Unknown - Douglas_Carole_Nelson_Cat_in_a_Jeweled_Jumpsuit_Bo

“Temple,” Matt said to Temple over the phone, “can I presume on your expertise again?”

“Something to do with talk shows?”

“Just my radio show. Could you come up and hear my new tape player?”

“Now?”

“Today would be good. Before I have to do another show.”

“That urgent? Well, sure.”

Temple hung up, looking through her closet for some visiting outfit more appropriate than a sweat suit.

As she hopped on one foot hunting the matching shoe on the closet floor, she did wonder how Max would like all this semiprofessional hobnobbing between his former rival and herself. Darn him, anyway! Why did he have to be off on one of his mysterious missions, which had gotten mysteriouser after the recent murder of the stripper he had tried to help? Temple froze, transfixed by a stab of real worry. Max ran on an exaggerated sense of responsibility for every ill in the world. His teenaged cousin’s tragic death in Ireland had started the cycle so long ago … who would end it? Of course, it was ludicrous to consider Matt anyone’s rival. A less competitive personality she had never met, or maybe she’d just never seen him want anything he had difficulty getting. Like her.

Had she been drawn into this help-Matt campaign as a clever way of entangling her emotionally? Matt had shown signs of being seriously interested, also confessing that he had a lot of personal issues to resolve first. She sighed. Ex-priests were so hard to read. She only knew one, admittedly.

By the time she’d worried the pros and cons of both men to shreds in her mind, she was dressed and ready to visit the apartment directly overhead. What Max might think of such neighborliness was none of his business, so long as it was just neighborly.

When Matt answered her knock, he seemed too excited to notice her appearance. “What do you know about Elvis Presley?” he demanded before the door had even closed behind her.

“Elvis Presley?” The weird coincidence knocked her out. “Strange that you should ask, but virtually nothing.” “As little as I’m likely to know about him?” “Probably not that little.”

“Then listen to this.” Matt grabbed her wristgrabbed!—to hustle her into the living room. There he positioned her dead center on his red suede couch.

He then grabbed (grabbed again) the stereo remote control from one of the modest gray coffee table cubes. He pointed it at the shelf unit stereo, which squatted like a technological god on a primitive islander’s makeshift altar: a board across two brick pillars.

“Listen!” Matt ordered.Ordered? Matt? He didn’t even sit beside her, but paced behind the sinuous fifties-style sofa, so she couldn’t crane her neck to read his face for some clue to this charade.

A moment later Matt’s voice came over the tape, mel-low yet intense, that nice combo of styles he brought to electronic media so naturally that seasoned on-air personalities would spit to hear it.

A young girl’s voice, vacant and unformed, was fad-ing off.

On came a man’s voice, a little mushy but also mel-low in its own way.

Temple listened for a few moments, then planted her elbows on her knees and her chin on her fists and listened harder. Behind her Matt paced, his footsteps making the fifty-year-old wood parquet floor creak at intervals, like a scratch in an obsolete vinyl record.

“ ‘Son,’ ” she repeated the caller once. “That’s an old Southernism.”

“Speaking of old … how old do you think he sounds?”

“Ummm. Mature. Middle-aged. But with a mischievous, maybe even melancholy boyish quality … no, not quite that, maybe a little self-mocking.”

Matt aimed the remote and suddenly shot the sound off, either pausing or muting the recording. “So? What do you think?”

She finally turned to confront him. “I think if you hadn’t mentioned Elvis, I’d never be thinking what I’m thinking.”

“Which is?”

“That it’s supposed to be Elvis.”

Matt made a noise behind her, then came around the sofa end to perch uneasily on a curve. “What do you mean ‘supposed’?”

“I mean the man is stone dead. Been that way since nineteen seventy-seven.”

“Is that when he died? That long ago?”

“Yes. Don’t tell me you don’t remember? I thought it was a Crucial Twentieth-Century Date, like when Kennedy was assassinated, or Martin Luther King, or Bobby Kennedy, or when Marilyn Monroe died.”

“We’re too young to have lived through or remember much about those other deaths, but I was around for Elvis’s death and I don’t remember it. I do remember when Pope John Paul the First died.”

“Not exactly the same thing, Matt.”

He grinned. “That’s why I need expert advice. Was that a credible Elvis?”

“I don’t know. I’m not an Elvis expert. I can tell you that Las Vegas happens to be crawling with Elvis impersonators at the moment, and I bet a lot of them sound pretty credible.”

“Elvis imitators, really? Why?”

“Ever heard that the Kingdome is coming?” “Kingdom—?”

Temple loved teasing people with the name. “Not the Kingdom, the Kingdome, and not the athletic facility in Seattle that’s just been torn down, either. It’s the new Elvis Presley-themed hotel-casino.”

“How could I have missed that? And you say that a host of Elvis imitators is in town for the opening? So my guy is just some Elvis imitator?”

“That’s the best guess.”

“But why?”

“Good publicity?”

Matt sighed. “Leticia is really jazzed on that call. Says it’ll skyrocket the show’s ratings.”

“Probably will. And since when have you used a verb like ‘jazzed’? Is working for that radio station corrupting you?”

Matt shook off her gentle jibe, still concentrating on what bothered him. “You don’t think the radio station, Leticia—?”

“Would arrange for Elvis to ‘phone home’ without telling you? No.” Temple glanced at him, measuring hismood. “But the thing about you, Matt, is you’re such a sincere, natural radio personality. If they did want to encourage more sensational news, like that call from the unwed mother a couple weeks ago, they might be tempted not to tell you it was a set up deal.”

“I would never approve of a deception like that.”

“Of course not, and I’m sure they know that. Besides, if it was a setup, you’d be a whole lot more believable if you really bought it.”

“They’d do that? Trick me? Use me?”

“You ever hear the story how some mean director got Jackie Cooper to cry as a child actor? He lied and told him his dog was dead, then shot the scene.”

“Well, nobody’s telling me Elvis isn’t dead. And I wouldn’t cry for him anyway. I mean, I know nothing about the man, except for his scandalous lifestyle.”

“Right, you were listening to old Bob Dylan instead of early Elvis. Talk about far-spectrum opposites. It is kind of amazing how it all came together in the late fifties and early sixties: Elvis making hard-edged rock ‘n’ roll out of the rockabilly and rhythm and blues closet, Bob Dylan leaving the Minnesota Iron Range to troll for authentic folk music in the South, then the Beatles borrowing from both and blowing in from England and blowing away both folk and rock for a while.”

“Huh? That all sounds like Sanskrit to me. You do know a heck of a lot more about this than I do, Temple.”

“No, just the rough outlines. I always had to know a little about a lot in my various jobs.”

“That’s why you’re so invaluable.”

“Right.”

“So how can I avoid being taken to the cleaners—on the air, yet—by this phony Elvis?”

“Know thy antagonist.” Temple bit her lower lip. “There’s the library,” she said, smiling at the vision of Quincey Conrad being forced to apply for a library card because of her Priscilla assignment. “Tons of books on the subject. And videos too, I’ll bet. You could check the voice against your own recording.”