Cockeyed (26 page)

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.

CoCkeyed
213

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

RICHARD 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.