Shotgun Lullaby

by Steve Ulfelder

  Bloomquist saw me looking. “My passion,” he said. “My calling. The vest is just inked for now. I’m getting ready to do the hard part. You like?”

  “I guess.”

  “My friends call me the Dude, see. After the movie.”

  “What movie?”

  His shoulders dropped. “Never mind. So … are you a family friend or something? I ask because I was pretty close to Gus, and like I say, he never mentioned you.”

  “I met him when he got out of rehab and started AA.”

  He nodded. “That would explain it. I didn’t see much of him once he went to Hazelden.”

  “I was showing Gus around AA, helping him when I could. I put him in the apartment where you two got high the other day.”

  He didn’t bother to deny it. He said nothing.

  “I know a little about homicide cops,” I said. “Two things make their jobs easy. First, if there’s a husband or a wife or a boyfriend or a girlfriend, that’s who dunnit. Bet your last dollar.”

  Bloomquist’s eyes sharpened up for just a second.

  “With Gus,” I said, “there was no girlfriend. Brings us to the second thing cops look at. Who saw the vic last? So far, the cops don’t know that was you. If they find out, they’ll flood this place. They’ll find whatever you’re selling”—I paused to let that sink in. It’d been a guess, and not a tough one—“to pad all that money you’re making off your leather goods.”

  He leaned forward, struggling. He was a small-time dealer with no use for the likes of me. On the other hand, I could see Gus had meant something to him. He needed a push.

  So push.

  “Brad,” I said, “they cut him in half.”

  “Bullshit. What?”

  I’d phrased it that way on purpose. Bloomquist’s reaction had been the right one. “With a shotgun, I mean. They didn’t actually cut him in half. Blew a big-ass hole in him, though.”

  His lower lip quivered. The beard added ten years visually, but this was a kid I was bullying around, a kid Gus’s age. “What do you … what do you want from me?”

  “Tell me things,” I said.

  “Tell you what?”

  I made a big circle with my arms. “Everything. You, Gus, UMass. Tell me anything that’ll help me find out who killed him.”

  He closed his eyes for a long time.

  When he opened them, they looked different. Straight, or the closest to it he’d been in five years.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  They met in Melville Hall, a dormitory at the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts. Bloomquist was a sophomore, Gus a freshman. Early in the year, Bloomquist’s roommate dropped out. “Boy, was he a hillbilly,” Bloomquist said. “From Gill, a hick town way out Route Two. Amherst was like Manhattan to him, and he couldn’t hack it in the big city.”

  Meanwhile, Gus’s roommate was a New Jersey kid. All night every night: Bon Jovi air-guitar fest. The room became a magnet for Jersey kids. Somebody put a sign on the door: NEWARK NORTH. The roommate was too dumb to know it was an insult. Gus phased himself out of the room. He wandered the halls a lot, crashing on couches and floors.

  Eventually, the floor he crashed on belonged to Bloomquist. They hit it off. They liked the same music. They hated Bon Jovi. They liked smoking weed.

  And how.

  With Bloomquist’s roommate gone, it was simple for Gus to swap in.

  They became pothead best friends. Lived together in various dorms and apartments for the rest of their UMass careers, sold high-end reefer to finance their own stash, dabbled in whatever other drugs fell into their laps.

  “Dabbled,” I said.

  “At first,” Bloomquist said. “I’m getting to that.”

  Like every other stoner who ever dealt on the side, they couldn’t keep their hands off the for-sale merchandise. I nodded as Bloomquist said so, remembering Gus had told me the same thing without mentioning any friend.

  They dug themselves into a hole smoking weed fronted them by higher-ranking campus dealers. They added meth, cocaine, and pharmaceuticals to their inventory to pay off the reefer debts.

  By the time Bloomquist was a senior and Gus a junior, they were both into cocaine in a big way. Debt deepened. They robbed Peter to pay Paul. Campus dealers stopped fronting them drugs. They got skinny. Bloomquist sold his five-thousand-dollar car to a townie for seven hundred bucks in fifties. “Technically,” he said, “it was still my dad’s car. But the buyer was willing to overlook the discrepancy.”

  With an index finger I gestured to speed it up. “I hear this story three times a week. Get to Teddy Pundo.”

  The name jarred him, as I’d hoped. “Man, why didn’t you say you knew that twisted, pants-shitting whale? Not a figure of speech, sad to say. Gus was in the same freshman dorm as Teddy. Teddy’s roommate got the hell out because Fat Teddy shat himself on a semi-regular basis. Word got around the dorm, you know? A psych major told me when it comes to predicting who’s going to be a total psycho murderer, pants shitting is right up there with torturing small animals and setting fires.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Fat Teddy lasted two semesters. Then he got busted stalking a senior. He broke into her room, went through her panties, videotaped himself jacking off in her bed, delightful stuff like that. The girl’s parents didn’t want the publicity that would’ve come from pressing charges, so Teddy was quietly invited to absent himself from campus.”

  “Tell me about the drugs.”

  “Before Fat Teddy got tossed, he used to drop hints that his dad was the Tony Soprano of Springfield. We all assumed he was full of shit, ha ha, pardon the pun. But when Gus and I looked into buying weed in quantity, we heard Teddy Pundo was indeed the man to see, due to the fact that his daddy was indeed a top hoodlum. This was a drag. We wanted nothing to do with Fat Teddy. He was no longer matriculating by then, but he hung around town a lot in typical loser fashion.”

  “You had no choice,” I said. “By then, the drugs were choosing your friends for you.”

  He tugged his beard. “I’m not going to argue that now. Anyway, Fat Teddy was like a puppy dog when we knocked on his door. He couldn’t wait to be our main man. He made sure we got fronted our weed. Later, he lent us the dough for the other stuff, the pills and coke.”

  “Did you ever deal with the dad? Charlie Pundo?”

  He shook his head. “We knew of him, of course, but we never once saw him. I didn’t, at least. Although … come to think of it, Gus might have. Ninety-nine percent of the time, he took on the lovely task of meeting with Fat Teddy. Say, do you mind if I do a bong hit? Just to clear my head?”

  “Yes. Why was it Gus who dealt with Teddy?”

  “His money, ergo his problem. Or his daddy’s money, to be precise.”

  What?

  Bloomquist had finally told me something new.

  I straightened. “Slow down. What the hell are you saying? Was Gus draining a trust fund or something?”

  He shook his head. “Dude, once we got seriously into the hard stuff, Mr. Biletnikov was buying the shit. He had a hot little trophy wife to take care of. She used to visit every weekend, and she had”—he touched his thumb to the side of his nose—“needs, if you get my drift.”

  “You’re talking about Rinn here?”

  “You know her? Devil woman, huh? She was sweet at first, but … anyway, we were the Three Musketeers for a while. But Lord, she could suck up the coke.” Bloomquist tugged his beard again. “No offense, but this is my casa and I’m going to break out the bong. I need to get motivated to patch that hole in the door.”

  I told Bloomquist to fire up his bong. I patched the hole myself with a pizza box and duct tape.

  While I worked, I wondered what the hell was going on with the Sherborn Biletnikovs.

  * * *

  “Come with me,” I said a half hour later, shoulder-jamming phone to ear while I rummaged through a cardboard box in Charlene’s basement.

  “It’s not that I need a
lot of convincing to drop in on Mrs. Biletnikov,” Randall said. “But why, exactly? What’s my role?”

  “She likes you, for starters. You know … likes you.”

  “Hoo boy. Maybe I’ll take her to the malt shop after the big game with State.”

  “Knock it off,” I said, flipping past my Milford High School diploma and a rubber-banded brick of snapshots. I hesitated, lowered my voice, feeling ridiculous even as I said the next bit: “The nanny said Gus went down to see her at the cottage, remember?”

  “When he came by to cadge money. So?”

  “So as far as we’ve been able to find, that makes Rinn the last one who saw him before he turned up dead.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “In her yard.”

  “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “And she found the body.”

  It was quiet so long I wondered if the call had dropped out.

  It hadn’t.

  “Really?” Randall finally said. “Think it through. We’ve been looking at a pair of hard-core gangsters, one with a well-established drug connection to Gus. Said gangsters are sufficiently worried to have attempted to turn you into an Ohio Blue Tip match. Moreover, the state police have enough evidence to be holding your buddy Donald Crump while they build a case against him. And yet you’re saying Rinn Biletnikov, movie-star-gorgeous socialite, worth eighty million via her older hubby, had a beef with her stepson? Whereupon she Rambo’d into a halfway house with a shotgun? Whereupon she killed three people, including the wrong kid? Whereupon she rectified her error by shotgunning said stepson for real in her own backyard? No, it’s even better. She shotgunned Gus somewhere else, then dragged him to her backyard. Really, Conway?”

  “I know. I know.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “But all that money opens up new possibilities. If you’ve got eighty million, you can kill a man without pulling the trigger yourself. Besides, what else am I supposed to do?”

  “Um, fix cars? Earn a paycheck?”

  I ignored that. “She’s starting to look like a real piece of work, you’ve got to admit that much.”

  He said nothing.

  “The nanny said Rinn was fascinated by you. Did I mention that?”

  His sigh told me I’d hooked him. I was smiling even before he said, “Give me half an hour.”

  As we clicked off, I found what I’d been looking for in the box, wrapped in my first checkered flag from Busch Grand National.

  I unwrapped. A thin book, its dust jacket mostly green.

  Goodnight Moon.

  Thanks to the checkered flag, it was pristine despite spending a decade-plus in the box. I opened it to the first blank page. Black pen, my handwriting:

  Roy—This was my first favorite book, can’t wait to read it to you. Love, Daddy

  I was on the road when Roy was born. Heard the news on my way out of Darlington. Bought the book in Saint George, South Carolina.

  I never brought it home. I stayed drunk a long time instead. By the time I got serious about my amends and came to know Roy, he was too old for it. I would have been ashamed to give it to him anyhow.

  Maybe this was the time to pass it on.

  I pictured myself handing Rinn the book. We’d chat. It would turn out we’d both loved Goodnight Moon as kids. We’d recite lines to each other. I’d tell Rinn my first memory was warmth in my stomach when my mother read the opening lines: In the great green room / There was a telephone.

  Shook my head, snapped out of it.

  Knock it off with the kid stuff. Why Rinn? Why now?

  I made myself look at the questions. Why now? Because, I figured, I felt like I was hip-deep in parenthood, whether I liked it or not. Roy, Gus, and even Jessie had made damn sure of that. I chuffed a half laugh as I realized Sophie was, in her own way, the most mature of them all.

  So why Rinn? She barely looks at her own baby. What’s she done to earn a book that means a lot to you?

  Huh. That was the tougher question.

  What had Charlene said the night I brought Gus to that Milford AA meeting? Conway Sax takes in another stray.

  Was I taking in Rinn? Trying to make her something she wasn’t? Something closer to what I wanted her to be?

  “Hell,” I said out loud. “Too much thinking.”

  I fetched a razor blade and ruler, sliced out the page I’d written on.

  Was in my truck in the driveway, set to hit Sherborn via Randall’s place, when my phone rang.

  I squinted at the incoming number.

  No goddamn way.

  I picked up.

  “Meet me at that barbecue joint,” Donald Crump said. “The awful one.”

  “You’re out?”

  “I’m out and I’m hungry. Told you I didn’t do nothing.” He clicked off.

  I sighed, texted Randall that I’d be a while. He could have Rinn all to himself.

  He texted back a smiley face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  When I rolled up, Donald was rattling the barbecue joint’s doors, trying to explain to a Latino dude that he was fresh out of a holding cell at the Framingham barracks and he was hungry, dammit.

  “They open at eleven,” I said.

  “I call it close enough,” he said, putting tiny fists on the hips of his sky-blue slacks and explaining the whole thing again—in Spanglish this time.

  The poor Latino dude finally let us in, then went back to warming up the fry-o-lator and slicing cucumbers.

  “Why’d they kick you loose?” I said a minute later in a booth. We each had a cold root beer in front of us, and Donald was working on a bag of chips. They seemed to’ve calmed him some.

  “They didn’t tell me exactly,” he said. “Don’t have to tell you shit, so they don’t. Hold a man twenty-two hours, serve him nothin’ but nasty McDonald’s, don’t even have the decency to admit they know he didn’t do what they been swearing he done for twenty-two motherfucking hours.”

  He sipped root beer. I kept my mouth shut, betting Donald Crump wasn’t finished talking.

  I won my bet.

  “So they didn’t tell me shit,” he said. “But I been to my motel, and I believe I figured out a few things.”

  I said nothing some more.

  “They tossed the room, of course,” he said. “When I straightened ’er up, something come up missing.” He smiled a challenge at me.

  “A pair of boots,” I said.

  He slapped the table. “Good one, good one! You ain’t so dumb. Way I got it figured, they thought they nailed me when they found boot prints my size. But when they went looking for the boots”—he made a big shrug—“no boots! Oh, they found two, three pairs in the same size, same brand—I favor Dan Post—but they must’ve been looking to match an exact print. And they couldn’t. And I’m guessing when Lima took that to the DA, she made him cut me loose. Told him without those boots, he didn’t have shit.”

  “So where are the boots?”

  “Don’t know.”

  I slapped the table. “Come on, Crump. We can help each other here. But not if you jerk me around.”

  He raised his hands. “Dead serious, Sax. My mouth to God’s ear. My charcoal twelve-inch Dan Posts gone missing. Stolen, you ask me.”

  “You mean … come on, you’re getting paranoid here.”

  Donald set finger to lips as the Latino dude lugged over a tray loaded with beef ribs, baby back ribs, dry Memphis-style ribs, wet Memphis-style ribs, sweet-potato fries, a half-pint of cucumber salad, and six Wet-Naps. Donald reached in his powder-blue Western-style jacket, pulled a wad, peeled off a fifty, and thanked the dude for his trouble, saying he truly did appreciate the extra effort.

  “Paranoid?” he said after tucking in his brown-paper-towel bib. “Nah. I was set up. Who the cops gonna look at closer than an out-of-town negro with a chrome-yellow cowboy suit and a grudge?”

  “Just for kicks, let’s work that angle,” I said. “Who’d want to set you up? You had twenty-two hours to think on it.”
>
  “Who had a beef with Gus Biletnikov?”

  “Andrade,” I said.

  Donald’s face told me he’d forgotten about him, or his name anyway.

  “The guy who sold Gus the shitbox?” I said.

  “You’re cold.”

  “He’s alibied up anyway. Cops were at his house twice that night.”

  “Ice cold, then. Who else?”

  “The Pundos, Charlie and Teddy both. I bumped up against them while you were inside. I’ll have to tell you about it.”

  “Some other time. For now, you’re still cold. Who else?”

  I finger-drummed the table.

  “Give you a hint,” Donald said, tossing another rib in his bone bucket. “I am an, uh, altitudinally challenged American.”

  “It’s possible I noticed that.”

  “With hands and feet sized proportionally.”

  “Where the hell are you going with this?”

  “Who had a beef with poor old Gus and could walk around in my boots?”

  “Nobody,” I said. “Hell, a girl maybe.”

  “Ding ding ding,” he said, popping a square of corn bread in his mouth.

  Then it was quiet a long time.

  “Come on,” I finally said.

  “Tear me off another yard of paper towel,” Donald Crump said, “and listen up while I tell you about Rinn and Peter Biletnikov. And it ain’t no accident I said her name first.”

  * * *

  We left a half hour later. Donald cradled his belly like a newborn child, yammering about how rotten the food had been.

  I wasn’t really listening. Was putting pieces together instead. Or trying to.

  It had been quite a download.

  I didn’t hear the voice at first. Then Donald tapped my arm and pointed.

  “Conway?”

  Huge guy, three hundred pounds easy. Blond mullet. His T-shirt said JEFF GORDON, with a faded cartoon of Gordon’s race car stretched across the belly. Over the T-shirt, despite the day’s warmth, he wore a faded blue flannel shirt, unbuttoned. In each hand he held a brown shopping bag full of takeout.