Shotgun Lullaby

by Steve Ulfelder

Kid reads me like a book. A comic book.

  “It doesn’t have to,” I said. “But it usually does.”

  “Look, let’s get past that. What’s up with the iPods?”

  I decided to trust him. Hell, he was Randall. I organized the story, then told it in thirty seconds.

  When I finished, he was quiet for a long time.

  “Well?” I finally said.

  “A wrench has been well and truly thrown.”

  “Well?”

  “Each iPod holds music, and not a lot,” he said. “Ridiculously small playlists, actually, given the capacity.”

  “What kind of music?”

  “Jazz. There’s a set by Ron Charles on one iPod and a set by Brubeck on the other. Must have been one of his last shows.”

  “So?”

  “The sets were recorded live at the Hi Hat. They’re introduced by the owner and impresario. None other than.”

  I said nothing, feeling it sink in.

  “These iPods,” Randall said, “are love letters from Charlie Pundo to Rinn Biletnikov.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  We switched roles.

  Me: the cool one, running alternative scenarios up the flagpole, trying to give Rinn or Pundo or somebody the benefit of the doubt.

  Randall: righteously pissed, ready to kick some ass, not overly concerned about whose.

  We met at the cemetery near the Biletnikov place. Randall insisted on it—wanted to surprise Rinn, which meant we couldn’t park in the driveway. We cut from the cemetery to the guesthouse, passing the clearing where Rinn had found Gus’s body.

  Black-red hole in a black sweatshirt. Bangs across the forehead like a boy … hell, say it … like Roy asleep after a long day in the sun.

  I tightened my jaw. Kept moving.

  Randall found the guesthouse key as easily as I had. Once we were inside, he asked where the other iPods were, pounded down the hall, came back with all of them.

  Then we waited.

  I tried to calm him, but the excuses I made for Rinn sounded weak even to me. It was hard not to assume that, at the very least, Charlie Pundo had a thing for her. Did it run both ways? Whether it did or not, the fact that she’d hidden it from me and the cops forced us to take a fresh look at her.

  “I should have known,” he said at one point, arms folded, looking out the window. “Given the Crump story.”

  “What Crump story?”

  “Their deal. He didn’t tell you?”

  “She was interning for Biletnikov when Donald came sniffing around for money, right?”

  “Sure, but there’s a bit more to it than that.”

  “So tell me.”

  “Crump oozed into Thunder Junction one day, hat in hand. He made quite the impression, as you might imagine.”

  “I can see it.” I smiled, thinking about how old Donald’s getup would go over in Cambridge, where uptight people pretended not to be uptight.

  Then I thought of Donald collapsing onto me in a Hopkinton parking lot, the blown-out exit wound in his left temple. And stopped smiling.

  Randall went on. Crump had worked Thunder Junction’s offices like the pro he was, cycling through as many employees as he could in search of a weak link.

  He thought he found it in Rinn Biletnikov, college girl. He worked her, charmed her, got her business card.

  What Donald Crump didn’t realize: that day, he was more mark than shark.

  “Clever,” I said. “Think that up yourself?”

  Randall shrugged, smiled, continued.

  An after-work drink at a local bar confirmed what Rinn had already figured out: Donald was looking for eyes and ears inside Thunder Junction.

  “Rinn agreed to be those eyes and ears,” Randall said. “For a price.”

  He looked a challenge at me. But given the timing, it wasn’t much of a challenge.

  I laid my thumb alongside my nose. “She needed more of this.”

  He mock-clapped for me. “Gus and Brad had worn out their welcome with Teddy Pundo. And Rinn had crossed that line, the one with which you’re far more familiar than I, separating want from need. Where that particular substance was concerned.”

  I thought it through.

  It worked.

  The timing, the connection, the familiarity between Rinn and Donald.

  But wait.

  “Biletnikov wound up hosing Crump good and hard,” I said.

  “Right you are.”

  “Rinn must have been part of that hosing.”

  “An integral part.”

  “She used him to score, then double-crossed him?”

  “Precisely.” Long pause. “She is something, is she not?”

  I shook my head. Damn right she was.

  We waited some more. I played with the new info on Rinn and Donald. Did it change anything? Did it make me more or less likely to look at anybody as Gus’s killer?

  I was still thinking at three o’clock, when Randall said, “Here they are.” We watched them pile out of the BMW: tipsy Peter, making for the main house without saying anything to anybody. Rinn, heading our way. Haley, who’d driven, lagging behind to pull Emma from her car seat.

  I sat in the room’s comfiest chair like a spectator. This was Randall’s show, and I wanted to see how he played it.

  Answer: harsh.

  Rinn keyed her way in, closed the door, saw us, jumped half a foot.

  “What the hell?” she said, her right hand over her heart. She looked at Randall, who was leaning on the bar that separated the living room from the tiny kitchen.

  Then she looked at me.

  Then back at Randall, whose face told her he was the boss right now.

  She set hands on hips. “What the hell, Randall? Scare a girl half to death.”

  Instead of saying anything, Randall tossed a double handful of silver-wrapped boxes at her feet.

  She looked at them, puzzled at first. Then her eyes sharpened and she put a hand over her mouth.

  “Oh,” Rinn Biletnikov said.

  Then she said it again.

  Then she sank toward the floor, dropping into a peasant crouch, ending up with rump against calves and both forearms covering her face. Like a kid hoping if she got small enough, she could disappear.

  “Explain,” Randall said.

  Rinn didn’t move.

  “To us or to Lima. Your choice.”

  She stayed in her you-can’t-see-me crouch until he pulled his phone and asked me Lima’s number.

  “No,” Rinn said, dropping the arms. Her eyes were wet. “No.”

  Then she crawled around the floor picking up scattered iPods.

  I sneaked a sideways look at Randall. I’d never seen him this way. He must’ve felt even more for Rinn than he’d let on.

  Now he felt like a jackass. Embarrassment had turned his crush into fury.

  I rose and found a box of Kleenex. Gentled the iPods and boxes from Rinn’s arms, steered her to the couch, told her I’d put everything away.

  She said, “They go—”

  “I know.”

  Half-beat pause. “You? Not him?”

  “I searched the main house. Figured I ought to search here, too.”

  “Tell me about you and Charlie,” Randall said.

  “Easy there, hotshot,” she said as she sat.

  I may have smiled as I walked down the hall to put away the iPods. You could knock Rinn Biletnikov off her game. But not for long.

  By the time I got back, she’d wiped her eyes and crossed her legs and started. “When I told you about Peter’s issues, I didn’t tell you everything.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Randall said.

  Her eyes flashed. “Do you blame me? I left off where things turned ugly.”

  I said, “They weren’t already?”

  Rinn ignored that. She was talking to Randall now. I don’t know if she felt for him some of what he felt for her, but she wanted something from him. Approval? Understanding?

  “When it
became clear that Peter and I weren’t going to accomplish any baby-making the old-fashioned way,” she said, “I gritted my teeth and looked into alternatives. I was willing to take one for the team.”

  “In vitro, et cetera,” he said.

  She nodded. “Peter flew into a righteous Russian rage and told me to stop researching the matter immediately. He was almost clinically paranoid by then. He frothed that Boston’s medical community is an incestuous one, and he’d be damned if he’d have everybody knowing his business. He, ah…”

  We waited.

  The sun had worked its way around. Outside, shadow now covered the cottage porch and half the backyard.

  “He had an alternative proposition,” Rinn said in a voice that wasn’t hers, the voice of a shy eighth-grade girl.

  Randall said, “And that proposition was?”

  “He proposed to have Gus knock me up,” she said. “He proposed to pay us a million-dollar flat fee apiece to make a baby and keep quiet about it.”

  You could barely hear her.

  I sat with my mouth open. The word that jammed itself in my head: “freaks.” Goddamn freaks, the lot of ’em. Give people all the money in the world and what do they do? Dream up new ways to be rotten.

  “Dear God,” Randall said, sliding to the couch, wrapping arms around Rinn. “Dear God.”

  She cried into his chest.

  We let her.

  Randall stroked her hair.

  “It was awful,” she said after a while, blubbering so I barely understood. “We were buds! We were pals! The Three Musketeers, Gus and Brad and Rinn.”

  “Peter’s never admitted it to me,” I said, “but he had to know Gus didn’t like girls. I’m guessing part of what drove him was to … alter that. Fix it. Couldn’t make his own privates work right, so he took a shot at his kid’s.”

  “That’s not the most gracious or politically correct way to put it,” Rinn said, dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex. “But it’s accurate enough.” She blew her nose.

  Randall said, “It appears the experiment was a success?”

  “A dismal failure. In every way.”

  He looked a question at her.

  Rinn shrugged. “Gus and I gave it the old college try. No luck. Our sessions became grotesque reenactments of my efforts with Peter. Can you see how miserable that would be for Gus?”

  Randall said, “Not so hot for you, either.”

  “By then, you’d told Gus all about how his dad couldn’t get it up,” I said. “I’m betting it was one of the things you all made fun of Peter for.”

  “Gus always thought of himself as pansexual, an if-it-feels-good-do-it type,” Rinn said. “Our epic bedroom failures forced him to reevaluate. They ruined our friendship, of course. They made Brad hate my guts. He was always much more into Gus than Gus was into him.”

  Freaks.

  Rinn half-laughed. “About the time I was ready to break out the turkey baster, along came an opportunity that seemed to solve everything.”

  “Charlie Goddamn Pundo,” Randall said.

  I took an easy guess. “Somewhere along the line, during your big cocaine spree, Charlie fell for you.”

  “We met at the Hi Hat and fell for each other.” Now she locked eyes with me. “I told you, this is not a one-way street for me and never has been. Charlie has been places. He’s done things. He’s got this … he’s got something similar to what you have.”

  I said, “A truck payment he can’t afford and a drinking problem?”

  Neither of them laughed.

  “Did Pundo know you were pregnant? And that the baby was his?”

  Rinn nodded.

  “How’d he react?”

  “He was thrilled. He’d always wanted a girl, believe it or not.”

  “I can see where he would have struck you as impressive,” Randall said. “Especially after you’d been palling around with Peters and Guses and Brads.”

  “Half-men and boys and potheads,” I said. “And you’ve got that bad-girl side to you.”

  “Exactly.” She shook her head to clear it. “Charlie and I became a furtive item. Meanwhile, I was procuring coke from Teddy on a regular basis, and Charlie knew nothing about that—he would have killed Teddy if he had. When I learned I was pregnant, I confided in Gus. It seemed so … elegant to have the baby.”

  “Peter would think she was Gus’s, with that lovely Biletnikov DNA,” Randall said. “The rest of the world would think Peter was a testosterone champ, makin’ whoopee with his gorgeous young wife.”

  “And you and Gus would pocket a million apiece,” I said. “But what did Pundo think of the plan?”

  “It didn’t bother him. He said he wanted a daughter, not credit for a daughter.”

  We said nothing for awhile. “There’s one other thing I want you to know,” Rinn said, “though I assume it’s too late for you to ever respect me. The minute, no, the instant the pregnancy was confirmed, I quit the cocaine like that.” Finger snap. “Everything else, too, including booze. I found I didn’t want it anymore.”

  She sneaked a glance at me.

  “You’re a goddamn saint is what you are,” I said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “The mind reels,” Randall said as we walked the path to the cemetery.

  “Freaks,” I said.

  “So what’s our move?”

  I thought about that as we stepped from woods onto manicured grass. His car and my truck were maybe fifty yards away.

  “From the get-go, Donald acted like he had dirt on Peter Biletnikov,” I said.

  “And?”

  “Not ‘and.’ ‘But.’ He was vague as hell. I put it down to con man’s instinct, the urge to always hold back. Maybe it was something else, though. What if he suspected this freak show but hadn’t confirmed anything when I first met him?”

  Randall knew where I was headed. “He did confirm it eventually. And the confirmation got him killed.”

  “By whoever killed Gus, most likely. Anybody who looked ready to blow the secret got wiped out.”

  “And who wanted the secret kept in the worst way?”

  “Peter Biletnikov,” I said. “And Charlie Pundo.”

  He leaned on his car. “Peter I’ll buy. The man’s all about appearances, and the second wife with the bouncing baby means way more to him than it should. He’s got inadequacy issues, paranoia issues. Maybe he goes a little crazy when the secret looks shaky.”

  “But you’re not sold on Charlie Pundo?”

  He shrugged. “A wiseguy bangs a young broad who digs outlaw types. This is not unprecedented.” Randall’s voice: bitter, brittle.

  “I guess. But the iPods. That’s Harry High School stuff. Mixtapes, remember those?”

  “It was mix CDs when I came along, gramps. But okay. Point taken. It’s out of character.”

  “Unless it’s not.”

  He looked at me.

  “Unless,” I said, “there’s more to that character than we know.”

  I climbed in my truck and headed for Charlene’s place.

  * * *

  Charlene wasn’t home. I found Sophie in her room, laying out her cheerleading uniform and gear.

  “Almost forgot,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Big competition tomorrow. Worcester?”

  “Springfield.” She didn’t look at me. She grabbed a can of hairspray and a brush that had rolled toward my hip when I sat, moved them a few feet. Davey, who spent twenty-three hours a day on the bed, opened one eye. I knew my other cat, Dale, would be under the bed, ready to swat my ankle when I rose.

  Sophie looked over her array, still not lifting her eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Jessie’s gone again.”

  Hell. “Same guys?”

  “No, she left with Kaydee. She borrowed a hundred dollars from me.”

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “Where do you think?”

  Work.

  “There’s nothing we can
do,” Sophie said. “Is there?”

  “I guess not.”

  I stood. Sure enough, Dale took a rip at my boot. It’s how he asks for attention.

  I carried him downstairs, told him he could help me put a frozen pizza in the oven. He lay in my arms like a baby, white belly up, and chirped. He does that.

  * * *

  While the pizza heated, Charlene texted. She’d be home in fifteen minutes. I texted back that dinner was under control. Then I looked at my cell, weighed it in my hand. What the hell. I dialed Lima.

  “Where do you stand on the shotgun?” I said when he picked up.

  “At the corner of Who’s Asking and Go Fuck Yourself,” he said. “You got a set of balls, Sax.”

  “I’m going to tell you something you don’t know.”

  Pause. “Okay. Listening.”

  I hit Lima with the bomb about Charlie Pundo and Rinn Biletnikov. I hard-sold, starting with the iPods.

  “You saw those iPods while you tossed the Biletnikov place,” he said when I finished. “Just like you said you would.”

  I said nothing.

  The line was quiet awhile.

  “It’s interesting shit, I’ll give you that,” Lima finally said. “But where does it take us? Where does it hook up to Almost Home or the Biletnikov kid?”

  “Seems to me,” I said, “a few more steps will get you there. Somebody’s jealous. Somebody’s being squeezed for dough.”

  He sighed. “My first homicide. Why couldn’t I get a gangbanger blasting a gangbanger while a dozen wits and a security cam watched the whole thing?”

  “Where are you with the shotgun?”

  “The tat for your tit.” He laughed.

  I said nothing.

  “Good news, bad news,” Lima said. “The good’s that ATF, DHS, and FBI jumped when they heard about the piece. Turns out there’s this cat in the Czech Republic. A little man, they say, ’bout ninety years old. He starts with a single stainless-steel billet, crafts a shotgun in any configuration you like, ships ’em all over the world. All the customer needs is a suitcase full of money. Price per gun starts at a hundred grand. The Feds would love to cream this dude mostly because he makes fools of them—he’s got a bunch of tricks for shipping the weapons one piece at a time.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “The Feds have about as much sway in the Czech Republic as they do on the moon. They know exactly who made the piece, but there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.”