I assured her I would do my best to locate Elvis Presley and retrieve the negatives. In the meantime, she was to sit tight and wait for him to contact her.
THE NEXT DAY I paid another call to the Resort, intending to knock on the seven Elvises’ doors, looking for the man in the snapshot. I stepped into the lobby, all spacious atrium, soaring spaces, and glittering poshness. I stopped dead in my blue suede shoes. The lobby was jammed with about thirty men who were, well… Elvis. Some of them were dressed in rhinestone-studded jumpsuits, others in brown suits, jeans, and tee-shirts, you name it. But each and every one of them resembled, in some way, the man in the snapshot. Elvis had not left the building. Elvis had tripped and fallen on the Xerox machine.
I groaned. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Maurice laughing.
I fought my way through the Elvises, looking each of them closely in the face, trying to match one of them to the photograph. It was about as possible as looking fashionable in a white jumpsuit when you’re a hundred pounds overweight. These men all had black pompadours, long sideburns, and fried grits accents. I eliminated a few, trained investigator that I am: too young (twelve), female (sex change?), and Japanese… (nah!) There were two who were very overweight, doing an Elvis-late-in-his-career routine, no doubt. Finally I made it to the front desk where Maurice was calmly waiting for me.
“Hello, Jakob,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
I held up the photograph for him to re-examine. “Have you seen him?”
“Nearly a hundred times.”
I sighed. “How many are there?”
He handed me the flyer for the Amazing Elvis Extravaganza. It advertised 101 Amazing Elvises. I was looking for an Elvis in an Elvis stack. “One hundred and one,” I repeated in a stunned whisper.
“Yes,” Maurice said. “And I understand the Grand Finale is a mass chorus singing ‘Jailhouse Rock’ a capella.”
Before I could respond, Maurice patted my hand and suggested I go into his office and put my head between my knees. Instead, I went knocking on the doors of the performers who had registered under the name of Elvis Presley. The first two doors I knocked on didn’t draw a response. The third door did-it swung open. An unlocked, open door to a private eye is like steak tartare to a pit bull. I glanced cautiously up the hallway, then down, then stepped into the room.
“Hello? Elvis? You in here?”
Elvis was not present. Alicia Kingston was. She was lying in the middle of the floor with a knife through her heart.
DETECTIVE RAY CHURCH glanced at me over his reading glasses. “Why are you here, Jakob?”
“I’m a big Elvis fan,” I said.
“Let me rephrase that.” Church paused long enough to glance into the middle distance with his blue-gray eyes, then said, “Why are you here, Jakob?”
There was enough menace in the second version to count as re-phrasing, so I told him about my search for the Elvis who was blackmailing Alicia Kingston.
“Huh,” Church said, using the edge of his notebook to scratch at the silver hair at his temples. Church was a big, powerful man in his mid-forties who looked like he spent a lot of time in a fishing boat with a rod and reel in his hand. As a matter of fact, he had retired from the St. Louis P.D. and moved to Grand Bay two years ago, hoping for just that. “Well, Jakob, I guess we’ll have to round up the, uh, usual suspects.”
“Usual?” I said.
“Work with me, Jakob,” he said. “Work with me.” He shook his head and muttered, “Show business.”
IT WAS THE oddest lineup in history: six Elvis imitators leaning against a wall in an open conference room provided by Maurice Winston. It was like that old ad: short ones, fat ones, even ones with… well, no chicken pox, at least not as far as we could tell. The Elvises who had legally changed their names to Elvis Presley ranged in age from twenty-two to fifty-three and seemed to range in weight from a ninety-eight-pound weakling to a three-hundred-fifty-pounder who looked like a heart-attack-in-training. The seventh Elvis in the room was the guy who ran the Elvis Extravaganza, and his legal name was Myron Shalton. Everybody called him Big Elvis. Shalton was in his fifties and looked like what Elvis would have looked like if Elvis had lived, spent a couple months at Betty Ford, changed his diet, hooked up with a personal trainer, and aged gracefully.
“Where’s the seventh?” Church growled.
Big Elvis said, “There are only six legally named Elvi with the show.”
“Elvi?” I asked.
Big Elvis nodded.
Church turned to Maurice Winston, who was hovering like a panicky hummingbird. “There are seven registered,” he said. “I gave the list to Jakob myself. Seven.”
“Do you remember the seventh?”
Maurice eyed the six, uh, Elvi. “Yes, Detective. I checked the seventh Elvis in myself.”
“What’d he look like? Can you describe him?”
Maurice turned to blast Church with an arctic glare. “Yes, Detective. He looked like Elvis Presley.”
I thought I could hear Church’s teeth grind for a moment before he turned to me. “Any ideas, Jakob?”
“One,” I said. I withdrew the mailing envelope and its cargo of incriminating photographs, retrieved one and compared its likeness to the six men before me. I pointed at him. “You we’ll keep. The rest, take a break-”
“But don’t go too far,” Church said.
Once Elvis Presley, Church, and I were alone in the room, I held up the photograph for him to see. His face grew red. “Who took that picture?” he blurted out.
“You didn’t?” I asked.
“No sir. I did not.”
“You’re sure?”
“I was a, uh, little busy at the time,” he said.
Church, meanwhile, was examining the mailing envelope. He tapped a finger on the cancelled stamps. “Mr. Presley, where were you six days ago?”
“The third?”
“Yes.”
“Well, let’s see. That would have been Indianapolis, I think. We’re zigzagging across the country, more or less. Cleveland to Detroit to Cincinnati to Grand Rapids to Grand Bay, then we’re up to Marquette, then a long trip over to Green Bay. From there we’ve got an extended run in Branson, Missouri.”
I took the mailing envelope from Church and examined the postage. The envelope, its photographs and blackmail note had been mailed from Grand Bay, Michigan, while our Elvis Presley was in Indianapolis, Indiana.
“Huh,” I said.
“You can say that again,” Church said. “Mr. Presley, you can go now.”
Elvis nodded and left. Church said, “Any more bright ideas?”
I looked at the stamps on the mailing envelope. “Well, just one. But it’s a good one.”
RAY CHURCH AND I were watching the tide of visitors ebb and flow through the Kingston house, a neat colonial with robin’s-egg blue vinyl siding and a beautiful crop of Kentucky blue for a lawn.
“I feel guilty,” I said. “I should’ve noticed the stamp. Things might’ve been different.”
Church shrugged. “You also told her to inform you when he contacted her and she didn’t. She went and met him alone instead. If she’d listened to you in the first place-it’s what she was paying you for-she’d be alive. Of course, it’s possible you’d be dead. Frankly, I’d rather try to figure out who killed Alicia Kingston than try to figure out who killed you.”
“I’m touched,” I said.
“It’s hard to find good fishing partners,” he said.
“You say I talk too much and scare the fish.”
He smirked. “You do. It’s possible that’s what makes you a good fishing partner.”