Elvis was out there somewhere.
Chapter 47
There Goes My Everything
(Elvis recorded this song about a broken marriage in June of 1970; it did well on three charts)
“Isn’t Izzy something?”
Electra had scrunched down in her theater seat to stare at the dark stage of the Kingdome showroom.
“You sound like the teenager you’re dressed as. He’s an interesting man—”
“And were you really serious with all those Elvis questions? Do you think the real King might be around?”
“I don’t know what I think, but when you figure in that Matt is getting very credible calls from a possible Elvis … and that Quincey was seriously harassed, something sinister besides murder is going on, but it seems so scattershot.”
Electra’s eyes were still only for her new beau. “Izzy doesn’t really expect to win,” she explained. “He just does this to have some fun. Who’s gonna let a realistic-looking Elvis win? Everybody wants Elvis at his peak, even on stamps.”
“I guess he was something in his prime, to go by the Fontana brothers.” Temple eyed the awesome clot of mostly early Elvi at stage left, near the band.
“They are so cute! I don’t know if the judges would let a whole litter win, but I’d vote for those boys any day.”
Temple scanned the seats in front of them in the house’s raked tier. Shiny black helmet heads pockmarked the burgundy velvet seats like beetle backs.
She spotted Mike and Jerry fussing with their jumpsuits in the wings, and the King of Kings watching from the shadows of the flies. Probably sizing up the competition. From what the guys had said, dark horse Elvi were always showing up at competitions, ready to dazzle the jaded Elvis world.
“Even the contestants who’ve already rehearsed can’t stay away,” Temple mused. “Guess they want to the see the competition strut their stuff. Look! That’s the King of Kings guy down behind the Fontanas. What’s he doing talking to the band? He’s had his time on stage.”
“He sounded like a perfectionist,” Electra said. “Elvis was. You think he could really be … our boy?”
“No! But he is uncannily good. Twenty years too young. Although, if Elvis had cleaned up his act, dumped the drugs, got some medical attention for his ills, lived clean, maybe he could look a couple decades younger. Sixty-four isn’t so old nowadays.”
“Glad to hear you say it, dearie!”
Before Temple could congratulate herself on her new maturity about advancing age, the onstage band members geared up with the squawk and stutter of tuning strings and instruments.
Crawford stepped up to the center-stage mike. “Number ninety-nine.”
Entry forms rustled in the echoing house, but Templeand Electra were not among those granted official documents.
A guitar screamed, then twanged. The drums beat their way in and then everything was cooking in the manner of overdone rock ‘n’ roll, a vaguely dissonant, deliciously anarchist stew of sound.
A dark figure in the wings rushed forward, then slid into a long knee-slide onto center stage: Young Elvis in his fifties suit—loose pants, tight jacket, and energy incarnate.
He rose by pushing his knees together until he was balanced on the balls of his straddled feet, part acrobat, part spastic. The musicians ground down into their instruments as their music mimicked his gravity-defying gyrations. “Tutti Frutti,” the newest Elvis was howling like a madman, or a mad dog, or maybe only like a dislocated Englishman in the noonday southern sun.
“Wow.” Temple sat up, Electra taking notice with her.
Elvis heads throughout the auditorium and in the wings snapped to attention.
Tutti Frutti Elvis had the right stuff, all right, Mama. His suit shook, he shook, everything had to shake ‘n’ bake, and rock, rattle, and roll along with him.
When the number ended, a ragged chorus of claps hailed a rehearsal that had been performance-perfect, but already the lacquered Elvis heads were consulting.
Temple could almost hear their judgments from where she sat: too raw, not enough variety; a shot of adrenaline, soul but no subtlety.
She wasn’t sure Elvis was about subtlety.
“That young man has drive,” Electra said, fanning herself. “Whew.”
“But he couldn’t really be Elvis.”
“Him? Heavens, no! Way too young. Way too … well, Elvis.”
Still, Temple could tell from the checkerboard of chatter and silence all over the theater that this Elvis was a new force to reckon with. Acts were being modified even now to meet the challenge.
The next Elvis to rehearse was Jerry. She recognized him as he walked up to give the director his stat sheet and nervously eyed the musicians. She could guess that he wanted to give them special instructions so his set would match the dynamic difference offered by the unexpected Elvis ahead of him.
While Jerry negotiated, the audience fidgeted.
Temple searched the wings for Tutti Frutti Elvis. She hadn’t seen his like around this place before. Even the King of Kings must be checking his crown.
Then the sound of an out-of-tune electric guitar shrilled up onto the stage and into the sparsely occupied seats like a dentist’s drill hitting a nerve.
The place had terrific acoustics.
Temple realized that she had heard this instrument before, and it was a set of human vocal cords pressed into their worst extremity.
Quincey! Her latest aria in terror lofted to the distant ceiling like a solo from The Phantom of the Opera.
Temple bolted from her seat. “Now what?” Luckily, she had her running shoes on, and she put them to good use.
“Wait!” came Electra’s diminishing plea behind her. “You don’t know what you’re rushing into.”
But Temple did. Another nasty impractical joke had obviously been played on the piece’s much-abused Priscilla. She remembered the puffy, red, razor-etched “E” on Quincey’s neck that she had flashed like Elvis flaunting one of his cherished law-enforcement badges when pulling over a cute chick on wheels for a mock traffic citation in Memphis. That girl’s notion of self-esteem would have done a sword-swallower proud. And here Temple had promised her mother to watch over the kid.
Other people were rushing toward the sounds, but none of them knew the route as well as Temple.
She got there first.To find …
To find Quincey still in her civvies, with only the swollen brunette beehive on her head, her fingers pressing into her soft, teenage cheeks, screeching like a slasher-movie patron.
No violated jumpsuit lay on the dressing room floor. No blood dripped down Quincey’s neck or hands. Nothing was wrong.
Quincey pointed, hiccoughing with hysteria when she tried to speak.
“Hmmmph, hummmph,” she wheezed, a dagger-long fingernail pointing as if transfixing a killer in a stage play. “It’s a ruuu-uuu-uuu-ined. They mur-murmurdered it. My bee-bee-bee-eueueueu-ti-ful gown.”
Temple stared to the aluminum rod suspended across the mostly empty expanse of the dressing room clothes niche.
The white wedding gown hung there, shredded like a toilet-paper mannequin. Cut into ribbons, the gown hung, a tortured ghost. Glittering piles of severed beads mounded like decorative Christmas sugar at its jagged hemline.
Another costume had been expertly assassinated. Why?
“There, there. There, there.”
The 3-D wool poodle on Electra’s shoulder was soaking up Quincey’s tears. It was hard to tell which sparkled more: the rhinestones glinting on the poodle’s collar, or the salty teardrops falling to the fabric in cataracts of distress.
Temple would not have known Quincey had that much water in her.
In the hall, the crew and performers shuffled and commiserated. Even Awful Crawford paced and stewed, more worried about the show going on than Quin’s welfare. Preopening theatrical disasters were always exaggerated. Lost costumes were mourned like long-lost relatives.
Temple dared not admit that she was relieved that the cause of Quincey’s alarm was so minor. Not that you can tell a sixteen-year-old girl that her destroyed prom-queen wedding gown is a small price to pay for a whole skin and a whole mind.