Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit (5 page)

“
Aw,
ladies. You just do not get it. Elvis had to be
bigger than life.
His fans expected it. He was the King."
"The king of codeine," Van
put in.

“
The king of groupies,"
Temple
added.

Aldo shook his head. "That's just bad press. He was
really, underneath it all, a nice, simple, misunderstood
guy.”

Temple
and Van exchanged a glance.

“
I'll say this," Van said, ending all further
discussion. "He better not be haunting my construction site, or he'll
be
the king of dying twice.”

Chapter 4

I Need Somebody to Lean
On

(The
first song by Elvis associate Red West to
appear in a movie,
Viva Las Vegas
with Elvis
and
Ann-Margret)

"M-miss Barr? I doubt you remember me, but this is
Merle
Conrad. I, ah, really need to talk to you about my
daughter. I don't have an answering machine, so I'll
keep trying
to call you.”

Temple
stared at her own answering machine. She
couldn't
imagine someone existing without this essential artifact of new-Millennium
life. Even Matt Devine, Mr. Non-high-tech Living, had bought one.

Merle Conrad? The woman had sounded upset, but
hesitant.
Temple
, as a
public relations freelancer, seldom dealt with people who found her—or a mere
machine—
intimidating. Yet
Temple
, who could read stress in
voices
like an earthquake meter could detect inner-core
tremors, would have sworn the caller was anxious. Anx
ious about calling little ole her, who was about as
im
posing as Jiminy Cricket?
She
puzzled over the call for a moment, agonizing
over her in-and-out schedule. The poor woman would
miss more often than not, and
Temple
couldn't do a
thing about it, since the caller had left no phone
number.
Why not? Then speculation faded before the nearer stimulus of
anticipation. Matt was coming down from his
apartment
to review his recent
national talk show tape with her.
Presto!
From PR gal to media consultant. At least on a
small, personal scale.

She left the spare bedroom that served as her office
and skated across the polished parquet floor to the living
area, massing magazines and papers
into tidier piles as
she
passed. Piles were still piles. She really had to find
some domestic time-out one of these days, whistle while
you
work and all that. Imagine that the broom ...

A
knock on the door stopped her in mid-tidy and mid-
Disney animation nostalgia. Matt never bothered to ring her many-noted
doorbell nowadays, and Max always en
tered
without knocking, born second-story man that he
was. At least she could always guess who was not com
ing to
dinner!
She opened the door, surprised to
experience a frisson
of anxiety
herself. Why did seeing someone you knew
on national television seem to make him more of a
stranger than before?

“
How'd it go?" she asked
as she swung the door wide.
Temple
would never make it in a "don't ask, don't
tell"
world.

“
You tell me." Matt smiled ruefully and walked in,
apparently looking around for Midnight Louie.
"You're
the one who saw it."

“
Not the only one. Hundreds of thousands, millions
of
people saw the show.”

He winced, standing in the middle of the living room
and taking inventory of its furnishings as if to ensure
they
were still there. "I feel like I've been in another world, even though
L.A.
is less than three
hundred miles away."

“
Listen, compared to the rest of the country,
L.A.
is
three
hundred light-years away. Scared you off with their manically laid-back ways,
huh?”

He
shrugged, still looking around.

“
Louie's lounging in the other room, and nobody else
is here, or has been recently, if
that's what you're look
ing for signs of."

“
I'm not looking for anybody," he said
quickly.
"I'm
just trying
to make sure I'm on terra firma again. That
whole lifestyle there makes you feel as if you're standing on a fault
line. The costly clothes, the sleek convertibles,
the head-turning
blonds—"

“Hey,
don't put them down: you are one."

“Toys
R Us, huh?”

He sat
on the sofa suddenly, and eyed the VCR as if
it were a spy machine.

Maybe it was
Temple
's
imagination, but just a few
days on
the fabled coast seemed to have sun-streaked
his blond hair to a beachy sheen. Matt favored clothes
in modest shades of beige and sand and khaki, but they
just
enhanced his brown-eyed, blond good looks.

“
So
what's the verdict on the home screens?" he
asked.

She sat beside him and
picked up the remote control. "Obviously the camera loves you to
pieces."

“
What does that mean?"

“
You're ultra-telegenic. Don't have a bad angle.
Voice is pleasant. Since this was a panel
discussion
show, you were in
competition with a whole lineup of
guests. Interesting."

“I
didn't consider this a competition."

“No,
but some of the other guests did. They want their
moment in the spotlight, their fair share of airtime,
which means more than anybody else. You were just
there to talk about the issue of the day, and it
shows.
Shows them up. I'm going to run it, and you look at it
like you were the other guests' agent, wanting your
cli
ent to shine. See what you think of yourself as the competition.”

He frowned. "We were there to communicate on a
hot-button issue: unwed teens, and kids desperate
enough to abandon or even kill their own newborns. I
wouldn't have gone on if it was some shallow media
feeding
frenzy. You told me the
Amanda
show was respectable."

“
It is, as talk shows go. Not quite the cachet of
Oprah,
but not everybody can be number
one, A. S. After
Springer. I'll roll
the tape. Just relax and watch. And
then we'll discuss it.”

This time Matt frowned at his wristwatch, the more formal
model his mother had given him for Christmas
instead of the drugstore variety he usually wore. He was
still
dressed for stardom. "That'll take a whole hour."

“
No, it won't. I'll fast-forward through
commercials,
and there are a lot of 'em."

“
This will feel silly. Watching myself. I was
hoping
you could summarize
everything. You know, tell me:
talk slower or faster, or quit looking at
the floor, or whatever."

“Quit
looking at the floor and watch the tape," she mock-ordered. Essentially
private people could be very
obstinate about
public appearances. At thirty-three, Matt
had the reserve of a man twice his age. Not so surprising.
In a few months he had catapulted from newly ex-
Roman Catholic priest working as an anonymous local
hotline counselor to radio shrink to a national hot prop
erty because of
one fateful phone call only days ago.

On the other hand, maybe nowadays his diffidence
had a different cause:
Temple
's vanished live-in lover,
Max Kinsella the magician, had reappeared to resume
their relationship just as Matt was making tentative goo-
goo eyes at her.
Temple
admittedly had goo-goo-eyed back, or probably first. So now that she and Max
were
again a matched pair, Matt made the
awkward hypote-
nuse of a triangle etched in dotted lines. Darn!
Temple
couldn't have a lover who wasn't a friend, but it
could
be hard to have a male friend who wasn't a lover.

She finally hit the right buttons on the remote.
AMANDA,
a graphic announced over the theme music.
Suddenly,
a recorded telephone conversation—an in-
 
terrogation, actually—crackled
over close-ups of the
hostess clutching a mike, listening intently against a
background of sober audience
members.

The girl's voice was a numb mumble, quietly hyster
ical. The man's voice was Matt's, sounding calm, but
deeply
concerned.

As
the shocking sentences faded, Amanda eyed the
  
camera.
"Actual audiotape of an almost-tragedy, folks:
               
a teenager having a baby in a motel room called a late-
night radio psychologist,
convinced the infant was an
 
alien she
had to destroy. Only the man on the other end
of the line could talk her
out of it. And here he is.”

Matt entered from stage right, wearing pretty much what he
wore now, except for the addition of a blazer
and muted tie. Amanda climbed the shallow steps to the
stage and joined him in sitting dead center in a row of
empty
chairs.

“
Matt Devine works for WCOO-AM in
Las Vegas
.
When did this happen,
Matt?"

“
Ten days ago. And I'm not a radio psychologist,
just
a counselor."

“
More than 'just a counselor,' I think. You used to
be
a Catholic priest."

“Yes,
I was."
Temple
could tell he was unhappy about
 
publicly confessing that ex-identity, but fame
demands
all the information that's fit to mention, and more, if it
can get it.

“
So it must have
appalled you, this young girl so dis
traught
that she viewed her own newborn as an alien
being that needed to be
destroyed."

“
Most people toss around the
word 'denial,' but they don't truly understand it. Denial is an emotional
version
of hysterical blindness. The consequences of her
situa
tion were so unthinkable, she
couldn't see them as real.
In her case,
imagining some
X-Files
type of alien-baby substitution played into her
need to deny her condition, to keep it secret at all costs."

“And she was willing to drown her baby in the bathtub?"

“
Who
can say? She sounded like she might."

“
Given your
religious background, you show a lot of compassion for her on the tape."

“There's no contradiction. A religious background should evoke
compassion. Condemnation never helped anyone."

“
Well,
Dr. Laurel might disagree."

“Dr. Laurel wasn't there."

“
No, but she is here. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Laurel
Lawson.”

Temple
hit the mute and pause buttons. "That must have been a bad
moment. Didn't you see her in the greenroom backstage?"