“And for two, three months,” Crump said, “they kept me around for kicks. Making like we was all buddies, then laughin’ at me behind my back. You know.”
“And you went with it,” I said, “but only while Peter Biletnikov looked like a hot prospect.” I remembered Donald telling me the first time we met that Peter got his kicks slumming around with a black guy who struck him as streetwise. That was making a lot of sense now—Peter would’ve known Crump via Rinn, would’ve known the Houston con man was all front.
“Yup,” he said. “I put on a show for the rich white kids, never paid for a drink, learned all sorts a info for future reference.”
“Such as Rinn’s baby’s real father.”
“I told too much already,” Crump said. “Ten tonight at this Hopkington place.”
He said it Hopkington.
A lot of people do that.
It’s an easy mistake to make.
* * *
In Sherborn, I knocked on the front door of the main house. If somebody answered, I’d ask for Rinn. If nobody did, I’d break in and search the joint.
That was all the plan I had.
“Overthinking a situation,” Randall once told me, “is not a malady from which you suffer.”
Here’s the thing, though: I’ve helped a lot of people out of rough spots. Before they got to those spots, every damn one of them had a clever plan.
So maybe clever plans were overrated.
Haley answered the door.
I said, “Somebody weld that baby to your hip?”
The way she looked at the kid told me a lot. It was a mother’s gaze, pure and simple. “I would do anything for this child.”
“Glad somebody would.”
She looked me in the eye. “Yes.”
“How do you work for her? For Rinn?”
She ignored the question and bounce-walked to the kitchen, cooing to the baby. Didn’t tell me to scram, so I followed.
Haley plucked a bottle she must have just warmed from the island’s granite countertop, popped it in the kid’s mouth.
It didn’t look like I’d get my chance to toss the house, so I might as well dig for info. Which meant loosening Haley up. I thought of the accent I’d noticed, how it and her looks didn’t sync up. “I’m going to take a guess,” I said. “You from the Dakotas?”
She blinked. “North. Horace. Outside Fargo.”
“I know where it is. I grew up in Minnesota. Mankato.”
“I didn’t pick it up. In your voice, I mean.”
“Been in Massachusetts a long time. How’d you wind up here?” I made a circling gesture. “In the middle of all this?”
“I interned at Peter Biletnikov’s firm.”
“Another Harvard kid?”
She smiled. “Undergrad, yes. I applied to the business school. People said interning at Thunder Junction guaranteed I’d be accepted.”
“Because Rinn did the same thing.”
“She wasn’t the first. How much did she tell you about her internship?”
“I know about the arm-candy bit, if that’s what you mean. She said there were others before her but that Peter was serious about her.”
“Fair enough. That jibes with what I heard.” She set the bottle down, put Emma over her shoulder, patted the baby’s back. “Before Rinn, and incidentally before Peter’s divorce, there was a regular stream of Harvard girls who spent a summer at Thunder Junction, then sashayed into the B school.”
I knew that, of course. But made a snap decision: play along, learn how much Haley knew. She seemed innocent, at least for this crowd.
“Oho,” I said, popping eyebrows. “Tell me more.”
She half-smiled and shook her head. “Slow down. I did my due diligence. The casting couch wasn’t part of the contract. A couple of my predecessors said Peter simply enjoyed having female company at parties and receptions.”
“There a lot of parties and receptions in his world? I thought banking was pretty dry stuff.”
She looked at me like I was a second-grader. “Investment banking. Peter’s job, his business, his expertise lies in connecting people who need funding to people who have it.”
“Middleman.”
“A middleman steering very big money around.”
“How big?”
“If you’re after less than fifty million, Thunder Junction doesn’t want to hear from you or about you. They don’t even know your name.”
I whistled.
Haley nodded. “Men bowing and scraping for that kind of capital will do just about anything to lubricate the deal. And I select the word ‘lubricate’ carefully.”
Emma belched. From Haley’s reaction, you would’ve thought the kid had written the Declaration of Independence.
“Vegas stuff?” I said. “Shows and booze and hookers?”
“It all depended on the deal and the players. Pebble Beach, a private day on the Formula One track at Dubai, pheasant hunting at a ten-thousand-acre retreat in Georgia. And yes, Vegas debauchery was a standard gambit.”
“That how you pictured your career going when you were at Harvard?”
Pursed lips, a hard headshake. “You didn’t let me get to it. What I learned from the girls who came before me—all brilliant, by the way, eminently qualified, now successful financiers themselves, thanks in part to Peter’s recommendations—it was as if Peter wanted a pretty young thang on his arm almost as a defensive measure, a way to ward off the excesses. He was big on excusing himself early from the bacchanal, throwing a big wink at the others, and escorting me out.”
“And?”
“And as soon as we were out of earshot of Team Viagra, he would thank me for my usual top-notch work and go to his room.”
“Alone.”
“Alone.”
If Haley knew more about the real reason Peter never made a pass at her, she hid it well. And she didn’t strike me as the type who would or could.
Down a hall, a buzzer buzzed and a clothes dryer stopped humming. Haley said something about clean onesies. For a split second, it seemed, she considered asking me to hold Emma.
Then she took the kid with her down the hall.
Not knowing exactly where she was or how long she’d be gone, I couldn’t do a lot of searching. I doubted Peter Biletnikov kept his shotgun—if he had one—with the corkscrews and vegetable peelers. I did flip lightly through stacks of paper, wicker baskets, a junk drawer.
Nada.
While I rifled I thought about Peter Biletnikov, trying to put him together. His daddy saved the world. He himself had made a pile of dough but didn’t give a rat’s ass about it. He’d named his first son after the daddy, but had a hell of a rough time with the son. He lived in a four-million-dollar house with all the personality of a furnished apartment. He hired pretty interns and made everybody think he was fooling around, but he never laid a glove on them. Even when his son died, he hadn’t known how to behave. It was like he’d picked out tired movie scenes—Collapse when you see the body! Tear your hair out at the funeral!—and imitated them as best he could.
And then there was Rinn, who called herself a trophy wife. She bore Peter Biletnikov’s midlife-crisis baby but wouldn’t have anything to do with either of them. Half-wanted to be a picture-book mommy, according to Donald, whose observations I trusted, but couldn’t handle the real-world details of the gig.
And I kept nibbling around the edges of Gus’s murder, but I still hadn’t nailed down where Peter or Rinn fit in.
It all made my head hurt.
When Haley came around the corner without Emma, I was standing with both hands on the granite, looking innocent. I hoped.
“Asleep,” she said to a question I hadn’t asked. “A warm onesie and a warm blankie, and she goes down like that.”
“Why are you still here?” I said. “You working through business school as Peter’s nanny? Is that part of the deal?”
“The well-trod path from Harvard College to the B school via Peter’s a
rm didn’t work out for me. Guess why.”
I thought it through. “Rinn pulled something.”
“Right you are. She has this power over older men. I swear, she bewitches them.”
“She does okay with younger ones, too,” I said. Thinking of Randall. And maybe myself.
Haley smiled. “So stipulated. Anyway, Rinn may have thought I had designs on Peter. I didn’t. Or maybe he had designs on me that I didn’t pick up on. Whatever the case, my B school application was rejected.”
“You sure that was Rinn’s fault? It’s got to be a tough place to get into.”
She laughed. “My mother’s father was an Inuk. Talk about a prize pedigree. For a woman with Inuk blood and a four-point-oh at Harvard College who interned at Thunder Junction, getting into the B school is anything but hard. Trust me. It had to be Rinn’s doing. She whispered in Peter’s ear, and he then whispered in a few ears himself.”
I pointed. “The baby urped on your shoulder.”
“Thanks.” But she didn’t wipe it off—left it like a merit badge. “The minute I got the bad news about grad school, this job miraculously opened up. Housekeeping for Mister Thunder Junction himself. The two of them invited me for dinner, then presented the offer as if I were Orphan Annie and they were Daddy Warbucks. You should have seen Rinn’s eyes.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’d done their research. My dad’s on disability, and my mom drives a school bus. And I had four years’ worth of student loans.”
“Come on, Harvard. You must’ve had other options.”
Haley looked at the floor, said nothing.
“They had something on you,” I said. “Dirt.”
Haley looked at the floor. I liked her even more for not lying to me and for feeling, as far as I could tell, shame. Between Rinn, Gus, Brad, and all the partying, I could imagine a dozen levers they might have on this kid. I decided not to press.
Instead, I said, “Is the pay okay?”
“Obscene. It was part of the reason I took the gig and it’s part of what keeps me here. And Rinn knows it.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why would Rinn screw you on the school application, then guarantee you stay this close to Peter? Hell, you live under his roof, which is more than she can say.”
Haley started to answer, but the doorbell rang. She answered it and came back with a woman who looked like a thirty-year prison guard but turned out to be a babysitter. “Even Fargo girls get an afternoon off,” Haley said to me.
I took the hint and split.
Outside, I finally did get something semi-useful out of the trip. All three of the garage doors had been opened by a kid who was detailing a black BMW X5. Next to it sat an identical SUV. License plates: HIZZUN and HERRUN.
I shook my head. SPURN and STRIKE must have been taken.
I looked in the third bay. Parked in tandem, kickstands and forks at identical angles, were a pair of black Harley-Davidsons. They were tricked out yuppie-style, with whitewalls and GPS units and better stereos than most homes and all the other crap that makes true Harley guys’ skin crawl.
The cars and bikes backstopped Rinn’s story about the jackass bet where she’d whipped Peter into playing twinsies. Poor sap.
“Is nice, uh?” It was the detailer, a boy working on a pencil mustache. He’d seen me staring.
I nodded. “Nice.”
“Big money.” He rubbed thumb across fingers.
“The biggest.” We nodded good-bye and I climbed in my F-250.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I’d left my cell charging in the truck. It buzzed as I climbed in. I picked up.
“Conway?”
I said, “Sophie?”
“Hi, stranger!” She spoke too loud, trying for casual but forcing it.
“You okay?”
“We had a half day at school. When I got home, Jessie was here with her friend Kaydee and two men. I don’t like diming anybody out, but I think they were … partying.”
I sighed and smiled at the same time. Diming anybody out. Gangster Sophie.
Kaydee: Jessie’s best friend, or what passed for it. I never had liked her. She wore this look on her mug like your fly was down and she’d rather Facebook it than tell you.
Charlene felt pretty much the same way I did about Kaydee. But a friend’s a friend, especially when your kid doesn’t have many. And she sure as hell wasn’t anorexic. That struck us as a good thing.
I said, “Where was your mother in all this?”
“Office.” Long pause. “I think she forgot I had a half day.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, oh.” Long pause. “It’s just … they were men, you know? Not old high school boyfriends or anything. They had tattoos, and one had a beard, and when I came in they looked like they hated me. Everybody was smoking, and the men were drinking wine, and I’m pretty sure Jessie was too except she hid it when I walked in, and I was scared.”
“Don’t blame you.” I looked at my watch. “Your mom’ll be home soon. Did the men leave yet?”
“They all did. Jessie couldn’t even look me in the eye, Conway. She told me to watch TV til Mom got home, and I swear she was almost crying, like she was making a mistake and she knew it but it was too late, and then she left.” Sophie talked fast, staying just ahead of tears.
My heart hurt. “I’ll be there in twenty-five minutes.”
“No! Please don’t. I want you…”
“What?”
“Can you find Jessie?”
“I doubt it.”
“They left in the men’s truck. It had a bumper sticker that said QuinsInk.” She spelled it.
“Sounds like a tattoo joint.”
“It is. I googled. It’s in Worcester, right on Lake Quinsigamond. Hence the name.”
“Good stuff, Sophie. But not much help. Anybody can get a bumper sticker.”
“I eavesdropped, and the men were talking all about tattoos. To impress Jessie and Kaydee, I think.”
“Well.”
“It was a green Dodge pickup truck. The huge kind, with four doors and extra tires on the back.”
“A duallie.”
“Yes! A duallie.”
“I’ll get going. Text me the address.”
“Already got it. Ready?”
Sheesh. A force of nature. It was a side of Sophie I hadn’t seen before.
“I’ll do what I can,” I said. “But kid, keep in mind Jessie’s an adult, and—”
“Chronologically, maybe. Please find her.”
Click.
* * *
I got to QuinsInk as fat raindrops began to fall.
A green Dodge duallie sat out front. On its front doors: magnetic signs for a house-painting outfit.
What do you know.
I parked across the street. Sighed.
If Gus’d had a heads-up sister like Sophie … well, who knew?
It was a poisonous thought, but I couldn’t help but chase it.
What the hell was I doing, looking to bail out Jessie when I ought to be running down Gus’s killer? I had no connection with Jessie. She’d resented me from the get-go, had done everything in her power to turn Charlene and Sophie against me. Then she’d hauled off and moved two thousand miles away. With my son. Giving us all the finger every way she could dream up.
I caught myself, felt embarrassed at the direction of my thoughts, took a deep breath.
Roy is not here. Gus is not here. Jessie is here.
I heel-rubbed my eyes, looked up and down the block. Lake Quinsigamond, which is built more like a wide river, slices down the eastern edge of Worcester, separating it from Shrewsbury. Leave it to Worcester to waste what ought to be primo lakefront real estate on a tattoo parlor flanked by dive bars. Charlene says Worcester could screw up a ham sandwich.
It hit me that I’d pulled a few Barnburners out of this place before, when it bore a different name. I don’t understand why drunks always want to stumble off for a tat, bu
t they do.
QuinsInk’s windows were blacked out, and I didn’t see anybody enter or leave. Maybe people were still too sober for tattoos. But the apartment above seemed occupied. Its window was cracked open, and what looked to be a beach towel served as a curtain. I thought I heard music, but couldn’t be sure.
There’d be a staircase around back.
Why couldn’t I haul myself out of the truck? I felt so … tired. Didn’t want to see what I was pretty sure I was going to see.
“Goddamn Jessie,” I said out loud.
Hell. If I was going to do this, I ought to do it fast. I took three deep breaths and climbed out.
Two minutes later, having eased up an outdoor stairway and gentled the knob of an unlocked door, I piled in.
The smell of pot was dense, ugly-sweet. The music was hard, loud, angry, fast. The beach towel/curtain featured Buzz Lightyear upside-down.
I strode into the living room. Between the weed and the music, it took them a few seconds to notice me. I used the seconds to scope.
On the couch sat a doughy kid, maybe twenty. Round face, gray sweatshirt, painter’s pants. Next to him was a guy ten years older, with a prison-seamed face and a cropped beard. Same sweatshirt, same pants as the doughy kid. An intricate, all-black tattoo crept from the sweatshirt’s neck.
Kaydee knelt on the floor, lighting a Marlboro over a yard-sale coffee table. Next to her, Jessie was bubbling a hit from a green bong. She popped her thumb from the airhole, sucked smoke, held it in.
Then she looked at me for the first time. She was so high it didn’t register right away that I shouldn’t be here. She smiled and waggled her fingers.
When the beard finally noticed me, he didn’t hesitate at all. He sized me up and reached for a Carhartt work jacket next to him. He was the one to worry about. He’d obviously done state time, and now he was going for a weapon he kept close by out of habit.
Taking the shortest distance between me and the beard, I giant-stepped onto the table, flattening it. Ashtrays, wineglasses, and the bong all tumbled. The beard scrambled in his jacket pocket. The doughy kid came out of a stoner dream and said, “Hey.”
Shotgun Lullaby Page 17
