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She suddenly understood the utter genius of the Kingdome: no image of the King himself was allowed, so the place was crawling with imitators. If No One could be Elvis, Everybody Else was.

While she stood there trying to absorb the existential implications of being, and not being, Elvis, someone had approached her from behind and now spoke.

“Awesome, isn’t it, T.B.?”

She whirled. Facing her was someone far more familiar, but a sad let-down from the high-camp presence of the Magnificent Four Elvi.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me.” Crawford Buchanan sounded peeved.

Let-down could hardly describe the anticlimax that Crawford Buchanan embodied. He was a short, slight man, neat as some scavenger carnivore. His full head of hair, last she had seen it, had been a silver waterfall that curled into froth at his nape. Now it was dyed jet black with moussey aspirations to a pompadour. Not to mention sideburns.

His voice was the same night-radio baritone, oily and suggestive.

His attitude was dyed to match his hair, or maybe it had always matched his current style: preening sexist smirk.

Temple suddenly remembered why she had never liked Elvis, impressive though his persona could be. She also realized why she felt obligated to help Merle with Quincey. Crawford Buchanan wasn’t warped enough to molest a girl, but he wasn’t above using Quincey as a nubile draw in his selfish schemes. What an unspeakable pseudo-stepfather for a teenage girl!

“So the place is thronging with ersatz Elvi,” she said. “Is that just for the contest, or will they be a regular feature?”

“Oh, the contest is just the opening salvo. The impersonators will be fixtures, a doorman here, a croupier there. That way the customers can get up close and personal with Elvis.”

“You actually think a Las Vegas hotel-casino can succeed without anything genuine to its real theme on the premises?”

Buchanan’s shrug drew attention to his black mohair suit, white shirt, and narrow black sixties tie.

“Since when did you start dressing like a Jehovah’s Witness?” she asked.

“This isn’t that look! This is the Memphis Mafia look. Maybe this will give you the right idea.” He whipped a pair of ultradark sunglasses with heavy black plastic frames from his breast pocket to his face.

“You still look more like Men in Black than Mafia from Memphis.”

“And you still look like a million dollars, T. B.” Crawford flipped up his shades to leer. “What are you doing over here anyway?”

Temple ignored the leer; it came with the territory when one ventured into Crawford Buchanan Country. “Just checking out the new game in town.”

“Then stick around a few days. I’ll be emceeing the world’s biggest Elvis Presley imitator contest. Well, some call themselves ‘impressionists,’ and some callthemselves impersonators, or even actors, but imitators seems the most honest description.”

Temple let her head swivel to survey various passing Elvi from the rear. “Looks like you’ve got every stage of Elvis from debut to death around here.”

Buchanan followed her glance with a sneer. That was C.B.: always a leer for the ladies and a sneer for the guys. She hadn’t seen him for so long she’d forgotten how despicable he was.

“There are only Three Stages of Elvis,” he was saying—pontificating. “Young Elvis, suits and guitars and pompadour hair; Comeback Elvis, the Man in the Black Leather Suit; and Touring Elvis, otherwise known as Vegas Elvis, the big galoot in the glitter jumpsuits and hernia-truss belts. Nobody much cares about movie Elvis, and neither did E.P. himself when he was alive.” “That’s right.” Temple frowned as she teased her memory. “I’ve seen a lot of fifties Elvis, and a lot of seventies Elvis, but what did he do during the sixties?” “Ran for cover like everybody else in American music when the Beatles came over and usurped Ed Sullivan from our barefoot boy with cheek of sideburn. You know why he’s called Comeback Elvis?”

“No, and the answer better not be a dirty punchline.” “T.B.! Would I inflict blue material on a class act like you?”

“Any time you thought you could get away with it.” That earned another leer, and an explanation.

“See, the Colonel—Colonel Parker, Elvis’s manager and, some would say, Svengali—sold Elvis to the movies for that whole decade. No tours, no live music, just rinky-dink rock ‘n’ roll romance movies. Travelogues, Presley himself called ‘em. Then Elvis went and got himself into the hands of a really good director for a TV special in 1968 that was supposed to revive his singing career. He was poured into this black leather biker suit and really poured on the performance power. That’s what launched all those tours in the seventies. ‘Course the Colonel soon squeezed the juice out of the comeback kid and got him on the treadmill of a stock touring show again. What a guy! You could always count on the Colonel to give an audience as little as he could get away with.”

“I’m impressed. How did you learn all this stuff about Elvis and the Colonel? You must have boned up for the emcee job.”

“Naw. I used to be a deejay back when music was on vinyl and only musicians were on drugs.”

“A disk jockey? That far back?”

“Ah … I worked in small towns, behind the times. Why, how old did you think I was?” Buchanan’s crooked smile grew crookeder under his black-dyed hair. Merle Conrad hadn’t mentioned Vanity as a deadly sin, but she should have.

“Gee. I dunno. As old as Dick Clark?”

Buchanan paled.

“Isn’t that a compliment?” Temple asked innocently. “Isn’t he supposed to be extraordinarily youthful-looking?”

“For the mummy of King Tut-tut!” Buchanan’s trademark snirk (what Temple called his patented combination of sneer and smirk) was fighting not to become a snarl. “That guy’s generation and mine are not even kissing cousins. So don’t worry, T.B. I’m young enough for you.” He leaned so close she could inhale the noxious scent of whatever goop was making his hair look both stiffened and greasy.

“Well, I’m too old for you.” Temple said in farewell, turning and hiking away before he could offer one last parting snirk. Poor Quincey! Someone had to help that girl, and her mother was too much of a victim herself to do it.

She was facing into another trio of oncoming Elvis imitators, and they were eyeing her like she was a fifteen-year-old fan.

Better to face dead men walking than Crawford Buchanan any day.

Chapter 8

Working on the Building

(A rousing gospel song Elvis recorded in 1960)

Temple finally decided that the Kingdome itself was a cross between the Coliseum in Rome and an Opryland Hotel.

She wandered through a semitropical Southern garden, past pillared gazebos, yet remained beneath an overarching glass dome. On the dome’s perimeter, in niches high above the milling crowds, stood white marble statues of Elvis, attired like collector Barbie dolls in bejeweled jumpsuits concocted by the world’s most famous designers. The neon role call of names above the designer-doll Elvi read like a mall sign in shoppers’ paradise: Donatella Versace, Calvin Klein, Bill Blass, Bob Mackie, Gucci, Dior.

The circle of elevated Elvi regarded the vastness erected in their honor with cataract gazes: the blank white eyeballs of classic Greek statuary. The face of Apollo (he wasn’t copyrighted) stood in for Elvis’s. Actually, the time-tested, white-marble medium used to memorialize long-gone gods such as Apollo and Pan fit Elvis’s full-lipped, Roman-nosed profile like an Attic glove, although the ghostly yet solid chorus line of Elvi also (and rather wickedly) reminded Temple of Pillsbury doughboys in candy-decorated astronauts’ suits.