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Miss Temple has obediently followed me over to the latest corpse.

The late dude’s dark cloak has parted to reveal glimpses of a most original and splendiferous jumpsuit beneath. Even I must swallow a lump of emotion. The suit is emblazoned with members of the feline kingdom, primarily tigers.

Now no one will see this marvelous jumpsuit in motion. The tiger’s rippling muscles of gold-and-black gemstones are forever stilled.

Miss Temple seems unaware of the jumpsuit as she stares down at the darkening face of the dead Elvis.

“Lyle?” she says, as if expecting that he might still talk back, despite the choke hold the white silk scarf has on his epiglottis. ‘The King of Kings is dead? Then … who is Elvis now?”

She looks at me. “Louie?”

Do not look at me, babe. He is not me, and I am not he.

Although I might look very good in the right jumpsuit.

We must talk to the A La Cat people about this, once there is no longer a whole lotta shakin’ going on in the Kingdome.

Chapter 49

Suspicious Minds

(One of Elvis’s signature songs, beloved by impersonators; recorded in 1969)

“Why did you come back up here? All the excitement was downstairs in the dressing room area.”

The detective was in his mid-thirties and had a neat blond mustache. His name was just as bland: Stevens. “That’s why I came back up here,” Temple said. “I wanted to think. So many bizarre things have been going on around here lately—”

“Two murders are more than bizarre. You knew the victim?”

Temple nodded, settling into the velvet theater seat. Forensic technicians were swarming over one corner of the stage, but otherwise the place was empty.

From below came the moans of anxious Elvi, fearful that the murder would postpone, or even end, the competition.

Temple found something uncanny in the fact of an Elvis “tribute performer” dying on stage.

“How did you find the body? With that dark cloak, it was fairly low-profile, and the lighting was low.”

Temple was not about to introduce her guiding light, Midnight Louie, who had glided into the shadows and disappeared as soon as she gave the alarm.

She managed a sheepish expression. “I used to act in school plays. I can’t cross a stage without ‘treading the boards’ a little. They all have a different sound.”

“So you walked your way right into the dead man.”

She nodded.

“Did you recognize him immediately?”

“Not quite. First I just saw he was an Elvis. Then I saw something familiar about him. Suddenly I knew it was Lyle.”

“Lyle Purvis.” The detective pursed his lips. “I’m still not clear what you’re doing over here anyway. Are you an Elvis fan?”

“Nope.”

“You and this”—he consulted his notebook—“Electra Lark were on the site of the last murder too.” “Just unlucky, I guess.”

“And prone to wandering off the beaten path.” He was checking his notes again, or, rather, another detective’s notes. “The Medication Garden where the drowned man was found was supposed to be off limits.”

“We trespassed a bit there.”

“And you didn’t trespass here?”

“Not that I know of.”

The detective shook his head. “You make a lousy suspect for anything worse than jaywalking, but you were at the discovery scenes of two recent, connected murders.”

“So the drowned man was murdered? And the murders are connected?”

“By you.”

“Oh.”

“Frankly, your being just another crazy fan, that would explain a lot.”

Temple couldn’t quite cop to that rap, but she could offer a hint for her presence. “Well … to be frank—” “You haven’t been before?”

“To be fully frank, I’m here because of what’s been happening to Quincey.”

“Quincey.” He eyed her with the baffled suspicion you’d direct at a harmless-looking person who kept turning up corpses. “You mean that old TV show. About the coroner. He was on close terms with corpses too.”

“No. I am not some fannish flake or a media nut! I’m just a PR person moonlighting as a nanny. Quincey is the girl who is playing Priscilla Presley for the competition. Her mother was concerned about the threats she was getting, so I said I’d keep an eye on her.” Temple could hardly mention the Elvis apparition at the Crystal Phoenix as the instigating event; then he’d really typecast her as a flake.

“ ‘Keeping an eye on Quincey’ took you to the Medication Garden and just now on stage?”

“I ran into those situations in the course of hanging out at the contest.”

“The attacks on the girl have been noted. You have any insight on that?”

“Not a clue. Except that this last time, her screams at discovering the assault on the dress did a pretty good job of pulling everybody out of the rehearsal area. Except for Lyle.”

“And his killer. Good thing you didn’t wander back here too soon.”

Temple had thought of that. Lyle must have been killed as soon as the stage was clear: lassoed from behind with the scarf, disabled and silenced by strangulation, and then held in thrall until dead.

It would take a strong, tall person to dominate a big guy like Lyle. A man, of course. Or a woman like Velvet Elvis.

“What do you think is going on with the Priscilla thing? A deranged fan?” the detective asked.

“They do dislike her, but—don’t you think it could be some other agency?”

“It’s some other agency that’s putting the jinx on our investigation, all right.”

Temple detected something besides bitterness in his voice. “You don’t mean … Twilight Zone stuff? Like Elvis sightings.”

“Don’t I wish.” He slapped the notebook shut. “We could all live with a little tabloid ridicule. It’s the hush-hush that kills an investigation, not the yellow journalism. Speaking of yellow journalism, you know a guy from the Las Vegas Scoop? Crawless Buchanan? He’s been chomping at the bit to interview you. I had to have a uniform restrain him, he was that hot to see the body. Some of these guys are really ghouls.”

“Crawless. Yeah, I know him. He was at the other death scene too.”

“He was?” The notebook flopped open.

Temple nodded solemnly. “He was so eager to examine that corpse he jumped into the pool with it.”

“That creep!” The notebook snapped shut again.

This was starting to look like an open-and-shut case, Temple thought.

The detective stood. “Maybe you’d give him an interview. Get him off our backs.”

“You’re asking a lot.” She glanced beyond Detective Stevens’s dark coat sleeve to the sight of Crawford practically slobbering with eagerness twenty feet away. “Are you sure you can’t pin anything on him?”

Then it struck her. Crawford had not only been at each death scene, he was Quincey’s stepfather. He could have popped in and out of her dressing room, spreading havoc, without much comment.

She feared her speculations were running rampant across her expression, but the detective had turned away already, eyeing the Crawf with distaste.

“Pin anything on him? A new haircut would help.” He stuffed the notebook into his side coat pocket and returned onstage to the cluster of white-gloved people hunkering over the dead man like abducting aliens.

Crawford sprang toward Temple like a spaniel. “T. B.! Thank God they didn’t arrest you!”

“What would they arrest me for?”

He brushed off the question with a gesture. “It’s not that Purvis guy dead, is it? Tell me. They won’t let me near enough to see the body. It can’t be him. He’s just not around downstairs, right? Maybe he didn’t come in today at all. His rehearsal was yesterday. What would he be doing here today?”