Cockeyed

“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, Hu

Hu

All eyes at the table watched Hu

Lawn’s mouth was actually hanging open.

“But,” Hu

“Yes, Hu

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,” Hu

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 Hu

ePiLogue

Hu

Hu

While the twins’ grades at hvCC were not good enough to get them into a pre-med program, Hu

Hu

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 Hu

Marylou and Antoine, who each received five million dollars from Hu

I never received a bonus of thirty million dollars from Hu

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 Hu

Nelson and Lawn were given a million dollars each of Hu

Mason Doebler received one thousand dollars to get his Pontiac fixed, but no more, and he dropped his frivolous lawsuit after Bob Chicarelli, Hu

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.

CoCkeyed 213

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 Hu

“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 Hu

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 Hu

On Labor Day weekend, I drove Timmy up to Lake George to show him some of the Hu

“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.”