“That’s where I heard of Shoemaker,” I said. “I’ve read about the Rdq. It’s a kind of neo-hippie group, the Radical Drama Queens.”
“Oh, lovely, lovely! I think this is just the pick-me-up that Hunny needs at this point. I’m sure the RDQ will bring a breath of sanity and fresh air into all our lives. And at this dark moment, we certainly could use a ray of sunshine or six. Since Hunny won the Instant Warren, his life has just gotten so… complicated.
Perhaps some people who have been placed on this earth to promote peace and love will simplify things and remind every one of us what is really important in life.”
Art said, “Marylou, honey, what you are saying sounds an awful lot like wishful thinking.”
That sounded right to me.
Chapter Sixteen
First thing in the morning, Hunny announced he was going to have “a shot of the twink that bit me,” but Art said, “No, pootykins, I am shutting you the hell off again.”
“Then bacon and eggs, it is!” Hunny declared heartily. “There will be plenty of time when I enjoy my customary elevenses to march into General Jack Daniels’ office and salute smartly.”
Hunny had phoned Nelson at the East Greenbush sheriff ’s office, where the search for Mrs. Van Horn had resumed, but no sign of her had yet been found.
Now the kitchen phone rang, and Hunny started and looked frightened. “Maybe this is about Mom. Oh Lord, oh Lord.”
He picked up the receiver. “Van Horn residence.” He listened for a minute or so with a look of consternation and finally said,
“Well, maybe you should be in rehab — butting-in rehab is what you really ought to sign up for!” He banged down the receiver.
“It was just one of my thousands of non-fans,” Hunny said glumly. “Somebody who saw me on Bill O’Malley. You know, boys, that entire portion of last evening is hazy. Tell me the truth.
Was I charming, and was I an effective spokesperson for the celebrity community? Or did I arrive at the studio snockered, and did I hop around on one foot and stick my other foot up my ass so that it was coming out of my throat and looked really weird on TV and grossed everybody out?”
“The latter,” I said.
“Donald,” Hunny said, fumbling with a fresh pack of Marlboros, “how did you sleep? Were you comfortable enough on the guest room fold-out?”
“The metal bar in the middle hit me in the back. But I folded up the bed and placed the mattress on the floor and slept there.
It was fine.”
“On the floor! Donald, you are such a primitive. It’s Jungle 120 Richard Stevenson
Jim. It’s Bomba the Jungle Boy. This is starting to turn me on.”
Busy getting breakfast together, Art looked over his shoulder and said, “How do you like your eggs, Donald?”
“Scrambled, thank you.”
The phone rang again. “Van Horn residence. Oh, Detective Sanders. I am so glad to hear your official-sounding voice. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yes, Detective Strachey is just to my port side. In fact, I was just about to offer him a glass of port. Here, let me put him on.” To me, Hunny said, “Colonel Sanders says there is no news on his end, but he wishes to speak with you.”
“I’ve been in touch with the East Greenbush sheriff,” Sanders told me, “and people over there have resumed the search for Mrs.
Van Horn. But they’re starting to run out of territory the old lady might have wandered into on her own. It’s looking more and more as if she got a ride somewhere, and yet nobody has reported picking up an elderly woman in her bathrobe and slippers. That pretty much leaves us with, she’s with somebody she knows. Her family and friends all deny taking her anywhere, but there may be somebody who’s been left out of that equation that you all are not thinking of. Would you please ask Mr. Van Horn about friends of his mother who maybe haven’t been contacted yet?”
“Sure. Mr. Van Horn’s mind is functioning more efficiently than it was yesterday, and I’ll see what I can find out.” Hunny looked at me cross-eyed and smacked himself on the forehead a couple of times.
“I take it,” Sanders said, “that there have been no more calls from supposed kidnappers.”
“No.”
“An abduction is unlikely then. Anybody doing it would likely have made their ransom demands by now. But I’m still intrigued by these people the Brienings. Mr. Van Horn mentioned them again last night on Bill O’Malley. He said that if his mom was watching she should not worry about the Brienings, that he would deal with them. These are the same Brienings, I take it, that Mr. Van Horn might give half a billion dollars to?”
“Probably. Are you sure he said Brienings on O’Malley? Some of his speech was indistinct.”
“You heard it as clearly as I did, Strachey. I’ve replayed the video of the O’Malley show twice. Now, what gives here? Who are the Brienings, and where do they fit into the equation? Look, I am playing straight with you, and I expect you to play straight with me. Otherwise, well…I don’t know. You’ll find that I am not a policeman to be screwed around with.”
“Lieutenant, let me get back to you on that. I do appreciate your interest and concern.”
“I’ll be back over to Mr. Van Horn’s residence this afternoon.
I’ll expect to be clued in. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“Fair enough.”
I hung up and said to Hunny, “Sanders is interested in the Brienings. You mentioned them on O’Malley last night.”
“I did? What in heaven’s name did I say?”
“That your mom should not worry about them. That if they had something to do with her disappearance, you would deal with them.”
“I said that on TV?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Blabbety-blabbety-blabbety. That must have been me.”
“Yes, Hunny. Blabbety-blabbety-blabbety.”
He thought this over and then winced. “I may have to go on the wagon. I’ve done it before.”
“That would help a lot.”
“For Mom. Just until she is safely back.”
“Hunny, it would do you good,” Art said. “You could slim down, too, while you’re at it.” Art retrieved two slices of heavily browned Wonder Bread from the pop-up toaster and set them on a section of paper towel next to a jar of grape jelly.
“I was off the sauce for three days when Larry Tralongo 122 Richard Stevenson died,” Hunny said. “Larry was our first friend to die of AIDS.
I thought everything was going to be different from then on, and I might as well get used to it. But I never did get used to it, even though there were many more opportunities — too many opportunities — to do so. I came home after Larry’s funeral that day and got lit. However, Donald, I’m just a social drinker, I want you to know. I never missed a day of work on account of the booze. Oh, Artie, what time is it? Lord, I cannot believe that I’m not out at the warehouse right this minute punching in my time card and planning out my day of trying to grope a few of the stock boys.”
“Why don’t you just pretend,” Art said, “that this is a workday and you’re not going to have your first cocktail until after work.
Later on you can be as social as you please. Just as long as you don’t have to go on TV again.”
Hunny chuckled. “Did I really call the other Marylou Whitney Mary Cheney, the war criminal’s daughter?”
“You did. We were all so proud of you. Marylou and Antoine were rolling around on the floor, they were laughing so hard. The twins thought it was a riot, too, even if they weren’t sure who Mary Cheney was. Tyler asked if she was part of that old folk-song group.”
“Bill O’Malley must have swallowed his tongue.”
“He thinks he’s the unperturbed type, but you could tell that your remark got to him.”
“Mom would have loved it. She’d have been falling out of her wheelchair.”
“It’s good that you insisted on showing her picture. O’Malley was just going to blow her off. He just wanted to distort everything and make you look bad. A
nd then showing Mason Doebler and saying you molested him. What a lot of BS that was.”
Hunny set down his coffee mug. “Was Mason Doebler on, too? I don’t remember that.”
“The twins taped it.” Art said to me, “The boys know how to work the VCR.”
“Oh. Should I watch it?” Hunny asked.
“No. Don’t.”
“What did Mason have to say? That he crashed his car while I was sucking his dick? He likes to go around making a big deal of that dumb incident.”
“He said you molested him when he was an altar boy. He’s suing you for three hundred seventy-five million dollars.”
Hunny resumed eating his breakfast. “Okay, as of this minute Mason Doebler is off…my…list. He goes into the Dave DeCarlo bin.”
“Mason and several others. You had calls earlier this morning from people we know who said not very nice things about you.
Not our friends, but people we know. People who saw you on Bill O’Malley. Or on Channel 13 the other night. Or on The Today Show.”
“Don’t tell me who. Not yet. Well, at least I got Mom’s picture on TV. I can’t believe that nobody has called with news of her.
Why hasn’t anybody spotted her somewhere? Unless she has had plastic surgery. But it’s been too soon for that. And Medicare wouldn’t cover a makeover. It’s cosmetic.”
I said, “Are you sure, Hunny, that there is no one in your family or in your mom’s circle of friends who might have picked her up and given her a ride somewhere? Someone Nelson or the police haven’t contacted yet.”
“I gave them a list. I wracked my brain.”
“Somebody phoned your mom fifteen minutes before she left the nursing home. Is there anybody you can think of who might feel free to phone her at seven forty-five in the morning? That’s pretty early to call most people.”
“I know. Though since Mom eschewed the bottle, she’s been one to rise and shine with the rosy-fingered dawn. So it could have been anybody who knows her.”
“Right. So perhaps there is someone she knows that you’re not thinking of. A church friend or a work friend maybe.”
Hunny pressed the sides of his head hard in an apparent attempt to stimulate thought.
After a moment, he said, “Arthur, I need a drink. One.”
“No. That would be unwise, dear one.”
“Well…Godfrey Daniels! Am I going to have to start sneaking down to the coal bin?”
The phone rang and Hunny picked it up. “Yeah? Who be you?” He listened and said, “Well, you’re not much of a role model either, bothering people at nine in the morning and calling them…crappy names and crap like that. Are you speaking for all the gay people in America? I very much doubt that, you evil queen!”
He hung up and said, “Verizon must be open by now. Artie, we really do need to get an unlisted number. Today.”
I said, “You should probably keep this number as long as people need to reach you about your mother. This is not the time to be going incommunicado, even if you have to put up with some cranks.”
Hunny shoved his plate aside and reached for his Marlboros.
In his desolation, he looked so unlike the euphoric Hunny that Timmy and I had seen on Channel 13 five days before that I wondered if he might ever recover from what had turned out to be a stroke of stupendously bad luck for him, winning a billion dollars.
The phone rang again, and this time it was not another gay person calling up to criticize Hunny for embarrassing the homosexuals of America. This call was from Nelson, who was now over at Golden Gardens. He said Mrs. Kerisiotis had asked him again who the Brienings were. They had phoned the nursing home and identified themselves as “business associates” of Rita Van Horn, and they said they might drop by late Wednesday with some information about her that the management of Golden Gardens would find interesting. They told Mrs. Kerisiotis to be sure to mention their call to Nelson and Hunny.
Chapter Seventeen
As I drove out to Cobleskill, low clouds moved in and soon I turned on the wipers to deal with a light drizzle. Swoosh, two, three — swoosh, two, three. Nissan, the waltz king. Did windshield washers Argentine tango? The temperature was up in the eighties, even with the rain. So if somehow Rita Van Horn was stuck out of doors she would not likely suffer too much from exposure to the elements, provided she was found soon.
Except, it seemed more and more likely that Hunny’s mom had not just wandered off but had been picked up by someone, perhaps whoever had phoned her fifteen minutes before she tottered out the front door at Golden Gardens. It didn’t make sense that whoever drove Mrs. Van Horn away had anything to do with the Brienings. Their investment was in keeping her in a spot where social pressure and the threat of humiliation would underpin their extortion scam. But their recent implicitly threatening phone call to Golden Gardens suggested that they might hold to their Wednesday deadline, whether or not Mrs. Van Horn was back at the home, and I needed to talk to them and buy time if at all possible.
Cobleskill looked fresh in the benign light rain, although Crafts-a-Palooza, lightly patronized on a Monday morning and smelling of what I took to be New York Thruway-restroom-scented candles, gave off a less welcoming vibe.
“You know what this is?” Clyde said, pointing a metal object at me. “It’s a glue gun, and believe me, I know how to use it.” He yelled at a curtained-off area in the back of the store, “Arletta!
Arletta, that goon working for Hunny Van Horn is back.”
She came through the curtains wielding her own weapon, a Mike Huckabee-brand crown of thorns. The wreath was still in its plastic wrapper, so if she came at me with it I would not likely be injured.
“So,” Arletta said, “did you bring Clyde and I a big fat check 126 Richard Stevenson from Rita’s drunken son?”
“Drunken?”
“Oh, don’t think we didn’t see him on Bill O’Malley last night making an ass of himself and of every one of his sorry ilk.”
“Then you must know that Rita Van Horn is still missing.
Hunny is so upset he can’t deal with anything else right now. I’m sure you understand that. Put yourself in his place.”
Clyde said, “Mr. O’Malley thinks this missing-Rita shenanigan is all a hoax. He has proof, he said.”
“Did he? I just heard a lot of wild speculation based on nothing at all.”
“It’s all about some reality TV show,” Arletta said. “I would no sooner believe anything any of the Van Horns told me than I would believe Barack Obama.”
I said, “Hunny turned down the offer of a show on All-Too-Real TV. His entire life has turned into a reality TV show, and he doesn’t like it.”
This caught Clyde up short. “Why would he say no to that?
Don’t those people on those shows get paid a lot?”
“Since we’re so important in Hunny’s life right now,” Arletta said, “and Rita’s, also, maybe Clyde and I could be on the show, too. Of course, then it would have to come out that Rita is an embezzler. No, I can see why they would try to exclude us.
Anyway, we’ll have plenty of money when Hunny splits his lottery winnings with us. Which will be just a couple of days from now, won’t it? What’s your name again?”
“Don Strachey.”
Clyde said, “But, Arletta, after we get the half a billion from Hunny, then we wouldn’t have to mention the embezzlement on the TV show. That stuff would be all squared away. We could just be there as Rita’s former employers. And as well-wishers.”
She screwed up her face. “That’s true.”
I said, “Let me run this by Hunny and get back to you later in the week. There is also the possibility of Oh Look! TV doing a biopic of Hunny. His winning the lottery, plus dramatic episodes from the first Gulf War and probably some stuff about vampires.”
Clyde and Arletta perked up even more. Maybe they thought they could play the vampires.
Arletta said, “Just make sure Hunny pays us the half a billion by Wednesday. We need to put
a deposit on space at Crossgates by the end of the week, and we’ll need time for Hunny’s check to clear.”
“I’ll see what I can do. You understand, of course, that at this point Hunny’s first priority has to be getting his mother back in one piece. If you think about it, that will be in your best interests, also. If anything happened to Rita — if she were to suffer a fatal stroke or heart attack, say, or become a victim of foul play — I guess both of you would in that case have to accept the fact that you are royally fucked.”
“Watch your language in the presence of my wife.”
“Sorry.”
“Well, what are the police doing, anyways?” Arletta asked.
“Are they investigating the hoax theory? Bill O’Malley is a man who knows what he’s talking about.”
“I know that the police are following every lead they can. The East Greenbush sheriff is coordinating with the Albany Police Department. The State Police are on the case, and there’s talk of bringing in the FBI.”
“The Van Horns are getting the celebrity treatment,” Arletta said, and sneered.
Clyde looked puzzled. “Why shouldn’t they?”
“Just because he won the Instant Warren? He’s a pervert and she’s a thief. This is what we’ve come to!”
Now Clyde grasped what his wife was getting at. “More of the same,” he said. “Just more of the same.”
“Obama’s America.”
I said, “The threatening letter you sent to Mrs. Van Horn was found in her room. So we know she received it. Probably on Saturday, the day before she walked out of Golden Gardens and has not been seen since. It does seem possible that your ultimatum
— Hunny pays you half a billion or Rita faces exposure and humiliation — might have triggered some desperate act by Mrs. Van Horn. If so, are you prepared to accept moral responsibility for that?”
“Desperate act, like what?” Arletta asked.
“We can only guess. I suppose she might try to kill herself. Or has already done it.”
“Oh!” they both cried.
“I’m not saying this just to frighten you, but there is also the possibility that she might try to get rid of the two of you. She is known to be distraught, and it was probably your letter that pushed her over the edge. What is your security situation here and at your home?”
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