“And he didn’t laugh you off.”
“At first, sure. Why not. He was in denial.”
“In denial.”
“Wouldn’t you be if you’d done such a good job of hiding your identity that no one would ever suspect?”
“But Elvis tribute perform—” Crawford was looking not only bereaved but homicidal, so Temple backtracked. “Impersonators are always suspected of being the real thing. It’d be the worst place to hide, because it’s the most obvious.”
“You said he was good!”
“Not that good.”
“How good does a sixty-four-yearold man who’s been out of the limelight except for the odd Elvis contest have to be?”
“What kind of evidence have you got?”
“Him! And now he’s dead.”
Temple scratched her neck. “Listen, Buchanan, you didn’t arrange for those attacks on Quincey as part of some scheme to get Lyle worried and reveal himself, did you?”
“No.” He sighed. “I thought of it after the first attack, that seeing ‘Priscilla’ in danger might shake him out of the denial of his new persona. But, face it, Elvis had gotten over her by now. And Quincey may have a punker’s heart, but she’s not a very convincing Priscilla.”
“I thought she was doing a really good job!” “What do you know about all this?”
“More than I used to know. So I’d be very hard put to buy that Lyle Purvis was Elvis Presley. Where’s your evidence?”
“You agree that he’s the best Elvis impersonator you’ve ever seen.”
“I do, but I haven’t seen very many, just the ones here. That new guy this afternoon was pretty good, but he’s way too young to be really Elvis. So stomping the stomp and shouting the shout are not evidence enough.”
“Purvis had lived in Las Vegas for several years, had enough money to afford a pretty big house with a copper roof and a six-car garage. You never saw him except at night. He didn’t smoke, or drink, or gamble.”
“There’s a pit boss at the Crystal Phoenix who doesn’t smoke, drink, or gamble, and you only see him at night. That doesn’t make him Elvis, and that isn’t as uncommon in this town as people think. Las Vegas is famous for churches as well as casinos.”
“Okay, but when I first got suspicious about who Lyle really might be, I started checking his background.” “Any good, or bad, reporter starts there. So?” “So … Lyle doesn’t, didn’t have any.”
“You just said he’d lived here for several years.”
“Right. Did Elvis gigs around the country, had an act at a small club for a while, but before that … zero. The man was fifty years old, at least. He had a driver’s license, but I couldn’t find a Social Security number on him, a credit record—he paid everything with, get this, cash.”
“Maybe he had a history of credit-card abuse.”
Crawford’s mournful dark eyes sharpened through their residual mist of emotion. “Exactly, T.B.! Once a spendthrift, always a spendthrift. There are certain habits so ingrained you can’t ditch them, even if you’re living in another place under another name.”
“Even if you’re Elvis, you say.”
“Especially if you’re Elvis.”
Chapter 50
Big Boss Man
(Elvis swung out in a 1967 Nashville session that was bedeviled by the usual personal politics among his associates)
“Mr. Midnight, I presume.”
Matt froze.
He wasn’t used to getting radio show calls at home. He wasn’t used to getting phone calls at home, period. But he wouldn’t put anything past his mysterious caller. His heart accelerated despite himself. Had “Elvis”
become a stalker?
“Don’t freak out,” the man’s voice urged, laughing. “It’s just Bucek.”
“Ah … Frank?” Matt’s mind once again had to merge the image of his long-ago spiritual director in seminary with the FBI agent he had become on leaving the priesthood. That always took a leap of the imagination, if not of faith. “I don’t get it. Why are you—”
“Calling? Combining business with personal business, I guess. Just to say I’m in town, and to ask a favor.”
“Sure.”
“I want tapes of your Elvis interviews.”
“Tapes. How did you—?”
“Hear about them? You’re famous. Or maybe I should say infamous.”
“But why do you need them?”
“Don’t know that I do, but I can’t really say.” “It’s about a case?”
“Can’t really say. Can you get me the tapes?”
“Sure. I’ll call the station right now; ask them to make a set.”
“Don’t say who for.”
“Okay.”
“I’d rather go through you. It’s more discreet. You could say they’re for your mother.”
“I will, but I don’t think I’d ever send her them. She’d think I had gone seriously weird.”
“What’s your take on this guy?”
“As a counselor?”
“Anyway you want to read it.”
“I don’t know. He could be completely immersed in the Elvis personality. He could be self-promoting in some way, not yet clear. If he comes forward and turns out to be a shill for the Kingdome, we’ll know.”
“But he’s credible?”
“He knows his Elvis trivia, but so do thousands of Elvis fans. I pick up a genuine confusion. He may have absorbed some of Elvis’s characteristics from sheer obsession. Has he really ‘become’ Elvis? It’s easier to believe that than that the real Elvis could have lived and hidden out so successfully all these years.”
“So he’s credible.”
“Yeah. As credible as a voice over the airwaves can ever be.”
“Interesting.”
“How will you get the tapes?”
“Someone will pick them up after the show tonight. You have your post-game groupies. One will ask you tosign a tote bag; you can slip the tapes in there.”
“Big Brother’s been watching me? This that urgent, and that covert?”
“Always, Matt. Always. Elvis mania may be good for a laugh, but we’ve got some grim business going on here.”
“FBI business.”
“You said that. Talk to you later, if I get time before I leave town.”
A brisk good-bye ended the exchange.
Puzzled, Matt dialed the station and got Dwight, technician and jack of all trades. His request for tapes was met with a belly laugh.
“You and two hundred others. Leticia’s working up a sales program, but I’ll run you some free. You want more than one set?”
“Yeah. Give me … three?”
“Fine. Freebies for you, but Leticia’s thinking twenty-nine ninety-five for the public.”
“Can you do that, without the caller’s permission? Without mine, for that matter?”
“What’s to object about? Anyone could have taped you guys from the air. And by calling in, these folks put themselves into a public arena.”
“I’d have a lawyer check it anyway.”
“Leticia will. She doesn’t let much get past her. Including gold mines.”
“What a wimp,” the caller said. “Holing up in his bedroom like a spoiled kid just because the world wants too much. If he had any guts he’d come out of hiding.”
“Why are you so angry?”
“Because if he really was the King, he wouldn’t have left us like he did, and if he did survive and go into hiding, then he cheated us another way.”
“It’s not like you owned him.”
“Yeah, we did. We made him.”
“A bunch of things made him … the music, the times, his own instincts, all the people who cried ‘lewd’ and made him notorious, all the people his death shocked into an orgy of mourning. But I don’t think he owed you anything. He had a right to just stop.”
Another voice had taken the airwaves. “That man is wrong. We didn’t just make Elvis, we made him sick. We made him stand in for our sense of rebellion and freedom and wanting to live so high we’d be legends. He was our … what do you call it?”
“Scapegoat?” Matt suggested.
“Standin,” another male voice said. “She had it right. He was our standin. But he’s gone, and we don’t need to listen to any version of him asking for answers on the radio. We don’t need standins anymore. You fans who won’t get over it, get a life!”