Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit (21 page)

Then
my mitt strikes something on my downward
swing.
There is a faint crackling above. Light winks on
before I land. The naked flare of overhead fluorescents
casts an eerie blue-white glow on the piled
crates and
concrete.

The scrabbling sound has stopped, and so has my heartbeat ... almost.

I
scan
the premises for my fellow inhabitant, who should now be visible, unless
I frown. One crate is made of chicken wire or
such,
and it is as big as a doghouse,
if the dog in question were
a mastiff.

Dogs do not eat fruit. I slink over, reassured by the
sight
of a huge padlock through a sturdy hasp.

My
pupils are still needle-sharp slits, thanks to the
downpour of fluorescent light, but I make out a huge,
shambling
shape scrabbling inside the construction.

I
have found the King, all right. King Kong. I mean,
Elvis's face was furry in his heavy sideburn years, but
this
guy is wearing hairy all over his jumpsuit.

When he spots me he starts jumping up and down and
screeching. He must weigh forty pounds. He bounces to
the chicken wire and sticks his hairless fingers through,
still
chattering up a storm.

I
cannot make out a word of it, but there is no doubt
that
I
am facing an ancestor of Homo sapiens, the hairy
little
ape known as a chimpanzee. On the side of his
cage,
hanging off the top strut, I spy something shiny. A
white jumpsuit, fit
for a chimp.

Now I have seen everything.

Chapter 20

Walk
a
Mile in
My
Shoes

(Recorded
during an Elvis show at the International Hotel, Las Vegas, 1970)

Temple leaned against the
hallway wall.

“
If I'd have known
it
was
going to take this much
hoofing to visit all of the Elvis impersonators, I'd have
worn track shoes.”

Matt
held up the wall beside her, even though it was
painted institutional gray and
liberally smudged with fin
gerprints, makeup,
and the occasional billboard of graf
fiti.
He glanced down at her feet in the begemmed
J.
Renee high heels she wore in honor of the jumpsuits, as
she had informed him
earlier.

“
Haven't you got something to switch to in your tote
bag?"

“
Yes, but that's for really rough terrain. I refuse to
get down and get sloppy when we're paying calls on
men
who are more lavishly attired than I."

“You have strange
standards."

“
So I've been
told." Temple eyed him a little cau
tiously. He was really out of
his element. "You did some pretty heads-up interviewing in there."

“
Maybe I'm getting good at my new job. But . . .
all
these guys, they start looking
like clones after a while.
Can you tell one from another?"

“
It's hard to see the person behind the persona. I
bet
that caused Elvis a lot of problems too.”

Matt nodded. He looked like someone who was tired
of
talking about Elvis, seeing Elvis, interviewing Elvis.

“Now
he's giving
me
problems," Matt went
on. "I'm
obligated to take this caller
seriously. Whatever else he
is, he
must be a very troubled man. Maybe he's as likely
to overdose any day now as Elvis was back in
seventy-
seven."

“
Yet," Temple pointed out with her usual
insouciance,
"if you take him too seriously, you could end up a
laughingstock."

“
Exactly. I don't know what to do. I know what Le
ticia wants me to do: ride the radio Elvis for all
it's
worth. But if the man is not just
a joker, if he's really
convinced he's Elvis, that could be dangerous.”

Temple pushed herself off the wall's welcome sup
port.
"Let's do this. Let's forget about interviewing Elvis imitators; let's
cherchez le suit."

“
It's true that these guys don't talk like Elvis
until
they're onstage, and then they
use mikes, so my chances
of
recognizing a voice are nil. But no one so far has
missed a
jumpsuit."

“We've
only hit a couple dressing rooms."

“Of
forty guys."

“
Tell you what. Let's find the girl's dressing room.
I
for one am eager to glimpse Velvet Elvis.”

They trekked back down to Quincey's dressing room,
but
it was empty.

“
Too
bad," Temple said. "She's the one most likely
to know—"

“
The girl most likely to know what?" a voice behind
them asked.

They turned.

The
woman was fashion-model tall, in other words,
about six feet.
Her jet-black hair was cut short at the
sides and back,
and full on top. She had the wide shoul
ders of an athlete
on a willowy frame. She wore a T-
shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. With two-inch heels.

“
We were looking for the women impersonators'
dressing room,"
Temple said gamely, a feat, since at
five-foot-nothing
she looked upon model-tall women as a form of goddess. They always seemed more
grown-up
than she. She knew her
attitude was an illusion and a
throwback to her squat and powerless
childhood, but she couldn't help it. That some girls could actually grow like
Jack's bean stalk all the way to Giant World .. .

“
You must be Velvet Elvis," Matt said in a cucumber-
cool fashion that only made Temple dislike her own
awe
all the more.

Tall men
didn't intimidate her. Tall buildings, horses,
even elephants
didn't intimidate her, but tall women .. .
at least this one
didn't carry a badge. Oops! Elvis had
carried lots of badges. Maybe his impersonators did too.

“
How'd you guess?" the woman asked with a grin.
She was also
disgustingly lean. Temple gritted her teeth, vowed to let Matt handle it, and repeated
to herself three
times: this is a
media-designed, unhealthy role model;
get over it.

“Shana Stewart." The
woman extended a hand first to Temple.

All right! Matt shook her
bony hand in turn.

“
My digs are right next door. I'm the only Elvisette
here. There were a couple other girls, but they
chickened
out.”

The
dressing room was a mirror-image of Quincey's
setup. Everybody
pulled a lightweight chair from under
the slab of dressing table that lined the walls, and sat.

“
What are you interested
in?" Shana asked.

“
We're
interested in costumes. Jumpsuits," Temple
began in a crab-sidling manner. No sense telling her too
much.

“I'm
a radio talk-show host," Matt said, giving his name, rank, and station
call letters. "Someone's been
calling
me, acting and sounding like Elvis. I'm trying to
figure out if it's a gimmick to promote the hotel
and the
Elvis competition, or if I'm dealing with a really sick
person."

“
If you are, it sure could be
Elvis," Shana said ruefully.

Temple
stared at Matt. He had blown his own cover, told this interrogatee everything,
but he didn't seemed worried about that at all.

Maybe
Shana Stewart
was
a
goddess, or at least a witch.

“
How did you become interested in impersonating
Elvis?" Temple put in, since frankness was obviously the
order of
the day, and she was frankly curious.

“
Lily Tomlin. You ever see her do Tommy Velour,
the quintessential lounge singer? Fabulous! Shows
you
what a woman can do when she cuts free of gender stereotypes. I'm a
model." As if Temple, ace amateur detective, hadn't figured that one out!
"I'd like to be an actress, but no one takes me seriously. I'm hoping for
some coverage from this, maybe a career boost."

“
It's quite a stretch," Matt
said. "You'd be hard to picture as a man.”

He
sounded nauseatingly admiring to Temple. What
had
happened to all his ex-priest's issues, like whether he could relate well with
women after all those celibate
years? That last line sounded like, well,
a line.

Shana stretched back against the dressing table as if
emulating Matt's figure of speech. "That's the point.
If
I looked butch to
begin with it wouldn't be as impressive an impersonation. And Elvis was a very
pretty man, you know? That's why he toughened up his image with black
hair and black leather. Didn't want anyone to see the
mama's boy under the swagger. A shrink could have a
field
day with Oedipus complexes and repressed homo
sexuality
with Elvis, but I think the guy was straight,
that way at least.”

Temple thought it was time to assert her presence as
expert interrogator. "I understand you have a very
orig
inal costume and act."

“
Oh, the boys have been talking about me, have
they?" Shana smiled conspiratorily.
"That's what you
want:
preperformance buzz. I let 'em see just enough to
get agitated about
what I might be doing."

“
You're a velvet painting
come to life?" Matt asked.

Shana suddenly stood, which was quite a production
at
her height. She went to close her dressing room door.
Temple was glad she was here as chaperone. Poor Matt
wasn't used
to dealing with upfront females like this.

Shana turned, holding the door shut with her body.
"You seem like a couple of decent people. I'll show
you
my outfit if you
keep mum about it. Oh, you can mention
it and roll your eyes in front of the other Elvises, but
that's
all."

“
We have become very good at rolling our eyes in
front
of the other Elvises," Temple said demurely.

Shana's raucous laughter bounced off the facing mir
rors.
"I bet you have!”

She went to a niche with a rod running across at
shoulder height, but no costumes hung there, just a blue
satin boxer's robe and a big sweater. A long portable
locked case, like sports equipment or a big musical in
strument
is carried in, leaned against the niche's far wall.

Shana rotated the dial of a padlock, then cracked it
open. The interior was lined in black felt, but something
else black took up the space.

Temple and Matt came over to
see better.

It
was a black velvet jumpsuit. Heavenly bodies—constellations, planets,
nebulae—decorated the flared bell-bottom pants, the wide sleeve-bottoms and the
front.

A
dazzling asteroid belt six inches wide hung at the hips.
Rather than being gemstones or studs, the celestial
land
marks were laid out in something
Temple, the glitz
freak, had never seen before: aurora borealis
rhinestones,
only in chalky neon colors of
lime green, hot pink, tur
quoise, and yellow.

“I've
got special gels for the stage lights, kind of like black-light gels."