“Haven’t you ever felt like a total groadie nerd?” Quincey curled the end of a false tress around a forefinger. “Maybe. Once. For a few seconds. But I got over it.”
“Hmmm. Anyway, you came in here to make up, and that’s when you found him?”
“I came in here to check on my makeup bag.” She nodded at a quart-size quilted fuchsia zipper bag on the otherwise empty length of communal dressing table. “Sometimes those Elvis boys borrow my stuff, you know? Especially my Daddy Longleg’s Centipede Sweetie mascara.”
“They use mascara?”
“Oh, girl. He did. Why shouldn’t they?”
“No reason. I mean, men in theater use makeup: foundation, eyeliner, but mascara—?”
“Well, what’s a poor guy to do when his eyelashes fade?”
“But Elvis was dark-haired.”
“Only after a good dose of Lady Clairol. That’s why he had to mascara his lashes and dye his eyebrows. I’ve researched these things. That’s why Priscilla dyed her hair jet-black. Elvis wanted her that way too. Her real hair was, you know. Dishwater brown. Yuck.”
“What color is your hair?”
“I don’t know. Maybe brown or something, but not often. Well, you must know; you do your hair red.” “No, I don’t ‘do’ it. It grows in that way.”
“You mean you look like this naturally? Way cool. Some people are born lucky.”
“Not many. And none of them like their original hair, believe me. Why was Elvis hung up on dark hair?”
“He decided that dark-haired actors had better movie careers, that they came off better on the screen.”
“You have researched this.” Temple couldn’t help sounding impressed.
“Oh, yeah. I even had to go in and apply for a library card so I could take out all the books on Elvis. No way am I being paid enough to buy them. Did you know there were places that had all these books on people’s lives, with all the dirty parts left in? Free? Weird. And Elvis was one of the weirdest.”
“So I’ve heard tell.” Temple turned to regard the construction on the floor. “It’s the wig that fools you into thinking it’s a real body at first glance. Somebody worked overtime to fashion this makeshift Elvis. Any idea why?”
Quincey interlaced her dagger-tipped fingers. “Yeah. They all hate me. They want to get me. This was just another warning.”
Temple pulled out a wooden chair and sat on it. “1 know about that.”
“Is that why you’re here?” Quincey’s posture perked up. She looked like an overdressed puppet whose invisible strings had just been pulled taut.
“Yup. Your mother called me in.”
Quincey deflated into a scornful sixteen-year-old. “My mother.”
“She’s really concerned about you. Okay, that’s an old story and you’re tired of it. But after what I’ve seen here, I’m concerned about you too.”
Quincey slumped, lipsticked bottom lip swollen with rebellion. “You’re not my mother.”
“Darn right, I’m not. So I can walk right out on you, and this murdered scarecrow, and my conscience won’t bother me one little teeny bit.”
“Good!”
“Just what I think.”
“Then why aren’t you walking?”
“And leave the scene of a crime unguarded? You go ahead.”
“Right.” Quincey jumped up, shaking out her Priscilla tresses like a spoiled preschooler. “I know what I’m doing, I’m getting paid for it. I’m good at it. I’ll be all right.”
“Right.”
“Okay.” Quincey swept—and in a floor-length pink polyester dress with girlish ties at the back it’s hard to “sweep”—to the dressing room door.
“Not only that,” Temple added grudgingly. “You’ve even got the screams down real good.”
Quincey’s back stiffened. Then she turned. “You really think someone wants to kill me? I mean, Priscilla?” “I don’t know yet. Do you?”
Quincey shook her head, no small achievement with about twelve pounds of borrowed hair on her head. “Did you hear about the … tattoo?”
“I heard about a razor attack.”
“Oh, Mom loves to exaggerate! It was just four little slashes. Really, all the girls at school are so jealous. It’s so cool, and I didn’t even have to pay for it. And no one can blame me for getting it, like a real tattoo. ‘E’ as in Elvis. The girls at school are beginning to think even Elvis might be cool. So I didn’t tell them the really bad parts about his life.”
“I’m sure he appreciates your discretion, wherever he is.”
“He really, you know, liked girls my age. Or younger. Even when he was really old, like forty.”
“Really?” Despite her acceptably cool tone, Temple felt a stab of what could only be borrowed maternal outrage.
“That’s why I’m so perfect to play Priscilla. I’m just like her.” She moved to the mirror, stared at her false image. “I even look like her.”
Temple didn’t tell her that Priscilla in this form was an icon, just as Elvis in his many incarnations was always an icon. That these carefully created images could be assumed by anybody who cared enough to try reasonably hard. Archetypes. Sixties Priscilla the virgin-whore. Elvis … the what? Temple could tell by taking one look at Quincey’s Priscilla what the image conveyed. She didn’t know enough about Elvis to do other than guess. Rebel, maybe, like James Dean. But that had to have been fifties Elvis. What would explain seventies Elvis?
“How did you get this gig?” Temple asked. Merle had told her, but she wanted to hear Quincey’s version. Mother and daughter were each at an age, and a stage in their relationship, where the chances of anything about them jibing were nil.
Quincey sighed. “Crawf, who else?”
“ `Crawf?’ That’s what you call him?”
“Yeah. What’s it to you?”
“I call him ‘Awful Crawford’ myself.”
“ `Crawf’ sort of sounds like barfing.““Especially if you have a cat.”
“You have a cat?”
“As much as anyone ever does.”
“Crawf hates cats.”
“I’m not surprised. You can’t trust anyone who doesn’t like cats.”
Quincey’ s Egyptian eyes lowered to the gaudy faux body on the floor. “Did Elvis like cats, I wonder?” “Don’t you know, with all that reading?”
“No … he had a few dogs and horses, but I never heard of a cat.”
Temple nodded sagely. Sometimes the most important things about people never made it into the history books.
Chapter 10
The Hillbilly Cat Scat
(Elvis was called the Hillbilly Cat in tribute to his mingled country and rhythm and blues persona early in his career)
Did Elvis like cats? Does your daddy not dance and your mama not rock ‘n’ roll? I thought so.
I have made it over to the Kingdome hard on my little doll’s heels.
And my little doll’s heels are usually hard on her and anybody who gets in her way.
So I am discreetly eavesdropping from the hall when this discussion over the fallen, fake-dead Elvis takes place.
There are so many fake-live Elvi in the world, not to mention just in this hotel right now, that a dead Elvis, fake or not, has by now become a novelty.
Like all of my breed, I thrive on investigating novelty. That is why I cannot resist following Miss Temple to this emporium of all things Elvis, and my instincts prove true, given the shenanigans I am (over) hearing about. While a punctured jumpsuit hardly has the makings of a federal case, a punctured Priscilla Presley impersonator sniffs of nefarious deeds to come. My expert help is now at the service of one and all, whether they know it or not.
And I know a thing or two about the cool cats of the world. That is how I am aware that when Elvis Presley first burst onto the music scene, they did not know whether he was black or white or blues or country, so they called him the Hillbilly Cat. See, hillbilly music was all-white whining, and rhythm and blues were only wailed in black bars then, so combining the two sounds was something daring.