Temple realized it was more serious than that. “An … alien?”
Another silence.
“Know what I think? I don’t think it was really anything weird like that.” The foreman nodded, a Daniel come to judgment. “It was Elvis.”
The silence went unbroken for a long, long time. The simple rightness of the suggestion had struck everyone dumb.
At last, a consensus.
Like the apparition itself, the inescapable conclusion was very, very weird.
Chapter 3
Blue Suede Blues
(Elvis recorded “Blue Suede Shoes” in 1956, and sang it at his screen test on April Fools Day that year)
“Elvis … Presley?”
Van von Rhine, an elegant taffy-haired woman in an Escada sueded-silk suit, lifted nearly invisible eyebrows with her voice.
That she should even have to use the last name indicated how bizarre she found the problem that Templeand Aldo had duly brought to her ultramodern office.
Then she laughed. “Really. This is … incredible. We’ll be accused of angling for publicity if this gets out. Elvis. Presley. Please! That’s another hotel. Better that the … visitant should be Howard Hughes. Or one of those X-Files creatures.”
“Aliens,” Aldo put in.
Van nodded absently, staring at the transparent surface of her glass desktop as if it were a wishing well. Temple realized that she had never seen anyone who kept an office so neat that a glass desktop remained empty except for its carefully placed accoutrements.
Van’s fingers tapped the end of a fountain pen on the glass. She looked worried when she glanced back up at them. “Glowing, they say. A man’s figure. You don’t suppose it could be the—the—”
“The ghost of Jersey Joe Jackson is too much to hope for,” Temple interjected. “There hasn’t been any .. . unauthorized activity in the Ghost Suite lately, has there?”
“Nothing anyone has had the nerve to tell me.” Van threw down the pen with a discordant click. “You do understand that if there is any subject on which the staff would spare my feelings—?”
“Van, your superstitious ways are legendary,” Templesaid. “But other people eat up the odd, the weird, the eerie. Jersey Joe Jackson is a fabulous legend to build the theme ride around: a poor person’s Howard Hughes, a desert pack-rat and miner-nineteen-forty-niner with stashes of hidden assets all over the place, who built this hotel in the old days, went broke, and died here. Anybody that interesting was bound to leave a little eau de ectoplasm behind. I wish I’d seen him hanging around his old suite, seven thirteen, instead of you. I’d have asked him for personal appearances.” Temple laughed as Van looked horrified. “But I know you don’t want to hear that because you believe in ghosts and other superstitious sightings. I’m amazed you let a black cat like Midnight Louie hang around out back before he migrated down the Strip to the Circle Ritz.”
“As long as he didn’t cross my path. And his successor, Midnight Louise, is especially good at avoiding me. I wish I could say as much for the ghost,” she finished with a mutter.
“You know, a ghostly visitation is not necessarily a bad thing. From a marketing standpoint.”
“You’re the public relations whiz. Is it possible you arranged for this apparition to make a small stir?”
“If I had, I’d be plenty disappointed. I’d much rather have the spirit of Jersey Joe Jackson show up than Elvis Presley.”
Aldo interjected himself into their conversation. “You got something against Elvis, MissTemple?”
“Well, other than the fact that he’s irrelevant to the theme of our hotel—”
“Elvis? ‘Irrelevant’ to Vegas? Hey, he made this town.”
Van joined Temple in staring at Aldo. Neither had seen a Fontana brother in such a state of enthusiasm, with the sole exception of Nicky, Van’s husband.
“Are you a fan, Aldo?” Van asked in polite amazement.
“Aren’t you? Isn’t everybody?”
“No!” Temple responded.
“What’s the matter? You don’t like rock ‘n’ roll?” “No,” Van said much more calmly.
Aldo looked as if he had been shot in the heart. “This is serious. I can understand the boss lady not liking Elvis. She grew up over there in Europe. But, MissTemple, you do not look like someone who would not like Elvis.”
Under Aldo’s wounded gaze, Temple found herself flailing for words, a novelty.
“Well, these things are very personal, Aldo. I never thought that much about why I don’t like Elvis… . For one thing, he was pretty much a dead issue when I was a teenager.”
“And he became so overblown in his later years,” Van put in, “so—”
“Fat?” Aldo suggested pugnaciously.
Van remained as cool as crème de menthe. “I was referring to his bejeweled jumpsuits, those World Wrestling champion-sized belts, those sideburns bushy enough to have made a grizzly bear blush.”
“I think Van is describing a general air of … tacky,” Temple added.
“Aw, ladies. You just do not get it. Elvis had to be bigger than life. His fans expected it. He was the King.” “The king of codeine,” Van put in.
“The king of groupies,” Temple added.
Aldo shook his head. “That’s just bad press. He was really, underneath it all, a nice, simple, misunderstood guy.”
Temple and Van exchanged a glance.
“I’ll say this,” Van said, ending all further discussion. “He better not be haunting my construction site, or he’ll be the king of dying twice.”
Chapter 4
I Need Somebody to Lean On
(The first song by Elvis associate Red West to appear in a movie, Viva Las Vegas with Elvis and Ann-Margret)
“M-miss Barr? I doubt you remember me, but this is Merle Conrad. I, ah, really need to talk to you about my daughter. I don’t have an answering machine, so I’ll keep trying to call you.”
Temple stared at her own answering machine. She couldn’t imagine someone existing without this essential artifact of new-Millennium life. Even Matt Devine, Mr. Non-high-tech Living, had bought one.
Merle Conrad? The woman had sounded upset, but hesitant. Temple, as a public relations freelancer, seldom dealt with people who found her—or a mere machine—intimidating. Yet Temple, who could read stress in voices like an earthquake meter could detect inner-core tremors, would have sworn the caller was anxious. Anxious about calling little ole her, who was about as imposing as Jiminy Cricket? She puzzled over the call for a moment, agonizing over her in-and-out schedule. The poor woman would miss more often than not, and Temple couldn’t do a thing about it, since the caller had left no phone number. Why not? Then speculation faded before the nearer stimulus of anticipation. Matt was coming down from his apartment to review his recent national talk show tape with her. Presto! From PR gal to media consultant. At least on a small, personal scale.
She left the spare bedroom that served as her office and skated across the polished parquet floor to the living area, massing magazines and papers into tidier piles as she passed. Piles were still piles. She really had to find some domestic time-out one of these days, whistle while you work and all that. Imagine that the broom …
A knock on the door stopped her in mid-tidy and mid-Disney animation nostalgia. Matt never bothered to ring her many-noted doorbell nowadays, and Max always entered without knocking, born second-story man that he was. At least she could always guess who was not coming to dinner! She opened the door, surprised to experience a frisson of anxiety herself. Why did seeing someone you knew on national television seem to make him more of a stranger than before?
“How’d it go?” she asked as she swung the door wide. Temple would never make it in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” world.
“You tell me.” Matt smiled ruefully and walked in, apparently looking around for Midnight Louie. “You’re the one who saw it.”