Arletta was aghast. “Do you mean shoot us or something?”
“There’s a shotgun missing from the office of Mrs. Kerisiotis, the administrator at Golden Gardens. There is no evidence that Mrs. Van Horn took it. In fact, she has no history of violence.
All I’m saying is, the two of you might want to kind of lay low for the time being. And don’t do anything more to provoke Rita Van Horn or her son.”
Clyde had gone pale below his A-1 hairdo, but now Arletta was looking suspicious. “It sounds to me, buster, as if you are threatening Clyde and I. Trying to spook us and make us back off. Well, if you are, you just might want to try some other tact.
We are both stubborn, and when we are in the right we stand our ground. We have our principles, and they matter to us more than life itself.”
It was all I could do to keep from wrenching Clyde’s glue gun out of his hand and gluing his wife’s mouth shut. But I knew that that wouldn’t help in the long run. I said, “I’ll report back to Hunny what your current position is — that you all will be CoCkeyed 129 in touch again later in the week to try to work something out.
Meanwhile, you’ll be giving Hunny some breathing room to deal with his missing mom, who we all hope hasn’t done violence to herself or is perhaps somewhere planning to bring grievous harm to others.”
Clyde still appeared shaky, but Arletta’s look hardened even more. She said, “Behind this curtain is a lockbox containing Rita Van Horn’s confession of a major felony. It is a confession that will put that dirty old embezzler behind bars where she belongs unless Hunny Van Horn makes good on his mother’s theft by noon on Wednesday. I said not Thursday, but Wednesday. Ya got that?”
Hunny and Art had driven across the Hudson to East Greenbush, where Hunny had gotten into a sniping match with Lawn over Hunny’s Bill O’Malley public psychodrama. I learned this during a phone call from Nelson as I was driving back from Cobleskill. I told Nelson the Brienings seemed not to have had any direct connection with Mrs. Van Horn’s disappearance but that they were going to be a continuing threat, and we needed to get Hunny’s mom back as soon as we could so that she wouldn’t still be missing if and when the Brienings went public with their wacky charges and demands. Nelson said there was still no sign of his grandma, and both the sheriff ’s department and the search volunteers were becoming increasingly frustrated.
I arrived back on Moth Street just as Art and Hunny were parking the Explorer, and now another vehicle pulled up in front of me and shuddered a few times before its driver shut the engine off. The driver’s door of a tiny gray Fiat opened, and a small man climbed out. The old car had a dinged and grainy finish, like the one on Hunny and Art’s Explorer, and the driver also looked as if he had some mileage on him.
“Yoo-hoo! Anybody home on Queer Street?”
The man waved at Hunny and Art, who peered back at him quizzically. Most of the TV crews had not yet arrived for their daily stake-out, but a lone cameraman peered over at the little man. The two bruisers from Gray Security, camped on the porch swing, also took in this strange new arrival, something else for them to think about.
The man was ectomorphic and gaunt. He was mostly hair from the neck up, frizzy and white. He wore sandals and knee-length cargo shorts, though oddly he also wore a button-down oxford-cloth dress shirt and a large necktie with an image on it that I was not yet able to make out.
The man crossed the street as the security guys watched him, 132 Richard Stevenson and Hunny and Art squinted at him warily. I caught up just as the man reached the sidewalk and cheerily introduced himself as Quentin Shoemaker and said, “And I’ll bet you boys are Hunny and Art, Albany’s richest cocksuckers. Am I right? I can spot one a mile away.” He beamed.
This is when Hunny noticed that the necktie Shoemaker was wearing was identical to the one Hunny had worn on the Bill O’Malley show, a hand-painted image of Jack Wrangler’s head and naked torso.
“Hey, girl,” Hunny said, “that’s my tie! You stole my Jack Wrangler necktie, you rapscallion you! You know, I saw His Royal Highness Missy Jack Wrangler in the back room at the Mine Shaft in 1978. Even got to touch it briefly, although there was an awful lot of pushing and shoving in that block-long queue.
Maybe you were there, Quentin, unless, of course, you hadn’t even been born yet, ha ha ha.”
“Oh, I missed all that urban cuddling and cooing, Hunny. I’m a country boy. I was in Oregon rolling around in the mud with the other mountain fairies. As for not being born yet, I’ve been born so many times I’ve completely lost count.”
Art looked apprehensive. “So what are you? Born again?”
“Yes, again and again and again and again and again.”
“But not a born-again Christian, if I’m not mistaken,” Hunny said. “Most of them are not as enthusiastic about cocksucking as you seem to be. Unless I misunderstood your greeting and you actually disapprove of that ever- popular activity.”
“No, in fact if all those senators arguing about health care and the public option and the trigger and so on would just take off their clothes and give pleasure instead of pain to one another, we’d have a single-payer system like Canada’s in place in no time at all.”
“Hey, you should write your congressman.”
“I did. I got a nice note back, too, saying he would be considering all sides in the health care debate and he valued my input.”
Hunny and Art had a good laugh, and they introduced me, and we all walked into the house. The rain had let up, and patches of blue sky were breaking through, good news for the volunteer searchers across the river.
“You’re a private detective?” Shoemaker asked. “I never met a real one. I sense that you are not like many of the men in your line of work. You are freer.”
“Apparently. At any rate, today I am comfortably in the company of two men who own Jack Wrangler neckties. That must mean something.”
Hunny led us into the kitchen and said, “Art, just one. I would like just one itsy-bitsy snort.”
“No.”
“My mother is missing,” Hunny told Shoemaker. “So we are all very stressed. Oh, I suppose you know that. Mrs. Whitney told me you called. That was so nice of you to take an interest.”
“It sounded to me as if you could use a few queer friends.
Some of us at the RDQ commune saw you on TV, and we all just stood up and cheered. I said, ‘Boys, behold! Can our eyes be deceiving us? He’s on TV, and he is an unassimilated gay man!’ Generally the gay people who appear on television are so assimilationist they might as well be het.”
Hunny and Art stared at Shoemaker. Hunny reached for a cigarette, then changed his mind and just fiddled with the ashtray.
Hunny said, “I’m glad somebody thought I was fun. An awful lot of people sure didn’t. That’s all I aim to be, Quentin — friendly and fun. What’s the point taking everything so seriously? At least when you don’t have to.”
“Yes, grown-up activities are necessary to making the world go round — plowing the earth, harnessing the energy of the waters, milking the goats. But acting grown-up all the time is utterly soul-destroying, and I could see immediately that you were not a man who had anesthetized or even strangled his inner child.”
Art said, “Hunny wouldn’t do that.”
“Gay spirit is being crushed at every turn in our society equally by small-souled straight people who can only stand us if we act just like them, and by gay people who’ve lost their connections to the great spirits of the earth and the universe that made us large and free.”
“Hunny is definitely large and free,” Art said.
“Well, I am honored to know you. Both of you.”
“Thank you,” Hunny said, glowing. “Thank you so much.”
Again, Hunny reached for a cigarette but then thought better of it.
“So, your mom left the nursing home and she still hasn’t been found?” Shoemaker asked.
“No, and it’s been over twenty-four hours. We think she went off with somebody, but for the life of us we can’t think who.”
“What is her birth date?”
“January twenty-eighth. Why do you ask?”
