But Remember Their Names

by Hillary Bell Locke

  Mission accomplished. He shrugged into a what-are-you-going-to-do laugh. Time to switch gears.

  “How was life in the tool business today?”

  “Not bad, actually. They’re having a year-end promotion on large tool storage units. Priced under two thousand, markup protected, and dealer billing deferred to February.”

  “Sounds great.” I’d actually understood most of what he said. A “tool storage unit” is a great big toolbox on wheels, with drawers and trays that have compartments perfectly fitted for every wrench, socket, screwdriver, drill bit, and other hand tool you could imagine. Also locks, I should mention that it has locks. Guys with grease under their fingernails who make fourteen-fifty to twenty-two dollars an hour will drop two grand on one of these things. Not with tools in it—empty. The promotion meant that, just in time for Christmas, Dad could offer these choice items at a price his customers couldn’t resist, get his usual thirty-percent profit even though the price was reduced, and play the float on the bill for two months.

  “Do I have time to change and take a shower?” He was already moving toward the stairs.

  Take a shower? Who are you and what have you done with Vince?

  “Sure. You’ve got fifteen minutes, anyway.”

  We’d moved to the home on Hickory when Dad made foreman at Epsom Tools. I was nine. We’d lived in a duplex before that, so I know what crockery sounds like when it smashes against the other side of a party wall. I was sixteen and Dad was fifty when Epsom started offering early retirement packages. Not because of declining business. The dot-com bubble hadn’t quite burst yet. I figured out later that Epsom was trying to buy its way out of a looming unfunded pension liability. Early retirement was a tough sell, because everyone there figured they’d have to relocate to someplace the Steelers didn’t play to find jobs half as good as the ones they’d be giving up.

  Dad had been taking shop when the clever kids were taking calculus at Kosciusko High, but he’s no dummy. He has plenty of nonverbal smarts and a hardheaded peasant shrewdness. He took a long, careful look at the situation and accepted the early retirement package. Then, as he described it himself, he used most of his severance money to “buy a job” as an Authorized Pro Tools Dealer. A hundred-thousand-dollar investment got him an inventory of professional hand tools, a walk-in van big enough to drive the inventory around in, and a route list with eighty shops employing two hundred professional mechanics, give or take. Dad was sort of his own boss, sort of running his own business, but the best part was that he could make the adjusted gross income number on his tax return pretty much anything he wanted it to be. It worked. The mortgage and utility payments kept getting made and the groceries kept getting bought—yet I’d had no trouble qualifying for need-based financial aid at Duquesne and then at Harvard Law.

  If you ever have to make a real, working class cheeseburger in the winter, when it’s too cold and dark to barbecue, here’s the way you do it: melt the margarine in the skillet; chop some onion into about half a pound of ground chuck; form the meat into a patty; poke a bunch of holes into one side of the patty with a fork; spread barbecue sauce over the patty, and then use a spatula to force the sauce into the holes; pour the Worcestershire sauce into the skillet; make sure the burner is on high; use a burger flipper to drop the patty into the middle of the skillet, standing well back so that you don’t get spattered; give it about ten seconds to sear one side and then flip the patty; ten seconds for the other side and flip it again; turn the heat down to medium and fry the patty for about six more minutes per side; put the cheese on after you flip for the last time and put the top of the bun over the cheese while it finishes cooking.

  Oh, yeah, the vent. I should mention that you need to have a vent over the stove, and it should be going on high from the moment you start heating the skillet.

  By the time Dad came downstairs in jeans and a Pro Tools tee-shirt, I had the cheeseburger in a bun topped with lettuce and tomato, and some Lay’s barbecue potato chips and a swatch of ketchup piled beside it on a plate. I had all of this sitting on the coffee table in the living room along with an open can of Schaeffer’s on a coaster. The pregame show for Monday Night Football filled the TV screen.

  “You’re spoiling me rotten,” he said as he sat down.

  “That would make us even.”

  I went back into the kitchen to refill my wine glass. When I opened the refrigerator for the Chablis, though, I saw eight cans of Schaeffer’s that were just sitting there. What the hell. I took out a can and popped the top. Dad’s eyebrows went up when I landed beside him with my own beer.

  “What are you trying to do—buff up your proletarian street cred?”

  “You are the only male on this planet who could make that crack without getting beer-spritzed.”

  Halfway through the second quarter Dad was on his third beer. That wasn’t anything like enough to make him drunk, but it didn’t augur well for lighthearted gaiety as the evening moved along, either—especially if the game got dull. I didn’t nag him about it, any more than I did about his pack or so of Marlboros every day or the twenty-five extra pounds around his gut. He was a grown-up and he had to make his own choices. But I decided to stay with him, instead of retreating to my room with my laptop.

  Good choice. He started getting maudlin around the beginning of the third quarter, when he was on beer number four.

  “I’m sorry about the street cred thing,” he said. “I shouldn’t of said that.”

  “It’s okay, Dad. It was a joke.”

  He turned his head and focused his eyes on me with bleary intensity, if that’s not an oxymoron.

  “Don’t give up.”

  “Don’t worry. One kid to the army, one to the Church, and the third one a lawyer: you’re hitting six-sixty-seven, and that ain’t bad.”

  “I mean it. That kind of life for you is one of the things I worked for. One of the things we worked for. Your mom and me.”

  “I know.”

  “Mom” was the magic word. Ironic, really. Smoking hadn’t shortened her life by a second. One kid in a Trans Am had accomplished in an eye-blink what thirty-five years of Salems couldn’t. The cops said he’d hit her at sixty miles an hour when she was walking on the sidewalk at least three feet from the curb. Airbags saved the driver’s life, but not hers. December 3rd would be the fourth anniversary.

  Dad polished off the fourth beer and just sat there, holding the empty can in both hands between his legs, staring at the blowout on television. I knew what was coming. I looked around the room, searching for inspiration. I saw a small, framed painting of a French peasant couple stopping their labors at noon to pray the Angelus together as the church bell chimed. I saw the silver crucifix taken from Mom’s casket.

  “I shouldn’t ever of hit your mom.”

  I only knew of one time that he’d hit her, during a rough patch in the Pro Tools dealership when he thought he might lose everything and she was nagging him to quit. There might have been other times, but I don’t think so. Neither Mom nor Dad was all that much of a hitter even with us kids, at least by blue-collar standards. That one time Dad had smacked Mom, though, had come two weeks before the kid in the Trans Am. Mom had gotten past the anger and the hurt overnight, but Dad hadn’t come close to getting rid of the guilt when the call from the cops came. Now he was beating himself up about it again. Why? Because my lame joke had triggered some Rube Goldberg chain reaction in his psyche? Because the calendar was careening ruthlessly toward December 3rd? Or was something else going on?

  I clicked the TV off. I took the can out of his hands and set it on the coffee table. I squatted in front of him so that I could look up at him while I took his hands in both of mine. Time to play the Catholic sentimental piety card.

  “You were a good husband, Dad. You loved Mom. She loved you. You gave her a good life and the kids she wanted. You’re human
. You made mistakes. You did things that were wrong. But she knew you were sorry and she forgave you. She’s on her knees up in heaven right now, praying that you’ll forgive yourself.”

  I saw a crafty gleam in Dad’s eye. What I read in it was something like, This ain’t Sister Mary Second Grade you’re talking to. I sent an urgent telepathic message to Ken. All right, bro. You’re the goddamned priest. I need some help here.

  “Some sins,” Dad said gravely, “are unforgivable.”

  I didn’t get a telepathic response from Ken, but my memory did manage to spit out one of the Kenisms I’d heard over the years.

  “That’s blasphemy. God’s power to forgive exceeds your power to sin.”

  He looked at me with a startled expression for about three seconds. Then, slowly, he started to smile.

  “Blasphemy. That’s pretty bad. I’d better get to confession.”

  “Right now,” I said, standing up and tugging on his right arm, “you’d better get to bed.”

  After I hustled him upstairs and got everything turned off and locked up, I took a long, hot shower before bunking down myself. To Mendoza, Jake was taking that shower. To Paul, CJ was lathering herself up. Dad was dreamily thinking of Cindy, his baby, who had to be scolded about incipient bad habits. Pauline D would have figured that Ms. Jakubek was indulging herself by using up all the hot water in the tank. Calder & Bull didn’t particularly care what Deferred New Hire Number Whatever was doing.

  I couldn’t waste a lot of energy stewing about which of those was the real me. That kind of thing was a luxury for people like Henry Widget in Paul’s novel. I just had to hold them all together for a little over two more months.

  Chapter Five

  “Can anyone name a colonist who died in the Boston Massacre?”

  Joan DeFillipo walked backwards through the Revolutionary War displays at the Pittsburgh Museum of American History. She led eighteen seventh-graders past paintings and exhibits depicting the run-up to the conflict: handwritten documents stamped in grudging compliance with the Stamp Act, pewter tea kettles, pamphlets printed with s’s that looked like f’s, and murals depicting the Boston Tea Party and what patriot propaganda had dubbed the Boston Massacre.

  Silence greeted her question. A veteran educator, she was unsurprised by this.

  “Can you name one, Josh?”

  “Yeah,” a mop-haired nerd-from-central-casting said, “but I’m saving it for Black History Month.”

  Titters piped through the group. They had no idea what the joke was, but they knew Josh had wised off. DeFillipo reacted with menacing blandness.

  “It would be a very good thing, not just for you but for the entire class, if you would share the name with us right now.”

  Her warning produced icy dread in eighteen bellies. Eighteen preadolescent brains suddenly imagined reams of punitive homework being assigned over the Thanksgiving weekend. Josh shrugged eloquently in defeat.

  “Crispus Attucks. African-American. Free person of color.”

  “Very good.”

  She gave them a little patter about the Boston Massacre while she led them toward the show’s highlight.

  “Can anyone tell me what happened at the Battle of Lexington?” She led the class through the door of a partition into a large room that seemed dark because almost all of its light was cast on a fifteen-by-twenty-foot stage.

  “Yeah,” Josh said. “The Brits kicked our butts.”

  “And how about the Battle of Concord a few hours later?”

  “Upset win for the home team.” Josh was on a roll.

  DeFillipo stopped now before the stage and smiled in satisfaction at the gasps the scene evoked from the jaded twelve-year-olds. Amazing how kids raised on high-definition television and computer-generated special effects could be impressed by something as quaint as a life-size, waxworks diorama. But there it was, so close you could touch it—and real, not pixels on a screen. Lexington Common with what seemed like hundreds of colonists and redcoats, most painted on the backdrop and side flats but at least two dozen of them eerily lifelike wax figures coming right out to the edge of the stage. Bright red, wool uniforms, shiny leather belts, very real Brown Bess muskets, and an angry officer aiming a flintlock pistol at the rebels. Several of the colonists lay on the floor, bloody and either dead or in agony.

  “No one knows for sure, but legend has it that an English officer with a pistol just like that one fired the first shot of the American Revolution,” DeFillipo said. “Does anyone know how many colonists died on Lexington Common that morning?”

  “Nine.” A solemn, dark-haired girl spoke up before Josh could open his mouth.

  “I think it was eight,” DeFillipo said gently.

  “Nine.” The girl shook her head gravely and pointed at the scene. “I counted them.”

  DeFillipo turned toward the stage. She gasped. Less than a yard from her on the stage lay a corpse more real than Madame Tussaud herself could have produced. It lay on its side, with its face toward the front of the stage. Wax colonists hid its feet and lower legs. Its full, half-buttoned white shirt, dark, open vest, and dark trousers had come from Brooks Brothers, but in this setting actually looked vaguely colonial. Its eyes were now as sightless as those of the other figures on the stage. The dark brown blotch on the left side of the shirt was blood that a human heart had pumped in its final, defiant spasm.

  Chapter Six

  When I saw fedrlbldng pop up on my caller i.d. screen just after 11:30 Tuesday morning, I figured Assistant United States Attorney Philip Schuyler was calling to bellyache about my dismissal-as-moot motion. I was right.

  “This wasn’t necessary,” were the first, world-weary words out of his patrician mouth.

  “‘The history of freedom is the history of procedure.’ Maitland.”

  I expected a peevish scolding for that crack, but instead his voice got serious.

  “Do you have any information about why Washington was killed?”

  “Not unless guesswork is passing for evidence over there these days.”

  “Guess for me.”

  “You were about to flip him and someone wanted to shut him up.”

  “If that were a good guess—and I’m not saying it is—then whoever it was might wonder if his lawyers were in the loop on the negotiations.”

  All of a sudden my snappy-patter switch clicked off. I felt a wet, cold drop in my diaphragm. A contract hit inside a federal prison is a huge deal. You’re probably talking about a hundred thousand bucks to arrange it. You don’t spend that kind of money to keep someone from talking about, say, where the DEA might find a rogue meth lab or a metric ton of coke. You’re trying to cover up something like having a congressman or a federal judge on your payroll—and now you think that maybe Luis Mendoza and Cynthia Jakubek know what it is.

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  “You’re welcome, but this isn’t just disinterested altruism. If Mr. Mendoza gets a feeler about a big retainer from someone who isn’t on his regular client list and is a little vague about exactly what the work would be, it wouldn’t be a terrible idea for him to give me a call.”

  “Noted.” I exhaled noisily, and realized that I’d been holding my breath.

  “You’re a good lawyer. Watch out for strangers with candy.”

  “Thanks.” I hung up, but before I could get all my fingers back on my desktop keyboard Mendoza came boiling down the corridor between the cubicles and the real offices.

  “All hands on deck! My office! Now! Including you, Jake!”

  I made it to his office in sixteen seconds flat, but even so Mendoza himself and three other people beat me there. When I completed the semicircle around his desk I joined Ricky Waters, who had only been practicing four years but had already notched three jury trial wins, which is a lot if you’re representing d
efendants in criminal cases; Sal Brentano, who in ten years of handling consumer fraud and Lemon Law cases had gotten to know every civil service file clerk from Pittsburgh to Philly; and Becky the Techie, one of the firm’s two investigators.

  Mendoza stood behind his desk, looking at us, unsmiling. He was calm, as usual, but deadly serious. He drummed the eraser end of a pencil against a legal pad about four times before he started talking.

  “About an hour ago, a seventh-grade class field trip stumbled over the body of T. Colfax Bradshaw in the Pittsburgh Museum of American History. Shot.”

  “From what range?” Waters asked.

  “Too far away to leave powder burns on his clothing, so I think we can rule out suicide. Nothing official on time of death yet, but I’m betting on Monday night. It could have been as early as Sunday evening, because the museum is closed on Mondays and most of the so-called security cameras are dummies as a result of budget cuts, but eight-to-one it was Monday night.”

  Ouch! I thought. He looked straight into my eyes, challenging me to say out loud what he knew I was thinking. I kept my gaze level and my mouth shut.

  “What this means,” he said then, “is that we have a client in legal peril. Not sure yet what the peril is, but whatever it may be we’re getting paid to get her out of it. So by three o’clock this afternoon I want to know every goddamn thing there is to know about what crime the state police were investigating Bradshaw for, what the cops think they know so far about his murder, and what he had for breakfast Saturday morning. I’ll see you at three.”

  I went back to my cubicle to Google Bradshaw because I couldn’t figure out what else I might bring to the party. It didn’t take long. Thomas Colfax Bradshaw went to Groton which, for a white kid in the sixties, meant family money. He turned eighteen in ’66, when ’Nam and the draft were both going strong, but he was too busy at Princeton (AB, Art History) and Yale (MA, Museum Management) to serve in the military. Nice little career in art and antiques, mostly flying below the media radar. Usual charitable and civic stuff. Cochair of the Steel Ring Arts Ball every other year, like clockwork, from ’92 through ’04. Quoted in the New York Times on the controversy over Italy trying to recover stuff from the Getty Art Museum in L.A.; got in a nice little shot about how something looted from a Roman galley that sank off the coast of Italy had presumably been looted from someplace else by the Italians who put it on the galley. Mendoza strode up to me just as I was retrieving my twelve pages of work product from the printer.