Shotgun Lullaby (A Conway Sax Mystery) (20 page)

The organist started up.

I checked my watch. One minute past.

Gus Biletnikov would go out in an empty church, with a eulogy from a preacher who likely never met him.

Hell.

Then I heard a twenty-one-gun salute of car doors.

It could only be the Barnburners. Drunks always meet at a Dunkin' Donuts, and they always pile in five to a car. It's where the best conversations take place. The best therapy, the best confessions. The best AA.

I opened the church doors.

Mary Giarusso was first, decked out in 1961 clothes all the way up to a velvet pillbox hat. She touched my arm. “We got lost,” she whispered. “Chester said he knew where it was, and everybody followed.”

“Chester can't find his ass in a telephone booth,” I said.

“That's what
I
said.”

The organist noticed the open doors and played filler to kill time. The musical vibe changed somehow—the organist seemed as relieved as I was that some warm bodies had showed.

In poured the Barnburners: nearly two dozen of them, ones I knew and ones I ought to. Chester Bagley, his wig a full inch off to one side, explaining to some kid how he hadn't
really
been lost. Carlos Q, a man who refused to speak to anybody without a year of sobriety—but would empty his wallet and his pantry for anybody with one. Charlene slipped in, and Sophie, too, looking grown-up in a midnight-blue dress. Then came Butch Feeley, a retired cop, the closest thing there was to a leader of the Barnburners.

The Brazilian gal who almost never talked but spoke better English than me when she did; the biker with a cobweb tattoo who'd slipped me a free raffle ticket at my first meeting; a bunch of old ones, a few young ones. Bringing up the rear, helped up the church steps by a heavy gal in a muumuu, was my pal Eudora Spoon. We go back.

I kissed her cheek. It was like kissing a moth's wing. She was eighty, or close to it. Her buzz-cut hair was whiter and stiffer than ever.

“Thanks for coming,” I said.

“Never met the young man,” Eudora said. “Those who did meet him didn't much like him. They said he was oleaginous. I came for you, Conway. We all did.”

“I know.”

She was scanning the front of the church, and I knew why. “Don't worry,” I said, “no casket in here. Burial's out in the cemetery after. Family only.”

“Thank God.” Eudora patted my arm, and she and her helper found seats. She'd had some kind of scare when she was a little kid—an open-casket funeral where the mortician did a hack job. It'd left a scar eight decades long.

The service was lousy. It wasn't the preacher's fault: you could tell that not only had she not known Gus, she probably hadn't met Peter and Rinn more than a couple of times. So the talk was all generic, about a life too short and making amends and bearing up after loss.

Near the end, when she'd said her own say and led the prayers and most of the hymns, the preacher invited people to stand and share memories of Gus.

She blew it there, misreading the crowd.

The church went quiet.

Nobody spoke. Nobody raised a hand.

The silence grew long, then embarrassing.

From the corner of my eye, I could see Brad Bloomquist. I hoped he would rise and speak. In my head I begged him to,
willed
him to.

He didn't.

Neither did Rinn.

Neither did anybody else.

The silence became awful.

I sighed.

I stood.

I cleared my throat.

“He was a hell of a dirt-bike rider,” I said.

They all turned and looked.

“What I mean,” I said. “What I mean, he could
do
things. That thing, anyway. A kid his age, from a town like this, that's easy to skim over. Nobody
does
anything anymore. Kids especially.”

Peter Biletnikov was trying to burn a hole in me with his eyes. Most everybody else was staring like I had a snake in my sport-coat pocket.

But a few—Carlos Q, the cobweb-tat dude, a few others—were nodding. The nods fueled me to push ahead.

“I got him out on a Yamaha one day,” I said. “He hadn't ridden for years, but he could tabletop a jump like nothing. When he was a kid, he wanted to be a motocross pro. Hacked out a little track in his backyard and everything. I believe he could've made the big time.” I locked eyes with Peter, watched his cheeks go extra red. Screw him. “With a little encouragement.”

There was more in my head. More about kids in nice towns who never
did
anything. There were no paper routes anymore. Kids didn't shovel snow from driveways or fix bicycles or comb the dump for treasure or build tree houses. They never got a chance to show they
could
do anything except work a cell phone and a credit card.

But the words wouldn't form up, wouldn't organize themselves. Which was typical for me.

I sat.

The preacher had learned her lesson: she didn't ask for more volunteers. Went straight to the final prayer instead.

When the organ started up and most people rose, flipping through hymnals, Peter Biletnikov began to moan. It came from nowhere. He doubled over. He cried loudly. He raked his face with his hands. Rinn took one shot at comforting him, but it wasn't much of a shot. She looked at Haley next to her, and I was pretty sure she rolled her eyes.

The hymn chugged along, with the preacher and not many others singing. Peter built a head of steam, putting on a show for all the Barnburners who'd never seen him before and never would again. “No, no,
no
!” Screeching it, raking the cheeks, shaking like somebody'd wired him to a battery.

As the hymn ended, the preacher closed her hymnal, glided down to Peter, and dropped to a knee. She tried to comfort him with words nobody else could hear. The organist stutter-stepped, then rolled into a tune that apparently excused us. Only the preacher and the family stayed: Peter blubbering and howling, Rinn cold-shouldering him, Haley bouncing the baby, Trans-Siberian aunts crossing themselves over and over.

I held the door again, wanting to be last one out.

“Quite a show,” Eudora said. Deadpan.

Carlos Q squeezed my arm. “I liked what you said.”

“There was more, but…” I shrugged.

“Was good. What you said. Was enough.”

“And the Oscar goes to,” Charlene said, tossing her head in Peter's direction.

I said nothing. Wasn't ready to make fun of a man who'd lost a son. There're plenty of ways to grieve. What had Lima said in Biletnikov's backyard?
Everybody does it his own way.

As he slipped past, the last Barnburner to leave, Butch Feeley caught my eye. “Parking lot. Meeting After the Meeting.”

I raised eyebrows in surprise, but nodded I'd be there. Was about to let the door close when I scanned the church one last time.

Brad Bloomquist still sat.

As I approached, I saw his tears had slowed not one bit. They rolled: eyes to beard, beard tip to lap. The lower third of his necktie, his shirt, and the front of his pants were all soaked.

I sat next to him.

I didn't know what to do.

I took his hand in both of mine.

He left it there.

We sat.

We watched the preacher and the church worker herd the Biletnikovs through a door.

Brad watched them leave like a puppy watching his new owner close the basement door for the night. “They wouldn't let me go to the burial,” he said. “I asked Rinn. She asked Peter. Peter deliberated long and hard before opining that I should go fuck myself.”

“Family only is what I heard.”

He looked at me. “Did anybody ever tell you you're not too quick on the uptake?”

Every goddamn day, pal.

I didn't say it. Hell, between the beard and the tears and the sad smile in his voice, I didn't even get mad.

“Gus wasn't just my roomie,” Brad Bloomquist said, “and he wasn't just my partner in crime. He was my love.”

I said nothing.

“My first love.”

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I'm easy to fool. I don't notice things.

Charlene, Randall, and Sophie make fun of me. “Gaydar,” Sophie calls it. I don't have it. Randall says I'm one thick SOB, but Sophie and Charlene say I'm sweet. “Everything
you
have, everything
you
offer the world, is right there, front and center,” Charlene had said one night while we watched a TV show about singing teenagers. “You're subtle as a motorcycle chain. And that's nice. But you expect everybody else to be the same way. You get snookered over and over. And will forever.”

I said nothing. Watched teenagers tap-dance and sing their way up a subway escalator.

“Jazz hands!” Sophie said.

“Shut up,” I'd said that night.

Now the church worker opened the door he'd just led Gus's family through, spotted Brad and me, frowned like he wished we'd leave, and closed the door.

“Tell me,” I said.

“I'm surprised Rinn didn't bend your ear already. The little twat never could keep her mouth shut, not to mention her legs.”

“You and Gus, that's your business. What I want is anything that'll help me find out who killed him. That's my job.”

“Your
job
? Your
job
is grease monkey. You knew Gus what, a few months? I knew him five
years
.” Brad spoke in a harsh whisper, knowing he sat in a church, not liking his own direction but unable to turn back. “Were you fucking him?”

“No.”

“What's your interest then?”

“I told you before. I was showing him the ropes in AA.” Explaining it again pulled me back to Brad's apartment, and that lit off a recollection: when I'd told him cops always suspected the boyfriend or girlfriend, it'd thrown him for a loop because he
was
the boyfriend. I'd been too thick to make the connection.

He took his hand from mine, made a tell-me-more gesture. “And?” Stretching the word.

“And he got killed.”

“Simple as that.”

“Simple as that.”

“Bullshit. There's more.”

Long pause.

“I threw him out,” I said.

Brad said nothing.

“He reminded me of my son. I never did right by my son. Ditched him when he was a baby.”

We sat. To our left, the sun was working its way around the building. Stained-glass windows hummed with the light. They were something to see.

Brad pulled tissue from the back of the pew in front of us. He winced. His fingertips were peeling. He saw me looking at them. “Heat gun,” he said. “A leather crafter's best friend. And mortal enemy.” He blew his nose, wiped his eyes. “I'm sorry about what I said.”

“Cops know about you and Gus?”

“Of course. Detective Lima saw right through me.”

“So he probably asked where you were the night Gus got killed.”

He nodded. “And the night of the Almost Home shootings.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Without even consulting my ultra-busy social calendar, I could tell him precisely where I was both evenings. Sitting in front of the TV, high as a kite, waiting for customers to call or knock. It sounds so depressing, doesn't it? And it is. Of course, he didn't take my word for it. I had to dish up a few client names, and I signed a release allowing Lima to look at my phone records without a search warrant.”

Behind us, the front door opened. I didn't bother to turn—figured it was the church worker again, trying to nudge us out so he could police up the joint. Well, he could wait: I was shuffling thoughts and memories, and I was getting somewhere.

Even with Brad and Gus factored in as a couple, something wasn't right. I felt like I was just starting to tighten a small bolt that was cross-threaded. With enough experience, you learn to feel it before wrecking the bolt.

I shuffled through things Brad had told me, things I knew about him.

Click.

“You're from somewhere on the Cape,” I said.

“Yes?”

“Got family down there?”

“Four generations of Bloomquists have called Brewster home. Not one of them amounted to anything, but that's another story.”

“To me,” I said, thinking it through as I spoke, “the Cape seems like a sweet place to live if you work with leather and deal weed…”

“And are queer as a two-headed quarter.”

“I didn't say that.”

“You didn't have to. What
are
you saying?”

“If I was queer as a two-headed quarter, worked with leather, and dealt weed on the side, I wouldn't be in a hurry to leave the Cape for a dumpy apartment in Framingham. Boston, maybe. But
Framingham
? In a complex full of secretaries and divorced dads?”

Brad's eyes had gone hard. I looked at him. He looked straight ahead.

I said, “How long did you say you've been here?”

He said nothing.

“The phone company doesn't have a number listed for your landline yet. You must be pretty new.”

He said nothing.

“Did you move up here around the time Gus got out of rehab?”

Nothing.

“You did, didn't you? You moved to the next town over from Sherborn.”

I felt, rather than heard, someone behind us. I ignored the presence.

“You say Gus was your first love,” I said. “Hell, you probably believe it. But is there any chance Gus thought of
you
as a reminder of a bad time? As a stalker?”

Then Brad Bloomquist got very, very lucky.

A hand fell on my shoulder.

I whirled, ready to make the pushy church worker regret touching me.

But it wasn't the church worker.

It was Butch Feeley.

“Everybody's waiting,” he said.

Brad scuttled out the door.