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Before the evening was over, Jerry slipped her a card with Elvis’s contact number on it. But she never called it—Elvis was thirty-six and nearly twice her age, and it just didn’t feel right. Then a month later, Charlie called her friend and invited her to Palm Springs, asking her to bring along the girl from the Phoenix show. Sherry spent a few days there, sleeping on the couch, and then went back later in the fall and winter.

As a teenager, she was confused about it all and felt overwhelmed on her visits. Charlie and Joe were nice to her, but the rest of the guys intimidated her. She’d had no male role models in her life and didn’t really know how to act around men that age. Then she tried talking to Ricky Stanley, because he was more of a peer, but she later learned that Elvis didn’t like any of the entourage—not even his stepbrother—talking with his girlfriends. It wasn’t allowed. He wanted all her attention.

“It was a very complex relationship . . . he was a lot of things to me: a friend, a brother, a father. He wasn’t a lover yet, [but] he filled a lot of shoes. He and I talked about that a lot.”

Late in the fall of 1970, perhaps spurred by the threats in Las Vegas, Elvis’s obsession with law enforcement took a pathological turn. In Denver that November, he spent more time talking with the off-duty policemen assigned to protect him than he did with his entourage and band. He made lifelong friends of detectives Ron Pietrafeso and Jerry Kennedy, who at his request, got him his own blue policeman’s uniform.

Like many collectors, he wasn’t content with just simply reaching a certain level, and each time he obtained a long-desired badge, he was already in pursuit of the next one. He talked his pals on the Denver police force out of an honorary shield, and then a real one, just as he had Shelby County Sheriff Roy Nixon back in Memphis. He was especially intent on acquiring Sheriff Nixon’s official deputy badge, as it permitted him to lawfully carry a pistol.

But after seeing a Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) badge that belonged to John O’Grady’s friend, Paul Frees, no other badge would do. Sooner or later, he would have one.

Offstage, his dress was beginning to reflect his compulsion. Not only did he actually wear the Denver police uniform on occasion, but when Regis Wilson’s brother, Jim, joined Elvis’s crowd at the Memphian one night, he was shocked to see that Elvis “had on a jumpsuit with guns in a holster, like a cowboy would wear.”

And that December, as best man at Sonny and Judy West’s wedding, he festooned his black velvet bell-bottomed suit with a large belt with gold eagles and chains. Then he strapped on an additional belt with a large gold buckle and a sheriff’s star, as well as his own official deputy badge that Sheriff Nixon had just given him. To that, he added two guns in a regulation police shoulder holster. Finally, he stuck a pair of pearl-handled pistols in his waistband, and a derringer in his boot.

To complete his look, he carried a fifteen-inch Kel-Lite flashlight. Before they went into the church, Marty practically had to wrestle it from his hands. It was daylight—he didn’t need a flashlight to see—but the black metal Kel was official police issue. “Goddamn,” he cursed. “I hate to give this up.”

Even without it, says Marty, he was a strange sight—his hair long and curled up in the back, his black suit set off by a white tie, his eyes covered with amber glasses: “I’ll bet he was the only best man in the history of Memphis to go to the altar with five guns on him, just to stand up for a groom.”

Each badge seemed to spawn another gun-buying spree, and his desire for firearms and all their accoutrements—he had customized gold handles made for his Colt and Berretta pistols—seemed to know no end. Marty called it his “super-spy period.”

The customizing of things also became another obsession, though he had always liked seeing his initials on things, starting with the rifle he got as a boy. It was an aggrandizement