Shotgun Lullaby

by Steve Ulfelder

  Age? Call it late twenties.

  “I’m going to take a wild guess,” Randall said. “You’re not Gus’s mom.”

  She laughed. “We’re only a few years apart, which makes for an odd relationship and then some. It’s one of the perils of being a trophy wife. Drink?”

  She fixed a Diet Pepsi for me, bubbly water for herself and Randall. She looked us over, not trying to hide it, while we sat in a white sofa and matching armchairs. “Haley seemed nervous about you,” she said to me. “I see why.”

  “I’m not Sherborn material.”

  “And thank God for that. It’s a dull little slice of paradise.”

  “Rinn,” Randall said, crossing his legs. “What an interesting name.”

  “Better than Brittania Whitney,” she said, staring at his plastic ankle.

  “Brittania?” he said. “Not Brittney or Brittany?”

  “Brittania Whitney,” she said. “Of the Wellesley Whitneys.”

  He made an exaggerated wince. “Rinn it is, then.”

  She laughed.

  They made merry eyes at each other.

  I rolled mine.

  I should say Randall is considered handsome. I’ve personally seen three strangers tell him he’s a dead ringer for that guy (they say, snapping their fingers), you know, the guy from The Wire, the one who’s a bad guy but you like him anyway. When Randall points out that half the cast fits that description and asks which one they mean, they get flustered—they don’t know how to distinguish one black guy from the next.

  Point being, he’s handsome.

  Rinn Biletnikov sure thought so.

  Yeesh.

  We sipped.

  “Out of curiosity,” I said, “why’d you want to meet with us? With me? You had no idea who I was.”

  “You looked interesting. It gets lonely down here, Mr.…”

  I said my name and Randall’s. “Why are you down here?” While your baby’s up at the main house? I thought. And your nanny seems pissed about it?

  She said nothing.

  “We came to talk about Gus,” I said. “Came looking for his father. Your husband, I guess.”

  “About?”

  “We’re worried.”

  “How so?”

  “You hear about the shooting at Almost Home, his halfway house?”

  “Yes.”

  “We think they were trying to kill Gus, not the other kid.”

  She put a hand over her mouth. “What makes you say that?”

  Randall jumped in, telling her what hadn’t been reported on the news. That Gus and Weller looked alike. That Weller had been in Gus’s room when he was shot. He told her about Andrade, about Teddy Pundo and his pedigree.

  Randall told her so much I nearly kicked him. He was enjoying her attention, her focus. It was hard to blame him. Hell, I’d balance my Diet Pepsi can on my nose if it’d buy me a minute of that. Something about the way she looked at you. Like you were the most interesting man she would talk to all day.

  Randall’s story finally petered out. “So that’s about it,” he said. “We’re wondering if you or Gus’s father know about other problems Gus is having. Things he might be hiding from us.”

  “Before he went to rehab,” Rinn said, taking her time, editing as she spoke, “Gus was on terrible terms with his father. Peter is the last person he would have confided in.”

  “How about you?”

  She hesitated. Did her face flare red? She made a flitting gesture with her hand, but too late. “We were pals,” she said, shooting for breezy. “We were probably closer than most stepmoms and stepkids in this situation. Which is a tricky one, and that’s an understatement. But he never confided in me. We never talked about anything serious.”

  It was quiet awhile.

  “So you met Gus a few months ago in AA?” Rinn finally said to me. “And that’s the … extent of your relationship? You’re certainly going above and beyond to help him.”

  “It’s a tight group. I told them I’d keep an eye on Gus, be an informal sponsor until he gets a real one.”

  “And then,” she said, “you proceeded to beat the living daylights out of one man, then beard a gangster in his lair.” She sipped bubbly water and looked at Randall. “Your friend keeps one hell of an eye.”

  “He’s known far and wide for the eye he keeps.”

  “And the company,” she said.

  “Who am I to argue?” he said.

  “Oh for chrissake,” I said.

  Rinn blushed some.

  We sipped.

  I said, “What does his father do?”

  “Investment banker. He is”—Rinn tucked her chin to her chest and used a newscaster voice—“the driving force behind Thunder Junction Partners, the red-hot Cambridge firm that’s the envy of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.” In her own voice: “Thunder Junction made a splash when it refocused on green tech at just the right time. Peter was hailed as a genius. The company’s done well these past few years, while everybody else has been flailing.”

  I started to ask something, but she snapped her fingers and interrupted. “You know, if you want a truly interesting take on Peter, here’s the man you should talk to.”

  “Interesting how?”

  She ignored the question, peered at her phone, wrote a number on a notepad, handed it across the table. It read Donald Crump and a number that started with 713, an area code I didn’t recognize.

  I pocketed the paper. “I’ll call. How long have you two been married?”

  “A year and a half. We met the summer between my junior and senior years, when I interned at Thunder Junction.”

  “What college?” Randall said.

  “Harvard.”

  “Where else?” he said. “How silly of me.”

  She smiled. “My application for the internship caught Peter’s eye. It was a memo. Six pages, single-spaced.”

  “What did it say?”

  “It said Thunder Junction should dump high tech and biotech and jump into green tech.” She used two fingers to pull a lime wedge from her water glass and pop it in her mouth. “With both feet.”

  Rinn Biletnikov chomped the lime, sucked its juice. If it struck her as bitter, she hid it well.

  * * *

  “My my my,” Randall said when the two of us left the guesthouse.

  “Married,” I said. “Six-month-old baby.”

  “Killjoy.” Long pause. “She is something, though. That you must concede.”

  I conceded it. We stood on the gravel drive, our backs to the cottage, each with car keys in hand, looking up the rise at the main house.

  “She’s down here,” Randall finally said, “and the husband’s up there.”

  “No sign of any baby in the cottage, either. That’s the part gets me. Ever seen the mother of a six-month-old move out like that?”

  “And she lied about her relationship with Gus,” he said. “Or, at the very least, omitted much.”

  “You picked up on that even with those stars in your eyes, huh?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Even with those little cupid arrows.”

  “Shut up.” He smiled, though. “What’s next?”

  I held up the slip of paper Rinn had passed me. “Guess I’ll call this guy.”

  “Geese to be chased,” he said. “Herrings to be … reddened, I guess.”

  “The hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re going to a lot of trouble, my friend. Heck, I’ll just say it: we’re going to a lot of trouble. Over a shooting that may have something to do with young Gus.”

  I said nothing.

  “Or may not,” Randall said.

  “I got that.” Long pause. “You saw the dude with the Desert Eagle.”

  He shrugged. “Beard a gangster in his lair, as lovely Rinn said. He puts on a show of bravado. This is a surprise?”

  I said nothing.

  “You go off on tangents,” Randall said in a different voice, the voice of a man talkin
g to a nervous horse. “You charge after causes. You misspend energy. You often do this when your actual life, life its own damn self, grows stressful. This is not news, Conway. This is not something of which you’re unaware.”

  We were quiet maybe twenty seconds.

  I searched my head.

  Then shook it.

  “I feel it,” I said. “They’re trying to kill him.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s what I need to find out. With you or without you.” Held up the slip again. “Next stop, this guy.”

  Randall Swale and I stared at each other, perfectly still.

  Then he sighed. “What do you want me to do?”

  “See what you can learn about Rinn’s husband. And about her.”

  “Brittania Whitney of the Wellesley Whitneys.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s a dirty job,” Randall said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The voice at the other end of the phone belonged to a black guy who talked a hundred miles an hour. Donald Crump said he felt like a late lunch, asked was there any decent barbecue around here. I thought of the place in the Marlborough strip mall where I’d crippled Andrade a couple nights ago, told him how to get there. Once I clicked off, I realized I didn’t know how to spot him.

  It wasn’t hard. When I rolled up, a man who had to be Crump was pacing out front, talking on a cell. I took him in.

  Tiny man. He wore ostrich-skin cowboy boots with heels that jacked him up at least two inches. His cowboy hat, whose band matched the boots, added another six inches up top. But he would still barely come up to my chin. His suit and shirt were the color of lime sherbet. He wore a bolo tie. Its silver clasp was shaped like a cow’s skull. The cow’s eyes: two tiny emeralds.

  When I neared him, he mouthed my name and his, but stayed on his cell. He pumped my hand like a hummingbird and pulled open the door. Stayed on his cell while ordering, waiting for the food, finding a booth.

  When I was about set to take his phone and stomp it, he snapped it shut. “I could see soon’s I pulled up this food’ll be horrible,” he said. “Don’t know why you don’t get better barbecue around here, man who opens a decent barbecue joint up north is an instant millionaire. Gonna put my hat on the table here, you don’t mind. Cost more’n most folks make in a month, I leave it on a hook it’ll walk right out the door. That all you eatin’, little pulled-pork sandwich? Help yourself you want any of my sides.”

  He waved at his tray. It bowed under a full rack of Memphis-style ribs, cucumber salad, dirty mashed potatoes, red beans, and three squares of corn bread.

  I said, “How much food do you order in a decent place?”

  His laugh: high-pitched. “Good one, good one.” His skin was very dark, very smooth. His head was shaved, his goatee precise, his eyes quick. He took a long strip of the brown paper towel they use for napkins, tucked it in his collar, smoothed it. “You looking at my paper towel? Got to protect the suit, suit costs more’n most people make in six months. Now why’d sweet young Rinn Biletnikov put you in touch with me?”

  I shrugged. “You tell me. Where you from?”

  “Everywhere. Anywhere. Now? Houston. Lot of opportunity there. Texas where a hungry man wants to be.”

  I ate a bite of my sandwich. It’d be easy to let Donald Crump, whoever the hell he was, steamroll you with the patter. He probably counted on it. So I focused, took a deep breath.

  “Rinn told me you’d have something to say about her husband. Peter. Something I ought to hear.”

  “Why you want to hear about him in the first place?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “You’re the one called me for a download, fool.”

  “Yeah, but you’re the one with a thing for Rinn,” I said. “You’d step off a building for her.”

  It was a guess.

  It was a good one.

  “She is something,” Donald said. “Ain’t she?”

  We ate.

  “Here’s why I want to know about Peter Biletnikov,” I said, and laid out a two-minute version of Gus’s story, ending with the Almost Home shootings.

  Crump eye-locked me. “You want to know did the father put a hit on the son.”

  I said nothing.

  “Truth is I never seen him do anything that heavy,” Crump said, wiping the corners of his mouth. “Nor heard tell of it.”

  I read his eyes. “But.”

  Half smile. “But. Hell yes, but. Wouldn’t put it past him. Ain’t much I’d put past Peter Biletnikov.”

  “Why? What’s he to you?”

  “Question is, what am I to him. And what I am is Willie McCoy.”

  He smiled, waited.

  I didn’t get it. And I guess that showed on my face, because he shook his head, dropped the smile, waggled a finger at me. “You’re weak on pop culture. Remember Jim Croce? Willie McCoy’s the dude tugs on Superman’s cape.” He started singing, banging his rib on the table edge to keep time. “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape.” People turned. Crump banged his rib harder. “You don’t spit into the wind. You don’t pull the mask off that ol’ Lone Ranger, and you don’t mess around with Jim.”

  Quiet laughs from nearby tables. A kid two booths over clapped. I looked at him. He stopped clapping.

  “Peter Biletnikov took all my money,” Donald Crump said. “And it may sound funny, but I come to get my money back.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “Think of me as a serial entrepreneur.”

  “How many times you been arrested for entrepreneuring?”

  Hummingbird laugh. “Good one, good one.” Then his eyes sharpened up fast. “Tell you what, Sax. Don’t ask about my arrests, I won’t ask about yours. You ain’t no virgin. Fair?”

  “Fair,” I said, smiling, admitting to myself I got a kick out of this cat.

  The tiny man had demolished his food. Now he fished a silver toothpick from his jacket pocket and began to use it while he told his story.

  He was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Had headed south twenty years ago and loved it right away. He’d hoped to die without ever again traveling north of Washington, D.C. But business was business. And business eventually pulled him to Westborough, a couple towns over from Framingham.

  Without saying exactly how, Crump said he was named CEO of a tiny company called SoPo Industries LLC. SoPo made lightweight glass and plastic products, mostly for solar-powered cars.

  “You, a CEO? No offense, but it’s hard to picture.”

  “You got to understand what a mess the company was,” he said. “It was like being CEO of a lemonade stand. At first, anyway.”

  When Crump rolled into Westborough, SoPo hadn’t met payroll for two months. Judging from the state of the building, he figured most of the employees had simply stood and walked out one day. Some left their computers turned on.

  He poked around and found a frazzled but loyal receptionist running the switchboard through her cell, a pile of dunning letters and liens, and two Chinese engineers who didn’t know a dozen words of English between them, playing NERF soccer in the conference room.

  Crump taught the engineers enough English to fire them, then persuaded the receptionist to stick around. Together they sifted through records and assets, looking for any way to turn a dollar before Crump folded up SoPo and headed south.

  There were not a lot of assets to pore through.

  Crump was about to throw in the towel, stuff a bunch of laptops in his car, and split when the receptionist came across a query letter from a division of DuPont, the giant chemical company. The letter expressed interest in a process developed by SoPo for applying antireflective coatings to extremely thin plastics molded in complex curves.

  “Ka-ching,” I said.

  Crump called DuPont. Then he called Thunder Junction Partners. Said have Peter Biletnikov buzz me: SoPo is reorganizing and needs capital.

  I said, “Why him?”

  “Hell, he�
�d been on the cover of Forbes the month before. He was hot and heavy on green tech.”

  “So Biletnikov and Thunder Junction dropped a truckload of money on you?” I said.

  “And it was a good-sized truck.”

  “How come, though? I know investing is what he does. I get that. But come on. It sounds like you won this SoPo outfit in a poker game. Why should a hotshot take a risk on you?”

  “Walk on the wild side. He liked slumming. He liked getting down and dirty with a genuine negro.” He said it JEN-yoo-wine NEE-gro, smiling.

  “Seriously?”

  “Hell yes. Not the first time I seen it.” Crump shrugged. “Didn’t matter to me, baby. His check cleared.”

  Peter Biletnikov, who was uptight about his kid riding dirt bikes around the yard of his three-million-dollar Sherborn home, rubbing elbows with a guy like Donald Crump?

  The man might be more interesting than I’d given him credit for.

  Crump said the big check, and some smaller ones from local businessmen Biletnikov strong-armed, had resuscitated SoPo. DuPont and other defense contractors licensed the company’s technology. Head count grew to twenty-five, then fifty, then a hundred and ten.

  Biletnikov helped out—or so it seemed at the time—by stacking the board of directors with gold-plated Boston business names. “Instant pedigree,” Donald said.

  “Bet that’s how you got screwed in the end, though.”

  “Bingo. Like I said, you ain’t no virgin.”

  Soon SoPo, in a rotten business climate, was one of a handful of start-ups that could realistically think about going public. Analysts predicted it. Business magazines speculated about it.

  When the time was right, Biletnikov screwed Crump.

  He dropped the hammer via leaks to the business press. Stories began to circulate about SoPo’s CEO. Turned out he had quite a few names, and convictions or injunctions to go with most of them. This was poison to a company setting up an IPO. The drumbeat built until SoPo’s board of directors—all those fancy Boston and Cambridge types who’d once seemed like a godsend—demanded Crump’s resignation.