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Having given Louie his due, Merle turned sad hazel eyes back to Temple. “Crawford keeps saying that you should come to work with him at the Scoop.”

“I left journalism a long time ago,” Temple said, politely refraining from mentioning that the Las Vegas Scoop was to journalism what lumps of coal are to diamonds.

“It’s just a joke. Then, he says, you could have a column called ‘Scoop Snoop Sister.’ “

Temple was not amused. “Merle, is this about a .. . criminal matter?”

Merle put her mug atop the morning paper on the coffee table.

“It’s about a worrywart mother, I suppose. But Crawford’s dragged Quincey into another one of his crazy schemes, and I’m worried about her.”

Temple had been worried about Quincey too. The sixteen-year-old had a diffident mother who was under the thumb of a pseudo-stepfather she loathed. Naturally, she retaliated by acting like Biker Chick.

“I got to know her a little,” Temple said, “when we were working in the pageant together last fall.”

Merle nodded, frowning. “As ‘pose-down models.’ That doesn’t sound too savory, but I supposed if an adult woman like yourself was doing it—”

“You didn’t see the pageant?”

“No. Quincey said it wasn’t much of anything.” Temple nodded, more to indicate information absorbed than agreement.

The romance cover-hunk contest had been something, all right, even without murder on the menu, which there had been. The pose-downs involved steamy simulated embraces with ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredth percent impurely unclad male cover models. Templehad wondered why any mother would let her teenagedaughter participate. As for herself, well, she had been undercover at the time.

“But this new thing Crawford’s got her into—” Merle was saying.

Temple jerked her memory back from that close encounter with actual death as well as virtual desire. “What new thing?”

“With the new hotel-casino. Of course they’re making ‘ a big to-do about it, but Crawford’s roped Quincey into playing a ‘role’ at the opening, and I’m afraid it could be … dangerous.”

“Wait. What new hotel-casino? There are so many right now, the Belladonna, otherwise known as the Beluga, for one.”

“Oh, the really big one.”

“There are so many really big ones, as the late Ed Sullivan would point out.”

“Huh? Oh, the `reeely big shew’ man from early TV. But haven’t you seen the signs?”

“In the heavens?”

“No. On the streets. They’re all over town: The Kingdome is Coming. The Kingdome is Coming.”

“Oh, those! I thought they were religious billboards.” “Not ‘Kingdom.’ Kingdome.”

“A new sports stadium? At a hotel-casino? Makes sense. The town hasn’t fully tapped the sports theme.”

“A new arena, all right. But for the King.” When Temple looked blank, Merle added, a bit testily, “Elvis.”

“Elvis?” That name kept turning up in her life with uneasy frequency.

“Yes. Everybody’s been going on about it.”

“Well, I was a little distracted, by some other things.” Like a few murders and a private life. “So it’s an Elvis hotel. High time, sounds like.”

“Anyway, Crawford is emceeing the Elvis imitator contest.”

Temple nodded. She could picture that. She could hardly picture it without laughing, but she could picture it.

“And he’s talked Quincey into dressing up like Priscilla Presley back in the sixties. The winner of the contest gets a championship belt from the hands of `Priscilla’ and gets a date with her. Except it’s Quincey.”

Temple kept nodding, although the gesture had started feeling mechanical. She could picture Quincey with Young Priscilla’s sky-high-teased dark tresses, wearing enough eye makeup to weigh a Las Vegas hooker down to her knees. Actually, Quincey was a natural for the role.

“And they want to kill her,” Merle added.

“What? Kill Quincey?”

“No, Priscilla!”

“But she lives in a Los Angeles suburb, doesn’t she?”

“Maybe. I don’t know where she lives! And they don’t want to kill that Priscilla anyway. Maybe just mutilate her a little.”

“But—”

“They want to kill the Priscilla who married Elvis in 1967 and divorced him in 1973. I guess they’ve always wanted to kill her.”

“Wait a minute! I don’t know much about Elvis, but who wants to kill her?”

“Everybody who loved Elvis hated Priscilla, Quincey says. Either because they envied her when she married him, or they blamed her for his downfall and death after she left him.”

“Talk about a no-win situation. Then female fans are the threat?”

“Sure. And some of the men, too. There was always a power struggle between Priscilla and the Mafia, you know.”

“The Mafia’s involved in this?”

“Not the plain Mafia. The Memphis Mafia, the guys who were Elvis’s bodyguards and gofers, who Priscilla was fighting for Elvis’s time and attention.”

“You talk like all this was just yesterday, Merle. It was over thirty years ago.”

Merle picked up the cooling tea and drank deeply. “I’ve been listening to Quincey chatter about it night and day. She’s gone ga-ga over the whole Elvis mania. She calls it digging deeply into her role. I call it obsession.” “Well, Elvis was an obsessive kind of guy, to hear tell. It’s only fitting his fans should follow suit.”

“Suit! And that’s another thing. This is a very costly show. Those stupid jumpsuits all the imitators wear cost a small fortune. And then the hotel invited all sorts of internationally famous designers to design new fantasy jumpsuits for Elvis, some with real gems on them, and those are on exhibit. I tell you, Miss Barr, the whole Kingdome is a festering circus of the seven deadly sins: avarice and gluttony and pride and envy and lust and—what else was there?”

“Sloth,” Temple answered absently.

“That’s why I thought of you,” Merle said, punctuating this interesting statement with a last swallow of cold peppermint tea.

“Just how concrete are these seven deadly sins getting?”

Merle leaned back to pet Midnight Louie again. He had been as quiet and attentive as Temple had ever seen him. Perhaps he was interested in Elvis lore.

“Well,” Merle said, “I don’t want to be an alarmist, but Quincey is getting death threats.”

“How. Telephoned? Written?”

“Both. And yesterday, when she was in the dressing room alone putting on all that false Priscilla hair and couldn’t see, someone sneaked up behind her, grabbed her around the throat, and cut an ‘E’ into her with a razor blade, right where her neck and shoulder meet.”

“Merle, this is a job for the police!”

“They think it’s just some Elvis nut.”

“Nuts are called nuts because they’re dangerous. What do you think I can do?”

“The police are ‘keeping an eye on things,’ and hotel security swears it’s going to be all over the place, but there are so many people in costume and weird getups … anybody could get around all that officialdom. I thought it’d be natural for a PR woman to be on the site, and you could, you know, snoop.”

“This doesn’t sound like a snooping job. This sounds like a bodyguarding job.” Temple’s eyes opened wide. Merle leaned forward, hopeful at last. “And that I might be able to arrange.”

“Thank you so much. You’re such a good example for Quincey.”

“I am?”

“Oh, yes. She said you really got down and boogied at that romance cover-hunk pageant. She thinks you’re way cool for an old person.”

Chapter 6

Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain

(Recorded at Graceland in 1976, the last song Elvis ever sang the day he died, August 16, 1977)