“Oh, nobody. The Brad Pitt of several generations back.”
“Brad Pitt. Yuck. Totally retro. He’s really let himself go.”
“Oh. I guess Elvis holds the record, then. He kept his fans for over twenty years, and even death did not them part.”
“But they’re all crazy.” Quincey sighed. “I guess crazy fans are better than no fans.”
“You could quit, you know. They can find another Priscilla.”
Quincey seemed to consider the idea. “It is a drag going to school during the mornings and then coming over here to sit around in case someone needs me to stand there while they rehearse the awards ceremony. Like anyone cares who wins best scarf-tosser and biggest belt buckle.” Her eyes grew suddenly calculating. “But if I quit, I wouldn’t have a chance to meet any cute Elvises.”
“I didn’t think there were any.”
“Well, the bodyguards aren’t bad.”
“The Memphis Mafia? I thought those old guys in hats and suits creeped you out.”
“Not those guards. The ones you got me. They’re the best-looking Elvises in the place.”
“Ah. They’re still a little old for you.”
“Please, moth-ther, give me a break. I like older guys if they’re not really old, like thirty or something.”
Before Temple could get into basic arithmetic with Quincey, obviously a subject she’d skipped in school, the dressing room door banged open against the wall. A phalanx of suits filled the doorway.
Three abreast, this particular outcropping of the Memphis Mafia resembled Siamese triplets. The black suits melted into one vague blob, and their three pale faces protruded like mushrooms under three very black caps … that is, fedoras.
“Okay, lady,” one addressed Temple. “Up against the mirror. What is your business here?”
“Ah, I’m Quincey’s manager.”
When they looked blank as well as menacing, she pointed to the seated Quincey, managing to impale her finger into a rat’s nest of Clairol’s blackest embrittled with hair spray. Yuck.
The Mafia guys were not distracted.
“You haven’t been around before,” one said.
With their eyes narrowed into tough-guy slits, the guys looked even more like Siamese triplets. Temple couldn’t tell which one had spoken. Of course they spit out their words between almost immobile lips, like Bogart on a laryngitis day. Must have been that damp andfoggy ending of Casablanca. Poor guy. Paul Henreid got the girl, and he got the upper respiratory infection.
Temple coughed discreetly. “Managers come and go. I have other clients, you know.”
“That right? She got a right to be here?” one asked Quincey.
A rebel glint brightened the tiny eye-holes between Quincey’s quintuple-strength false eyelashes. With one word she could rid herself of a voice for maturity and prudence.
Also a cohort in a hostile world.
“Sure.” Quincey punctuated her casual response by snapping her bubblegum. It echoed in the empty room like a gunshot.
The boys stiffened and clapped hands to armpits. Then they began clearing their throats, shuffling their feet, and backing out of the room before they looked even more foolish. Pulling firearms on two lone women would look like overkill.
“Were those the real Kingdome Memphis Mafia, or shills?” Temple wondered aloud.
“You mean there are fake hotel security guards?” Quincey paled a little. “Who can you trust around this place?”
“Regard it as the real Graceland, and trust no one.”
“You know, that’s true. Elvis had closed-circuit TVs in his bedroom so he could watch people around the house and decide whether to come down and play. So many people came around, it got so he couldn’t see them all.”
Temple shook her head. “Was that in his later years? Paranoia seems to be the last stage before complete breakdown.”
“Maybe I’m being paranoid.” Quincey clasped her narrow white arms and shivered. “I’m sure not going to be voted Miss Congeniality here. Do you suppose the guy in the pool had his throat cut? With a razor?”
“No! Definitely not.”
“How do you know?”
“There would have been blood, for one thing.” “In a big pool like that?”
“Good point, Quincey. The large amount of water would dissipate any blood. But why slit someone’s throat and throw him into a pool? Overkill, if you ask me.”
“Las Vegas is an overkill kind of place,” Quincey said earnestly. “I mean, I wasn’t going to freak because of some funny notes, and whoever wrote the ‘E’ in my neck could have just as easily slit my throat, but didn’t. But now there’s a really dead guy—and I’m getting a little worried.”
Temple leaned against the tabletop. “So that’s why you were so cool about that razor incident. You’d already figured out it wasn’t a serious attack.”
“I figured it was some publicity stunt. And hanging around here hadn’t gotten so boring yet.”
“Well, hang in a little longer. As your ‘manager,’ I’m going to visit the other dressing rooms and see if they’re talking about you.”
Quincey tossed the immovable edifice of her hair and used a pick as long as a chopstick to torture the topmost strands even higher. “They better be talking about me. I’m not wearing this creepy crepey polyester dress just for my health, you know.”
Temple nodded and left, refraining from mention of the seventies urban legend that polyester caused cancer. Quincey had enough to worry about.
Chapter 37
From a Jack to a King
(One of Vernon Presley’s country favorites, recorded by Elvis in 1967)
“Gotcha!”
“You idiot! Get your hands off me.” Temple had pulled away from whoever grabbed her and adapted a battle-ready martial arts stance.
Crawford Buchanan, dry but otherwise as slimy as ever, was leaning against the wall where he had suddenly appeared.
“What’s the matter?” he taunted. “Snake got you a little nervous?”
“No. Not that snake, anyway. Why are you here pestering me, anyway? I thought you had major news stories to write. ‘Elvis Dies!’ Really. Are your trying to build the death in the pool into some kind of Elvis legend?”
“I’m not here to pester you,” he answered, shoving himself off the wall and batting his naturally dark-lashed eyes. Temple thought unhappily of Daddy Longlegs’s Centipede Sweetie mascara. “I’m here to keep an eye on Quincey.”
“The way you were doing when she got slashed.” “I can’t be around here every second.”
“I haven’t seen you around here at all, until now.” Temple glanced down the empty hall beyond him. Nothing that way but storage rooms. “And what were you doing up in the Medication Garden? And why the twenty-foot dash into the pool?”
“You sound like the police. I’m a reporter as well as an emcee, right? So I have to check things out. My being in the Medication Garden when the corpse turned up was just a piece of good luck. I tripped over one of those damn critters from the Animal Elvis exhibit when I saw the body after you and the landlady noticed it. Believe me, I had no urge to share a pool with that snake and its prey.”
“I see you’ve got your followup article written.” Crawford grinned. ” ‘Giant Snake Gets Elvis All Shook Up.’ How does that grab you?”
“Not much better than you did just now. The autopsy results aren’t even in. It’s irresponsible to blame the death on the snake.”
“Maybe, but it’s sure spectacular. My next piece will be Elvis’s resuscitated career all washed up now.”
“You’re not going to try to turn the dead man into the real Elvis, are you?”
“Why not? Any dead Elvis could be the real one in disguise. Why do you think Elvis is the story that won’t die? It’s classic. It’s beautiful. You can speculate on anything and it’s impossible to prove different. It’s even better than Amelia Earhart.”
“It’s the story that won’t die because irresponsible so-called journalists like you keep beating a dead horse.”