Shotgun Lullaby

by Steve Ulfelder

  Randall and I said nothing.

  “I … oh God, I can’t believe I’m going to say this out loud. Conceptually, I love her. But in detail, in the day-to-day…”

  “The wailing, puking, shitting day-to-day,” Randall said.

  Rinn nodded. She looked at nothing. She especially did not look at me.

  “Let’s get back on point,” Randall finally said. “The more I hear about Peter, the more I want to hate him. But if you look at it from his point of view, it took a twisted brand of courage to make his move on you. To open up.”

  “I’m not unaware of it,” Rinn said. “He wanted something badly enough to risk a lot.”

  “He risked ridicule,” Randall said. “Which I gather is something he greatly fears.”

  “More than anything.”

  “And you proceeded to heap ridicule on him. Spurnings and strikings and matching cowboy duds.”

  “I said I’m not proud of it.”

  Randall said nothing. He rose.

  So did I. And then looked at what I held in my hand. Had forgotten about it.

  My gaze drew Rinn’s, and hers drew Randall’s, and then it was too late for me to stash it behind my back. So I held it out.

  “Goodnight Moon,” Rinn read.

  “I, ah,” I said. “It’s a good book. For babies. For little kids. For Emma.”

  She took it. Set it on an end table without really looking at it. “How sweet.”

  Randall and I left.

  * * *

  “She wouldn’t have looked much different if I’d handed her a steaming dog turd,” I said in the driveway, not looking at Randall as I spoke because we both assumed she was watching.

  “She’s probably not going to make Mother of the Year,” he said. But seemed reluctant to admit even that much.

  “I told you she was a piece of work.”

  “Which doesn’t make her a murderer. Especially up close and personal with a shotgun. Can you picture it?”

  I took my time answering. “I’ve seen a lot of things I couldn’t picture before I saw them.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “So have you.”

  “That’s different,” he said. “War … it’s different.”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that. He’d been there. I hadn’t.

  So we stood quiet awhile.

  “What’s your take on Rinn?” I finally said. “Anything jump out?”

  “Her lack of connection to the baby, her disdain for Peter, they’re … palpable.”

  “Spurnings and strikings.”

  He nodded. “And the running around with Gus and Brad. I hate to admit it, but now you’ve got me wondering if she had anything to do with the murder. There’s something worth teasing out here.”

  “So tease it out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Make yourself Rinn’s best new pal. Charm her. Tell her about the time you jumped on that grenade. In that foxhole.”

  “To save those nuns,” he said.

  “And orphans. Meanwhile, I’ll talk to Brad again, see if I can learn more about Gus’s relationship with his dad. And I need to figure out where Lima’s headed with this thing. I should talk to Peter, too. I need a better handle on him.”

  “That all you’ve got planned? Easy peasy,” Randall said, and I heard his smile, though I still wasn’t looking at him. “What about your good friend Charlie Pundo? Aren’t you worried he’ll take another run at you?”

  “Worried? No. Dead sure? Yes.” I shrugged. “We’ll cross that bridge.”

  “Anything I can do, amigo? Besides the arduous duty of making myself available to Rinn?”

  “Yeah,” I said, heel-rubbing my eyes. “Make sure Charlene doesn’t kill me while I’m screwing around with this.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Guilt drove me to the shop to see how things were going.

  They weren’t going well. I found Andrade parked in the office, one-handing the computer. He said he was learning our software, but his fast mouse click when he saw me looked like a telltale for solitaire. Or porn surfing.

  Floriano was working on two cars at once and trying to handle late drop-offs at the same time.

  I really wanted to visit Brad Bloomquist again.

  “Hell,” I said.

  If Floriano heard, he didn’t respond.

  I sighed, grabbed my coveralls, stepped into the flow.

  Spent the rest of the day doing boring maintenance on boring cars. Thought about Rinn Biletnikov, Donald Crump, Brad Bloomquist. Especially Brad. Something about his story didn’t click. I waited for it to come to me.

  It didn’t.

  What did come to me: flashes of Gus. The banister slide into his very first Barnburners meeting. His hero worship when I beat up Andrade. His hidden nervousness about speaking in AA, followed by the smooth talk itself.

  The way he tabletopped his dirt-bike jumps, like he was born to do it.

  The way he looked like Roy: slender, big brown eyes, uncombed hair, that unfinished look to his features.

  The way he looked gut-shot in a sweatshirt, his back arched, one hand clutched delicately like he was holding an imaginary piece of chalk.

  The way I’d walked out on Roy. The way I’d tossed Gus down a flight of cast-iron stairs.

  These flashes would come, and I would feel so … heavy. Like I needed to sit right away. But if I sat, I’d want to lie down. And if I did that, I’d want to sink through the floor.

  I worked slow that day.

  At five thirty, we all drove to Marlborough for Andrade’s tools. Three wide on my F-250’s bench seat. Nobody said a word. When Floriano saw Andrade’s immaculate shop, he made a tight little nod, and I knew he understood why I’d hired a new guy with one good arm.

  You can’t lift a loaded rolling tool chest. We had to empty every drawer by hand, and even then Floriano and I could barely wrestle the piano-sized chest into the back of my truck. By the time we got everything to my shop, unloaded, and squared away, it seemed like I should take the guys to dinner. And then we had to wait twenty-five minutes for a table at T.G.I. Friday’s. And still none of us said much of anything.

  Long day.

  * * *

  “No man should have to do this,” I said to Peter Biletnikov the next morning, extending my hand. I had made my way up front, to the pews reserved for family.

  He stared at the hand until I pulled it back. Then he turned and put his arm around Rinn, who stiffened but let him leave it there.

  I walked to the back, wanting to serve as an informal usher when the Barnburners rolled in.

  It was a small church, but pristine. The paint was fresh, the blue carpeting was new, all the Bibles matched—it was what you’d expect in a town like Sherborn.

  Those reserved pews weren’t anywhere near full. It was just Peter, Rinn, Haley holding the baby, and a pair of great-aunts who looked just off the Trans-Siberian Express. Everybody wore black. Nobody spoke.

  Even at two minutes of ten, the joint was nearly empty. Maybe the Barnburners had stiffed Gus—hell, they barely knew him.

  The preacher, a woman who didn’t look much older than Gus, spoke quietly in a corner with a man who must have worked there. Brad Bloomquist sat in a back pew, as far from the Biletnikovs as he could manage. He was the only one who’d arrived before me. His suit was neat enough, and he’d trimmed his beard.

  And he was crying. Silently, steadily. Bolt upright, hands between his legs, making no effort to wipe the tears that rolled into his beard and eventually dripped from it.

  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 conversation
s 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.”