Cockeyed - Stevenson Richard - Страница 45

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“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 popular 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.”

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