Shotgun Lullaby (A Conway Sax Mystery) (7 page)

I followed as fast as I could. Smiling big.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Hello?”

I walked down a short flight of steps, stutter-stepping in the dark. Felt half-ridiculous, half-mad at Charlene.

“Anybody home?” As I said it, I pushed through the church basement door. It was unlocked, which was good. But I couldn't see three feet in front of me, which was bad.

Goddamn disorganized drunks.

Here's what'd happened: while Gus and I had trailered the dirt bikes back to the shop, I'd found a rambling voice mail from Charlene. Breathless, almost panicky, not like her at all. The gist of the ramble was that a couple of good eggs we both knew, longtime Barnburners, were trying to launch a new AA meeting. Greek Orthodox church out in Hopedale. The meeting wasn't getting off the ground. To change that, a big crew was planning to swarm the joint tonight and lay down some Barnburner mojo. Upshot: could I come by? It'd mean a lot, blah blah blah.

“That's a hell of a sigh,” Gus had said as I glared at my phone. He looked like a reverse raccoon: white skin where his goggles had sat, dirty everywhere else. I guessed I looked the same.

I'd been looking forward to a hot shower, an hour with QuickBooks, then dinner and TV. I told Gus all this. The little bastard hadn't seemed sympathetic. If anything, he'd smirked as I dropped him off.

Anyway, here I was in Hopedale, which makes Framingham look like Chicago. Showered but still hungry, I'd made it three minutes early for the eight o'clock meeting.

And the parking lot was empty, and the building was dark, and Charlene wasn't picking up.

“Hello?” I let the door shut behind me.

Nothing.

Something beneath my feet crinkled. I barely noticed.

“Well fuck me sideways,” I said to the darkness.

“For that,” a man's voice said from a far corner, “you want the Congregational place down the street.”

And a hundred people cracked up.

And the lights snapped on.

And there they were.

The banner behind them said
FREE AT LAST
.

And I'm so thick it took me another second to remember: my parole had ended at 12:01 that morning.

They were hooting and clapping and smiling, but in my head everything went silent as I took them in.

All of them.

There were Charlene and Sophie, front and center. I even spotted Jessie, arms folded, along the back row. All the key Barnburners were there: Butch Feeley, Mary Giarusso, Carlos Q (the world's meanest Colombian, and that's saying something), a bunch more. Floriano and his wife Maria stood off to one side, not knowing most of the others. Eudora Spoon and Moe Coover, my two favorite old-school AAers, smiled and clapped. Randall stood with his father, Luther. Luther was beckoning me for some reason.

Hell, even Gus Biletnikov was there. He must have been in on the setup—it explained the smirk that afternoon when I'd dropped him off.

Roy wasn't there.

No reason he would be, really.

Luther Swale's beckoning was nearly out of control. I took a step forward, and the hooting and hollering doubled. Luther cupped his hands to be heard. “How does it feel to be off paper?”

I looked down. They'd taped newspaper just inside the door. It explained the crinkling when I stepped in.

It was a long way to go for an inside gag. See, parole is called being on paper. The best day of an ex-con's life comes when he gets off paper. No more weekly PO visits, no more travel restrictions, no more peeing in a cup.

Charlene strode across the basement and planted a big honkin' kiss on my lips, putting extra Hollywood on it for the benefit of the crowd. Then the rest of them flooded over and ringed us. Somebody cranked music on a boom box.

It was a good night. Who says drunks don't know how to throw a party?

*   *   *

The good vibe ended when my eyes snapped open the next morning. My first thought wasn't of dirt bikes or parties: what popped into my head was the dude outside the Hi Hat. A dude who walked around with a giant handgun stuffed in his pants and didn't mind showing it to you.

The dude was Charlie Pundo's muscle man. But was he also
Teddy
Pundo's muscle? Or was he more like Teddy's babysitter?

Hell, that was just one thing I needed to look at. First, I'd decided to drop in on Gus Biletnikov's family. Unannounced.

Whether Gus acknowledged it, it sure felt to me like whoever'd done Almost Home was trying to kill him.

Which meant I had to bail out of work today.

Which maybe happened more often than it should, thanks to Barnburner chores.

Which didn't go over so great with Charlene or Floriano.

I slipped from bed, took the world's quietest shower, and escaped the house without waking Charlene. Which meant I didn't have to explain to her that I wasn't going to work.

Phew.

Called Randall while driving east, told him where to meet me.

Dropped by the shop and told Floriano I had errands to run. His raised eyebrow and the Silent Sam routine as he looked over the day's appointments were his version of a hissy fit. I told him I'd call Tory again to ease his workload, but he said she was out of action for the rest of the week—getting trained up on the new direct-injection fuel systems.

Hell.

Well, Floriano would just have to stay pissed. I needed to keep tugging threads.

On the ride home last night, I'd worked through it in my head. I'd given Gus two chances to level with me about anybody who might have it in for him. Each time, he'd fed me Andrade and Teddy Pundo. Each time, he'd acted sketchy when I pressed. He wasn't telling everything there was to tell.

Far as I was concerned, that gave me license to end-run Gus. And the place to start was with his dad.

Or I hoped it was. Couldn't think of anybody else.

Randall had agreed with my thinking. Our plan was to meet at the Biletnikov place and see what made the family tick.

Sherborn is ten minutes southeast of my shop. It's also a different world.

The last address I passed in Framingham was a squat cluster of Section 8 housing. Once I crossed the town line, the first address in Sherborn was a horse farm. It's up there with Wayland and Weston as the ritziest towns in the state.

A few horse farms later I climbed a hill, angling northeast now, and turned where the GPS said to. Cleared a stone wall, drove up a steep gravel driveway.

The house: a McMansion. New, designed to look old. Vast, designed to look modest. Flowing, designed to look rambling.

I parked, rang the bell.

A young woman in jeans answered. Chinese looks. Shoulder-length black hair thick as a horse tail. Perfect skin, sweat-sheen on her forehead. “Yes?”

“Mr. Biletnikov in?”

“I'm afraid not.” Her accent was vaguely familiar and not what I'd expected.

“There a Mrs. Biletnikov?”

“I'm afraid I can't help you.” She began to close the door, but a phone clipped to her jeans buzzed. She raised a finger and took the call.

Then everything changed.

She hung up, smiling and half-bowing, and opened the door wide.

“Come this way. Mrs. Biletnikov has been down in the cottage lately.” In addition to the cell clipped to one belt loop, she had a pink and white walkie-talkie clipped to another. She saw me looking at it. “I'm Haley. Nanny for little Emma.”

“Emma is … Mrs. Biletnikov's?” I knew Gus's parents had split up. Looked like his dad had remarried and had a kid.

“In a manner of speaking.” Haley said it with a locked jaw. While I puzzled that through, she led the way.

The house was clean and tidy, but with baby stuff scattered here and there: a dozen bottles on the kitchen counter, nipples to match, a stuffed giraffe with a bow around its neck. I checked out the place as we walked. Wide pine floorboards, probably scavenged from an old farmhouse. Overstuffed chairs with preworn arms. New paintings that looked like folk art. The most authentic country money could buy. Snap judgment: this was a poser house, the home of people who didn't know who they were. If a decorator walked in tomorrow and told them to change over to midcentury modern, they'd write a check to make it happen.

We walked a long hall, then down a flight of stairs. I tried not to stare at Haley's rear end. I failed.

We moved through a walk-out basement to the backyard. Wildflowers, oaks, a patio with thousand-dollar steel chairs prerusted. Patina, they call it. It costs extra. I kid you not.

The lot was three acres, easy. And though the spring leaves were still puny, I couldn't see even a hint of any neighbor's house. No wonder Gus'd had room to hack out a motocross track.

Haley led me down a short path to a green-trimmed cottage screened by trees. To my left, Randall's Hyundai crunched gravel. He climbed out and joined our wagon train, introducing himself to Haley on the fly.

She gestured toward the door of a cottage half-hidden in the woods, smiled without really smiling, and walked back the way we'd come.

I knocked. Heard “Yes.” Entered a room with walls the color of peach ice cream.

“I'm Rinn Biletnikov,” she said, stepping into the room from a hallway.

I took a fast breath. Heard Randall do the same.

Everything about her was just right. Genuinely blond hair, chopped at chin length. Smart blue eyes that said
If you play your cards right
and
You wish
all at once. Nose freckles, tiny gap between her front teeth. Cross a 1950s Hollywood starlet with a frog-catching tomboy, you had Rinn.

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.”