Shotgun Lullaby (A Conway Sax Mystery) (13 page)

I looked at him.

“One thing I learned in a hurry when I got this gig,” he said, tapping his detective's shield. “Everybody does it his own way.”

“Does what?”

“Grieves.”

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I drove.

Everybody grieves his own way.

I should've gone back to the shop.

Instead, I drove. A long loop. Millis, Medway, Milford, Mendon. Angle northwest: Hopedale, Upton. Cut east again: Bryar, Hopkinton, Ashland, rolling toward the place I was supposed to be.

And didn't want to be.

You know who'd be nice to talk to right about now? Sophie. Sophie would get it.

She wouldn't be out of school for another hour and a half.

Hell.

I pulled into a parking lot that used to be a Cadillac dealership. Killed my truck. Shifted my head left, then right.

My neck made a sound like a stepped-on twig.

My head weighed half a ton. It pulled itself down and forward until my forehead rested on the steering wheel.

Gus Biletnikov.

I need help.

Of course he had. He needed help and a fix both. He wanted the fix more.

But he wanted the help, too.

I need help.

Truth and bullshit both. Junkie 101.

They break you, these motherfuckers. Try to help them and they break you.

I cried onto my air bag.

Not for long: my cell snapped me out of it. I sleeve-wiped my eyes and looked at a number I didn't recognize.

Three rings. Four.

What the hell. I picked up, said nothing.

“Sax.”

My breathing hitched. It was goddamn Crump.

He said, “I didn't kill your boy.”

“Sure you did. And he had a name.”

“'Course he did, 'course he did, sorry. Gus. I didn't kill him. Pay no mind to what these cops telling you.”

“They didn't have to tell me. I saw 'em myself.”

Pause. “Saw what?”

“Boot prints.”

Longer pause. “Shit.” He said it
sheee-it
. “So that's what they got? That's
all
they got? You should see 'em, walkin' in and out of this room like they got me dead to rights. They got shit.”

“The Rhinestone Cowboy getup did you in, asswipe. Where are they holding you? Still at the Framingham statie barracks?”

“Yeah.”

“Live it up, Crump. Next stop's a lot worse. Trust me. What phone are you on, anyway?”

“Listen while I tell you one thing,” he said, ignoring the question. “You don't like what you hear, you bring a tub of popcorn to my trial every day and have a ball. Fair?”

I said nothing.

“For a tight-ass commie state,” he said, “y'all surely have a lot of shotguns floating around all of a sudden.”

I said nothing.

“Shotgun here, shotgun there. Whole lot of people got shotguns. Know what? I ain't one of 'em.”

I said nothing, heard a background voice behind Donald. He'd conned somebody out of their phone, and they wanted it back.

“Take a look at that,” he said. “I know you will. If you want to find out who killed your boy. Sorry, sorry. Who killed Gus.”

Click.

*   *   *

Crump's question was fair.

Who's got a shotgun?

How about a man who walks around with a Desert Eagle in his pants? A man who serves as the right hand of a gangster?

I needed to talk with Lima.

You need to go to the shop. To
your
shop.

I needed to talk with Lima.

I thought during the five-minute drive to the police barracks.

Maybe Crump was bullshitting me for some reason I hadn't figured out. But he had a point. Truth is, cops take the path of least resistance. Why shouldn't they? Experience tells them the obvious answer's the right one almost every damn time. Boot print? In a size that matches a funky black guy who's connected to the Biletnikovs? Bingo.

So unless the staties had found a shotgun in Donald's Escalade—or in the Sherborn woods with his prints all over it—the idea was worth checking out. Massachusetts ain't exactly lousy with shotguns.

Not legal ones, anyway. In Massachusetts, it's easier to get a pet zebra than a shotgun.

As to extralegal ones … well, now we were back to gangsters and guys who wore Desert Eagles the way janitors wear key rings.

The question, I thought as I trotted across the parking lot toward the red-brick building, was how eager Lima would be to look at anybody other than Crump.

“Go fuck yourself,” he said three minutes later, speed walking from the reception desk into an old brick-walled room retrofitted with drop ceilings and cubicles. He hurled himself into his rolling chair hard enough to make two other detectives look up from their sandwiches. He glared at me. He didn't tell me to sit.

I sat. “I was in your shoes, I'd like Crump for it too. But listen—”

He tapped a folder on his desk. “Crump, Donald. From his Social, it looks like he was born here in Mass. Aliases include David Cringle, Danny Cringle, Dwayne Chapparal. I love that one. Also John Anthony Randle. Know who that is?”

“Football player.”

He nodded. “It's not my game, but I guess Randle was good. Hall of Famer. Two years ago, Crump was arrested at a boat show down in Cary, North Carolina. But not before he signed autographs for two hours. You know how they send third-string celebrities to those things? Crump walked in and said he was
the
John Randle, former Minnesota Viking, who I guess was on the bill. Crump made himself at home, signed football cards, posed for pictures, the works. Funny part is he would've walked out with a couple grand in his pocket and nobody the wiser, but he grabbed a girl's ass and she hollered for show security.” He shrugged.

I eeled into my chair and said nothing.

“Got to give Crump credit for balls,” Lima said. “The cat's maybe five-three, one-twenty-five, and he convinced everybody he was a Hall of Fame defensive lineman. So whatever he conned you into believing, Sax … don't take it hard.”

I needed to slow Lima down before he gave me the bum's rush. “What do you know,” I said, “about Charlie Pundo out in Springfield? And his kid Teddy?”

The room went still.

The other two detectives, who'd been doing a pretty good job pretending they weren't listening, flat froze.

The only personal item in Lima's cubicle was a snap of him and a man who had to be his father on the back of a fishing boat.

The old building's HVAC system kicked on. Near the ceiling, two red streamers tied to a vent cover went from limp to horizontal.

Lima had straightened. He tapped a pencil eraser against his front tooth—or, I guess, his braces. “What do
you
know about the Pundos?” He said it slowly, carefully, aware of his audience.

I told him. Leaned forward and kept my voice down so the other detectives couldn't hear—ex-con instinct told me not to tell any cop anything if I didn't have to. The pair of them must have wanted the story pretty badly, because they looked hate rays at me while I spoke.

And I spoke for quite a while.

Told Lima about Gus's run-ins with the Pundos. About the trip Randall and I made to Springfield—Charlie Pundo's frustration at his son, the way Teddy'd been summoned to the Hi Hat on the double. About Boxer. About the way we'd taken Teddy and Boxer out yesterday when they tailed me.

Lima slapped his thigh then. “I
knew
something stank about that wreck.”

To show a little balance and let him know I didn't have tunnel vision for the Pundos, I told him about Andrade, too. Even though it went against my ex-con's grain to spill so much to a cop.

Lima must have known this, because he looked at me a long time, chin on fist, when I finished. He finally said, “Feel any better?”

“No.”

“Good. 'Cause Biletnikov's just as dead now as he was ten minutes ago when you started.”

I said nothing. I took it.

“And if you'd come to me with all this—
any
of this—a day or two ago, he might be alive.”

I looked him in the eye. I deserved it. I took it.

“But no. You bring me this cock-up
now,
when I've got a viable suspect in hand, complete with forensic evidence.” He waved a disgusted hand. “Andrade with the car. Teddy Pundo 'cause he
might
own a shotgun. Colonel Mustard in the goddamn drawing room.”

I rose.

“Sit,” Lima said. “Hang on.”

I sat. He logged on to his desktop computer, keyed around a while. Rose, walked to a printer on the far side of the room. That was good because it gave the other two detectives, who hadn't moved an inch, fresh opportunities to look hate rays at me.

Lima returned, sat. He squared the printout he carried, stapled its top left corner, scribbled something on the last page. He rolled the papers into a tube and rolled his chair toward mine until our knees about touched.

“If you want to run around like Castle looking for the guy who killed your buddy, Sax, that's your choice. But back in the cells”—he jerked a thumb over his shoulder—“I got a three-state felon who had a beef with Biletnikov's daddy and left boot prints all over my crime scene. I like what I got.”

He paused. Started to speak, but didn't. Tapped the paper tube on his thigh. If I hadn't known better, I would've thought he started to choke up.

“But,” I said.

“Yeah,
but
. You mention Teddy Pundo around me and the boys here—anytime, any context—you'll find we're all ears.”

Then he thrust the rolled-up papers at my chest.

“What's that?”

“Take it and scram.”

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I sat in my truck in the parking lot and read.

It was a police report. Filled out by a detective in Chicopee, a fading mill town next to Springfield. It was written in constipated cop-report language, but rage trembled through.

Just over a year ago, early April. A man later ID'd as Theodore Joseph Pundo pulled up next to a twelve-year-old girl walking home from a Chicopee middle school just east of the Connecticut River. The girl's parents were Guatemalan. The family had come north thirteen months ago. The girl had already picked up a lot of English. She read at a twelfth-grade level, had single-handedly revived the school debate team, and was considered a rare gem in the city's shitty school system. As she did every day after school, she was walking straight home to tend her seven- and four-year-old brothers so her mother could pick up a few hours at a dry-cleaning shop.

Along came Teddy Pundo in a teal-colored Mustang GT convertible, later found to be stolen from a nail-salon parking lot. It was a warm day, and Teddy was rolling with the top down.

He asked the girl if she wanted a ride to Dairy Queen in his slick new car.

No dice.

He asked her to help look for his puppy, which had jumped out of the car somewhere around here.

No dice.

Those must have been the only come-ons Fat Teddy knew, because he looked around, apparently didn't see anybody, climbed out, hit the girl in the head with a little souvenir baseball bat, and stuffed her unconscious in the Mustang's backseat. It was a small seat, but the girl fit just fine. Hell, she only weighed seventy-six pounds.

Then Teddy Pundo put the top up, drove to a shut-down distribution center for a convenience-store chain, and raped the little girl until nightfall.

Me: gut-punched. I set down the report, breathed deep a few times.

Red mist. It starts in the temples.

I made myself pick up the report.

Fat Teddy Pundo had tied the little girl up and done awful things to her for three-plus hours. The cop who'd written the report laid it all out. I could barely stand to read it.

At dusk, Fat Teddy set the girl's clothes on fire, left her there naked, and drove off in the Mustang, top down again now that he had nothing to hide in the backseat.

Bottom of the last page, block printing, Lima's message to me:
Girl, parents, & sibs all gone. No forwarding addr, probably back to Guatemala or dead. Owner of Mustang recanted, claimed she loaned car to suspect. All charges dropped.

I felt like throwing up. Tossed the report on the passenger seat. Had a hundred questions for Lima. Why had the staties gotten involved in a local crime? Had they been trying like hell to make something stick to Teddy Pundo? If so, it looked like they'd failed. Was that because Charlie Pundo, for all his I'm-just-a-jazz-bigwig bleating, still had juice?

It sure looked that way.

And what message was Lima sending? Was he telling me not to bother, the Pundos were above my weight class? No, that felt wrong—especially when I recalled how the other detectives' ears had pricked up when I mentioned the Pundos. There was a vendetta here, something personal. Maybe Lima was green-lighting a run at Teddy Pundo, letting me know the state cops wouldn't mind one little bit.

Yeah. That felt right.

I fired up the truck and checked my watch. “Springfield bound,” I said out loud.

*   *   *

“What the hell for?” Randall said into his phone three minutes later.

“To rattle the Pundos,” I said. “Especially Charlie. You know that pry bar we talked about?”

“Boxer.”

“Right. Supposed to be Charlie's guy, but now he's sporting around with Teddy.”

“Yeah.” He drew the word out, made it half a question.

“I'm going to work that pry bar into the crack. Work it in deep. Let Charlie know his world's being rocked.”

“Your voice is shaking, my friend. That police report put you in a bad place. It's making you stupid. Here's what you—”

“No!” Maybe I barked it harder than I meant to. I took a breath, softened my voice. “Well … put me in a bad place? Okay. If you'd read it, you'd be there too. But I think Lima's doing two things. First, he's letting me know what Fat Teddy's all about. What he is at his core, what he's capable of doing.”