Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit (52 page)

“
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 ob
session.
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, tech
nician 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. In
cluding gold
mines."

“
What a wimp," the caller said. "Holing up in his bed
room
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.

“
Stand-in," another male voice said. "She
had it right.
He was our stand-in.
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 stand-ins anymore. You fans
who
won't get over it, get a life!”

The
debate was high-octane tonight.

“
Couldn't you tell the poor man is just looking for
peace, whoever he is?" The woman's voice was
teary.
"We can give it to him if
we just stop expecting him to
be anything any more, even alive. That was
so sad, Mr. Midnight. What Elvis said last night. I hope he's all right
now."

“
He's all right, mama. He's probably calling in
from
some money-laundering island in
the Caribbean, laugh
ing at how
gullible we all are. He's probably got a secret
deal with the estate to stay dead, so they can milk his
image better. Who wants to see Elvis a senior
citizen? I
hope you radio people
expose the bastard who's been
pulling
the wool over everybody's eyes. If he comes on
again, I dare you to let
me ask him a few questions."

“
You'd scare him away! You probably already have.
Guys
like you were just jealous of Elvis.”

Matt was playing referee tonight. He hardly had to
put a word in as Leticia conducted the bristling switch
board
like a bandleader.

He sat there, listening, exhausted by the strong feel
ings
pro and con the topic of Elvis raised, growing more concerned that this outbreak
of emotion would drive
away the one man who
really needed to get on the line:
the supposed Elvis himself.

These calls had always come independently of who
ever
else was calling in and what they were saying. Elvis
seemed cocooned in his own world, musing in a sometimes laid-back,
sometimes manic monologue. Matt al
most
got the impression that he didn't listen to the radio
show at all, that he just dialed during the proper
hour
and connected.

Two isolated men, talking, with the world listening in.
And
the FBI.

Matt shifted in his seat, interrupting a denouncement
of rock 'n' roll music. "The music can't talk back.
And
neither can Elvis."

“
Yes, he can!" the next caller argued.
"He's been talk
ing here."

“
We don't know who that is. Was," Matt said,
sud
denly sure. "I don't think
whoever he was will be calling
in again."

“Why,
is his contract up?" a snide-sounding man demanded.

“
I think
he's shared as much of himself as he's going
to. Didn't you
notice his call last night had a .
final . . . air to it?"

“
Aw, he won't ever go away, not really." The woman
sounded more anxious than certain. "You can't
mean
that was it. That he'll just stop."

“He
did before.”

But the calls didn't stop. Someone even asked every
one
not to call in, "so that the King could get through.”

Matt smiled to see Leticia's face solidifying into hor
ror on the other side of the glass barrier. Nobody wanted
Elvis to stop calling.

Except
Matt.

“It's
over," he said, voicing his thoughts.

The big hand on the schoolhouse clock sliced the line
that stood for twelve fifty-nine. The roulette wheel of
time
was running out tonight, and even Leticia's will-
ingness to let the show run
overtime meant nothing if
the main attraction failed to show.

“
He's skipped a night before," a woman's thin
voice
pointed out just as the minute
hand clicked into place
on high noon, or high midnight.

Matt heard his rush of closing words. Thanksforcall
ing,
we'llhavetowaitandsee. Waitandsee.

Reluctantly, Leticia's falling hand cued Dwight to run
the
scheduled ad.

Matt pulled off the headphones before he could hear
some inane jingle for a furniture rental place or a car
dealership or a Laundromat. Advertisers at the midnight
hour expected a young and restless audience in need of
credit and consumer goods. What a role model Elvis was
for
them.

“Sorry,"
Leticia told him on the way out.

He
didn't want to admit that he wasn't sorry.

Maybe his long session last night had exorcised Elvis.
He
hoped so.

The group outside was bigger than ever, up to nine
people.
All women.

“
He didn't call us," one wailed as soon as she
saw
him.

“
Don't take it personally. If he's standing anybody
up,
it's me."

“Nobody
would stand you up, Mr. Midnight.”

Matt stared, nonplussed, into devoted eyes that would
look
right on a basset hound.

“
How did you all get here so fast?" he
wondered
aloud.

“
We came early and listened on the car radio,"
a pair
of plump night-shift nurses
said, almost as one, proud
of their initiative.

“
Maybe he'll call tomorrow." Another woman
handed
him the usual photograph to sign.

Leticia had given him a pen that wrote in silver, so it
would show up on the photo's darker surfaces. She had
a
whole box of the things, brand-new, and had beamedlike Santa Claus bestowing an
electric train instead of a
producer
anticipating many nights of numbing ritual out
side the radio station door that would soon become tiring
and then
an imposition.

Once
the novelty wore off, so would the ease.

“You
might want to sign this on something solid.”

Matt had been so busy autographing his photos that
he hadn't noticed the quiet woman come up. She looked
more businesslike than the average fan, and her tote bag
still
had shipping folds in it. Elvis's face on the black background was drawn and
quartered right through the Pepsi-Cola smile.

Matt
took the thick fabric pen she offered—do their
research, the FBI—to the newspaper vending machine,
slipping the one set of tapes from his jacket
pocket and
into the bag.

He wrote "Sincerely, Mr. Midnight" in big loose
let
ters across the rough surface.

Her
mumbled "thank you" vanished into the pressing
crowd, who weren't many, but who all wanted to be
in
the first row of his admirers.