Electra had temporarily abandoned Temple to make a round of the domed chamber’s vast perimeter, admiring each designer Elvis in its niche.
Around Temple, gawking tourists thronged, often bumping into her, the lone stationary object, as they gazed up at Elvis in 3-D surround.
Somebody bumped her and didn’t back off.
A half-second later she shook off her thoughts enough to become annoyed. “Hey!”
“Hey, hey, hey! You ticklish, T. B.?”
“Get your hands off my ribs, or you will be corned beef hash.”
Crawford Buchanan backed away just enough so that she could focus on his abhorable face. It was grinning.
“What is that dreadful smell?” Temple demanded.
“My cigar.” Buchanan swaggered the small brown cylinder to the side of his mouth. “A Tampa Jewel, like Elvis used to smoke,” he said through his cigar-clenching teeth, just like a melodrama villain. “Got it in the gift shop.”
“He smoked cigars, too? Not my type.”
“All of us big shots smoke cigars. It’s a guy thing.” “That’s what I mean.”
“So what are you doing here alone?”
“I’m not alone. Just because I look alone doesn’t mean I am.”
“Oh, come on, T. B. You don’t have to pretend with me. You haven’t always got some guy on a string, like you want me to think. Afraid to admit you could use an escort? I don’t see any rings.”
“You would have, but I lost it.““That ‘lost ring’ excuse is as old as Elvis.”
“It happens to be true in my case.” Temple felt a justifiable stab of self-pity. Not every woman lost her engagement ring to a traveling magician’s sleight-of-hand. She’d barely had it for two weeks, and, presto! Gone forever.
“Now, don’t pout. Crawford’s here to turn every saltwater tear to pure cane sugar.”
“Yuck!” Temple said.
He leaned close. The more she expressed her distaste, the more he felt compelled to force himself on her. She wondered for a wild moment what would happen if she actually encouraged him … but she couldn’t count on an equal and opposite effect.
“You’d cheer up if you were sitting on what I’m sitting on,” he whispered in sing-song, taunting tone.
Temple didn’t want to know what he was sitting on. “I doubt it.” She scanned the crowd, looking for the loud beacon of Electra’s muumuu—chartreuse, black, and orange today.
“I am on to something so big it’ll rock this town right off its blue suede shoes.”
“That’s hyperbole even for you.”
“It’s the biggest story of the century.”
“Isn’t that premature? The century isn’t quite over yet. I believe 2001 is the actual date.”
“And it won’t be over until I break this story. Believe me, this is the Big One. I can write my own ticket when this gets out.” He leaned closer, radiating cigar stench. “And you can ride it with me.”
“Why should I want to?”
“Because nobody can resist a success.”
“I can, very successfully.”
He blew a thin stream of blue smoke over her right shoulder. “Tut-tut, T. B. You talk a good game, but you’d fold like everyone else if you knew what I’m sitting on.”
“Well, I guess nobody will until you get up.”
“Oh, I will, when I’m ready. And then everyone will notice me. The story of the century. Want a clue?” “No.”
Leaning to whisper in her ear. “It’s the biggest, hairiest hot flash since Abel axed Cain.”
“Cain killed Abel.”
“Details.”
“So what have you got? King Kong?”
“Even better.” Buchanan’s smile wrapped itself around the soggy cigar end. “But you’ll see. You’ll see.”
At last he moved on, a small poisonous cloud of Tampa-jewel cigar smoke hanging over his head like a visible miasma of bad news.
Hot story, ice-cold heart, Temple thought. As if all someone had to do to earn her interest was have a career conquest. King Kong! Well, the Elvis dome was big enough to hold a mythical beast of that size, but even Elvis couldn’t live up to that scale.
Electra returned from her circuit, flushed and impressed.
“Those jumpsuits are fabulous. I can see why they have to keep them so high up for security purposes—they must be worth millions, altogether—but I’d love to see them closer up.”
“Have you ever been to Graceland?”
Electra lowered her pale eyelashes demurely. “I’m afraid so. It was years ago, of course. I happened to be in the neighborhood.” She answered Temple’s unspoken question. “In Atlanta. Distances aren’t that far in the East.”
Temple nodded at the non sequitur. Obviously, Electra had gone considerably out of her way to visit Graceland. “I’ve seen pictures. Graceland is not that impressive.”
“It is when you think it’s what a dirt-poor teenage boy was able to buy for his mother in three short years of performing music that nobody had ever heard quite that way before. And that two-story, pillared portico reeks of Southern dignity. Of course the inside is decorated ingot-rich-quick kitsch, but Elvis was a musical genius, not an interior designer.”
“What I find impressive,” Temple admitted, “is the performance records he set in this town. Did you know that he outpulled them all in terms of audience numbers—Sinatra, Streisand, Dean Martin—and that was after he made his comeback in the late sixties.”
Electra nodded, as somber as Temple had ever seen her. “That. time I saw him perform live back in the late fifties. He was pure heat lightning, energy and music and raw sex branded white-hot onto that stage and searing out into the audience.”
“A hunk-a-hunk-of-burning-love. Stupid lyrics.”
“Not when Elvis sang them. He got more feeling out of a song than you believed it was possible to put in. And he was always so charming and gorgeous.”
“Electra! You were a groupie.”
“I wasn’t always ‘of indeterminate age,’ you know. And I’ve had a few husbands.”
“A few!”
Electra’s shrug made the flowers on the muumuu shoulders do the hula. “A few,” she repeated, and said no more.
Temple let her gaze drift to the surrounding Elvis statues. “It’s all so garish, so gross.”
“That was the seventies, kiddo. It’s just that Elvis is so famous his image is frozen in time. If you’d seen his contemporaries then you’d realize he wasn’t that over the top. Don’t you remember the glitter rock ‘n’ roll crowd, Elton John with his huge glitzy sunglasses, David Bowie, KISS … ?”
“I was just a kid; they were antiques.”
“Besides, he was inspired by Liberace. When they met and he discovered Liberace was also a twin, they really hit it off.”
“Now Liberace I appreciate. A master of high camp. Liberace turned glitz into a gold mine. He could make those glitter rock stars look like they were wearing tinfoil.”
Electra nodded. “You have something there. So explain to me again how the hotel is able to exploit Elvisdom without violating the estate trademarks.”
“It is fascinating,” Temple said, much more turned on by marketing magic than dead legends. “Everything here is ‘Almost Elvis.’ Nobody can copyright anything in its generic form, so that’s what the Kingdome homed in on. Like selling Elvis’s favorite brands of things in the gift shop. And capitalizing on his love of fast vehicles of any description in all their indoor/outdoor rides, calling the whole thing Raceland.”
As she talked, she guided Electra past the blinking, buzzing, neon-lit entrance to Raceland. A bumper-car attraction in which all the vehicles, modeled after Elvis’s favorite cars from pink Cadillacs to black Stutz Bearcats to Mercedes, clashed at the behest of their drivers aged eight to eighty.