Shotgun Lullaby

by Steve Ulfelder

  Downtown Framingham. The GM plant was long since closed. The retail had moved out to malls on Route 9, a busy east-west road. Some sap had bought the old Dennison factory and turned it into yuppie condos, but as far as I could see there weren’t a lot of takers.

  North of Route 9, Framingham was a nice suburb. Down here, south of 9, it was a beat-up red-brick city scratching its head. Losing its industrial, its retail. Gaining methadone clinics and soup kitchens, puzzling out its next move.

  We hit gridlock near the center of town. I figured the gates guarding the railroad tracks had jammed again. Wrong: we cleared the tracks, but not the traffic, and crawled.

  A block from Almost Home, the jam was explained: cop cars, fire trucks, ambulances. Parked every which way, the way they park them.

  Matt Bogardis was directing traffic with a flashlight, orange poncho over his uniform. I honked, cracked my window. He hustled over, crouching against the rain, strobed blue by his own roof lights.

  “Some mess, huh?” he said. “Take a left, try Franklin Street.”

  I thumbed at Gus. “I’m dropping him off on this block.”

  Matt looked at Gus for the first time. “Where on the block?”

  “Almost Home,” Gus said. “The halfway house.”

  Matt motioned for me to roll my window farther. He flashlighted Gus. “Where you coming from?”

  I said, “AA meeting in Milford.”

  “Let me see some ID.”

  Gus passed his license over. Matt’s visor dripped on it. He passed it back. “Come with me, both of you.” He wiped rain from his nose, looked at Gus. “Everybody thinks you’re dead.”

  * * *

  A half hour later, I stood under the sub-shop awning. Crowded spot: it was the closest shelter to Almost Home. The halfway house itself was out of the rain, obviously—but I got the feeling the cops and EMTs didn’t want to spend any more time in there than they had to.

  Gus had been pulled aside as soon as Matt Bogardis told the Framingham police chief who the kid was. He was a full forty feet away. I couldn’t hear anything Gus said, or the questions they asked him. Had to make do with body language.

  Which was pretty plain: this was a clusterfuck. Framingham’s big enough to get its share of druggie knifings and the occasional home-invasion murder, but this was way bigger. The fact that the chief, a silver-haired glad-hander who spent as much time in Boca as he did behind his desk, was here in full dress uniform told me that.

  The news trucks confirmed it. Channels 4, 5, 7, 56, Fox, Bay State Cable News.

  Then the state cops rolled in, silently taking over—the Framingham chief looked relieved about that—and I began to pick up conversation snatches from coffee-drinking ambulance folks and street cops. Bloodbath. Execution style. Damn near puked. Real Scarface stuff, I shit you not.

  At the far end of the awning, Gus was talking to a guy who had to be a state police detective. He was shorter than most, but otherwise had the look: bowed legs, weightlifter’s chest that his Windbreaker couldn’t hide, black hair an eighth-inch too long to be called a buzz cut. Gus seemed to be handling himself fine. If the cop was like the others I’ve run across, he was repeating and tweaking questions to catch Gus in a lie. But Gus had a hole card: he didn’t have a lie to tell. Not about something that’d happened while we were in Milford.

  I got bored. Watched the TV crews set up, wished for coffee. Every so often, one cop would ask another who the hell I was, then come over and get my story. I told the Framingham cops, then the staties about the Milford meeting. I said fifty people’d seen us there, go ahead and check. Gave phone numbers.

  The detective in charge said one last thing to Gus, then came to me. He had a high-mileage face that looked older than the rest of him. Smart brown eyes. And he wore braces—those translucent plastic ones adults get when they want to fix their teeth but are embarrassed about it.

  He stood close, looked up, studied me, didn’t try to hide it or be polite. Slapped a reporter’s notebook against his thigh. Finally said his name was Lima. I told him mine.

  “I heard about you,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  “Yeah, I heard a lot about you. Everybody at the Framingham barracks knows you. You’re on paper.”

  “Not for long.” It was an understatement. My parole was due to end at midnight. I didn’t see any reason to tell Lima that.

  “Manslaughter,” he said.

  “Self-defense. I got hosed by a DA running for office.”

  “’Course you did.”

  “You’re new,” I said. “In Framingham.” Did he blush? I guessed and pressed. “No, it’s more than that. You’re a new detective. Three months ago, I bet you were running speed traps in … Fall River?”

  He blushed like hell.

  “It was just a good guess,” I said. “I’ve never seen a Brazilian detective on the staties.” I said the last part in Portuguese. I’ve learned some out of necessity.

  “First in the commonwealth,” he said, puffing out his chest. If he was surprised at my Portuguese, he hid it.

  When Lima realized he wasn’t controlling the conversation, he stepped back and forced his eyes to go flat. Produced a pen, bit off its cap, fired questions at me while writing in his notebook.

  Everything he asked I’d already told at least twice. But I played along. Realized I enjoyed having a straight story to tell. It was a new feeling for me. It made things easy.

  Lima soon figured out he wasn’t going to catch me in a lie. He sighed, made a sharp whistle, motioned at Gus to join us.

  “You’ve lived here three weeks,” he said to Gus.

  “Yes.”

  “How long you going to stay?”

  “I’m not sure.” Gus shuffled his feet. “My counselor suggested six months at least, but I got the feeling that was flexible. Some guys stay longer, but most leave sooner.”

  “Why?”

  “They don’t make it. They pick up, you know? They go back out there.”

  “You mean they take drugs.”

  “Or drink.”

  “How does anybody know that?”

  “Random testing, for starters,” Gus said. “You had to pee in a cup whenever Ellery asked. He’s the housefather. Weird dude. But the thing is…”

  Lima waited.

  “… the thing is,” Gus said, “even without the testing, everybody knew. You get a half-dozen junkies all living in a little house together? It was easy to tell when somebody was high.”

  “What happened when people got caught?”

  “They had to split immediately. Ellery would get a phone call with a positive. Then he’d shuffle down the hall—all I ever saw him wear was shower clogs—and knock on a door, and you’d know someone was getting tossed.”

  “How many guys been tossed since you got here?”

  Gus squinted. “There was a black guy who barely lasted a day. I don’t even remember his name. Then last week, a guy named Cal split after two weeks.”

  “Either of ’em pissed off about it? Make any threats? Start a fight?”

  “Nah. When guys left, they were mostly ashamed. They couldn’t look you in the eye. They just wanted to go back out and use.”

  Lima closed his notebook. “If this was a movie made in 1954,” he said, “I’d tell you both not to leave town. But you”—pointing at me—“got a parole officer I know pretty well. And you”—pointing at Gus—“answer to him, far as I can tell. So I don’t have to say all that, do I?”

  “You know Luther?” I said.

  Lima ignored me, turned to leave.

  Gus grabbed the sleeve of his Windbreaker. “Who got shot? Why was everybody worried about me?”

  The cop faced us. Gus’s hand still clutched his sleeve, but Lima spoke to me. “I don’t have to tell you this, okay? I’m doing you a favor.”

  “’Preciate it.”

  “Three vics in there. First two look to’ve been standing in the front hall when the shooter walked in. He could’ve t
hreatened them, or he could’ve walked right past. Instead, he blew their innards all over the ugly striped wallpaper.” He looked at his notebook. “Only vic upstairs turns out to be Weller, Brian C. Mass license, Winchendon address.”

  I said, “So?”

  Long pause. Lima looked at Gus.

  “He was my best friend in the house,” Gus said, his face the color of peed-on newspaper. “My only friend in the house. We got here the same day. People said we looked and acted like brothers.”

  “Still,” I said, “why the mix-up?”

  “Weller was killed in Gus’s room,” Lima said, “and the housefather gave us a bad ID. Easy mistake. Shotgun, close range. Face was pretty much gone.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Gus was quiet. That was different.

  No way was I letting him stay at Almost Home tonight. Or ever again.

  Once the bodies were gone, Lima had let him go in and pack his gear. Gus had come out with a duffel and a white face. I wondered how much blood was in there.

  We drove.

  “Can’t take you to my place,” I said. “My girlfriend’s place, I mean.”

  “Charlene.”

  “You knew?”

  “Barnburner royalty,” he said. “Everybody knows.”

  I let the royalty crack slide. “I’d bring you there, but … it’s a crowded house right now. Or feels like one. Long story.”

  I worked a few blocks north and west, parked in front of a four-square colonial. Even on a rainy night, you could see the house was the best one on the street. Fresher paint, a fence that didn’t sag, curtains in all the windows. No surprise there: Trey Phigg and his wife, Kieu, loved the place and told me so every chance they got.

  Bonus: from the blacked-out third-floor windows, it looked like they were between renters for the in-law apartment.

  I had Gus follow me up the flagstone walk.

  Five minutes later, he was switching on lights in the apartment. “Not bad at all,” he said. “But I have to ask … is this a damn safe house or something? Are you Barnburners that serious?”

  I shook my head. “I once owned this place, and I’m friends with the folks who bought it. Just dumb luck that it’s empty.”

  We were quiet maybe thirty seconds.

  I turned and fussed with a blind that didn’t need fussing with. “Ask you something?”

  “Okay.”

  “You always cry during the Lord’s Prayer.”

  Gus said nothing.

  “At meetings.”

  “I knew what you meant. When does the question arrive?”

  “Why?” Brushing dust from the blind as I said it.

  “It … it makes me think of my mom,” Gus said.

  “Gotcha.”

  “Hang on. There’s more. You asked. Now receive.”

  I turned, leaned on the wall, folded my arms.

  “As far as I know, my dad’s never spent two seconds thinking about God one way or the other,” Gus said. “My mother was raised as what she called a Guitar Catholic in some hippie-dippie church. She fell away from the whole deal. I was never baptized or any of that gobbledygook.”

  “Only child?”

  He nodded. Looked at nothing, recalling something. Then made the nicest smile I’d yet seen on his face. “When I was nine, Mom got a wild hair across her ass for structure and tradition. I think … piecing it together, I think she and my dad were having problems, serious marriage problems, for the first time. She was taking stock. She was reconsidering.”

  I said I could picture that.

  “One night as she served dinner,” he said, “Mom folded her hands and suggested we say grace. She tried to make it casual, but it came out of nowhere, man. She wouldn’t have surprised us more if she’d lifted a cheek and farted ‘Shave and a Haircut.’”

  Gus paused. Took his time. Smiled again, looking at nothing. “If she was hoping my dad would lead the charge and murmur sweet Norman Rockwell-isms, she miscalculated. His cheeks flared bright red—he’s Russian, in case you hadn’t guessed—and he said, without moving his lips, ‘Fine then. Feel free to say your grace.’”

  “And?”

  “It quickly became clear my mom was stumped. She hadn’t thought it through past the initial suggestion, didn’t know what to say. She steepled her hands and closed her eyes.”

  I said nothing.

  Gus licked his lips. When he spoke again, his voice was husky, just north of a whisper. “I guess all she could think of, grace-wise, was the Lord’s Prayer. So she said it. That was the first time I heard the whole thing, stem to stern. We said it every night at dinner, me and Mom, for the next … five years? Six?”

  “And your father?”

  “Never joined in.” Long pause. “Never once, until they split up my freshman year in high school.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Huh,” Gus said. And slapped his thighs. “I should unpack. That might take damn near a minute.”

  I stepped to the door. Grabbed its knob. Stood still.

  “Thank you,” I said. “For telling me.”

  “De nada,” Gus hollered from the bedroom.

  I left and headed west to Shrewsbury. To Charlene’s place.

  * * *

  During the twenty-minute drive, I let my head go where it wanted to. Thought about Gus’s story, which led me to think about the danger he was in.

  Possibility: some methed-up former Almost Homer with a grudge. Got high, lucked into a shotgun, waded into the place not knowing who or what he was going to kill. Call that the most likely scenario. It was a big part of the reason I’d never liked halfway houses.

  Possibility: the kid who got blasted, Brian Weller, was the kid who was supposed to get blasted. It’d happened in Gus’s room, but so what? They’d been thick as thieves, had shared iPods and sweatshirts and God knew what else. If former-Almost-Homer-with-a-grudge had come looking for Weller, Gus’s room would be the second place he looked.

  But those possibilities left out Gus.

  And my job was to look after Gus.

  So seize the initiative, as my buddy Randall Swale always said. Jump to the assumption that could lead to an action plan. Call it possibility three: The killer had come looking for Gus. Maybe he’d been told to hit a certain bedroom. Maybe he’d seen just enough of Weller to confuse him with Gus.

  The thought chain had lodged something in my head.

  Randall.

  My parole officer’s son. We met a while back. He helps me out here and there. Former army, knows what he’s doing.

  Randall was big on seizing the initiative, big on confirmed information, not so big on assumptions.

  So get his help confirming some info—or not.

  I called his cell. Voice mail. Sketched out what I was after: Brian Weller of Winchendon, shot down at Almost Home. Could Randall sniff around, see what kind of nonsense Weller had been up to? Had to be some—Eagle Scouts don’t end up in sketchy Framingham halfway houses.

  I clicked off. Drove more, thought more.

  What I needed was to talk with Gus, figure out who might want him dead. Andrade was the obvious choice. He needed looking at, and he’d be my first stop. But … the vibe was wrong. Andrade felt like a bottom-feeder, not a killer. So it was worth asking Gus for more ideas, more jerks with grudges.

  I didn’t know much about Gus. The Barnburner grapevine said he was a Richie Rich from around here who’d gotten in a jam at college. He’d done the rehab thing, then started showing up at AA and NA meetings. Hard kid to read: he might be serious about staying straight, or he might be smirking his way along to satisfy the court and Daddy.

  I’d find out tomorrow.

  Checked my watch as I swung into the driveway. Almost midnight. Upstairs, Sophie’s light was off.

  Jessie’s was not.

  I sighed, climbed out, let myself in.

  Charlene was piddling around with her laptop in the kitchen/great room where we spent all our time.

  The laptop’s neve
r far away.

  Charlene Bollinger made it to the Barnburners a few years after I did. Booze and meth had been her things, and they showed. Back then, she weighed maybe ninety, wore eye makeup that gave her a raccoon look, jitter-jumped at the slightest noise.

  The state had taken away her daughters, the ones who were up in their rooms now. For Charlene, that was the bottom you hear people talk about, the thing that finally pushed her to AA.

  Over the next few years, she worked harder than anybody else I’ve seen. Got clean, stayed clean, got the girls back. Found steady work transcribing in Westborough District Court, used that as a springboard to her own transcription-and-translation company.

  The business is a big deal now. Charlene’s a big deal.

  “Thanks a million,” I said, setting my keys on the counter. “You stranded me up there telling my life story.”

  “People love hearing your life story.” She shut her laptop, leaned back on the red sectional, scratched the head of Dale, one of my cats. “I love hearing your life story. That’s why I stranded you.”

  I flopped, sat, yawned. “How is she?”

  The way Charlene stiffened was all the answer I needed.

  Hell.

  You’ll never meet anybody works harder than me to stay out of soap operas. But here I was, smack in the middle of one.

  My son Roy and Charlene’s older daughter, Jessie, are the same age. A while back, when they were high school seniors, they hauled off and fell in love. Trouble was, Jessie’d just gotten out of treatment for anorexia and bulimia. Staying out of serious relationships for a year was part of her aftercare program, right there in black and white.

  Like all dumb-ass parents, Charlene and I tried to talk sense into Jessie and Roy.

  Like all dumb-ass kids, they told us to pound sand. The two of them moved to Boulder, Colorado, where she waited tables and he worked in a body shop.

  Just a few weeks ago, without a phone call or a text message, Jessie had showed up on Charlene’s doorstep. She and Roy had broken up. Jessie wouldn’t tell Charlene an awful lot, and Charlene in turn didn’t tell me everything she heard, but it was easy to see the breakup hadn’t been pretty. Neither of the kids could afford an apartment on their own, so Jessie left Colorado and landed at Charlene’s place. Roy went back to his mother, my ex. She lives in Lee, Massachusetts, about as far as you can get from me and still be in the state.