“I take that as a compliment.”

“As it was intended.”

We kissed. It wasn’t a wild, passionate kiss, but tender and sweet. In the matter of passion, she wanted to go slow, and I wanted whatever she wanted.

She had been orphaned at seven, when her parents died in a plane crash. After that, for a time, she had been an abused child, a victim of her adoptive parents. In spite of all that she had suffered, the world had not broken her.

With jet-black hair, a Mediterranean complexion, and mysterious dark eyes, she was straight out of a dream about an Egyptian queen regarded as a demigoddess by her subjects, which is how I would have regarded her if she wouldn’t have punched me for daring to put her on a pedestal. Stormy Llewellyn didn’t want a pedestal. She wanted only someone who would look her straight in the eyes and always tell her the truth.

As I opened the passenger door of the Mustang for Stormy, I said, “Mr. Presley is in the backseat.”

“Elvis?”

“I thought you should know. Though he can’t speak, he can hear whatever we say.”

Stormy got into the car and looked behind her seat, but of course she couldn’t see the King of Rock ’n’ Roll because he had been dead for years, in fact, for decades, and it was only his spirit that was going with us to the carnival.

Most people leave the world when their bodies die. Some spirits linger, reluctant to cross over to the Other Side. They come to me because they know that I can see them and that I will help them if I can. Sometimes they want their murders avenged. Mr. Presley wasn’t murdered—except by numerous movie critics when he was alive. But he, like some others, seemed to be afraid of what might await him in the Great Beyond.

He had been hanging out with me for some months, though he made no effort to explain himself. The dead don’t talk. I don’t know why. But they have ways of conveying their concerns and desires. Mr. Presley seemed content just to keep me company.

As I got behind the wheel of the Mustang, Stormy said, “What’s he wearing this time?”

“That ridiculous Arab getup from Harum Scarum. Sorry, sir, but it is ridiculous.”

All other lingering spirits that I had known were limited in their wardrobe to the clothes they had been wearing when they died. Mr. Presley, however, was capable of manifesting in anything he had worn during his storied career. He tended to avoid the flashy Vegas costumes that made him look like a less-well-coiffed Liberace.

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that he had in an instant changed from the Harum Scarum garb to the flamenco-dancer costume that he had worn in Fun in Acapulco: tight black tuxedo pants, a two-thirds-length black jacket, and a ruffled white shirt with an elaborate black foulard at the throat.

“Better,” I said.

He made a gun of his thumb and forefinger, pointed it at me, and winked.