Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit (19 page)

“Mother
drank?"

“
Discreetly, but most of his male relatives weren't
in
the least discreet. Overdrinking and early death were
family traits. Elvis was down on alcohol, forbid having
it around, though he tried it out a few times in later
years.
His instincts were right about booze; his family
obviously had a genetic predisposition for the disease,
but no one then realized that that kind of thing is
genetic,
and that drugs are the same
bad ticket to ride. Elvis was
pretty
astute, but he had an odd habit of deferring to
people too much. He could have been predisposed to
depression, partly because of the loss of his twin,
which
made him likelier to take drugs.”

Temple studied the industrious rows of Elvis clones.
"Do you think any of these guys abuse drugs?"
"That'd
be taking imitation too far."

“
I'd think so, but you never know. Let's check 'em
out."

“This
isn't a grocery store," he commented.

Insouciant, she grinned back at him while wading into the
narrow, gym-bag cluttered passage between big guys
in bulky suits spraying their hair and fluffing their
side
burns with hair dryers.

“Media
coming through," Temple caroled, making
them
a head-turning attraction. "No cameras yet, don't
panic.
Preliminary interviews while you primp.”

Matt remained bemused by the sheer wholesale scale
of Elvis imitation as an avocation, and perhaps an art
form, for all he knew. He was reserving judgment until
he
saw some of the acts.

Was
any of these men his soft-spoken midnight caller?
Some shouted back and forth, exchanging tips and val
ued
accessories such as safety pins. Most were grimly
confronting their other selves in the mirrors, touching up
pale roots with dye-wands, struggling to balance
une
venly glued-on sideburns.

A few wives or girlfriends acted as dressers. Every
body seemed to be frowning in concentration, or shout
ing for an essential something that was inexplicably
missing. It reminded Matt of the fevered concentration
in dressing rooms before the grade-school Christmas
pageant.

“
Anybody missing a jumpsuit?" Temple added her
voice to the hubbub. It carried like a trumpet when
she
wanted it to, and she did now.

That shut them all up., Faces snapped from the mirrors
to focus on her red hair. And to focus on Matt standing
behind her, suddenly wishing he weren't. He still wasn't
used
to being in the spotlight.

“
Seriously, folks." Now that she had their
attention,
Temple pressed her advantage. "Who would mutilate an
expensive costume like that? Any ideas? And whose
suit
was it?"

“
You media," one Elvis finally said, his voice
nothing
like the real Elvis's. "Always looking for the bad news.”

Temple
shrugged. "Maybe it was a publicity stunt.”

That got them going. A half dozen voices chimed in.
No legitimate Elvis, was the consensus, would deface the
King's image in any form. And anyway, the imper
sonators all knew how much money went into the Suit.
They'd
have to be "lower than Red West" to trash one.

“So
where is the ruined suit now?" Matt asked, nonplussed when all those
blue-suede eyes focused on him.
Apparently
colored contact lenses were part of the cos
tume.

“That's
a good question," a significant other piped up. "Maybe it was
salvageable."

“
Someone should ask hotel security," another
woman
said.

“Maybe
the police have it," Temple suggested.

Their
glaring eyes returned to her. Matt realized that
Temple didn't mind stirring things up one little bit, in
fact, she reveled in it, smiling impishly as their
voices
turned on her as one.

“Why
would the police have anything to do with it?" "Nobody got
hurt."

“It
was just some Priscilla-hater fan, trying to throw a scare into Quincey to get
her out of the show.”

Matt
found himself with a need to know too. "Why
would
anyone want Quincey out of the show?"
A pause. He had hit a nerve.

“
A lot of us feel she
doesn't belong here," began a
portly
Elvis who wore an outfit Matt recognized from
photos: the American eagle jumpsuit created for the
El
vis:
Aloha from Hawaii
satellite TV special in 1973.

“
Why not?" Temple asked indignantly. Matt
could tell
she was in her
defense-of-the-helpless-and-innocent
mode,
although Quincey Conrad was neither. "She was
the only woman out of
gadzillions he actually married."

“Elvis
was forced into that," a tall, thin Elvis objected. "Her father and
Colonel Parker put the pressure on."

“
And look at her now, turned everybody on the staff
out
like horses too old to pull their weight, snubbed the
long-time fans, and turned Graceland into a tourist at
traction. She even redecorated the place before it
went
public. Elvis's Red Period was too tacky for her. Nobody
understood that Elvis kept his roots and his
tastes; he
didn't go Hollywood like
Miss Priss. That woman was
all bottom-line from the very
beginning."

“How
'bottom-line' could a fourteen-year-old be?”

Matt
interjected, goaded into feeling some of Temple's indignation. "When she
left Elvis in seventy-two at age
twenty-six,
she didn't even know how to write a check.
All of her spending money had been parceled out, and
stingily
too, by Vernon."

“
Maybe there was reason to keep her on a short
leash,"
muttered an Elvis wearing the "claw" jumpsuit
featuring Native American designs, dabbing some stuff
Matt recognized as concealer under his black-lashed
eyes.

“
She wasn't kept on one short enough," another
man
put in with a bawdy laugh.

Matt found his blood pressure rising. He'd read
enough about these people, bizarre as their lifestyle
was,
to feel he knew
them somewhat. "Elvis never stopped
seeing
his rotating harem of women. Priscilla wasn't un
faithful until Elvis stopped having sexual relations with
her
after Lisa Marie was born."

“
Elvis was the King," announced a stocky man
with
a wig that resembled a nesting duck-billed platypus. "He
didn't live by the rules everybody else does. She didn't
understand him. She tried to domesticate him. He
was
born to be wild and free."

“
And screwed up," Temple muttered so only Matt
could hear her.

“The
women who really cared about him," said a quiet
voice from a corner, where a man apparently had heard
her comment, "they couldn't stay. It wasn't
the infidelity
so much as his downward
slide with the drugs. They
couldn't stand to watch him sinking.”

Matt was struck by the voice. It wasn't the one on the
call-in phone, really, but closer to a genuine Southern
accent than any of the Elvis impersonators' natural
voices so far. When his searching eyes found the
speaker,
he wasn't surprised, given his conversation with
Temple not long before. Something of Elvis lurked in
the bone
structure beneath the baby face.

This guy was not primping,
just sitting jiggling his
dark-booted foot
enough so that the forelock curlicued
onto
his forehead trembled like it was caught in a fan
draft. Something about his relaxed, pensive
posture re
minded Matt of some of the
moody black-and-white
photos of Elvis in his early and mid career.

Matt didn't know much about performers, but this
guy's very sobriety suggested he could uncoil as hard
and
fast as a rattlesnake onstage.

A dark horse in the glittery Elvis sweepstakes, but
who
knows?
Temple was trolling for more obvious
prey than po
tential winners.

“
So," she said more loudly into the lingering
silence
the distant Elvis's comment
had caused, "does anybody
here have it in for the Priscilla
clone?"

“
Us?" A yip of indignation from an Elvis in
the op
posite corner. "We don't
have to like the real one, but
this
girl's part of the grand finale. She hands out the
authentic imitation gold belt from when Elvis
broke the
Las Vegas attendance record
at the Hotel International
in nineteen
sixty-nine to whoever wins the competition. No way we're gonna short-circuit a
moment of glory for
one of us."

“
Only one of you can win," Matt pointed out.
"Maybe
the other ninety-nine wouldn't mind a sour ending
note."

“
Nah. We're not like that. We compete, sure, but we
know
you're up one time and down another."

“
You mean there are no leading candidates for the
grand
prize?" Temple asked.

Silence and shrugs infected the room. A wife, or
girlfriend, paused in teasing a pompadour, then one finally
spoke.

“
Oh, there are guys who've won before, and might
again. El Vez always has a good act, and other guys
are
tops too. But we've been at
dozens of these competi
tions, and
there's always some upset, or some new guy
winning out of the blue. You can't count on winning,
no matter
who you are, and you sure can't do anything
about
it except to do your best when it's your time on
stage.

“But
surely," Temple persisted, Matt feeling almost
embarrassed by her dogged pursuit of a point of view
so strongly denied, "some one contender is
particularly
strong, someone who won last time, or whatever.”

Again, the silence, during which blue eyes courtesy of
Bausch and Lomb consulted each other. The fragile
wooden
ice-cream chairs creaked under the shifting posteriors of nervous Elvi.

“
There's KOK, of course," said a fellow so
diminutive
only his voice could be heard.

“
KOK?" Temple was perplexed, and Matt had
never
seen the initials in all the Elvis books he had skimmed, including
those on impersonators.

A huge Elvis stood, and it wasn't hard to look huge
in
those white, flared-bottom jumpsuits.

“
KOK," he repeated. "The King of Kings.
Guy
named . . . what? David something.”

How
appropriate, Matt thought.

“
No, no, no. His name was Ken-something. Peebles
maybe,"
another Elvis suggested.

“No,
Perkins."

“
Purvis. Ken or Kyle—something Purvis," the
Elvis
in the corner contributed again, warily.

“Perkins,"
the second Elvis said firmly. "Man, he was
something. Didn't think he was Elvis, mind you. But he played the part
like a reincarnation of Elvis. Eerie, that
guy was. In fact, that's what some of us nicknamed him.
Eerie Elvis. That's with two Es at the beginning,
not like
in Erie, Pennsylvania.”