“I can almost hear the wheels grinding up there in cranial central command. Don’t hurt yourself, champ.”
Jack opened his eyes. “Okay. You win. Fact is, the Mike Hammer biz could be a whole lot better. No one’s tried to kiss me. And this morning a guy took a couple of shots at me with a shotgun.”
“Ah … so you’ve met Pipeline Beach’s own King of Rock ’n’ Roll.”
“You know him?”
“I wouldn’t say that. I know a little bit about him. For instance, I know he uses a Winchester shotgun to enforce a strict vulture no-fly zone over his property.”
“He likes other men even less than he likes vultures. I think he worries about his wife’s extracurricular activities.”
“Yeah … but a guy like that, he’s not too hard to figure. I mean, think about it. Elvis impersonator loses his voice to larynx cancer, the old confidence meter has gotta clock dangerously low. I bet he would have rather lost his nuts.” Jack remembered the Elvis impersonator’s comment concerning cactus and castration. He didn’t share it with Benteen, but he figured her appraisal was dead-on.
And the part about larynx cancer-that explained the scars on the guy’s neck, the gizmo that looked like a microphone, and the guy’s robotic voice. His vocal cords had been surgically removed.
“What else do you know about him?” Jack asked.
“Ellis Aaron Perkins. Born Ed Klausthauser. He moved to Vegas shortly after the King’s death and became the first Elvis impersonator to hit it big. Had a five-year contract with one of the major hotels and was a big hit with all those fan club queenies, at least the ones who could still fit into their high school prom dresses. Apparently the guy was a sexually voracious predator, if you want it in Gold Medal paperbackese. He really got into some serious roll-playing. You know, he enjoyed that semimournful, seminecrophiliacal snatch.”
“You mean he liked the women to pretend he was the real deal?”
Benteen nodded. “If they were talking to his face. Carry on that conversation a couple feet lower, he liked ’em to address the royal member as Little Elvis.”
“Cute.”
“It gets better. After the cancer ended his career, he disappeared for a couple years. Drove around the country in that pink Caddy of his. Then, about five years ago, he moved here and settled down with the lovely Priscilla. She was the daughter of some fan club queen from Tucson-he’d known her since she was a little girl. Anyway, he bought himself a bigga bigga hunka desert in Pipeline Beach. Planned to build The Elvis Presley Museum and Memorial Miniature Golf Course.
“It would have been something, too. Ellis planned to create a copy of Graceland with a different miniature golf hole in each room. Paradise, tourist-trap style. He actually started construction, but the Presley estate found out about the deal and came down hard. Pretty soon our buddy Little Elvis had eight or ten lawyers jerking his balls. Ellis dropped some serious change on lawyers of his own, even tried to compromise, but the Presley people wouldn’t have any of it.”
“He should have put in windmills.”
“Huh?”
“Windmills,” Jack repeated. “For the miniature golf course. You want to be a success, you’ve gotta have windmills.”
Benteen nodded. “Yeah, windmills probably would have swung the deal. He had a pretty good eighteenth hole designed, though.”
“Yeah? What?”
‘The last hole was supposed to be in the master bathroom. There’d be a horizontal Elvis statue on the floor, mouth open. You’d putt your ball right through the King’s sneer. Game over.”
“It didn’t roll out his asshole or anything?”
She shook her head. “Nope. That would have been sacrilegious. Besides, if the first rule of miniature golf is that you’ve got to have windmills, the second rule is that you’ve got to get the ball back at the end of the game.”
Jack shook his head. “How’d you find out about Ellis, anyway?”
“Sandy Kapalua-Dayton. The woman who runs the Saguaro Riptide. Seems like she knows every story in town.”
Jack grinned. Talk about scouting your opponent. Kate Benteen was turning out to be one amazing woman. “So what’s Ellis do these days? I mean, besides shooting at strangers with his shotgun.”
“He’s an electronics wiz. You must have seen that battery-powered rig he’s got for talking-that didn’t come out of any medical supply catalog. He custom-designed it himself, wanted it to look like one of the big ol’ stage mikes Elvis used in Vegas.”
She brushed a stray strand of hair away from her face.
Her hair was auburn. And then it caught the light, turned the darkest red. .
Damn, Baddalach. You’re getting carried away.
Benteen hadn’t noticed. “Anyway, Ellis has a little electronics business. You know those emergency phones they’ve got along the highways these days?”
“You mean those solar-powered cellular things?”
“Yeah. The ones you use if you break down in the middle of nowhere.”
“Okay.”
“Well, our friend Ellis steals those phones. Guts them. Transplants the circuitry and programs the codes in another cell phone. He sells the finished product at flea markets around the state. Whoever buys one gets a couple of months free long distance courtesy of the great state of Arizona. After that, the phone company catches on and cuts things off. But, hey, in the meantime it’s a pretty good scam.”
“A real character.”
“A real psycho character. Sandy thinks he beats up his wife. He’s just around the bend from pathologically jealous, as you found out this morning.” Benteen took a deep breath, and suddenly her voice went cold. “I think that maybe Ellis killed Vince Komoko. Or if he didn’t, he knows who did.”
Jack shook his head. There it was, right in front of him. Kate Benteen was definitely dishing it up and putting it right on his plate.
He wondered why. He could think of a half-dozen reasons right off. Some good. Some not so good.
Maybe he could trust her. Maybe they could work together- get to the end of this thing without anybody getting hurt.
Maybe he should tell her what Ellis had said about Komoko- that Ellis claimed to know the people who had chopped Vince down.
She said, “Let me ask you a question, champ.”
“Shoot.”
“Did you know Vince?”
“No.”
"Then you’re just after the money, nothing else? This whole thing isn’t personal to you?”
He looked at her. A long hard look. She stared straight ahead, at the road, waiting for an answer.
He wanted to tell her about his last night in the ring and how he knew he could never climb through the ropes again, and his worries about the new career Freddy had in mind for him. And he wanted to tell her about the hit man who was on his tail, and what the guy had done to his dog, and what the guy might have done to Johnny Da Nang, and how just the idea of putting someone so completely innocent as Johnny in danger was driving him nuts.
But most of all Jack wanted to give Kate Benteen the right answer, the one that she wanted to hear. He didn’t know why. But it occurred to him that maybe if this whole thing was something personal to Kate Benteen, it might become something personal to him, as well.
He sucked a deep breath. That was crazy. Man, he didn’t know anything about this woman. She could be anybody. Sure she could dive into a swimming pool as smooth as Esther-fucking-Williams, but that didn’t make her an Olympic medalist. And sure she could ride a horse, but that didn’t prove she was a rodeo queen.
Let alone all the other stuff she claimed to be.
And she claimed to be one hell of a lot.
Man oh man. .
“I’m waiting, champ,” she said. “One more time: is it personal?”
“I’ve got to think about that,” Jack said, and the words were barely out of his mouth when she whispered, “Don’t think too long.”