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“Right! It was fun. I couldn’t keep ‘em away. They loved it. Got to be wearin’ on a guy. Too much to live up to. A lot of the time we didn’t do anything. Heck, a lot of the girls I was with for a long time before we did anything serious.”

“Kind of like in high school, huh? Necking and games, but nothin’ you could get in real trouble for.”

“Yeah. But you’re right. My mama like to kill me if she knew all the messes I got into on the road.”

“Maybe she did. Maybe that’s what killed her.”

“Don’t say that! I thought you were listenin’ to me. I thought you were one of my guys! There’s loyalty, and you don’t be loyal to me and say things to tear me down. To bring me down. Damn it.”

Breathing, labored, came over the line.

Matt wasn’t watching Leticia, or the clock. He wasn’t seeing anything but the dark tabletop in front of him. His ears were tuned to his caller’s every nuance, every breath. This was a man on a tightrope over a mental chasm, stretched as taut as an overtuned guitar string.

His history was national knowledge. His life was a national resource. His death was history.

He may be delusional, but the delusion was reality-based. If he thought he was Elvis, he was Elvis. He had to be treated as Elvis.

Treated as Elvis. Not just handled, but counseled. Helped. No one could save Elvis the first time around. Did twenty years of psychobabble make it possible to do now what couldn’t be done then? Was “Elvis” finally ready to be saved, or was this Elvis clone ready to die like Elvis? Inevitably? Publicly? Pathetically?

“I think I’m ready to go back to Graceland for good. Graceland,” Elvis said, his voice even softer. “Name never meant anything. People thought it did, but Grace was just the first name of the daughter of the guy who first owned the place. He musta loved his little girl, like I loved mine. Just happened to sound like something special, even spiritual, when you put ‘land’ after it. Like Dixieland. Only now it sounds commercial. Like Disneyland.

“But not that commercial. It had a special sound, Graceland. I bought it to be our home. My mama’s home. My daddy’s home. My home. That’s all it ever was. Graceland. Peaceful sounding, isn’t it?”

“You deserve peace,” Matt said. “Didn’t you tell Dixie, your first long-time girlfriend, when you broke up in 1960, that already the weight of the Elvis empire wastoo heavy? That you’d like to drop out but too many people depended on you for their livelihoods?” “That’s right. Too many people had a piece of me. Not much left for myself. Best thing I ever bought was Graceland. Up there on the hill. On the highway. Elvis Presley Boulevard, they renamed that part of it. How many people have a piece of highway named after them? I was proud of that. It meant I’d been somewhere. Maybe I didn’t stay somewhere. But I’d been there.” He laughed, softly.

“Graceland. That there Simon guy named a whole album after it when he got toney. I always liked the sound of it. Liked those high white pillars. Loved to race around those rolling hills on whatever wheels I could use. Only time I felt free, felt like the world had caught up to me, was when I raced around. I think maybe I was born racing, my whole self, my heart, and my head. Movin’, movin’. Always movin’. Only thing’d stop me was them pills. And start me again. Stop. Start. Racin’.

“It was my home. Graceland. Not any of those Hollywood houses on Bellagio and Perugia and all those foreign candy-box-soundin’ names.

“Graceland was the kind of place you can go over Jordan from. I still see my mama’s chickens peckin’ around the yard, as happy there as on any ole spit of land we ever rented and she ever spread chicken feed on.

“And Daddy corralling his donkeys in the dry swimming pool at Graceland. I tell yah, it makes me laugh, and laugh, until I cry. We sat on those white steps, Daddy and me, and cried and cried. Cried for Mama’s chickens she’d never feed again. Cried for her bein’ gone, and us bein’ left and all those damn chickens.

“Neighbors used to sniff at Mama’s chickens, and Daddy’s donkeys, and my big cars, and later reporters came ‘round to sniff at my shot-out television sets and my red rugs. Hell, Mama, she got scared when I got so famous and the girls came screaming. Mama, she got worried for me. Said I should give it all up. Come home to Graceland and sell furniture, I was so good at collectin’ it for Graceland. I swear to God, that’s what she really wanted me to do. Sell furniture. I swear to God. Mama.

“She was my best girl. I always said that. It’s as true today as it was then. What was I gonna do? Turn all them girls away? No red-blooded boy’d do that. But they were just all noise and worry and wantin,’ them girls. They didn’t really care for me, most of ‘em. And those that did, didn’t last. Maybe I didn’t let them last. She was always my best girl. I even said it on a collection of those bubble gum cards they sold in fifty-six. You know, Elvis answers all your questions. Said back then I didn’t like to be bored, and I ended up bored to death.

“See, that’s what I gotta wonder about death. Always did. Is it just sleepin’? Or is it boredom? Bore, bore, boredom. Man, that’d kill me!”

“You’re not thinking of dying, are you, Elvis?”

“About time, isn’t it, Mr. Midnight? Maybe I just gotta let go of this world, even though nobody seems to want to let me go. Just let go, get the answers to all those mysteries for myself.”

“You don’t want to take your own life?”

“And ain’t I supposed to have done that already, son? How can you kill a dead guy?”

Chapter 45

Keep Them Cold Icy Fingers Off of Me

(Traditional country ballad Elvis sang at the Humes High School Minstrel Show in 1953)

“All right,” said Motorcycle Elvis. “We’re gonna rock around the clock until tonight.”

Temple admired their energy. They had been rocking since last night, long after she left the Kingdome, when an escaped chimpanzee had been found digging up a body of evidence in the Medication Garden.

She had no idea that Fontana Inc. had her home phone number, but they did, or they had gotten it somewhere. She had been rousted from sleep at seven A.M. by an Elvis singing “Wake Up, Little Susie.”

She had no idea whether the song was associated with him, but he had recorded so many songs that it was possible. Certainly the song’s era had been his heyday.

“We thought we would break the news to you gently,” the serenading Elvis had explained once her fury at a wake-up call that implied she was “little” had eased.

“Elvis would do that kind of thing,” he added. “Call up a girl and sing an appropriate lyric to her by way of greeting.”

“Elvis is dead, so even if he did that, I certainly don’t want to be awakened thinking I’m either past the pearly gates myself, or being treated to a tabloid newspaper incident.”

“Yes, Miss Temple,” the contrite Elvis said, asking her to meet them at the Kingdome ASAP. That’s how he said it: ASAP with a long A. Not the full form: As Soon As Possible.

Now her personal guard of Elvi were assembled in the dressing-room hallway in all their glitter and glory. “So what’s the news?” she asked.

“Well, we managed to linger in the area of the, ah, dig, remaining inconspicuous.”

Temple eyed them en masse, Rainbow Elvis. She had to admit that in the Kingdome, this was indeed a subtle and soft-spoken disguise: Max’s maxim that overdressed is the best camouflage in Las Vegas proved true once again.

“And we were able to see the … victim disinterred,” Oversized Elvis added delicately.