Chapter 16
Send in the Clones
(Elvis never sang or recorded the schmaltzy ballad “Send in the Clowns,” but he should have)
“I feel like a fraud,” Matt said, examining the vast white elephantine bulk of the Kingdome complex shining in the thin winter sunlight.
“You do have a radio show,” Temple pointed out. She locked the Storm and they started walking into Kingdome World.
“But not the kind of radio show that would ever welcome an Elvis imitator.”
“Not knowingly anyway,” Temple agreed.
“And what makes you think I could recognize a voice I heard only once among this horde of burning hunks of love.”
Temple paused to eye him. ” ‘This horde of burning hunks of love.’ That’s good. Very hip. You must have absorbed a lot from Electra’s Elvis books last night.”
“A lot and not enough. I’ve never glimpsed a more promising or a more poisoned life story before, not even in confession. These tell-all books do tell it all, don’t they?”
“I don’t know. I never read them.”
“Virtuously indifferent to other people’s dirt, or just too busy?”
“A bit of both, I imagine. So Elvis’s private life was as spectacular as his public success, huh?”
“Both seem to have gone up and down. I can see why the mysteries of Elvis are so tantalizing…. What is that?”
Matt had stopped to stare at the four-story-tall tilted guitar in the Kingdome’s massive atrium. Heads could be seen zipping along the handle and strings while musical riffs boomed out from everywhere.
“It’s a slide. A guitar slide, get it? Popular with kids.”
“I guess making noise always is,” Matt shouted over the hullabaloo. “Are you sure I can use my radio show as a pretext to listening to various Elvis voices?”
“Who’s to challenge you? Publicity-hungry Elvis imitators would cozy up to a scrofulous porcupine if they thought it meant airtime. Speaking of which, Crawford Buchanan will suck up any attention this circus can get him. You are Media now, Matt. You can go anywhere and ask anything and people will trip over their own toes trying to catch your attention.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it. But at least I might get to see your major crown of thorns in a brand-new hairdo.”
“Oh, the Crawf’s Elvis pompadour does nothing for him, not that anything would. Try not to laugh out loud.” “The Crawf?”
“His unofficial stepdaughter’s term. I had stereotyped her as a rather vacant sleazehead, but it turns out that’s just the façade of a typical teenager nowadays. Quincey may not be a happy camper, but she’s not such a dim Coleman lantern, after all.”
“How could she be a happy camper, with the Crawf for a father figure? I recall Buchanan as an obnoxious combo of bootlicker and egomaniac, and I don’t find that particularly laughable. Those people can be dangerous. That’s what some of Elvis’s Memphis Mafia turned into.”
“Obsequiously overbearing?”
“Well, only obsequious to Elvis; overbearing to everyone else.”
“Sounds big-time dysfunctional.”
“And what do you call this?”
Temple lowered her eyes from the circling Elvis statues on high to the milling crowds, among whom the Elvis-like black-shag wigs and industrial-strength sunglasses materialized here and there. And this was just the come-as-you-weren’t public; they hadn’t even encountered any genuine imitators yet.
“You know,” she mused, “Las Vegas could be the world’s first theme park for the dysfunctional. I never thought of the old town as therapy.”
“Or metropolitan enabler,” Matt said. “I’m glad I skimmed Electra’s books. This all should mean a lot more to me.”
“If it means anything at all,” Temple agreed. “I thought we’d take advantage of our on-site guide.” “On-site guide?”
“The Priscilla impersonator.”
Matt’s pale eyebrows lifted. “The cynical teenager. Should be interesting. Can I expect tattooed and pierced flesh?”
“Only razor-burned.”
This time no screams led the way to Quincey’s dressing room.
In fact, a uniformed Kingdome security guard blocked the backstage route to the dressing rooms below.
A Kingdome security guard uniform was the same Men in Black outfit Crawford had affected yesterday: white shirt, black suit, narrow black tie, fedora, and ultradark sunglasses.
“Sorry, folks.” He laid down the law with an in-character smirk that wasn’t at all obsequious. “This is off limits.”
“We’re here to see Quincey Conrad,” Temple said briskly. Brisk always sounded businesslike and, more important, legitimate.
The guard’s head shook.
“Perhaps I should say ‘Priscilla.’ “
“You may be here to see her, but she’s not ready to see you. We don’t let in tourists, only people connected to the performers.”
“We’re connected. Check with Crawford Buchanan, the emcee. He knows the value of publicity.”
The sunglasses kept her from reading any loosening of presumably narrowed eyes, but the guy extracted a cell phone from the suit and punched in a predialed number.
“Yeah. Fiorello here. You know a—” During a long pause the impenetrable sunglasses so reminiscent of the latest fashion in alien eyes seemed to wordlessly interrogate them. Then the guard extended the phone so Temple could speak into it.
“Temple Barr with Matt Devine from WCOO radio.”
The guard clamped the phone to his ear for the reply.
In a moment he nodded grudgingly and stepped aside, but barely enough to let them pass.
They brushed by itchy-scratchy mohair into the same claustrophobic stairwell Temple had used the day before.
“This is so much nicer without the sound effects,” she told Matt.
“You mean Quincey’s screams.”
Temple nodded, surprised to find the hallway that had been so empty yesterday full of colorful foot traffic. Elvi in various stages of development (Young, Comeback, and Jumpsuit) and undress (no shirt, open shirt, navel-reaching jumpsuit vee) hustled by, too busy to give them a glance. Matt rubbernecked like someone at a tennis match
“They sure have the look down,” Matt said. “No wonder rumors started that Elvis was alive and well and imitating himself.”
Temple darted toward an open dressing room door. “Quincey is expecting us. I told her that I was bringing media and needed an Elvis tour.”
She vanished, and Matt hesitated before following her. This place looked like a rabbit hole of the first water. Entering such illogical Wonderland worlds had put Alice through a lot of trauma as well as adventure. He wasn’t eager to disappear into another unreal world like talk radio. Investigating Elvis gave the man who had called him more legitimacy. It put Matt in the business of dealing with the lunatic fringe. It meant he was making money off other people’s weaknesses. But so was every Elvis imitator in the hotel, and so Elvis himself had done.
Matt shrugged and followed Temple into the room. She was a much more reliable guide than the White Rabbit, not to mention more attractive.
Then there she was, Miss Teenage America, a petite female figure dwarfed by a full bridal-veil fall of jet-black hair. Her eyes played hide-and-seek in a blur of furred lashes, painted eyebrows, and kohl liner. A black Madonna. Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra without the aura of seduction. She also reminded Matt of another teasingly familiar image from the sixties, or even the fifties, but he couldn’t quite place it. Certainly she was a revenant of the orchestrated image Priscilla Beaulieu had donned when she had lived at Graceland with Elvis from the ages of seventeen to twenty-six, more than half the time without benefit of marriage.
“Quincey Conrad,” Temple introduced this apparition. “Matt Devine.”
If the eyes beneath the awning of lashes could have narrowed further, they did. “He’d never pass as Elvis,”