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“Word gets around,” Kenny admitted. “We all watch what the others are doing.”

“Paranoid?”

“Naw, eager to learn. After all, there’s no one like us, right?”

“How many are running around the hotel?”

“Gosh, maybe a hundred.”

“A hundred?”

“This is the biggest Elvis-impersonator competition ever. Everybody’s here from the Grand Old Men who invented the art to the rawest new kids on the block.”

“And where do you rank?”

“Somewhere in the middle.” Kenny grinned. “But anything can happen. It’s a competition, right?”

“Competitive enough for somebody to ice somebody else’s jumpsuit?’

“Gee, Elvis was red, white, and blue suede shoes. I’d hate to think someone would get petty in his name. None of us would be doing this if we didn’t revere the man’s talent and what he stood for. So, no, I can’t imagine one of us sinking that low. Besides, any competition’s a crapshoot. It’d be better to attack the judges than some poor innocent jumpsuit.”

“This looks like a pretty spectacular one. I’d hate to duplicate it on short notice.”

Kenny shook his head mournfully. “I couldn’t feel worse seeing that destroyed there, other than seein’ some guy in it. God, I put in every spare minute and nickel for the past three years to get myself here. When I first started performing at karaoke clubs around Philly, I got laughed off the stage until I got good enough to laugh back. Someone who’d ruin any Elvis imitator’s mainstay deserves to be stabbed in the back too.”

“But your suits are safe.”

“Better be. I got two. A lot of guys only got one and they put all their hopes and dreams and their best buddies’ cash into it. Families, friends, they gotta support your Elvis habit, or you wouldn’t make it this far.”

Temple was actually starting to choke up over the ruined jumpsuit.

For an Elvis impersonator, she saw, a jumpsuit was a costly second skin. Designing and underwriting one was the single biggest commitment he made to his avocation. Whoever had thrust the gaudy dagger through the rhinestone stallion had also stabbed a metaphorical blow into the owner’s heart.

Malicious mischief wasn’t quite strong enough to describe the ruin wreaked here.

“It could be dirty tricks before the competition,” she said.

Kenny nodded. “Or it could be someone who hates the King, in any form.““That would mean you all were in danger.”

Kenny’s bright blue eyes squinted almost closed. “He did get a lot of death threats when he was alive. You’d sorta hope that would stop when he was dead.”

“I thought he was still showing up here and there regularly.”

“So the tabloids say. That’s always been the big joke.”

“What?”

“That Elvis faked his own death because he was tired of all the hoopla. That he’s out here somewhere, masquerading as an Elvis imitator.”

“He’d be … how old?”

“Almost retirement age. Sixty-four.”

“Do you think he could pass as himself at that age?”

“I’ve seen dudes that old pass as Elvis at thirty-five.

I even saw a woman do a great Comeback Elvis.” “Why would a woman want to imitate Elvis?” “Same reason we all do: loved the sound and the songs; loved the King.”

Kenny’s voice had sunk to a reverential hush.

“What kind of work do you do, Kenny, when you’re not doing Elvis?”

He hung his head a little. Maybe he was shy, or maybe the helmet of hair was too heavy a burden to carry. “Shoe salesman in the mall. And no, they don’t make blue suede shoes anymore, least not for guys. Say, those are some sharp heels you got on there.”

“That’s the general idea,” Temple said. A three-inch heel was a portable dagger.

Chapter 12

I Forget to Remember to Forget

(A catchy song Elvis recorded for RCA in 1956; record execs were much higher on it than his next recording, “Heartbreak Hotel”)

He’d look at the old photos now and then.

Where had he gone, Young Elvis? And Middle Elvis—didn’t those damn Egyptians have a Middle Kingdom or somethin’? He didn’t count for much, Middle Elvis. A flash in the developing pan: for a few blinks of the camera’s eye lean and mean in a black leather suit. Just a bridge over troubled waters. And then there was Jumpsuit Elvis, and he’d been pretty good almost to the end, except you could see it in his eyes, in the photos. Zonked on pharmaceuticals. So finally he became Ultimate Elvis. Fat and Forty Elvis. Even Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show took potshots at Fat Elvis. That had hurt. He watched TV a lot. And he didn’t shoot out the screen, either. He was too weary by then to hit back.

Parade-blimp Elvis. Nothin’ to hide behind but his own excesses. But were they ever his own? Ever’body owned him. Hismama and his daddy, his Colonel Parker and his Memphis Mafia, his playgirls and his maybe-real girls, who touched him just enough to make him not ever wanta get burned that way again.

When he was young, he could eat what he wanted, play wlth what he wanted, screw what he wanted. Or what wanted him.

And everythin’ movin’ did.

Oh, yeah.

That’s all right, Mama.

The King frowned. It wasn’t all right, Mama. Never had been.

No one had told him. He never knew he couldn’t just keep on keepin’ on. That there’d be consequences.

Consequences! Hell, that was the name of a town in New Mexico with “Truth or” in front of it. He’d never visited that tank town, though the Colonel had him traipsing through every whistle-stop in America. Never out of America, though. Turned out his whole career was driven by what Colonel Parker had to hide. Where were the tell-all books about that? How the Colonel was an illegal Dutch alien, so he kept turning down flat all of the million-dollar offers to play Europe or Japan or Australia, challenging moves that would have kept a performer interested in his own life and career, instead of getting bored to death. Or on the way the Colonel kissed the King off to Hollywood, for thirty-two quick-shoot movies that minimized his performing talent just to maximize everybody’s profit. Or how he ran him ragged in Las Vegas with two shows a night because the Colonel owed millions in gambling debts to the International Hotel owner, even when it later became the Las Vegas Hilton. Colonel played and Elvis paid. And paid. And paid, until there was only one way to stop.

No use crying over spilt buttermilk, though.

The Colonel was finally dead now after living to the ripe old age of eighty-seven. And Elvis is still going strong, in one way or the other.

He bestirred himself to open one of the long row of mirrored closet doors.

Time to go out. To see and be seen. Let’s see. What would he wear? His pale, beringed hand reached out for something white.

Chapter 13

All Shook Up (Elvis’s 1957 all-time hit, thirty weeks on the charts; Elvis’s “Yeah, Yeah” here inspired the trio of yeahs in Lennon and McCartney’s “She Loves Me.” Elvis had recorded a song named “Yeah, yeah, yeah” in 1954.)

Matt Devine was thirty-five minutes into his midnight radio show, but it felt like he had only spent about ten minutes at the microphone.

Maybe he was getting good at this.

Or maybe this had been an easy night.

He’d had the usual lovelorn listeners he inherited from Ambrosia’s earlier “music for misery” three-hour show. “Music for misery” was Matt’s name for it. Also “soft rock for hard times.” To be fair, not everyone who called in was feeling blue; some wanted a sentimental song to celebrate a new love, or a dedicated parent or sibling. Still, it added up to a three-hour stint of with-it schmaltz.