Shotgun Lullaby (A Conway Sax Mystery) (16 page)

“So?”

“So I need to know who the dude was.”

“Because?”

“Because it's a blank space,” I said. “A space that might tell us something. Think about the timeline. This dude was one of the last people to see Gus alive.”

“Maybe
the
last. Other than the killer.”

“Unless the dude
was
the killer.”

“Pardon me,” Randall said, “but aren't we pretty damn sure at this point that some combination of the House of Pundo killed Gus? Or, failing that, this Houston con man?”

“Pretty sure's not sure enough.”

He finger-drummed the table. “The cops must be looking at this mystery friend.”

“I don't think they know about him. Lima told me he stopped by the place and it reeked of weed, but he didn't mention anybody other than Gus. So maybe the dude was gone by then. Or in another room.”

“Naturally, you haven't mentioned this critical bit of intelligence to Lima.”

“I may have forgotten to.”

Randall sighed and pushed his chair away from the table. “So you're not going back to work tomorrow, to train the one-armed mechanic who hates your guts. Instead, you'll chase after Gus's mysterious pot-smoking comrade.”

“I might.”

Randall squeezed and kissed Sophie. “Great omelet, Muffy.” He'd been calling her that since he first saw her cheerleading getup. “See if you can talk some sense into Charlie Chan here, 'kay?”

“Fat chance,” she said.

“Fat chance,” he said, and started toward the front door.

“Randall,” I said.

He stopped. Turned.

“Thank you,” I said.

“De nada,”
he said, and left.

“Did he really save your life?” Sophie said, turning on the dishwasher.

“Pretty much.” I explained what he'd told me once we cleared out of the skate park and he was driving me back to the Hi Hat to fetch my truck. He'd felt bad about stiffing me, so he'd headed for Springfield. He found my empty truck, failed to raise me by phone, spotted a Town Car easing from the club's alley. He followed, watched Pundo's men lug me into the skate park, reconnoitered, and decided the best move in an unarmed one-on-four attack was to set fire to the dump before Boxer and his men were truly ready for it.

“Not bad for a gimp,” Sophie said. She undid and hung her apron, then patted me on the shoulder as she walked past. “Turn out the lights when you come upstairs to face the music.”

How was I supposed to not smile?

The smile faded, though, as I was left alone on the first floor with household noises.

I sat at the kitchen table a good long time. Thinking about fathers and sons and how disappointment runs in both directions.

*   *   *

When I finally padded up the stairs, ready to take whatever Charlene dished out, Jessie stepped from her room and we nearly banged into each other.

She said, “Howdy, stranger.”

I could have let it slide. Should have.

But it'd been one hell of a long day.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Haven't been around much lately, have we? Since the problem daughter returned. We're brave when it comes to bad guys, but in the domestic realm we're all flight, no fight.”

The “we” bugged me. “Bullshit.” I hissed it, trying to keep quiet.

Jessie kept her voice low, too. “Is it? You've sure been dreaming up excuses to be elsewhere. Between work and the Barnburners, I never see you.”

I stammered.

Stopped.

She was right.

Hell.

“The disappearing act is fine by me,” Jessie said, “but your two
devoted
Bollinger gals, the paycheck and the fangirl, miss you around the house. They miss you
a lot
. And what hurts them hurts me.”

“What about when
you
hurt them?”

She stared at me, hands on bony hips.

I stared back. “You break her frigging heart,” I said. “How could you not? Look at you.”

“You think I don't know it?” A tear rolled—even in the mostly dark hallway I could see it. “You think it's something to be
fixed,
like … like a leaky head gasket?”

Why not?
I thought.

I was smart enough to not say it out loud.

Barely.

Jessie let her single tear fall to the carpet. Then she stepped into the bathroom and pulled shut the door.

When I let myself in the master bedroom, Charlene had the lights out and lay with her back to me. Asleep.

Or faking it.

Either way was fine by me.

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

At six thirty the next morning, I stood in the apartment I'd chucked Gus from.

There wasn't much to see. He'd grown accustomed, junkie-style, to living out of a backpack. All his gear had fit in it and a plastic trash bag. The apartment was bare.

So look around anyway.

For what?

Hell, I'd know when I found it.

If.

I started with all the trash cans, glad my friend Trey hadn't yet emptied them, and plucked every nasty item individually. Kleenex, fast-food Styrofoam, a couple of bags from the Osco Drug down the street.

Nothing interesting, nothing that pointed me anywhere, nothing written down. Which was no surprise, really. In the age of smartphones, what twentyish kid jotted notes anymore?

Living room: nothing.

Eat-in kitchen, with its yard-sale table and its Target plates and glasses: nothing.

Bathroom: less than nothing.

Bedroom: nothing.

Just to be thorough, I checked every teenager's favorite stash space: pulled the twin-sized bed on its black metal frame away from the wall, leaned over, looked down …

… at nothing. Not even dust bunnies.

Hell. I sighed and worked the bed back where it belonged …

… and saw something.

Knelt on the bed, looked close.

“I'll be damned,” I said out loud.

Scratched into the wall near the head of the bed, barely higher than the mattress itself:

4315 AGR

It was etched lightly into the off-white drywall, so I'd nearly missed it. Maybe it'd been scratched by a pen that had run out of ink. Or by a pushpin, or a tack.

In any case, it was fresh: I spotted fallen drywall powder on the baseboard beneath.

I straightened, keyed it into my phone's notepad: 4315 AGR.

What is that?

I knew.

Almost.

It meant something to me.

Almost.

It would come to me if I didn't focus on it.

So I forced my head elsewhere by policing trash into a single bag. Felt my mind humming, sifting possibilities all the while.

License plate? Not in Massachusetts, where the plates were still six characters max.

Initials? Maybe.

Address? That felt right.

I let it work its way through my head.

Left the apartment toting a full trash bag, was halfway down the steps when it hit me. I stopped and said out loud: “Arms at Granite Ridge.”

Then I smiled.

Chucked the trash in a barrel, hopped in my truck.

*   *   *

The Arms at Granite Ridge was the latest name of a big-ass apartment complex on Route 9, Framingham's main drag. It was built into a hillside—the granite, I guessed—overlooking the road and, beyond it, a reservoir. Four buildings, maybe two hundred units apiece.

Driving past the tennis courts and health club nobody ever used, I thought for the hundredth time this was the type of place people lived when they were starting out or starting over. I'd known a dozen Barnburners who spent time here after a divorce. The apartments were okay, but turnover was fierce because whoever built the joint in the 1980s took the easy way out and installed electric heaters in each unit. They were cheap for the builder, but brutal for renters. New tenants would get their December electric bill, faint dead away, put on an extra sweater, and vow to move out before the next winter hit.

I parked at the 4000 building, the one farthest from Route 9. Stood at the doorway pretending to search my pockets for keys until a young woman came out. Slipped in before the glass door latched, made sure the woman wasn't eyeballing me, walked across a green-carpeted lobby to look at mailboxes. Found it:

4315 B. BLOOMQUIST

Back in Minnesota, you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a Bloomquist. But I'd never met one around here, so the name seemed worth searching.

I used my phone to do a Google and a Switchboard.com. Didn't find anything helpful—no address for a B. Bloomquist, which might mean something or might not.

I thought for a minute, then googled bloomquist and “university of massachusetts.”

Boom. There he was in an article from an Amherst newspaper: Bradford Bloomquist. Hometown: Brewster, Massachusetts. Graduated a year before Gus Biletnikov.

This was starting to make sense.

Two minutes later, I stood with my ear to the door of 4315.

Pink Floyd.

Really?

I knocked. Volume dropped, somebody spoke.

“It's Conway,” I said. “Friend of Gus.”

As the dead bolt turned, I kicked out hard. My left foot went through the cheap door, but the door didn't open—I'd timed it wrong, and the dead bolt hadn't yet released. My ankle stuck and I fell backward, sitting down hard in the hallway with my foot higher than my head. Not to mention stuck in the door.

All the detective cred I'd built by finding the address and googling Bloomquist pretty much disappeared right then.

A guy in a bathrobe and a shaggy beard was looking down at me.

“Dude,” he said.

I pulled my boot from the hole, rose, bulled him into the apartment, slammed the door. We walked—me forward and pushing into his personal space, him backward—until he had nowhere to go and half-fell onto a futon.

I stood, breathing hard. Feeling like a jackass.

Bloomquist: long brown hair, that hippie beard. The bathrobe was terry cloth the color of red wine. Plaid flannel pajama pants, bare feet. I couldn't help but do a double take at the feet: they looked like kayaks.

I eye-locked him, saw he was stoned to the gills. “Gus Biletnikov.”

“He was a friend of mine. He's dead.”

Had he stutter-stepped at
friend
? Maybe just a little? “Tell me when you saw him last,” I said. “Tell me what you did with him. Tell me everything.”

“Are you a police officer?”

“No. My name is Conway Sax. I was Gus's friend.”

“He never mentioned you.”

“He never mentioned you to
me
.”

Bloomquist nodded, scratching his beard. “Fair point. May I, ah, ask why you kicked in the door of my castle keep?”

“Sorry. Had to make sure I got in. Didn't realize you'd be mellow. I don't run across much mellow. What happened to Gus wasn't mellow at all.”

“What
did
happen? He was shot, this much I know. You seem to know more.” As Bloomquist spoke, he rose and recinched his bathrobe. Gestured me to a sofa covered by a Mexican blanket. Turned down the stereo, sat facing me on one of those giant exercise balls.

Behind him was a folding table covered with hobby gear. Atop the table: a torso-only half-mannequin draped in a brown leather vest. The vest's back faced me. It looked like an art project: a portrait of Bloomquist and, arced above the portrait, words:

THE DUDE ABIDES

I sniffed, realized that under the scent of weed and cigarettes and incense and bachelor pad hung the clean smell of leather. Looked harder at the table, was impressed at the array of tools. Adzes, awls, hole-punches, a dozen small knives, a whetstone and oil to keep their blades sharp.

Bloomquist saw me looking. “My passion,” he said. “My calling. The vest is just inked for now. I'm getting ready to do the hard part. You like?”

“I guess.”

“My friends call me the Dude, see. After the movie.”

“What movie?”

His shoulders dropped. “Never mind. So … are you a
family
friend or something? I ask because I was pretty close to Gus, and like I say, he never mentioned you.”

“I met him when he got out of rehab and started AA.”

He nodded. “That would explain it. I didn't see much of him once he went to Hazelden.”

“I was showing Gus around AA, helping him when I could. I put him in the apartment where you two got high the other day.”

He didn't bother to deny it. He said nothing.

“I know a little about homicide cops,” I said. “Two things make their jobs easy. First, if there's a husband or a wife or a boyfriend or a girlfriend, that's who dunnit. Bet your last dollar.”

Bloomquist's eyes sharpened up for just a second.

“With Gus,” I said, “there was no girlfriend. Brings us to the second thing cops look at. Who saw the vic last? So far, the cops don't know that was you. If they find out, they'll flood this place. They'll find whatever you're selling”—I paused to let that sink in. It'd been a guess, and not a tough one—“to pad all that money you're making off your leather goods.”

He leaned forward, struggling. He was a small-time dealer with no use for the likes of me. On the other hand, I could see Gus had meant something to him. He needed a push.

So push.

“Brad,” I said, “they cut him in
half
.”

“Bullshit. What?”

I'd phrased it that way on purpose. Bloomquist's reaction had been the right one. “With a shotgun, I mean. They didn't
actually
cut him in half. Blew a big-ass hole in him, though.”

His lower lip quivered. The beard added ten years visually, but this was a kid I was bullying around, a kid Gus's age. “What do you … what do you want from
me
?”