Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit (60 page)

“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 never
came 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. Al
most
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 im
pression 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 jump
suits."

“
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 re
gret
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 de
stroy 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 Pris
cilla'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 curi
ously 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 Pris
cilla figure entering this stark environment like an aveng
ing
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-over
sterling-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's
paranoia.
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 mas
querading as Priscilla, you deserved anything you got.
Killing Quincey or killing Temple would have been no
sweat
to him.

“
You nailed Elvis when you were just
fourteen," he
accused back,
"and he was away from home with his
mama just dead and gone. Snared him like a Mississippi
Delta
catfish in a net. Like Dee Stanley snagged Vernon.
Elvis was never free after he met you. The Colonel and
your father made him marry you finally in
sixty-seven,
and that was the
beginning of the end. You broke his
heart when you left him.”

Obviously, Kenny had imprinted on the image of Pris
cilla the way a racing greyhound is trained to imprint on
the helpless cats and rabbits used as
bait to get it run
ning.

“
You loved Elvis," Temple said. "You
really hated to
see that Elvis jumpsuit destroyed. Yet you must have
commissioned it, brought it here, and it wasn't
even a
design that Elvis had worn. It was totally invented."

“
Well, you don't want the estate to get its trademarks
in a wad, and it owns just about
everything Elvis. So
some of us make
up our own designs. That was a great
one.
I never planned to trash it, but I needed distractions,
and ... it had
to go."

“
Why the horse motif?"
Temple wondered.

“Why not?”

Bucek
suddenly spoke. "Wish we'd known about that earlier. If you knew Kenny's
background, it would make sense.”

Temple turned, puzzled.

“
I don't know whether
your big ego or your small
brain is
more trouble to you, Kenny." Bucek joined
Temple at the chickenwire barrier and shook his head.
"Now that you mention it, Kenny left a clue
the size of
horse hockey."

“You
mean burying the suit?"

“
That, but what was on the suit is more
telling." Bu
cek kept his eyes on
Kenny, but he spoke to Temple.
"Kenny
has a nickname in the Mob. Most of them do.
His is 'Kenny the Horse.' Comes from starting out as a
mule for heroin deliveries, before he moved up to
hit
man. No matter how much he was
into impersonating
Elvis, he couldn't
help letting some braggadocio about
his
Mob connections creep in. Now he gets to take his victim's place, and we get to
hide him and protect him
and call him
our very own, until we can make a good
case on the whole organization.”