Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit (32 page)

The site now teemed with
uniformed Las Vegas Met
ropolitan police
officers, latex-gloved evidence techni
cians
and video camera operators, some plainclothes
detectives scouring the scene, and the gathered hordes
of early arrivals. None of them looked remotely
familiar,
and for that Temple was grateful.

Eventually,
the inevitable happened. A man ambled
over to them, laminated police ID clipped to his suit coat
lapel, and flipped open a notebook. He
rested a foot on
the empty end of their bench and took down their names,
addresses, and phone numbers.

“You two found the
body?" he finally asked.

“
Not so much 'found' as turned around and noticed,"
Electra
said quickly.

“
You mean you had been here a few minutes before
you noticed
it?"

“
Yes," Temple said, having learned through her dealings with
Lieutenant Molina that interrogation sessions
were like a dance class: it was better to let the police
lead and
the witness follow.

“
I understand this part of the hotel wasn't open yet."
Temple
and Electra nodded in tandem.

“You two don't look like
scofflaws."

“Thank you," Electra
interjected.

The
detective was not interested in bestowing com-
pliments; he just wanted to
know the why and wherefore.
"I've . . .
been involved with the Elvis pageant," Tem-
ple said.
"Electra was, is, an Elvis fan and was curious
about how the hotel
was going to evoke the Meditation
Garden. We figured we wouldn't hurt anything if we
took a look.”

He nodded and took notes, allowing Temple to take
her own mental notes: nice-looking
in
a bland way,
probably
a family man with two kids and a wife and a
minivan.
Quietly intelligent, preferred pencils to pens,
maybe an artistic
streak. . . .

“
What did you think when you
first saw the body?"

“
That it wasn't a
body," Electra blurted out. "Well, we'd been looking at all these
Elvis jumpsuits around here, out in the dome and in these display cases here,
and then there was that murdered jumpsuit in the
dress
ing room the other day."

“
Murdered jumpsuit?”

Electra, cow-eyed, glanced toward Temple. It oc
curred
to her too late that she might have said too much.

Temple
answered. "An Elvis jumpsuit was found with some red nail polish splashed
on the back and a dagger pushed through it."

“
Was this reported?"

“
I was told that hotel security was alerted and that the
police would be keeping an eye on things, but that
was
just hearsay."

“
Hearsay." The yellow pencil was held poised
over
the pad like a
strike-threatening snake. "You a lawyer,
ma' am?"

“
No way. I'm just saying what I heard. You'd have
to check with the hotel and the police department
to find
out exactly what was reported and what was done about
i
t."

“
What is your
occupation?" he persisted.

“I'm a public relations
specialist. Freelance.”

He glanced to the knots of people strung around the
pool.
"In your professional opinion, is this good, or bad, publicity for the hotel?"

“
Sudden death is always bad
publicity for a hotel." "Sudden death of a guy in an Elvis suit?”

Temple
sighed. "That's iffy. Some people can't get
enough of Elvis,
alive or dead, living or dying."
"Could it have been a publicity stunt gone bad?"

“
I don't see how. If the area was open to the public,
maybe. You
know: see Elvis wrestle an anaconda in the
Graceland
pool ... but that doesn't make any sense!
Aside from his Jungle Room, Elvis didn't have anything
to do with
snakes. Unless it was some of the people who surrounded him."

“Oh?"

“
I didn't have any particular snakes in mind; just the
general
show-business variety."

“What about that Buchanan
guy?"

“You noticed the
affinity."

“You know him?"

“
Only as much as I have to. He's a local writer, I suppose you'd have to
call him. For the
Las
Vegas
Scoop.”

The detective nodded with
that patented noncommittal
expression they
must go to police academy to master.
"And why do you suppose he was
here?"

“
I have no idea. He just came barreling out of the
bushes and rushed
straight into the pool. He claimed he tripped over something.”

The
detective flipped his notebook back a couple of
pages. "
'Some kind of animal, low and furred, like a
weasel.' The brownsuits say that
there's no weasel in the Animal Elvis exhibit."

“
The only animal we've seen here," Electra put in, "is
that
awful snake. Did they finally take it away?"

“Yes, ma'am. Quite a
struggle I hear. Too bad a snake doesn't leave tread marks.”

Electra shuddered at the
implication.

The
detective slapped his notebook shut and took his
foot off the bench. "Thanks for
the cooperation."

“
Like we were gonna take the Fifth," Electra muttered
as he
left. "Can we go now?”

Temple looked around.
"I guess so." She frowned at
Buchanan, still shivering on his bench.
"Apparently
they're hanging the
Crawf out to dry. You know, keep
ing
him waiting until he cracks and comes up with a
good excuse for being here. I'd almost feel sorry for him
if I didn't know his biggest regret is not being
able to
get back to the
Scoop
to break the story."

“Temple,
control yourself! Everything you've told me
about
him makes him the most venal, obnoxious man in
Las Vegas, and that's a
hard title to earn here."

“Yeah.
Think about the competition he's up against. Colonel Tom Parker. I'm going to
breeze by the dressing rooms and see if there's any reaction there."

“Think
they've heard?"

“This
is a pretty bizarre event to hide. Besides, I just directed the investigation
toward the Elvis pageant. I bet
those
impersonators will hunger for my hide; they don't
want to break their
concentration for anything."

“
They should be glad you're here to protect their
hides. If someone wants to kill ersatz Elvi,
there's a
whole menu to choose from."

“
I suppose you'll sacrifice your time and your best
interests
to accompany me down into the heart of Elvisdom?"

“
You do need a witness to prove the innocence of
your intentions. Just how many Elvi did you say
are on
tap downstairs?"

“It's
a regular microbrewery of megalomania."

“
Oh,
goodie!" Electra rubbed her hands together and
put her muumuu in motion.

Chapter 33

Bad Moon
Rising

(Elvis sang this Credence Clearwater Revival hit
in some of
his 1970s concerts)

Matt shrugged on his faux sheepskin jacket, but he
didn't
pull on his leather gloves.

He knew by now that a straggle of fans would be
waiting outside the radio station for him to autograph a
motley
assortment of ephemera: his photographs, their autograph books, even the
occasional T-shirt.

Leticia Brown encouraged this departing ritual. He
dreaded
it.

For one thing, he couldn't help feeling defeated at the
end of every show. The Midnight Hour had turned into
the
Elvis Hour. The phone lines bristled with calls from pro-and anti-Elvis
listeners. The list of stump-Elvis questions had grown to three pages.

As if sensing this mob excitement building, the mys
terious
caller had remained mysteriously silent last night. Matt was being upstaged by
a no-show.

He was annoyed with himself for not liking it, for
wishing the sonofagun would end the suspense and just
call, even it was to admit the whole thing was a hoax.
Which was what it had to be, of course. Better to be
revealed as the butt of a sick joke than to be stood up
by
a phantom.

They were always female, his fans, and they made
him nervous. They looked at him with such fevered,
hungry eyes, especially the Elvis groupies, as if he were
an artery to the heart-blood of the King. He had a feeling
they would slit his throat if they thought
that would re
vivify Elvis.

Why else were they standing out here in the chilly
dark
collecting worthless autographs from the pen of a pseudonym?
Still, they flocked to him when he exited the
building
with the touching excitement
of residents of a home for
the mentally challenged welcoming a rare
visitor to their world.

And maybe he was more than slumming in the alter
nate universes of talk radio and media idolization.
Maybe if they didn't have this outlet, this hope, their
lives
would implode, or explode.

Matt smiled and signed, won over despite himself by
their enthusiasm. Of the six fans tonight three were
stud
ents and three were middle-aged. The
twenty-five-to
forty-five-year-old age group
seemed to have better
things to do than fandom.

He glanced beyond their crowding shoulders to the
distant
street light.

No
ambiguous silhouette stood in wait.

Matt wondered if he had become caught up in Elvis fever,
had imagined that witness to his first encounter
with fans. Was this how Elvis had started? With a paltry
few? No, they had come in droves from the first. Evi
dently
Matt didn't have that animal magnetism.

The very notion made him
laugh, and the fans laughedwith him, delighted that he seemed happy to give
them attention.

Attention.
That was the key. Every human, and every animal, craved it. At times. Now he'd
had his fill.

The street light had a running mate tonight: a full
moon that hung above it like a hovering UFO. Blue
Moon
of Kentucky. Something Elvis had sung, or some amalgam of song and memory that
Matt had made up?
He wished them good night
and mounted the English-
made
motorcycle called a Hesketh Vampire, so well
named for nocturnal jaunts.

They eyed it with satisfaction. Elvis had loved mo
torcycles.

I hate this thing,
Matt wanted to shout at them. It was
borrowed, once-removed, from a man he at best disliked
and at worst envied and feared. It was as obvious and
noisy as it was spectacular and fast. Spectacular and fast
had never been Matt's speed.

He hated the ostentatious way you had to rev the en
gine before kicking off onto that aerial act of balancing
a thousand-pound machine like it was an English bicy
cle. And the thing tilted like a pinball machine on curves
and turns, defying gravity.