“Not exactly. He was a surviving twin. His brother was delivered dead about a half hour before he was born. Why do you ask?”
“I just wondered if anyone here did a twin act.”
“I suppose it’s possible.” Matt didn’t add that the ever-expanding boundaries of bad taste could encompass almost anything nowadays. “His twin was named Jesse Garon.”
“And Elvis was Elvis Aaron?”
“A lot of people in the South used rhyming names for twins, if not first names, then middle names.” Matt studied the mirror-magnified mob of Elvises. “Psychologists say that twinship bonds are formed in the womb. Surviving twins like Elvis never seem to recover from the loss of that exact double. They say twins touch in the fetal stage, even kiss.”
“Ooh. Creepy.”
“And suicide rates for surviving twins are much higher than normal.”
“So maybe not just drug abuse killed Elvis?”
“No one was willing to go on record that drugs did it. Heart failure was the ostensible reason, the diagnosis for all sudden deaths. It was also used for his mother, but later sources say her death at age forty-six was caused by cirrhosis of the liver.”
“Mother drank?”
“Discreetly, but most of his male relatives weren’t in the least discreet. Overdrinking and early death were family traits. Elvis was down on alcohol, forbid having it around, though he tried it out a few times in later years. His instincts were right about booze; his family obviously had a genetic predisposition for the disease, but no one then realized that that kind of thing is genetic, and that drugs are the same bad ticket to ride. Elvis was pretty astute, but he had an odd habit of deferring to people too much. He could have been predisposed to depression, partly because of the loss of his twin, which made him likelier to take drugs.”
Temple studied the industrious rows of Elvis clones. “Do you think any of these guys abuse drugs?” “That’d be taking imitation too far.”
“I’d think so, but you never know. Let’s check ‘em out.”
“This isn’t a grocery store,” he commented.
Insouciant, she grinned back at him while wading into the narrow, gym-bag cluttered passage between big guys in bulky suits spraying their hair and fluffing their sideburns with hair dryers.
“Media coming through,” Temple caroled, making them a head-turning attraction. “No cameras yet, don’t panic. Preliminary interviews while you primp.”
Matt remained bemused by the sheer wholesale scale of Elvis imitation as an avocation, and perhaps an art form, for all he knew. He was reserving judgment until he saw some of the acts.
Was any of these men his soft-spoken midnight caller? Some shouted back and forth, exchanging tips and valued accessories such as safety pins. Most were grimly confronting their other selves in the mirrors, touching up pale roots with dye-wands, struggling to balance unevenly glued-on sideburns.
A few wives or girlfriends acted as dressers. Everybody seemed to be frowning in concentration, or shouting for an essential something that was inexplicably missing. It reminded Matt of the fevered concentration in dressing rooms before the grade-school Christmas pageant.
“Anybody missing a jumpsuit?” Temple added her voice to the hubbub. It carried like a trumpet when she wanted it to, and she did now.
That shut them all up., Faces snapped from the mirrors to focus on her red hair. And to focus on Matt standing behind her, suddenly wishing he weren’t. He still wasn’t used to being in the spotlight.
“Seriously, folks.” Now that she had their attention, Temple pressed her advantage. “Who would mutilate an expensive costume like that? Any ideas? And whose suit was it?”
“You media,” one Elvis finally said, his voice nothing like the real Elvis’s. “Always looking for the bad news.”
Temple shrugged. “Maybe it was a publicity stunt.”
That got them going. A half dozen voices chimed in. No legitimate Elvis, was the consensus, would deface the King’s image in any form. And anyway, the impersonators all knew how much money went into the Suit. They’d have to be “lower than Red West” to trash one.
“So where is the ruined suit now?” Matt asked, nonplussed when all those blue-suede eyes focused on him. Apparently colored contact lenses were part of the costume.
“That’s a good question,” a significant other piped up. “Maybe it was salvageable.”
“Someone should ask hotel security,” another woman said.
“Maybe the police have it,” Temple suggested.
Their glaring eyes returned to her. Matt realized that Temple didn’t mind stirring things up one little bit, in fact, she reveled in it, smiling impishly as their voices turned on her as one.
“Why would the police have anything to do with it?” “Nobody got hurt.”
“It was just some Priscilla-hater fan, trying to throw a scare into Quincey to get her out of the show.”
Matt found himself with a need to know too. “Why would anyone want Quincey out of the show?” A pause. He had hit a nerve.
“A lot of us feel she doesn’t belong here,” began a portly Elvis who wore an outfit Matt recognized from photos: the American eagle jumpsuit created for the Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii satellite TV special in 1973.
“Why not?” Temple asked indignantly. Matt could tell she was in her defense-of-the-helpless-and-innocent mode, although Quincey Conrad was neither. “She was the only woman out of gadzillions he actually married.”
“Elvis was forced into that,” a tall, thin Elvis objected. “Her father and Colonel Parker put the pressure on.”
“And look at her now, turned everybody on the staff out like horses too old to pull their weight, snubbed the long-time fans, and turned Graceland into a tourist attraction. She even redecorated the place before it went public. Elvis’s Red Period was too tacky for her. Nobody understood that Elvis kept his roots and his tastes; he didn’t go Hollywood like Miss Priss. That woman was all bottom-line from the very beginning.”
“How ‘bottom-line’ could a fourteen-year-old be?”
Matt interjected, goaded into feeling some of Temple’s indignation. “When she left Elvis in seventy-two at age twenty-six, she didn’t even know how to write a check. All of her spending money had been parceled out, and stingily too, by Vernon.”
“Maybe there was reason to keep her on a short leash,” muttered an Elvis wearing the “claw” jumpsuit featuring Native American designs, dabbing some stuff Matt recognized as concealer under his black-lashed eyes.
“She wasn’t kept on one short enough,” another man put in with a bawdy laugh.
Matt found his blood pressure rising. He’d read enough about these people, bizarre as their lifestyle was, to feel he knew them somewhat. “Elvis never stopped seeing his rotating harem of women. Priscilla wasn’t unfaithful until Elvis stopped having sexual relations with her after Lisa Marie was born.”
“Elvis was the King,” announced a stocky man with a wig that resembled a nesting duck-billed platypus. “He didn’t live by the rules everybody else does. She didn’t understand him. She tried to domesticate him. He was born to be wild and free.”
“And screwed up,” Temple muttered so only Matt could hear her.
“The women who really cared about him,” said a quiet voice from a corner, where a man apparently had heard her comment, “they couldn’t stay. It wasn’t the infidelity so much as his downward slide with the drugs. They couldn’t stand to watch him sinking.”
Matt was struck by the voice. It wasn’t the one on the call-in phone, really, but closer to a genuine Southern accent than any of the Elvis impersonators’ natural voices so far. When his searching eyes found the speaker, he wasn’t surprised, given his conversation with Temple not long before. Something of Elvis lurked in the bone structure beneath the baby face.
This guy was not primping, just sitting jiggling hisdark-booted foot enough so that the forelock curlicued onto his forehead trembled like it was caught in a fan draft. Something about his relaxed, pensive posture reminded Matt of some of the moody blackand-white photos of Elvis in his early and mid career.