Cat In A Jeweled Jumpsuit

“He did love pink, though. Had teddy bears all over his bedroom to the end, and his first bedroom before Graceland had pink bedclothes. Black and pink were high-fifties-chic colors.”

“Teddy bears. He was just a big overgrown kid, wasn’t he?”

“In some ways. In some, not. You know, not all us teen fans were pimply and awkward. The good-looking ones got invited to meet Elvis. He had his pick, believe me.”

“Groupies.” Temple made a face. “Why do those young girls sell themselves so cheaply to a bunch of egocentric drunk and/or drugged guys old enough to know better and not much worth bragging about as human beings?”

“It’s obvious, my dear girl, that you have never seen an authentic sex symbol in action.” Electra’s face assumed a beatific look as she pulled down a plush fold-up seat and plunked her middled-aged heft on it.

“From what I read, Elvis wasn’t born bad and beautiful; he deliberately modeled himself on his favoriteactors, those urban bad boys Marlon Brando and James Dean and Tony Curtis. And he started putting those bumps and grinds into his act when he saw the girls’ reaction to the moves he probably picked up from black performers he saw on Beale Street.”

“That’s the thing. Underneath the act was this shy guy our age who was acting out what we all wanted to be: independent and bold, and rebellious and, hey, even rich and famous. Teen dream. Didn’t your generation have something like that?”

“We had a choice between satanist rockers and TV-show family sitcom guys who sang a little. Elvis’s bad-boy act was minor-league compared to the decadent rock that came along after.”

“It was a time. It was a place. It brought city and country together, white hillbilly music and black blues. It brought black and white together before the Civil Rights movement made it official. Elvis usually had black groups in his band.” Electra looked at Temple over her reading glasses. “But then you don’t know a thing about the Civil Rights movement either, do you, whippersnapper?”

“I know, I know! I’m just a shallow yuppie. I missed all the major social upheavals of the sixties. I couldn’t help it. I was just a baby.”

Mollified that Temple had admitted total ignorance of her life and times, Electra settled down and gazed happily toward the huge empty stage. “The Colonel always sent Elvis to the funniest out-of-the-way arenas when he was on tour, even after he became a megastar. Places like Portland and Buffalo and Baton Rouge and Wichita.”

“Maybe it was a strategy to make Elvis available to more than his big-city fans. Where did you see Elvis?”

“Carlsbad, New Mexico, February fourteenth, nineteen fifty-five. I weighed a hundred-and-eighteen pounds for probably the last time in my life. The waist of that circle skirt I wore would hardly fit my thigh nowadays.

They dis Elvis for getting fat, but who doesn’t?”

“Gods, supermodels, and rock stars aren’t supposed to. And maybe they take all those drugs to make sure they don’t.”

“We never even dreamed about taking recreational drugs back then. Cigarettes and whiskey and rock ‘n’ roll music, they were the wicked ways teenagers wanted to get into. If we took anything, it was the officially sanctioned uppers that Elvis started with, his mother’s amphetamine diet pills. My mother had some too, and I `borrowed” em.”

“And it was all so innocent.”

“Yup. Magic pills from Dr. Family Physician.”

Temple gazed toward the stage. The fifties seemed so quaint, like they really were lived in blackand-white. On stage, a band was assembling. Drummer, a real piano man, guitarist, backup singers, they all dressed in some amalgam of fifties–sixties clothes.

Electra leaned over to whisper in Temple’s ear, even though no one sat near them. The rows of empty seats were sprinkled with guests of the performers who took pains to sit as far away as possible from each other. Maybe they thought they might give away the trade secrets of their Elvis, like Mike’s lip trick with liquid latex.

“Most of these guys started singing along to karaoke machines, or used their own tapes. Performing with a live band is a major step up for them. They’re beginning to understand what Elvis was up against for the hundreds of performances he gave from nineteen seventy to seventy-seven.”

Temple absorbed the information. She didn’t sing a note, didn’t ever want to do more than hum along to “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “Happy Birthday to You,” all a loyal American or decent friend should be expected to do. Molina, though, the humming homicide lieutenant, she could stand up on the Blue Dahlia stage and belt out a melody to whatever riffs the backup bandwas ruffling. Took nerve. And if the nerve wasn’t there anymore, maybe it took pills.

Then a bouncing baby Elvis was bursting into stage center, his fringe jiggling and the gemstones winking like a drunken fleet of sailors on shore leave. That’s what Elvis’s white jumpsuits reminded Temple of, not comic-book superhero uniforms like the books said, but little boy’s sailor suits, wide-legged, jaunty, innocent, only Elvis’s had been embroidered with glitter. Suddenly the teddy bears that lined his bedrooms made sense.

She watched the heavyset guy who resembled every repairman who’d ever been sent to her apartment to fix something, down to the swag of heavy belt at his hips, tool-belt-as-gunslinger-holster substitute.

Elvis was not only blue suede shoes, he was bluecollar superhero. The guy who went from high school into the navy or the army. The average Joe, not Joe College. And his garish onstage taste celebrated the common person’s idea of glamour, half Hollywood, half gas-station fire sale.

The music, though, that was timeless, classless. The words were nonsense, the beat was liberating. Gotta dance. Elvi came and went, a lot of them the chunky sailor-suited model so endearingly kiddish despite so many being on the other side of forty. The sleeker ones did Comeback Elvis in black leather biker suits that shone like silk-velvet tafetta in the spotlights. Velvet Elvis made a spectacular entrance in her midnight jumpsuit. Temple knew that the costume would light up like a gasoline-slick rainbow under the actual performance’s special light gels, but even underlit the look was dynamite.

Oddly enough, the sole female Elvis impersonator was also the only contestant to evoke Elvis the sleek young sex symbol. Electra, not knowing Velvet’s gender, grabbed Temple’s forearm and hung on as Velvet Elvis strutted, purred, and stomped through “Tiger Man.”

“That’s it!” Electra cheered Velvet Elvis on, under her breath. “That’s it!”

That’s it, all right, Temple thought, a good part of the young singer’s appeal, only then the phenomenon hadn’t been noticed and named. The Androgynous Elvis. Clairol on his hair, eyebrows, and sideburns, mascara on his lashes.

The fifties were more decadent than they knew.

Temple found herself getting a kick out of the proceedings. Some of the impersonators were so nervous they shook (so had Elvis) but they had brought an innocent, sincere, raw energy to their acts that overcame the sophisticated theater-goer’s expectations.

She leaned back in her seat, scrunched down on her tailbone, and let her right tennis shoe noiselessly tap the carpeted floor.

Beside her, Electra sat transfixed, her features lit by the reflected stage lights so she glowed like a, well, a thirty-six-yearold, anyway.

Elvis was gone, but his fans lived on, and they would never see him again. Only imitations.

Temple scoured her memory. for some performer whose absence from a stage or the planet would deprive her. All she could come up with was the Mystifying Max, and that wasn’t a fair comparison. Maybe she just wasn’t born to be a fan… .

The onstage musicians must have been tiring of backing up such an endless parade of Elvises, who were beginning to blend one into the other. Even what they excelled at seemed lost in the sheer repetition.

You could hear the musicians’ feet shuffling during a lull, and those of the backup girl singers—and they were no more or less than girls in their fluffy outfits and hair.

Then she became aware of a figure, a ghostly figure lost in the dark at the back of the set.

The drums started pounding in deep, bellowing alteration: drum/drum drum/drum drum/drum. “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” the universe-opening theme music from2001: A Space Odyssey that live-concert Elvis had taken for his opening theme.

It was melodramatic, it was egomaniacal and pretentious, it was terrific theater.

The man at the back lifted his arms slowly to the pulsing throbs of the drums, a short cloak he wore spreading like wings. Then he turned and strode forward into the lights, a dead man walking.

He came onward. This was Edwardian Elvis of the early seventies. This was the mature, recharged Elvis who had resumed live performance tours after nine frustrating years of inane movie-making, all engineered to provide the most money and exposure and least star satisfaction by the inimitable, pseudonymous, and bogus Colonel Tom Parker, carny confidence man turned theatrical manager. Some said Parker had mismanaged Elvis to death.

But he wasn’t dead now. He was in complete control.

Temple quite literally sat up and took notice. His steps, timed to the thundering drumbeat, seemed to lift her off her seat.

He came right to the stage’s very brim. If maddened girls weren’t jumping up and down in the orchestra pit, screaming, they should have been.

The band suddenly revved up and the still figure exploded into searing song and mind-bending motion. First came “Jailhouse Rock” as delivered by a pneumatic drill. Then “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Don’t Be Cruel.”

Women started screaming in the audience. Temple stared wide-eyed as Electra jumped up on her seat and began clapping her hands. Temple blinked at the spectacle on stage. Images of Elvis in performance were emblazoned on the collective popular memory. The impersonators had the patented poses all down, wide stance, swiveling hips, knees flexed, tippy-toe balance, dipping almost to the stage floor. Elvis fan or not Elvis fan, everyone had images of Elvis branded into their brains.

This guy made it all new, reinvented the moment as if twenty-some years had never passed. Evoked the same primal screams.

Temple felt herself about to surrender to the mass hysteria that welled up around her like a ground fog filled with shrieking horns that happened to be people.

She clenched her fists and crossed her ankles under her seat.

By sheer willpower, she forced herself to stay calm in a monsoon of recognition and disbelief and ear-blasting nostalgia.

And then the performer suddenly stilled, and clasped his mike like a sinner would a cross, and sang a sweet, aching version of “Love Me Tender” that had the hysterics in silent tears.

Some people wanted to see Venice and die. This crowd only had to glimpse Elvis to go to heaven.

Chapter 38

Jailhouse Rock

(A Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller song for the 1957 movie of the same name, a hit on several U.S. charts and the first single in the history of British music charts to debut at number one)

It is a good thing that every dressing room door in the backstage area is open, and that every dressing room wall is lined with mirrors.

This is how, despite the fact that the floor is full of milling boots and blue suede shoes, I can make my discreet way along the crowded hall. These Elvis impersonators are always checking out their hair and clothes in the nearest mirror.

A crocodile could be twining through their ankles, and they would never notice.

And I am far less noticeable than the average croc, especially when I am not snapping my incisors and growling.

So I slink on my belly like a snake of my great and good acquaintance along the joining of floor and wall, hoping that the one person who could spot me in a coal cellar (my devoted roommate Miss Temple Barr) is not in the vicinity.

You can bet I breathe a huge sigh of relief when I arrive at the end dressing room occupied solo by Miss Quincey Conrad. I almost sound like a dog. (Have you ever noticed that dogs are very big sighers, especially when they are settling down to sleep? My kind, however, avoids the extravagant gestures, especially overt begging. You will not hear huge happy—or unhappy—heaves from us. Just another of the many little ways in which we differ from the inferior species.) I cannot resist peeking in. I have never seen a human hairstyle that reaches the height and hubris of Miss Quincey’s Priscilla-do. I believe that I could curl up in it and remain unseen for some time. As well as keep quite toasty-warm, if a bit tipsy on all that hair spray.

She is at the dressing table, doing her fingernails and looking very bored indeed, despite the handsome gentleman in a caped white jumpsuit who has one foot up on an empty chair and a guitar in hand and is serenading the lady fair with “Love Me Tender.”

I have to admire the dude’s courting technique. You cannot beat a good melancholy howl for making points with the ladies. Sometimes, if you are lucky, they will howl right back.

But Elvis, despite all the onscreen lovelies he serenaded in his thirty-two movies, was better off singing to them, as he continued to do with great results up to the bitter end.

So I slink away down the hall to the pleasant strains of song and story.

I am hoping that the object of my quest is a little easier to reach this time. When I arrive at the door, it is shut. Since it is made out of painted steel this is a severe setback, although not unexpected. Here my native ingenuity leaps to the four. I mean, fore. And to the four-on-thefloor I am equipped with.

Since there is nothing so formal as a threshold, I amable to thrust a mitt under the steel door, pads and shivs up. First I move my limb to the left and to the right, then I stretch and strain, and stretch and strain with all my might. I do the pokey hokey and turn my leg around, and that is what breaking in is all about.

Naturally, I feel nothing but air, empty air. No one has considerately dropped a key on the other side of the door that I can paw onto this side (so then I can go get Miss Temple and get her to open the door for me, which is the last thing I wish to do, because my investigation is not yet ready for another operative’s messing with it).

I am so exasperated it almost crosses my mind to sigh, although that is entirely too doglike a thing for any self-respecting dude of my sort to do.

And then … I feel a flutter light as a moth in the palm of my pads. Eek! It tickles! I do not do giggles either.

So I steel myself against the teasing sensation and keep my mitt still. Smooth pad leather strokes mine. Playing footsie through the door might be a toothsome experience were the Divine Yvette or some other lissome lady on the other side, but I know what is on the other side, and I do not want it getting overfriendly with my pads.

So I pull my questing limb back under the door. Sometimes what is denied is what is most desired. Face it: what is denied is always what is most desired, a fact which accounts for the success of several crime families all over the globe.

I hear a soft pressure on the door’s other side and fix my gaze on the locked doorknob above me.

I know the Stare will not be sufficient to get me to the other side of this door, given the circumstance, but I also know that Someone on the Other Side Likes Me.

The silver steel knob jerks. Then jerks the other way. I heard the sweet snick of a deadbolt being drawn. The knob rattles.

And then the door cracks inward, and I am again al-most overwhelmed by the fruit-salad odor that sweeps out the open door.

I hold my breath, drag the cracked door open just enough to admit my svelte form, and dart into the darkness within.

I am welcomed with a raucous chatter and a crushing embrace

Chapter 39

Guitar Man

(Featured in the ‘68 Comeback Special, this Jerry Reed song was given a new Reed instrumental background by Felton Jarvis in 1980, and become Elvis’s last number one song on any Billboard chart)

It was as if Elvis had risen from the dead.

All the other Elvi’s nearest and dearest stood in tribute, applauding wildly. They left their seats and stormed the orchestra pit, reaching up to this sudden embodiment of what the Kingdome was created to memorialize.

He stayed down on one knee near the stage rim, shining with the holy sheen of effort, head bowed, both the humble knight-to-be awaiting the icy touch of the naked sword, and the prideful acolyte accepting richly deserved acclaim.

Only the fact that Temple sat on the aisle kept Electra from charging out of her seat and doing likewise. “That was incredible,” Temple said. “This guy is good!”

Electra flashed Temple a glance. “He’s only about a tenth as good as the real Elvis.” She sat back, and her voice shook a little. “But he’s the best make-do I’ve ever seen.”

“He must be KOK, and that means that the dead guy isn’t.”

“KOK?”

“The King of Kings. The other impersonators were talking about him like he carried the Holy Grail. I can almost see this guy justifying rumors that Elvis is alive and masquerading as one of his own imitators. How old do you think he is?”

“Does it matter? Temple, we just glimpsed something that no one has seen for over twenty years. It’s like breathing the air of a pyramid that hasn’t been opened since the time of the pharaohs.”

“Electra, I know you’re a fan, but breathe deeply. Think. Elvis isn’t a pharaoh. He isn’t eternal. Maybe he had extraordinary performing charisma, but … we all die, and he lasted longer than Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, the other rock-star drug casualties of the seventies.”

“Elvis wasn’t like them. He didn’t get into the drug culture from that disaffected counterculture. He was like us. He got into it because no one told him it was dangerous; it was prescribed.”

The degrees of difference in drug addiction didn’t cut any cocaine with Temple. She was impressed by good theater, by how totally a performer could absorb the persona of another. She was thinking how perfectly playing a dead man might challenge the gods, how it might seem to demand death as its perfect, true-to-life ending. One thing had really struck her about the performance, besides the impersonater’s passionate perfection, his own true compelling charisma.

It was the design embroidered on the back of his martial arts gi: from where she sat, it looked remarkably like a rearing stallion. (She had read enough about Elvis by now to sit back and free associate. Rising Sun was the name of Elvis’s horse, and also a bow to Eastern mysticism and Japan, the land of the Rising Sun. It even could refer to Sun Records, his first recording house. He had called the ranch where the horses were kept the House of the Rising Sun.) Around the equine rampant radiated stylized sunbursts of gilt and red embroidery: fireworks, if you will, also an Eastern invention, whence came the rising sun every morning. And of course dawn was the symbol of rebirth.

Just how old was this guy under the iconistic disguise? Could he possibly be a fit sixty-four … oh, Temple, get a grip! Still … his performance had given her chills.

And she didn’t even like Elvis, or his music, or his looks, or his lifestyle, or his legend.

Chapter 40

Bossa Nova Baby

(From Fun in Acapulco, another of Elvis’s “travelogue” movies)

My first notion is to panic. Here I am, entrapped in the dark by person or persons unknown.

Except that I have a pretty good clue to the identity of my captor, especially when I inhale deeply to keep from having the breath squeezed out of me, and smell banana breath.

“Well,” I growl, “you have already answered one of my questions. I now know that you like to wander at will if your master forgets to latch your cage.”

I am dropped like a hot potato, or more accurately, a mashed one.

“You not human,” the creature manages to spit out between indecipherable syllables of high-pitched chatter. “Human come. Feed. Human come. Talk. You not human.”

“That is good to hear.” I shake myself to repair theflattened hairs. My coat of choice may not be Memphis Mafia mohair, or Elvis jumpsuit wool gabardine, but it is a decent set of threads, even if they are home-grown. “I had thought you had to exist here alone in the dark all the time.”

I get a long drum-roll of chatter in its native language. Then it settles down to tell Louie all.

“Only for surprise,” Chatter says. “Chatter big surprise. Must wait in dark. Be patient. Be patient.” I can tell the poor monk is repeating the mantra some human has put in his head. “Chatter perform soon.”

I suddenly have an inspiration. “Hey, Chatter. Jump up at the wall there next to the door. Yeah, right there. See where the crack of light from the outside ends. Right. There is a small switch on the wall. Pull it down as you descend.” No use exerting myself when there is someone else around to do the dirty work, that is, any work at all.

Amid screams of excitement, Chatter manages to follow instructions, and after several upward bounds hailed by arpeggios of awful squawking, fluorescent light suddenly floods down on us like a jungle rainstorm.

Chatter’s hairy little form is now in full display. I examine his long arms and the naked fingers at the end of his large hairy hands. His naked face is repellent to one of my breed. Chatter is like a halfway house between the animal and the human, and I find this cross-species appearance and behavior unsettling. One should either be four-or two-footed, I feel, but Chatter proceeds to canter around the storage space, his legs doing the leaping and his dragging forearms dipping now and then along the ground like oars.

“What is it that you do when you perform?”

“I play the … the—” The chimpy chump makes sounds like a machine gun gagging.

After about five minutes of close interrogation, I determine that Chatter plays a musical instrument. Yuk-yuk-yuk-yuk.

I finally realize that Chatter is not doing a bad Curly of Three Stooges fame imitation, but is trying to articulate the name of his instrument of choice. A ukulele. What a word! He plays this tongue-twister instrument wearing, of course, the miniature Elvis jumpsuit I spied hanging from his cage on my first visit.

Now that we have light, I head for the cage, jumping atop some piled boxes and then climbing the chicken wire side to inspect the costume hanging high above the concrete floor.

I am not thrilled about performing this high-wire act, but I need to investigate the ape suit. I had noticed that this jeweled jumpsuit included a built-in diaper, which would not have been a bad idea for the original wearer, given the sad state drugs had put him into during his last months. To my expert eye, and I have in the past discovered smuggled diamonds, the stones begemming the suit are purely glass and plastic. I bat at the low-slung seat to see if the built-in diaper is suspiciously heavy. (It would be an excellent hiding-place for smuggled goods, since who is going to inspect a chimp diaper but the keeper?) Nothing but the usual absorbent padding.

And, by the way, if chimpanzees are supposed to be the next thing to human, give or take an australopithecene this or that discovered hither and thither, how come they have not the basic elimination skills you can find in an alley cat? A much overrated species, in my opinion, and Chatter is doing nothing to change that conclusion.

“Louie climb good,” he comments, leaping up and down on his knuckles from below.

“When I have to.” I let my built-in pitons relax and drop back onto the box top.

Then I turn my attention to Chatter’s cage latch. No doubt about it, the critter has excellent motor control in his fingers. And that damnable opposable thumb .. .

“I see you’ve figured out a way to let yourself in and out of confinement,” I note.

Chatter jumps up and down, screaming, which I assume is his way of taking the Fifth.

I jump down to the concrete to join him.

“I like visitors,” he screeches. “I like Cilia.”

This is not surprising. I knew the beauty was sneaking in to visit the beast, but I never knew why.

“Is she your friend?”

“Friend. Cilia pat Chatter. Cilia talk Chatter. Cilia bring presents.”

“Okay. “Fess up. Who is your master? Who brought you here?”

“Master?”

“Do not play dumb. I am not your usual gullible human. You are an impersonator as much as all those Elvis clones running around out there. You represent Elvis’s pet chimp Scatter. You were brought here for a purpose. Was it just to play second banana to some Elvis impersonator? Or something else?”

Chatter hides his ugly mug behind his funky fingers, just his bright beady eyes peeping out, looking oh-so-coy. “Chatter play tricks.”

“I know. The ukulele.”

“More! Chatter run around.”

“So does a gerbil.”

“Chatter run around and look up the lady skirts. Big laugh.”

“Nasty trick. I bet the original Scatter was a peeping Tom too. Is that all you can do, act like a deviate?”

He may not know the word, but he is smart enough to recognize an insult when he hears one. Chatter screams at me, monkey invective. “Chatter clever. Chatter smart. Chatter open cage and no one knows.”

“Hah. Louie knows.”

“Not just here.”

“Not just here? Then where?”

Chatter’s marble-round eyes squint shut, just like a human suspect when he is feeling shifty. “Upstairs.” “You got loose upstairs?”

“I get loose.”

“And did you let anything else loose?”

Chatter plays peekaboo through his fingers again.

I quash a spasm of annoyance. I am getting the picture. This lethal weapon with the opposable thumbs is a loose cannon on a very big deck.

“Did you let Trojan out of his container?”

“Trojan?”

“The big snake.”

“Biiiig snake. Jungle creature like Chatter. Big snake like to get out of cage.”

“So who put you up to it?”

“I not put up. I jump down to open latch.”

“But who told you to do it?”

“No human tell Chatter to do anything.”

“A human tells you to put on your Elvis suit and strum the ukulele.”

The chimp shook its head. “Not same. That work. Other play. Chatter play.”

“When did you release the snake?”

“When Chatter did it, Chatter did it.”

I question the creature further, but it has no sense of time other than when it is performing “work.” Sometime before the anaconda was discovered doing the backstroke in the pool by my lovely roommate, this devious chimpanzee was on an illegal scouting expedition and released the snake from confinement. Chatter would have me believe that was merely a mischievous prank.

It does not have the brains to realize it might have been used. If its unknown owner did not encourage this stunt, perhaps Miss Quincey Conrad did, for reasons of her own.

I have never trusted dames who play the submissive sort, and the young Priscilla Quincey impersonates is certainly one of that ilk. Are alt these resurrected Elvises strolling around reviving old vendettas too? Maybe against Priscilla, as my roommate fears, and maybe against one particular Elvis, whoever or wherever he may be.

Chapter 41

Moody Blue

(Recorded in 1976 at Graceland, during a period in which Elvis could hardly be dragged into recording sessions, it made three charts, reaching number one on the country chart and number two on the easy-listening chart)

For the first time in her life, Temple ran nose-first into what it was like to be a fan, and, indirectly, what it was like to be a star.

The backstage area thronged with shouting, milling people, all bent on seeing the Elvis of the moment.

And these were not amateur fans; these were professional fans with a personal stake in other Elvis impersonators. Their presence here was flagrantly disloyal.

But they didn’t care. The entire object of the Elvis imitation exercise was to evoke the presence of the King, and this man evidently had.

Not only did his rehearsal hall performance and its rapt reception skew the very idea of a competition, it made every other Elvis impersonator into excess baggage. Who could hope to compete with this triumphal performance? Maybe not even the real Elvis.

“Having trouble, Miss Temple?”

She turned, looked up, smiled to see Oversized Elvis looming behind her. “I’d like to get into the dressing room to see that incredible Elvis impersonator,” she told him, “but everybody else seems to have the same idea.”

“No problem.” Aldo turned and whistled sharply once, as if hailing a cab.

In a couple of minutes eight tall Elvi converged on them both.

Then they made like the Memphis Mafia, surrounded her and wafted her through the mob, through even the narrow birth canal of the dressing room door, and into the room itself and the presence of the new King. She could get used to this.

Tuxedo Elvis handed her a tiny tape recorder.

“Miss Temple Barr,” he announced to a man sitting before the mirror. “She is doing a feature for, ah, Vanity Fair. The hotel would appreciate your cooperation.”

The brothers Fontana ebbed back to the door, serving as a phalanx to keep out the rest.

Temple felt a stab of guilt about standing between a man and his true believers, but she squashed it like a bug. She had finally become utterly fascinated by the Elvis legend then and now. She also still wondered why an Elvis apparition had visited the Crystal Phoenix excavation, and why a man seeming to be Elvis was calling Matt on the radio. Something was going on, and it was more than it seemed to be. She couldn’t resist a mystery, and Elvis was a double mystery. There was the man himself, and there was how someone could be using him, or his persona.

The performer seemed exhausted now, as well he should. He was oddly passive, going along with whatever promised an island of calm in the frenzy his performance had created.

Right now, that was a phalanx of Elvis Fontana brothers guarding the door, and the fraudulent notion that a major national magazine reporter was asking for an interview. Actually, Temple was thinking, having a tape recorder meant she could maybe write an article about this phenomenon and sell it to Vanity Fair. Well, perhaps some more modest magazine. She didn’t have the connections to sell to a major rag.

So by the time she asked her first question, Temple was actually feeling quite honest and justified. Amazing how easy it was to impersonate someone and, even more incredible, to be believable in that role.

“I know you’re exhausted,” Temple said. “Do you need anything? A glass of water? Something stronger? I can have one of the ersatz Elvises get it.”

He glanced to the door, and smiled wearily. “I’ve never seen a multiple Elvis act before, except for the Flying Elvises they concocted for that Honeymoon in Las Vegas film. No. I’m fine. Actually, I could use a quiet conversation to take me down.” He lifted the white terry cloth towel hanging around his neck and patted at his sweaty face, as actors will who don’t want to smear stage makeup.

A pro, Temple thought. What else? “Did you expect to make such a sensation here?”

“Not at the rehearsal.”

“You’re the ‘King of Kings’ Elvis, aren’t you? The other impersonators were wondering why you weren’t registered for the pageant, especially since you live in Las Vegas.”

He nodded. His eyes were dark blue. Temple tried to catch a glint of colored contact lens edges shifting on his eye whites. Of course, if they were soft contact lenses, they would be harder to spot.

“I . debated coming out for this. I’m basically retired. I’ve had my hour in the sun.”

“Ken … is that your name?”

Another weary smile. “Fleeting fame strikes again. My name is Lyle. Lyle Purvis. I’m from Alabama originally, ma’am. I don’t know where anybody got the idea my name was Ken. Guess Lyle’s a different name. Parents like different names for their kids, and then the kids spend the rest of their lives living it down. That’s what first made me feel for Elvis. That was even worse than Lyle. At least there was this actor, Lyle Talbot. There wasn’t no Elvis Talbot, that’s for sure. Now, of course, there’s Lyle Lovett, the country singer.”

“I know what you mean about names. Temple?” “It’s real fine for you.”

“Thanks. So is that what impersonation is all about, feeling for the person you’re evoking?”

He thought, dabbed sweat, drank from a half-empty bottled water container. “Maybe so, yes. Most of us started as Elvis fans, plain and simple. And, for me, it helps to have a Southern soul to understand Elvis.”

“When did you become an Elvis fan?”

“Well, now, ma’am, are you tryin’ to find out my age in a nice way here?”

“Maybe. We reporters like to pin down hard facts like age.”

“And name, rank, and serial number, right?” His laugh was loose and infectious. “Can’t help you there. Never served my country in the military. Not that way. Not that I wouldn’t have, if it had worked out. I’m a loyal American.”

“Does being an Elvis impersonator require being a loyal American?”

“Yes, it does. That boy, he was Mom and apple pie personified.”

“What about the rest of it? Babes and barbiturates?”

“Aw, now, Miss … Barr. The boy was under tremendous pressure. Sure he went overboard, but those girls were throwing themselves at him. He was young, he was breaking free from a very strict religious upbringing … you know, he didn’t touch a lot of those girls. Sometimes all he wanted was someone to sleep with, like those teddy bears he collected. In a lot of ways, he was just a scared seventeen-year-old country boy.”

“In some ways, he was the wicked, rebel King of Sex.”

“Yep. He had that charisma. But that type of thing works better from the stage and screen than it does in real life.”

“You have some of it.”

“Very kind of you to say that, a sophisticated professional lady like yourself. But it’s a stage thing. It isn’t real. That’s where Elvis went a little haywire. He thought he had to live up to his stage image. See, Elvis only felt really free when he was onstage. That was his biggest love affair, with the audience. Nothing else could live up to that. It’s hard to explain. I’ve heard dozens and dozens of other people who saw him perform live. He was like nothing else they ever saw. Some folks like to make fun of him, or put him down, but they were fighting against the tide. Even in their hardest hearts, they must of seen the phenomenal pull he had on people. It was like one big mass—can I say this? If not, please don’t print it. I’m tired and I’m not thinking sharp enough to defend myself .. .”

Temple nodded. “I won’t use anything harmful, that you don’t mean to say.”

“It was like one big mass orgasm, is what it was like. Only spiritual. An emotional release like you’ve never had before.”

“You obviously saw him perform live.”

Lyle nodded. “In the seventies, of course. I came late to the banquet.” He paused. “I even saw him in the last couple years, when he was just pitiful. He was like a puppet on those drugs. It made grown men who knew him cry. The fans cried, but they never stopped loving him. Unconditional love, isn’t that what you call it? It was like he couldn’t do anything to make them not love him, and sometimes I think that’s what he was trying to do, putting himself onstage when he was too drugged to stand up, or to remember lyrics or anything. He was trying to make them give up on him, so he wouldn’t have to bear the burden anymore. If they would just stop loving him … but they couldn’t, any more than he could stop hating himself at the end. He was ready to leave. That I know. He was ready. Everybody around him knew it. He died standing up, with his boots on, not in that bathroom at Graceland. That was just the actual fact. The real death was earlier. We were all watching a dead man walking for a long time.”

“What did you do then?”

“Do?” Lyle shook his head as if to shake off a nightmare, Temple thought.

She glimpsed the tiniest flash of white roots at his left temple. His face was lightly lined and tanned, the way Elvis liked to look after a trip to Hawaii. Temple was miserable at guessing ages. Because she felt she looked so ridiculously young, she tended to underestimate other people’s ages too. She would put Lyle Purvis in his forties. In fact, Elvis’s hair had gone white by forty-two. It was weird to picture a snowy-haired Elvis.

While Temple was dallying on top of old Smokey, all covered with snow, Lyle had come out of his own fog reliving Elvis’s last performances.

“What do you mean ‘do’?”

“Do for a living back then?”

“I don’t even remember. I was just a kid.”

“What’s your day job now?”

He laughed, uneasily. “It’s pretty unglamourous.” When she waited in silence, he added, “I work for a messenger service.”

“Around town here?”

“Right. Have car, will travel.”

“None of the Elvis impersonators have performance-type jobs that I can tell. Unless they’re the ones who make a living at it.”

“There are a few of those,” he agreed.

“Why not you? Everybody talks like you’re the best.” “Because I don’t want it to be that serious, all right? I want it to be something I can do if I feel like. I don’t want to end up like Elvis, having to go through the motions to make enough money to get everybody off my back, and then get so depressed I blow the money myself and have to dig myself in deeper to keep the whole cycle going.”

“It’s hard making a living as an entertainer,” she agreed. “What brought you out of hiding for this show?” “Hiding? Who says I was hiding?”

“I didn’t mean hiding, exactly. Just that the other Elvises see you as some kind of mysterious figure that comes and goes without notice.”

“There’s nothing mysterious about me.”

“You certainly wowed them by showing up on the stage.”

“Okay. Maybe I like theatrical entrances. Elvis did too, and that’s who we’re supposed to be impersonating. These offbeat Elvises oughta be drummed off the stage. The idea is to honor the man and his music, not come up with the funkiest interpretation. Cheese Whiz Elvis. Where’s the respect?”

“Didn’t Elvis mock himself and even his audience sometimes?”

“Yes, he did.” KOK sat forward and fixed Temple with a stern look. “And he was wrong. It was a gesture of surrender to his own vulnerabilities. In the end, his self-esteem was so low he looked on his audience’s love for him with contempt. Instead of seeing them as forgiving friends, he saw them as fools and dupes he couldn’t force to turn against him.”

“You’re saying he wanted to be martyred.”

“He wanted to end what had become too hard to keep up. He didn’t see any honorable way to desert the field. So he performed himself to death.”

“What about the Colonel’s role in driving Elvis into mediocre movies and debilitating tours?”

“Oh, Colonel Parker. The villain of the piece. Everybody was responsible but Elvis Presley. Did you ever notice how the least likely suspect in a murder case always turns out to be the killer?”

“Who’s the least likely suspect in the Elvis saga?”

Lyle’s tiny shrug made the gold threads on his gi shimmer and shimmy. His lower lip curled up before he gave a half smile that lifted the left side of his upper lip, just like Elvis’s.

“How about the victim himself?”

Chapter 42

Elvis and Evil

(Elvis recorded the song, “Adam and Evil,” for the 1966 film, Spinout)

“What a weirdo guy,” Temple reported to Electra, after Full-spectrum Elvis had escorted her through the throngs waiting to bedevil Lyle, aka the KOK.

They all made proper farewells—bows, kisses, caressing scarf moves—and left, leaving Electra in an even greater girlish tizzy.

“How can you say that about the Elvis of the nineties?” she demanded of Temple when they were alone.

“What’s the Elvis of the next decade going to be: the King of Zeroes?”

“I thought you had seen a bit of the magic that made Elvis the biggest star of the twentieth century. I thought you were becoming converted.”

“Converted to a particular impersonator being good, yes; to Elvis, no. Besides, this Lyle guy said something so bizarre at the end of our interview. He implied that another Elvis impersonator killed the Elvis in the pool.’ “Professional jealousy?”

“How could that be? The dead Elvis isn’t even missed. If it had been Lyle Purvis himself, okay. But a nonentity Elvis isn’t worth killing. Besides, Lyle sounded about as clear as Elvis was during one of his spiritual meanderings. It was like he was describing some mystical sort of murder, as if Elvis somehow had killed himself.”

Electra’s sweet-sixteen sixties face—today Temple had glimpsed the madcap teenager inside the not-sodignified matron’s exterior—grew radiant with inspiration.

“Temple! Elvis could kill an Elvis … but only if the real one is out there somewhere.”

“ ‘Out there’ like ‘the truth’ on the X-Files? Over the edge and into Paranoid Country? I’m sorry, Electra. I will never buy that ‘Elvis lives’ scenario.”

“Oh, you little hard-headed cynic! That notion doesn’t have to be taken literally.”

“What other way is there to take it?”

“If you need to ask, I don’t need to tell you.”

“Huh? Oh, that this too, too solid delusion would melt, dissolve into a dew—”

“When you’re done spouting, could we meet somebody else?”

“I’m sorry you couldn’t go in to meet KOK Elvis. It would have blown my cover.”

“Well, I can meet one pseudo-celebrity without blowing your cover.” Electra took Temple’s arm firmly. “Now. Show me Miss Priscilla.”

Quincey was in and receiving visitors in her dressing room. “Hi,” she tossed over her shoulder and around her flowing hair at Temple. “I heard a whole lot of stomping going on upstairs. Did somebody off Elvis onstage?”

Electra stepped around Temple, which was never hard to do. “No, dear. We just saw an Elvis performance thatrocked the roof off the Kingdome. A pity you were confined down here.”

“I’ll see plenty of Elvis acts at the real show.” Quincey’s long, pale fingernails poked at her towering hair, which leaned a little to the left, like the edifice at Pisa. “I’ll have to sit there for hours and hours, dying of boredom. But my gown arrived, thanks to the hotel. Isn’t it cool?”

She led the way to the costume niche, where a white column of silk and lace and beading hung like a frozen fountain.

Temple, who had been known to glance at a bride’s magazine gown layout when killing time in front of a magazine stand, was stunned by the high-necked, long-sleeved design of Priscilla’s wedding gown, a world away from the strapless bustier styles modern brides preferred.

She was stunned that Quincey, with all her teenage eagerness to equate beautiful with bad, actually liked this virginal froth of fabric.

Quincey lifted an empty sleeve as if introducing a friend. “It’s not a perfect replica. I guess the estate owns that. I’ll wear it when I present the winning Elvis with the championship belt.”

“That’s scrumptious, dear,” Electra said with naked envy. “Oh, my. I could have fit into that, once for fifteen minutes in nineteen fifty-two.”

Quincey laughed. “Don’t worry, Everybody gets their fifteen minutes of fame, and I guess everybody gets their fifteen minutes at fitting into an impossible dress.”

Temple formally introduced Electra, then thought of something. “By the way, you two, with all the Elvis trivia you must have stockpiled, was there ever any mention of a pet snake?”

Electra and Quincey exchanged coconspirators’ glances: Was Temple off her rocker?

“You have to admit a huge snake is a pretty bizarre prop for a murder,” Temple said. “It has to mean something, it being in the Medication Garden …”

“Oooh.” Quincey was waxing theatrical. “Like in the Garden of Eden.”

“The snake is a universal symbol of evil,” Temple agreed, “through no fault of its own except the usual human superstition.”

Quincey giggled. “A big snake is the symbol of something else humans are pretty superstitious about.”

Electra collapsed onto a dressing table chair, laughing. Her muumuu turned even more fluorescent in the makeup lights. “You got that right, girl. Say, now that we’re on the subject. I do recall something about a big snake.”

“The only strange animal I can think of was the mynah in the basement,” said Quincey.

“That was at Graceland,” Electra said. “The snake was not there. Somehow … I know!”

Temple and Quincey came over to Electra like an audience gathering for a revelation.

“Felton Jarvis,” Electra said portentously. “That ring any bells for you, Quincey?”

The girl dropped her jaw, rolled her eyes, and otherwise pantomimed deep thought, or what passed for it in her set. She shook her head.

“Nothing?” a disappointed Electra wailed.

Quincey tried, God love her. “Uh. Felton. Kinda like Elton. And the last name starts with a ‘J.’ ” When Temple and Electra continued to stare blankly at her, she added defensively, “Elton John. His name’s kinda like Elton John’s.”

“Not really,” Temple said. “And what about the snake? Where’s the snake in all this?”

“Felton Jarvis,” Electra intoned, as if she were channeling the man, or calling up her memory. She smiled like Buddha. “Felton Jarvis! He was a record producer who actually did a good job for Elvis in the sixties and early seventies. Worked out of Nashville. And he had apet anaconda he took swimming with him in his apartment pool.”

“Did he call it Trojan?” Temple asked.

“I don’t know what he called it, dear. All I know is you’re lucky that I remember that much. Can’t you check this out with the Animal Elvis attraction manager?”

“Yes, I can, now that you’ve remembered something concrete.” Temple glanced from Quincey to Electra. The effect was like a time machine. Over thirty years ago, Electra had—what color hair?—and maybe had dressed like Quincey’s Priscilla in white go-go boots and teased hair. On the other hand, the real Priscilla, who was at least a decade younger than Electra, didn’t look anything like the older woman, and probably never would, not with all the anti-aging services Hollywood had to offer.

“Fel-ton Jar-vis,” Temple intoned, mimicking Electra. Southern men’s names had a certain elegance when they weren’t the usual countrified Billy Bob and Bobby Joe: Rhett Butler. Lyle Purvis. Ashley Wilkes. Elvis Presley. Felton Jarvis.

“She’s thinking,” Electra whispered to Quincey. “It doesn’t always come easy.”

“Hush your mouth!” Temple mock-snapped. And then the subtlety that had been nagging at her snapped back. “Ohmigosh! Elvis’s name is in Fel-ton Jar-vis. El-vis. Do you suppose that was a clue? Is that why the snake was let loose in the pool with a dead man? Because it had a personal connection to Felton Jarvis and therefore Elvis himself? Was Lyle right? Did an ‘Elvis’ have something to do with the mock Elvis’s death?

“Or did his anaconda?” Quincey threw in, looking excited. She turned to Electra. “Where did you read about that anaconda?”

“I don’t know. In one of my books.”

“You actually own books about Elvis?”

“Dozens.”

“Can I come over to your house and study them? If I missed something as way cool as the snake, I need to.”

“I did loan some to a friend, but I’m sure you could look those over too. When do you get off here?”

“The rehearsal’s over, so I can split.”

“Great.” Electra stood. “Temple, coming?”

“No. I need to find out more about Trojan here. There must be a keeper for that miniature zoo somewhere.”

“Hope he isn’t a miniature keeper,” Quincey said with a giggle.

She and Electra exited left, laughing.

Chapter 43

Too Much Monkey Business

(A song Elvis recorded—and never released— during a truculent 1968 recording session, the first time his musicians noticed a puzzling personality change)

I am beginning to develop a deep sympathy for those forced to make their living as nannies.

This conclusion comes home to me when I escort the ingratiating Chatter on an outing to the local zoo and garden, both happily uninhabited yet by humans, save for the staff.

Chatter, it seems, would like to hold my hand. Apparently, the chimp is used to being treated like a child and likes to cling to his escort of the moment. It cannot have escaped anyone’s observation by now that I do not have a hand.

Oh, I have useful forelimbs, aka arms, and clever pads and shivs. But hands they are not, and they must double as walking extremities. When I am afoot, they belong to no one but me.

So Chatter, being an inventive, clever chimp, settles for tightening his long fingers around my tail.

Oh, the indignity! Fortunately, this is a clandestine outing.

We have made our surreptitious way from the dressing room area, keeping to shadowed halls, handy walls, and hiding behind the lush landscaping once we enter the Kingdome itself.

Our situation is made even worse by the fact that I did not care to take Chatter out undiapered, so he is wearing his jeweled jumpsuit, which he was only too happy to don at my request. I do not know how humans with offspring keep their sanity during these terrible Wonder Years. Perhaps they are called that because parents are always wondering why they became parents in the first place.

But Chatter is happy to have a stroll, and keeps the chit-chat down, also at my request.

I breathe a big doggy sigh of relief when we reach the Animal Elvis exhibit unremarked upon. This has been one of my toughest undercover assignments yet.

“Now, Louie, now? Chatter sing. Chatter swing. Now?”

“Not yet,” I tell him, trying to release my rear member from his tight grasp. “First we need to talk to Trojan on redirect.”

“Huh, Louie, huh? How we talk Trojan? I no talk Trojan. What redirect?”

“Lawyer talk. I do not have an Esquire after my name for nothing.”

“S-cried? Who S?”

“Never mind.”

I manage to ease Chatter around Rising Sun and Domino. He is all hot to crawl up on their backs and hang onto their “hair.”

I have never seen a critter so interested in hanging onto the appendages of other creatures. What he made of Trojan, who has no appendages, I cannot imagine.

When we get to the snake pit, I let Chatter open the lunch slot and bounce in first.

If Trojan is in the mood for food, I am sure monkeymeat is much more nourishing than a few scrawny feline limbs.

But the big snake is pretty much where I left him yesterday, doing the usual drowsing and digesting routine. In fact, he may still be hypnotized by my soothing feline wiles.

Chatter jumps on his back and begins playing ride ‘em, Cowboy. It would take only two lazy coils of that svelte muscular body to turn Chatter from a three-dimensional being to a two-dimensional one, and I am tempted to let nature take its course and preserve my tail.

But my Miss Temple has mysteries to solve, so I sacrifice poetic justice and the law of the jungle to serve the greater good.

“Off the furniture!” I tell Chatter.

He yips like a dog and bounds to the cage floor.

Trojan’s narrow jet-black eyes blink. I have never seen eyes so black. They are like pools of tar, and I know that if I were not hypnotizing Trojan, Trojan would be mesmerizing me into a menu item.

I begin purring, causing an irritated ripple to pulse down Trojan’s long, long scaled and mottled back.

But this is the only way I can communicate with the big fella. That reptilian tongue that doubles as a sniffer does not have a huge range of vocabulary.

“You remember Chatter?” I ask first.

The huge body shifts as if it rests on a nasty tack or something.

“I thought so. Did the monkey release you from the cage?”

“Yesssss.” Trojan turns his massive, spade-shaped head the chimp’s way.

“Why did you take the opportunity to leave the safety of your, er, artificially accurate environment?”

“To ssssee Vegassss.”

Is everybody a pushover for a good promotional campaign, or what? “How about getting into the pool?” “Pusssshed.”

Now this is interesting. “Who pushed Trojan?” “Men. Men alwayssss pussssh Trojan around.”

“Well, there’s a lot of you to push. I imagine they think they mean well.”

‘Thesssse men not mean well.”

“How do you know?”

“They put Trojan in water with carrion. I like fressssh prey.”

“So you’re saying that the dude was dead before you took a dip in the pool with him?”

“Dude?”

“Man.”

“Man dead. Trojan try to play, but man dead.” “How long?”

“In jungle river, piranhassss would eat all.”

I love the tropics: giant reptile stranglers, little bitty flesh-eating fish. Before you can take a bite out of them, there will be nothing left but your false teeth chattering like a demented chimpanzee before sinking to the bottom of the Amazon River. Remind me to stay north of the Grand Canyon.

Speaking of the devil you know, Chatter is getting restless and wrestling with the twisted length of jungle vine.

It occurs to me that this is the narrow far end of the mighty Trojan. I flash my shivs across Chatter’s knuckles. “Did you not see the signs outside? DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS. Which is what you will be doing if you continue to toy with Trojan’s nether regions.”

With a shriek, the chimp desists, going to crouch against the glass.

I remain in the middle, caught between two highly erratic animals.

“So, sir,” I conclude, addressing Trojan respectfully, which is the only way to talk to a twenty-foot-long garrotte. “Your accidental dive into the pool had no bearing on the life or death of the poor dude—man—who shared your natatory endeavors?”

“Sssssay what?”

“Never mind. We will be leaving now. Is there anything we can do for you?”

“If you encounter anything edible besides yoursssselvesss, sssshove it through the door assss you leave.”

I look at Chatter. It is tempting, but I still need the overactive little Elvis throwback. No wonder I would dearly like to throw him back to Trojan. Another day, perhaps.

Chatter is bouncing beside me as soon as we exit single file through the food door.

“Can see more, Louie? Huh? Huh? Huh? Look up skirts? Huh? Huh? Huh?”

“Sorry, kid. Dames do not wear skirts like they used to. You will have to get another hobby.” I do not mention that I took a peek for Miss Priscilla’s garter belt just before entering Chatter’s storage closet a couple days ago. That was purely investigational.

I lead the way to my former hangout, the Medication Garden.

I have to stop the action right here to say that I do not understand the great contempt in which Elvis is held for liking a mood-altering substance. My kind has a similar weakness for a little herb called catnip in our honor. It is true that when we indulge in catnip we are transported to moods beyond our normal range. We become kittenish and clown around and roll around and generally cavort around, to the amusement of all and damage to none. Apparently the nip that Elvis used was less innocuous. Perhaps if he had tried catnip, he would have had all the enjoyment and none of the ill effects. Instead of “just say no,” perhaps humans should just say “hello” to catnip. What could it hurt?

“Have you been here before?” I ask Chatter, not hoping for much in the way of lucid reply.

He takes a lope around the pool, those disgusting knuckles brushing the pavement all the way around. He stops, sits, and shimmies the lower half of his face from side to side, as if sniffing the air.

“No,” he finally says.

I gaze around, disappointed. This was where Crawfish Pukecannon—as I renamed him long ago in honor of his disagreeable personality that begins to smell three minutes after you meet him—met up with me last. Or do I mean three seconds? Anyway, where C. B. is lurking I smell a rat. It would help my little doll no end if I could do the dirty work and dig up this rat without her mussing her dainty little high heels.

I admit to being disoriented in this garden. Someone has seeded the place with attractive but stinky plants. It smells like the respiratory infection remedy shelf of your local discount pharmacy.

I mean, menthol and mint, lemon and licorice, and not a snippet of catnip.

I am not at my best when getting a sick headache from innocuous medicinal herbs.

But does this atmosphere bother the affable Chatter? No way.

He bounds around, jumping from the top of one see-through plastic coffin to another, gazing at the garish suits within and shrieking with laughter.

I cannot blame him. Compared to the modestly jeweled jumpsuit he is wearing, these laid-out ones are over the top and around your block. They shine under the artificial dome light, a shifting sky of white clouds that take on the faces of the principal players in the Elvis Presley saga … Mama Gladys, Daddy Vernon. Baby brother Jesse Garon is a cute little unformed fluffy cloud attached to Mama and Daddy, I guess. There’s a big blue thunderhead that is either Colonel Parker or the three Memphis Mafia members who wrote the first tell-all book, Red and Sonny West and Dave Hebler, all melded together to look like Colonel Parker, another villain of the piece. There is a Priscilla cloud, an all-white thunderhead that must be all hair, and a whole bunch of babe clouds who are pretty fluffy in all the right places.

Of course, this is a subtle effect, and I do not spy LisaMarie’s cats among the heavenly cavorters, although I spot a few horses.

Chatter has been silent for a while now, so I get my head out of the heavens and back down to earth. And I do mean earth.

In the two minutes I have let my attention wander, my chattering charge has been up to major mischief. I gaze aghast at the ground.

This is the damage the unfettered opposable thumb can do.

Chatter has worried at the ground opposite the tasteful Elvis funeral suit display, tossing foul herbal plants aside like weeds (I cannot blame him for that) and uncovering something buried just deep enough to need a demented chimpanzee to unearth it.

It is a pale limb. It is soft and limp. As I stare, bemused, for I have never witnessed the de-burying of a body before, I see that it is not bone, but the flared sleeve of a white jumpsuit, encrusted with faux gemstones embedded in genuine dirt.

Speaking of dirt, Chatter has got it all over his own white jumpsuit.

And I think he has become a little too excited at the discovery. My sniffer tells me someone should change his diaper.

I will leave the disposition of that to the proper authorities.

As for the jumpsuit in the herb garden, is it Elvis or is it Memorex?

Chapter 44

Also Sprach Zarathustra

(The Richard Strauss piece whose thundering drum overture was so effective in 1968’s futuristic film, 2001:A Space Odyssey; Elvis used it to open his live concerts beginning in 1972, and on many albums)

“Two nights running, no Elvis.” Leticia’s mellow voice sharpened with disappointment.

She had just finished her five-hour on-air shift as Delilah and now was switching her performer’s beret for a producer’s hard hat. “I don’t get it,” she added.

“We play the passive part in this charade,” Matt pointed out. “We sit here and wait. People choose to call in. Or not.”

Leticia’s frown carved no parallel tracks between her brows, merely a fleeting ripple in her mocha skin. “What’s not to call in for? We’re a feel-good station. You’re a feel-good radio shrink. That Elvis guy was getting a lot of reaction, not to mention ink.”

“He was getting us a lot of reaction and ink. Maybe`Elvis’ is tired of notoriety. Or maybe … maybe he can’t call.”

“What do you mean? Someone is holding him prisoner?”

“Leticia! You’re buying into all those Extreme Elvis scenarios. As if he’s really still alive and out there, and no theory is too wild about what might have happened to him or what he might be doing now. This caller was just a guy with an Elvis fetish, indulging his mania and getting lots of the attention he craves.”

“So why’d he give it up then?”

Matt sat at the desk and took up the headphones she had abandoned. The schoolhouse clock said he had less than a minute to contemplate the absence of Elvis. Then he’d have to get on with what he was here for: talking to real people. “Maybe he died.”

“Funnee man.”

“No, really. A guy in an Elvis suit was found floating in the Kingdome pool the day before yesterday.” “I haven’t heard anything; how did you?”

“I know the two women who found him. And there was an obscure article in the paper. Oh, and for the weird set, a huge anaconda was floating in the pool with him.”

“It was dead too?”

“No, quite alive. In fact, it’s a suspect.”

“What the hell’s an anaconda doing in a Kingdome pool?”

“There’s an exhibit of animals associated with Elvis. Apparently an anaconda was one of them. Don’t ask me why.”

“An anaconda …” Leticia’s dark eyes glittered with possibilities.

“Don’t tell me: if a snake calls tonight, I’m to keep it on the line as long as possible. Even if it lisps.”

The first three callers wanted to know the same thing Leticia did: Where was Elvis?

“He doesn’t give me his touring schedule, you know,”

Matt answered wryly. “And it’s a bad idea to believe everything you hear.”

“You call him ‘Elvis.’ “

“I call him what he implies he is. We’re strangers. I owe him at least that courtesy.”

“Howard Stern would be calling him a sicko ghoul who needs to ride on a corpse’s reputation, and a lot worse.”

“Maybe that’s why he didn’t call Howard Stern.” The next caller was less accusing. “Just tell him that we miss him and would like to hear from him again.” A third caller wanted to get into the Existential Elvis. “You know, everybody is either ready to believe it has to be Elvis, or angry that it can’t possibly be Elvis,”

she said. “What if it’s something in between?” “Semi-Elvis?” Matt asked.

“How about semisolid Elvis? He was a recording artist, after all. Maybe the airwaves were always the best way to deal with Elvis. It doesn’t matter what he wears or how much he weighs, it just matters how he sings.”

“That’s the beauty of radio. Image is nothing.”

“It’s the perfect medium for Elvis: voice is all. And that’s what he really cared about—the music and how he sang it. The rest was just distraction.”

“The rest was destructive. But even today a rock star has to tour to keep the fan base. We want our performers live and in person.”

“They say by the year twenty-twenty we’ll have Virtual communication. Like the holodeck of Star Trek’s starship Enterprise.”

“Maybe by then you can visit with Virtual Elvis at Graceland.”

“Are you sure this whole ‘Elvis calling’ thing isn’t a promotional gimmick for the Kingdome opening?”

“No,” Matt said, “I’m not. But who ever is sure about anything connected with Elvis?”

“That’s some achievement,” the woman mused, “when you think about it. To have made such an impactthat even after your death endless scenarios seem possible. At least to some people.”

“Elvis struck me as both pretentious and unpretentious, and the ways he was pretentious were the ways we all might go overboard if we had the opportunities he did. That’s what’s wrong with some people making him into a god. He had such predictably human failings. The same ones teenage sports stars show today. It’s more instructive to regard him as a man gone wrong, not a god betrayed.”

“ ‘Instructive.’ Gee whiz, Mr. Midnight, do you know how odd it is to hear that word on talk radio?” “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Elvis would like that word. That’s what his spiritual quest was, to find some way he could inspire people beyond moving them with his music. Some way to use that remarkable power.”

“I have to say that the Rolling Stones don’t seem too concerned about using their remarkable drawing power for anything other than what was the darker side of Elvis: sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.”

“No, Elvis was peculiarly American, both idealistic and egotistical.”

“Do you know how, rarely the word ‘peculiarly’ is heard on talk radio?”

She chuckled. “Bingo! I’d better get back to my Elvis-channeling sessions. Say hi to the King for me.”

Matt was happy that the audience was mellowing, accepting that the caller, whoever he was, could go as suddenly as he had come. Whatever the so-called Elvis had done or not done, he had certainly kept the phone lines ringing at WCOO.

“Mr. Midnight? Are you still on? I kinda lost track of time. Sometimes I do that.”

That familiar easygoing voice made Matt sit up ramrod straight, as if he were on television and had to look alert. “I figured you weren’t going to call again.”

“Heck, man. Who else am I gonna call? Ghostbusters?”

The caller’s hearty laughter faded into worn-out wheezes. He sounded like a punch-drunk kid who’d stayed up late for too many pizza nights in a row.

“Give it up, man,” Matt urged. “You’re not a ghost. There’s not even a ghost of a chance that you’re who you claim to be. You don’t have to be Elvis.”

“Yeah, I do.” Rage drove a baritone-deep spike into the soft, Southern underbelly of the tenor voice Matt was used to hearing. “I can’t help who I was born as. Can’t help that God chose me to be Elvis Presley.”

“Being Elvis could be dangerous right now,” Matt warned, back-peddling. “You heard about the man who died at the Kingdome?”

“Yeah. Terrible thing. But that don’t scare me. I used to get death threats all the time.”

Maybe, Matt thought, he could use the facts of Elvis’s life to force this deluded man to confront his own fictions. “Isn’t that why you were forced into that isolated lifestyle, why you kept an entourage between you and everything else?”

“What do you mean ‘lifestyle’? It was my life, man. I guess I gave it some style. That’s all.”

“Everybody thought you lived a lavish and isolated life because that was what stars did, but most of it was due to the fans. They just couldn’t leave you alone. One of your guys says when you made those cross-country train trips to and from Memphis, you had crowds waiting at every stop, like nothing anybody had seen since Lincoln’s funeral train.”

“Yeah, the fans were always there for me. And I didn’t even have to die to do it. At first. At the end—” Laughter again, forced laughter.

“Elvis … you don’t mind if I call you that?”

“No, sir. They used to think it was a funny name, in the beginning, made fun of it. Now it’s all they know me by.”

“And they know you all over the world.”

“That’s right. We’re a trinity: Jesus, Elvis, and Coca-cola. I only drank Pepsi, though. They always get something wrong. I got a few things wrong myself.” A pause. “Wish I coulda toured the world. Kept getting invited, but Colonel, he always managed to hex any trips like that. Guess he had reasons.”

“He wasn’t a U.S. citizen. He was afraid if he put a foreign tour in motion, that would come out.”

“Yeah, but it would have given me new worlds to conquer, right? I needed that. The old one was getting stale. It’s always more interesting getting somewhere than being there, you know?”

“I know. And you got there so fast. You stayed there for a long time.”

“A long time. Almost lived to be my mama’s age. Now that was a miracle. I never missed no one or nothing so much as I did her. Still do.”

“Don’t you … see her now?”

“Naw, what do you think, man? Think I’m Superman or something? Think I’m a swami? I’m just trying to figure out the world and God and stuff, and why I was chosen to be Elvis Presley. There must have been a reason.”

“There’s always a reason.” Matt looked down at the lists on the tabletop, feeling like Judas Iscariot, or like a chief prosecutor, he didn’t know which. “There was a reason you got a guitar for your eleventh birthday. Your mother took you and you got a used one … how much did it cost?”

“Eleven ninety-five. Shoot! I wanted a gun! But my mama said no, so I got the guitar.”

“And that was the beginning.”

“Who knows what a beginning is, man. Or an end. If I could tell you that I would really be somebody. It all runs together, and then we put order on it and say this happens because that happened. Like they say my mama dying was the end of me, or Cilia leaving, or, hell, why not my dog Getlo dying after eighteen years? That dog was there when mama still was, when my star was shiny and new. How does anybody know what brought me down? I don’t even know it.”

“Everybody’s an expert on you, Elvis.”

“You got that right, Mr. Midnight. Ever’body but me, huh?”

“Haven’t you had time to become an expert by now?”

“I’ve had time to think, that’s for sure. If I just hadn’t been raised to respect my elders like I was. Maybe I woulda given Colonel his walking papers. I used to threaten to do it, but ever’ time I got mad enough to do something about him, he’d sit me down and scare me, like that time in seventy-six when he showed me this bill of millions I’d owe him if I fired him. That man was a wizard with figures. Had mah daddy beat seven times around the block. Somethin’ in me just couldn’t say no to anybody’s face. It was like I was paralyzed.”

“You couldn’t say no to your mama. Maybe that put the fear of saying no in you.”

“That’s what they say about drugs now: just say no. Heck, they got no idea how hard sayin’ no is.” “But you don’t take drugs now.”

“Ah . . naw. Mostly not. Hell, I haven’t got the money for that stuff now.”

“But your estate’s been built up again. It’s worth millions. Why don’t you go back and claim it?”

“See, that’s what got me in trouble, all the money, and then the Colonel letting me pay ninety percent taxes on it, then me being a Big Spender. I was needing dough in those last years. Had to work to keep ever’body paid and the planes and cars coming so I had a chance of going somewhere fast some way. So I don’t want all that. Finally got away, son; think I’m gonna run right back?”

“What happened to the boy who wanted to be James Dean, who showed up on his first movie set with the whole script memorized: his and everybody else’s lines?”

“I was a go-getter then, wasn’t I? I still had hope Icould make somethin’ of myself, instead of ever’body makin’ something on or off of me.”

“What happened to those girls you fell in love with back then? Dixie, and June, and Debra Paget, your first costar. You were always falling in love, Elvis. What would have happened if you’d have married one of those girls and stopped letting those fans in the motel and hotel rooms for you and the boys to pick from like a basket of free fruit the management sent? They were just adventure-crazy young girls. What did you or they get from all that?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Midnight. It seemed like a new adventure ever’ night, that it did. And the guys, they really looked up to me. I was the King. I could have every woman in the world. They could take what I left.”

“That’s … not the way you were raised, Elvis. Not what your mother wanted.”

The pause elongated into that one thing dreaded in live radio: dead air time.

“I know it.” The voice was soft, shamed. “I know it. She wanted me to be clean-living. No cussin’, no drinkin’, no wild, wild women. And I didn’t let anybody have alcohol around for a long time, or do no cussin’. But then I got used to the hard life of the road, and ever’thing slipped. It seemed like fun. It seemed like I was somebody.”

“You were the King. You were everything you weren’t in high school, right?”

“Right! It was fun. I couldn’t keep ‘em away. They loved it. Got to be wearin’ on a guy. Too much to live up to. A lot of the time we didn’t do anything. Heck, a lot of the girls I was with for a long time before we did anything serious.”

“Kind of like in high school, huh? Necking and games, but nothin’ you could get in real trouble for.”

“Yeah. But you’re right. My mama like to kill me if she knew all the messes I got into on the road.”

“Maybe she did. Maybe that’s what killed her.”

“Don’t say that! I thought you were listenin’ to me. I thought you were one of my guys! There’s loyalty, and you don’t be loyal to me and say things to tear me down. To bring me down. Damn it.”

Breathing, labored, came over the line.

Matt wasn’t watching Leticia, or the clock. He wasn’t seeing anything but the dark tabletop in front of him. His ears were tuned to his caller’s every nuance, every breath. This was a man on a tightrope over a mental chasm, stretched as taut as an overtuned guitar string.

His history was national knowledge. His life was a national resource. His death was history.

He may be delusional, but the delusion was reality-based. If he thought he was Elvis, he was Elvis. He had to be treated as Elvis.

Treated as Elvis. Not just handled, but counseled. Helped. No one could save Elvis the first time around. Did twenty years of psychobabble make it possible to do now what couldn’t be done then? Was “Elvis” finally ready to be saved, or was this Elvis clone ready to die like Elvis? Inevitably? Publicly? Pathetically?

“I think I’m ready to go back to Graceland for good. Graceland,” Elvis said, his voice even softer. “Name never meant anything. People thought it did, but Grace was just the first name of the daughter of the guy who first owned the place. He musta loved his little girl, like I loved mine. Just happened to sound like something special, even spiritual, when you put ‘land’ after it. Like Dixieland. Only now it sounds commercial. Like Disneyland.

“But not that commercial. It had a special sound, Graceland. I bought it to be our home. My mama’s home. My daddy’s home. My home. That’s all it ever was. Graceland. Peaceful sounding, isn’t it?”

“You deserve peace,” Matt said. “Didn’t you tell Dixie, your first long-time girlfriend, when you broke up in 1960, that already the weight of the Elvis empire wastoo heavy? That you’d like to drop out but too many people depended on you for their livelihoods?” “That’s right. Too many people had a piece of me. Not much left for myself. Best thing I ever bought was Graceland. Up there on the hill. On the highway. Elvis Presley Boulevard, they renamed that part of it. How many people have a piece of highway named after them? I was proud of that. It meant I’d been somewhere. Maybe I didn’t stay somewhere. But I’d been there.” He laughed, softly.

“Graceland. That there Simon guy named a whole album after it when he got toney. I always liked the sound of it. Liked those high white pillars. Loved to race around those rolling hills on whatever wheels I could use. Only time I felt free, felt like the world had caught up to me, was when I raced around. I think maybe I was born racing, my whole self, my heart, and my head. Movin’, movin’. Always movin’. Only thing’d stop me was them pills. And start me again. Stop. Start. Racin’.

“It was my home. Graceland. Not any of those Hollywood houses on Bellagio and Perugia and all those foreign candy-box-soundin’ names.

“Graceland was the kind of place you can go over Jordan from. I still see my mama’s chickens peckin’ around the yard, as happy there as on any ole spit of land we ever rented and she ever spread chicken feed on.

“And Daddy corralling his donkeys in the dry swimming pool at Graceland. I tell yah, it makes me laugh, and laugh, until I cry. We sat on those white steps, Daddy and me, and cried and cried. Cried for Mama’s chickens she’d never feed again. Cried for her bein’ gone, and us bein’ left and all those damn chickens.

“Neighbors used to sniff at Mama’s chickens, and Daddy’s donkeys, and my big cars, and later reporters came ‘round to sniff at my shot-out television sets and my red rugs. Hell, Mama, she got scared when I got so famous and the girls came screaming. Mama, she got worried for me. Said I should give it all up. Come home to Graceland and sell furniture, I was so good at collectin’ it for Graceland. I swear to God, that’s what she really wanted me to do. Sell furniture. I swear to God. Mama.

“She was my best girl. I always said that. It’s as true today as it was then. What was I gonna do? Turn all them girls away? No red-blooded boy’d do that. But they were just all noise and worry and wantin,’ them girls. They didn’t really care for me, most of ‘em. And those that did, didn’t last. Maybe I didn’t let them last. She was always my best girl. I even said it on a collection of those bubble gum cards they sold in fifty-six. You know, Elvis answers all your questions. Said back then I didn’t like to be bored, and I ended up bored to death.

“See, that’s what I gotta wonder about death. Always did. Is it just sleepin’? Or is it boredom? Bore, bore, boredom. Man, that’d kill me!”

“You’re not thinking of dying, are you, Elvis?”

“About time, isn’t it, Mr. Midnight? Maybe I just gotta let go of this world, even though nobody seems to want to let me go. Just let go, get the answers to all those mysteries for myself.”

“You don’t want to take your own life?”

“And ain’t I supposed to have done that already, son? How can you kill a dead guy?”

Chapter 45

Keep Them Cold Icy Fingers Off of Me

(Traditional country ballad Elvis sang at the Humes High School Minstrel Show in 1953)

“All right,” said Motorcycle Elvis. “We’re gonna rock around the clock until tonight.”

Temple admired their energy. They had been rocking since last night, long after she left the Kingdome, when an escaped chimpanzee had been found digging up a body of evidence in the Medication Garden.

She had no idea that Fontana Inc. had her home phone number, but they did, or they had gotten it somewhere. She had been rousted from sleep at seven A.M. by an Elvis singing “Wake Up, Little Susie.”

She had no idea whether the song was associated with him, but he had recorded so many songs that it was possible. Certainly the song’s era had been his heyday.

“We thought we would break the news to you gently,” the serenading Elvis had explained once her fury at a wake-up call that implied she was “little” had eased.

“Elvis would do that kind of thing,” he added. “Call up a girl and sing an appropriate lyric to her by way of greeting.”

“Elvis is dead, so even if he did that, I certainly don’t want to be awakened thinking I’m either past the pearly gates myself, or being treated to a tabloid newspaper incident.”

“Yes, Miss Temple,” the contrite Elvis said, asking her to meet them at the Kingdome ASAP. That’s how he said it: ASAP with a long A. Not the full form: As Soon As Possible.

Now her personal guard of Elvi were assembled in the dressing-room hallway in all their glitter and glory. “So what’s the news?” she asked.

“Well, we managed to linger in the area of the, ah, dig, remaining inconspicuous.”

Temple eyed them en masse, Rainbow Elvis. She had to admit that in the Kingdome, this was indeed a subtle and soft-spoken disguise: Max’s maxim that overdressed is the best camouflage in Las Vegas proved true once again.

“And we were able to see the … victim disinterred,” Oversized Elvis added delicately.

“Don’t tell me! It was Elvis, as fresh as the day he was put to rest.”

“We can’t tell you that, Miss Temple,” Fifties Elvis rebuked her. “It wasn’t even a person.”

“The suit was empty?”

“Yup.”

“You’re sure them bones, them bones, them dry bones weren’t paper towels?”

“Absolutely. That suit was as flat as a long-playing record.”

“And get this!” Rhinestone Lapels Elvis put in. “We saw some of the gemstones and the pattern was of, like, rays around something. Some of the dirt and moss covered the design.”

“A rearing stallion?““Could be.”

“Then that’s the jumpsuit that was ‘killed’ in Quincey’s dressing room? Why bury it in the Medication Garden? Listen to me! I’m beginning to go along with Elvisinsanity. Why bother to bury a jumpsuit at all?”

“Wanted to get rid of it,” Fifties Elvis suggested. “Didn’t do a very good job of it, did they?”

“Yeah,” Cape-and-Cane Elvis said, “but how often is a chimpanzee going to go ape in the Medication Garden? I mean, the tourists weren’t about to root up the herb beds like dogs, were they?”

“There’s an Elvis fan who carted a toenail clipping away from the shag rug in the Jungle Room at Graceland. Another devoteé went to a doctor who had removed a wart from Elvis very early in his career and—”

“Wait a minute.” Oversized Elvis looked genuinely concerned. “The doctor or Elvis?”

“What?”

“Which one was early in his career when the wart was removed?”

“Elvis! Nobody knows where the doctor was then, or now. Or cares. So what does it matter?”

“Timing is very important in these things,” Oversized Elvis/Aldo said.

“Anyway,” Temple emphasized fiercely, “this other fan bought the wart from the doctor—he’d apparently kept it preserved all these years. It’s now a major Elvis artifact. So does this give you any hint of what Elvis fans might try to do in the Medication Garden?”

“Yeah, but the people who buried the suit might not have known much about Elvis fans.” Karate Elvis.

“Not like you, Miss Temple, who is always on top of everything.” Oversized/Aldo again.

“Yeah. I was even on top of that buried suit. From what you say about its location, Electra and I—and Crawford Buchanan—were sitting right near it when the body was found in the pool.”

Temple had a sudden epiphany, which was a fancy word for insight. Maybe it was an Elvis Epiphany. She could feel her eyes narrow. Rainbow Elvis sucked in their diaphragms in preparation for action.

“Crawford Buchanan!” She could feel the clues struggling to click into place. “Has he been heard from or seen lately? Could he have buried the suit? Could he be buried up there too? Too much to hope for, but he was acting very strangely when Electra and I found the body floating in the pool. Dove right in with it. Was he trying to save … the suit?”

“I understand these artifacts are worth a great deal, Miss Temple,” Aldo said.

Even Temple could tell he was agreeing with her wild theories simply because he was trying to be kind.

She took a few steps into Quincey’s dressing room and sat down, glad that Quin was not there to see Temple flailing for answers. That girl needed a strong role model, and a confused thirty-year-old was not it.

Jumpsuit Elvis stepped forward with the air of a man about to tell a tale or two.

“We have been making some inquiries,” he said gravely.

“Of whom about what?”

The brothers Fontana shook their dark-helmeted heads in awe, rendered speechless.

“Did you hear the lady?” Jumpsuit Elvis asked Karate Elvis.

“I did.”

“Of whom,” Jumpsuit Elvis repeated reverently. “Does anyone here doubt that this is the proper grammatical form?”

Heads shook in unity.

“Of whom.” Jumpsuit Elvis regarded her with the fond wonder of Columbo catching a murderer in yet another slick but useless lie.

“Awesome,” Motorcycle Elvis added.

Jumpsuit Elvis shook off his amazement to return to business. “We have been making inquiries,” he resumedhis speech with a politesse equal to Temple’s employment of the pronoun “whom,” “of those who might know or be able to find out who the stiff in the pool was when he was lucky enough to be breathing air instead of chlorine.”

“What kind of people are these?”

“Connections,” Karate Elvis said shortly.

“Friends of the family,” Rhinestone Lapels added.

“You mean, friends of your uncle Mario?” Their uncle Mario was Macho Mario Fontana, an old-time kingpin of Las Vegas when the only mafia in town had decidedly not been from Memphis.

“In a manner of speaking,” said Motorcycle Elvis.

“Let’s say they owe him,” Tuxedo Elvis added.

Temple nodded. Since she didn’t have an in, or even an out, with any official police personnel on this case, it was handy to have sources on whom one could depend on the other side of the law.

“So, who was this guy?”

Tuxedo Elvis shimmied his shoulders inside the formal jacket. “Well, actually, the bigger question is … the suit.”

“The suit. The jumpsuit?”

“Right. See, it isn’t a tourist-shop number.” Tuxedo’s dark blue eyes made quick contact with his brothers’.

“And it isn’t from the big-time Elvis outfitters around the country,” Karate said, making a move appropriate to his name.

“Nor is it from the twinkling needles of any show costumer like Miss Minnie.” Oversized.

“And it certainly isn’t from any collection of the real jumpsuits—” Blues Brothers Elvis.

“So you see our problem.” Oversized again.

Temple looked from Blues Brothers Elvis to Fifties Elvis to Karate Elvis. For once Quincey was right: they were all scrumpdilliscious. But they were also all as aggravating as … Elvis.

“Let’s try another tack,” she suggested. “Who’s the dead guy?”

“Some loser who used the name Clint Westwood.” Fifties Elvis curled half his upper lip at the obviously phony moniker.

“Used the name?”

Karate Elvis shrugged. “He’d been arrested for petty this and minor that for so long that ‘Also Known As’ was closer to his name than anything else.”

“Just a local deadbeat.” Tuxedo.

“A nobody.” Rhinestone Lapels.

“Rumor had it he ran errands for Boss Banana twenty years ago.” Oversized.

“Some old guy. In his sixties.” Fifties Elvis. “Should have been wiped years ago, but he slipped through the cracks.” Karate.

Temple interrupted this epitaph for a petty crook. “Kind of like the dead bodies slipped through the cracks of the Goliath and Crystal Phoenix ceilings in the last couple years?”

Throats cleared and cheeks pinked on a ripple of Elvis visages. Sideburns even shifted, as small cigars were moved from one side of the mouth to the other. At least they were all unlit. So far.

“Kind of,” Cape-and-Cane Elvis finally said after removing the small cigar from his mouth. Elvis and his Tampa Jewel cigars. C-and-C Elvis resembled a Western novel dude gunslinger and coughed as discreetly as Doc Holliday. “This was a Man Who Did Not Matter, that’s the main thing. No one would miss him. Not the police—”

“Not the criminal element,” Oversized gave the man his epitaph.

“So why was he given this really classy sendoff?” Motorcycle Elvis asked excitedly.

Temple had to clarify things. “You consider an undetermined death in an ersatz Elvis suit in an Elvis ersatz-garden classy?““For a guy like this? Yeah.” Motorcycle also twitched his shoulders clad in a black leather jacket.

Apparently the brothers Elvis were itchy-twitchy today.

“The snake,” Oversized Elvis added, “that was an inspired touch. Can you imagine what the police are trying to make of that?”

Temple had to admit that the notion of Lieutenant C. R. Molina contemplating an AWOL anaconda, a slightly larcenous corpse of no importance, and a soggy Elvis jumpsuit of original design might be a sight for sore eyes.

Hers.

Chapter 46

Today, Tomorrow, and Forever

(Elvis sang this song based on Liszt’s “Liebestraume” in Viva Las Vegas in 1964)

Temple turned the glass canning jar in her hand, worrying about the ring its condensation-dewed sides were leaving on the wooden tabletop.

It wouldn’t be the only dark circle on a surface that sported more rings than the planet Saturn.

The dark brew inside was Pepsi-Cola, of course, Elvis’s favorite beverage.

You could get anything you want, except Coca-Cola, here at Gladys’s Restaurant.

The wooden, high-backed chair was hard on Temple’s bony derriere. She fidgeted, slicking her palm with dew drops, and glanced at the long chromed lunch counter with its dotted line of swiveling stools, upholstered alternately in black and pink vinyl.

The jukebox was playing “Johnny B. Goode.” Hokey as the environment was, it made it easy to imagine a teenage Elvis sitting here, drinking pop and dreaming the dreams harbored by pimply kids with no money and less self-confidence everywhere.

“Hey!”

Temple turned. Electra was waving at her from the door.

Temple blinked.

Electra wasn’t wearing a muumuu.

Electra’s hair wasn’t sprayed a wild and wacky color. Electra’s hair was sprayed brown.

B-r-o-w-n. The one color no female influenced by Media America would ever want to own up to. Plain brown.

It was up in a saucy ponytail, and a hot-pink chiffon scarf was knotted around her throat. She was wearing a blackand-white checked circle skirt and a black sweater. A hot-pink patent-leather belt, wide, circled her lessthan-svelte waist.

She looked as cute as a bug in a rug. A jitterbug in a rug.

Next to her towered this tall old guy with snowy, thick hair and one of those elaborately billowing guts atop thin hips and legs that made him an excellent Santa Claus candidate.

He was wearing boots, jeans, and a nylon windbreaker. And Frosty the Snowman sideburns as fluffy as cotton balls.

The two sashayed over to Temple’s booth like Saturday-night square-dancing partners: in tune and dressed to charm.

“Temple,” Electra said, gesturing to her escort, “this is Today Elvis!”

For a bizarre moment Temple thought she was on a TV show, like Today from NBC, or This Is Your Life (but It Shouldn’t Be).

The old guy stuck out a callused hand that took Temple’s and shook. Hard. “Howdy. Nice to meetcha. Call me Israel.”

She blinked again. “I beg your pardon?”

“Or my younger friends call me `Izzy.’ Israel Feinberg. I, ah, am in the show. I do Today Elvis.”

“You do ‘Today Elvis.’ Elvis Today. What else?”

While Temple babbled, Electra slid into her side of the booth first, on the power of her unseen crinolines—mercy, but those fifties skirts had Puff Power! Israel slid in after her.

Aside from the gut, he was a handsome old boy with a self-denigrating charm that could either go country or populous urban.

“So you’re the legendary Temple Barr,” he said, nodding sagely. “Electra here says you’re a mean gal to cross.”

“Um, I don’t know. Nobody bothers to cross me much. So how’d you become Today Elvis?”

He chuckled, a rich, operatic sound. A singer, Temple twanged.

“Born in the USA, the same year as E. Nineteen thirty-five. Heart of the Depression. Up north. Philadelphia. Wouldn’t know a guitar from a sitar. But I sang a little. Did a lot of Neil Simon on the amateur circuit in the sixties. You ever see Come. Blow Your Horn? Ah, it’s old, cold stuff now. I was the playboy son in that. Kept my hair. Liked to sing. Suddenly occurred to me: if Elvis were alive today, he might not look, or sound, too different from me. Can you believe it? Elvis had Jewish blood, you know.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, he thought so. Wore a Star of David and a cross together, to hedge his bets. Put a Star of David on his mother’s headstone. Gotta love a guy like that, and him studying all those Eastern gurus too. Omni-Elvis. I can dig it.”

“So, now you do—?”

“Ordinary Elvis.” His arms spread wide to display his middle-class, middle-aged spread. “Unadorned Elvis. How he might have been had he lived to his father’s age. His hair was already white at forty-two. Maybe hishealth problems made his weight worse, but it’s the burden male flesh is heir to. He was wearing girdles in his last months. The black hair dye wasn’t cosmetic then, it was necessary. Johnny Carson said it: old, fat, and forty. Johnny was blessed with thin genes. Me, I wear jeans, and I’m old, fat, and sixty”—he glanced at Electra—“something. Elvis would be sixty-four today. I figure I’ve aged and saged and sagged enough to do him justice. So, I ‘do’ him.” He leaned over the table to wink at Temple. “Most fun I ever had in my whole life.”

Temple put her hands to her … temples and leaned back in the booth. “Thank you. ‘Fun.’ That’s what everyone forgot. Elvis had fun. Even if it was just an escape—”

“Especially if it was an escape! Let the man have a little fun, young lady! He didn’t have much while he was growing up poor. He didn’t have much after the Colonel got his claws into him. He didn’t have as much fun as his fans got out of him. The fun was short and the shit was deep. I play Elvis as if he had outlived and outloved and outlawed them all.”

“That’s neat,” Temple said.

Across the table from her, Electra beamed.

“That’s right. That’s all right, Mama.” Izzy winked.

Temple felt as if she had entered an Alice-in-Wonderland set.

They dined on fried-banana-peanut-butter sandwiches, with burned bacon on the side. She and Electra had cherry Pepsis and turtle sundaes with pecans, butterscotch, and hot fudge sauce. Yummmm! All she needed was a dormouse and a caterpillar. No Red Queen, though. Skip the Red Queen. Come to think of it, where was Molina? They discussed the buried Jumpsuit.

“Right,” Izzy said, munching on a burger. He had skipped the burned bacon. “It’s Freudian. Symbolic. If there’s any one symbol of Elvis, it’s those damn jumpsuits. We impersonators—pardon, according to the estate, we’re now ‘tribute performers.’ La-di-dah! La-didah-dah. La-di-dah-dah.” He was jiving in the booth, drumming his fingertips on the mint-green Formica tabletop and Temple was thinking Elvis would be sixty-four … when I’m sixty-four. Need me, feed me. Fried bananas and peanut butter. Comfort foods, every last one of them.

“Izzy?”

“Yeah, kid?” Drum, drum, drum-drum-drum. Doowap, doo-wap.

He was like some uncle she had never had, the one you could ask about anything. He was cool for an old dude.

“Izzy? Would Elvis really be exactly like you today?”

“I hope not, honey.” He leaned toward her, his dark eyes set in baggy, wrinkled bezels like elephant knees. “I hope Elvis today would be sleek and toned, flat-bellied, and that his coiffure would be dark and smooth as semi-sweet chocolate. I hope he’d be everything that I’m not. Eternal almost-youth at no more than … urn, fifty-six, a well-preserved, hale and healthy fifty-six. With lots of plastic surgery and hair transplants and maybe Viagra; you think?”

She laughed. “If he isn’t like you, he should be so lucky.”

He inclined his snowy head. Like a king. “Thank you.”

“Izzy. Could Elvis still be around? If he was, what would … could he look like? Really?”

Izzy sighed deeply. “If he didn’t look quite like me? What are you asking?”

“Could he pass as himself? Could he still be out here? Somewhere? What would he really look like?

“You tried one of those police department computer imagining things?”

“No, and I don’t have access. I only have access to speculation. To you, Today Elvis.”

“You’re serious. You think Elvis could be out there. You … have a notion.”

“I have a wild idea.”

Electra, who had sat back to luxuriate in Temple’s learning to appreciate Izzy, stared dreamily at the grille of a fifty-eight Oldsmobile embedded into the soda fountain. “I’m getting the weirdest feeling. Like Elvis is everywhere, just like Mojo Nixon said. Just … open your mind’s eye, and see for yourself.”

Temple’s mind’s eye saw senior citizens, even if they used to rock ‘n’ roll. But who could channel Elvis better?

“Izzy, is there anybody in this competition who could really be Elvis?”

He shook his head. “No contest. I’m probably the closest thing to reality, and I’m a far cry. A far cry. Hey. Young lady. You just reminded an old man how inadequate he is.”

“No. I just reminded you how close you are. No one else?”

“Well … I’ve seen most of the acts rehearsing.” He shook his frosty head. “Naw. Maybe … that guy they call the King of Kings. Maybe him. Maybe. Heck, lil’ darling shiksa. He looks too young, but then you kinda hope Elvis would be Forever Young. He’s got the power. Part of it, anyway.”

“Do you think he could still be out there?”

“Sheesh! Where’d this kid learn to ask questions? No. Elvis is dead. He killed himself after everybody around him let him down, after he let everybody around him down. He’s better off dead. He had too much pain. He had too much … too much. The man makes me cry. That’s why I ‘do’ him. He makes me feel. That’s a luxury at my age.”

Electra took his hand.

“I’da saved him if I could,” Izzy said, “but no one could. And especially not you, kid. Especially not you.”

Temple, chastened, thought. She thought, rebelliously. Elvis was out there somewhere, or all of this wouldn’t be happening.

Elvis was out there somewhere.

Chapter 47

There Goes My Everything

(Elvis recorded this song about a broken marriage in June of 1970; it did well on three charts)

“Isn’t Izzy something?”

Electra had scrunched down in her theater seat to stare at the dark stage of the Kingdome showroom.

“You sound like the teenager you’re dressed as. He’s an interesting man—”

“And were you really serious with all those Elvis questions? Do you think the real King might be around?”

“I don’t know what I think, but when you figure in that Matt is getting very credible calls from a possible Elvis … and that Quincey was seriously harassed, something sinister besides murder is going on, but it seems so scattershot.”

Electra’s eyes were still only for her new beau. “Izzy doesn’t really expect to win,” she explained. “He just does this to have some fun. Who’s gonna let a realistic-looking Elvis win? Everybody wants Elvis at his peak, even on stamps.”

“I guess he was something in his prime, to go by the Fontana brothers.” Temple eyed the awesome clot of mostly early Elvi at stage left, near the band.

“They are so cute! I don’t know if the judges would let a whole litter win, but I’d vote for those boys any day.”

Temple scanned the seats in front of them in the house’s raked tier. Shiny black helmet heads pockmarked the burgundy velvet seats like beetle backs.

She spotted Mike and Jerry fussing with their jumpsuits in the wings, and the King of Kings watching from the shadows of the flies. Probably sizing up the competition. From what the guys had said, dark horse Elvi were always showing up at competitions, ready to dazzle the jaded Elvis world.

“Even the contestants who’ve already rehearsed can’t stay away,” Temple mused. “Guess they want to the see the competition strut their stuff. Look! That’s the King of Kings guy down behind the Fontanas. What’s he doing talking to the band? He’s had his time on stage.”

“He sounded like a perfectionist,” Electra said. “Elvis was. You think he could really be … our boy?”

“No! But he is uncannily good. Twenty years too young. Although, if Elvis had cleaned up his act, dumped the drugs, got some medical attention for his ills, lived clean, maybe he could look a couple decades younger. Sixty-four isn’t so old nowadays.”

“Glad to hear you say it, dearie!”

Before Temple could congratulate herself on her new maturity about advancing age, the onstage band members geared up with the squawk and stutter of tuning strings and instruments.

Crawford stepped up to the center-stage mike. “Number ninety-nine.”

Entry forms rustled in the echoing house, but Templeand Electra were not among those granted official documents.

A guitar screamed, then twanged. The drums beat their way in and then everything was cooking in the manner of overdone rock ‘n’ roll, a vaguely dissonant, deliciously anarchist stew of sound.

A dark figure in the wings rushed forward, then slid into a long knee-slide onto center stage: Young Elvis in his fifties suit—loose pants, tight jacket, and energy incarnate.

He rose by pushing his knees together until he was balanced on the balls of his straddled feet, part acrobat, part spastic. The musicians ground down into their instruments as their music mimicked his gravity-defying gyrations. “Tutti Frutti,” the newest Elvis was howling like a madman, or a mad dog, or maybe only like a dislocated Englishman in the noonday southern sun.

“Wow.” Temple sat up, Electra taking notice with her.

Elvis heads throughout the auditorium and in the wings snapped to attention.

Tutti Frutti Elvis had the right stuff, all right, Mama. His suit shook, he shook, everything had to shake ‘n’ bake, and rock, rattle, and roll along with him.

When the number ended, a ragged chorus of claps hailed a rehearsal that had been performance-perfect, but already the lacquered Elvis heads were consulting.

Temple could almost hear their judgments from where she sat: too raw, not enough variety; a shot of adrenaline, soul but no subtlety.

She wasn’t sure Elvis was about subtlety.

“That young man has drive,” Electra said, fanning herself. “Whew.”

“But he couldn’t really be Elvis.”

“Him? Heavens, no! Way too young. Way too … well, Elvis.”

Still, Temple could tell from the checkerboard of chatter and silence all over the theater that this Elvis was a new force to reckon with. Acts were being modified even now to meet the challenge.

The next Elvis to rehearse was Jerry. She recognized him as he walked up to give the director his stat sheet and nervously eyed the musicians. She could guess that he wanted to give them special instructions so his set would match the dynamic difference offered by the unexpected Elvis ahead of him.

While Jerry negotiated, the audience fidgeted.

Temple searched the wings for Tutti Frutti Elvis. She hadn’t seen his like around this place before. Even the King of Kings must be checking his crown.

Then the sound of an out-of-tune electric guitar shrilled up onto the stage and into the sparsely occupied seats like a dentist’s drill hitting a nerve.

The place had terrific acoustics.

Temple realized that she had heard this instrument before, and it was a set of human vocal cords pressed into their worst extremity.

Quincey! Her latest aria in terror lofted to the distant ceiling like a solo from The Phantom of the Opera.

Temple bolted from her seat. “Now what?” Luckily, she had her running shoes on, and she put them to good use.

“Wait!” came Electra’s diminishing plea behind her. “You don’t know what you’re rushing into.”

But Temple did. Another nasty impractical joke had obviously been played on the piece’s much-abused Priscilla. She remembered the puffy, red, razor-etched “E” on Quincey’s neck that she had flashed like Elvis flaunting one of his cherished law-enforcement badges when pulling over a cute chick on wheels for a mock traffic citation in Memphis. That girl’s notion of self-esteem would have done a sword-swallower proud. And here Temple had promised her mother to watch over the kid.

Other people were rushing toward the sounds, but none of them knew the route as well as Temple.

She got there first.To find …

To find Quincey still in her civvies, with only the swollen brunette beehive on her head, her fingers pressing into her soft, teenage cheeks, screeching like a slasher-movie patron.

No violated jumpsuit lay on the dressing room floor. No blood dripped down Quincey’s neck or hands. Nothing was wrong.

Quincey pointed, hiccoughing with hysteria when she tried to speak.

“Hmmmph, hummmph,” she wheezed, a dagger-long fingernail pointing as if transfixing a killer in a stage play. “It’s a ruuu-uuu-uuu-ined. They mur-murmurdered it. My bee-bee-bee-eueueueu-ti-ful gown.”

Temple stared to the aluminum rod suspended across the mostly empty expanse of the dressing room clothes niche.

The white wedding gown hung there, shredded like a toilet-paper mannequin. Cut into ribbons, the gown hung, a tortured ghost. Glittering piles of severed beads mounded like decorative Christmas sugar at its jagged hemline.

Another costume had been expertly assassinated. Why?

“There, there. There, there.”

The 3-D wool poodle on Electra’s shoulder was soaking up Quincey’s tears. It was hard to tell which sparkled more: the rhinestones glinting on the poodle’s collar, or the salty teardrops falling to the fabric in cataracts of distress.

Temple would not have known Quincey had that much water in her.

In the hall, the crew and performers shuffled and commiserated. Even Awful Crawford paced and stewed, more worried about the show going on than Quin’s welfare. Preopening theatrical disasters were always exaggerated. Lost costumes were mourned like long-lost relatives.

Temple dared not admit that she was relieved that the cause of Quincey’s alarm was so minor. Not that you can tell a sixteen-year-old girl that her destroyed prom-queen wedding gown is a small price to pay for a whole skin and a whole mind.

Memphis Mafia were shouldering into the room to take charge, enough of them to staff a Strip hotel and the local office of the federal government too.

Temple exchanged eye contact with the string of Fontanas penned behind a wall of black wool sleeves in the hall with the other spectators, including the Crawf, thank God.

Best let the authorities, however many and however much in competition, fight for their turf without her.

She eased into the hall, missed by no one. Electra was upholding the distraught girl with a motherly fortitude far beyond Temple’s experience.

“What happened?” Oversized Elvis asked in real concern.

“The Priscilla wedding gown was trashed. Pretty completely.”

“What a shame. Miss Quincey really liked that costume.”

“Guess this sets the rehearsal back a bit.” Temple fought her way through a clucking group of sympathetic Elvi to the stairwell leading to the stage. “I don’t know what to think,” she told whatever Elvi followed her.

“We don’t blame you.” Karate, downcast, shook his full head of dark hair, reminding her of Elvis gearing up to render one of his more poignant ballads. “Maybe you should sit down.”

“Where?”

“Good question.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Temple told them. “You guys stay here and keep an eye on what the officials,and unofficials, are up to. I’m going upstairs to think in peace and quiet.”

“That’s it, Elvi! Back to the admiring throngs below.” Temple smiled faintly at Cape-and-Cane. She found his air of urbane authority soothing.

So she retraced her steps up to the stage. Theaters also had a soothing effect on her. The dark vortex of an empty stage, the mathematical repetition of rows of empty seats, the becomingness of it all, the silent potential, reminded her of well-designed churches.

She loved to hear her footsteps echo in an empty theater.

She walked onto the dark-painted boards, so different from the warm honey color of most theater floors. This was Vegas. You wanted drama, not hominess. You got Elvis on his knees, not ballet troupes in flying leaps.

She was surprised to see something walking toward her over the ebony boards, not making a sound.

She was completely astonished to recognize Midnight

Chapter 48

Tiger Man

(Sung in concert, usually in medley with “Mystery Train”)

I am always reluctant to be the bearer of bad tidings, and particularly on this occasion.

I can see that my Miss Temple is both weary and puzzled, and not looking around as alertly as she usually is.

Naturally, when I heard the screams from the belly of the beast I avoided doing the obvious. It is the nature of my breed to do whatever is opposite to what the common herd is doing.

So there I stay in my humble position of unseen observer behind the assemblage of drums onstage.

I do not like drums normally. They are needlessly noisy and are the original blunt instruments, bereft of finesse.

However, though the stage floor is black and excellent camouflage for me, I did feel the need of a better barrier, so established myself behind the percussion section.

The only reason I am here in the first place is to try tofigure out what this hillbilly cat has got that no one will let the poor dude rest in peace. This Elvis character is the only human dude I have ever seen—or not seen—to manage something approximating nine lives. Well, maybe five lives going on six. He is only human, after all.

Still, I had hoped to learn somewhat of the Elvis phenomenon from my onstage watching post. Would that I had thought to cram some cotton into my supersensitive ears. That Tutti Frutti guy could have raised the dead with his high Cs.

Even I did not realize at the time that what was going on was not raising the dead, but laying the living low.

So it is my sad duty to meet my Miss Temple and escort her to the unavoidable conclusion.

“Louie?” she says.

She always acts surprised to see me, when she should know by now that I am expert at being where I am least expected.

But I merely look wise and sad, a habit of my kind, and turn to lead her to the crux of the matter.

I am glad that we are alone. I would not want the world at large to know how much leading my Miss Temple requires in certain matters. Certainly, I do not need the credit. I am noted for being a primo predator by my own self. It is nothing new for me to be presenting a recently live prey to my charming roommate.

I only wish that it was something that might make her scream and faint, like a mouse or a lizard.

I am sorry that it is a guy this time, and one that she has met recently.

He is lying on the floor by the deserted instruments in a most undignified position. In fact, were he still upright, the position would not be unlike the late King’s more convoluted contortions on the balls of his feet, as we just saw demonstrated so recently by the newest Elvis candidate.

To put it shortly, the dead guy is twisted like a salted pretzel, and his face is growing red and dark and will soon blacken. I think it is due to the long white silk scarf twined around his throat.

He surely will not sing “Love Me Tender” now.

Miss Temple has obediently followed me over to the latest corpse.

The late dude’s dark cloak has parted to reveal glimpses of a most original and splendiferous jumpsuit beneath. Even I must swallow a lump of emotion. The suit is emblazoned with members of the feline kingdom, primarily tigers.

Now no one will see this marvelous jumpsuit in motion. The tiger’s rippling muscles of gold-and-black gemstones are forever stilled.

Miss Temple seems unaware of the jumpsuit as she stares down at the darkening face of the dead Elvis.

“Lyle?” she says, as if expecting that he might still talk back, despite the choke hold the white silk scarf has on his epiglottis. ‘The King of Kings is dead? Then … who is Elvis now?”

She looks at me. “Louie?”

Do not look at me, babe. He is not me, and I am not he.

Although I might look very good in the right jumpsuit.

We must talk to the A La Cat people about this, once there is no longer a whole lotta shakin’ going on in the Kingdome.

Chapter 49

Suspicious Minds

(One of Elvis’s signature songs, beloved by impersonators; recorded in 1969)

“Why did you come back up here? All the excitement was downstairs in the dressing room area.”

The detective was in his mid-thirties and had a neat blond mustache. His name was just as bland: Stevens. “That’s why I came back up here,” Temple said. “I wanted to think. So many bizarre things have been going on around here lately—”

“Two murders are more than bizarre. You knew the victim?”

Temple nodded, settling into the velvet theater seat. Forensic technicians were swarming over one corner of the stage, but otherwise the place was empty.

From below came the moans of anxious Elvi, fearful that the murder would postpone, or even end, the competition.

Temple found something uncanny in the fact of an Elvis “tribute performer” dying on stage.

“How did you find the body? With that dark cloak, it was fairly low-profile, and the lighting was low.”

Temple was not about to introduce her guiding light, Midnight Louie, who had glided into the shadows and disappeared as soon as she gave the alarm.

She managed a sheepish expression. “I used to act in school plays. I can’t cross a stage without ‘treading the boards’ a little. They all have a different sound.”

“So you walked your way right into the dead man.”

She nodded.

“Did you recognize him immediately?”

“Not quite. First I just saw he was an Elvis. Then I saw something familiar about him. Suddenly I knew it was Lyle.”

“Lyle Purvis.” The detective pursed his lips. “I’m still not clear what you’re doing over here anyway. Are you an Elvis fan?”

“Nope.”

“You and this”—he consulted his notebook—“Electra Lark were on the site of the last murder too.” “Just unlucky, I guess.”

“And prone to wandering off the beaten path.” He was checking his notes again, or, rather, another detective’s notes. “The Medication Garden where the drowned man was found was supposed to be off limits.”

“We trespassed a bit there.”

“And you didn’t trespass here?”

“Not that I know of.”

The detective shook his head. “You make a lousy suspect for anything worse than jaywalking, but you were at the discovery scenes of two recent, connected murders.”

“So the drowned man was murdered? And the murders are connected?”

“By you.”

“Oh.”

“Frankly, your being just another crazy fan, that would explain a lot.”

Temple couldn’t quite cop to that rap, but she could offer a hint for her presence. “Well … to be frank—” “You haven’t been before?”

“To be fully frank, I’m here because of what’s been happening to Quincey.”

“Quincey.” He eyed her with the baffled suspicion you’d direct at a harmless-looking person who kept turning up corpses. “You mean that old TV show. About the coroner. He was on close terms with corpses too.”

“No. I am not some fannish flake or a media nut! I’m just a PR person moonlighting as a nanny. Quincey is the girl who is playing Priscilla Presley for the competition. Her mother was concerned about the threats she was getting, so I said I’d keep an eye on her.” Temple could hardly mention the Elvis apparition at the Crystal Phoenix as the instigating event; then he’d really typecast her as a flake.

“ ‘Keeping an eye on Quincey’ took you to the Medication Garden and just now on stage?”

“I ran into those situations in the course of hanging out at the contest.”

“The attacks on the girl have been noted. You have any insight on that?”

“Not a clue. Except that this last time, her screams at discovering the assault on the dress did a pretty good job of pulling everybody out of the rehearsal area. Except for Lyle.”

“And his killer. Good thing you didn’t wander back here too soon.”

Temple had thought of that. Lyle must have been killed as soon as the stage was clear: lassoed from behind with the scarf, disabled and silenced by strangulation, and then held in thrall until dead.

It would take a strong, tall person to dominate a big guy like Lyle. A man, of course. Or a woman like Velvet Elvis.

“What do you think is going on with the Priscilla thing? A deranged fan?” the detective asked.

“They do dislike her, but—don’t you think it could be some other agency?”

“It’s some other agency that’s putting the jinx on our investigation, all right.”

Temple detected something besides bitterness in his voice. “You don’t mean … Twilight Zone stuff? Like Elvis sightings.”

“Don’t I wish.” He slapped the notebook shut. “We could all live with a little tabloid ridicule. It’s the hush-hush that kills an investigation, not the yellow journalism. Speaking of yellow journalism, you know a guy from the Las Vegas Scoop? Crawless Buchanan? He’s been chomping at the bit to interview you. I had to have a uniform restrain him, he was that hot to see the body. Some of these guys are really ghouls.”

“Crawless. Yeah, I know him. He was at the other death scene too.”

“He was?” The notebook flopped open.

Temple nodded solemnly. “He was so eager to examine that corpse he jumped into the pool with it.”

“That creep!” The notebook snapped shut again.

This was starting to look like an open-and-shut case, Temple thought.

The detective stood. “Maybe you’d give him an interview. Get him off our backs.”

“You’re asking a lot.” She glanced beyond Detective Stevens’s dark coat sleeve to the sight of Crawford practically slobbering with eagerness twenty feet away. “Are you sure you can’t pin anything on him?”

Then it struck her. Crawford had not only been at each death scene, he was Quincey’s stepfather. He could have popped in and out of her dressing room, spreading havoc, without much comment.

She feared her speculations were running rampant across her expression, but the detective had turned away already, eyeing the Crawf with distaste.

“Pin anything on him? A new haircut would help.” He stuffed the notebook into his side coat pocket and returned onstage to the cluster of white-gloved people hunkering over the dead man like abducting aliens.

Crawford sprang toward Temple like a spaniel. “T. B.! Thank God they didn’t arrest you!”

“What would they arrest me for?”

He brushed off the question with a gesture. “It’s not that Purvis guy dead, is it? Tell me. They won’t let me near enough to see the body. It can’t be him. He’s just not around downstairs, right? Maybe he didn’t come in today at all. His rehearsal was yesterday. What would he be doing here today?”

“That’s a very good question.”

“Then … he was here today?”

“Yup.”

“But he left.”

“Oh, yes.”

Crawford slumped into the dark lines of his Memphis Mafia suit. “Thank God.”

“Well, he left, but, like Elvis, he’s not completely gone. Something remains.”

Crawford’s expression turned sick as he glanced at the assembled officials. Talk about “ring around the collar:” a noose of Memphis Mafia suits surrounded them as thoroughly as they circled the corpse.

“Oh, God.”

Temple was actually moved to put out a hand in case Buchanan folded. “It is Lyle. Why are you so upset? I didn’t know you were friends.”

“Friends?” Crawford’s normal sneeringly sure look had melted away like a wax dummy’s expression in the face of a forest fire. “God, no. He couldn’t stand my guts.”

When she said nothing, he added, “What’s new? Who can?”

“Whew. You are in bad shape, C.B. Here. Have a chair.” She pushed down a fold-up theater seat with her foot. Crawford Buchanan, in any shape, was not someone she cared to bend over near.

He collapsed into the seat, patting the backs of his hands over his face as if wiping off invisible beads of sweat. His normal pasty face had gone as green as spinach fettuccine.

In a moment his face was in his hands, and he was rocking to and fro.

Temple looked around for witnesses. This was embarrassing.

“He’s gone,” Crawford wailed softly. “My God, my God. He’s gone.”

“He seemed like a nice man,” Temple said inadequately. What else could you say about someone you’d only met once. “And a damn good Elvis tribute performer.”

“Oh, don’t use that stupid euphemism!” the Crawf snapped. “Impersonator is an honorable word. And in his case, it wasn’t even an act. Don’t you understand?”

Tears stood in his large, cappuccino-dark eyes.

Temple sat on the seat next to him out of sheer, mute amazement. “You really cared about this guy.”

“Why shouldn’t I? I found him. I found him out! And then he exits on me.” The Crawf slapped a palm to his forehead, so hard that Temple winced.

“Crawford, you don’t—You couldn’t think … It’s crazy.”

“He. Was. The. King. I know it.”

“That’s your story that was going to shake the world?” “Was!” The word came out half a cry of rage, half a bawl. “I was so close. This would have made me.” “What about him?”

“Huh?”

“What about … Lyle. Did he want to be the means of your getting made?”

“No, but I could have talked him into it.”

“You told him your suspicions?”

“Of course. It wouldn’t work unless he cooperated and went public.”

“And he didn’t laugh you off.”

“At first, sure. Why not. He was in denial.”

“In denial.”

“Wouldn’t you be if you’d done such a good job of hiding your identity that no one would ever suspect?”

“But Elvis tribute perform—” Crawford was looking not only bereaved but homicidal, so Temple backtracked. “Impersonators are always suspected of being the real thing. It’d be the worst place to hide, because it’s the most obvious.”

“You said he was good!”

“Not that good.”

“How good does a sixty-four-yearold man who’s been out of the limelight except for the odd Elvis contest have to be?”

“What kind of evidence have you got?”

“Him! And now he’s dead.”

Temple scratched her neck. “Listen, Buchanan, you didn’t arrange for those attacks on Quincey as part of some scheme to get Lyle worried and reveal himself, did you?”

“No.” He sighed. “I thought of it after the first attack, that seeing ‘Priscilla’ in danger might shake him out of the denial of his new persona. But, face it, Elvis had gotten over her by now. And Quincey may have a punker’s heart, but she’s not a very convincing Priscilla.”

“I thought she was doing a really good job!” “What do you know about all this?”

“More than I used to know. So I’d be very hard put to buy that Lyle Purvis was Elvis Presley. Where’s your evidence?”

“You agree that he’s the best Elvis impersonator you’ve ever seen.”

“I do, but I haven’t seen very many, just the ones here. That new guy this afternoon was pretty good, but he’s way too young to be really Elvis. So stomping the stomp and shouting the shout are not evidence enough.”

“Purvis had lived in Las Vegas for several years, had enough money to afford a pretty big house with a copper roof and a six-car garage. You never saw him except at night. He didn’t smoke, or drink, or gamble.”

“There’s a pit boss at the Crystal Phoenix who doesn’t smoke, drink, or gamble, and you only see him at night. That doesn’t make him Elvis, and that isn’t as uncommon in this town as people think. Las Vegas is famous for churches as well as casinos.”

“Okay, but when I first got suspicious about who Lyle really might be, I started checking his background.” “Any good, or bad, reporter starts there. So?” “So … Lyle doesn’t, didn’t have any.”

“You just said he’d lived here for several years.”

“Right. Did Elvis gigs around the country, had an act at a small club for a while, but before that … zero. The man was fifty years old, at least. He had a driver’s license, but I couldn’t find a Social Security number on him, a credit record—he paid everything with, get this, cash.”

“Maybe he had a history of credit-card abuse.”

Crawford’s mournful dark eyes sharpened through their residual mist of emotion. “Exactly, T.B.! Once a spendthrift, always a spendthrift. There are certain habits so ingrained you can’t ditch them, even if you’re living in another place under another name.”

“Even if you’re Elvis, you say.”

“Especially if you’re Elvis.”

Chapter 50

Big Boss Man

(Elvis swung out in a 1967 Nashville session that was bedeviled by the usual personal politics among his associates)

“Mr. Midnight, I presume.”

Matt froze.

He wasn’t used to getting radio show calls at home. He wasn’t used to getting phone calls at home, period. But he wouldn’t put anything past his mysterious caller. His heart accelerated despite himself. Had “Elvis”

become a stalker?

“Don’t freak out,” the man’s voice urged, laughing. “It’s just Bucek.”

“Ah … Frank?” Matt’s mind once again had to merge the image of his long-ago spiritual director in seminary with the FBI agent he had become on leaving the priesthood. That always took a leap of the imagination, if not of faith. “I don’t get it. Why are you—”

“Calling? Combining business with personal business, I guess. Just to say I’m in town, and to ask a favor.”

“Sure.”

“I want tapes of your Elvis interviews.”

“Tapes. How did you—?”

“Hear about them? You’re famous. Or maybe I should say infamous.”

“But why do you need them?”

“Don’t know that I do, but I can’t really say.” “It’s about a case?”

“Can’t really say. Can you get me the tapes?”

“Sure. I’ll call the station right now; ask them to make a set.”

“Don’t say who for.”

“Okay.”

“I’d rather go through you. It’s more discreet. You could say they’re for your mother.”

“I will, but I don’t think I’d ever send her them. She’d think I had gone seriously weird.”

“What’s your take on this guy?”

“As a counselor?”

“Anyway you want to read it.”

“I don’t know. He could be completely immersed in the Elvis personality. He could be self-promoting in some way, not yet clear. If he comes forward and turns out to be a shill for the Kingdome, we’ll know.”

“But he’s credible?”

“He knows his Elvis trivia, but so do thousands of Elvis fans. I pick up a genuine confusion. He may have absorbed some of Elvis’s characteristics from sheer obsession. Has he really ‘become’ Elvis? It’s easier to believe that than that the real Elvis could have lived and hidden out so successfully all these years.”

“So he’s credible.”

“Yeah. As credible as a voice over the airwaves can ever be.”

“Interesting.”

“How will you get the tapes?”

“Someone will pick them up after the show tonight. You have your post-game groupies. One will ask you tosign a tote bag; you can slip the tapes in there.”

“Big Brother’s been watching me? This that urgent, and that covert?”

“Always, Matt. Always. Elvis mania may be good for a laugh, but we’ve got some grim business going on here.”

“FBI business.”

“You said that. Talk to you later, if I get time before I leave town.”

A brisk good-bye ended the exchange.

Puzzled, Matt dialed the station and got Dwight, technician and jack of all trades. His request for tapes was met with a belly laugh.

“You and two hundred others. Leticia’s working up a sales program, but I’ll run you some free. You want more than one set?”

“Yeah. Give me … three?”

“Fine. Freebies for you, but Leticia’s thinking twenty-nine ninety-five for the public.”

“Can you do that, without the caller’s permission? Without mine, for that matter?”

“What’s to object about? Anyone could have taped you guys from the air. And by calling in, these folks put themselves into a public arena.”

“I’d have a lawyer check it anyway.”

“Leticia will. She doesn’t let much get past her. Including gold mines.”

“What a wimp,” the caller said. “Holing up in his bedroom like a spoiled kid just because the world wants too much. If he had any guts he’d come out of hiding.”

“Why are you so angry?”

“Because if he really was the King, he wouldn’t have left us like he did, and if he did survive and go into hiding, then he cheated us another way.”

“It’s not like you owned him.”

“Yeah, we did. We made him.”

“A bunch of things made him … the music, the times, his own instincts, all the people who cried ‘lewd’ and made him notorious, all the people his death shocked into an orgy of mourning. But I don’t think he owed you anything. He had a right to just stop.”

Another voice had taken the airwaves. “That man is wrong. We didn’t just make Elvis, we made him sick. We made him stand in for our sense of rebellion and freedom and wanting to live so high we’d be legends. He was our … what do you call it?”

“Scapegoat?” Matt suggested.

“Standin,” another male voice said. “She had it right. He was our standin. But he’s gone, and we don’t need to listen to any version of him asking for answers on the radio. We don’t need standins anymore. You fans who won’t get over it, get a life!”

The debate was high-octane tonight.

“Couldn’t you tell the poor man is just looking for peace, whoever he is?” The woman’s voice was teary. “We can give it to him if we just stop expecting him to be anything any more, even alive. That was so sad, Mr. Midnight. What Elvis said last night. I hope he’s all right now.”

“He’s all right, mama. He’s probably calling in from some money-laundering island in the Caribbean, laughing at how gullible we all are. He’s probably got a secret deal with the estate to stay dead, so they can milk his image better. Who wants to see Elvis a senior citizen? I hope you radio people expose the bastard who’s been pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes. If he comes on again, I dare you to let me ask him a few questions.”

“You’d scare him away! You probably already have. Guys like you were just jealous of Elvis.”

Matt was playing referee tonight. He hardly had to put a word in as Leticia conducted the bristling switchboard like a bandleader.

He sat there, listening, exhausted by the strong feelings pro and con the topic of Elvis raised, growing more concerned that this outbreak of emotion would driveaway the one man who really needed to get on the line: the supposed Elvis himself.

These calls had always come independently of whoever else was calling in and what they were saying. Elvis seemed cocooned in his own world, musing in a sometimes laid-back, sometimes manic monologue. Matt almost got the impression that he didn’t listen to the radio show at all, that he just dialed during the proper hour and connected.

Two isolated men, talking, with the world listening in. And the FBI.

Matt shifted in his seat, interrupting a denouncement of rock ‘n’ roll music. “The music can’t talk back. And neither can Elvis.”

“Yes, he can!” the next caller argued. “He’s been talking here.”

“We don’t know who that is. Was,” Matt said, suddenly sure. “I don’t think whoever he was will be calling in again.”

“Why, is his contract up?” a snide-sounding man demanded.

“I think he’s shared as much of himself as he’s going to. Didn’t you notice his call last night had a . final … air to it?”

“Aw, he won’t ever go away, not really.” The woman sounded more anxious than certain. “You can’t mean that was it. That he’ll just stop.”

“He did before.”

But the calls didn’t stop. Someone even asked everyone not to call in, “so that the King could get through.”

Matt smiled to see Leticia’s face solidifying into horror on the other side of the glass barrier. Nobody wanted Elvis to stop calling.

Except Matt.

“It’s over,” he said, voicing his thoughts.

The big hand on the schoolhouse clock sliced the line that stood for twelve fifty-nine. The roulette wheel of time was running out tonight, and even Leticia’s willingness to let the show run overtime meant nothing if the main attraction failed to show.

“He’s skipped a night before,” a woman’s thin voice pointed out just as the minute hand clicked into place on high noon, or high midnight.

Matt heard his rush of closing words. Thanksforcalling, we’llhavetowaitandsee. Waitandsee.

Reluctantly, Leticia’s falling hand cued Dwight to run the scheduled ad.

Matt pulled off the headphones before he could hear some inane jingle for a furniture rental place or a car dealership or a Laundromat. Advertisers at the midnight hour expected a young and restless audience in need of credit and consumer goods. What a role model Elvis was for them.

“Sorry,” Leticia told him on the way out.

He didn’t want to admit that he wasn’t sorry.

Maybe his long session last night had exorcised Elvis. He hoped so.

The group outside was bigger than ever, up to nine people. All women.

“He didn’t call us,” one wailed as soon as she saw him.

“Don’t take it personally. If he’s standing anybody up, it’s me.”

“Nobody would stand you up, Mr. Midnight.”

Matt stared, nonplussed, into devoted eyes that would look right on a basset hound.

“How did you all get here so fast?” he wondered aloud.

“We came early and listened on the car radio,” a pair of plump night-shift nurses said, almost as one, proud of their initiative.

“Maybe he’ll call tomorrow.” Another woman handed him the usual photograph to sign.

Leticia had given him a pen that wrote in silver, so it would show up on the photo’s darker surfaces. She had a whole box of the things, brand-new, and had beamedlike Santa Claus bestowing an electric train instead of a producer anticipating many nights of numbing ritual outside the radio station door that would soon become tiring and then an imposition.

Once the novelty wore off, so would the ease.

“You might want to sign this on something solid.”

Matt had been so busy autographing his photos that he hadn’t noticed the quiet woman come up. She looked more businesslike than the average fan, and her tote bag still had shipping folds in it. Elvis’s face on the black background was drawn and quartered right through the Pepsi-Cola smile.

Matt took the thick fabric pen she offered—do their research, the FBI—to the newspaper vending machine, slipping the one set of tapes from his jacket pocket and into the bag.

He wrote “Sincerely, Mr. Midnight” in big loose letters across the rough surface.

Her mumbled “thank you” vanished into the pressing crowd, who weren’t many, but who all wanted to be in the first row of his admirers.

“Maybe if Elvis doesn’t call any more, you won’t have to sit out here at midnight listening to your car radios,” he joked, signing as fast as he could.

“Oh, no. We’ll still be here for you,” they promised in a ragged chorus.

They were fans. They would always be there. For somebody.

Chapter 51

It Wouldn’t Be the Same Without You

(A song Elvis recorded during an early Sun session, without much success)

Temple’s phone rang eight times before she answered it, and it was after noon.

Matt was too weary to have much imagination after a sleepless night haunted by Elvis clones, but he couldn’t help wondering if Max Kinsella was back in town, keeping Temple up late.

She sounded rushed when she finally picked up the phone.

“Hell-oo.”

“Matt. I wondered if you have a moment for career consultation.”

“Now?”

He felt like the ceiling had rained a bucket of ice-water. “No, of course not. Not now. Whenever—” “Matt, don’t be so darn eager to oblige. You sound alittle … worried. I’m sorry. It’s been wild. Why don’t we go to lunch, or something.”

“What would the ‘or something’ be?”

“Something fun. I know! We could drive out to Three O’Clock Louie’s at, ta-dum, Temple Bar. I’ve been wanting to patronize the old guys. This is as good an occasion as any.”

“But you’ll have to drive, as usual, and it’s me who wanted to get together. I’ve really got to find some free time to buy a car.”

“Agreed. I could go with you … except I’ve forgotten all the tips on car-buying, it’s been so long since I got the Storm.”

“Maybe I’ll just get a Saturn.”

“Sounds fine, but kind of … predictable.”

“Sony. Why don’t I be unpredictable now? Any reason we can’t take the Vampire out to the lake?”

“It’s just as far away as my leggings and fifties ankle boots. I can use Electra’s ‘Speed Queen’ helmet. I’ve been dying to.”

“Okay! Twenty minutes?”

“Make it fifteen. I’m hungry, and there’s nothing like a nice, cold, bouncy ride to enhance an appetite.” Yeah, Matt thought, hanging up.

Suddenly, it was an expedition.

He felt a little like Elvis going for a motorcycle thrill-ride, putting on his suede half-boots, his faux sheepskin jacket, and getting out his leather gloves. Picking up Temple, who was perky enough to pass as one of Elvis’s fifties starlets and even resembled a smaller, less sexy Ann-Margret, who had shared Elvis’s love for motorcycles and had apparently shared a deep love with Elvis before he had begun the final, slow spiral downward. Ann-Margret never opened a show from then on without a huge floral tribute in the shape of a guitar from Elvis … except for the show she opened the night of August 15, 1977. No floral guitar, no Elvis after August 16, in Memphis, or anywhere else … except here and there and everywhere, like that “demmed elusive Pimpernel” of Scarlet Pimpernel fame. The actress-singerdancer’s hair had been a heavier, sultrier red than Temple’s, which was even now being dampened by the sleek silver bubble of Electra’s helmet.

“Speed Queen” read the cursive letters above the dark visor. The play on words was a late-middle-aged woman’s jest and defiance to the world, but Elvis had been a Speed King in every worst connotation of the phrase. And that had not been a joke but a tragedy.

Why couldn’t he get a long-dead man out of his mind? Matt wondered. Maybe it wasn’t a dead man he was trying to exorcize.

“Did you bring gloves?” he asked Temple. “It gets icy at seventy miles an hour without heating.”

She pulled something that resembled wooly udders from her dressy white leather jacket pockets. “Courtesy of a Minnesota girlhood. Will they do?”

“Are you sure you can spare the time?”

“Stop being such a Guilty Gus!” Temple stomped a toy boot heel on the shed’s concrete floor. “I’ve been dying to travel on this thing. Let’s do it.”

“You had a ride once before.”

“But we didn’t go anywhere. For a purpose. Not a whole round trip.”

She was like a kid; her promised outing had to be the whole enchilada. Matt smiled, unlocked the shed, and rolled the massive machine into the clear winter sunlight. The flat, bright light ignited the Hesketh Vampire’s fluid silver lines, reminding him of the slanted, silver letters he scrawled on photographs nowadays.

“Awesome.” Temple waited for him to mount the cycle, then struggled to hop on behind him. The seat had been “cut down” for Electra, but Temple was a lot shorter than their landlady.

He felt her hands curl into the side seams of his jacket,donned his own, unlabeled helmet, revved up the lion’s-roar motor, and kicked off. They slid into smooth, chill motion.

Electra, being a solitary rider, had never invested in helmets with walkie-talkies built in. Silence was enforced. The bumpy side streets evened into the entry ramp to Highway 95; soon they were sweeping past the clogged lanes of the city onto the asphalt that slashed through the Nevada desert.

He couldn’t know if Temple was nervous, or cold, or having a ball.

He knew the machine enough to enjoy the ride now, though. And he was actually reluctant when they pulled onto the smaller access road to rattle up the deliberately rutted dirt road to Three O’Clock Louie’s.

Various vehicles were scattered like dice around the rough-hewn restaurant building: ersatz Wild West on the shores of a lake the brilliant color of a London blue topaz. He’d looked at those stones when buying a Christmas present for Temple, deciding on the black opal cat necklace instead. Opals and black cats had lived up to their unlucky reputation that time, Matt thought grimly; his gift came too late, after Temple’s Christmas reconciliation with Max Kinsella.

He felt the idling bike lighten as she jumped off, then he shut off the motor, kicked down the stand, and let it tilt into silence and stillness.

“Gosh. I’m still vibrating!” Temple shook her gloved hands. “I’ve never had my teeth chatter from motion before, not cold.”

“You didn’t like it.”

“I loved it. Like being in a blender. Makes me want to eat a hamburger with onions on it and a brown beer.” “A brown beer?”

“Yeah, you know. That manly stuff that comes in long-necked bottles. Let’s hustle inside.”

Matt shrugged and followed her in.

Two steps outside the door they picked up a big black cat with a gray muzzle.

“Hi, Three O’Clock!” Temple turned to Matt. “The critter the place is named after. Isn’t that a scream? A name like Louie’s and he looks like his grandfather!”

Three O’Clock humped his back, whether in anger or as the prelude to a leg-rubbing it was hard to tell.

“I don’t know if he’s allowed in,” Temple said, hesitating in the open wooden screen door.

“Of course he’s allowed in.” An elderly man for whom the phrase “old coot” had been invented, down to the handlebar mustache, leaned out to hold the door open for man, woman, and cat. “Come on, Miss Temple Barr. We owe you lunch on the house.”

“I can’t think what for. We wanted to add to the restaurant’s customer base.”

“And this fellow is—?”

“Matt Devine, one of Electra’s most valued tenants.” “After yourself,” the guy said with a bow.

“This is Wild Blue Pike, one of the restaurant owners.”

Matt, gloveless again, shook a gnarled hand that gave no quarter.

“Cold hands, warm heart,” Wild Blue commented, shaking his fingers gingerly.

“Sorry. We motorcyled out. I guess my fingers are too cold to know their own strength.”

“No problem. I like a hearty shake, and a hearty lunch. You ready for a Louieburger, Miss Temple?”

“A Louieburger! What’s that?”

“Sourdough bun, almost a pound of prime lean beef with jalapeno cheese, Worcestershire sauce, and cayenne-peppered onion rings.”

“Wow. Lead us to it.”

The tables were wood with inset tiles, the chairs heavy to match, and sported woven-rush seats and backs.

Wild Blue led them to a corner near a roaring mesquite-wood fireplace.

“This is neat,” Temple said as she sat in the chair Wild Blue held out for her, and then pushed way under the table, as if for a child. “I can’t believe I saw this place in the making, a sawdust palace.”

“All good things gotta start with a pile of elbow grease,” Wild Blue said, slapping plastic encased menus before them.

“Forget the menu. It’s a Louieburger for me.” “Me, too,” Matt said.

“All the trimmings?”

“The full Louie,” Temple responded. “And the brownest beer you have.”

Wild Blue frowned. “You like dark ale?”

“No, but I’m suited up and ready to ride.”

After Wild Blue left, Matt regarded her. “You’re in a feisty mood.”

“I’m probably in the same state you are: my brain is weary and my spirit is wilted. Desperate times take desperate measures. Bad-for-you food is the answer!”

“I never thought of advising that over the radio. These guys should buy a spot on the Midnight Hour.”

“Tell ‘em.”

“That’s not my job.”

“It’s your show.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s his.”

“His? Ohhh, your guest celebrity.”

“I think he’s made his last appearance.”

“Really? Why?”

“We had a real go-round the night before last. I pushed him on all the issues. I feel bad about that.” “You were too hard on him?”

Matt shrugged out of his jacket. The fire was hot. “No. I feel sad about it, that’s all. We … he reached a kind of closure. I think he’s … gone for good this time.”

“Really?”

“You keep saying ‘really,’ in that noncommittal tone. Like everything you say has a double meaning.”

“It could,” she said seriously, drawing back while Wild Blue plopped a condensation-dewed bottle of dark beer before each of them.

“Should have asked for a glass.”

“Easy riders don’t ask for glasses.”

“Sorry.” She sipped, then sighed. “I’ve been feeling kinda blue too. One of the neatest Elvis impersonatorsoops, we say ‘tribute performers’ nowadays—died yesterday. He was really, really good. Might even have passed as the real thing, if you were inclined to think that way. Had a great chance of winning the competition. I did it again: found the body, thanks to Midnight Louie.”

Matt only noticed then that Three O’Clock had settled on the brick skirt of the fireplace and was watching them through slitted eyes.

Despite the half-full dining room, he felt that here even the cats had ears, and lowered his voice. “That’s the second guy to die at the Kingdome.”

“Don’t I know it. The first wasn’t a real tribute performer, just some petty crook in a cheapo costume. Not a truly cheap costume, but not up to what Elvis had ever worn. That guy was drowned, as far as the police are saying. Lyle was killed onstage, strangled with a white silk scarf.”

“Aren’t women usually killed by strangling?”

“True. Maybe because they’re easier to overwhelm from behind. That’s what bothers me about this murder. Lyle wasn’t quite as big as Oversized Elvis, but he was no bantamweight. It would take a lot of force to bring him down with one silk scarf.”

“Bizarre. And this happened—?”

“Yesterday.”

“The night Elvis didn’t call. The night after our big on-air showdown. I hope I didn’t drive the guy away to do something foolish. I assume you haven’t been following my nightly channeling sessions.”

“Not recently.”

“I could leave a set of tapes at your door. You think—?”

“I think what you think: something awfully close to Elvis has been going on here. After all those jokes about Elvis playing one of his own impersonators. I must say that Lyle was an impressive Elvis impersonator. He looked closer to fifty than to sixty-four, but plastic surgery nowadays can make even a Savannah Ashleigh look fifteen to twenty years younger. Elvis had already had a facelift when he died, although his associates said he really hadn’t needed it. Poor guy, age and prescription abuse were catching up with him and he was trying to stem the tide—he really was a great-looking man, almost to the end. It must have hurt to see that sliding away.”

Matt nodded. “You could come to take it for granted.”

“Oh?”

He found Temple regarding him with interest and realized that he had never before spoken as if his own good looks were a given. Maybe the midnight groupies had converted him. Maybe he was making as much progress in self-acceptance as the call-in Elvis had been.

“What can you do about this man’s death?” Matt asked. “You’re not really involved. You should stay away from that Kingdome place. And what was Louie doing there?”

“I don’t know. He tends to tail me, excuse the expression.”

Matt glanced at Three O’Clock, his forefeet tucked under him like a Chinese mandarin’s hands slid into his sleeves. The posture made the venerable cat into a feline sage.

“These cats have a way of looking like they know as much—or more than we do. I don’t know if I could live with that. I like dogs; at least they look a lot more anxious and dependent.”

“Can’t take an equal animal, huh? I love the way Louie seems to get one step ahead of me sometimes. I know I’m reading things into simple feline behavior, but it’s fun to pretend.”

“Finding corpses should not be fun, Temple,” Matt lectured. “What about what got you to the Kingdome? Anything new on the Elvis apparition at the Crystal Phoenix?”

“Not a word.” She took a disgruntled swig of beer. “But I feel responsible for Quincey, especially now that her Priscilla wedding gown has been trashed.”

“You should get out of the picture. You and Louie should get back to the Phoenix and to harassing goldfish and the ghost of Jersey Joe Jackson. I’d feel a lot better if you did.”

“So you think your gorgeous, intelligent, pleading brown eyes are gonna cut it with a cat person?”

Matt shook his head. “Nope. I know your weakness for the aloof and mysterious feline and that, against that competition, I ain’t nothing but a hound dog, cryin’ all the time. It’s just that advice is my business nowadays. I may have exorcized my Elvis forever. Time you exorcized yours.”

“Don’t be cruel,” she answered with a mock pout. “We could go on forever in Elvis-ese.”

“There is an Elvis for every occasion.”

“Even murder, apparently. I mean it, Temple. I’ve only had to deal with Elvis long-distance. You’ve gotten much too up close and personal. Time to pull back.”

She nodded, serious. “You’re right. I don’t even have • a link to the crimes against persons unit this time. Molina could be on the moon for all I’m hearing from or about her.”

“You miss her?”

“Lord, no! It’s nice to be an innocent, anonymous witness for a change, with the detective on the case just shaking his head at my unsuitability as witness or suspect. I could get used to playing Susie Citizen again.”

“Take my advice, and try it.““Got a Lot 0’ Livin’ to Do,” Temple agreed.

“I hope so. It Wouldn’t Be the Same Without You.” They both had been studying way too many Elvis books.

Chapter 52

That’s Not All Right (Mama)

(Elvis’s breakthrough song, recorded during his first session at Memphis’s Sun Records, July 5, 1954)

Temple returned to the Kingdome aflame with righteous resignation.

Matt had convinced her: she was out of the Elvis business.

Apparently no one else was, because acts were lounging about the vast stage on which Lyle Purvis had died so recently, rehearsing for the competition tomorrow night.

In fact, Purvis’s death had thrown expectations into turmoil. It seemed that a whole lotta shaking was going on now that the King of Kings was out of the picture. A lot of the other candidates had a decent chance.

Could the Elvis murders be the ultimate answer to performance anxiety? Temple also noticed that the Memphis Mafia numbers seemed to have tripled. Men in black suits were everywhere, watching rehearsals like competing Hollywood agents, and flocking in the hotel’s vast lobby.

Temple even expected to see them lurking like Cold War spies behind slot machines, jotting down notes and talking into shoe-cell-phones.

The Kingdome’s general air of high intrigue may have been why she wasn’t surprised to hear piercing screams issuing from the backstage dressing rooms again.

She joined the stampede to get there, a force divided almost equally between the sublime (Elvis tribute performers mostly in jumpsuits) and the ridiculous (the dudes in black mohair suits).

For once a conservative mode of dress looked far more self-dramatizing than wall-to-wall jeweled jumpsuits.

Alas, the shrieker was the usual suspect.

Quincey, this time wearing civvies (hip-slung black vinyl pants and a skimpy shrink-top in neon leopard-print), sobbed and thrashed like a punk banshee.

This time, the person harassing the much-tried Priscilla performer was … her mother.

“I don’t care how much faster the world will end if you leave the show. You’re leaving it.” Merle Conrad finished her declaration by folding her arms over her low-profile chest. Her daughter’s high-profile edition, emphasized by skin-tight Spandex, heaved with disappointment.

“This’ll ruin my life!”

“Maybe,” Merle said, faintly but firmly unshakable. “At least you’ll be alive to have a ruined life. This is it. You’re out of the pageant. Or contest. Or race. Or whatever it is.” Her darting dishwater-hazel eyes fastened on Temple. “It’s time, isn’t it, to take Quincey out of this terrible place where people are dying?”

“The Elvises are dying,” Quincey wailed. “There’s only one Priscilla, and all I’ve gotten is spooked a little.” “A little spooking is too much.” Merle grabbed her daughter’s skinny arm. “I’ll get the hotel to stand behind me, if I have to. Enough is enough. Two men are dead. You have no business being here.”

“She’s right,” Temple told the girl, whose mascara-blurred eyes were desperately panning the hallway outside for supporters. “If Elvi are dying, it’s not safe for the one Priscilla among them.”

“But they’re counting on me!”

Somehow, Merle had dragged her daughter to the doorway. “They can count on some other girl.”

“The Crawf is counting on me!” Quincey clawed at the doorjamb, but her long fingernails snapped under the pressure. “My manicure—!”

A man in black stepped forward. “Need some help, ma’am? We’d like your daughter out of the line of fire, too.”

“Fire?” Merle stiffened. “There’s been shooting too?”

“Just an expression, ma’am. Come on, miss. Your mother’s right. This is no place for a teenager.”

“Elvis was my age when he started his career!” Quincey was kicking as well as screaming now, and the man in black’s mohair shins were bearing the brunt of it. “You don’t know what you’re stopping here! I’ll sue! I’ll get my probation officer to go to the highest court in the land. I’ll—”

The words, “probation officer” had the opposite than desired effect. Men in black tightened their lips, and their grips. They hustled Miss Quincey down the hall to instant obscurity, and therefore safety, her mother taking up the rear.

“Probation officer,” Temple mumbled, awestruck. All she had was one unimpressed homicide lieutenant, and it had taken her until age thirty to attract official attention.

That Quincey was a pistol.

But she was gone, and the dressing room emptied of spectators with the expulsion of Quincey and her mother, no doubt bound somewhere well east of Eden.

Temple, left alone, stared a little sadly at the impressive rows of discount store hair, eyes, teeth, and nail products laid out like leaderless soldiers whose general had been captured. Saddest of all was the gaudy tube of Daddy Longlegs’s Centipede Sweetie mascara, and the spidery array of false eyelashes entombed in their clear plastic packaging coffins like Elvis jumpsuits in the Medication Garden.

Enter the cause of it all, the snake, hissing, stage left. “Psst! T. B.”

How could she have forgotten? The last Elvis Exploiter, foiled at first and always. Her eyes met his in the mirror.

They were alone.

Crawford—somehow the title of Elvis’s King Creole opening number, “Crawfish,” came inexorably to mind—crept into the deserted dressing room.

“Glad to see you haven’t gone ballistic, T. B.”

“I will if you continue to refer to me as an infectious disease.”

He ankled over to stand beside her in the mirror. “Why, Temple honey, I didn’t know you cared.” She elbowed him in the ribs.

“I’m done,” he said, doubling over.

“Come on. I didn’t hit you that hard.”

“It’s not that.” He looked up from almost black eyes, large and accusing. “It’s my emcee gig here tomorrow. I need my Priscilla.”

“Maybe you can talk Merle into doing it.”

“Merle? She’s all wrong for the role.”

“Oh, come on! Anyone can impersonate a Priscilla Barbie Bride. You could do it now that you’ve shaved off your stupid mustache.”

“I’m hosting the competition, much as I care anymore.” Without taking his arm from his midsection, he collapsed onto a dressing table chair. “You’re right. None of it matters. The King is dead. My career is dead. Quincey will have to go to reform school; I won’t have the dough to bail her out.”

“Crawford! Since when were you going to lift a finger for Quincey anyway? You’re always getting her into some gig no teenage girl should do. I’m glad her mother has finally shown some backbone and jerked Quin from the competition. How bad does it have to get before you start thinking of someone besides yourself?”

“About as bad as this.” He looked up, his face stricken. Crawford Buchanan stricken looked like a Chihuahua with Montezuma’s revenge. Small and obnoxious and big-eyed pathetic. “I really idolized the King. Wouldn’t admit it to just anyone, but I did. I was thrilled to emcee this competition. I don’t mind the impersonators. Maybe all together they only capture a tenth of what he had, but it’s a tenth more than we’d know about today without them. Even lightning needs lightning rods, huh?”

“Maybe lightning bugs,” she suggested pointedly. “I’m not sure I can go on,” he sniveled.

Yes, Crawford Buchanan sniveled as well as sneered and leered. He belonged in a bad melodrama, as if there were any good ones.

“You’ll live,” she said shortly, moving toward the dressing room door.

“No, I don’t mean I can’t go ‘on’ on. I mean I don’t know if I can go on stage tomorrow night. For the competition. It’s not only too soon after Elvis’s death”—Temple rolled her eyes and found herself exchanging exasperated glances with a big fat spider on the ceiling; how appropriate; even the insect world had no use for C. B—“but it’s dangerous out there. Someone could kill me by mistake.”

“Don’t worry about it. I can’t ever see it happening that someone would kill you by mistake.”

“What if the Elvis-killer is another impersonator, mad to win? Or a deranged fan afraid a rediscovered King wouldn’t live up to his old image? It could be anybody.” “That’s absolutely right.” Temple folded her arms over her chest, which even in his extremity of emotion was attracting too much notice from Crawford Buchanan. “Okay. I can provide you with bodyguards, but that’s all.”

“I need a Priscilla to share the stage. It’s a great part, T. B. —Temple.”

“Oh, sure. Stand around in the background like an albino Christmas tree and then sling some humongous, heavy belt to the guy who wins, all the time wearing shredding organza and unraveling seed pearls. And maybe while I’m at it, a deranged fan/killer/maniac can rush out and strangle me with a guitar string. Bodyguards.”

“Who can you get for that?”

“Experts. That’s all you need to know.”

“There are enough guys running around here in those funeral-director suits already. They haven’t been able to stop a thing.”

“Those aren’t my bodyguards.”

“Who are they then?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Then how do I know if they exist and are doing their jobs?”

“You’ll just have to take my word for it.”

He frowned and squinted, trying to squeeze out a fresh glaze of liquid to his eyes. Apparently he was done crying for the King. He only managed to look constipated, which was also appropriate.

Temple turned to leave.

“Please! I need a Priscilla tomorrow night.”

“Rent a department store mannequin, then, and drape what’s left of the wedding gown on it; I’m sure no one in the audience will notice. Now.” She pointed a forefinger. “Out.”

He slunk away like a whipped weimaraner.

Temple sat on the vacated chair, feeling virtuous about heeding Matt’s advice to take the sane and stable road of noninvolvement.

He had been right. How satisfying it was to turn C. B.

down cold, although it might have been fun to masquerade as Priscilla. If the dress hadn’t been trashed, she might have tried it, but no dress, no Priscilla, and one less Presley persona to worry about.

She glanced again at the many accoutrements necessary for recreating a late sixties woman, including almost-white lipstick. Ick! How had they brainwashed women into these universal “looks” back then? Temple liked to skim a fashion magazine occasionally, and occasionally went after a way-out nail color or a certain article of clothing, but she was mostly immune to the color palette of the season or the next weird Hollywood hair thing.

The soft scrape of a shoe on cement made her look up.

A man in black’s silhouette filled the doorway. As she watched, puzzled, he stepped into the room, drawing the door closed behind him.

Maybe the impenetrable sunglass lenses spooked her. They were as shiny and opaque as the bug-eyes on those shrimpy albino aliens who were the official poster beings of the UFO set.

Whatever, the visitor was a tall, impassive guy, born to be typecast as either a mob enforcer or an IRS agent. Temple theorized that they moonlighted as each other a lot more often than people realized.

Whatever his affiliation, government, crime, or out of this world, his presence radiated authority and force, and had Temple absolutely cornered.

She stood and backed up, nervously, feeling her throat tingle and her stomach tighten.

“Why do I get the impression,” she asked, “that you’re not hotel security?”

He pulled off the sunglasses by one ear bow. “Good instincts?” He smiled slightly, but she had already recognized him.

“You’re … Bucek. Matt’s Father Frank.” She didn’t relax one bit. “You’re FBI.”

“Thanks for saving me digging out my ID. Now you can do me another favor.”

“Favor?”

He nodded, pulled out the chair she had abandoned, turning it toward her.

“I’ ll stand.” Temple fanned her fingertips on the countertop for balance. Her knees were still knocking slightly from the adrenaline rush of finding herself alone with a strange—and strange looking—man.

Bucek shrugged and sat himself, holding his shades loosely in the hand he balanced on one knee.

“I heard you tell Buchanan that you wouldn’t step in as Priscilla Presley in tomorrow’s Elvis competition.”

“That’s right. Two men are dead, and the girl who played Priscilla has endured harassment and even personal attack. I have no business taking such risks because ‘the show must go on.’ I’m just an innocent bystander.”

“Excellent decision. I’m sure Matt Devine would be very happy to hear that.”

“How nice for him, but I came to this conclusion all by myself. So you don’t have to worry about my ‘meddling’ in this case. I’m outa here.”

He smiled again, to himself.

“I am outa here, aren’t I? You aren’t going to arrest me, or anything sinister? I didn’t do it, honest.”

“No, I’m not going to detain you at all, but there is that favor …”

“I’m leaving, this very instant. I’ll be out of your hair forever.” Temple pushed herself away from the support of the countertop in demonstration of her imminent departure.

Bucek shook his head. “I’m afraid we’re both about to disappoint Matt. I want you to stay.”

“Here? Now?”

“I want you to stay for whatever time it takes to enact Priscilla Presley tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to get yourself another bride of Elvis. I’m absolutely determined to keep out of it.”

“Again, an admirable decision, and pretty atypical, from what I’ve heard from Lieutenant Molina, but you’re here. You know the setting, the actors, the costume. We don’t have enough time to prep a female agent and get her into place this fast. I don’t like it, either, but you’ll have the agency’s full protection.”

“Hah! That didn’t help Lyle Purvis much.”

Bucek sat forward, alert. “You knew he was a target?” “It was pretty obvious after I found him dead.” “You knew we were here?”

“The Memphis Mafia security crew make a great cover for G-men, but there were a few dozen too many of you running around.”

Bucek’s smooth features suddenly roughened with a new insight. “And you had the fabulous, flying Fontana brothers to point out dramatis personae to you.”

“They did mention the Mob, and the feds. And they knew that the first victim, Clint Westwood, was a minor crime figure. Where do the bozos get these names?”

Bucek chuckled. “In their own self-dramatizing imaginations. Even the bad guys want to see themselves as good guys.”

“Maybe especially.”

He nodded slowly and puckered his lips. “Career criminals are just that: upwardly mobile working stiffs trying to climb the ladder. Whoever hit Lyle will expect a promotion.”

“And it’s the same person who harassed Quincey. Why?”

Bucek tilted back on the wooden chair’s fragile legs, making Temple even more nervous. She hadn’t relaxed for a second since he’d entered the room, though she was finding the information he was sharing fascinating. Why, he was almost talking to her like a colleague … or a patsy.

“You ever read any G. K. Chesteron?” he asked.

Temple shook her head. “Not an Elvis impersonator, I take it.”

“British writer. Created the Father Brown mysteries in the nineteen-teens and -twenties. Ever read those?” “Not that I can remember.”

“Guess they’re considered old-fashioned these days. Chesterton was a writer with a theological bent. He used Father Brown as a vehicle for his ideas about God and good and evil. Father Brown was this utterly overlookable little man who just happened to understand the human soul in all its extremes.”

Temple nodded politely, as she did at all impromptu lectures, but she was wondering when Frank Bucek would get to the point. She could see him holding forth before a class of seminarians. No wonder so many had left the priesthood.

“Anyway,” Bucek said, sensing her restlessness, “Father Brown once asked Flambeau the thief ‘Where do you hide a leaf?’ `In a forest,’ Flambeau answered. The case involved an officer who died on a battlefield.”

“And you think the killer here is hidden among the Elvis impersonators. Makes sense.”

Bucek’s smile grew patronizing without his realizing it.

Temple felt anger flare, as it did whenever she detected men patronizing her, which they did more than they realized, in no small part because of her petite appearance.

Yet her anger suddenly illuminated the other side of the same equation.

“And someone else was masquerading as an Elvis impersonator! That’s redundant, ‘masquerading as an Elvis impersonator.’ Wasn’t there a rumor after Elvis’s death that he went underground with the witness protection program because his antidrug stance angered the Mob?”

“That’s farfetched, even for conspiracy buffs. Elvis had nothing to do with illegal drugs, except for some LSD he tried once, and a little pot, also a brief experiment. He loved playing power roles, though; that’s why the Memphis Mafia. But it was all play. Nothing to take seriously.”

“Except as a cover at the Kingdome.”

Bucek nodded. “Unfortunately, that works both ways. We have a few real players running around here in shades and suits, just enough to confuse the issue.”

“So. How long had Lyle Purvis been in the witness protection program, if he wasn’t really Elvis?”

“He wasn’t, but he was a lifelong Elvis fan. We went along with the cover because it was the perfect identitywithin-an-identity for him. It’s hard for these guys to drop out of their previous lives, move, get new identities, worry about jobs, all that. Lyle was a loner, divorced, no children. He decided to indulge his secret passion for all things Elvis. It embarrassed him, but no one knew about it. He already had the perfect hobby to hide in, even made pretty good money at it. And the notion that surfaced now and again that he was really Elvis, well … Elvis is a larger-than-life figure. He makes a pretty good screen, just obvious enough that everybody looks right past the impersonator to Elvis. But somehow the players had figured out where he was. We don’t take kindly to breaches of the witness protection program.”

“Poor Lyle.” Then Temple snapped herself out of the lonely life and pseudonymous death of a former crook. She didn’t even want to know what he had done, and she was sure Bucek wouldn’t tell her anyway. “But poor Lyle is dead. And what about Clint Westwood? He wasn’t in the witness protection program?”

Bucek’s head shook. “Remember the question about hiding the leaf?”

“You were hiding a witness among the Elvises, and the Mob was sending in their own Elvis impersonator to find and kill your witness. But more than that, the Mob was hiding its real target behind a flurry of other incidents. The attacks on Priscilla, the bizarre killing in the Medication Garden, with a snake in tow no less. You’retelling me they’d kill other people to hide the fact that they had hit Lyle? That’s vicious.”

“That’s why they’re the Mob. They don’t know we’re onto them, and we don’t want them to know that until we can build a case not only against the hit man, but against the family that ordered it. So they don’t know that there’s any reason to stop their original plan.”

“Another killing. Turn the whole thing into a three-ring circus: Clint, Lyle, and … oh, no!”

“You’ll have all the protection I can get.”

“It didn’t help Lyle, as I so presciently mentioned before.”

“We didn’t know Lyle was the target. We knew something was up when Westwood turned up dead, and you know that there’s an ongoing mob scam in this town tracing back to the Goliath and Crystal Phoenix hotel casino deaths tied to the late Cliff Effinger, our friend Matt’s noxious stepfather. If we don’t blow our cover now, we may be able to net years’ worth of illegal activities, perhaps on an international scale. So we need to catch the killer in the act. We think he has no reason to stop his plan now.”

“I have no evidence to believe you guys could stop a flea from biting my cat, much less a hit man from killing me.”

Bucek’s smile was apologetic. “You have reinforcements, don’t forget.”

“Reinforcements.”

“Full Spectrum Elvis. The only reason they didn’t keep Quincey’s dress from getting trashed was that they had to be onstage to run through their number. We expect the last murder to occur during the show. We’ll all be onstage, and you can have it the way you set it up for Quincey: Priscilla with her personal bodyguard around her at all times. The Fontana brothers are as apt to spot the perp as we would be. Just tell them you’re the target of a hitman, and they’ll be better than a pack of watchdogs. Plus, we’ll be there.”

“I don’t know. I’ve been attacked on stage before, but I’ve never gone on knowing someone was going to attack me. Talk about stage fright!” Temple shivered and looked around the dressing room. All the laid out cosmetics reminded her of a mortuary preparation room. Tomorrow night Poor Priscilla could go from wedding to grave.

“Besides,” Temple took a last stab at eluding the role of sacrificial lamb, “poor Priscilla doesn’t have a thing to wear anymore.”

Bucek stood. “Are you telling me there isn’t a fairy godmother in this town who can get you a gown by tomorrow evening?”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“You’ll be as safe as in your own living room. We’re fully on to this scheme now. I wouldn’t ask you if I weren’t sure we could protect you.”

Temple read absolute conviction in his eyes, but no one could promise immortality. She nodded. She had a horrible feeling Quincey would try to resume her role if Temple didn’t take it, and Temple had promised Merle to look out for Quincey.

She just hadn’t expected to do it in the persona of Priscilla Presley.

Chapter 53

Catchin’ on Fast

(From 1964’s Kissin’ Cousins)

Temple poked her head in the various dressing rooms, hunting Full Spectrum Elvis and casting her eye over likely suspects: Velvet Elvis, for instance, looking like the Melancholy Dane. She was big enough to manhandle an unwary Elvis, and big enough to be a transsexual. Now that was a thought. Maybe she was, somebody had found out, and she’d been blackmailed into murder to avoid being disqualified from the competition, though Temple didn’t quite see why or how transsexuals would be barred.

Mike and Jerry were still best buddies despite the looming pressure of competition, exchanging grooming essentials, and looking nervous. Wasn’t Jerry from New Jersey, a storied if stereotypical Mob bastion? Sometimes stereotypes, like fairy tales, can come true.

Oh, and there was Kenny, eager-beaver Kenny, so quick on the scene of the jumpsuit murder.

Not to mention a whole raft of other Elvis impersonators.

Full Spectrum Elvis was not in the below-stage area, so Temple was forced to clomp up the backstage stairs to hunt them down.

She found them massed in the wings at stage right, watching a sincere but uninspired Elvis perform the difficult American Trilogy medley of “Dixie,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “All My Trials.”

“Speaking of ‘trials . ” Motorcycle jerked his head at the guy onstage as soon as she spotted them. “We gotta run through our act after that. Anything going on downstairs? We heard, ah, whining.”

“You heard right. Quincey had another crisis.” Elvi gathered around, glittering.

“How so?” Rhinestone Lapels wanted to know.

“The Priscilla wedding gown was slashed to smithereens, well, rags, anyway. Quin’s mother had heard about the murdered impersonator and took the attack on the dress as a last straw. She was ready to jerk Quincey from the show.”

“Aw,” came the chorus. The brothers Fontana, even in unrecognizable guise, at least had the grace to sound disappointed.

“But Quincey talked her out of it,” Temple added quickly. “And you have someone more vital to guard now.”

“How so?” asked Oversized.

“Your endearing emcee, Crawford Buchanan, is convinced the late Elvis impersonator was really the late Elvis, that someone killed Lyle Purvis because of it, and that now that someone will kill him, Crawford, because he too ‘knows’ it.”

A silence greeted this theory, during which they could all hear a really dreadful version of “Suspicious Minds” filling the stage.

“You want us to watchdog the Crawf?”

Temple laughed at their hound-dog-long Elvis faces. “Guess you heard Quin discussing her adored stepdaddy. Yeah, watch to make sure he doesn’t fall apart on stage and ruin the show for all the genuine impersonators who are not Elvis, really.”

“Purvis.” Cane-and-Cape lifted the former, and tossed back the latter. “Not such a farfetched idea. The guy had something.”

“Maybe, but do you think someone would kill to win a contest, or to keep Elvis dead?”

“In this crowd,” Fifties said, surveying his clones backstage, “anything is possible, including the impossible.”

“Do not worry,” Oversized assured her. “We will watch the little weasel like hawks.”

“Are you going to stay now to watch our act rehearse?” Karate asked eagerly.

“I can’t. I promised a friend I’d stay out of the field of fire,” she answered mendaciously.

Mendaciously was one of those long, not-readilyknown words that made lies sound like something naughty but noble. The fewer people who knew who the real fake Priscilla was tomorrow night, the better. That was where she disagreed with FBI-man Bucek.

“Meanwhile, once you get off, do you think you can dig up a new bridal outfit for Quincey?”

“We got these swell costumes in no time flat, didn’t we?” Rhinestone Elvis waggled his glittering lapels. “I want that cut down to my size after this is over,” Temple said, narrowing her eyes.

“I don’t know, Miss Temple.” Oversized twinkled his Elvis-blue eyes. “We might be too fond of our personas to pass them on.”

“Just pass on the name of your tailor, which I already know. But I’ll see you in all your onstage glory tomorrow night. I’m sure I won’t be able to keep Electra from dragging me to the actual show. What exactly is your act?”

“We do a medley of song titles.” Fifties struck a guitar-twanging pose.

“One Elvis, one title,” said Karate, leaping into a deadly stance.

“Oh, really.”

Temple couldn’t picture it, but perhaps originality counted. Then again, she thought—waving good-bye to the guys and hustling offstage and through the empty house, gazing at Elvis to the umpteenth power—maybe when it came to Elvis impersonation, originality did not count.

Chapter 54

Double Trouble

(The title song from Elvis’s 1967 film)

Temple sat staring at the morning paper.

An illo on the top front above the masthead showed a pseudo-Elvis in full writhe. “Night of 100 Elvises,”

read the teaser head.

The Kingdome should be happy for this plug for its imminent six-hour opening extravaganza of Elvis, Elvis, Elvis.

But the local highlight of the day wasn’t what had riveted Temple’s eyes to 9.3-point Roman type.

What had done that was the one-column crime story below the front-page fold that announced “Elvis imitator iced.”

The headline was crude and would drive advocates of the term “impersonator,” and even “tribute performer” nuts.

But that wasn’t what had Temple staring like a zombie at the tiny type.

No, it was Lyle Purvis’s name, right there in blackand-white. She was sure the reporter had gotten it right. “Lyle Pervisse.” It was too odd to be a misspelling.

A rollerball pen drooped from her nerveless fingers.

She wasn’t sure she had done her task right, so tried again: The “le” from Lyle, and the “vis” from Pervisse equaled Elvis. That left the “Ly” from Lyle and the “e” from isse for “Ley. That mean the “Pers” from Pervisse, combined with the Ly and the e, added up to PresLey.

Oh, my.

Lyle Pervisse’s name was an anagram for Elvis Presley. Elvis (“lives”) Presley had loved anagrams. Of course, everyone who heard the name “Pervisse” thought of the more common, phonetic spelling, Purvis.

Could the unthinkable be? Had the Crawf been right? Had Lyle Pervisse really been Elvis? No.

He had been an Elvis fanatic. As a protected witness, he could take any name he chose. He chose an anagram of Elvis Presley. If anybody noticed, he was certified as an Elvis nut, not a rat fink on the run.

And he had to have been a rat fink on the run from the Mob to need the witness protection program. Simple.

Even a crook could have an Elvis obsession. Maybe especially a crook.

Temple looked up at her computer screen. She was in her second-bedroom-cum-office. One of dozens of Web pages on Elvis was frozen on the screen.

It described a seventeen-million-dollar armored-car heist in North Carolina. The crooks were caught, and their ill-gotten gains were seized and sold at auction. There were more than a thousand items, including fifteen vehicles from minivans to a BMW convertible. There were rows of tanning beds and big-screen TVs.

But the lone star of the auction was a velvet painting of Elvis.

The loot went to prove, said one bidder, that you can steal millions of dollars, but you still can’t buy taste. Still …

The item that attracted the most interest, that everyone wanted his or her picture taken with, that made it into the single photo used to illustrate this cornucopia of ill-gotten gain up for sale, was … the velvet painting of Elvis.

It went for $1600 to a pawnshop owner who intended to display it with a plaque describing where it came from.

Because that was the point. Elvis did one extraordinary thing with his life of fame and fortune and talent and lost opportunities: he never left his roots. He never stopped being a poor boy from Memphis. He never went Hollywood or St. Tropez, and never reinvented himself as a banner boy of Taste.

An Elvis is an Elvis is an Elvis, as the poet said about the singular and lovely rose.

He was a King even a crook could aspire to. And maybe more than one had.

Chapter 557

Scratch My Back (Then I’ll Scratch Yours)

(In 1966’s Paradise, Hawaiian Style, Elvis sang this seductive number with pussycat Marianna Hill)

I am still on self-assigned duty in the Kingdome.

It seems that guys in black suits do the security detail around here, so I figure I might as well stick around too until I see my little doll through her descent into Elvis-mania and back onto solid ground again.

Despite the overpopulation of Elvi, I have tumbled to some other suspicious overpopulations too. Like three times as many Memphis Mafia members as there should be. Given my unique position in undercover work, I am soon eavesdropping on everybody.

You would be amazed how dudes on both sides of the law are willing to unburden themselves of information that should be kept hush-hush in front of a least-likely suspect like myself. They should be ashamed! But their indiscretion is my information highway, so I do what I do best: creep around, look innocent as well asdeaf, blind, and dumb, and soak up the situation.

One thing going down that I decidedly do not like is the absence of Miss Quincey Conrad and the subsequent presence of my Miss Temple. When I see the Fontana brothers come in early flourishing a plastic clothing bag about eight feet long, I am pretty sure what Miss Temple is up to: an unauthorized Priscilla Presley impersonation. EPE (Elvis Presley Enterprises) will not like this, and I am even more against it.

I am well aware of the climactic role this Priscilla person is supposed to play in the ceremonies up top. And I am well aware that young Quincey was subjected to some sinister tricks that may culminate in something even more sinister … death.

Steps must be taken, and it will be hard to shepherd events onstage with 100 Elvis tribute performers milling about among two dozen Memphis Mafia wannabes from the highest and lowest ranks of both law enforcement and organized lawlessness.

I have a strong sense of competence as well as responsibility, but even I know that an operation of this scale is too big a job for the likes of me to make much of a difference.

Unassisted, that is.

So I amble down the hall—no one, and I mean no one thinks much of an ace mouse-snapper like me hanging out in basement dressing room areas—to my least favorite door.

Even from outside I can smell the fermenting fruit, not to mention bodily fluids.

I close my eyes and insert a forelimb beneath the crack under the door. I can only push a few shivs through, but these I wiggle around.

Primates are notoriously hard to teach, especially if they are of a higher order, but this primate is on the primitive side, and I soon bent it to my superior will. As soon as it hears the scrape of my shivs on the concrete floor inside the storeroom, I hear an answering scrape along the lock of its cage, which I have fixed to never quite close by sacrificing a luxuriant tuft of my own hair-shirt, thrust into the mechanism.

Because the dumb little ape is brown, and I am black, and the storeroom lighting is the usual monkey piss color they use in such places, the human who cares for the odious Chatter was not likely to see my modification of the lock.

So Chatter, using its obnoxious jointed fingers and rotten opposable thumbs, is soon free as a bird on helium. I hear the creature working to turn the doorknob and admit me.

Despite the fancy forelimb appendages, it is a good three minutes before the door is cracked and I eel in. “Shut it, quick!” I order.

“Why shut? Just open.”

“Because I want it shut! Took you long enough.” “The hair got caught under my nails.”

“Braggart!” Just because my nails are not broad enough to entrap much of anything … I hate one-up-apeship.

I pace, because I am getting worried. “Did you see your so-called master today?”

Chatter sits back on his obscenely hairless rear and rocks happily. “Oh, yes. We had kiwi and banana.” “How terrific. How is your master?”

“Busy. No time. Brings and is bye-bye.”

“I bet. Listen, I know you are not a dog, and that you do not have the brains of a cat. But do you think you can sniff, see, find your master in a place crowded with strange people and smells and sounds?”

Chatter lives up to his name and begins gibbering. He goes so far as to bite his nails.

“Idon’tknow. Idon’tknow. Been in dark so long. Scared, Louie. Chatter do tricks. Look up skirts. Can look up skirts.”

“There will be no skirts on this scene, except one, and it goes all the way to the ground, and then some. You willhave to forget the vulgar tricks you were taught and concentrate on one, very important thing.”

“Yes? What?”

The hairy little ape is agitated. Personally, I would not keep anything I was devoted to in the dark like this, no matter what I was up to.

“Now, now. Smooth that savage brow. Nothing to worry about. Uncle Louie is here. All you have to do is clear your mind of all confusion. Just go where I say and find your master.”

“No trick? Master like trick.”

“No trick. Just find your master. He, she, or it will like that trick plenty.”

Chatter hop-slides over to me and puts a big hairless mitt on my paw. His long fingers curl around it as if we were holding hands, had we hands. I control my aversion.

“Scared, Louie. Big place. Noise. People. Like … zoo. Like lab.”

“Lab? You were in an experimental lab?”

“Big lab. Small cage. Dark like this half the time.” Chatter frowns. I am beginning to find his almost-human expressions creepy. “Master take away.”

I shift my weight from forelimb to forelimb and do it again. “That is good. You owe master a big kiss for that one. That is all you have to do: find master. I will be there to protect you.” Too bad I cannot protect his master.

“Okay.” Chatter leaps up and down. “It is game. Fun. Find master. Louie say find master.”

“Louie say find master. But first we wait until there is a lot of thump-thumping on the stage upstairs. Then we go, quietly, up.”

“Game. Trick. Chatter love trick.”

Yeah. I was hoping that Chatter’s master would just love this trick to death.

Chapter 56

Who Are You (Who Am I)

(From 1968’s Speedway)

“Boys,” said Temple in her second-best Mae West voice, “you are the finest fairy godmothers a girl ever had.” “Watch it!” Karate Elvis glowered.

Her hand dropped its instinctive caress of the new wedding gown, a column of shining white fabric and iridescent beads that hung from the otherwise empty rod in Quincey’s dressing room. “How did Minnie make this up so fast?”

“Minnie made the first gown,” said Oversized. “She loves a challenge, and you and Quincey are the same petite size as Priscilla.”

Temple lifted a swath of empire skirt. “Priscilla picked this style herself, off a rack. So much had been decided for her. I think the simple act of buying something ready-made was a statement. After she left Elvis, she ran a boutique with a friend. Picking and choosing,she who had so much picked and chosen for her.”

“Elvis could be a little overbearing,” Tuxedo admitted, clearing his throat. “Especially with women.”

“Elvis could be a lot overcontrolling,” Temple said. “Just like his mother. To them, it was a sign of caring.”

“I haven’t seen Miss Quincey about today,” Motorcycle put in.

“She’s coming along later. I’ll help her get dressed. Now you guys, shoo! You’ve got wardrobes and makeup and lyrics and moves to tend to. I’ll help Quincey.”

They scattered, excited despite themselves. Elvis had a way of doing that to people.

Temple confronted herself in the mirror. It awaited her, the impersonation of a career that never was. She went to shut the door, then dragged an ice cream chair from the dressing table and tucked its upper rung under the doorknob.

“Give a girl a little privacy on her wedding night,” she whispered to the empty hall.

She went back to the mirror and began assembling her weapons: false eyelashes, false nails, white lipstick, black wig. She couldn’t totally say why she was doing this, except that she agreed with Velvet Elvis: someone owed it to Elvis, or to Lyle Pervisse, or even to whoever had so hated to stop the music, but had to do it anyway, despite himself.

There’s something about a show just about to go on. You can feel it in the air, all around.

You can sense it in your lonely dressing room, the thumps and stutters of preparations on the stage above, like a dead body being dragged out of a trunk and into the center spotlight.

The audience is sifting into their seats, chattering in the soft illumination of the house lights, deciding whether their location is good or bad, eyeing the other audience members’ position and clothes, glancing at the naked, empty stage, almost afraid of catching some lowly set technician doing something overt.