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“But he’s not registered for this competition,” a cheeky chipmunk Elvis put in optimistically.

This Eerie Elvis guy was sounding, even to Matt, like the ghostly gunfighter riding into town at the last moment and blowing everyone else away: Lee Van Cleef at his most smoothly sinister. Part hero, part villain. Not much different from Elvis, really.

“Maybe it was charisma,” a hairdressing wife said dreamily. “Elvis had it by the bushel. Some people have that air about them.”

The guys were quick to dismiss the mystical approach, just as Elvis’s Memphis Mafia had loathed his explorations of Eastern mysticism with L.A. hairdresser Larry Geller.

“Nah, this Kyle-whoever was just damn good at being Elvis.”

“But he’s not registered for the competition,” Chipmunk Elvis repeated.

“No. He dropped out of sight a couple of years ago. Fast.”

Elvises nodded in mirrored multiples.

“Like something had caught up with him,” Distant Elvis said slowly.

“Maybe the Memphis Mafia,” one joked.

“Yeah, John,” Chipmunk Elvis goaded Distant Elvis with an air of long practice. “The Memphis Mafia is on the loose and taking out bad actors. We better watch out.”

“What do you think of those guys?” Matt asked. More shrugs. “The Memphis Mafia? They were okay.

Too many relatives riding on Elvis, though. And the Mafia boys, they added a lot of pressure to his life for all they took care of things for him.”

“Squabbling like jealous two-year-olds,” a significant other added, shaking her sheenless strawberry-blond fright wig. “Boys will be boys, and Elvis’s entourage sure proved it. From that standpoint, I don’t blame Priscilla one little bit for trying to get the guy to settle down into a normal domestic life.”

“Tame the King? No way!”

Matt could see that these adult men weren’t much different from the employee-pals who became known as the Memphis Mafia. They were lost boys too, trying to preserve a Never-Never Land of adolescence that was a far cry from what it should have been. They needed their Peter Pan, even if it took fistfuls of amphetamines to keep him flying. No matter that he’d crashed and burned and died alone in a Graceland bathroom over twenty years ago, he still wasn’t allowed to stop.

The King is dead, long live the Kings.

Temple must have felt some of the frustration he did when confronting the self-destructive lifestyle and indestructible legend of Elvis Aaron Presley. “Thanks,” she said, ending the mass interview. “You were very helpful. Good luck to you all during the competition.”

“Hey! Are we gonna be on … whatever show?”

“We’ll be back,” Temple promised with a jaunty, noncommittal wave.

So they all turned back to the mirrors and the job of becoming the best damn Elvis they could be.

Temple was quiet until they were opposite Quincey’s dressing room again, and had no chance of being overheard.

“KOK. This Kyle Purvis guy sounds like one hell of an impersonator.” Temple eyed Matt soberly, then wiggled her eyebrows for comic relief.

“It’s hard to tell how good these guys would be onstage. The one who talked about Priscilla’s reasons forleaving Elvis, he struck me as having the natural equipment, maybe the temperament for the role.”

“Seemed kind of low-key for the King of Rock ‘N’ Roll.”

“Okay. Let me have it,” Matt said with resignation. “You think he is Elvis.”

“I think somebody wants somebody to think Elvis is walking these halls. It could be this Kyle Purvis.”

“Kyle Purvis. King of Kings,” Matt scoffed. “Somehow, I don’t think so.”

Chapter 19

You Ain’t a Hound Dog

(Sales of the Elvis version of “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog” exceeded six million copies in 1956 alone)

Every time I turn around in this Kingdome joint, I hear someone say that they owe it to Elvis.

I have never heard of a dead dude before with so many IOUs still out.

I owe nothing to no one, but that is the advantage in being nothing but an alley cat. Nobody expects anything of me, so I have an unlimited range of astonishment.

Right now I am determined to get into someplace where I should not go.

My only hope is the Marie-Antoinette hairdo on this little doll Quincey. If it is sufficiently cumbersome, she will be so occupied in getting it safely through the open door that she will not notice me flattened against the floor and wall next to the door. Like Elvis in his latter years, I do not flatten as well as I used to.

But these thoroughly modern misses have no idea how cumbersome big hair is, and I am counting on this as my advantage, since I have watched the Divine Ashleigh sisters try to sashay their Persian fluff through various apertures. They cannot pay too much attention to the surroundings.

I must wait a long time before the door opens again, during which time I hear the distant strains of “Suspicious Minds” being hummed by an awful lot of guys with no ear for music. At last I hear something from within the mysterious room. It is little Miss Quincey intoning, “Bye-bye, baby. Be good now.”

And then she is backing out of the doorway, bent over with the weight of her vertical coiffure.

I slither inside on my belly like a snake, or like Little Egypt shedding her veils when performing, wondering if I have solved all the mysteries rolled into one: Elvis is alive and well in a storage room in the Kingdome.

The door snaps shut behind me, and my strategy to use my dark coloration as camouflage has never been so successful. I am in the utter dark, invisible to all, including myself. I cannot so much as see my tail in front of my face, not that I should ever want to do any such thing.

Tails belong in the rear, where one cannot trip over them.

Now who can Miss Quincey have left in the utter dark, locked up, and still call “baby”? A ghost comes to mind. I do not believe that normal physical deprivations, such as light and companionship, would harm a ghost. Still, even a ghost is no one unless he or she is seen in the right places, and it would seem cruel to condemn a spirit, no matter how restless and in need of containment, in dark isolation.

On the other hand, Elvis had Dracula tendencies: staying up all night and going to bed at dawn; tinfoiled bedroom windows, whether at home or on the roam, to keep the light out; luring young, beautiful girls to his bedroom, where he engaged in much of what humans call “necking,” no doubt resulting in what humans call “hickeys” and what vampires call faucets.

This would certainly explain the “Elvis is not dead” notion. If he really were a vampire, all he would need is some native earth—in his case, Mississippi mud—and a nice hidden, dark location in which to stash a coffin. His documented midnight visits to Memphis mortuaries certainly lend credence to the vampire theory. If only I could go on talk shows without a mouthpiece! But since I do not deign to speak to humans, my media career will have to be confined to cat food commercials.

So I crouch just inside the door, envisioning rooting out a six-foot vampire with a depilatory problem.

Faint heart never won a fair fight. I guess I can go fang to fang with anything living or undead. I silently pad deeper into the dark. The floor is concrete, as it is in all backstage dressing room areas. It is also cold on the tootsies. In fact, it is cold and it is damp, which lends weight to my theory that Elvis is a vamp.

I hear a sudden machine-gun burst and flatten to the floor. Elvis kept those on hand, too.

Odd, though, no fire flashes have lit the dark.

My heart is pounding against the cold concrete to which it is pressed. In the restored silence, I can hear every beat, but little else. Another raucous outburst shatters the silence. I had hoped a vampire would stick to the gentlemanly and Old World weapons of fang and nail.