Temple minced back, leaving Crawf to the disgusted mercies of the Memphis Mafia.
Electra had retreated to a curved concrete bench from which one could contemplate the glorious luciteentombed suits, so Temple joined her.
“I guess we’re witnesses.” Electra couldn’t conceal a slight tone of pride.
“Yeah. Also suspects.”
“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. Why did that foolish man blunder into the pool like that?”
“I don’t know, other than ‘fools rush in,’ and Crawford Buchanan is certainly one not to suffer gladly, in both the passive and active grammatical sense. What I’d like to know was why dear old ‘C. B.’ was lurking around here.”
“Also the snake.”
“That is so bizarre. Elvisdom can embrace almost any eccentricity, but I don’t see why massive South American serpents would be among them.”
“It’s the other exhibit.” A brown-jumpsuited attendant who was not busy holding something against the pool wall with a hook had overheard them, and now approached. He lit a cigarette.
“Better not do that: contaminating the crime scene,” Temple warned.
“Who are you? The coroner?”
“No, but unless you don’t want the police to think that you were lurking here smoking cigarettes until your victim showed up and you pushed him into the pool with the snake you had brought in, I wouldn’t smoke around here.”
This was obviously a guy born to trample Don’t walk on the grass signs. “I’ll take my butt with me when I leave,” he said with a sneer.
Temple didn’t point out that everybody usually did that, and other people took their heads with them too. “You’ll leave ashes, trace DNA maybe, who knows what? The police love that sort of high-tech evidence nowadays; saves them from doing a lot of legwork finding the perp. Now, what ‘other exhibit’?”
The man, busy jamming his cigarette back into a half-empty pack, jerked his head to the left. “Over there. It’s not open yet. ‘The Animal Elvis,’ ” he declaimed sarcastically. “Duplicates of the horses at Graceland: Rising Sun, the palomino horse he rode. Priscilla’s Domino. Then there’s Elvis’s chow-chow. And Priscilla’s poodle.”
“And an anaconda named Trojan?” Temple prompted. “How does that fit into the Elvis bestiary?”
“Wow, lady. Elvis was into a lot of strange things, but I didn’t hear he was into that.”
“Never mind,” Temple said. “I’m asking how the snake fits into the Animal Elvis exhibit.”
“I just handle the stock. Must have some connection. Maybe Elvis dated a belly dancer.”
“They don’t work with snakes.”
“I don’t know. All I know is that scaly mother is gonna be a truss-buster to fish out of that water. Whoever got it here didn’t work alone.”
Temple allowed the information to sink in. An interesting observation. But who would go to all this snake-toting trouble to off an Elvis impersonator? A jealous rival, or several? A crazed fan, or several? Animal rights activists? And why the snake? Such a cumbersome set dressing. Or was it the murder weapon? Or, if it was just set dressing, what was the message? A twenty-foot-long anaconda named Trojan.
Oh.
Temple finally got one message.
Why the anaconda was named Trojan.
And that gave her one connection to the King right there. As Electra had just pointed out, Elvis had loved puns.
Was Somebody Up There laughing at them? Or was Somebody Not Up There who should be?
Chapter 32
I’m Gonna Sit Right
Down and Cry
(Over You)
(One of the first songs Elvis recorded for RCA in early 1956)
Crawford Buchanan was shaking like a willow in a windstorm.
He looked worse than a drowned rat, huddling under the “Kingdome” decorative blanket that had been rushed in from the hotel gift shop.
He sat alone on his own Medication Garden bench, teeth chattering too much to talk. Thank goodness, Temple thought.
She preferred the bench she and Electra occupied outside of Crawford’s talking range, where she could catch phrases of officialese when the interior air-conditioning drafts were right.
“. .. least it wasn’t one of the damn display jumpsuits,” a Mafioso muttered.
“Bet they’ll be checking the Elvis impersonator roster,” another speculated.
The body lay by the pool edge, clothed in a garbagebag-green body bag. Temple wondered why that deep black-green color was considered appropriate for disposal of everything from orange rinds to corpses, and who decided such things.
Perhaps it wasn’t quite as chilling as dead black.
The site now teemed with uniformed Las Vegas Metropolitan police officers, latex-gloved evidence technicians and video camera operators, some plainclothes detectives scouring the scene, and the gathered hordes of early arrivals. None of them looked remotely familiar, and for that Temple was grateful.
Eventually, the inevitable happened. A man ambled over to them, laminated police ID clipped to his suit coat lapel, and flipped open a notebook. He rested a foot on the empty end of their bench and took down their names, addresses, and phone numbers.
“You two found the body?” he finally asked.
“Not so much ‘found’ as turned around and noticed,” Electra said quickly.
“You mean you had been here a few minutes before you noticed it?”
“Yes,” Temple said, having learned through her dealings with Lieutenant Molina that interrogation sessions were like a dance class: it was better to let the police lead and the witness follow.
“I understand this part of the hotel wasn’t open yet.” Temple and Electra nodded in tandem.
“You two don’t look like scofflaws.”
“Thank you,” Electra interjected.
The detective was not interested in bestowing compliments; he just wanted to know the why and wherefore. “I’ve … been involved with the Elvis pageant,” Tem-ple said. “Electra was, is, an Elvis fan and was curious about how the hotel was going to evoke the Meditation Garden. We figured we wouldn’t hurt anything if we took a look.”
He nodded and took notes, allowing Temple to take her own mental notes: nice-looking in a bland way, probably a family man with two kids and a wife and a minivan. Quietly intelligent, preferred pencils to pens, maybe an artistic streak… .
“What did you think when you first saw the body?”
“That it wasn’t a body,” Electra blurted out. “Well, we’d been looking at all these Elvis jumpsuits around here, out in the dome and in these display cases here, and then there was that murdered jumpsuit in the dressing room the other day.”
“Murdered jumpsuit?”
Electra, cow-eyed, glanced toward Temple. It occurred to her too late that she might have said too much.
Temple answered. “An Elvis jumpsuit was found with some red nail polish splashed on the back and a dagger pushed through it.”
“Was this reported?”
“I was told that hotel security was alerted and that the police would be keeping an eye on things, but that was just hearsay.”
“Hearsay.” The yellow pencil was held poised over the pad like a strike-threatening snake. “You a lawyer, ma’ am?”
“No way. I’m just saying what I heard. You’d have to check with the hotel and the police department to find out exactly what was reported and what was done about it.”
“What is your occupation?” he persisted.
“I’m a public relations specialist. Freelance.”
He glanced to the knots of people strung around the pool. “In your professional opinion, is this good, or bad, publicity for the hotel?”
“Sudden death is always bad publicity for a hotel.” “Sudden death of a guy in an Elvis suit?”
Temple sighed. “That’s iffy. Some people can’t get enough of Elvis, alive or dead, living or dying.” “Could it have been a publicity stunt gone bad?”
“I don’t see how. If the area was open to the public, maybe. You know: see Elvis wrestle an anaconda in the Graceland pool … but that doesn’t make any sense! Aside from his Jungle Room, Elvis didn’t have anything to do with snakes. Unless it was some of the people who surrounded him.”