Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit (4 page)

Temple
and Aldo rounded a bend to find the tunnel
had
broadened into a cavern. Heavy-duty machinery, use-scuffed, sat idle.

So did the workmen in their yellow hard hats, beams
from the built-in lights cast on the ground.
Temple
had never seen such
a hang-dog crew, obviously in need of
an
"Avast, me hearties" speech.

Which
they were now getting from the foreman.
One by one, the
hard hats lifted and their beams fo
cused on the newcomers.

The foreman turned, for a moment looking worried.
But his expression soon hardened into contempt. "And
who
are you two? Dorothy and the Straw Man?”

Aldo stepped forward as if posing for an
Esquire
ad
in a soldier of fortune magazine.
"That's `scarecrow' to
you. We
are representatives of the management. What's
the
holdup down here? Still seeing things?”

The workmen stirred. Some spat. All of them grum
bled
uneasily.

Temple
realized that she and Aldo looked like dudes
on
a mustang ranch. She eyed the foreman, one of those
salt-of-the-earth, sweat-of-the-brow types who wore a
tool belt
like it sported six-guns. Someone who inspired confidence, and a wide berth.

He was tall, burly, big-bellied, hairy, and grizzled, like
a teddy bear gone ballistic.

She decided not to beat around the bushiness. "We
heard there was trouble down here." It was hard not
to
add "in
River
City
.”

Everyone shifted his weight,
but no one spoke. "Everything's obviously been going great,"
Temple
went on. "The mine shafts are a work of art, I
see the
ride tracks are laid, the
phosphorescent walls are as
creepy as you could hope—”

All motion, even spitting,
stopped on the word "phosphorescent.”

Maybe it had too many
syllables.

“
You know, the eerie, glowing . . . whatever . . . you
painted on
the walls.”

A silence. Then Teddy
Foreman spoke with the grum-
ble
of a wakening volcano. "That's just it, Miss. We got
too much phosphorescence for our own good."
"It's
not like, a chemical reaction? An allergy?”

A workman laughed.
"That's it. An allergy. We need shots."

“
I know the kinda shots we need," another man
shouted.

But they
were guffawing instead of growling under
their breaths and
spitting, and
Temple
counted that a
victory.
Of sorts.

“So what's wrong?" she
asked, straight up.

The
foreman removed his hard hat to scratch his bald spot. "It's like this.
The set dressers come down after us
to paint up the rocks. Like you said,
real nice job. Except
the phosphorescence detail comes behind us. And we
suddenly got a little swamp
gas ahead of us.”

Temple
advanced into
their midst, aware of Aldo like
a reversed shadow on her heels. Such
as those heels
were. "What's ahead of you?" She peered into the
tun
nel's
continuation on the cavern's other side.

Teddy shrugged.
"Doesn't show up right now." "Maybe the light's bad," she
suggested.

Hard hats shook.

“
Lights are what made us see it," Teddy the Foreman
said.

“It was weird," another
voice volunteered. "It moved."
"These
beams of light are always moving."
Temple
looked to Aldo for agreement. His nod
demonstrated
how wavery a hard hat beam could be. "Even breathing
makes them tremble a little, you know how it is
when
you look through binoculars.”

A man
stood up, his beam a tremor in the dimness,
like his voice.

“
We saw it. We shouldn'ta seen it. It was brighter
than those
paintings behind us. It was moving. Away."

“
Cold lightning." Aldo's voice sounded firm as a fire
arm.

“
Naw. We've seen cold lighting. We've seen blue
light arcing. Spark
showers. Electricity on a bad trip.”

A third
man's voice joined the chorus. "This was .. .
thin light, but
shaped, like those tunnels people who are
dying see. Only
the light wasn't the tunnel, the light was
the man in it."

“Man?"
Temple
asked sharply.

“
Or a woman in pants, or an ape in chaps," an anon
ymous voice snapped from the dark. "Jeez,
lady, I guess we know what a man or a woman looks like in the dark,
even when they're gussied up in some strange-fangled
halo—"

“Or an aura?"
Temple
wondered.

“Coulda been this guy here
in the ice-cream suit, if it
glowed. You
know, pale with the pinched-in waist.
Don't
care what you call it—halo, aura, Day-Glo gaso
line, it was weird."

“
You think you saw a ghost,"
Temple
concluded.
They were silent.

Temple
realized it was
more serious than that.
"An
... alien?”

Another silence.

“
Know what I think? I don't think it was really any
thing weird like that." The foreman nodded, a
Daniel
come to judgment. "It was Elvis.”

The silence
went unbroken for a long, long time. The
simple rightness of
the suggestion had struck everyone
dumb.

At last, a consensus.

Like
the apparition itself, the inescapable conclusion
was very, very weird.

Chapter 3

Blue Suede Blues

(Elvis recorded "Blue Suede
Shoes" in 1956,
and sang it at his screen test on April Fools Day
that year)

"Elvis ... Presley?”

Van von
Rhine, an elegant taffy-haired woman in an
Escada sueded-silk
suit, lifted nearly invisible eyebrows
with her voice.

That
she should even have to use the last name indi
cated how bizarre
she found the problem that
Temple
and Aldo had
duly brought to her ultramodern office.

Then she
laughed. "Really. This is ... incredible.
We'll be accused
of angling for publicity if this gets out.
Elvis. Presley.
Please! That's another hotel. Better that
the ... visitant
should be Howard Hughes. Or one of
those
X-Files
creatures."

“Aliens," Aldo put in.

Van
nodded absently, staring at the transparent surface
of her glass desktop as if it were a
wishing well.
Temple
realized that she had never seen anyone who
kept
an office so neat that a glass desktop remained
empty except for its
carefully placed accoutrements.

Van's fingers tapped the end of a fountain pen on the
glass. She looked worried when she glanced back up at
them. "Glowing, they say. A man's figure. You don't
suppose
it could be the—the—"

“
The ghost of Jersey Joe Jackson is too much to hope
for,"
Temple
interjected. "There hasn't been
any .. .
unauthorized activity in the
Ghost Suite lately, has
there?"

“
Nothing anyone has had the nerve to tell me."
Van
threw down the pen with a
discordant click. "You do
understand
that if there is any subject on which the staff
would spare my
feelings—?"

“
Van, your superstitious ways are legendary,"
Temple
said. "But other people eat up the odd, the
weird, the
eerie. Jersey Joe Jackson
is a fabulous legend to build
the
theme ride around: a poor person's Howard Hughes,
a desert pack-rat and miner-nineteen-forty-niner
with
stashes of hidden assets all
over the place, who built this
hotel
in the old days, went broke, and died here. Any
body that interesting was
bound to leave a little eau de
ectoplasm
behind. I wish I'd seen him hanging around
his old suite, seven thirteen, instead of you. I'd have
asked him for personal appearances."
Temple
laughed as
Van looked horrified. "But I know you don't
want to
hear that because you believe
in ghosts and other super
stitious
sightings. I'm amazed you let a black cat like
Midnight Louie hang around out back before he mi
grated down the Strip
to the Circle Ritz."

“
As long as he didn't cross my path. And his succes
sor, Midnight Louise, is especially good at
avoiding me.
I wish I could say as
much for the ghost," she finished
with a mutter.

“
You know, a ghostly visitation is not necessarily
a
bad thing. From a marketing standpoint."

“
You're the public relations
whiz. Is it possible you arranged for
this
apparition to make a small
stir?"

“
If I had, I'd be plenty
disappointed. I'd much rather
have the spirit of Jersey Joe Jackson show
up than Elvis Presley.”

Aldo interjected himself into their conversation.
"You
got something against Elvis,
Miss
Temple
?"

“
Well, other than the fact that he's irrelevant to
the
theme of our hotel—"

“
Elvis? 'Irrelevant' to Vegas? Hey, he made this
town.”

Van joined
Temple
in staring at Aldo. Neither had seen a
Fontana
brother in such a state of enthusiasm,
with
the sole exception of Nicky, Van's husband.

“
Are you a fan, Aldo?" Van asked in polite
amaze
ment.

“
Aren't you? Isn't
everybody?"

“No!"
Temple
responded.

“
What's the matter? You don't like rock 'n' roll?"
"No,"
Van said much more calmly.

Aldo looked as if he had been shot
in
the heart.
"This
is serious. I can
understand the boss lady not liking
Elvis.
She grew up over there in
Europe
. But,
Miss
Temple
, you do not look like someone who would not
like
Elvis.”

Under Aldo's wounded gaze,
Temple
found herself
flailing
for words, a novelty.

“
Well, these things are very personal, Aldo. I
never
thought that much about why I
don't like Elvis. . . . For one thing, he was pretty much a dead issue when I
was
a teenager."

“
And he became so overblown in his later
years," Van
put in, "so—"

“
Fat?" Aldo suggested
pugnaciously.

Van remained as cool as crème de menthe. "I was
referring to his bejeweled jumpsuits, those World
Wrestling
champion-sized belts, those sideburns bushy enough to have made a grizzly bear
blush."

“I
think Van is describing a general air of . . . tacky,"
Temple
added.