You can’t trust anyone who doesn’t like cats.”

Quincey’ s Egyptian eyes lowered to the gaudy faux body on the floor. “Did Elvis like cats, I wonder?” “Don’t you know, with all that reading?”

“No … he had a few dogs and horses, but I never heard of a cat.”

Temple nodded sagely. Sometimes the most important things about people never made it into the history books.

Chapter 10

The Hillbilly Cat Scat

(Elvis was called the Hillbilly Cat in tribute to his mingled country and rhythm and blues persona early in his career)

Did Elvis like cats? Does your daddy not dance and your mama not rock ‘n’ roll? I thought so.

I have made it over to the Kingdome hard on my little doll’s heels.

And my little doll’s heels are usually hard on her and anybody who gets in her way.

So I am discreetly eavesdropping from the hall when this discussion over the fallen, fake-dead Elvis takes place.

There are so many fake-live Elvi in the world, not to mention just in this hotel right now, that a dead Elvis, fake or not, has by now become a novelty.

Like all of my breed, I thrive on investigating novelty. That is why I cannot resist following Miss Temple to this emporium of all things Elvis, and my instincts prove true, given the shenanigans I am (over) hearing about. While a punctured jumpsuit hardly has the makings of a federal case, a punctured Priscilla Presley impersonator sniffs of nefarious deeds to come. My expert help is now at the service of one and all, whether they know it or not.

And I know a thing or two about the cool cats of the world. That is how I am aware that when Elvis Presley first burst onto the music scene, they did not know whether he was black or white or blues or country, so they called him the Hillbilly Cat. See, hillbilly music was all-white whining, and rhythm and blues were only wailed in black bars then, so combining the two sounds was something daring.

It was so new and daring that it would eventually get that Hillbilly Cat named the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which is what everybody decided to call the new blend once it was rolling off of every radio in the country.

What do I know about music? Listen, I have been a backyard one-man band all of my life. All of us down and out sorts, whatever the color of our coats, like to get together for a good community wail now and then. Not that my breed has ever been much chased by record companies throwing big-money contracts at us, just by irate sleepers hurling shoes and chamberpots. Not everyone has an ear for music. And, luckily, almost no one has a chamberpot these days.

I must say that I am glad to see my Miss Temple getting out of the house and into a new environment. She has spent far too much time around the Circle Ritz these days, worrying about the care and feeding of this one human dude or the other, when there I sit needing a fresh bribe on my dry pile of Free-to-Be-Feline nuggets.

But I see that shenanigans of a sinister sort have lured her from the domestic front to the center of the newest action on the Strip, and that cannot be a bad thing.

As for someone who would find it necessary to create his—or her—own murder victim before plunging in the fatal dagger, what can you expect in a town that is all show and go and no substance? I see that the age of the Virtual Victim is upon us, especially when someone has gone to the trouble of offing the mannequin of a dead man. Pretty soon there will be a computer game available for this scenario.

But for now, the outré spectacle of a murdered costume is real-time, in the here and now.

Only in Las Vegas, of course.

Chapter 11

Any Way You Want Me

(A million-selling hit Elvis recorded in his Golden Year of 1956 at RCA)

A head poked around the dressing room door.

“I heard about the deceased jumpsuit and came to see it if was one of mine.”

The face was cherubic under a gleaming helm of high, wide, and handsome dark hair, with the heavy sideburns resembling the hinged metal side-flaps on a knight’s helmet.

Temple had never pictured Elvis Presley as Sir Lancelot, but these stylized wigs sure made the comparison apt. The hair looked lacquered enough to resist a direct hit by a medieval mace.

“Hi, Kenny,” Quincey greeted him.

The Elvis imitator sashayed into the room, still gazing at the fallen jumpsuit with fascinated disbelief. “Man, that’s one of those wool-gabardine numbers out of De-troit. Must be worth three grand … or was before the blood got on it.”

“Nail polish,” Temple said, drawing his attention for the first time.

“Say, this must be a shock for you, kid, coming over to visit your classmate and running into a ruined Elvis suit.”

Most gainfully employed women of thirty would be thrilled to be taken for a high-school senior. Temple, at five-feet-three tops in high heels, considered it a declaration of war.

“I do PR for the Crystal Phoenix,” she said as crisply as a military officer giving rank. “We’ve had a … manifestation at a construction site and I came over here to look into it.”

Kenny frowned, which did not budge his hairline a centimeter. “Why would you come over here to check out a problem on a work site all the way over at the Crystal Phoenix?”

“The disruption was apparently an Elvis sighting.”

“Whoo, boy! There’s a few of those in town right now, and I bet that’s always happening.” He nodded at the suit. “Wow. This thing has been laid out, excuse the expression, in the position of a chalk body outline from a crime show on TV. D’you suppose the suit was out for an unauthorized walk, got attacked at the Phoenix, and made it back here before collapsing?”

“Anything is possible,” Temple said, meaning it.

Standing here talking to a five-feet-six Elvis clone (the real one had been around six feet, she guessed) with a sixties Priscilla Presley looking on was more than a trip down memory lane, it was a trip, period. And trips like that, Temple had supposed, were mostly of seventies vintage, when LSD was the operating system of choice.

Quincey must have decided that too, because she sat down and returned to arranging her layers of false eyelashes in the mirror, using a straight pin to strip the excess mascara off each one. There was a lot of excess mascara to lose.

Kenny shook his head sadly at the dead jumpsuit. “I’m glad it isn’t one of mine. Bet it wasn’t insured either. We put a lot of time and heart and soul into our acts, but we put our cash into the jumpsuits. And the hair.” He pointed upward, as if anyone could miss the Hair.

“So word about the ruined jumpsuit is getting around,” Temple said, encouraging further confidences.

She wanted to figure out if there was any reason an Elvis imitator would make an unscheduled appearance at the Jersey Joe Jackson Mine Ride-in-progress. Or if anyone might have a motive for laying someone’s expensive costume low. Anything that touched the Crystal Phoenix was her business.

Kenny pulled out a wooden chair, flipped it around and sat so he could cradle his forearms on the back. He was a bantam Elvis, chunky, with overdeveloped muscles rather than fat, his high hair like a brunet coxcomb. Despite his rounded features, no one would mistake him for a high-schooler. Temple guessed that he was a decade older than she.

“Word gets around,” Kenny admitted. “We all watch what the others are doing.”

“Paranoid?”

“Naw, eager to learn. After all, there’s no one like us, right?”

“How many are running around the hotel?”

“Gosh, maybe a hundred.”

“A hundred?”

“This is the biggest Elvis-impersonator competition ever. Everybody’s here from the Grand Old Men who invented the art to the rawest new kids on the block.”

“And where do you rank?”

“Somewhere in the middle.” Kenny grinned. “But anything can happen. It’s a competition, right?”

“Competitive enough for somebody to ice somebody else’s jumpsuit?’

“Gee, Elvis was red, white, and blue suede shoes. I’d hate to think someone would get petty in his name. None of us would be doing this if we didn’t revere the man’s talent and what he stood for. So, no, I can’t imagine one of us sinking that low. Besides, any competition’s a crapshoot. It’d be better to attack the judges than some poor innocent jumpsuit.”

“This looks like a pretty spectacular one. I’d hate to duplicate it on short notice.”

Kenny shook his head mournfully. “I couldn’t feel worse seeing that destroyed there, other than seein’ some guy in it. God, I put in every spare minute and nickel for the past three years to get myself here. When I first started performing at karaoke clubs around Philly, I got laughed off the stage until I got good enough to laugh back. Someone who’d ruin any Elvis imitator’s mainstay deserves to be stabbed in the back too.”

“But your suits are safe.”

“Better be. I got two. A lot of guys only got one and they put all their hopes and dreams and their best buddies’ cash into it. Families, friends, they gotta support your Elvis habit, or you wouldn’t make it this far.”

Temple was actually starting to choke up over the ruined jumpsuit.

For an Elvis impersonator, she saw, a jumpsuit was a costly second skin. Designing and underwriting one was the single biggest commitment he made to his avocation. Whoever had thrust the gaudy dagger through the rhinestone stallion had also stabbed a metaphorical blow into the owner’s heart.

Malicious mischief wasn’t quite strong enough to describe the ruin wreaked here.

“It could be dirty tricks before the competition,” she said.

Kenny nodded. “Or it could be someone who hates the King, in any form.““That would mean you all were in danger.”

Kenny’s bright blue eyes squinted almost closed. “He did get a lot of death threats when he was alive. You’d sorta hope that would stop when he was dead.”

“I thought he was still showing up here and there regularly.”

“So the tabloids say. That’s always been the big joke.”

“What?”

“That Elvis faked his own death because he was tired of all the hoopla. That he’s out here somewhere, masquerading as an Elvis imitator.”

“He’d be … how old?”

“Almost retirement age. Sixty-four.”

“Do you think he could pass as himself at that age?”

“I’ve seen dudes that old pass as Elvis at thirty-five.

I even saw a woman do a great Comeback Elvis.” “Why would a woman want to imitate Elvis?” “Same reason we all do: loved the sound and the songs; loved the King.”

Kenny’s voice had sunk to a reverential hush.

“What kind of work do you do, Kenny, when you’re not doing Elvis?”

He hung his head a little. Maybe he was shy, or maybe the helmet of hair was too heavy a burden to carry. “Shoe salesman in the mall. And no, they don’t make blue suede shoes anymore, least not for guys. Say, those are some sharp heels you got on there.”

“That’s the general idea,” Temple said. A three-inch heel was a portable dagger.

Chapter 12

I Forget to Remember to Forget

(A catchy song Elvis recorded for RCA in 1956; record execs were much higher on it than his next recording, “Heartbreak Hotel”)

He’d look at the old photos now and then.

Where had he gone, Young Elvis? And Middle Elvis—didn’t those damn Egyptians have a Middle Kingdom or somethin’? He didn’t count for much, Middle Elvis. A flash in the developing pan: for a few blinks of the camera’s eye lean and mean in a black leather suit. Just a bridge over troubled waters. And then there was Jumpsuit Elvis, and he’d been pretty good almost to the end, except you could see it in his eyes, in the photos. Zonked on pharmaceuticals. So finally he became Ultimate Elvis. Fat and Forty Elvis. Even Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show took potshots at Fat Elvis. That had hurt. He watched TV a lot. And he didn’t shoot out the screen, either. He was too weary by then to hit back.

Parade-blimp Elvis. Nothin’ to hide behind but his own excesses. But were they ever his own? Ever’body owned him. Hismama and his daddy, his Colonel Parker and his Memphis Mafia, his playgirls and his maybe-real girls, who touched him just enough to make him not ever wanta get burned that way again.

When he was young, he could eat what he wanted, play wlth what he wanted, screw what he wanted. Or what wanted him.

And everythin’ movin’ did.

Oh, yeah.

That’s all right, Mama.

The King frowned. It wasn’t all right, Mama. Never had been.

No one had told him. He never knew he couldn’t just keep on keepin’ on. That there’d be consequences.

Consequences! Hell, that was the name of a town in New Mexico with “Truth or” in front of it. He’d never visited that tank town, though the Colonel had him traipsing through every whistle-stop in America. Never out of America, though. Turned out his whole career was driven by what Colonel Parker had to hide. Where were the tell-all books about that? How the Colonel was an illegal Dutch alien, so he kept turning down flat all of the million-dollar offers to play Europe or Japan or Australia, challenging moves that would have kept a performer interested in his own life and career, instead of getting bored to death. Or on the way the Colonel kissed the King off to Hollywood, for thirty-two quick-shoot movies that minimized his performing talent just to maximize everybody’s profit. Or how he ran him ragged in Las Vegas with two shows a night because the Colonel owed millions in gambling debts to the International Hotel owner, even when it later became the Las Vegas Hilton. Colonel played and Elvis paid. And paid. And paid, until there was only one way to stop.

No use crying over spilt buttermilk, though.

The Colonel was finally dead now after living to the ripe old age of eighty-seven. And Elvis is still going strong, in one way or the other.

He bestirred himself to open one of the long row of mirrored closet doors.

Time to go out. To see and be seen. Let’s see. What would he wear? His pale, beringed hand reached out for something white.

Chapter 13

All Shook Up (Elvis’s 1957 all-time hit, thirty weeks on the charts; Elvis’s “Yeah, Yeah” here inspired the trio of yeahs in Lennon and McCartney’s “She Loves Me.” Elvis had recorded a song named “Yeah, yeah, yeah” in 1954.)

Matt Devine was thirty-five minutes into his midnight radio show, but it felt like he had only spent about ten minutes at the microphone.

Maybe he was getting good at this.

Or maybe this had been an easy night.

He’d had the usual lovelorn listeners he inherited from Ambrosia’s earlier “music for misery” three-hour show. “Music for misery” was Matt’s name for it. Also “soft rock for hard times.” To be fair, not everyone who called in was feeling blue; some wanted a sentimental song to celebrate a new love, or a dedicated parent or sibling. Still, it added up to a three-hour stint of with-it schmaltz.

Matt and his “serious” talk show was supposed to be the heavy hitter; the real counselor. But it was hard for Matt to take the emotional scratches and contusions of callins to WCOO-AM seriously after months of handling hotline counseling for ConTact. There the daily owies ranged from domestic violence to drug overdose to suicide, life-threatening problems that were sometimes still in progress.

Still, he had debuted on this station to handle an almost-infanticide, and he’d rather help apply Band-Aids than perform CPR any day.

“So what d’you think, Mr. Midnight?” the tentative female voice was asking for all the world to hear. “Should I ditch Spencer and stick with Kirby?”

Given names nowadays! Hard to imagine what a St. Spencer or a St. Kirby would be like. As for a St. Tiffany…

“Tiffany, it’s your life. You’re only sixteen. You don’t have to choose anyone yet. You have a right to tell both guys you want to play the field. You have a right to pick one, or neither. What you don’t have a right to do is be dishonest with them, or yourself.”

“Right.” She didn’t sound like the road had become clear and straight ahead of her, or ever would. “I know! Maybe I should find a third guy. That way neither one can blame the other, or me.”

“You could try life without a boyfriend for a while.” “Really? I never thought of that.”

“Maybe you don’t need to know more guys. Maybe you need to know yourself a little better so you can figure out what guys are right for you.”

“Oh, that is such a radical idea, Mr. Midnight. Guess what I’m gonna do? Nothing. I’m gonna stay home nights and listen to your show, and figure out what everybody else is doing. It’ll be like going to school, right?”

“Maybe.” At moments like this, Matt longed to simply end the conversation with some schmaltzy song, as Ambrosia did. With a voice as warm and mellow as her cafe-au-lait skin, “Ambrosia” was producer Leticia Brown’s seven-to-midnight alter ego. Mr. Midnight, unfortunately, sang a cappella. “Whatever you do, do it for yourself first. If you don’t know who you are, you won’t be able to tell who anyone else is.”

“Oooh. That is so right on. Thank you, Mr. Midnight.

I’ll be here, listening to you.”

That’s what Matt was afraid of. In the commercial radio counseling game, it seemed that the messenger, not the message, was the big attraction.

Radio was an anonymous medium, but it wasn’t a private one, like the hotline. Matt still felt uneasy about the difference.

In the control booth, Ambrosia/Leticia was giving him the thumb’s-up sign. Her beautiful, upbeat face was his lifeline. She didn’t have to stay after her gig, but she had hired him. She planned on babying him along, especially after his spectacular debut.

“Great, Matt,” her deep voice, so like a cat’s that had swallowed a brandy Alexander, purred over the headphones. “You’re developing quite a teenybopper following.”

“That’s good?”

“That’s very good. That’s the groove the advertisers crave.”

And that’s what was happening while they talked: commercials were playing, paying his salary.

Leticia lifted a forefinger like a chorus director. When it descended, another voice was humming in his ears, male this time.

“This, ah, that midnight talk show?”

“Certainly is. The Midnight Hour on WCOO-AM: talk radio with heart.” Matt delivered this corny line with as much heart as he could muster.

“I’m just sittin’ here, and I heard your last caller.

There sure are a lot of lonely little girls out there.” “Tiffany wasn’t exactly lonely; that was the point.”

“Yeah, well, I got a lot of sympathy for kids these days, with all the drugs and bad folks that are out there. We really oughta do somethin’ about that.”

“We keep trying. So, what can I help you with tonight?”

“Me? I just wanta help other people. I’m in a position of some influence, you know.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Bein’ an entertainer and all. Folks look up to you. Sometimes, though, it can be a pain in the butt. They just gotta come around and get all that attention. I try to give ‘em as much back as I can, but it’s endless. Just endless.”

“Is that your problem?”

“Hell, it’s not a problem, son! It’s success.”

“Seems to me success has been a problem to a lot of people, especially some of those whose acts have played this town.”

The man laughed, deep and easy. Matt was having flashbacks to another Vegas celebrity he had unwittingly counseled at ConTact. A light sweat prickled his skin as he remembered that man’s manipulative dark side. Their conversations had become antagonistic and deeply personal. Matt wanted to avoid that sort of game on live radio at all costs. It catered to the caller’s egocentric needs and did him no good. And it did Matt’s psyche not a bit of good either. It was like dueling Lucifer, a being of pride and power and incidental evil. Matt’s past as a priest made him all too open to other people’s spiritual ills.

“Well, now, see, I’m not just your ordinary performer.

I put my whole soul into my shows. And my fans, man, they put their souls right out there, in the palm of my hands. I’m just a wringin’-wet rag when I come off that stage. Hell, I gotta have guys onstage to wipe my brow and bring me water.”

Matt was scouring his brain. Who could this be? Who that big was playing Vegas right now? Who that big would call a dinky show like the Midnight Hour?

“These big Vegas shows sure are marathons of endurance,” Matt said sympathetically, playing for time.

“En-dur-ance. That is the word, son. I can’t hardly sleep until dawn after one of these babies. I can’t hardly sleep ever.”

“The adrenaline of performance can be pretty hard to burn off afterwards,” Matt said, remembering that Temple had often stayed up with Max Kinsella, the magician, until he “came down” after his two evening shows. Even Matt was experiencing trouble sleeping now that he had a midnight performance date every Wednesday to Sunday. “Maybe you need someone around to help you come down.”

This time the laugh went on as long as an aria. “I got somebody. I got truckloads of somebodies; always had, always will. I am not alone unless I wanta be. And when I don’t wanta be alone, I just snap my fingers and I got people to do whatever I wanta do when I wanta do it: play pool, play football, play footsie and a lot more.”

“Sounds like you could do more to do what the people around need and want, instead of just indulge yourself.”

“I work my ass off, and they get a lot of privileges workin’ for me. It’s a rough schedule, two shows a night, night after night. And these shows are all me. I’m not as young as I usta be, gotta have a doctor travel with me, to tend my needs, you know? I give those guys and girls plenty. Least they could do is what I want, when I need it.”

“I understand. I’m just saying it might not be good for you to have everyone in your life arranging theirs totally around you, no matter what you pay them. You can’t buy love.”

“Hey, what’re you sellin’? A song title? Been done, son. And you’re wrong. You can buy love. I’ve done it.” A pause, for the first time. “Loyalty, though. You can’t buy that. I been burned there. All those guys and girls, all blowin’ off their mouths after they left me, tellin’ the inside story on this and the inside story on that. Makin’ me look like a pitiful fool. Makin’ money off me even when they’re long off the payroll.”

“People can betray you,” Matt agreed. He glanced at Leticia, wondering if he should lose the guy. She’d like the idea of a celebrity performer calling in, but this guy could be doing standup comedy in some fringe club, for all Matt knew. And his voice was slurred with sleep, or with something stronger.

But Leticia’s expression was rapt beyond the glass window, and her hand was making the circling motion that meant: keep it going.

“What can I do to help you?” Matt asked.

“Well, son, I came up the hard way, never got much education … not that I wasn’t plenty sharp. I made me, and don’t let anyone tell you different. But it all just hit so fast when I was so young, and before you know it I’m hidin’ out from fans. Though I never did manage to hide out from the pretty ones, you know what I mean?”

Matt disliked the complacent womanizing tone. “So you only care about attractive fans.”

“No, man! You don’t know me. I love ‘em all, and they love me back. But there are … side benefits, all right? But that was before I got in touch with my spiritual side.”

Matt rolled his eyes at Leticia. This guy sounded about as spiritual as a tire iron.

“I had my fun,” the caller admitted. “More than any one man has ever had, I’ll bet. But I lost my mama when I was young, and we were real close. Couldn’t buy her all the things she’d never had, she was gone that fast. Couldn’t buy her anything then, but at least she had that pink Cadillac. She didn’t drive, but what’s money for but spendin’? Wish I’d-a watched who was spendin’ what, though. I had to work too hard on my movies and stage shows to wanta do much but have fun when I wasn’t workin’. Guess I shoulda been watchin’ the purse strings, like they say. I made a lotta money, but a lotta people made too much money off me. It makes me mad, to tell you the truth, when I lie here after a show and everybody’s gone and my mind goes round and round,and nothin’ can touch that feelin’ and I can’t sleep no matter what I take. I shoulda watched out for myself more. But I thought I was payin’ them to watch out for me. And they did, as much as I’d let ‘em. Maybe I didn’t let ‘em much.”

“The problems you describe are very real, except for the scale you live your life on. You’re too pampered, that’s the problem. You sound too isolated. If you have so many people around taking care of your every want, why do you need to call me?”

“That’s just it. Seems like they’re not around anymore. First my mama gone, then my little-girl wife and my little girl, then some of the boys turned on me. I don’t know what to do. I try to go on with my shows, but they take so much out of me, and it gets harder and harder to live from show to show. Oh, they say, see a shrink, but I’m not gonna have no guy rootin’ around in my head where no one can see it. I’m in a rut and I don’t know how to get out of it. I need to talk to somebody I don’t pay, and you’re the only one I could think of.”

Matt caught sight of Leticia’s flailing arm, hand pointing to her wrist watch. Almost out of time.

“You have big problems all right; more than a few minutes on a phone can solve.”

“Maybe I can call again.”

Matt devoutly hoped not, but this show was like an old-fashioned confessional: you couldn’t stop anyone who wanted to from walking in, keeling down, and confessing all their sins. Here, at least, you could cut them off the air if they took too much time, and this guy definitely had.

“You can always call again,” Matt said reassuringly, but he had already grown cynical enough to add mentally, if anyone lets you through.

“That’s good. That’s all right.” The man sounded genuinely relieved, and Matt felt a stab of pity for him. “Thank you. Thank you verra much.”

Matt rolled his head on his shoulders while taking off the headphones, reducing the muscle tension. The fading rant of a local car dealer commercial was still droning in his ears when Leticia burst into the studio.

When a woman has the face of an archangel, the energy of a whirling dervish, and a three-hundred-pound body, any place she enters is a breakin.

“I know. I let this guy run on too long.”

“Too long? Didn’t you recognize his voice?”

“Recognize his voice? The only celebrity I ever counseled before was at ConTact, and this wasn’t him. This voice was baritone, all right, but with a slurry kind of accent.”

“A Southern accent, maybe.”

“Yeah, but it was, ah, softened, like he’d been out of the South for some time.”

“Oh, he sure has, honey chile. That man has been off the planet for twenty-two years.”

“He’s that far gone mentally, huh? Sorry, I guess I’m not up on the entertainers at all the hotels. Should I have known him?”

Leticia said nothing, just came over and enveloped him in a smothering, industrial-strength hug.

“Matt, baby, you are the sweetest, out-of-the-loop thing, bless your heart. Don’t you even have a clue who that was? Watch our numbers soar now! That was the Hillbilly Cat, Mr. Las Vegas, the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, E. the P., the no-longer-late Elvis Presley, or I’m just ninety pounds of soggy grits and chitlin’s.”

“But … he’s dead.”

“Not on WCOO-AM he isn’t. Ohhh, baby!”

Chapter 14

Louie,Louie

(Elvis recorded the 1898-composed “The Whiffenpoof Song,” which mentions a Temple Bar and Louie the bartender in 1968; it was used in 1969’s The Trouble with Girls)

Okay, Elvis never recorded any version of my eponymous song, that venerable drinking anthem that has so enliv-ened the past couple decades.

But he did record “The Whiffenpoof Song,” another, far older drinking song in which I and my Miss Temple Barr are mentioned. (Indirectly, of course, but we always were discreet. Or rather, I was. I cannot speak for Miss Temple Barr, especially during her obscure years before she met me.) The King recorded Whiffenpoof back in ‘68, and it was used a year later in one of his films, The Trouble with Girls. Not that the King had any trouble with girls other than beating them off.

This is how I know so much about the ultimate E. We have a lot in common.

After my undercover visit to the Kingdome. it is natural that Elvis should be on my mind. I have retreated home to the Circle Ritz overnight, so Miss Temple finds me innocently sitting on her sofa or her bed, whichever will lnconvenience her most at the moment, apparently lazing away my days and nights. Like Nero Wolfe, my mind is most active when I appear most physically inactive.

It is clear that any hijinks involvlng Elvis, whether at the Crystal Phoenix or the Kingdome, will require a vast insight into the man, his life, and times. For me, this is a snap. We have a lot in common.

You could say that Elvis Presley and I are synonymous with Las Vegas.

True, he did not appear to recognize the concept of “low-profile,” and I am a master of blending into my environment, but we share a certain raw animal magnetism and a taste for exotic dishes both voluptuary and culinary.

Neither of us went for health food, that was for sure. I am certain all are familiar with E’s adoration of burnt-black bacon, hard-fried eggs you could use as blackjacks, buttermilk biscuits, and the infamous fried bananapeanut-butter sandwiches. To him, fruit and vegetables were major abominations, as the Free-to-Be-Feline food pellets that resemble health-store pills are to me.

I do lack E’s flair and passion for dressing up, and I do not need the services of his later, ever-present sunglasses. My sunglasses, like my concealed weapons, are built in. I have these laser-fast pupils that contract to shut out too much light. I bet Elvis would have really grooved on my eyes, could he have begged, borrowed, or bought them.

And he would have tried

Chapter 15

Heartbreak Hotel

(Written by Tommy Durden and Hoyt Axton’s mother Mae, snapped up by Elvis in November 1955, and recorded in January 1956; Elvis’s first million-seller)

“Temple,” Matt said to Temple over the phone, “can I presume on your expertise again?”

“Something to do with talk shows?”

“Just my radio show. Could you come up and hear my new tape player?”

“Now?”

“Today would be good. Before I have to do another show.”

“That urgent? Well, sure.”

Temple hung up, looking through her closet for some visiting outfit more appropriate than a sweat suit.

As she hopped on one foot hunting the matching shoe on the closet floor, she did wonder how Max would like all this semiprofessional hobnobbing between his former rival and herself. Darn him, anyway! Why did he have to be off on one of his mysterious missions, which had gotten mysteriouser after the recent murder of the stripper he had tried to help? Temple froze, transfixed by a stab of real worry. Max ran on an exaggerated sense of responsibility for every ill in the world. His teenaged cousin’s tragic death in Ireland had started the cycle so long ago … who would end it? Of course, it was ludicrous to consider Matt anyone’s rival. A less competitive personality she had never met, or maybe she’d just never seen him want anything he had difficulty getting. Like her.

Had she been drawn into this help-Matt campaign as a clever way of entangling her emotionally? Matt had shown signs of being seriously interested, also confessing that he had a lot of personal issues to resolve first. She sighed. Ex-priests were so hard to read. She only knew one, admittedly.

By the time she’d worried the pros and cons of both men to shreds in her mind, she was dressed and ready to visit the apartment directly overhead. What Max might think of such neighborliness was none of his business, so long as it was just neighborly.

When Matt answered her knock, he seemed too excited to notice her appearance. “What do you know about Elvis Presley?” he demanded before the door had even closed behind her.

“Elvis Presley?” The weird coincidence knocked her out. “Strange that you should ask, but virtually nothing.” “As little as I’m likely to know about him?” “Probably not that little.”

“Then listen to this.” Matt grabbed her wristgrabbed!—to hustle her into the living room. There he positioned her dead center on his red suede couch.

He then grabbed (grabbed again) the stereo remote control from one of the modest gray coffee table cubes. He pointed it at the shelf unit stereo, which squatted like a technological god on a primitive islander’s makeshift altar: a board across two brick pillars.

“Listen!” Matt ordered.Ordered? Matt? He didn’t even sit beside her, but paced behind the sinuous fifties-style sofa, so she couldn’t crane her neck to read his face for some clue to this charade.

A moment later Matt’s voice came over the tape, mel-low yet intense, that nice combo of styles he brought to electronic media so naturally that seasoned on-air personalities would spit to hear it.

A young girl’s voice, vacant and unformed, was fad-ing off.

On came a man’s voice, a little mushy but also mel-low in its own way.

Temple listened for a few moments, then planted her elbows on her knees and her chin on her fists and listened harder. Behind her Matt paced, his footsteps making the fifty-year-old wood parquet floor creak at intervals, like a scratch in an obsolete vinyl record.

“ ‘Son,’ ” she repeated the caller once. “That’s an old Southernism.”

“Speaking of old … how old do you think he sounds?”

“Ummm. Mature. Middle-aged. But with a mischievous, maybe even melancholy boyish quality … no, not quite that, maybe a little self-mocking.”

Matt aimed the remote and suddenly shot the sound off, either pausing or muting the recording. “So? What do you think?”

She finally turned to confront him. “I think if you hadn’t mentioned Elvis, I’d never be thinking what I’m thinking.”

“Which is?”

“That it’s supposed to be Elvis.”

Matt made a noise behind her, then came around the sofa end to perch uneasily on a curve. “What do you mean ‘supposed’?”

“I mean the man is stone dead. Been that way since nineteen seventy-seven.”

“Is that when he died? That long ago?”

“Yes. Don’t tell me you don’t remember? I thought it was a Crucial Twentieth-Century Date, like when Kennedy was assassinated, or Martin Luther King, or Bobby Kennedy, or when Marilyn Monroe died.”

“We’re too young to have lived through or remember much about those other deaths, but I was around for Elvis’s death and I don’t remember it. I do remember when Pope John Paul the First died.”

“Not exactly the same thing, Matt.”

He grinned. “That’s why I need expert advice. Was that a credible Elvis?”

“I don’t know. I’m not an Elvis expert. I can tell you that Las Vegas happens to be crawling with Elvis impersonators at the moment, and I bet a lot of them sound pretty credible.”

“Elvis imitators, really? Why?”

“Ever heard that the Kingdome is coming?” “Kingdom—?”

Temple loved teasing people with the name. “Not the Kingdom, the Kingdome, and not the athletic facility in Seattle that’s just been torn down, either. It’s the new Elvis Presley-themed hotel-casino.”

“How could I have missed that? And you say that a host of Elvis imitators is in town for the opening? So my guy is just some Elvis imitator?”

“That’s the best guess.”

“But why?”

“Good publicity?”

Matt sighed. “Leticia is really jazzed on that call. Says it’ll skyrocket the show’s ratings.”

“Probably will. And since when have you used a verb like ‘jazzed’? Is working for that radio station corrupting you?”

Matt shook off her gentle jibe, still concentrating on what bothered him. “You don’t think the radio station, Leticia—?”

“Would arrange for Elvis to ‘phone home’ without telling you? No.” Temple glanced at him, measuring hismood. “But the thing about you, Matt, is you’re such a sincere, natural radio personality. If they did want to encourage more sensational news, like that call from the unwed mother a couple weeks ago, they might be tempted not to tell you it was a set up deal.”

“I would never approve of a deception like that.”

“Of course not, and I’m sure they know that. Besides, if it was a setup, you’d be a whole lot more believable if you really bought it.”

“They’d do that? Trick me? Use me?”

“You ever hear the story how some mean director got Jackie Cooper to cry as a child actor? He lied and told him his dog was dead, then shot the scene.”

“Well, nobody’s telling me Elvis isn’t dead. And I wouldn’t cry for him anyway. I mean, I know nothing about the man, except for his scandalous lifestyle.”

“Right, you were listening to old Bob Dylan instead of early Elvis. Talk about far-spectrum opposites. It is kind of amazing how it all came together in the late fifties and early sixties: Elvis making hard-edged rock ‘n’ roll out of the rockabilly and rhythm and blues closet, Bob Dylan leaving the Minnesota Iron Range to troll for authentic folk music in the South, then the Beatles borrowing from both and blowing in from England and blowing away both folk and rock for a while.”

“Huh? That all sounds like Sanskrit to me. You do know a heck of a lot more about this than I do, Temple.”

“No, just the rough outlines. I always had to know a little about a lot in my various jobs.”

“That’s why you’re so invaluable.”

“Right.”

“So how can I avoid being taken to the cleaners—on the air, yet—by this phony Elvis?”

“Know thy antagonist.” Temple bit her lower lip. “There’s the library,” she said, smiling at the vision of Quincey Conrad being forced to apply for a library card because of her Priscilla assignment. “Tons of books on the subject. And videos too, I’ll bet. You could check the voice against your own recording.”

Matt frowned. “I don’t have a VCR.”

“Yet. One more improvement of modern life to invest in, son,” she added in a relaxed baritone drawl.

Matt looked at her as if he’d never seen her before. “That was pretty good for a girl who’s no Elvis freak.

If you can do Elvis that well, how good would a real Elvis imitator sound?”

“Like the real thing. Especially if he had a facial structure that actually resembled the King’s. The shape of the facial mask affects how the voice is produced. Ever notice how lookalikes usually sound alike?”

“No.”

“Well, they do.”

“Come to think of it, there was a priest in Arizona we always used to say looked and sounded like Gig Young, the actor.”

Temple giggled.

“Why are you laughing?”

“If you knew Gig Young’s wicked, womanizing ways … well, him as a priest is pretty funny. Plus, he committed suicide.”

“Poor man. But no way would he have been priest material. So I’m still in a pickle: how do I keep from looking like a complete fool the next time the guy calls, if he does?”

“Oh, he probably will. Even if he’s just a nut with no motive but exposure, kind of like a psychic flasher, he’ll want more attention. Say, I wonder—? May I use your phone?”

“I can’t resist anyone who says ‘may’ instead of `can’.”

“Only every other Tuesday.” Temple picked up the heavy receiver. Matt, parsimonious former priest, had ordered the least fancy model. She dialed a number she knew by heart.

“It’s not … him,” Matt mouthed suddenly, glowering as much as one with his sunny blond looks could. He referred to Temple’s significant but often missing-inaction other, Max Kinsella. Temple shook her head, unwilling to get into personal differences.

“Hi!” she greeted whoever answered, her PR person’s voice set on High-energy Percussion. “What do you know about Elvis? Oh, really? No kidding. Can you get some to Matt’s place? Right now? Good.”

“Temple, what have you done?” he asked the minute she hung up.

“I’ve brought in an expert witness: a fairy godmother with a heavy Elvish fetish, it turns out.”

“Who?”

“Oh, a music lover of our acquaintance.”

“Not Lieutenant Molina.” Matt sounded shocked.

Temple couldn’t talk for laughing. “Holy Half-note! Not Molina. I wouldn’t sic her on you for anything. She not only is convinced Max should be on the Ten Most Wanted List for something, but she thinks I’m a pest who couldn’t figure out what’s in the mystery meat for dinner, much less decode a recipe for murder. Besides, she’s into oldies older than Elvis. Can you imagine her and Elvis together? Ugh! Joan Crawford and James Dean. No way. You’ll like your friendly neighborhood Elvis expert. I guarantee it.” The doorbell rang. “And here comes—”

Temple pranced to the door on her mid-heel pumps to flourish it open.

Behind it stood Electra Lark, wearing a subdued blackand-pink muumuu and carrying two canvas bags bulging with books. She assumed the wide-legged and -armed stance of an entertainer as she belted out:

“If your baby done left you, You’ve found the right place to dwell.

The bellhop is a black cat, The landlady’s dressed in black, Down Las Vegas’s own Lonely Street, At Huh-Huh-Heartbreak Huh-Huh-Hotel.”

Chapter 16

Send in the Clones

(Elvis never sang or recorded the schmaltzy ballad “Send in the Clowns,” but he should have)

“I feel like a fraud,” Matt said, examining the vast white elephantine bulk of the Kingdome complex shining in the thin winter sunlight.

“You do have a radio show,” Temple pointed out. She locked the Storm and they started walking into Kingdome World.

“But not the kind of radio show that would ever welcome an Elvis imitator.”

“Not knowingly anyway,” Temple agreed.

“And what makes you think I could recognize a voice I heard only once among this horde of burning hunks of love.”

Temple paused to eye him. ” ‘This horde of burning hunks of love.’ That’s good. Very hip. You must have absorbed a lot from Electra’s Elvis books last night.”

“A lot and not enough. I’ve never glimpsed a more promising or a more poisoned life story before, not even in confession. These tell-all books do tell it all, don’t they?”

“I don’t know. I never read them.”

“Virtuously indifferent to other people’s dirt, or just too busy?”

“A bit of both, I imagine. So Elvis’s private life was as spectacular as his public success, huh?”

“Both seem to have gone up and down. I can see why the mysteries of Elvis are so tantalizing…. What is that?”

Matt had stopped to stare at the four-story-tall tilted guitar in the Kingdome’s massive atrium. Heads could be seen zipping along the handle and strings while musical riffs boomed out from everywhere.

“It’s a slide. A guitar slide, get it? Popular with kids.”

“I guess making noise always is,” Matt shouted over the hullabaloo. “Are you sure I can use my radio show as a pretext to listening to various Elvis voices?”

“Who’s to challenge you? Publicity-hungry Elvis imitators would cozy up to a scrofulous porcupine if they thought it meant airtime. Speaking of which, Crawford Buchanan will suck up any attention this circus can get him. You are Media now, Matt. You can go anywhere and ask anything and people will trip over their own toes trying to catch your attention.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it. But at least I might get to see your major crown of thorns in a brand-new hairdo.”

“Oh, the Crawf’s Elvis pompadour does nothing for him, not that anything would. Try not to laugh out loud.” “The Crawf?”

“His unofficial stepdaughter’s term. I had stereotyped her as a rather vacant sleazehead, but it turns out that’s just the façade of a typical teenager nowadays. Quincey may not be a happy camper, but she’s not such a dim Coleman lantern, after all.”

“How could she be a happy camper, with the Crawf for a father figure? I recall Buchanan as an obnoxious combo of bootlicker and egomaniac, and I don’t find that particularly laughable. Those people can be dangerous. That’s what some of Elvis’s Memphis Mafia turned into.”

“Obsequiously overbearing?”

“Well, only obsequious to Elvis; overbearing to everyone else.”

“Sounds big-time dysfunctional.”

“And what do you call this?”

Temple lowered her eyes from the circling Elvis statues on high to the milling crowds, among whom the Elvis-like black-shag wigs and industrial-strength sunglasses materialized here and there. And this was just the come-as-you-weren’t public; they hadn’t even encountered any genuine imitators yet.

“You know,” she mused, “Las Vegas could be the world’s first theme park for the dysfunctional. I never thought of the old town as therapy.”

“Or metropolitan enabler,” Matt said. “I’m glad I skimmed Electra’s books. This all should mean a lot more to me.”

“If it means anything at all,” Temple agreed. “I thought we’d take advantage of our on-site guide.” “On-site guide?”

“The Priscilla impersonator.”

Matt’s pale eyebrows lifted. “The cynical teenager. Should be interesting. Can I expect tattooed and pierced flesh?”

“Only razor-burned.”

This time no screams led the way to Quincey’s dressing room.

In fact, a uniformed Kingdome security guard blocked the backstage route to the dressing rooms below.

A Kingdome security guard uniform was the same Men in Black outfit Crawford had affected yesterday: white shirt, black suit, narrow black tie, fedora, and ultradark sunglasses.

“Sorry, folks.” He laid down the law with an in-character smirk that wasn’t at all obsequious. “This is off limits.”

“We’re here to see Quincey Conrad,” Temple said briskly. Brisk always sounded businesslike and, more important, legitimate.

The guard’s head shook.

“Perhaps I should say ‘Priscilla.’ “

“You may be here to see her, but she’s not ready to see you. We don’t let in tourists, only people connected to the performers.”

“We’re connected. Check with Crawford Buchanan, the emcee. He knows the value of publicity.”

The sunglasses kept her from reading any loosening of presumably narrowed eyes, but the guy extracted a cell phone from the suit and punched in a predialed number.

“Yeah. Fiorello here. You know a—” During a long pause the impenetrable sunglasses so reminiscent of the latest fashion in alien eyes seemed to wordlessly interrogate them. Then the guard extended the phone so Temple could speak into it.

“Temple Barr with Matt Devine from WCOO radio.”

The guard clamped the phone to his ear for the reply.

In a moment he nodded grudgingly and stepped aside, but barely enough to let them pass.

They brushed by itchy-scratchy mohair into the same claustrophobic stairwell Temple had used the day before.

“This is so much nicer without the sound effects,” she told Matt.

“You mean Quincey’s screams.”

Temple nodded, surprised to find the hallway that had been so empty yesterday full of colorful foot traffic. Elvi in various stages of development (Young, Comeback, and Jumpsuit) and undress (no shirt, open shirt, navel-reaching jumpsuit vee) hustled by, too busy to give them a glance. Matt rubbernecked like someone at a tennis match

“They sure have the look down,” Matt said. “No wonder rumors started that Elvis was alive and well and imitating himself.”

Temple darted toward an open dressing room door. “Quincey is expecting us. I told her that I was bringing media and needed an Elvis tour.”

She vanished, and Matt hesitated before following her. This place looked like a rabbit hole of the first water. Entering such illogical Wonderland worlds had put Alice through a lot of trauma as well as adventure. He wasn’t eager to disappear into another unreal world like talk radio. Investigating Elvis gave the man who had called him more legitimacy. It put Matt in the business of dealing with the lunatic fringe. It meant he was making money off other people’s weaknesses. But so was every Elvis imitator in the hotel, and so Elvis himself had done.

Matt shrugged and followed Temple into the room. She was a much more reliable guide than the White Rabbit, not to mention more attractive.

Then there she was, Miss Teenage America, a petite female figure dwarfed by a full bridal-veil fall of jet-black hair. Her eyes played hide-and-seek in a blur of furred lashes, painted eyebrows, and kohl liner. A black Madonna. Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra without the aura of seduction. She also reminded Matt of another teasingly familiar image from the sixties, or even the fifties, but he couldn’t quite place it. Certainly she was a revenant of the orchestrated image Priscilla Beaulieu had donned when she had lived at Graceland with Elvis from the ages of seventeen to twenty-six, more than half the time without benefit of marriage.

“Quincey Conrad,” Temple introduced this apparition. “Matt Devine.”

If the eyes beneath the awning of lashes could have narrowed further, they did. “He’d never pass as Elvis,”

she commented as if Matt weren’t there, or were hearing impaired.

Obviously, her current assignment had narrowed her world to the Elvis and the not-Elvis.

“I’d never want to,” Matt said. “Elvis had a very troubled life, and death.”

“I’m not so sure.” Quincey sat back down at the dressing table mirror to fine-tune her mask of makeup. “That he was troubled?”

“That he’s dead.”

“Really?” Temple interjected. “What makes you question that?”

“It’d be so cool, that’s all.” Quincey blotted her tearose-pale lipstick. “Okay. You guys ready to go on an Elvis tour?” She stood up and eyed Matt again. “What’s his cover?”

“It’s no cover,” Matt said a little indignantly. “I’ve got a radio show. I might be interested in having some of the Elvis imitators on.”

“Local?” Quincey’s tone dripped boredom.

“Syndicated.” Temple sounded like someone laying down a royal flush on a poker table.

“Ohhhh.” The exaggerated eyes gave Matt new respect. “National exposure. That’s what these guys all dream of.” As if she didn’t. She rolled her eyes, an athletic feat under the circumstances. “Like A Current Affair is the big time.”

“Well,” Matt said, “they’re not likely to get Sixty Minutes.”

“Not unless Elvis really is alive and well in Las Vegas,” Temple pointed out. “Let’s go find out.”

Matt’s few glimpses of life behind stage, accomplished only since he had moved to Las Vegas and in Temple’s presence, still hadn’t accustomed him to people running around in states of undress.

Here, at least, there were no leggy chorus girls fleeting through like mobile Venus de Milos. No, there were justincarnations of Elvis, elbowing past each other as if encountering mirrored images of oneself in disguise were the most normal thing in their world. And it probably was.

Matt’s recent fast-forward skitter through a raft of picture books of Elvis’s career helped him identify every imitator’s place on the Elvis spectrum. None mimicked the “dirty-blond” natural-born Elvis of the mid-fifties. All were black and beautiful to a degree, depending on age and physical fitness and actual resemblance to the King.

“Ooof!” Even the stage-savvy Temple seemed awed by the proliferation of Elvi. “Where do we begin?”

“These are the community dressing rooms,” Quincey said. “Us few girls get separate rooms.”

“ ‘Us’?” Temple jumped on the word. “There are more Priscillas down here?”

“No. I’m the only one. But there are three female Elvises.”

Temple’s eyes wordlessly questioned Matt.

“I just want to meet the men,” he said hastily. “I mean, the voice—”

Temple got his message, so she nodded at Quincey. “Let’s start at the end of the hall and work our way back. Show us to the first dressing room and we’ll take it from there. I’d love to know whose jumpsuit got axed.”

“It’s been the talk of rehearsals,” Quincey agreed. “Some hotel security guy finally came after you left and took it away, so someone should have noticed it was missing by now. And—” She paused outside an open door before leaving them, suddenly dead serious. “I should warn you. These are nice guys, mostly, but a little bent. I mean, they, like, worship the dead guy. So don’t say anything anti-Elvis. Somebody might stick his ringed fist into your teeth, and these guys wear Godzillasize rings, let me tell you.”

With that word of warning, they entered the first dressing room.

A miasma of hair spray hung in the hot air along with a multiscented wave of deodorant. Heavyset, bluecollar-muscled guys were primping everywhere, patting down sideburns as big as tarantulas, arranging crosses and lightning bolt pendants on springy cushions of chest hair, smoothing shocks of black hair into place, some teasing a few fitful locks down onto the forehead, like the little girl who had a little curl of nursery rhymes. When she was good, she was very, very good. And when she was bad, she was horrid.

That was certainly true of the real Elvis, Matt thought.

The round yellow bulbs that framed the chain of mirrors lining both sides of the long room made the assembled colored stones and gold studs on the various costumes glitter like neon miniatures of Las Vegas hotel signs. Matt recognized several versions of the famous American eagle jumpsuit, the denim-blue and silver-studded model, the Native American motifs. Most were white, or the occasional black version.

For a while during the sixties, he had read, Elvis had dressed in black pants, white shirts: street clothes, but already mirroring the sharp opposites his jumpsuits would embody. The jumpsuits themselves were the pin-nacle of Elvis’s transference of boyhood needs and loves into popular culture icons. Inspired by Elvis’s early love for comic-book superheroes in fancy jumpsuits and capes, they had been tailored to the sixties and seventies fashion explosion of innovations in normally staid men’s clothing, like bellbottom trousers and necklaces for men. Although they looked excessive to the modern eye, they had merely been a show-biz version of the new male peacock emerging. Matt recalled that even Nehru jackets and vaguely priestlike white collars had been popular then, along with crosses of every description.

Although the “Fat and Forty” Elvis of the tabloids had only had a short run at the very end of the performer’s career, this version of Elvis was present everywhere in the dressing room. Where else could broad-bellied, middle-aged Everymen find a role model who had remained beloved and sexy to legions of female fans to the bitter end? Seeing these out-of-shape Elvises reflected in the facing mirrors and each other made Matt understand one reason for the entertainer’s life after death: such imperfections and failings had only further endeared him to his fans. Reading of Elvis’s Messiahlike appeal had puzzled Matt until today. Here, the degraded Elvis image was embraced as enthusiastically as the idealistic one of endless youth and fitness and energy, most of it running on amphetamines.

Christianity had been the world’s first religion to worship a God with a vulnerable face: one facet of the Trinity was divinity made flesh. In a sense, like a shaman who takes upon himself both powers beyond ordinary humans and failings even greater than ordinary humans face, Elvis had become larger than his life. And Matt, from his reading, guessed that he knew it, which explained his thirst for spiritual enlightenment, even his grandiose belief that he could inspire young people to avoid street drugs when he himself gobbled prescribed drugs at a rate that stunned medical experts after his death.

“Awesome, isn’t it?” Temple commented under her breath. “The essence of Las Vegas. Or old Las Vegas, anyway, before the Bellagio and the Beluga came along to turn this old town into a literal cultural oasis.”

“The Beluga?”

“My nickname for the new Belladonna hotel-casino. Though it could describe some of these guys in jumpsuits.”

“That’s what’s so interesting. Elvis was slim for most of his career, but because middle-aged guys emulate him, he’s like a fly trapped in amber or a tabloid photograph: immortalized at his least flattering moment.”

“Maybe that was his most average moment.”

Matt nodded. “He’d always had a prodigious appetite.

He was almost hyperactive. That’s how the performance moves started. His left leg was always jiggling off excess energy even in high school, and onstage it kept time to the music and started the whole pelvis thing when the girls began screaming. He could tuck away enormous amounts of fatty fried food that would send any heart surgeon into cardiac arrest just to hear about it. When he got past forty, he was too used to conspicuous consumption to stop. I think his high metabolism also allowed him to tolerate large doses of drugs. But in a way, fat killed him. The first evidence I can find of him taking any kind of prescription drug was his mother’s diet pills; she wanted to lose weight when his career began to take off, and she didn’t like her appearance in photographs.”

“What kind of diet drugs?” Temple asked. “Like fen/ phen?”

“No, no. Amphetamines. Speed. Doctors handed them out to everyone in the fifties and sixties before anyone knew much about the physiology and psychology of addiction. Then when Elvis was drafted into the army, he was given Dexedrine to stay awake on night guard duty—”

“And uppers and downers when he started working in Hollywood, I bet. I have heard about that.”

Matt nodded. “I can even sympathize now that I’m on a night ‘performance’ schedule. It’s a lot harder to un-wind at two A.M. after the Midnight Hour live, than after anonymous private counseling sessions at ConTact.” “So what do you do to relax?”

Matt laughed uneasily. “Lately? Like last night? Stay up until five A.M. reading Elvis books.”

“You know, this is the first time I’ve ever found Elvis interesting. Who’d think stuff like a nervous tic and a few of your mother’s borrowed diet pills could both make you and break you?”

“Yeah. As I read this stuff, I keep wondering, when did it go wrong? What, or who, could have saved him? If anyone could have.”

“And if they had,” Temple added with a sweeping gesture, “would we still have had all this?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know which one of these guys, if any, might be my Midnight caller.”

“The only way to find out is to look, listen, and ask a lot of nosy questions. I’ll play PR frontwoman. Follow me.”

Matt wouldn’t have known who to approach. Face it; he wouldn’t have approached any of these intent men busy being born-again in the image of a dead superstar.

But Temple just kicked her snappy heels into high gear and clicked over to a neighboring pair of white-suited Elvises who were exchanging a small tube of glue.

On the concrete floor, the heels’ approach was as arresting as the sharp stutter of castanets. Temple’s pred-ilection for politically incorrect footwear was a subtle way of knocking on people’s doors as she approached them. Then they saw her red hair and were as good as snagged by her elfin charm.

Like all small creatures, she couldn’t afford to be invisible.

“Hi, fellahs. Lookin’ good. Have you a moment to answer some questions? I’ve got a radio guy here.” Elvi turned their heads in matched-Doberman tandem to eye Matt as if he were raw meat.

“Live?” one asked.

“No, these are just preliminary questions about the competition, about playing Elvis, about the King.” Matt gave Temple an A-plus for avoiding the phrase

“Elvis imitator.” Exactly what they called themselves, or were called, was a sore point with many semipro Elvis clones.

Matt decided the ball was in his court.

“So. How long have you two been Elvis impersonators?” he began.

Like twins, they answered for each other.

“Jerry’s been honing his act for three years,” said one

“Mike’s been in the biz for at least two.”

“What’s involved?” Matt asked, pulling over an empty chair.

Mike and Jerry exchanged glances. They were class A exhibits of what Matt saw was the most common Elvis imitator model: short, stocky urban guys with big dreams.

It wasn’t that they looked like Elvis very much to start with; it was that they wanted to. He’d guess that they could sing a little, but not enough to forge an independent performing persona. They needed Elvis for instant identity, as much as he needed them to carry on his entertaining legend.

“What’s involved? A lot,” Mike said. This close, you could see the sand-blasted surface of the cheeks not hidden by the sideburns. Acne scars, but nothing severe enough to be visible from stage. “First we gotta get our act together. Get the right songs for our voices, get the props and costumes, get in touch with the Elvis impersonator network—”

“Get the noive,” Jerry added, giving a belly laugh that shook his broad Elvis belt like a rhinestone surfboard hit by a big-mama wave.

Mike wore glasses. Not sunglasses, but real glasses. Elvis looked weird with see-through lenses on his face.

“I, urn, ditch these for the show,” Mike said, suddenly self-conscious.

“I’m sorry,” Matt said. “Didn’t mean to stare. I’m just studying everything. I’m new to all this.”

Mike stripped off his modern-day frames. “Yeah, well, we’re used to people thinking we’re nuts. We don’t start out anything like Elvis, most of us. That’s the challenge.”

“You mean, the greater stretch the impersonation is, the more accomplishment?”

“Something like that,” Mike agreed.

Jerry leaned forward, intent. He had a TV sitcom Jersey accent, and fire in his eye.

“The thing is, you gotta love the King, or you got no business even trying to do this. You gotta respect the man.”

“A lot of people don’t,” Matt pointed out. “Didn’t they really put him down at the beginning of his career? Call him a white-trash, no-talent hick who had nothing to offer but dirty dancing?”

“Yeah.”

Mike was getting pugnacious, twirling his nerdish glasses by one earpiece. He’d be a good on-air interview, Matt was horrified to find himself thinking. Was Temple right? Was he being corrupted by his new media role?

“Yeah. They said all that at the beginning, and it was better than what they said at the end, that he was a drugged-out, used-up fat fool who threw his life away. It’s just kinda funny that in between all that bad press the guy reinvented pop music in this country—in the world! He put it all together and brought it on home: rhythm and blues, gospel, country, pop. Man, the Beatles, that Dylan guy, they all were big cheeses after Elvis, and they all said they owed him a lot.”

“Yeah,” Jerry added. “Elvis grew up poor, but those church folk in the South, they knew how to sing. He heard it at church, he heard it in the bars on Beale Street, on the black radio. No one had put it all together like he did. It was never the same after Elvis. He’s the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

The present tense was not lost on Matt. Elvis lives: an eerie anagram of the performer’s name that even he had noticed. And now it had come true.

“Are there any black Elvises?” Matt asked. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed Temple making a startled motion after sitting statue-still and letting him conduct the interview.

He had been thinking of the black churches he had used to drop in on, and the glorious use of music in the liturgy, the most inspired blending of music and worship since the Middle Ages, he would bet.

But Jerry and Mike were bristling.

“We ain’t prejudiced,” Mike said. “It’s just that Elvis mostly isn’t a black thing. They got their Johnny Mathis and the old blues guys and gals. They were great, don’t get me wrong. But Elvis just isn’t a black thing.”

“But,” Matt mentally riffled through his previous night’s reading, “wasn’t Elvis accused later of ripping off the black musicians? And didn’t he dress black in high school? He was hanging around Lansky’s on Beale Street, which outfitted black guys and musicians. He was put down for it then.”

“Yeah, yeah. That stuff was there. That’s why he was a friggin’ genius. But … what can I say? We don’t get many black Elvises. We don’t keep ‘em out. They just don’t show up.”

“What kind of Elvises do you get?”

“We got a Mexican Elvis,” Jerry said. “El Vez. One of the top veterans in the business. We got Oriental Elvises. We even got a broad or two. But we don’t get black Elvises.” He shrugged. “It’s just a cultural thing.”

“Why do Elvis when you can do Ray Charles?”

Matt nodded. Elvis had been a musical, stylistic bridge from black to white, but it still wasn’t necessarily a two-way street, for either race.

“What other specialty Elvises are there?”

The two men exchanged another of their insiders’ glances: should we tell him? Jerry decided to do exactly that. “It’s a riot. The Elvises we got. Just when you think you’ve seen ‘em all, along comes a whole new act. Like Velvet Elvis.”

“Velvet Elvis?”

“Yeah, man. Very cool. Wears this black velvet jumpsuit with these neon decorations, just like a velvet painting.”

“Beeeeau-ti-ful,” Mike said, nodding and curling his lower lip instead of the Elvis upper one. “You should see that one under the stage lights. And it’s a woman.”

“You mean a dyke,” Jerry corrected.

“Well, the jury is out on that one, but not the outfit.First class. Original. There’s always room for originality in an Elvis competition.”

“But not too original,” Jerry said. “There’s a certain ranking for the songs and stuff. You got to deliver on the classics. Can’t go too far off the path.”

“But Velvet Elvis is pretty impressive. Great shoulders.”

“Yeah. Velvet Elvis is okay. I don’t think she’ll win shit. I mean, a woman …”

“And then there’s Velveeta Elvis.”

“Yeah. Cheesy!”

Their raw crescendoes of laughter threatened to split jumpsuit seams. Matt had read that the overweight Elvis had actually done that.

“Styles his hair with Cheese Whiz!” Jerry got out between guffaws. “Dude from Dallas, where I guess Velveeta is the local, you know, cure-all.”

“Yeah, they probably use it instead of Viagra there!” Both men were laughing themselves almost off their chairs.

“Anyhow, Velveeta Elvis is no lightweight. Must go two-seventy. And he has a white jumpsuit and all the stones are this yellow-orange—”

“Like those yellow bulbs they embed in streets. We call him ‘Warning Light Elvis’ too.”

“That guy just won’t give up.”

Matt hated to interrupt the laugh fest. “Anybody get so serious about impersonating Elvis that they don’t give it up—ever? They won’t go—” He glanced at Temple. She knew the phrase for what he was trying to say.

“They don’t ever go out of character,” she supplied.

The two guys barely blinked at her interjection, though they responded to it.

“Oh, yeah,” Jerry said. “The Ever-Elvises. These are not professional-caliber impersonators. They never walk away from a gig. They are the gig.”

“These yoyos show up at Graceland in costume! Tacky, tacky, tacky. We are talking wannabe wannabes.

See, we don’t have any delusions. We know we aren’t Elvis. We are performers. These guys, they are head cases. They gotta walk like Elvis, talk like Elvis, dress like Elvis, sing like Elvis out there in the real world. Among the public. On the street.”

“Sad,” Jerry put in for the coda.

“So … you don’t approve of people like that?” Matt wanted to be sure.

Mike had no doubt. “They give us all a bad name.” “They should be taken out and shot,” Jerry said. “Or stabbed?” Temple suddenly suggested.

The men were too deep in their disdainful duet to notice her, or the sharp relevancy of her question.

“Just drowned, maybe,” Jerry conceded, as if one mode of murder were less violent than another.

“Yeah. Elvis is dead.” Mike shook his dyed, lacquered head. “It’s too bad that creeps like those aren’t.”

“Amen, brother.”

Mike and Jeff, Elvises of one mind under the skin, grinned absolute agreement at each other.

Chapter 17

Turn Me Loose

(Written for Elvis in 1959 when he was in the army; Fabian recorded it first, and it hit the Top Ten)

This is one occasion when I do not have to worry about keeping a low profile while working undercover. I mean, this Kingdome place is a zoo.

Flrst of all, you figure on dozens of performers milling around in the dressing room area. Not just chorus members, mind you, but all solo acts. (If you can ever consider impersonating someone else as a solo act.) Then you have the costumes, which are stiff enough with glittering gewgaws to stand on their own, like a space suit. I am beginning to think that these fancy jumpsuits are capable of going out and doing a show on their own power. I mean, in this case it is a very close call as to whether the man makes the clothes or the clothes make the man. Or, in this case, the King.

This makes me sorry to see my little doll and Mr. Matt Devine wasting their time going around and talking to various of these impersonator dudes when it would be much wiser to cultivate a unique source. Talk to one Elvis impersonator, and you have talked to them all, is my point.

So my target is not this plentitude of dudes, but the lone little doll among them, and I am not referring to Miss Temple. Once she has led my friends to the Elvis concession and turned them loose, the subject fades out into the hall, where I am waiting.

A classic line in crime detection is French: cherchez la femme.

In plain English, this means tail the frail.

So I pitter-patter after Miss Priscilla, aka Quincey.

Frankly, I do not expect much to come of this. I expect to end up back at her dressing room, where she will resume obsessing about the state of her resemblance to a woman who at least is still alive, even though this particular semblance of her evokes the Bride of Dracula.

I can understand the King’s fixation on the color black, however.

No wonder he dyed his wimpy golden locks to the color of soot. I am glad that my rival for the cat food spokespurrson role, Maurice, has not thought to turn his yellow coat black like mine. Elvis, I heard Miss Electra holding forth, dyed his hair because even from the first he wanted a film career and he felt dark-haired dudes had a stronger screen presence. Dudes like Marlon Brando in The Wild One, or James Dean. Well, James Dean was a little wishy-washy in the hair color department, but Tony Curtis was another favorite of Elvis, and he was black as Midnight Louie.

Another thing Elvis was into was black leather. I come by mine naturally: nose, footpads and eyeliner, only I do not have to apply mascara like some Adrian Actor dude.

So I cannot fault the guy for changing himself around to look like me. Maybe not me personally, but my kind of cat. We are considered tough hombres, let me tell you, and the ladies really go for that macho look.

Why he wanted his Miss Priscilla to also look black tothe max, I do not know. I myself prefer a bit of variety in my private life. But everyone is entitled to his little quirks, and Elvis, a born collector of everything from cars and ‘cycles to girls and horses, was dealt a full hand of little quirks too.

So there I am, only a few steps behind these cute chunky old shoes, and I almost run into Miss Priss’s pale hose when she stops at a door that is not hers.

It is all I can do to keep my whiskers from tickling her calves. I do not manage to keep from gawking up her Aline skirt to check out a garter. Nobody wears garters anymore but snakes. Sure enough, Miss Quincey has been accurate enough to Miss Priscilla’s era to be wearing a garter belt. I am impressed by her acting verisimilitude.

She does not notice me, though, not even my vulgar surveillance.

She opens this door, darts in, and turns to close it so fast she leaves me standing in the hall extracting my whiskers from the doorjamb. I have just received a most unexpected and unattractive crimp in my facial hair.

Now I am really curious! Just what is so secret behind that door? I retreat to a nearby trash container, hunker behind its cola-streaked side, and wait.

When Miss Priscilla comes out, I will be ready to dash in, or my name is not Mr. Lucky.

Actually, my name is not Mr. Lucky, but there are times when it should be.

Chapter 18

King Creole

(The title song from a 1958 film)

“And I thought that Mike and Jerry were a twin act,” Matt said, staring at the next-door dressing room chockfull of burning hunks of Elvis.

“I guess their dressing room was unusually deserted,” Temple said. “Say, wasn’t Elvis a twin?”

“Not exactly. He was a surviving twin. His brother was delivered dead about a half hour before he was born. Why do you ask?”

“I just wondered if anyone here did a twin act.”

“I suppose it’s possible.” Matt didn’t add that the ever-expanding boundaries of bad taste could encompass almost anything nowadays. “His twin was named Jesse Garon.”

“And Elvis was Elvis Aaron?”

“A lot of people in the South used rhyming names for twins, if not first names, then middle names.” Matt studied the mirror-magnified mob of Elvises. “Psychologists say that twinship bonds are formed in the womb. Surviving twins like Elvis never seem to recover from the loss of that exact double. They say twins touch in the fetal stage, even kiss.”

“Ooh. Creepy.”

“And suicide rates for surviving twins are much higher than normal.”

“So maybe not just drug abuse killed Elvis?”

“No one was willing to go on record that drugs did it. Heart failure was the ostensible reason, the diagnosis for all sudden deaths. It was also used for his mother, but later sources say her death at age forty-six was caused by cirrhosis of the liver.”

“Mother drank?”

“Discreetly, but most of his male relatives weren’t in the least discreet. Overdrinking and early death were family traits. Elvis was down on alcohol, forbid having it around, though he tried it out a few times in later years. His instincts were right about booze; his family obviously had a genetic predisposition for the disease, but no one then realized that that kind of thing is genetic, and that drugs are the same bad ticket to ride. Elvis was pretty astute, but he had an odd habit of deferring to people too much. He could have been predisposed to depression, partly because of the loss of his twin, which made him likelier to take drugs.”

Temple studied the industrious rows of Elvis clones. “Do you think any of these guys abuse drugs?” “That’d be taking imitation too far.”

“I’d think so, but you never know. Let’s check ‘em out.”

“This isn’t a grocery store,” he commented.

Insouciant, she grinned back at him while wading into the narrow, gym-bag cluttered passage between big guys in bulky suits spraying their hair and fluffing their sideburns with hair dryers.

“Media coming through,” Temple caroled, making them a head-turning attraction. “No cameras yet, don’t panic. Preliminary interviews while you primp.”

Matt remained bemused by the sheer wholesale scale of Elvis imitation as an avocation, and perhaps an art form, for all he knew. He was reserving judgment until he saw some of the acts.

Was any of these men his soft-spoken midnight caller? Some shouted back and forth, exchanging tips and valued accessories such as safety pins. Most were grimly confronting their other selves in the mirrors, touching up pale roots with dye-wands, struggling to balance unevenly glued-on sideburns.

A few wives or girlfriends acted as dressers. Everybody seemed to be frowning in concentration, or shouting for an essential something that was inexplicably missing. It reminded Matt of the fevered concentration in dressing rooms before the grade-school Christmas pageant.

“Anybody missing a jumpsuit?” Temple added her voice to the hubbub. It carried like a trumpet when she wanted it to, and she did now.

That shut them all up., Faces snapped from the mirrors to focus on her red hair. And to focus on Matt standing behind her, suddenly wishing he weren’t. He still wasn’t used to being in the spotlight.

“Seriously, folks.” Now that she had their attention, Temple pressed her advantage. “Who would mutilate an expensive costume like that? Any ideas? And whose suit was it?”

“You media,” one Elvis finally said, his voice nothing like the real Elvis’s. “Always looking for the bad news.”

Temple shrugged. “Maybe it was a publicity stunt.”

That got them going. A half dozen voices chimed in. No legitimate Elvis, was the consensus, would deface the King’s image in any form. And anyway, the impersonators all knew how much money went into the Suit. They’d have to be “lower than Red West” to trash one.

“So where is the ruined suit now?” Matt asked, nonplussed when all those blue-suede eyes focused on him. Apparently colored contact lenses were part of the costume.

“That’s a good question,” a significant other piped up. “Maybe it was salvageable.”

“Someone should ask hotel security,” another woman said.

“Maybe the police have it,” Temple suggested.

Their glaring eyes returned to her. Matt realized that Temple didn’t mind stirring things up one little bit, in fact, she reveled in it, smiling impishly as their voices turned on her as one.

“Why would the police have anything to do with it?” “Nobody got hurt.”

“It was just some Priscilla-hater fan, trying to throw a scare into Quincey to get her out of the show.”

Matt found himself with a need to know too. “Why would anyone want Quincey out of the show?” A pause. He had hit a nerve.

“A lot of us feel she doesn’t belong here,” began a portly Elvis who wore an outfit Matt recognized from photos: the American eagle jumpsuit created for the Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii satellite TV special in 1973.

“Why not?” Temple asked indignantly. Matt could tell she was in her defense-of-the-helpless-and-innocent mode, although Quincey Conrad was neither. “She was the only woman out of gadzillions he actually married.”

“Elvis was forced into that,” a tall, thin Elvis objected. “Her father and Colonel Parker put the pressure on.”

“And look at her now, turned everybody on the staff out like horses too old to pull their weight, snubbed the long-time fans, and turned Graceland into a tourist attraction. She even redecorated the place before it went public. Elvis’s Red Period was too tacky for her. Nobody understood that Elvis kept his roots and his tastes; he didn’t go Hollywood like Miss Priss. That woman was all bottom-line from the very beginning.”

“How ‘bottom-line’ could a fourteen-year-old be?”

Matt interjected, goaded into feeling some of Temple’s indignation. “When she left Elvis in seventy-two at age twenty-six, she didn’t even know how to write a check. All of her spending money had been parceled out, and stingily too, by Vernon.”

“Maybe there was reason to keep her on a short leash,” muttered an Elvis wearing the “claw” jumpsuit featuring Native American designs, dabbing some stuff Matt recognized as concealer under his black-lashed eyes.

“She wasn’t kept on one short enough,” another man put in with a bawdy laugh.

Matt found his blood pressure rising. He’d read enough about these people, bizarre as their lifestyle was, to feel he knew them somewhat. “Elvis never stopped seeing his rotating harem of women. Priscilla wasn’t unfaithful until Elvis stopped having sexual relations with her after Lisa Marie was born.”

“Elvis was the King,” announced a stocky man with a wig that resembled a nesting duck-billed platypus. “He didn’t live by the rules everybody else does. She didn’t understand him. She tried to domesticate him. He was born to be wild and free.”

“And screwed up,” Temple muttered so only Matt could hear her.

“The women who really cared about him,” said a quiet voice from a corner, where a man apparently had heard her comment, “they couldn’t stay. It wasn’t the infidelity so much as his downward slide with the drugs. They couldn’t stand to watch him sinking.”

Matt was struck by the voice. It wasn’t the one on the call-in phone, really, but closer to a genuine Southern accent than any of the Elvis impersonators’ natural voices so far. When his searching eyes found the speaker, he wasn’t surprised, given his conversation with Temple not long before. Something of Elvis lurked in the bone structure beneath the baby face.

This guy was not primping, just sitting jiggling hisdark-booted foot enough so that the forelock curlicued onto his forehead trembled like it was caught in a fan draft. Something about his relaxed, pensive posture reminded Matt of some of the moody blackand-white photos of Elvis in his early and mid career.

Matt didn’t know much about performers, but this guy’s very sobriety suggested he could uncoil as hard and fast as a rattlesnake onstage.

A dark horse in the glittery Elvis sweepstakes, but who knows? Temple was trolling for more obvious prey than potential winners.

“So,” she said more loudly into the lingering silence the distant Elvis’s comment had caused, “does anybody here have it in for the Priscilla clone?”

“Us?” A yip of indignation from an Elvis in the opposite corner. “We don’t have to like the real one, but this girl’s part of the grand finale. She hands out the authentic imitation gold belt from when Elvis broke the Las Vegas attendance record at the Hotel International in nineteen sixty-nine to whoever wins the competition. No way we’re gonna short-circuit a moment of glory for one of us.”

“Only one of you can win,” Matt pointed out. “Maybe the other ninety-nine wouldn’t mind a sour ending note.”

“Nah. We’re not like that. We compete, sure, but we know you’re up one time and down another.”

“You mean there are no leading candidates for the grand prize?” Temple asked.

Silence and shrugs infected the room. A wife, or girlfriend, paused in teasing a pompadour, then one finally spoke.

“Oh, there are guys who’ve won before, and might again. El Vez always has a good act, and other guys are tops too. But we’ve been at dozens of these competitions, and there’s always some upset, or some new guy winning out of the blue. You can’t count on winning, no matter who you are, and you sure can’t do anything about it except to do your best when it’s your time onstage.

“But surely,” Temple persisted, Matt feeling almost embarrassed by her dogged pursuit of a point of view so strongly denied, “some one contender is particularly strong, someone who won last time, or whatever.”

Again, the silence, during which blue eyes courtesy of Bausch and Lomb consulted each other. The fragile wooden ice-cream chairs creaked under the shifting posteriors of nervous Elvi.

“There’s KOK, of course,” said a fellow so diminutive only his voice could be heard.

“KOK?” Temple was perplexed, and Matt had never seen the initials in all the Elvis books he had skimmed, including those on impersonators.

A huge Elvis stood, and it wasn’t hard to look huge in those white, flared-bottom jumpsuits.

“KOK,” he repeated. “The King of Kings. Guy named … what? David something.”

How appropriate, Matt thought.

“No, no, no. His name was Ken-something. Peebles maybe,” another Elvis suggested.

“No, Perkins.”

“Purvis. Ken or Kyle—something Purvis,” the Elvis in the corner contributed again, warily.

“Perkins,” the second Elvis said firmly. “Man, he was something. Didn’t think he was Elvis, mind you. But he played the part like a reincarnation of Elvis. Eerie, that guy was. In fact, that’s what some of us nicknamed him. Eerie Elvis. That’s with two Es at the beginning, not like in Erie, Pennsylvania.”

Another ladyfriend stopped combing and teasing. “Yeah, I remember that guy. Looked a lot like Elvis before his final downslide. You know, pretty damn good, really, considering all the pharmaceuticals he was downing. That guy was so particular about every detail, more like a fan than an actor.”

“Yeah. There was something … ritual about him. Hadto have the music played just right. Real nervous before he went on—”

“Just like Elvis was.”

“Hell, we’re all nervous!”

“Anyway, he was something. I never seen anybody so into Elvis. Like it was his … career, or something.”

“Grim, yeah. Offstage anyway. Like his life depended on it.”

“But he’s not registered for this competition,” a cheeky chipmunk Elvis put in optimistically.

This Eerie Elvis guy was sounding, even to Matt, like the ghostly gunfighter riding into town at the last moment and blowing everyone else away: Lee Van Cleef at his most smoothly sinister. Part hero, part villain. Not much different from Elvis, really.

“Maybe it was charisma,” a hairdressing wife said dreamily. “Elvis had it by the bushel. Some people have that air about them.”

The guys were quick to dismiss the mystical approach, just as Elvis’s Memphis Mafia had loathed his explorations of Eastern mysticism with L.A. hairdresser Larry Geller.

“Nah, this Kyle-whoever was just damn good at being Elvis.”

“But he’s not registered for the competition,” Chipmunk Elvis repeated.

“No. He dropped out of sight a couple of years ago. Fast.”

Elvises nodded in mirrored multiples.

“Like something had caught up with him,” Distant Elvis said slowly.

“Maybe the Memphis Mafia,” one joked.

“Yeah, John,” Chipmunk Elvis goaded Distant Elvis with an air of long practice. “The Memphis Mafia is on the loose and taking out bad actors. We better watch out.”

“What do you think of those guys?” Matt asked. More shrugs. “The Memphis Mafia? They were okay.

Too many relatives riding on Elvis, though. And the Mafia boys, they added a lot of pressure to his life for all they took care of things for him.”

“Squabbling like jealous two-year-olds,” a significant other added, shaking her sheenless strawberry-blond fright wig. “Boys will be boys, and Elvis’s entourage sure proved it. From that standpoint, I don’t blame Priscilla one little bit for trying to get the guy to settle down into a normal domestic life.”

“Tame the King? No way!”

Matt could see that these adult men weren’t much different from the employee-pals who became known as the Memphis Mafia. They were lost boys too, trying to preserve a Never-Never Land of adolescence that was a far cry from what it should have been. They needed their Peter Pan, even if it took fistfuls of amphetamines to keep him flying. No matter that he’d crashed and burned and died alone in a Graceland bathroom over twenty years ago, he still wasn’t allowed to stop.

The King is dead, long live the Kings.

Temple must have felt some of the frustration he did when confronting the self-destructive lifestyle and indestructible legend of Elvis Aaron Presley. “Thanks,” she said, ending the mass interview. “You were very helpful. Good luck to you all during the competition.”

“Hey! Are we gonna be on … whatever show?”

“We’ll be back,” Temple promised with a jaunty, noncommittal wave.

So they all turned back to the mirrors and the job of becoming the best damn Elvis they could be.