Cockeyed (22 page)

The phone rang again and Hunny answered it. He had a brief exchange, wrote something down on his Domino’s menu and hung up.

“That’s Mrs. Kerisiotis’s girl calling back. They got Mom’s address book and found Tex Clermont’s number.”

I suggested to Hunny that he give his mom’s buddy a call and ask her if she had heard from Mrs. Van Horn or if she even knew that she was missing.

Hunny said, “This is outside our calling area, but I guess I can afford to call anywhere I please.”

He dialed and soon had an exchange with someone who apparently was not Tex Clermont. Hunny exclaimed a number of times and told the person who answered Mrs. Clermont’s phone about his mother’s disappearance and why he was calling. Then he said he thought the police in both Texas and New York ought to be notified and hung up.

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“Eileen Clermont has also disappeared,” Hunny said to Art and me. “This is just incredible. She’s been gone since last Thursday, and the police are looking for her, and everybody down there is just worried sick.”

“I thought she was on a walker,” Art said, “and couldn’t get around.”

“I talked to the nurse that answered Tex’s phone, and she said that one of the home’s aides is missing too. They think he might have taken Tex somewhere because they were always pals and joked about running off and getting married. The aide’s name is Herero Flores, and his family and friends are worried about him, too.”

“It would be useful to know, “ I said, “if Herero Flores has a car and if so what kind.”

I asked Hunny for the nursing home number he had used and then made a series of calls on my cell.

Ten minutes later I said to Hunny, “I think we’re going to get your mom back.”

“I have a feeling you’re right, Donald. I think all our thoughts and prayers are soon to be answered. But just in time, I’m afraid, for the Brienings to work their evil on Mom and on all the rest of the Van Horns. I have only twenty-four hours before the Brienings go after Mom, and I’m afraid I have no choice but to fork over half a billion dollars, tomorrow morning at the latest.”

I told Hunny I had one more idea on how to deal with the Brienings, and it didn’t involve exorcism.

By six that evening I was set up in Cobleskill and ready to take possession of the original document in which Rita Van Horn had confessed to embezzling sixty-one thousand dollars from the Brienings. It was like the situation in
The Letter
, the Maugham story and Bette Davis movie, except I was not going to pay a lot of money for the letter and then get knifed in the gut anyway. I was going to create a distraction that would lure the Brienings out the front door of their store, and I was going to go in the back door and take away the lock box where they told me the letter had been secured.

The crew I had assembled met me at the McDonald’s on the eastern edge of town. Marylou was there but not in drag.

She was in a business suit and looked like the average middle-aged accountant you might expect to find at the New York State Department of Taxation.

Accompanying her were several people I recognized from the two lottery-prize celebrations at Hunny’s house, the one broadcast on Channel 13 six days earlier and then the Saturday night bacchanal the neighbors had complained about. All of these people were in go-to-work professional or blue-collar gear.

The only thing that might have distinguished them from typical commuters on the way home after a summer work day was this: close up some of the men looked as if they might have been women, and some of the women looked as if they might have been men.

Marylou had on a name tag that read
Buzz Beasley, Simon &
Schuster
. Others had name tags, too, that were whimsical — Tom Cruise, Britney Spears, Senator Charles Grassley — and they were all gathered around a van with a big sign on the side that read
Sarah Palin Book Tour — Going Rogue in Cobleskill!
Climbing out of a Lincoln Town Car was the sensational best-selling author herself, former vice presidential candidate and political
180 Richard Stevenson

phenomenon of the decade, Sarah Palin. Ms. Palin had on a red miniskirt and blue sleeveless top and was wearing shades with white frames to complete the patriotic color scheme. Her big hair was more orderly than it normally appears on television, and both her calves and Adam’s apple seemed to have grown.

Otherwise, Ms. Palin was very much herself, chatty and vivacious.

Some McDonald’s customers gawked and a few began to head our way, grinning and waving, but we had no time for public relations. Anyway, we had just ten copies of the Palin book that somebody had picked up at a discount at the Stuyvesant Plaza Book House, and we were saving those for the former mayor of Wasilla’s biggest fans in Cobleskill.

Our motorcade made its way to the strip mall with Crafts-a-Palooza at one end and Subway at the other. I peeled away from the procession as it approached the Brienings’ storefront and cruised around the back of the building and parked by the Subway Dumpster. Marylou called my cell, and we kept our connection open so she could keep me informed as to everybody’s location in front of Crafts-a-Palooza.

One of Marylou’s crew out in the parking lot had a bullhorn and I could hear it all the way in the back of the building when he began to announce: “Come and meet Governor Sarah Palin! Meet the woman who wants to help you take back your country! Read her great book full of good ideas and big words and mavericky attacks on liberals! Come and get your Sarah Palin tome, and meet the next president of the United States!”

Marylou’s voice said into my ear, “People are starting to come out of the store. Some are walking down from Subway, too.”

“Have your guy with the speaker keep saying Palin’s name until the Brienings appear.” I had explained to Marylou that the Brienings were a small ferret-like couple. I hoped that this wouldn’t be the day when six other small ferret-like couples happened to be shopping at Crafts-a-Palooza and they all raced out to meet Sarah Palin while the Brienings remained inside the store because they were hard of hearing and would miss their opportunity to meet their sociopolitical goddess.

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The bullhorn kept blazing away, noisily hectoring people for half a mile around to gather by the Palin van and meet the famous political personage and now best-selling author. I was poised by the metal back door of Crafts-a-Palooza with my lock-picking tools and, if I had to use it, my crowbar.

Marylou said, “Here come Clyde and Arletta. They look excited.”

“I’m going in.”

The lock was easy, and there was a bar inside the door that I used the crowbar on. I was inside the Brienings stockroom and office within a minute. The lights were on and I headed for their desk, an old wooden job with a dusty desktop computer on it and a couple of file cabinets next to it. I didn’t see anything that looked like a lockbox. I had asked Timmy what a lockbox was, and he said I would have to ask Al Gore.

The Crafts-a-Palooza stock room smelled terrible, and my throat started getting scratchy. I guessed it was the potpourri.

There were huge crates of it nearby, shredded dead vegetation treated with an assortment of chemicals, most of them toxic, I guessed, if not lethal. If I hadn’t had a more urgent task, I would have phoned the ePA.

I saw no safe — my chief worry had been that the Brienings had a safe that was locked and too heavy for me to carry — and I didn’t see any “box” either. The file cabinets were unlocked, and I began flipping through the manila folders. There was nothing filed under Van Horn or Rita or confession or embezzler.

“What’s happening?” I asked Marylou.

“There are fifteen or twenty people. The Brienings are trying to elbow other folks out of the way.”

“Slow them down if you can.”

There was a wooden crate nearby with what looked like old financial records heaped atop it. I flipped through these, fruitlessly, and then set the records on the floor and lifted the lid off the crate. It was full of more reeking potpourri. I replaced the lid and set the bank records back where I had found them.

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My eyes were watering and I sneezed. I sneezed again. Then I sneezed a third time.

Lockbox, lockbox. Where was the lockbox?

I opened the drawers of the desk, but they were full of office tools — scissors, staples, rubber bands — and junk mail from the Republican National Committee. Hanging on the wall above the desk were various “awards” from the RnC for helping save America from socialism.

I went back to the file cabinets to see if maybe a “box” of some kind had been secreted behind the rows of stuffed file folders. Nothing. I had a brainstorm and decided to check the crates of potpourri to find out if a box had been buried inside the many pounds of leaves and twigs.

I opened one crate and sneezed again. Then again. Then I sneezed and sneezed and could not stop sneezing. The lavatory was nearby, its door ajar, and I went in still sneezing, and wadded up bits of toilet paper and stuffed them up my nostrils. But when I sneezed again one of the wads shot out my nose, and then the other one became dislodged and flew across the enclosure and bounced off the door.

I kept on sneezing, and I could only think, Christ, I’ve got to get out into the open air.

I managed to say to Marylou, “What’s happening out there?”

“What?”

“I’m sneezing. What’s going on with the Brienings?”

“Oh, darling they wanted to buy a dozen books, but now they are acting…odd.”

“Are they —
atchooo
— suspicious?”

“I think they might be. Especially Arletta. Clyde is plainly in love with the governor, but even he is starting to look at her in a funny way.”

I sneezed some more, and Marylou said, “What? What?”

My eyes were watering so badly that I was having a hard time CoCkeyed
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seeing the Brienings’ desk or anything else. I wiped my eyes with my hankie, but then the sneezing started again and the eye watering got even worse.

I said, “I have to get outside. I can’t see. Or breathe without sneezing.”

“Somebody is talking about calling nine-one-one,” Marylou said. “Arletta said something about imposters. I’m afraid they’re onto our merry chicanery, Donald, luv.”

“Then pack up and leave. I’m heading out. If I can find the door.”

“Are you all right, darling? Oh my.”

“Leave the books in the parking lot and go back to McDonald’s.

I’ll meet you all there.”

“We sold all the books. Clyde and Arletta bought six. Raphael autographed them.”

I sneezed some more but managed to wipe the tears from my eyes long enough to get out of the Crafts-a-Palooza back door and slam it shut. I got my car going and barely missed the Dumpster behind Subway. As I pulled around to the front of the strip mall I could make out through the blur of tears the Palin book tour van and the Lincoln Town Car cruising out of the parking lot and onto the highway.

Back at McDonald’s, I went into the lavatory and washed out my eyes and sneezed some more and cleaned myself up as well as I could with a fistful of napkins I had grabbed.

Outside, the book van, its sign removed, had left for the drive back to Albany, but Marylou was waiting and looked worried about my well-being and appearance.

“Donald, you look like Olivia De Havilland in
The Snake Pit
.

Is Hunny going to have to have you committed?”

“I didn’t find the so-called lockbox. Or anything else. I was attacked by crates of potpourri. The Brienings might as well have had a rottweiler in there.”

“A little potpourri goes a long way. I have a quarter of an
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ounce or so in a Burmese lacquer dish in my Palm Beach boudoir, and it is more than enough to clear my sinuses after a long day of doing charity work.”

My cell phone went off, and it was Hunny.

“Donald, girl, how did you make out snatching the lockbox?”

“I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t able to find it. My information turned out to be too vague, and I didn’t get lucky.”

“Oh, well, rats. Antoine didn’t have any luck either. Mom and Tex weren’t at the Lake George Super 8 either, and the desk clerk wouldn’t tell them who was staying there. They checked the Silvery Moon again also, and they are all heading over to Cobleskill now to meet Quentin and the other Rdq boys who are on their way to Crafts-a-Palooza. They’re going to perform an exorcism on the crafts store, they said. I told them not to bother, really. But they wanted to help out in the way they know how.

And what harm is there in it, anyways? They should be over there any minute now if you want to watch.”

Marylou rode with me in my car, and we parked along the highway about a hundred yards from the crafts store. Hungry and worn out, we had picked up a couple of Big Macs and a bottle of water at McDonald’s and sat and ate while we waited for the show to begin.

“Oh, I’ve never eaten one of these before,” Marylou said.

“This time of day I am generally pecking at a ladylike nibble of fois gras.”

“Are you enjoying your burger?”

“It tastes predigested. As if it had been marinating in someone else’s stomach chemicals.”

“If you say that, you are arguing with success.”

“I wasn’t criticizing, just pointing out.”

We chatted for a while about Palm Beach life and about the Saratoga social scene during the summer racing season. Marylou reminded me that Rita Van Horn had also been an aficionado of the race track, and this gave me an idea as to where Hunny’s mom and her friend Tex might have been spending recent days, if in fact it was her old pal from Texas who had carried Mrs. Van Horn away to parts unknown.

At seven nineteen, the Radical Drama Queen convoy arrived.

The strip mall lot was nearly empty, except for three cars in front of Crafts-a-Palooza and four or five down at Subway. There were no cops around. The Brienings apparently had not reported the fake Sarah Palin book event, and they must not yet have discovered that the lock on the back door had been broken and their desk and files rifled.