“Irresponsible? You think I’m irresponsible?” He edged nearer again, his anger turning him from a laughable pest into a sobering threat. Temple retreated despite herself, until her back was hugging the wall. “I’ll showyou! I’m sitting on a story so hot that it’ll make me the journalist responsible for the biggest story of the Millennium.”
She didn’t know what to say in the face of Crawford’s angry but impressive conviction.
She didn’t have to say anything. Jumpsuit Elvis had appeared behind Buchanan like the Caped Crusader. He caught up the Crawf by the scruff of his black mohair suit coat and practically lifted him off the ground.
“Hey, there, son,” he intoned in a passable imitation of Elvis’s laid-back jovial country drawl, “you don’t want to scare the ladies, and you sure don’t want to make me mad.”
When he let Crawford’s black wingtips touch concrete again, the toes did a nervous little tap, like a puppet’s whose strings were too short, before the soles came down solidly.
“You phoney bozos!” Crawford’s invective spit and hissed. “You’re laughable, get it? But no one will be laughing at me when I’m ready to move. Get outa my way.”
Crawford shoved past Temple and surged down the hall toward the other dressing rooms, soon lost in a milling crowd of Elvis impersonators.
“I shoulda smashed him while I had him. You okay, Miss Temple? He tried to use you as a discus.”
“He was really hot under the mohair. I’ve never seen him like that.”
“Mean as a wolverine.”
“I guess.” Temple shook her head. Dead or alive, Elvis certainly brought out strong feelings in people.
“I’m sorry I deserted my post.” Jumpsuit Elvis nodded to the dressing room door. “There was lots of talk down the hall, and Miss Quincey said she’d be all right.”
“She was fine. The Crawf apparently isn’t worried about her at all.”
“Why should he be?”
“He’s her mother’s boyfriend, for one thing. And it was his idea to have her play Priscilla. He’s the emcee for the pageant.”
Elvis’s face had grown darker and darker of expression as Temple had explained the status quo. “She’s an awful pretty little thing to bring into this crazy place.”
“Ah … which one are you? Ernesto? Julio?”
“Um, Ralph.”
“Well, ‘Um Ralph,’ I hope you’re not digging too deep into the Elvis mythology. Quincey is only sixteen. You wouldn’t be getting inappropriate ideas?”
“Sixteen! What kind of rat would bring a sixteen-yearold girl into this? Urn, you think maybe I’m getting into my role too much, Miss Temple?”
“How so?”
“Elvis had a hangup for real young girls. Do you think someone else’s spirit could take over a guy?”
“How so?”
“Well, I notice a lot of the guys here, the impersonators. Some have named their kids after Elvis or Lisa Marie. They get so into their roles it’s a good thing there aren’t TV sets around the backstage area.”
“TV sets?”
“I’d expect some of these guys to shoot out the picture tubes when they get a little frustrated. Elvis was kinda crazy that way.”
“From what I’ve read, Elvis was drugged out of his mind, all on doctor-obtained prescription drugs, of course. Any of the impersonators seem to be taking drugs? There might be pressure to use speed to better imitate his energetic performances. The guy who went into the pool might have had a drug overdose.”
“When you get down to the other dressing rooms, send a couple of my bros back, and I’ll start asking around.”
“Has anybody mentioned which Elvis impersonator died?”
“Naw. I’ve seen the police all over the place asking questions, and even these Memphis Mafia hotel securitytypes, but you know what me and my brothers think of them.”
“That they’re more than who they pretend to be. But what else can you expect at a gathering of Elvis imitators?”
Ralph struck an Elvis pose and sang the opening of “T-R-O-U-B-L-E.”
Temple nodded her approval. There was an Elvis song for every occasion. Despite his increasingly calamitous lifestyle, the man had been a singin’ fool.
She was relieved to see that Crawford Buchanan had disappeared from the dressing room scene before he could make another kind of scene.
Elvis certainly brought out strange passions in people.
Not her. She was merely masquerading as an inquiring reporter, not in the trying and true C. B. gossip-rag mode.
“You covering this?” a friendly voice called out. “What happened to your on-camera guy?”
Temple smiled wryly at the assumption that she was an off-camera producer and Matt was the upfront reporter. Guess she’d been right to leave TV news.
Mike—or was it Jerry?—came barreling out of a crowd of his twins to say hello.
What a perfect situation for murder: a confusing mob of potential victims/killers all done up to look like each other.
“Wow.” Mike seemed out of breath. “This is a media frenzy. It’s great for the pageant and us guys, but kinda hard on the hotel and the dead guy. I just got interviewed for Hot Heads. You know, the entertainment world TV show? I got to do a minute of “Suspicious Minds” for their cameraman. They want to use the song as a theme for what might be going on here.”
“Clever. And good exposure for you. Say, has anybody figured out which impersonator died in the pool?”
Mike bit his bottom lip, which emphasized the slight curl in the upper left lip. Just like Elvis.
“Mike, before you answer, how do you do that?” “Do what? Besides being cool and being Elvis.” “The lip curl. Isometric exercises?”
“Naw. Too hard.” He leaned so close that Temple could smell the Dentine on his breath. “Trade secret. Promise you won’t use it.”
“I look like I could imitate Elvis?”
His laugh caused smooth dark heads all around to turn their way. “Guess not. Liquid latex. Used for years by old-time stage actors. Guess the special effects wizards have higher-tech methods nowadays.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s the stuff that tightens the skin and makes realistic scars.”
“I use just a little. If the spotlight catches the shiny part, it looks like sweat.”
“Sweat is good?”
“Sweat is great. Elvis perspired like a sprinkler system. It showed he was giving his all. Had guys onstage bringing him water and towels. In with one, out with the other. Did you know that some of his costumes weighed thirty pounds?”
“Figures. Opera costumes are awfully heavy, and Elvis was his own opera company, wasn’t he, with the elaborate costumes, and giving away scarves and kisses?”
“His jumpsuits were made of wool gabardine from Milan, Italy. Most guys here, we can’t afford that, not even for what it cost Elvis twenty years ago.”
“You know, the more I hear about Elvis, the more I get this sense of a heavy weight pulling him down. Literally, like the costumes, but also in the retinue he collected, the superstructure he had to support of people and debts, and then his own spending sprees.”
“You’re right. The man just finally sank under the weight of everything everyone put on him, and everything he needed to keep himself going, holding up the movies and the tours and the relatives and the fans and the employees. Like that world guy, you know—?““Atlas.”
“Right. Atlas. And the biggest thing to hold up was mostly the expectations, including his own.” He glanced down at the white silk scarf around his neck. “A lot of people have the real thing of these, not just soaked with Elvis’s sweat, but in a way his blood and tears too. When I do my act, this ends up wringing wet. I’m a basketcase. High, too, but a basketcase. I can see it myself, just pretending to be him. It was just too much for any one person to do alone. And Elvis was alone. He always kept lots of people by him, but he was always alone.”