Shotgun Lullaby

by Steve Ulfelder

  “What the hell do you have against me?”

  “Why, nothing. Sir. Mr. Sax. What makes you say?”

  “Knock it off,” I said. “The eye rolls, the sneer every time you open your trap. What’s it about?”

  She started to mouth off. But she was a good kid deep down, as I’d thought, and so she deflated instead. “I’m sorry. I’m transferring frustration to you. Uncool. Not fair.”

  “Transferring from where?”

  She swept an arm. “From here. From this. From them.”

  I waited. She was dying to tell more, to spill. My best move was to say nothing.

  I’m good at that.

  Haley looked at the baby, then her watch. Cocked her head, hearing a household noise that meant something to her but not to me. She sighed, tossed earbuds onto the black granite countertop, and turned to present me her arm. I figured out she wanted me to de-iPod her. I ripped Velcro, set the rig next to the earbuds, waited for Haley to spill.

  She didn’t get a chance. Peter Biletnikov pounded in.

  He was almost tall. He was almost handsome. I would have guessed Russian even if I hadn’t known already, from the weak mouth, the apple-red cheeks, and the way his hairline was moving up his forehead, leaving a widow’s peak that was his second-best feature. His best: quick blue eyes. They took me in, resented me, and filed me away as a nuisance in the time it took to cross to the stainless fridge and pull out a bottled smoothie.

  “Haley,” he said, reading the smoothie’s label instead of looking at either of us, “who is this gentleman and why is he here so early?”

  “Peter Biletnikov, Conway Sax. The man who’s been helping Gus.”

  “Gus was staying with some friends of mine,” I said. “Since the shooting at the halfway house.”

  “I see. And why are you here?”

  Haley’d had enough. She popped the bottle in the baby’s mouth and began to make a casual break for a long hallway.

  “I’m here,” I said, “because Gus is missing. And I’m afraid he’s using.”

  Haley stopped dead. Peter read his smoothie label. “Missing?” he said.

  Time to come clean. I sighed. “I ran him out of my friend’s place for smoking weed. Haven’t seen him since. I, ah … I feel responsible.”

  “Correction. You are responsible.”

  I hadn’t known Peter Biletnikov two minutes, and I wanted to slap the smoothie out of his hand.

  But he was right. Damned if he wasn’t.

  “What I was wondering,” I said, gritting my teeth, balling my fists, “I was wondering if he’d shown here. Come around looking for money, maybe. Or a bed.”

  “No,” Peter said.

  “Yes,” Haley said.

  “Huh,” I said.

  “He came by last night,” Haley said. “He wanted me to take him to the ATM and withdraw the maximum on your card, Peter.”

  “And?” he said.

  “He made me nervous. He was either high or desperate to get that way. I gave him a hundred dollars to get rid of him. Then he went down the hill toward the guesthouse.”

  “Of course,” Peter said.

  “Did you see him after that?” I said.

  “No,” Haley said. “You can get back to the road from the guesthouse. There’s a path.”

  The baby began to cry.

  “Take her,” Peter said.

  “I know, I know,” Haley said, and this time she did disappear down the hall.

  I said, “Did you ever visit Gus at Almost Home?”

  “No,” Peter said.

  “Mind if I ask why?”

  “It sounds like you’ve been part of this world, this AA-rehab-counseling-drug thing”—he made a circular motion with his drink—“for a while now. So you must know how hard it is on the family.”

  “It’s kind of hard on the person doing the AA-rehab-counseling-drug thing, too.”

  His eyes flashed. “I’ve helped Gus every way I could, make no mistake. I’ve nodded like a good boy and done whatever the guidance counselors, drug counselors, policemen, shrinks, and rehab sales reps told me to do. And do you know what I never heard from any of those people?”

  I waited.

  He slammed his smoothie on the countertop hard enough to fountain purple berries. “What they never said, not one of them, was, ‘Your son is a spoiled brat, Mr. Biletnikov. He’s sucking up trust-fund income and laughing at you while he does so. He’s happily riding his monthly check until the big score, the inheritance, comes in. That, Mr. Biletnikov, is what Gustav Biletnikov the Second looks forward to most. Your son gets a little thrill of anticipation every time you board an airplane, every time you cross a busy street.’”

  He panted, nostrils flaring, cheeks redder than ever. These Russians have a way of coming across as royalty and white trash at the same time. Not sure how they pull it off, but they do.

  He pinched his nose, breathed deep a few times. Finally looked at me again. “I wish nothing but the best for Gustav. I bid you go find him. Talk to Rinn, talk more with Haley, do as you wish. As for me, though”—he dry-washed his hands—“I am done with it. With him. With you.”

  Peter Biletnikov clapped once, fished car keys from a wicker basket, and walked out without looking back.

  The word that hung in my head: “inheritance.” It meant a lot more than Peter seemed to know. It meant a lot even if you didn’t have two nickels to rub together.

  Like my dad.

  I thought about him. Fast Freddy Sax: stock-car racer, welder, drunk.

  I had experience on the receiving end of an inheritance, all right.

  Now I was on the giving end, which turned out to be a lot harder. By the time you understood how important it was, you’d already screwed things up a dozen ways.

  Maybe your kid was waiting for you to die.

  Maybe your kid wasn’t taking your phone calls.

  Fathers and sons.

  “Hell,” I said out loud in the empty kitchen. Heard a V8, looked out the window, watched a black BMW SUV tear down the gravel drive faster than it needed to.

  “Welcome to my world.”

  I spun. It was Haley, without baby and with sweatpants now. She’d catfooted up the hall.

  I said, “What’s his story?”

  “He’s got a hundred million dollars or more,” she said, “and he feels like a failure.”

  “Why?”

  “His father was Gustav Biletnikov the First, the man Gus was named for. Does this ring a bell?”

  “No.”

  “He may be the reason we’re not speaking German. He worked as a nuclear physicist for the Nazis during World War II. They worked on their bomb while we worked on ours. A lot of smart people say they were on track to beat us to fission, thanks primarily to Gustav Biletnikov’s brain.”

  “What happened?”

  “He defected in early ’44, with help from Richard Feynman. There are books about it. By then it was nearly impossible for anybody, let alone a key scientist, to get out of Berlin.”

  “Who’s Feynman?”

  “Not important. Gustav Biletnikov became one of our Russians. After the war, Cornell wrote him a blank check to start a physics department.”

  “What’s all this got to do with Peter?”

  “Peter grew up in a house of titans. Feynman, Oppenheimer, Bethe, and Lawrence dropped by whenever they could. Albert Einstein gave Peter a Batman comic book for his eighth birthday.”

  “Son of a great man,” I said, thinking of a few I’d known. “Not an easy thing to be.”

  “Precisely.”

  “But Peter’s done okay for himself. And then some.”

  “That’s how I see it, too,” Haley said. “That’s how most anybody would see it. But he grades himself on a different curve, and he sure didn’t save the world from Hitler.”

  I started to answer.

  But was interrupted by the longest, loudest scream I’d ever heard.

  It made my neck hairs stand up, and that hadn�
��t happened for a long time.

  We stared at one another, frozen for half a beat.

  Then we pounded down the back stairs, me in the lead. Exited the walk-out basement to the wildflower-lined yard that separated the main house from the guesthouse.

  I paused. I thought the scream had come from farther back in the yard, to my right as I stood now, but it was hard to be sure.

  Haley pulled up behind me, put a hand on my back.

  Another scream. It had less shock this time around, but maybe more pain. It was definitely coming from my right.

  We ran.

  “Path,” Haley said. “Angle left just a little.”

  I did, found it, led her over pine needles at a dead sprint. A corner of my head wondered if this was the motocross track Gus had cleared when he was a kid, the one that’d pissed off his father.

  We popped into a ragged clearing piled high with compost—mown grass, storm-wrecked branches: the place the landscapers brought yard junk—and there she was.

  Rinn Biletnikov.

  Squatting, her back to us. Tiny sneakers, off-white slacks, a thin kelly-green sweater riding up.

  She turned, looking in our direction but not seeing much—had the thousand-yard stare.

  The smell in this clearing: rot under sweet, like a dead rat in a candy shop. It was the mown grass, I knew: dumped here for years, composting, collapsing in on itself.

  We stepped toward Rinn. Whatever she was screaming about was mostly hidden by her body, by tall grass, by scrub oak.

  It became clear as we drew closer.

  Basketball shoes.

  Blue-jeaned legs.

  Sweatshirt.

  “Oh God,” Haley said, and stopped walking.

  I didn’t.

  Couldn’t.

  It was Gus.

  On his back. Eyes open wide. One lazy fly walking his cheek.

  His black sweatshirt said FLATOUT.

  His middle, from the bottom of the word to the button of his jeans, was just a red-black mess.

  “Shotgun,” I said to nobody.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “I need help.”

  The last thing he said to me.

  I helped by throwing him down a flight of stairs.

  Because some sixteen-thousand-dollar-a-year counselor once told me tough love was the way to go.

  “For God’s sake, Conway, what should we do?”

  I snapped to.

  It was Rinn. She’d risen from her crouch, was hugging her arms.

  “She’s doing it,” I said, nodding in Haley’s direction. She had dialed 911 and was saying the address.

  “What happened?” Rinn said, looking down at the body.

  “You tell me.” She’d made a pretty quick transition from helpless screaming to analyzing the situation, hadn’t she?

  I stepped toward Gus’s body. I made myself a camera. Needed to suck up info now, while I had a chance. The cops would hustle us out of here in a hurry.

  I looked. It’s a sucker bet to play CSI, but common sense can tell you a lot.

  Common sense told me right off the bat that Gus hadn’t been killed where he lay. His back arched across a slab of protruding stone the size of a card table, and there wasn’t enough blood for him to have been blown open there. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t been killed nearby, on his father’s grounds.

  I turned to Rinn. “Did you hear it? The gun?”

  She shook her head.

  “Maybe overnight?” I said.

  She shook it again.

  “You?” I said to Haley, who’d finished her phone call. “Middle of the night, maybe? Anything?”

  “No,” she said, biting her lip. Then, firmer: “No. We’re only a hundred feet from Emma’s bedroom window, and she’s easy to unsettle. A gunshot would have woken her.”

  I nodded, turned back to the body, made myself look hard at the belly. Camera. Capture info. Anything else comes later.

  The blood was three or four different shades, running from crusty near-black through rose. So try common sense again: Gus had been killed, then moved—to a car, maybe—then moved a final time, to the spot I was staring at. With each movement, crusted blood would crack and fresh blood would flow.

  Maybe it was a CSI sucker bet, but I didn’t think so. It felt like a starting point.

  Sirens. From the road. All three flavors: cruiser, ambulance, fire.

  “They won’t know how to find us,” Haley said. “I’ll show them.” She backtracked up the path.

  “Gus,” Rinn said. “Sweet Gus.”

  My head swiveled, sharper than I meant it to. She’d only said three words, but they carried backstory.

  She caught me staring, hugged her arms again, shivered.

  It was a fake shiver. A good one, but a fake.

  The sirens died, which meant we had a minute or two, no more.

  Camera. I took a step to my right, changing my angle to make myself see things differently. Gus’s big eyes, wide open. That brown hair, not really parted. That goddamn fly, still cheek-walking. Gus’s back arched across the flat gray stone he’d been dumped on. Deep-green moss creeping up the stone’s edges where it protruded …

  There.

  In the moss.

  A heel print, clear as day.

  And another next to it.

  Deep prints. Prints you’d make if you were dragging a body by its armpits, walking backward—awkward, stooped over. You had dragged the body quite a way already. You were tired. Maybe you had sweat in your eyes. You wanted to get this the hell over with. By now, you were just digging in your heels and hauling.

  “Huh,” I said out loud.

  “What?” Rinn said.

  “Nothing,” I said. Behind me: trotting footsteps on the path, cop radios, the rattle of a gurney on uneven ground.

  What were those heel prints from? I knew, but I didn’t know. Who looks at shoes?

  They were small, but not spiky like high heels. No, call them the shoes of a small-footed man.

  Click.

  Not shoes. Boots.

  Tiny cowboy boots.

  I was thinking about stomping the prints to get rid of them—I wanted to handle this my way, not the official way—when a dozen cops piled into the clearing.

  And that was that.

  * * *

  “Tiny cowboy boots,” Lima said to me ninety minutes later.

  I leaned back in my thousand-dollar patina’d chair, stared at him, said nothing.

  It wasn’t the first time cops had given me the hot-box, hurry-up-and-wait business. Not by a long shot. But it was the first time they’d done it in a place this pretty.

  The way it had played out: the crew that had first crashed the clearing was led by a sergeant with smart eyes and a voice like a cement mixer. The moment she saw the body, she hollered, “Stop right where you are,” and believe me, everybody did—that voice. Then she snapped cell phone pics of me and Rinn where we stood, I guessed to show the techs when they rolled in, and she had us step back to the clearing’s mouth. No cuffs—not for the lady of the house, not in this town—but each of us got our elbow held by a patrolman.

  They’d set up the backyard as their command post, had even made a cozy arrangement of Adirondack chairs and a picnic table. Somebody brought a pitcher of lemonade down from the kitchen.

  Sherborn.

  The politeness didn’t mean they were dimwits. Lima had rolled in not thirty minutes after the local cops. He led a full-court press of staties, and before you knew it the place was a bona fide crime-scene nuthouse.

  Just like Almost Home had been.

  I passed the time looking at Google Earth on my phone, trying to figure how Gus had ended up where he did. The bird’s-eye view didn’t help much. Sherborn was woodsy, but it wasn’t Green Acres: Biletnikov’s house was close enough to schools, ball fields, and a cemetery that whoever’d dragged Gus here could have come from a half-dozen spots without drawing attention.

  After letting me simmer a good
long time, Lima had stepped from the path, walked straight to the picnic table, poured himself a lemonade, and sat next to me.

  And said: “Tiny cowboy boots.”

  There was no sense playing dumb. “In the moss,” I said.

  “He tried to be careful. But he had to be beat by then. You ever drag a body a long way, Sax?”

  I said nothing.

  Lima laughed. “I had to try. Seriously, though. We’re talking a couple hundred yards. From the school parking lot, probably.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But check the cemetery first.” Held up my phone, showed him Google Earth.

  “Dammit, you’re right. That little spur road’s the shortest route. As the crow flies, anyway.” He sipped lemonade. “You’re not stupid, are you?”

  I said nothing.

  “Most of the crooks I run across are dumb as a post.”

  I said nothing.

  “Tiny cowboy boots,” he said. “Just right for the tiny black guy you ate lunch with yesterday.”

  “You’re not so stupid yourself,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “Most of the cops I run across are.”

  Lima’s eyes went stormy, then cleared. He put his free hand behind his back, pantomiming like his arm was being twisted. “Uncle,” he said, and maybe he even tried to smile. But he didn’t try hard. “Now tell me about Donald Crump.”

  “Who?”

  “Cut the shit. From yesterday.”

  “Businessman from Houston.”

  “There’s a little more to him than that, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections, the Louisiana Registry of Motor Vehicles, and the IAFIS.”

  “What’s that last one, fingerprints?”

  He nodded. “FBI database.”

  I said nothing.

  “We picked him up forty minutes ago, you know. They’re sweating him at the Framingham barracks right now.”

  I said nothing. Noticed that Peter Biletnikov had shown up. He stood near the driveway’s edge, gray and deflated.

  An ambulance backed to the very end of the gravel drive, making that obnoxious beep-beep-beep while it was in reverse, then onto the lawn.

  I saw that not only had Rinn slipped away from my area, which felt like the suspect holding pen—she’d had Haley bring her the baby to boot. Peter, Haley, Emma: brave family in tragic circumstances.

  “We’ll talk to her, too,” Lima said, following my gaze. Goddamn cop knew what I was thinking. “Bet on it. In a town like this, it’s tricky. Takes finesse. But we’ll get to her.”