Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit (12 page)

Only in Las Vegas, of course.

Chapter 11

Any Way You
Want Me

(A
million-selling hit Elvis recorded in his
Golden Year of 1956 at RCA)

A
head poked around the dressing room door.

“
I heard about the deceased jumpsuit and came to see
it if was one of mine.”

The
face was cherubic under a gleaming helm of high, wide, and handsome dark hair,
with the heavy sideburns
resembling the
hinged metal side-flaps on a knight's hel
met.

Temple had never pictured Elvis Presley as Sir Lan
celot, but these stylized wigs sure made the comparison
apt. The hair looked lacquered enough to resist a direct
hit
by a medieval mace.

“Hi,
Kenny," Quincey greeted him.

The Elvis imitator sashayed into the room, still gazing
at the fallen jumpsuit with fascinated disbelief.
"Man,
that's one of those wool-gabardine
numbers out of De-
troit. Must be worth three grand ... or was before
the
blood got on it."

“
Nail polish," Temple said, drawing his
attention for
the first time.

“
Say, this must be a shock for you, kid, coming over
to visit your classmate and running
into a ruined Elvis
suit.”

Most gainfully employed women of thirty would be
thrilled
to be taken for a high-school senior. Temple, at
five-feet-three tops in high heels, considered it a decla
ration of
war.

“
I do PR for the Crystal Phoenix," she said as
crisply
as a military officer giving
rank. "We've had a ... man
ifestation
at a construction site and I came over here to
look into it.”

Kenny
frowned, which did not budge his hairline a
centimeter.
"Why would you come over here to check
out a problem on a work site all the way over at the
Crystal
Phoenix?"

“
The disruption was
apparently an Elvis sighting."

“
Whoo, boy! There's a
few of those in town right
now, and I
bet that's always happening." He nodded at
the suit. "Wow.
This thing has been laid out, excuse the
expression,
in the position of a chalk body outline from
a crime show on TV. D'you suppose the suit was out
for an unauthorized walk, got attacked at the
Phoenix,
and made it back here before collapsing?"

“
Anything is possible,"
Temple said, meaning it.

Standing
here talking to a five-feet-six Elvis clone (the
real one had been around six feet, she guessed) with a
sixties Priscilla Presley looking on was more than
a trip
down memory lane, it was a
trip, period. And trips like
that,
Temple had supposed, were mostly of seventies
vintage, when LSD was the
operating system of choice.

Quincey must have decided that too, because she sat down
and returned to arranging her layers of false eye
lashes
in the mirror, using a straight pin to strip the ex
cess mascara off each one. There was a lot of excess
mascara to
lose.

Kenny shook his head sadly at the dead jumpsuit.
"I'm glad it isn't one of mine. Bet it wasn't
insured
either. We put a
lot of time and heart and soul into our
acts, but we put our cash into the jumpsuits. And the
hair."
He pointed upward, as if anyone could miss the Hair.

“
So word about the ruined jumpsuit is getting
around,"
Temple said, encouraging further confidences.

She wanted to figure out if there was any reason an
Elvis imitator would make an unscheduled appearance
at the Jersey Joe Jackson Mine Ride-in-progress. Or if
anyone might have a motive for laying someone's ex
pensive
costume low. Anything that touched the Crystal Phoenix was her business.

Kenny pulled out a wooden chair, flipped it around
and sat so he could cradle his forearms on the back. He
was a bantam Elvis, chunky, with overdeveloped mus
cles
rather than fat, his high hair like a brunet coxcomb.
Despite his rounded features, no one would mistake him
for a high-schooler. Temple guessed that he was a
de
cade older than she.

“
Word gets around," Kenny admitted. "We
all watch
what the others are doing."

“Paranoid?"

“Naw,
eager to learn. After all, there's no one like us, right?"

“How
many are running around the hotel?"

“Gosh,
maybe a hundred."

“A
hundred?"

“
This is the biggest Elvis-impersonator competition
ever. Everybody's here from the Grand
Old Men who
invented the art to the rawest new kids on the block."

“And
where do you rank?"

“
Somewhere in the middle." Kenny grinned.
"But
anything can happen. It's a competition, right?"

“
Competitive
enough for somebody to ice somebody
else's jumpsuit?'

“
Gee, Elvis was red, white, and blue suede shoes. I'd
hate to think someone would get petty in his name.
None
of us would be doing this if we
didn't revere the man's
talent and
what he stood for. So, no, I can't imagine one
of us sinking that low. Besides, any competition's a
crapshoot. It'd be better to attack the judges than
some
poor innocent jumpsuit."

“
This looks like a pretty spectacular one. I'd hate to
duplicate
it on short notice.”

Kenny
shook his head mournfully. "I couldn't feel
worse seeing that
destroyed there, other than seein' some
guy in it. God, I
put in every spare minute and nickel
for the past three years to get myself
here. When I first
started
performing at karaoke clubs around Philly, I got
laughed off the stage until I got good enough to laugh
back.
Someone who'd ruin any Elvis imitator's mainstay deserves to be stabbed in the
back too."

“But your suits are
safe."

“
Better be. I got two. A lot of guys only got one and
they put all their hopes and dreams and their best
buddies' cash into it. Families, friends, they gotta support
your Elvis
habit, or you wouldn't make it this far.”

Temple was actually starting to choke up over the
ruined
jumpsuit.

For an
Elvis impersonator, she saw, a jumpsuit was a
costly second
skin. Designing and underwriting one was
the single biggest commitment he made
to his avocation.
Whoever had thrust the
gaudy dagger through the rhine
stone
stallion had also stabbed a metaphorical blow into
the owner's heart.

Malicious mischief wasn't quite strong enough to de
scribe
the ruin wreaked here.

“
It could be dirty tricks before the
competition," she
said.

Kenny nodded. "Or it could be someone who hates
the
King, in any form.""That would mean you all were in danger.”

Kenny's
bright blue eyes squinted almost closed. "He did get a lot of death
threats when he was alive. You'd sorta hope that would stop when he was
dead."

“I
thought he was still showing up here and there reg-
ularly."

“So
the tabloids say. That's always been the big joke."

“What?"

“That
Elvis faked his own death because he was tired
of all the hoopla. That he's out here somewhere, mas
querading as
an Elvis imitator."

“He'd
be . . . how old?"

“Almost
retirement age. Sixty-four."

“
Do you think he could pass
as himself at that age?"

“I've seen dudes that old
pass as Elvis at thirty-five.

I even
saw a woman do a great Comeback Elvis."
"Why would a
woman want to imitate Elvis?"
"Same reason we all do: loved the sound and the
songs; loved the King.”

Kenny's
voice had sunk to a reverential hush.

“What
kind of work do you do, Kenny, when you're not doing Elvis?”

He
hung his head a little. Maybe he was shy, or maybe
the
helmet of hair was too heavy a burden to carry.
"Shoe salesman in the mall. And
no, they don't make
blue suede shoes anymore, least
not for guys. Say, those are some sharp heels you got on there."

“That's
the general idea," Temple said. A three-inch heel was a portable dagger.

Chapter 12

I Forget to
Remember to Forget

(A
catchy song Elvis recorded for RCA in 1956;
record execs were
much higher on it than his
next
recording, "Heartbreak Hotel")

He'd look at the old photos
now and then.

Where
had he gone, Young Elvis? And Middle Elvis—didn't
those damn
Egyptians have a Middle Kingdom or somethin'?
He didn't count for much, Middle Elvis.
A flash in the devel
oping pan: for a few
blinks of the camera's eye lean and mean
in a black leather suit. Just a bridge over troubled waters. And
then
there was Jumpsuit Elvis, and he'd been pretty good almost to the end, except
you could see it in his eyes, in the
photos.
Zonked on pharmaceuticals. So finally he became Ultimate Elvis. Fat and Forty
Elvis. Even Johnny Carson on the
Tonight Show
took potshots at Fat Elvis.
That had hurt. He watched TV a lot. And he didn't shoot out the screen, either.
He was too weary by then to hit back.

Parade-blimp
Elvis. Nothin' to hide behind but his own ex
cesses. But were
they ever his own? Ever'body owned him. Hismama and his daddy, his Colonel
Parker and his Memphis Ma
fia,
his playgirls and his maybe-real girls, who touched him just enough to make him
not ever wanta get burned that way again.

When
he was young, he could eat what he wanted, play
wlth what he wanted, screw what he wanted. Or what wanted
him.

And everythin' movin' did.

Oh, yeah.

That's all right, Mama.

The
King frowned. It wasn't all right, Mama. Never had been.

No one had told him. He never knew he couldn't just keep
on keepin' on. That there'd be consequences.

Consequences!
Hell, that was the name of a town in New Mexico with "Truth or" in
front of it. He'd never visited that tank town, though the Colonel had him
traipsing through
every whistle-stop in
America. Never out of America, though.
Turned out his whole career was
driven by what Colonel
Parker had to hide.
Where were the tell-all books about
that?
How the Colonel was an illegal Dutch alien, so he kept
turning down flat
all of the million-dollar offers to play Eu
rope
or Japan or Australia, challenging moves that would
have kept a
performer interested in his own life and career,
instead of getting bored to death. Or on the way the Colo
nel
kissed the King off to Hollywood, for thirty-two quick-shoot movies that
minimized his performing talent just to maximize everybody's profit. Or how he
ran him ragged in
Las Vegas with two shows a
night because the Colonel owed
millions in gambling debts to the
International Hotel owner, even when it later became the Las Vegas Hilton.
Colonel played and Elvis paid. And paid. And paid, until there was only one way
to stop.

No use crying over spilt
buttermilk, though.