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“Could you put my name on it?”

“Name?”

“Up there, over your shoulder. “To Cheryl Baker.” “Cheryl Baker.” He began writing it.

“Uh, no. With two r’s.”

“Huh?”

“There are two r’s in Cherryl.”

“Oh. Well, I’ll make the upper part of the ‘y’ into an `r’ and … how’s that?”

“Great! Thanks, Mr. Midnight. You were really super with that poor girl. Is she okay?”

“As okay as she can be at the moment. I think she’ll get better with time.”

“That was so awesome.” Fan number two crowded closer to extend a second photo.

He knew right where to sign this time. “And what’s your name?”

“Xandra with an ‘X.’ “

“You’ll have to spell that.”

She did, letter by letter, as if she’d done this before. Fan number three advanced in turn.

This was no slip of a girl, but a heavyset woman in the whimsical cat-print scrub-clothes that nurses wore nowadays. She must have come on her way to—or from—the night shift at a hospital.

This fifty-something veteran of such interchanges knew exactly what he was supposed to write. “From Mr. Midnight and Elvis, to Diane.”

“I don’t know if I’m entitled to sign Elvis’s name.” “You’ve talked to him, haven’t you?”

“I’m not sure. Are you?”

“Oh, yeah. I have listened to everything Elvis for years. I’ve been to Graceland three times for the August memorial.”

“Wouldn’t it be … pretty amazing if Elvis really were alive, and after all these years started calling some obscure radio show in Las Vegas?”

She shook her shoulder-length hair, which had once been springy and black but now was frosted with broad brush strokes of white. Matt guessed she’d worn the same haircut for three decades, and had worshipped Elvis through every one of them.

“Nope,” she said matter of factly. “I mean, not thatit’s not amazing, but Elvis was pretty amazing himself. He wouldn’t give up on his fans. And if he did get too tired and sick to go on, he might have arranged to disappear. He had the money to go anywhere or be anybody.”

“So why would he come back via live radio, over twenty years later?”

“He knew how to make an entrance.” She smiled and snapped the gum she was chewing. Matt caught a faint, nostalgic whiff of Juicy Fruit. “You can just never tell what Elvis might do.”

Matt recognized pure faith when he saw it. He had never seen it shown to anything other than a religious figure. Maybe the shrinks who identified Elvis as a shaman, a primitive holy man, weren’t all wet. Didn’t the faithful visit the burial shrine at Graceland every August, and every day of the year, making it second only to the White House in annual visitor count?

“From Mr. Midnight, who listens to Elvis,” Matt wrote. Anyone with a stereo could listen to Elvis. “Happy-ever-after listening.”

She read the inscription, pulling the photo close to her lenses. “That’s all right,” she said, grinning and nodding. “Elvis would have liked that.”

None of Matt’s autograph hounds (hound dogs?) were ready to leave, but stood shifting from foot to foot, grinning.

Matt looked up for some reason, beyond their imprisoning semicircle.

A fourth figure stood silhouetted in the light of a distant lamp.

Its wide-legged stance made clear that it wore bellbottom pants. The night was chilly, maybe fifty-five degrees. Matt assumed the bulky but truncated outline of a classic ‘cycle jacket. The outline of the figure’s hair made its gender murky.

Disturbed, he stared, trying to read recognition into what was little more than a cardboard cutout. For an instant he wondered if a fan had brought along one of those lifesized standup celebrity cutouts. He had seen them in various models: Marilyn Monroe, Captain Kirk and … Elvis Presley.

Someone tugged on his sheepskin jacket sleeve for attention. “Could you autograph a photo for my friend Karen who couldn’t come?”

“For Karen-who-couldn’t-be-here,” he wrote, already showing the cautious sensitivity to double-meanings of someone who thought his least act might return to haunt him.

Return to haunt him.

He glanced up again to the inadvertent spotlight cast by the street light. The pool of light was vacant. Elvis has left the parking lot.

Matt shook off the eerie speculation and his own superstition. The only ghost he recognized came and went with the adjective “holy.”

As he was signing the Mr. Midnight name, he heard a motorcycle cough into life and roar away. Fast.

Chapter 24

Tutti Frutti

(Raucous rock ‘n’ roll number Elvis sang on the Dorsey Brothers TV show, 1956)

“You’re as bad as my mother!” Quincey complained. “I don’t want my big chance ruined.”

“Being a harassment victim is a ‘big chance’?” “Show business can be rough.”

Quincey turned back to the mirror to fluff up her already high hairdo. Instead of wearing half of the hair up and the other half down her back—with one coy lock flipped forward over her shoulder—Quincey had teased the hairpieces into a mound as high as her face was long.

Her face was especially long now with teenage angst. “I don’t need ‘bodyguards.’ I’ll look like a kid or something.”

“Or something,” Temple agreed, surveying the bizarre child/whore façade Quincey had perfected, just as Elvis had ordered it done more than thirty years ago, partly to make his teenage houseguest look old enough to avoid dangerous gossip. “Frankly, bodyguards will only add to the illusion that you’re the real Priscilla. Besides, these aren’t the usual type of bodyguards. Believe me, they’ll blend right in.”

“Oh. ‘Blend in’ how? Are they the reincarnation of the Memphis Mafia? Fat old guys in dark suits and hats and sunglasses. Gross.”

Temple sighed. She knew everybody over twenty was ancient to a teen angel-vixen like Quincey. Still, she had gone to some trouble to provide low-profile protectors for the kid, and would have liked a smidgeon of credit for being cool for an old person. Apparently, having concerns for someone’s safety had cost her the “cool” credentials.

“Shall I ask them in to meet you?” Temple said. “Them? I’m gonna be trailed by two fat old guys in glasses? Double gross.”

“Not exactly.” Temple pushed herself out of the chair, her high heels clicking concrete all the way to the ajar door, and sounding just a tad miffed. “Fellas, you can come in now.”

Come in they did, two by two, just as the animals had entered the ark. Two, and then four, and then six, and then eight, and then the company’s lone last member.

They filled up the mirrors and the dressing room, six feet tall and nine strong. They loomed. They glittered. They were all Elvis, Elvis to the ninth power. They were, in a word that Quincey would respect, awesome.

She had almost knocked over her chair as she jumped to her feet to take in this manifestation. “What is this? Who are they?”

“Meet Full-spectrum Elvis, a new and original act for the competition.”

After a long pause, during which Quincey scanned every incarnation of Elvis: the raw fifties kid in the pink-and-black pants and shirt, Gold-Lame-Suit-withRhinestone Lapels Elvis, Tuxedo Elvis, Motorcycle Elvis, Blues Brothers Elvis, Karate Elvis, Cape-and- Cane Elvis, Jumpsuit Elvis, and, last but definitely not least, Oversized Elvis.

Seen in this historical perspective, it was obvious that the many overweight Elvises on the imitators’ circuit portrayed a minority version of the superstar. Only the last Elvis, Oversized Elvis, could be described as “gross.” Temple credited this man with a true actor’s devotion to a role for donning the required fat-suit beneath the jeweled jumpsuit.