Cockeyed, стр. 1

Praise for other Don Strachey novels

“Lively, skillful...highly recommended.”

The New York Times on On the Other Hand, Death

“As much travel memoir as mystery, this tenth in a series spanning three decades is supremely satisfying as both.”

Bookmarks on The 38 Million Dollar Smile

“As always with the Strachey novels, the murder and mayhem takes a back seat to the keen social criticism and defiant wit of our detective.”

Maureen Corrigan of NPR,

naming Death Vows one of the top five mysteries of 2008

“A gripping, fast-paced mystery.”

Booklist on Strachey’s Folly

“Stevenson’s mysteries are among the wittiest and most politically pointed around.”

The Washington Post on Chain of Fools MLR PRess AuthoRs

Featuring a roll call of some of the best writers of gay erotica and mysteries today!

M. Jules Aedin

David Juhren

Maura Anderson

Samantha Kane

Victor J. Banis

Kiernan Kelly

Jeanne Barrack

J.L. Langley

Laura Baumbach

Josh Lanyon

Alex Beecroft

Clare London

Sarah Black

William Maltese

Ally Blue

Gary Martine

J.P. Bowie

Z.A. Maxfield

Michael Breyette

Patric Michael

P..A. Brown

AKM Miles

Brenda Bryce

Jet Mykles

Jade Buchanan

William Neale

James Buchanan

Willa Okati

Charlie Cochrane

L. Picaro

Kirby Crow

Neil S. Plakcy

Dick D.

Jordan Castillo Price

Ethan Day

Luisa Prieto

Jason Edding

Rick R. Reed

Angela Fiddler

A.M. Riley

Dakota Flint

George Seaton

S.J. Frost

Jardonn Smith

Kimberly Gardner

Caro Soles

Roland Graeme

JoAnne Soper-Cook

Storm Grant

Richard Stevenson

Amber Green

Clare Thompson

LB Gregg

Lex Valentine

Drewey Wayne Gunn

Stevie Woods

Check out titles, both available and forthcoming, at

www.mlrpress.com

CoCkeyed

A Donald Strachey Mystery

RiChARd stevenson

mlrpress

www.mlrpress.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by

MLR Press, LLC

3052 Gaines Waterport Rd.

Albion, NY 14411

Visit ManLoveRomance Press, LLC on the Internet:

www.mlrpress.com

Cover Art by Deana C. Jamroz

Editing by Judith David

ISBN# 978-1-60820-097-9

Issued 2010

“There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”

Joel McCrea as movie director John L. Sullivan in Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941) ChAPteR one

The first time I laid eyes on Art Malanowski and Hunny Van Horn was the day Hunny won the first New York Lottery payout of one billion dollars.

Normally Timothy Callahan and I are settled in bed and ready to be cheered up by Jon Stewart at eleven, and then we try to stay awake for Colbert. But a colleague of Timmy’s in Assemblyman Lipshutz’s office phoned earlier and urged Timmy to catch the Channel 13 news at eleven. He said, “You’ve gotta see this to believe it,” but refused to say what it was.

So we tuned in, and even before Hunny spoke, I said, “I do believe I detect what Johnny Carson used to call a hint of mint.”

“And then Ed would guffaw and say, ‘I’m not touching that one with a ten-foot pole!’”

“And Johnny would get that look, and say, ‘Mmmnn, a ten-foot pole!’”

“And the audience would crack up.”

I said, “Don’t you miss those days?”

“Nah.”

A female reporter looking fresh out of communications school was doing a live stand-up outside Art and Hunny’s house on Moth Street in Albany’s North End. With its tar-paper-shingled front porch and aluminum awnings on the two second-story windows, Art and Hunny’s place looked a good deal less minty than Timmy’s and my Crow Street townhouse, with its Albany Historical Society bronze plaque next to the front door and the discreet rainbow stickers on half the Toyotas and Subaru Outbacks parked legally up and down the block. But the house on the television screen was in the old working-class North End, where predictability was harder to come by.

Huntington Van Horn, the reporter was saying, was the man who had purchased the unprecedentedly lucky winning 2 Richard Stevenson

ticket at DeMaestri’s Variety Store, two blocks down the street at the corner of Moth and Transformer. Hunny was sharing his spectacular winnings, the young woman said with a smile, with his “longtime partner,” Art.

“It’s good,” Timmy said, “that Albany TV reporters no longer refer to people like these two guys as admitted homosexuals. Of course, by the looks of Hunny and Art, they would have a tough time denying it.”

As the reporter went on to describe how the August twelfth drawing was the State Lottery’s first Instant Warren — making some fortunate player a Warren Buffet-like billionaire overnight

—the picture showed Hunny and Art earlier inside their house.

They were leaping about and flapping their wrists, shrieking with joy, uncorking champagne bottles and exchanging air kisses with others in the room. One of the celebrants was a middle-aged black man with large breasts, a heavy beard and a single rhinestone-studded earring dangling from his left earlobe and extending down to just above his collarbone. On this spectacularly lucky day, could the sparklers have been actual diamonds? Also prominent in the party crowd were two identical, nicely sculpted Caucasian youths of about community college age on whose T-shirts were printed the words wAnt soMe?

We soon saw more tape of lottery officials earlier in the evening exclaiming over the Instant Warren drawing, and reporting that ticket sales were the heaviest in the lottery’s history, and going on about how beneficial the lottery was for state educational programs. Then we were back live with the reporter. She was up on the front porch now and moving determinedly past the porch swing and through the open front door to the scene of festive mayhem in the Malanowski-Van Horn living room.

It was a little hard to hear the reporter over the Village People’s “In the Navy” blasting from somewhere outside camera range, but it was apparent that she was moving toward the man of the hour, who was now at the center of an undulating and somewhat disheveled all-male kick line. With their arms draped over one another’s shoulders, the dancers were having trouble CoCkeyed 3

keeping their champagne in their glasses, and some of the bubbly splashed onto the well-groomed reporter as she approached Hunny.

He was a short stout man, about sixty, I guessed, with a frizz of gray-blond hair around a bare pate that glistened in the TV

lights. Hunny’s pale blue eyes were bright with merriment, and there were two smiles on his blocky face, a broad one of his own, and the other the scarlet imprint on his right cheek of an apparent congratulatory smooch from somebody who was wearing lipstick. Hunny had on dark jeans that looked brand new, a caftan-like lavender shirt and a blingy gold-colored amulet on a necklace that looked phallic but could have been a doggie treat or a cucumber from the damaged-farm-produce bin.