Shotgun Lullaby (A Conway Sax Mystery) (21 page)

*   *   *

Most of the Barnburners had left. The remaining half dozen gathered around a pair of picnic tables just behind the parking lot.

This was the Meeting After the Meeting crowd. The ones who saved my life.

A long time ago, after more tries than you could count, I finally put together some sobriety. A couple of months, my longest dry stretch since I was fourteen.

It was awful. I didn't know what I was doing. My knuckles were white, my teeth were ground to nubs, my nightmares lasted all day.

It was slipping away, and I knew it. I was feeling shame already over the next backslide. Had a feeling it would be the last one, the one that carried me all the way down.

And then I stumbled into a Barnburners meeting.

They were different. You saw it the minute you stepped into the basement at Saint Anne's. The old-timers arranged fifteen or so chairs jury-style, so they could watch the speaker at the podium and keep an eye on the crowd, too. Anybody who spoke or laughed or sneaked out for a smoke earned a dirty look or a little talking-to. I learned that night the Barnburners' watchword was “serious AA for serious people.”

Soon enough, I would learn more. The Barnburners were born after World War II of a bizarre wreck between AA, which was new at the time, and a vigilante biker group—combat veterans who trusted nobody but fellow dogfaces and took a blood oath to watch each other's backs.

Barnburners take care of Barnburners. And the small Meeting After the Meeting crowd runs the show.

Working your way into the Meeting After the Meeting takes patience. You need to show up at Saint Anne's for every single meeting, keep your mouth shut, and do as you're told.

You also have to have skills that'll be useful to the group.

When I found the Barnburners, I'd spent the better part of a decade as a full-tilt bum. Hobo jungles, county lockups, bars, barges, underpasses, a grate in the Bowery.

Like that.

You want to survive that way, you learn skills.

Ugly skills.

Skills that come in handy.

The night Butch Feeley told me to stick around for the Meeting After the Meeting was and is the best night of my life. My silent vow: I would do anything this crowd asked me to.

And I do.

And I take the weight that comes with it.

Mary Giarusso—Switchboard Mary, gossip queen, organizer of events, keeper of the telephone tree—patted the bench next to her.

I sat, listened to my friends wrap up some new business. A Barnburner needed babysitting help or she'd have to quit her job to get her kids off the school bus. The job was keeping her sane. If she quit, she'd spiral downhill, would be using again before you knew it.

A ninety-two-year-old Barnburner who got confused easily had been ripped off by gypsy roofers. They'd squeezed him for eight thousand that he knew of, maybe more.

“Keeps it in a focking cigar box,” Carlos Q said. “I'll take that one. Kick the shit out of these gypsies, then talk that fool into getting a savings account.”

“Isn't that one more up my alley?” I said.

Most everybody looked at their hands or the picnic tables before them while Butch Feeley slipped Carlos Q a picture of the roofers' license plate.

“What?” I said, picking up the vibe. They'd talked about me before I joined them. It was obvious.

Butch cleared his throat. “Whyn't you sit this one out, Conway? Looks like your plate's pretty full as it stands.”

I felt redness crawl up my neck. “I can handle both.”

“Don't look to me like you can handle neither,” Carlos Q said, eye-locking me. “They putting one of yours in the ground right now.”

Full-bore red face now. I felt the heat of it.

“I,” I said.

And looked around. A few of the newer ones, maybe ones who were scared of me, were interested as hell in the picnic table. But most of them were staring at me.

A jury of my peers.

“I,” I said again.

But couldn't think of anything else to say.

The Barnburners. The Meeting After the Meeting. Serious AA for serious people. Talk meant shit. Results meant everything.

I stood.

I walked to my truck.

Climbed in.

Drove away.

Felt Barnburner eyes on my back the whole time.

*   *   *

“Uniform and cruiser?” I said, crouching to set my face at passenger-window level. “Don't tell me you got busted back to trooper.”

“Get in,” Lima said.

I did, but passed him a coffee first. It seemed to surprise him. He set the coffee on the dashboard, leaned over the huge center console they cram in those police Crown Vics, and moved junk to make room for me.

“Busy times like these, they let detectives earn time and a half on details,” he said. “But you got to wear the uniform. Public don't like guys in ties sitting in cruisers.”

I knew what Lima meant by busy times even before he gestured with his coffee: the Boston Marathon had been run less than two weeks before. On the phone he'd told me to find him in Ashland Center, where he silently strobed his blue lights while a work crew broke down the course. They were picking up orange and white barrels, power-washing mile and kilometer markers from the road, hauling out Porta-Johns. Like that.

“I always get out of Dodge the weekend of the marathon,” I said.

“For me, it's a good weekend to earn four weeks' pay.”

“Amen.” I toasted with my own coffee.

We sat awhile watching a man in a Boston Athletic Association Windbreaker argue with a lady in an Ashland Public Works Windbreaker.

“You're wondering where we're at,” Lima finally said. “With the Biletnikov thing.”

“Yes.”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because I remembered you take a large black.”

“Do better.”

“How about this? You think Crump killed Gus Biletnikov. It looks obvious to you. The boots, the grudge against Peter Biletnikov, all that. But the DA won't buy in. He prosecutes lead-pipe cinches only. It makes for pretty stats. When you couldn't get an exact match between Crump's boot and the print in the moss, the DA said cut him loose.”

“Which is fucking re
tard
ed, because how definitive a match can you expect from something as springy as moss? Keep going.” He sipped. “By the way, the DA's a she.”

“I don't think Crump did it.”

“Because you like him. Because he's charming. Smarten up, Sax. He's a con man. Charming and likable, that's his
job
.”

“Nah, it's more than that. You must've looked hard at Crump's record. He ever do anything even a little bit violent?”

From Lima's silence, I knew the answer was no.

“The funeral was this morning,” I said. “I talked with Brad Bloomquist. Turns out he and Gus were an item.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“Yeah, he told me you figured it out pretty quick. How'd you find Bloomquist, anyway?”

“We did cop work. You didn't know they were an item?”

Jazz hands.

I didn't say it out loud. Instead, I said, “You must've taken a hard look at him. He said he gave you phone records. Is he alibied up?”

“Hard to make a definitive call with phone records. But on the Almost Home night and the Gus night,
somebody
answered a bunch of calls in Bloomquist's apartment. The callers say it was Bloomquist.”

“Stoners making thirty-second phone calls,” I said. “Probably using dumb-ass weed-dealer code, like ‘I need half a cruller.' I was you, I'd want something better than that.”

“Pound sand, Sax. Put the calls together with the boots. You see the size of Bloomquist's
feet,
for crying out loud? It doesn't work.”

But he sounded like he was trying to sell himself.

So maybe I could sell him another idea if I kept working at it.

Good to know.

Across the street, a forklift tried to lift a pair of Porta-Johns on pallets. One of the green plastic toilets was off-center. It rose three feet and fell from its pallet. The man in the BAA Windbreaker threw his hands up.

“Your tax dollars at work,” Lima said.

“Where's the shotgun?” I said.

He sighed. “Damned if I know.”

“No
CSI
crap on that?”

He half-smiled. “Like, ‘Oh, it was a left-handed Eskimo with high blood pressure'? Come on, you been around. That shit never helped any working cop. Specially when a shotgun's involved. The barrel's not rifled, you know? Everything just blows up.” He sipped. “Though there was one thing.”

Lima looked through his windshield.

My best bet was to say nothing, but
man
did I want him to go on.

He would or he wouldn't.

He did. “The shot used on Biletnikov wasn't the same stuff used at Almost Home.” He looked to see if I got it.

I did. He meant the size of the pellets in the cartridge. “What was the difference?” I said.

“They used one-aught at Almost Home,” Lima said. “Serious stuff, big stuff. About what you'd expect from a killer.”

“What'd they use on Gus?”

“Bird shot.
Mid
-sized bird shot, but still.”

“Hunting shot,” I said.

“Yeah. Nasty way to die. Little holes everywhere. Bigger spread.”

I thought of the black-red gash in Gus's middle when we'd found him.

The memory hurt my chest.

I said, “What do you make of it?”

“Nothing, most likely. They probably ran out of one, so they used the other.”

“Bullshit, Lima.”

He said nothing. His eyes went stony.

We watched the workers.

After a while I said, “Have you guys tossed Peter Biletnikov's place?”

Lima stared at me. “Tossed? Sax, you
toss
a junkie's apartment when he runs in the door with some lady's pocketbook. You don't
toss
the mansion of a swell who's got a picture of himself deep-sea fishing with John Kerry.”

“Not even if you think he killed his kid?”

“You want the truth? No. Not even then. What are you, a child?”

My face was good and red, but there was an angle here.
So press it.

“You're trying hard,” I said, “but you're not pulling it off.”

“Trying what? The hell are you talking about?”

“Trying to fit in.”

“With who?”

“With these burnout detectives who wake up every two weeks at paycheck time,” I said. “The cops who only make cases when one dealer dimes out another, or a husband wanders into the barracks with a bloody hatchet in his right hand and his wife's head in his left.”

“Get out.”

I ignored it.
Press press press.
“You're ambitious. You want to go somewhere. The braces give it away.” I touched my front teeth with my thumb.

Now it was Lima's turn to go red in the face. He put his free hand across his mouth, went redder, dropped the hand.

I kept pressing. “I think you're good-ambitious, not asshole-ambitious. I think you want to get something done. So if the burnout detectives got to you already and taught you how to coast … that's a damn shame. But what do I know? I'm a child.”

He stared through the windshield at the Keystone Kops across the way trying to right the Porta-John. Stared for a good long while. Like he was counting to a hundred in his head.

“What's your pitch?” he finally said without opening his mouth, and I felt bad about mentioning the braces.

“I get that you can't toss Peter Biletnikov's house. But
I
can.”

“How's that?”

“I've got an in with the nanny.”

He sipped. His coffee had to be cold. Mine was.

“Let's say you toss it,” he said. “What happens then?”

“If there's no gun, there's no gun.”

“Which doesn't prove much of anything.”

“Prove? Maybe not. But it's good info to have, huh? Points you in other directions, maybe. And if I
do
find anything…” I shrugged.

“That,” Lima said, “would be
really
good info to have.”

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

My cell rang while I drove to Sherborn. It was Crump.

“I was just with Lima, the cop,” I said. “He still thinks you killed Gus.”

“Fuck Lima. Need to tell you something.”

“Okay.”

“Not now, not on a cell. Let's meet.”

“That restaurant again?”

“
Hell
no. Dark and private. Tonight. This here's your town. You say where.”

“Everything all right?”

“Say where.” Donald's voice: tight in a way I hadn't heard before.

“Hopkinton State Park. There's a gate they lock at sundown, but in a truck you can just drive around it. What you do, you take Nine west to Eighty-Five south—”

“I'll google it. Got to go.” Donald Crump, near-midget cowboy con man, was rattled as hell.

“Hang on, Crump. From the minute Rinn gave me your number, you've fed me info in bits and pieces to suit your needs. Now you're in a jam, and I'm supposed to drop everything for a
Mission: Impossible
meeting?”

“Says who I'm in a jam?”

“Says everything about this call, for chrissake. You want help? Fill me in. Tell me about you and Rinn and the Biletnikovs.”

“Tonight.”

“
Now.
Or there
is
no tonight.”

Donald Crump went quiet.

He was out of options. And didn't much like it.

I knew the feeling.

Finally, he let out one hell of a long sigh. “She was at Thunder Junction, working for nothing,
interning
they call it, nice racket, when I called Biletnikov to invest in SoPo.”