“Lyle Purvis.” The detective pursed his lips. “I’m still not clear what you’re doing over here anyway. Are you an Elvis fan?”
“Nope.”
“You and this”—he consulted his notebook—“Electra Lark were on the site of the last murder too.” “Just unlucky, I guess.”
“And prone to wandering off the beaten path.” He was checking his notes again, or, rather, another detective’s notes. “The Medication Garden where the drowned man was found was supposed to be off limits.”
“We trespassed a bit there.”
“And you didn’t trespass here?”
“Not that I know of.”
The detective shook his head. “You make a lousy suspect for anything worse than jaywalking, but you were at the discovery scenes of two recent, connected murders.”
“So the drowned man was murdered? And the murders are connected?”
“By you.”
“Oh.”
“Frankly, your being just another crazy fan, that would explain a lot.”
Temple couldn’t quite cop to that rap, but she could offer a hint for her presence. “Well … to be frank—” “You haven’t been before?”
“To be fully frank, I’m here because of what’s been happening to Quincey.”
“Quincey.” He eyed her with the baffled suspicion you’d direct at a harmless-looking person who kept turning up corpses. “You mean that old TV show. About the coroner. He was on close terms with corpses too.”
“No. I am not some fannish flake or a media nut! I’m just a PR person moonlighting as a nanny. Quincey is the girl who is playing Priscilla Presley for the competition. Her mother was concerned about the threats she was getting, so I said I’d keep an eye on her.” Temple could hardly mention the Elvis apparition at the Crystal Phoenix as the instigating event; then he’d really typecast her as a flake.
“ ‘Keeping an eye on Quincey’ took you to the Medication Garden and just now on stage?”
“I ran into those situations in the course of hanging out at the contest.”
“The attacks on the girl have been noted. You have any insight on that?”
“Not a clue. Except that this last time, her screams at discovering the assault on the dress did a pretty good job of pulling everybody out of the rehearsal area. Except for Lyle.”
“And his killer. Good thing you didn’t wander back here too soon.”
Temple had thought of that. Lyle must have been killed as soon as the stage was clear: lassoed from behind with the scarf, disabled and silenced by strangulation, and then held in thrall until dead.
It would take a strong, tall person to dominate a big guy like Lyle. A man, of course. Or a woman like Velvet Elvis.
“What do you think is going on with the Priscilla thing? A deranged fan?” the detective asked.
“They do dislike her, but—don’t you think it could be some other agency?”
“It’s some other agency that’s putting the jinx on our investigation, all right.”
Temple detected something besides bitterness in his voice. “You don’t mean … Twilight Zone stuff? Like Elvis sightings.”
“Don’t I wish.” He slapped the notebook shut. “We could all live with a little tabloid ridicule. It’s the hush-hush that kills an investigation, not the yellow journalism. Speaking of yellow journalism, you know a guy from the Las Vegas Scoop? Crawless Buchanan? He’s been chomping at the bit to interview you. I had to have a uniform restrain him, he was that hot to see the body. Some of these guys are really ghouls.”
“Crawless. Yeah, I know him. He was at the other death scene too.”
“He was?” The notebook flopped open.
Temple nodded solemnly. “He was so eager to examine that corpse he jumped into the pool with it.”
“That creep!” The notebook snapped shut again.
This was starting to look like an open-and-shut case, Temple thought.
The detective stood. “Maybe you’d give him an interview. Get him off our backs.”
“You’re asking a lot.” She glanced beyond Detective Stevens’s dark coat sleeve to the sight of Crawford practically slobbering with eagerness twenty feet away. “Are you sure you can’t pin anything on him?”
Then it struck her. Crawford had not only been at each death scene, he was Quincey’s stepfather. He could have popped in and out of her dressing room, spreading havoc, without much comment.
She feared her speculations were running rampant across her expression, but the detective had turned away already, eyeing the Crawf with distaste.
“Pin anything on him? A new haircut would help.” He stuffed the notebook into his side coat pocket and returned onstage to the cluster of white-gloved people hunkering over the dead man like abducting aliens.
Crawford sprang toward Temple like a spaniel. “T. B.! Thank God they didn’t arrest you!”
“What would they arrest me for?”
He brushed off the question with a gesture. “It’s not that Purvis guy dead, is it? Tell me. They won’t let me near enough to see the body. It can’t be him. He’s just not around downstairs, right? Maybe he didn’t come in today at all. His rehearsal was yesterday. What would he be doing here today?”
“That’s a very good question.”
“Then … he was here today?”
“Yup.”
“But he left.”
“Oh, yes.”
Crawford slumped into the dark lines of his Memphis Mafia suit. “Thank God.”
“Well, he left, but, like Elvis, he’s not completely gone. Something remains.”
Crawford’s expression turned sick as he glanced at the assembled officials. Talk about “ring around the collar:” a noose of Memphis Mafia suits surrounded them as thoroughly as they circled the corpse.
“Oh, God.”
Temple was actually moved to put out a hand in case Buchanan folded. “It is Lyle. Why are you so upset? I didn’t know you were friends.”
“Friends?” Crawford’s normal sneeringly sure look had melted away like a wax dummy’s expression in the face of a forest fire. “God, no. He couldn’t stand my guts.”
When she said nothing, he added, “What’s new? Who can?”
“Whew. You are in bad shape, C.B. Here. Have a chair.” She pushed down a fold-up theater seat with her foot. Crawford Buchanan, in any shape, was not someone she cared to bend over near.
He collapsed into the seat, patting the backs of his hands over his face as if wiping off invisible beads of sweat. His normal pasty face had gone as green as spinach fettuccine.
In a moment his face was in his hands, and he was rocking to and fro.
Temple looked around for witnesses. This was embarrassing.
“He’s gone,” Crawford wailed softly. “My God, my God. He’s gone.”
“He seemed like a nice man,” Temple said inadequately. What else could you say about someone you’d only met once. “And a damn good Elvis tribute performer.”
“Oh, don’t use that stupid euphemism!” the Crawf snapped. “Impersonator is an honorable word. And in his case, it wasn’t even an act. Don’t you understand?”
Tears stood in his large, cappuccino-dark eyes.
Temple sat on the seat next to him out of sheer, mute amazement. “You really cared about this guy.”
“Why shouldn’t I? I found him. I found him out! And then he exits on me.” The Crawf slapped a palm to his forehead, so hard that Temple winced.
“Crawford, you don’t—You couldn’t think … It’s crazy.”
“He. Was. The. King. I know it.”
“That’s your story that was going to shake the world?” “Was!” The word came out half a cry of rage, half a bawl. “I was so close. This would have made me.” “What about him?”
“Huh?”
“What about … Lyle. Did he want to be the means of your getting made?”
“No, but I could have talked him into it.”
“You told him your suspicions?”
“Of course. It wouldn’t work unless he cooperated and went public.”