“Grandma Rita,” Nelson said, after we had ordered our fish platters, “we can certainly understand why you would want a break from nursing home life, even from such a comfy-cozy place as Golden Gardens. But next time, why don’t you just phone Mother or me? It would be our pleasure to take you out for a steak dinner at Jack’s. And maybe even a cocktail or two.”
He winked.
“Yes,” Lawn added. “You are very dear to us, Grandma Van Horn. It would be our great pleasure to be seen in public with you.”
“Oh, that is so sweet. You boys make such a nice couple. You know, I’m so glad there are so many gay boys in our family. Boys who really know how to have fun. Not a bunch of stick-in-the-muds like most Van Horns have been.”
Nelson blushed and Lawn quickly scanned the room to see if anyone was listening.
Tex said, “Yes, you gay boys are baaaad. And I think we can see plenty of evidence of that right at this table. Herero, honey, you can barely keep your eyes open. I know you were out tomcatting around all night because I heard you come in next door at four fifteen a.m. You know, I left my Zolpidem in Houston, so I sleep 206 Richard Stevenson
very poorly.”
“Oh, Tex,” Hunny said, “I can get you some pills. The twins have a regular pharmacy in their bike bags. They’re two young friends of Artie’s and mine who plan on practicing medicine. I’m putting them through podiatry school.”
Nelson and Lawn exchanged glances, and Lawn reached for the bread basket.
Herero did look droopy-eyed, but now he perked up and said,
“I haven’t yet completed my education. But Hunny is gonna help me out, too.”
“What are you studying, Herero?” Art asked.
“Nursing. I’m pretty good with the tLC already, but I need more skills and the piece of paper.”
“You can tLC me anytime, Herero,” Hunny said gaily, and everybody guffawed except Nelson and Lawn.
“Uncle Hunny, we’re out in public now,” Nelson said.
“You’re right, Nelson,” Mrs. Van Horn said. “We’re not locked up in the old folks’ dungeon today, so I guess I can’t tell any rude jokes, either.”
Tex said, “Well y’all can play goodie-goodie if that’s what y’all want to do. Me, I’m too old and too bowlegged to care. Now, Nelson. Did you hear the one about the lady and the supermarket bag boy?”
“Oh, Tex, you old devil, you,” Hunny said. “That joke is not for tender ears like Nelson’s.”
Art said, “You could change it to scratchy Toyota.”
Tex, Rita, Herero and Hunny howled over that one. Nelson and Lawn looked perplexed, but neither asked for a clarification.
The stuffed haddock lunch went on in this jolly vein until, as coffee was being served, my cell phone rang, and I walked out to the parking lot to take the call.
“I’ve got good news and semi-bad news,” Card Sanders said.
“The good news is, I was there when the fire marshal located CoCkeyed 207
the lockbox, so-called. It was at the bottom of the remains of a burned wooden crate that may well have contained the dead-leaf smelly stuff you described to me. The contents of the lockbox, however, were charred. The box was not airtight and the material inside combusted. There appeared to be the remains of paper documents and what the inspector said were crumbled bits of U.S. currency. Quite a bit of it, in fact.”
“That’s the semi-bad news, I take it. So, what’s the good news, Lieutenant?”
“Clyde and Arletta Briening were on the site when we recovered the lockbox and its contents. Asked about it, they claimed they had no idea what it was or how it had gotten there.
They said maybe the arsonist left it to confuse the police. They said there had been a break-in earlier in the day, and their back door had been pried open.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s bullshit, of course. But with nothing to go on but Mrs. Van Horn’s unsubstantiated allegations, the DA isn’t likely to want to send the charred papers to the state lab for a time-consuming and very expensive forensic analysis. The upshot is the Brienings are out their million-plus dollars in unreported income, and the Van Horns are free of any charges or accusations the Brienings were intending to make against them, whatever those charges and accusations might have been. I’ll bet you know what those charges and accusation were. Am I right?”
“Sure.”
“Both Clyde and Arletta told me they don’t like the Van Horns
— they called Hunny a degenerate fruitcake — but as far as that family is concerned they’re willing to let bygones be bygones.
They said they were glad to hear that Mrs. Van Horn had been located and that she wasn’t dead at the bottom of a quarry, as they put it. And now they just want to concentrate on collecting the insurance money and rebuilding their store, they said.”
“Sounds good.”
“They do, of course, want the arsonist caught and the crime 208 Richard Stevenson
prosecuted.”
“Yeah. He should be restrained. That I can’t argue with. The guy could really hurt somebody the next time.”
I only wished that the priest who had raped Stu Hood when he was a child and probably wrecked his conscience and filled him with loathing could also be locked up, maybe in the same state prison. But that wasn’t anything I or Sanders could do anything about for the moment.
I went back inside the restaurant and announced to Hunny and the others that the Brienings had been neutralized and both Mrs. Van Horn’s good name and Hunny’s billion dollars had been saved and were now secure.
Hunny said, “Well, I am so relieved that those wicked cretins in Cobleskill are now off Mom’s back. Now, Mom, no more bezzy-wezzy for you. Promise?”
“Bezzy-wezzy?”
“Hand in the till. You know?”
“Oh, my word, I forgot all about that tomfoolery. It was so long ago. I can’t remember what I did last week, for heaven’s sakes.”
Art said, “So, Hunny, you get to keep the billion dollars. We could have made do without it, but you have to admit that it’s sure to come in handy.”
Hunny looked pensive. “The billion dollars is actually more of a burden than I really want to shoulder. It has brought me mainly grief, and I almost wish I had never bought my Instant Warren tickets and then won that gosh-darn prize.”
All eyes at the table watched Hunny anxiously, including mine.
Lawn’s mouth was actually hanging open.
“But,” Hunny said, “if some tired old fart like Warren Buffet can put up with being a billionaire, I guess I can, too.”
“Yes, Hunny, be brave,” his mother said. “You can do a lot of good in the world with that amount of money. Help the less fortunate, spruce up Moth Street at Christmas with loads of CoCkeyed 209
pretty lights.”
“Support education,” Herero said. “You already said that.”
“And of course if you invest wisely,” Nelson said, “you can increase your considerable assets substantially.”
“Nelson, you are on the money with that sound investment comment,” Hunny said. “And I have only one word for you —
all of you gathered here who may end up with a piece of my big yummy money pie.”
“What’s that?” Tex said. “I hope it’s not playing the ponies like your mother.” Tex and Mrs. Van Horn looked at each other and snickered.
“Is the word plastics?” Art asked.
We all leaned in to listen to Hunny’s one-word investment strategy. “Oh, Artie, who do you think you’re talking to? Am I Hunny Van Horn, or am I Hunny Van Horn? The investment word has got to be Applebee’s!”
ePiLogue
Hunny did buy over eight hundred million dollars’ worth of Applebee’s stock, enabling the restaurant chain to expand into such locales as Lock Haven, Pennsylvania; Bethel, Maine; and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. At the company’s annual meeting, Hunny was elected to the board of directors. He and Art toured many of the franchises. They were po
pular visitors, although they were asked to leave Utah following an incident with a bus boy whose fake ID misstated his actual age.
Hunny gave away many millions of dollars to his former coworkers at BJ’s Warehouse. Most of the recipients used the cash to further their educations or fix up their homes, although several also became addicts and drunks and got into gunfights with other family members.
While the twins’ grades at hvCC were not good enough to get them into a pre-med program, Hunny helped them open a foot massage parlor at the Crossgates mall in the space the Brienings had been planning on expanding into.
Hunny never heard from Clyde and Arletta Briening again.
They rebuilt their Cobleskill Crafts-a-Palooza store with the insurance money from the fire. They remained active with the Family Preservation Association of Albany County and other tea party groups, but they did not make any major donations to any of them. Bill O’Malley did not return to Albany and didn’t mention Hunny again, although he did include in his show a brief approving mention when the Brienings got their own reality show on Bravo, Arletta, Get Your Glue Gun!
Marylou and Antoine, who each received five million dollars from Hunny, quit their jobs at Golden Gardens and the tax department and often traveled with Hunny and Art, where they handled corporate communications and media.
I never received a bonus of thirty million dollars from Hunny.
That apparently slipped his mind. He did, however, give me a 212 Richard Stevenson
nice tip of four percent on my regular fee. He told me the tip would have been much larger if I had played my cards right, and we both had a good laugh over that.
For several months, Rita Van Horn had her own elegant Albany apartment overlooking Washington Park, complete with live-in staff. But she was bored, she told Hunny, so she moved back out to Golden Gardens. The Willett Street folks didn’t laugh at her jokes, she said. Hunny paid for Tex Clermont to leave Houston and move in with Rita at Golden Gardens. Nola Conklin moved down the hall.
Nelson and Lawn were given a million dollars each of Hunny’s money to invest as they saw fit. Lawn put all of it in “bundled habitable-shelving securities” in Tokyo, and it vanished as soon as Japan’s economy began to recover.
Mason Doebler received one thousand dollars to get his Pontiac fixed, but no more, and he dropped his frivolous lawsuit after Bob Chicarelli, Hunny’s lawyer, pointed out to Doebler’s lawyer that the combination of Doebler’s assault convictions and his scary appearance would work against him with a jury.
Stu Hood received his thousand also. The day after we all returned from Lake George with Rita Van Horn safely in tow, Card Sanders and I spoke by phone.
“Strachey, you misled me with this Hood guy. He has an arson record, yes. Burned down his folks’ house with them inside it.
Grisly. Horrible. But he did not do the Crafts-a-Palooza fire.”
“He didn’t?”
“The fire was set between two and three fifteen in the morning. Firefighters were on the scene by three forty. Hood was stinko at the Watering Hole, that gay bar on Central Avenue, until closing time at four. Twenty people saw him there, including the two bartenders, and most of these people strike me as credible witnesses. So he didn’t do it. He wasn’t surprised that he was a suspect. He was just pissed off. But Stu Hood did not do this crime. Repeat — did not. Any other ideas?”
I thought about suggesting that Mason Doebler be questioned.
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But I figured that that would be a waste of time and unfair to Doebler.
Then I remembered who it was who badly wanted to get hold of a piece of Hunny’s billion-dollar boodle and who had traveled over a thousand miles in a dilapidated automobile in order to do so. Someone who had been barely able to stay awake after
“tomcatting around,” as Tex Clermont had theorized, until after four a.m. on the night of the fire. But was this some kind of ethnic profiling on my part? And what was the evidence? No, it felt too amorphous even to mention, too much of a reach.
I told Sanders, “I’m at a loss. Dozens of people are going to profit from Hunny keeping his billion dollars and the Brienings being shut out. I can give you a list. But as to where to start, it beats me, Lieutenant.”
He grunted. He never believed a word I said, and I felt bad about that. He was an honest cop, and I was a lying creep asshole jerk realist.
I found out later that Herero Flores got his million from Hunny but apparently did not attend nursing school. Tex Clermont learned that Herero took off for Mexico soon after his return to Houston and no one knew exactly what became of him. Someone told Tex that Herero had a sometimes boyfriend in Acapulco, a butch top reputed to be a mob enforcer who burned down businesses that refused to pay a percentage of their gross income to the local godfather. Tex’s eight-carat diamond wedding ring turned up missing, and she suspected that Herero had made off with it. But she said she couldn’t be sure, and anyway he was such a loveable little lady-boy.
On Labor Day weekend, I drove Timmy up to Lake George to show him some of the Hunny Van Horn-case attractions. We stayed at the Super 8 Motel, the one the Radical Drama Queen psychic told us Mrs. Van Horn was holed up in.
“Some people do seem to have amazing intuitive powers,”
Timmy said. “I’d guess, though, that it was just a motel chain the guy had heard of and the name popped into his head.”
214 Richard Stevenson
“But why not TraveLodge? Or Days Inn? Or Holiday Inn Express?”
“Are you saying that Mrs. Van Horn’s aura possibly drifted down from the Super 8 and into this guy’s brain?”
“Maybe. Her energy field. Look, if Verizon can make speech and thoughts fly through the air and land in somebody’s head, why can’t the human brain do the same thing? It’s electrochemical after all.”
“It can’t for the simple reason that the human brain is not as well organized as Verizon.”
“Maybe some people’s brains are. Just not yours or mine.”
“Donald, you’re giving me the heebie-jeebies. You’re going all hippie on me again. I’d half expect you to turn up with flowers in your hair — if you had enough hair left to stick any flowers in.”
“At least I don’t have hair growing out of my ears, like you.”
“Ha ha.”
“Or my butt.”
“You love that I’m getting hairier. Admit it. Even as you become less so.”
“That reminds me. I want to show you what I’m told is an amazing sight.”
We walked down to the beach, asked around, and found Sean Shea, the lifeguard. When I identified myself as a friend of Hunny, Sean was plenty excited — this was a celebrity-contact-once-removed — and he agreed to show Timmy and me his tat when his break started in forty minutes.
Afterward, as we headed over to Joey and Bernie’s Take-a-Peek Inn for lunch, Timmy said, “It was a poor likeness. It looked more like Dick Cheney.”
“Yes, but that’s not the point. It is a brilliant act of defiance.
It’s that impudent, tasteless, fuck-you part of gay culture that I am afraid is going to disappear as so many of us toodle off to the altar and register our decorating choices at Georg Jensen or CoCkeyed 215
Sears. It’s why I value Hunny Van Horn even though I wouldn’t dream of living a life so rude and messy and even dangerous as his.”
“I admit, Donald, that you’re right to value the cockeyed caravan of Hunny’s style of gay life. In my head, if not in my wussy viscera, I do too. So. Are you going to get your dick tattooed?
Not an image of someone you can’t stand, like that Sean guy did, but maybe a likeness of one of your cultural heroes? Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Thelonius Monk?”
“No, I think you should go first. How about Saint Augustine?
Or the entire masthead of The New York Review of Books?”
He laughed. “Sure. I could get them all on there. Could you?”
About the AuthoR
RICHAR
D STEVENSON is the pseudonym of Richard Lipez, author of twelve books, including the Don Strachey private eye series. He also cowrote Grand Scam with Peter Stein, and contributed to Crimes of the Scene: A Mystery Novel Guide for the International Traveler. He is a mystery reviewer for The Washington Post and a former editorial writer for The Berkshire Eagle. Lipez’s reporting, reviews, and fiction have appeared in Newsday, the Boston Globe, The Progressive, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and many other publications. Four Don Strachey books have been filmed by here!TV. Lipez grew up in Pennsylvania, went to college there, and served in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia from 1962–64. He is married to sculptor Joe Wheaton and lives in Becket, Massachusetts.
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