Carole Douglas - Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit

“Don't tell Matt. It would destroy him."

“And you too, probably. So ... somehow the chimp, who belonged to the hit man, got out. So he happened to find his master right when the guy was homing in for the kill. Then the killer was an Elvis addict, right?"

“Right." Bucek still looked amused, like Temple was a trained chimp he was watching. "You're so smart, how come you didn't finger the killer before he laid a finger on you?"

“With so darn many Elvis impersonators here? I'm not totally stupid. I had a leading candidate, but he nevercame near me all night and I didn't figure he could kill me long distance."

“Then you got a little distracted."

“Oh. Yeah."

“That next-to-last Elvis really got to you, didn't he?" "He was good."

“He was great. Distracted you from the fact that you were a potential victim. Maybe even made the killer so jealous he decided to interrupt the act with murder. Almost was the death of you, that Elvis. You remember him?”

Temple tried to look vague and helpless. It was hard. "Yeah, but . . . it all mashes together."

“He got you out of harm's way, though, in the end. Amazing how he swept you into that photo opportunity at the last moment. The Sun photographer says he's got a shot that looks just like Elvis and Priscilla at their wedding. Yep. That ninety-ninth Elvis made a big impression on the judges. They were going to give him the top award."

“Going to?"

“Couldn't find him after all the excitement." "Really?"

“Couldn't find him entered in the competition." "Really."

“The rumor is, Elvis saved you."

“Elvis? That guy was much too young—"

“Not Elvis Now. Elvis Then."

“Oh, Mr. Bucek. The FBI doesn't believe in ghosts, does it?"

“Only on TV, Miss Barr. Only on TV."

“So who won?”

Bucek looked down at the coiled satin snake in the bag.

“Maybe I should ask, 'Who lost?' " Temple said. "Sometimes you can have it both ways.”

She caught her breath. A fitting end for an assassin: triumph and capture at one and the same moment.

“The judges didn't know, of course," he said. She nodded.

“And you weren't available to award the belt, so they just had Crawford Buchanan hand it to the winner."

“I see." Temple couldn't keep her lip from curling in an Elvis sneer. Crawford's moment in the limelight must have been bitter, having to crown a King who'd slain the man he believed was the real King.

“Hard to hold a belt like that with handcuffs on, but some you win and some you lose."

“You have a true gift for cliché."

“Thank you. Care to guess the identity of the winner and loser?”

Temple took a deep breath. "Is it ... Kenny?”

Bucek nodded, impressed. "What did you figure out first: who won the competition, or who worked for the Mob?"

“Kenny was good tonight, though not as good as . whoever. But I'd already suspected him. Because of the jumpsuit."

“What jumpsuit? The place was crawling with jumpsuits."

“The first jumpsuit. The first victim in all this. The one that was trashed in Quincey's dressing room and turned up buried later in the Medication Garden."

“More legerdemain. Tricks to fool the eye."

“Not really. Because I finally realized that if Lyle the protected witness could be an Elvis fanatic, maybe his executioner could be one too. To catch a thief, et cetera. Like you said about the leaf and the forest and Father Brown. It had to be all about Elvis. So I decided that the killer must have loved Elvis as much as the victim. And I still remember how genuinely sad Kenny was about the violated jumpsuit. Then, when it disappeared and turned up buried—in the Medication Garden, next to all those enshrined Elvis jumpsuits—I realized why." “Why?"?”

Temple sipped the coffee, though she'd probably regret it in a couple of hours. "It was buried in reverence, not in guilt and concealment. The killer was sorry he'd offed the jumpsuit. Do you see? The hitman could destroy a living, breathing target, but it almost killed him to ruin any Elvis artifact, no matter how effective the ruse was."

“Interesting theory. You want to test it on the source?"

“Kenny's still here?" She thought about it. "I suppose he didn't know it was really me he was going to off so spectacularly on stage.

“No, he didn't, but it wouldn't have really made any difference. Lucky that his lonely chimp got out and that Elvis impersonator decided to sweep you into the end of his act, or it would have been the end of yours. That backstage was an piece of chaos, a perfect murder scene.”

Temple lifted the long, slightly worn skirt of Priscilla's second wedding dress. Kenny had murdered two people, and who knows how many before that. Did she really want to see him? Did she really want him to see her? Then she glimpsed herself in the mirror. Odd how wearing a costume can make you forget that you look utterly unlike yourself.

“Sure, I'll see him, since he can't really see me.”

Bucek took her elbow to assist up from the chair. Temple wasn't sure whether he assumed she was shaky from her recent veil's-breadth escape or he thought that the trailing gown was hard to walk in, which it was.

Faces in the hall—mostly Elvis faces—peered curiously at Temple as she passed. For the moment, Priscilla had stolen the spotlight from her ex-spouse.

Two grim men in black guarded a closed steel door.

Temple recognized the fruity smell of the storage room that must have housed the chimpanzee, but now the large cage was occupied with a human being.

Kenny paced in his glittering jumpsuit like a big cat in one of those awful confined cages zoos used to have before most of them became humane and provided ani- mals with open spaces reminiscent of their natural environments.

She had always seen him as muscular, but it wasn't until he performed that she had seen how strong he was.

He looked up as she and Bucek entered, and stopped dead.

One leg, his left, twitched.

Two other men sat on folding chairs near the cage.

Under the flat, unfriendly illumination of overhead flourescent lamps, the entire scene had a surreal feeling.

Temple would have liked to have seen her gothic Priscilla figure entering this stark environment like an avenging ghost.

Kenny didn't look scared, just uptight.

A third folding chair, empty, stood near the cage. On it lay a massive, gold-plated belt studded with Austrian crystals, very like the vermeil belt Elvis was given to honor his 1969 appearance that broke all existing Las Vegas attendance records. Elvis had his gold-oversterling-silver belt inlaid with sapphires, diamonds, and rubies later.

It must have weighed the world.

Curious because she'd never held this less valuable but no less massive belt, Temple bent to pick up the trophy she'd lost the chance to award because the man in the cage was trying to throttle her.

“Don't touch it!" he said.

Temple paused, startled by his vehemence.

“You don't deserve anything Elvis earned," he went on in the same low, loathing tone. "Or anything anyone else earned by honoring Elvis.”

She turned and went closer, even though the men on the chairs stirred uneasily. The metal chair feet screeched on the concrete floor.

The only thing that kept this bitter man from calling her "bitch" was the presence of the men in black. For the first time she understood the roots of Elvis'sparanoia. He'd gotten death threats for years; so had Priscilla; so had Lisa Marie.

“How could you persecute a sixteen-year-old girl who had nothing to do with Elvis or Priscilla, who was just playing a part in a stage show?”

She didn't bother revealing that she wasn't Quincey, or that he had seen her earlier in her ordinary form. It didn't matter who she was to Kenny. If you were masquerading as Priscilla, you deserved anything you got. Killing Quincey or killing Temple would have been no sweat to him.