Shotgun Lullaby

by Steve Ulfelder

  Because of Andrade’s dead-end job at Ocean State Job Lot and his penny-ante rip-off schemes, I’d pictured him as sloppy, disorganized, half-assed.

  Wrong wrong wrong. Maybe he was all those things, but his garage sure wasn’t.

  The far end was neatly stacked to the ceiling with old tires, new tires, labeled cartons full of parts. Another surprise: the shop floor wasn’t stained, beat-up concrete. It looked dead level and was painted in a checkered-flag pattern. A homemade workbench ran arrow-straight down one long wall. Behind it, screwed to the wall, was Peg-Board Sharpied with black outlines of hand tools. And every tool was on its peg.

  So admit it: you misjudged Andrade in one way that you know of.

  Ten minutes later, I knocked on the door of Andrade’s apartment. It was in a maze of two-story red-brick buildings, four apartments to a unit. The development wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t nice either. It was a place to live.

  The woman who answered was very young and short. I’m no expert, but the little boy she held on her cocked hip seemed too old to be working a binky.

  The woman looked at me. Pretty blue eyes, round as hell. Her mouth held something halfway between a question and a smirk. Snap judgment: she deserved better than this, and knew she deserved better, but hadn’t thrown in the towel.

  “Andrade here?”

  She smiled some, said, “Andrade!” Walked away. Back to the linoleum-tiled kitchen floor, where she was doing something with the kid.

  Andrade appeared from the hall that must lead to a pair of bedrooms and a bath, struggling to thread his black leather belt one-handed. A fiberglass cast ran from his right wrist nearly to his shoulder, locking his elbow at a ninety-degree angle.

  He stopped dead when he saw me. “You let him in?” he said, looking at me but speaking to his wife, or maybe girlfriend. “This is him. This is the guy.”

  “The guy knocked on the door,” she said. “I thought maybe it was Zoller.”

  Nobody asked me to step in.

  I stepped in.

  Saw that the woman and the kid were working on a puzzle with fifty pieces, each the shape of a state. The kid’s fingers were flying, and he mumbled as he worked. When I heard “Albany, Harrisburg, Boston,” I put it together: he was saying capitals as he dropped the pieces in.

  People surprise you if you let them.

  “Thanks a fucking lot,” Andrade said, finally speaking to me. He’d made a quarter turn to thrust the cast in my direction.

  “Must make it hard to roll back odometers,” I said. “Hard to brew up bullshit inspection stickers.”

  He ignored that. “Plus the cops came by. Said they know all about me now. Said they’re watching me close.”

  “Good.”

  “Plus the hospital bill’s gonna be like fifteen grand. Plus I got a hydraulic lift on order that costs three grand. No way Jose. So I’m gonna lose my down payment.”

  “Carson City,” the kid said. “Boise, Salem, Sacramento.”

  I said, “You hear what happened in the halfway house in Framingham?”

  “Yeah.” Andrade dragged out the word, wondering where I was going.

  “What do you know about it?”

  “What do you mean?” His eyes: puzzled. Then something clicked. “Fuckin’ Biletnikov! He was staying there. I knew the address seemed familiar.”

  “What I was thinking, maybe you dropped by. Maybe you got all beered up and brave.”

  “You gotta be shitting me.”

  “Were you over in Framingham last night?”

  “Piss up a rope. You bust me all up, then you drop by my home and…” His face went red. “Piss up a rope. Or smash my other arm.”

  My reaction must’ve given away the way I was starting to feel, because Andrade pressed. He took a step toward me, making a show of presenting his good arm. “Yeah, Mister Hard Guy, Mister Drunk’s Best Friend. Bust up my other elbow in front of my kid and my girl. Why not, tough man?”

  “Whyn’t you just tell him?” his girlfriend said, not even looking up, tapping on Alaska because the kid had lost it beneath his own ankle. “Your brothers came over and you all got drunk hooting about your million-dollar lawsuit. The cops pounded on the door at eleven, then ran your brothers off at midnight. Just tell him.”

  Hell.

  Andrade was alibied to the gills. He didn’t have anything to do with any killings.

  As I drove off, I felt like a real man for destroying his elbow. Kid at home, hydraulic lift on order. And I’d crippled him to show off for Gus. Why? Because Gus reminded me of Roy.

  Hell of a reason to blow up a guy’s elbow.

  I felt like a million bucks.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  With Andrade ruled out, my next stop had to be Springfield. I called Randall again, hoping to grab an address.

  “Great Caesar’s ghost,” he said after picking up on half a ring. “Talk about an interesting google. Why are you curious about Charlie Pundo?”

  “It’s the son Teddy I really wanted to know about.”

  “Forget Teddy. Teddy is nothing. It’s Charlie that makes for a spine-tingling read.”

  “You got an address? Or was your spine too tingly to notice?”

  The line went so quiet I wondered if the call had crapped out.

  Randall finally said, “You’re not going to visit Charlie Pundo, are you?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s a bad idea, Conway.”

  “You got an address or not? I can find it on my own if I have to.”

  He sighed. “Swing by.”

  “You’re coming?”

  “As if you didn’t know I would when you dialed. Bastard.”

  Randall clicked off.

  I may have smiled.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, I watched him rattle down an outdoor stairway from the second-floor apartment he rented in Framingham’s Saxonville neighborhood. Watching him zip down the shaky iron stairs, tablet computer tucked under one arm, you could just about forget one of his feet was made of titanium and high-tensile-strength plastic.

  Randall Swale was the son of my parole officer, Luther. We met a while back. Randall wasn’t overseas for three weeks before an IED under a trash-can lid in a godforsaken village blew his right foot and half his shin over a wall. He came home, learned to use his prosthesis, showed zero self-pity, said he was never looking back. Had standing offers for full-boat academic scholarships from most of the best colleges in the country—but had spent over a year bumming around, helping me out sometimes, getting himself into relationships with women that started out serious but dried up.

  A few weeks back, Luther’d asked me to talk with Randall. If he was going to start college in September, he needed to make a commitment soon.

  I’d tried. Randall had muled up right from the start, the way I’d known he would.

  The kid was going through something. And whip-smart though he was, I got the feeling he didn’t know himself what was holding him back. He had to get through whatever he had to get through, and he had to do it mostly on his own.

  I knew a little something about that.

  When I was in an honest mood, I admitted all this worked to my benefit. A dude who’d been first in his class at officer candidate school was good to have around. And if that dude was black to boot … well, Randall could go a lot of places I couldn’t.

  I aimed us west on the Mass Turnpike.

  “Helping you out,” he said, “ensures me a lengthy stay in hell. Standing on my head in a bucket of shit, as the old joke goes.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This morning, I spent fifteen minutes on the phone with the late Brian Weller’s guidance counselor.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “She may have had the impression I was writing a feature for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette.”

  “Nice.”

  “I’ll treasure that compliment when I’m in hell.”

  “Well?”

/>   Randall pushed up a pair of imaginary glasses on his nose. It’s his tic when he gets set to tell me something juicy. “Poor wrong-place, wrong-time Brian Weller was a great kid. A great kid who drank exactly once, according to the counselor. The first time he sampled old John Barleycorn at a neighborhood party, he backed over the knee of the high school track star, a girl who was a lock for the Olympic team in both the two hundred and four hundred meters.”

  “It’s not easy to back over a knee.”

  “It’s somewhat easier when the girl is passed out under your mom’s car.”

  “Oh. So Weller got a choice between Almost Home and jail, one of those deals?”

  “It’s actually a bit more complex. The poor dumb kid wanted to do hard time. He begged the judge to send him to MCI Cedar Junction. A fit of conscience, that sort of thing.”

  “Which proves he wasn’t much of a hard case,” I said.

  “Agreed.”

  “So I’m going to assume he was shot by accident. By somebody who was after Gus.”

  “Who is Gus?”

  I gave him a three-minute fill-in.

  Then Randall spent twenty minutes zipping around his iPad, reading me Charlie Pundo horror stories.

  “This is one bad hombre,” he said. “Took over Springfield in the late eighties, and had to step on a lot of New York Mob toes to do it. Apparently another family, the New York–approved Santosuossos, were getting big at the time, too. So it was ‘This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.’ High noon in Springfield, et cetera, et cetera. A full-on gang war broke out.”

  “Charlie Pundo won the war.”

  “Clearly. And ran Springfield for a quarter century or so, and didn’t make a lot of friends doing it. But starting a few years ago, he backed off. Ceded turf back to NYC, which from what I gather is simply not done. Now he plows money into the Hi Hat and jets around to jazz festivals, but otherwise keeps a low profile.”

  “What about the son?”

  Randall shrugged. “Theodore’s a nonentity. Well, I shouldn’t say that. I found news stories about an aggravated rape charge a few years back. But the case was dropped for no reason I could find.”

  We exited the pike onto Route 291, nearing Springfield. I tried to resist. Couldn’t. Pulled my cell. “Since we’re this far west anyway.”

  Randall said nothing, and bless him for that.

  I called my ex-wife. Got voice mail. Said I was in Springfield on business, be a shame to come so far and not see Roy. Said I’d call back later, maybe I could take him to dinner.

  Randall said nothing.

  I nearly missed the Hi Hat on my first pass, assuming the bombed-out ghetto we were rolling through couldn’t be home to a big-time gangster’s place. Springfield’s a sad little city and a familiar story: a manufacturing hotbed until fifty years ago, in decline ever since as the jobs went first down south, then overseas. Old-timers will tell you the Feds drove a stake through Springfield’s heart when, using typical Fed wisdom, they built I-91 on the bank of the Connecticut River, which used to be and ought to still be the city’s best feature.

  Springfield’s a city that just gave up. It must have fifty neighborhoods like the one we were passing through: good homes gone to seed, good people who just couldn’t make it.

  But ghetto or no, Randall whacked my arm and pointed right—at a short block that looked like 1965.

  “What the hell?” I said, cutting the wheel.

  The club was wedged between a barber shop and a men’s clothing store. A haberdasher, I guess, or so said the old-fashioned sign. Directly across the street: a deli and general store, complete with a rack of fresh fruit out front. Overhead: another fancy sign.

  I craned my neck. Anchoring the other end of the block was a church in red-brown brick. Catholic, I was guessing, though I had only a glimpse.

  Although the streets leading here were pure inner city—Hondas on cinder blocks, pit bulls with rib cages showing, dead-eyed kids staring at us—this block was pristine. I half-expected to see a white-uniformed man working a push broom.

  In the window of the club itself: a neon sign, HI and HAT alternating, a drum cymbal opening and closing every other pulse. You put a sign like that most places in Springfield, it’s busted out an hour later. It’s that kind of city.

  “Charlie Pundo,” Randall said, “appears to have built himself a gangster Disneyland.”

  “See that fruit, just sitting out front of the deli? He must be respected as hell.”

  “Or feared.”

  “Same thing.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “Around here it is.”

  Randall thought that over. Didn’t argue it.

  We parked.

  Inside, the Hi Hat was long and narrow and more contemporary than I would’ve guessed. Jazz came from speakers I couldn’t see. Exposed brick, polished floors, restored bar and woodwork. Low but decent-sized stage filling the far end. Two old-timers at the bar watching ESPN with no volume. Young bartender in a white shirt, his head shaved, his soul patch perfectly symmetrical, his cuffs folded precisely.

  I forget how sad bars make me until I’m inside one.

  We stood at the bar. I asked for a Diet Coke. Randall asked for ice water. We waved off the lunch menus the bartender extended. I asked for a pen. When he brought the drinks, I slid him a note on a cocktail napkin: We are not cops. We need to talk with Charlie Pundo about Gus Biletnikov.

  The bartender was good: his expression changed not at all as he read. We took our drinks to a table and listened to jazz.

  Soon another man appeared. He was dressed like the bartender, but built more solidly. Had the shaved-head look but wore no soul patch. His ears, nose, and scalp belonged to a man who’d boxed. But not well.

  He looked at me, nodded, jerked a thumb over his shoulder. Randall and I rose, but the man shook his head once and gestured for Randall to stay there.

  I shrugged.

  Randall shrugged, sat, sipped.

  The man led me to a short hallway with doors for the restrooms, the kitchen, and something else.

  The office.

  The man knew what he was doing. He waited until I was hemmed in, with doors on all sides and limited movement available, then turned and held his arms out, shrugging some at the same time—pantomiming Sorry, but I’m gonna search you and there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it.

  I extended my own arms. He searched me.

  Then he nodded me in and closed the door behind me. Never did say a word.

  Staring at me from a cheapo rolling chair was the man who had to be Charlie Pundo.

  I nodded to him and looked around.

  It was the working office of a man who didn’t give a rat’s ass what anybody thought of him. Office-grade carpet, old schoolteacher’s desk with a laptop, mix-and-match lamps, hospital-colored walls.

  It was cold, too.

  I turned to take in the wall behind me. It was floor-to-ceiling custom shelves, sized perfectly for records. Actual vinyl LPs.

  “Best move I ever made,” Charlie Pundo said, waving an arm at the LPs. He rose, shook my hand, passed me a business card, sat again. “Forty years ago, all the experts and know-it-alls wanted me to put the music on reel-to-reel and throw out the records. Then it was cassettes. Then they wanted me, they begged me, to digitize everything and save the space, the hassle. I stuck to my guns. Now those records are worth I can’t even tell you how much. I’ve had three Hollywood guys and the chairman of Blue Note Records write me a blank check. They told me fill in a number. Uh-uh. I guess they’ll end up in a museum when I’m gone.”

  I slipped his card in my wallet. “The records why it’s cold in here?”

  “Also why I keep the lights low.” He sighed so long and loud that I turned and really looked at him for the first time.

  Give Gus credit: he’d said Charlie Pundo reminded him of a retired barber, and I saw what he meant. Nearly as tall as me, thirty pounds lighter, call it twenty years older. Mos
tly bald, salt-and-pepper ring of hair that could use a trim. Droopy mustache, also salt-and-pepper. Heavy brown eyes. He wore a perfectly tailored gray suit, pinstripes, white shirt, purple necktie. Looked about as menacing as the grandpa from a cookie commercial.

  He gestured at me to sit. When I did, he sighed again. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

  “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “You say you’re not a cop, and as far as I can tell, that’s true. Are you a private cop?”

  “I’m a mechanic.”

  He smiled, shook his head. “A mechanic. Go figure. Now why’d you come here asking about one”—he looked at the cocktail-napkin note—“Gus Biletnikov?”

  I told him about the shooting at the halfway house, about Gus’s claim that he got in trouble dealing for Pundo. When I finished, Charlie leaned back in his chair and looked at me over his reading glasses.

  “You put me in an untenable position,” he said, unbuttoning his suit coat and clasping his hands behind his head. “You force me to make the I’m-a-legitimate-businessman speech, the can’t-an-Italian-American-get-a-break speech. But I am, and I can’t. I run the most important jazz club in New England. That’s not according to me, that’s according to Downbeat magazine. I showcase the American art form to folks who’d be line dancing in hillbilly bars otherwise.”

  “So if Gus Biletnikov says he dealt drugs for you, he’s lying.”

  “Or delusional.”

  “Then I guess I’m glad he didn’t say that.”

  Pundo frowned, looked a question at me.

  “He said he dealt for your son. For Teddy.”

  Charlie Pundo’s jaw dropped half an inch. His teeth weren’t so great for a rich man. He must be too old to care.

  “Yeah, for old Fat Teddy he called him, no offense, just repeating what I heard. Guess they would’ve been at UMass around the same time, huh?”

  He was so quiet, so moveless for so long that I decided to rise.

  Pundo just sat there, staring at his wall of LPs, hands locked behind his head. Ignoring me, maybe making connections in his head.

  “You put this whole block together,” I said. “The deli, the tailor. Even the church, I’m guessing.”