ambulance near the site where it had been discovered, and Nelson said he was about to be driven over there to view the corpse and declare whether or not it was Rita Van Horn.
Hunny remained seated at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. Art sat next to him, an arm over Hunny’s shoulders. No one had much to say. Occasionally, Hunny shook his head and cried quietly. “Oh, Mom, Mom.”
Quentin Shoemaker had already driven back to Vermont to consult with the Rdq psychic and the commune’s astrologer, but Marylou and the twins had arrived at the house. They stayed in the living room monitoring the local TV news. There had been a brief report about a woman’s body being found in Nassau, but no details were yet available.
Hunny’s sister Miriam phoned at one point, but she was hysterical and unable to speak for long.
Before the call from Nelson came, I had brought up the laundry basket from the basement and organized its contents on one end of the kitchen table. This was the heap of hundreds of letters, phone messages and e-mails that had arrived in the days following Hunny’s lottery win begging for money or — in some cases — demanding cash in return for silence about some indiscretion or supposedly illegal act on Hunny’s part. More letters had arrived that afternoon, a couple of them from national gay organizations pleading with Hunny not to make any more public appearances where he embarrassed the gay movement and 146 Richard Stevenson
“jeopardized the gains in public opinion and acceptance of gay men and women over recent decades,” as one organization put it.
I made three piles, one called Deal With, another called Not Urgent, and a third — which included the letters from national gay organizations — called Go Fuck Yourself.
The Deal With pile contained a number of blackmail threats I had already defused. Or thought I had — Mason Doebler’s lawsuit came as a rude surprise, and I could only surmise that he had been conned by a scuzzy lawyer into believing that he had a case. But now Hunny had his own scuzzy lawyer, a man I had recommended. A year earlier Bob Chicarelli had gotten me mixed up with a couple of Albany psychos whose case almost got Timmy thrown off a high balcony in Bangkok, Thailand.
This guy owed me a favor.
While we waited to hear from Nelson, I sifted through the letters and notes looking for any possible connection, however remote, to Mrs. Van Horn’s disappearance. None of the writers or callers mentioned her at all. A few of the extortion attempts urged Hunny to avoid embarrassing his family. But this seemed like generic blackmail-note language. There was no indication that any of these people even knew Hunny had parents to embarrass.
Two of the Deal With messages did seem worrisome. One was from an Albany man who claimed Hunny had given him gonorrhea in 1998, and he was sure he had named Hunny as a contact when he went to the std clinic, and if he sued Hunny the clinic records would be subpoenaed. Plainly, this was just some jerk angling for an embarrassment-avoidance settlement
— his threat was legally moronic — but I noted his name and contact information so that we could have a talk. Also in need of attention was the phone message left by an Albany man who claimed Hunny had promised him ten dollars if Hunny could photograph the man’s genitalia with his cell phone. Hunny had not only reneged on the payment, the man said, but later a picture of the man’s erect penis turned up on the Internet. Now he was thinking of suing Hunny but said he would consider an out-of-court settlement. I figured I would meet this one and give him ten dollars and a wedgie.
The Not Urgent pile consisted mainly of pleas for financial aid for good causes, less good causes and individuals whose requests would have to be considered case by case. Hunny’s idea of setting up a foundation like Paul Newman and his wife Bea Arthur’s was looking like the way to go.
The Go Fuck Yourself pile of messages included the ones from the gay organizations that were politely begging Hunny to cease to exist, as well as entirely silly requests like the one from the Albany man who asked for fifty dollars reimbursement for damage done to a valued article of the man’s clothing. He said that in 1978 Hunny had spilled a glass of Jack Daniels on the man’s cashmere sweater at the Playhouse, a long-defunct Central Avenue piano bar, and Hunny had never paid the man’s dry-cleaning bill.
Sadly, the contents of the laundry basket were going to have to be dealt with in their various ways no matter how things went with Hunny’s missing mom. There was also the unnerving possibility that Mrs. Van Horn had met with foul play, in which case Hunny would be legally obliged to hand the letters and messages over to the police for them to paw through. That could get ugly both for Hunny and for many of the schmoes, schlemiels and schmegeggies bent on grabbing hold of a piece of Hunny’s unexpected bounty.
The phone rang four times while we waited to hear from Nelson. Two were press inquiries, and one was the Democratic Senate Campaign Fund calling again. Hunny was abrupt with all three callers and understandably harsh in his remarks to the Democrats.
The fourth call was from Stu Hood. Hunny was too upset to talk with Stu, who was told to call back on my cell phone so that Hunny’s land line could be kept open.
Out on Hunny’s back porch, I told Stu, “Look, you’ll get your thousand dollars. But you have to be patient. Hunny’s mother is still missing and that is the only thing he’s thinking about at the moment. Haven’t you heard about Mrs. Van Horn?”
“I don’t think they get that channel at the Watering Hole.
They just get wrestling.”
“Well, it’s a serious situation. A woman’s body was discovered over in Nassau this afternoon, and it might be Mrs. Van Horn.
We’re waiting to hear from someone who went out to possibly identify the body. So you have to cool it, Stu. We’ll be in touch later in the week about your thousand, and I’m guessing that you can figure out a way to scare up forty or fifty to tide you over in the meantime.”
“Okay,” Hood said, “but anyway I am seriously thinking of backing out of that agreement. A thousand dollars is not gonna do me much good, and I deserve a whole lot more. I heard Mason Doebler is going for the big money and he has a good chance of getting it. Somebody I know saw Mason on TV saying Hunny fucked him when he was an altar boy and Mason wants three million dollars or something. And Hunny wasn’t even a priest, just some horny old troll in the park, so the fuckin’ pope can’t stop Mason from getting recompensed.”
“Recompensed?”
“That’s what I heard from the bartender here, James.”
“Mason isn’t getting a nickel, Stu. He’s deluded. Is he drinking again, by chance?”
“I guess so. I saw him in here last night. He had a beer or three.”
“Hunny never knew Mason when Mason was a boy. They met when Mason was over forty. This is all made up. It’s a nuisance suit. That means he hopes Hunny will settle for less than the three hundred seventy-five million dollars Mason is claiming but more than the thousand Hunny offered him so Mason’s car would pass inspection. Any lawyer who takes the case is doing so just to get on television so that when somebody needs a lawyer they might recognize that name in the yellow pages. It has nothing to do with law or justice. It’s just advertising, and I hope you won’t waste your time and money taking part in a cynical publicity stunt that’ll never amount to anything else.”
A little silence. I could hear voices and dance music in the background. “You are such a bullshitter, Strachey.”
“Not in this case.”
“I just feel like I’ve been treated like I’m a big nothing.”
“No, Hunny wants to be fair. But you’ve been his trick, not his best friend since kindergarten. A sometime- trick can be a nice friendly thing in life. But it involves few ethical obligations — beyond the use of condoms when appropriate — and no legal obligations at all. The thousand dollars Hunny offered you — and still intends to pay you — is actually a very generous amount for someone in your position.”
“No, it’s not. You’re forgetting that Hunny brought me out.”
“Stu, you wouldn’t really want to make that claim in court.
It wouldn’t work. Witnesses with other versions of your sexual history might come forward.”
“Is that what you would call a threat?”
“I guess so, yes.”
“Well, you better keep your fire hose handy.”
“Don’t say that, Stu. You don’t know if this call is being recorded.”
