“Huntington,” Mrs. Kerisiotis said, “you are such a celebrity.
The next thing you know I’ll go into the Grand Union and your face will be on the cover of the
National Inquirer
. We’ll find out all about your hidden secrets and scandalous love life.”
Mrs. Kerisiotis grinned, but Hunny only smiled back feebly.
The noontime sun was brilliant and the air steamy, and I cranked the AC as I sped down the interstate toward Cobleskill.
It seemed unlikely that the Brienings were in any way connected to the disappearance of Rita Van Horn. She was most valuable to them settled comfortably among her unknowing and potentially judgmental fellow residents at Golden Gardens. But I needed to talk with them anyway about their crude extortion plot, so it wasn’t going to hurt to gauge their reaction to Mrs. Van Horn’s having gone AwoL.
Hunny, meanwhile, was phoning family members and his mother’s friends and acquaintances to find out if any of them knew of her whereabouts. And the East Greenbush Fire Department was preparing to launch a volunteer ground search if Mrs. Van Horn had not been found by mid-afternoon.
I had never been to Cobleskill. It was one of the small towns off I-88 heading west toward the southern tier counties, about forty-five minutes from Albany. It had a thriving agricultural college that was part of the State University of New York system, and as I headed into town from the interstate the place didn’t have that woebegone feeling of so many upstate burgs whose original industrial reasons for existing had long since migrated to Central America and Asia.
My gPs led me to Crafts-a-Palooza in a strip mall in the west end of town. The Brienings had a place the width of two storefronts, and the vacant, former used bookstore next door looked like the spot where they might be planning their multi-million-dollar mega-expansion. I had a tuna sub at the Subway store at the other end of the mall, and when I walked outside and the sun pounded down on me I was sorry I had eaten the whole thing. I wasn’t going to be as alert with the Brienings as I wanted to be, not that I was under the impression that dealing with them was going to require subtlety.
66 Richard Stevenson
The place was busy with Sunday afternoon young and old women perusing the paints, beads, sparkles, plastic water lilies the size of bed pans, and unpainted plaster dwarfs. There were front yard windmills whose vanes had the Ten Commandments printed on them and in the middle a picture of a smiling Sarah Palin. I had never set foot in an extruded-yard-novelty factory in Taipei, but I imagined that if I ever went there it would smell just like the Crafts-a-Palooza store in Cobleskill, New York.
A checkout clerk told me that Arletta and Clyde didn’t ordinarily come into the store on Sundays, but they happened to be nearby. They were next door in the former used bookstore taking measurements. I asked if that was because Crafts-a-Palooza was expanding, and the clerk said yes, probably in the early fall.
I hadn’t noticed the Brienings inside the defunct bookshop because the lights weren’t on, but I soon spotted them in the dim recesses at the rear. I shoved the front door open and walked in and they both looked my way, startled.
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Briening?”
“Yes?”
They both gave me a sour-faced once-over.
“I’m Donald Strachey, a private investigator. My client, Huntington Van Horn, suggested that we talk.”
Four eyes narrowed at the mention of Hunny’s name.
“A private detective?” Clyde said. “My wife and I have nothing to say to you. If we talk to any detective, it will be a detective on the New York State Police.”
“Now, we’re busy,” Arletta said, “and, Mr. Detective, I think you need to just scoot on out of here.”
They were both tiny rail-thin people with tiny rail-thin faces and mean gray eyes. Both their complexions were the texture and color of zinc. She had on blue slacks and a white blouse with big orange polka dots on it, and he was wearing Nantucket red golf CoCkeyed
67
pants and a tan sport shirt and had colored his hair with what looked like steak sauce.
I said, “Extortion is a class-A felony in the state of New York. If you keep on scamming Hunny’s mother, instead of spending your golden years in the Florida Keys, you may wind up spending them in Sing Sing. That is what I have driven out here to emphasize to you. Maybe up until now you have not been obliged to think about what you have done in those terms. But now I hope you will think about it with care. I’ll bet you would much rather have your grandchildren running up to you and showing you the pretty seashells they found at the beach down in Tavernier than pressing their noses up against a filthy plexiglass shield in Ossining with the two of you on the other side of it sobbing.”
They both looked at me as if I were brainless, and she said,
“Rita Van Horn is an embezzler. She is lucky she isn’t in Sing Sing herself. It is only out of the goodness of our hearts that we didn’t have that woman sent straight to jail. As for any idea of extortion, as you call it, you are just full of it, fella. We possess a legal document, signed by Rita Van Horn, stipulating repayment of the money she stole from Clyde and myself. The agreement contains clauses for penalties and interest, and the only thing Clyde and I have done in recent days is invoke a few of those clauses. And if you think I am bluffing, well, then we will just see you in court! So, how do you like
them
apples, Mr. Albany Private Investigator?”
It occurred to me that I had never laid eyes on the infamous letter, and I wondered if Hunny or anyone else had. Or had they just taken the word of Hunny’s mother that she had signed such a document?
I said, “That letter is worthless, and I think you know it is. It’s an informal agreement with no force of law. You’re just a couple of con artists, and I am here to tell you that your con is over as of this minute. Mrs. Van Horn has repaid you many times over for the money she took. And the idea that you might extract some absurd additional sum from her or her newly wealthy son is just
68 Richard Stevenson
plain nuts.”
“So,” Clyde said coolly, “do you think Rita doesn’t particularly care if the folks out at Golden Gardens find out that she is a criminal? And that woman
is
a thief. We’re doing them all a favor by keeping her from committing additional crimes. In fact, we told her straight out that as long as she doesn’t steal money from folks in the nursing home, or any of the staff — and as long as she keeps up with the make-good payments to Arletta and myself —
we won’t notify the residents that they have a dangerous klepto lurking right there among them.”
“We just wrote to Rita on Thursday,” Arletta said. “And she must have received our letter by now. I’m not surprised she hasn’t shown it to you or probably to anybody else. She is up to her eyebrows in shame, shame, shame. As well she should be. Clyde and I sent her a Xerox of her agreement with us, and we let her know that we have other copies we will be compelled to send to the Albany County district attorney’s office if we are not repaid soon. And I mean compensated both for our financial losses and for the pain and suffering we endured when we lost not only sixty-one thousand dollars but also our sense of trust, which was betrayed so sickeningly. Clyde and I used to be trusting people, and now we have become more cynical. It is not just our money that Rita Van Horn stole, but our innocence.”
These people were both calculating and delusional, and it was becoming clear that the worst they were likely to do was shame and embarrass an old lady whose additional years of experiencing embarrassment and moral shame were limited. But they weren’t limited quite enough. Mother Rita was, according to Hunny’s friend Antoine, still eighty-two percent there on some days. And she apparently cared what people thought of her, as did her family — Hunny, his sister Miriam and her husband Lewis. Nelson, who had hooked up with a man who dealt in tranches and derivatives, seemed ready to forgive and forget and to be more philosophical about swindling the unwary. Not so, the more orthodox-Methodist Van Horns, and not so Hunny, who seemed willing to do almost anything to keep his adored and CoCkeyed
69
adoring mother from being humiliated, if not hauled into court.
The store room we were standing around arguing in was uncomfortably hot without air-conditioning. It occurred to me to invite the Brienings over to the nearby Subway outlet for a cool drink, and where I might shove both of these vicious little creeps into the cooler compartment, if Subway had one, and jam the door shut. But they might not die. They might wrap themselves in coats made of doughy sub buns and survive on American cheese. And I would be convicted of attempted murder.
So instead I said, “Rita Van Horn is missing from the nursing home. She left this morning around eight, and no one knows what has become of her. A search has been organized. If you wrote her a letter that precipitated some kind of emotional crisis in Rita, you will bear a heavy responsibility for whatever has happened to her.”
They gawked. “Nobody escapes from those places,” Clyde said. “Rita must be hiding on the premises.”
Arletta added, “Have they checked the bookkeeper’s office?
If the safe is in there, where they keep the residents’ valuables, that would be the first place I would look.”
I said, “Do you people seriously believe that Hunny Van Horn might actually turn over half a billion dollars to you?”
“We not only believe it,” Arletta said, “we are counting on it.
We are expanding our store here in the fall, and we have been in touch with Crossgates about leasing space at the mall. In addition, as we told Nelson, we are planning to build a lovely retirement home in Florida. And — not that it is any of business of yours — we plan to make a major contribution to an excellent organization in Albany that is protesting the lottery commission paying out all that taxpayer money to a man as immoral as Hunny Van Horn.”
“You’re talking about fPAAC?”
Looking smug, Arletta said, “You betcha.”
“But if the lottery commission revokes Hunny’s winnings, you won’t get a dime.”
70 Richard Stevenson
Clyde stood looking serene, and Arletta smirked some more. “Well, of course they aren’t going to take Hunny’s billion dollars back. The lottery commission is run by a bunch of big-government liberals who support the radical homosexual agenda.
So I am confident that Hunny will keep his billion dollars, and I am just as confident that Clyde and I are going to end up with our fair share. That would be half.”
I said, “Of course, if something bad has happened to Rita Van Horn, you people are up the creek.”
“Has she really run off?” Clyde asked, looking nervous.
The two of them stood watching me with sudden apprehension, and that’s when I concluded that even if they hadn’t snatched her, the letter they had sent her renewing their threats had shoved Mrs. Van Horn into some awful tailspin that was likely to end up badly hurting her as well as everyone else involved.
Back at the house on Moth Street, Hunny sat by the kitchen table chain-smoking. He gazed up longingly at the wall phone as if he might will it to ring and someone on the other end of the line would happily announce that Rita Van Horn was safe and sound. In anticipation of such a call, Hunny had sent out for champagne and clam dip. Nelson and Lawn had come by briefly and then driven over to join Hunny’s sister Miriam and her husband Lewis at Golden Gardens, the epicenter of the search.
Friends had gathered at Hunny and Art’s house to offer comfort. Schuyler and Tyler were there, off in a corner where Marylou Whitney was helping them with their homework. They were students at Hudson Valley Community College, Art told me, and were planning to switch their major from corporate communications to pre-med since Hunny had offered to finance their educations.
Mrs. Whitney, whose real name, Art confided to me, was Guy Snyder and who was an accountant in the New York State Department of Taxation, was also serving as press liaison. For word had spread that the aged mother of the lottery billionaire had gone missing and reporters were gathering out front on the sidewalk. Among them was a crew from Focks News that included the field producer Jane Trinkus, as well as a new cameraman and two armed bruisers from the Focks security department in New York. They spent much of their time palavering with the two Gray Security guards Hunny had hired at my suggestion. The wounded cameraman was still under treatment at Albany Med and was said to be recovering from his back injury. Trinkus had told Hunny that Bill O’Malley himself might be coming up to Albany, and Hunny should consider having an attorney present for the interview.
Other media representatives had also been in touch, Hunny told me, including a man from the All-Too-Real Channel who
72 Richard Stevenson
had seen Hunny on
The Today Show
and wanted to talk to him about doing a reality show. Cameras would be installed around the house, the man said, and Hunny and Art would live normally except for the addition of some “plot points,” such as screaming matches over who had left the shower curtain outside the tub and jealous fits over either Hunny or Art coming on to a uPs man.
Hunny had also been contacted by someone from a gay cable channel called Oh Look! TV about the channel’s doing a movie of Hunny’s life. A writer from the network had already called and said he planned on dramatizing Hunny’s experiences in the first Gulf War and his encounters with vampires.
I said, “Hunny, were you actually in the military?”
“Define
in.
”
Art said, “When we lived in New York, a soldier who hung out at the Stonewall used to drive us over to Fort Dix and sneak us in to cheer up the troops. That’s how Fort Dix got its name.
Hunny and I named it.”
“We thought about calling it Fort Cox.”
“Or, if the Army found that too risqué, Fort Erection.”