Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit

“Oh, I will, when I'm ready. And then everyone will notice me. The story of the century. Want a clue?" "No.”

Leaning to whisper in her ear. "It's the biggest, hairiest hot flash since Abel axed Cain."

“Cain killed Abel."

“Details."

“So what have you got? King Kong?"

“Even better." Buchanan's smile wrapped itself around the soggy cigar end. "But you'll see. You'll see.”

At last he moved on, a small poisonous cloud of Tampa-jewel cigar smoke hanging over his head like a visible miasma of bad news.

Hot story, ice-cold heart, Temple thought. As if all someone had to do to earn her interest was have a career conquest. King Kong! Well, the Elvis dome was big enough to hold a mythical beast of that size, but even Elvis couldn't live up to that scale.

Electra returned from her circuit, flushed and impressed.

“Those jumpsuits are fabulous. I can see why they have to keep them so high up for security purposes—they must be worth millions, altogether—but I'd love to see them closer up."

“Have you ever been to Graceland?”

Electra lowered her pale eyelashes demurely. "I'm afraid so. It was years ago, of course. I happened to be in the neighborhood." She answered Temple's unspoken question. "In Atlanta. Distances aren't that far in the East.”

Temple nodded at the non sequitur. Obviously, Electra had gone considerably out of her way to visit Graceland. "I've seen pictures. Graceland is not that impressive."

“It is when you think it's what a dirt-poor teenage boy was able to buy for his mother in three short years of performing music that nobody had ever heard quite that way before. And that two-story, pillared portico reeks of Southern dignity. Of course the inside is decorated ingot-rich-quick kitsch, but Elvis was a musical genius, not an interior designer."

“What I find impressive," Temple admitted, "is the performance records he set in this town. Did you know that he outpulled them all in terms of audience numbers—Sinatra, Streisand, Dean Martin—and that was after he made his comeback in the late sixties.”

Electra nodded, as somber as Temple had ever seen her. "That. time I saw him perform live back in the late fifties. He was pure heat lightning, energy and music and raw sex branded white-hot onto that stage and searing out into the audience."

“A hunk-a-hunk-of-burning-love. Stupid lyrics."

“Not when Elvis sang them. He got more feeling out of a song than you believed it was possible to put in. And he was always so charming and gorgeous."

“Electra! You were a groupie."

“I wasn't always 'of indeterminate age,' you know. And I've had a few husbands."

“A few!”

Electra's shrug made the flowers on the muumuu shoulders do the hula. "A few," she repeated, and said no more.

Temple let her gaze drift to the surrounding Elvis statues. "It's all so garish, so gross."

“That was the seventies, kiddo. It's just that Elvis is so famous his image is frozen in time. If you'd seen his contemporaries then you'd realize he wasn't that over the top. Don't you remember the glitter rock 'n' roll crowd, Elton John with his huge glitzy sunglasses, David Bowie, KISS . . . ?"

“I was just a kid; they were antiques."

“Besides, he was inspired by Liberace. When they met and he discovered Liberace was also a twin, they really hit it off."

“Now Liberace I appreciate. A master of high camp. Liberace turned glitz into a gold mine. He could make those glitter rock stars look like they were wearing tinfoil.”

Electra nodded. "You have something there. So explain to me again how the hotel is able to exploit Elvisdom without violating the estate trademarks."

“It is fascinating," Temple said, much more turned on by marketing magic than dead legends. "Everything here is 'Almost Elvis.' Nobody can copyright anything in its generic form, so that's what the Kingdome homed in on. Like selling Elvis's favorite brands of things in the gift shop. And capitalizing on his love of fast vehicles of any description in all their indoor/outdoor rides, calling the whole thing Raceland.”

As she talked, she guided Electra past the blinking, buzzing, neon-lit entrance to Raceland. A bumper-car attraction in which all the vehicles, modeled after Elvis's favorite cars from pink Cadillacs to black Stutz Bearcats to Mercedes, clashed at the behest of their drivers aged eight to eighty.

“There's a pink Cadillac tunnel of love farther in." Temple gestured past the busy casino areas that acted as a river of commerce between the theme-park attractions, the machines burping out electronic versions of the apparently hundreds of songs Elvis had recorded during his twenty-four-year career.

“And of course they can play his music, as long as they pay for the privilege.”