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She nodded, serious. “You’re right. I don’t even have • a link to the crimes against persons unit this time. Molina could be on the moon for all I’m hearing from or about her.”

“You miss her?”

“Lord, no! It’s nice to be an innocent, anonymous witness for a change, with the detective on the case just shaking his head at my unsuitability as witness or suspect. I could get used to playing Susie Citizen again.”

“Take my advice, and try it.““Got a Lot 0’ Livin’ to Do,” Temple agreed.

“I hope so. It Wouldn’t Be the Same Without You.” They both had been studying way too many Elvis books.

Chapter 52

That’s Not All Right (Mama)

(Elvis’s breakthrough song, recorded during his first session at Memphis’s Sun Records, July 5, 1954)

Temple returned to the Kingdome aflame with righteous resignation.

Matt had convinced her: she was out of the Elvis business.

Apparently no one else was, because acts were lounging about the vast stage on which Lyle Purvis had died so recently, rehearsing for the competition tomorrow night.

In fact, Purvis’s death had thrown expectations into turmoil. It seemed that a whole lotta shaking was going on now that the King of Kings was out of the picture. A lot of the other candidates had a decent chance.

Could the Elvis murders be the ultimate answer to performance anxiety? Temple also noticed that the Memphis Mafia numbers seemed to have tripled. Men in black suits were everywhere, watching rehearsals like competing Hollywood agents, and flocking in the hotel’s vast lobby.

Temple even expected to see them lurking like Cold War spies behind slot machines, jotting down notes and talking into shoe-cell-phones.

The Kingdome’s general air of high intrigue may have been why she wasn’t surprised to hear piercing screams issuing from the backstage dressing rooms again.

She joined the stampede to get there, a force divided almost equally between the sublime (Elvis tribute performers mostly in jumpsuits) and the ridiculous (the dudes in black mohair suits).

For once a conservative mode of dress looked far more self-dramatizing than wall-to-wall jeweled jumpsuits.

Alas, the shrieker was the usual suspect.

Quincey, this time wearing civvies (hip-slung black vinyl pants and a skimpy shrink-top in neon leopard-print), sobbed and thrashed like a punk banshee.

This time, the person harassing the much-tried Priscilla performer was … her mother.

“I don’t care how much faster the world will end if you leave the show. You’re leaving it.” Merle Conrad finished her declaration by folding her arms over her low-profile chest. Her daughter’s high-profile edition, emphasized by skin-tight Spandex, heaved with disappointment.

“This’ll ruin my life!”

“Maybe,” Merle said, faintly but firmly unshakable. “At least you’ll be alive to have a ruined life. This is it. You’re out of the pageant. Or contest. Or race. Or whatever it is.” Her darting dishwater-hazel eyes fastened on Temple. “It’s time, isn’t it, to take Quincey out of this terrible place where people are dying?”

“The Elvises are dying,” Quincey wailed. “There’s only one Priscilla, and all I’ve gotten is spooked a little.” “A little spooking is too much.” Merle grabbed her daughter’s skinny arm. “I’ll get the hotel to stand behind me, if I have to. Enough is enough. Two men are dead. You have no business being here.”

“She’s right,” Temple told the girl, whose mascara-blurred eyes were desperately panning the hallway outside for supporters. “If Elvi are dying, it’s not safe for the one Priscilla among them.”

“But they’re counting on me!”

Somehow, Merle had dragged her daughter to the doorway. “They can count on some other girl.”

“The Crawf is counting on me!” Quincey clawed at the doorjamb, but her long fingernails snapped under the pressure. “My manicure—!”

A man in black stepped forward. “Need some help, ma’am? We’d like your daughter out of the line of fire, too.”

“Fire?” Merle stiffened. “There’s been shooting too?”

“Just an expression, ma’am. Come on, miss. Your mother’s right. This is no place for a teenager.”

“Elvis was my age when he started his career!” Quincey was kicking as well as screaming now, and the man in black’s mohair shins were bearing the brunt of it. “You don’t know what you’re stopping here! I’ll sue! I’ll get my probation officer to go to the highest court in the land. I’ll—”

The words, “probation officer” had the opposite than desired effect. Men in black tightened their lips, and their grips. They hustled Miss Quincey down the hall to instant obscurity, and therefore safety, her mother taking up the rear.

“Probation officer,” Temple mumbled, awestruck. All she had was one unimpressed homicide lieutenant, and it had taken her until age thirty to attract official attention.

That Quincey was a pistol.

But she was gone, and the dressing room emptied of spectators with the expulsion of Quincey and her mother, no doubt bound somewhere well east of Eden.

Temple, left alone, stared a little sadly at the impressive rows of discount store hair, eyes, teeth, and nail products laid out like leaderless soldiers whose general had been captured. Saddest of all was the gaudy tube of Daddy Longlegs’s Centipede Sweetie mascara, and the spidery array of false eyelashes entombed in their clear plastic packaging coffins like Elvis jumpsuits in the Medication Garden.

Enter the cause of it all, the snake, hissing, stage left. “Psst! T. B.”

How could she have forgotten? The last Elvis Exploiter, foiled at first and always. Her eyes met his in the mirror.

They were alone.

Crawford—somehow the title of Elvis’s King Creole opening number, “Crawfish,” came inexorably to mind—crept into the deserted dressing room.

“Glad to see you haven’t gone ballistic, T. B.”

“I will if you continue to refer to me as an infectious disease.”

He ankled over to stand beside her in the mirror. “Why, Temple honey, I didn’t know you cared.” She elbowed him in the ribs.

“I’m done,” he said, doubling over.

“Come on. I didn’t hit you that hard.”

“It’s not that.” He looked up from almost black eyes, large and accusing. “It’s my emcee gig here tomorrow. I need my Priscilla.”

“Maybe you can talk Merle into doing it.”

“Merle? She’s all wrong for the role.”

“Oh, come on! Anyone can impersonate a Priscilla Barbie Bride. You could do it now that you’ve shaved off your stupid mustache.”

“I’m hosting the competition, much as I care anymore.” Without taking his arm from his midsection, he collapsed onto a dressing table chair. “You’re right. None of it matters. The King is dead. My career is dead. Quincey will have to go to reform school; I won’t have the dough to bail her out.”

“Crawford! Since when were you going to lift a finger for Quincey anyway? You’re always getting her into some gig no teenage girl should do. I’m glad her mother has finally shown some backbone and jerked Quin from the competition. How bad does it have to get before you start thinking of someone besides yourself?”

“About as bad as this.” He looked up, his face stricken. Crawford Buchanan stricken looked like a Chihuahua with Montezuma’s revenge. Small and obnoxious and big-eyed pathetic. “I really idolized the King. Wouldn’t admit it to just anyone, but I did. I was thrilled to emcee this competition. I don’t mind the impersonators. Maybe all together they only capture a tenth of what he had, but it’s a tenth more than we’d know about today without them. Even lightning needs lightning rods, huh?”