But Remember Their Names

by Hillary Bell Locke

  “Whatcha got, Jake?”

  “Not much.” I handed him the printout.

  He gave it a skim, running an index finger down the middle of each page to help him speed-read.

  “How do you suppose he got to be cochair of Steel Ring?”

  “On a wild guess, Groton/Princeton/Yale.”

  “Necessary, perhaps, but not sufficient. He’d also have to write a check for something between twenty-five thousand and a hundred thousand dollars. The Steel Ring Arts Ball is a big league fund-raiser, and cochairs are expected to lead by example.”

  “So after ’oh-four, maybe he stopped writing those checks.”

  “Right. And the question is why.”

  “Case of the shorts?” I speculated. “Money trouble in paradise?”

  “Not a bad guess.”

  Mendoza pursed his lips in a rare display of indecision. Then he seemed to make up his mind. When he spoke his voice sounded almost apologetic.

  “How do you feel about driving me out to the Bradshaws’ house? I’m not mistaking you for a chauffeur, but I need to get out there fast and I’ll have to study this stuff and work my phone like a call girl all the way.”

  “I’m in.” I grabbed my briefcase and we started quick-stepping it toward the elevators. “Are we taking your Citera?”

  “No. We’re taking the Foundation’s Citera.”

  “Right.”

  “Flowers, you think?” We ducked into the elevator.

  I rolled that over in my mind. Flowers seemed a little off-target somehow.

  “You send flowers for a death in the family,” I said then. “You bring food.”

  “No time for that.”

  “Give me five minutes in Elly’s Deli while you’re bringing the Foundation’s Citera around and let me see what I can do.”

  He glanced at his watch as the elevator reached the ground floor.

  “I’ll give you eight minutes. I’ll meet you outside Elly’s at twelve-oh-five.”

  Delicatessen food is a little tacky for a bereavement visit, but I couldn’t go home and whip up a pot roast in eight minutes. I elbowed my way through enough early lunch customers at Elly’s to pick up a two-pound slab of meat loaf swimming in a promising pool of brown gravy in a shiny, tinfoil broiling pan. Replacing the shrink-wrapped cellophane over it with lovingly hand-folded aluminum foil to make it look a little homier took about thirty seconds, so I made it outside with a minute to spare. When Mendoza pulled up in the Citera, I stashed the meat loaf on the driver’s side backseat floor while Mendoza was circling around to the front seat on the passenger side. I dumped my briefcase on the backseat as I slipped behind the wheel, which meant that the annoying little buzz-chime from the seat-belt cop in the dashboard stayed on even after I clicked my own seat-belt into place. I ignored it but Mendoza didn’t. With a flash of irritation he reached laboriously into the backseat to retrieve the briefcase and haul it into the front to wedge next to his feet.

  As I worked my way through downtown toward I-579, I mentioned Schuyler’s admonitory phone call. He wasn’t too impressed.

  “We’re court-appointed pro bono counsel for the appeal.” He shook his head. “Strictly paper lawyers. No one thinks we’d be involved in any insider stuff. The operating assumption is that we barely know our client’s name.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. That sounded good, but I wasn’t sure I was convinced.

  “You know what I think? I think Schuyler has the hots for you and wants to be on your short list if you ever pull that engagement ring off your finger.”

  I actually blushed at that. Me, Cynthia Jakubek. Not much. Just a little pink creeping up the backs of my ears and across the top of my forehead. But enough to aggravate me.

  Freeway driving in Pittsburgh is like performance art for sumo wrestlers. As you approach steep downgrades, and there are lots of them, you’ll see signs telling you that a “Runaway Ramp” is a quarter-mile or a half-mile ahead. A runaway ramp is an unpaved lane that juts off about thirty yards from the edge of the freeway in a straight line and ends in sandbags and reinforced steel pilings. If you’re driving a big rig, and you lose control on one of those grades, you’re supposed to steer into the runaway ramp and for all practical purposes commit suicide rather than pile up three-dozen cars at the bottom of the hill and take their drivers along with you.

  Mendoza worked his phone, just as he’d said he would. From his half of the first conversation, I gathered that the guy he reached was a cop acquaintance. After some convivial banter and a little Spanish, he got down to business.

  “Listen, Hector, ’bout this rich Anglo just got his chest ventilated, I represent Caitlin Bradshaw….No, daughter….Since shortly after the statzpolizei tossed his mansion….Don’t know what it was about. Neither does she….Anyway, reason I called, I don’t want her getting the bad news about her padre from a detective when she’s coming out of gym class. Just por favor ask whoever’s running the case to call me and we’ll set up a time to talk to her.”

  There was more Spanish after that, and then he ended the call. He immediately hit a speed-dial button and left a voice-message for someone he addressed as “Sam”—Sam Schwartzchild at Fletcher & Peck, I assumed—saying that we were on our way to the Bradshaws’. Then he gave the phone a rest for about ten minutes while he pored over my printout, now giving it careful examination instead of a quick-study skim.

  “What’s Becky’s direct-dial?” This question came about the time I pulled off the freeway.

  “Two-nine-seven-five-five-three-eight.”

  He started punching numbers instantly and was talking eight seconds later, which meant that Becky was at her desk and had answered on the first ring. I could easily imagine her sitting there at her computer, not saying a word except “Becky” at the beginning and “Got it” at the end, expressionless, listening on a headset while her fingers flew over the keys.

  “Hey, Becky, this is Luis. Listen, Jake ran across something on Google about Bradshaw. He got quoted around three years ago in the New York Times on recovery of art that museums bought without being careful enough about how the seller got his hands on it. But there’s nothing in the printout about any books or articles he’s written, and he was living in Pittsburgh, so it’s not like he had lunch once a month with the Living Arts editor of the Times. So what I want to know is, how did the reporter come to call him in the first place? He has to have a clipping file with contact information for half-a-dozen instant experts he could call on Manhattan Island, so how does he end up tabbing Mr. Bradshaw?”

  By the time that call was over I had found Fleming Court—a local street, not an English manor—and was looking for the Bradshaws’ house number.

  We weren’t the only ones who decided to pay respects to the surviving Bradshaws that afternoon. I automatically tallied the cars parked along the side of the street outside: Audi, Lexus, Escalade, BMW, Infiniti, Mercedes, Land Rover, with one telltale white Ford Crown Victoria, which I suspected meant the cops had beaten us there. Mendoza found a spot on a thirty-degree grade about forty feet beyond the driveway and eased into it. On the opposite side of the street was a green Prius. Not pale, washed-out mint green—you see a lot of Priuses that color—but honest-to-Pete, no-kidding, go-to-hell British racing green. Environmental statement, maybe: “When I talk about ‘driving green,’ I mean driving green.” As we trekked back toward the driveway to head up to the house, Mendoza turned around and looked at the Prius for three or four seconds. “Notice anything about that car?”

  “Little downscale for the market around here. And the color is unusual.”

  “It has New York plates. New York State and New York County.”

  New York County, i.e., Manhattan. As in where Bradshaw was coming back from during his last weekend on earth.

  “Do me a favor, Jake.” He lowered
his voice slightly because four people populated the front porch we were approaching. “When you get back to the shop, hop on the computer and see if it’s possible to buy a Prius from the factory painted British racing green.”

  “Will do.”

  Three of the four people on the porch were men. The shortest of them was in his late fifties with a brocaded yarmulke fastened to thinning but still distinguished silver hair. I recognized him as Sam Schwartzchild. I’d never actually seen the other two men before but I figured them for cops, partly because their suits looked a lot more like the one Vince wears to Mass than the elegant number Schwartzchild sported. The fourth porch resident, a woman dressed in a navy blue pantsuit who looked like she was maybe ten years older than I was, confirmed this when the first word I heard her speak was “officers.”

  “Officers, we appreciate your concern. Ms. Bradshaw’s personal physician has given her a tranquilizer. We will be in touch with you before the end of the day to discuss an appointment for an interview. In the meantime, if there is any information you would find useful in your investigation into this tragic business, please call me or Mr. Schwartzchild.”

  With that, she handed over two business cards.

  One of the cops took the cards. He looked at the other cop. The other cop looked at him. Then they both gave for-the-record nods and started trudging down a flagstone walking path to the driveway. They didn’t look too happy, but there was nothing they could do about it. You don’t have to talk to cops if you don’t want to, and no matter what the people who write the Law and Order scripts think, cops can’t just run you downtown to improve your attitude. Still, I couldn’t help wondering whether the encounter would have gone down quite this way if the little chat had taken place in front of a house on, say, Vince’s block instead of in a neighborhood with half-acre minimum lot sizes.

  “Sam, good to see you,” Mendoza said, striding forward and extending his right hand, as soon as the cops were past us. “You can ignore the voice mail I left for you.”

  “Good afternoon, Luis. This is my partner, Sally Port. She handles some of our white collar crime work.”

  Mendoza shook hands, first with Schwartzchild and then with Port. Then he introduced me as his “colleague,” which I thought was a definite improvement over “intern.” Given the meat loaf and all, I just nodded.

  “Food.” Schwartzchild looked toward Port after glancing at my burden. “We should have brought food.”

  I’d never met Mrs. Bradshaw, of course, but the prim matron guarding the front door had to be someone else. She spent a couple of extra seconds on the once-over she gave Mendoza and me, for one thing, presumably because it was pretty clear neither of us had any ancestors on speaking terms with William Penn. That struck me as an awkward, protective impulse of a solicitous friend helping out in a time of need—a socially clumsy hesitation that the mistress of the house wouldn’t have allowed herself. Fortunately, with Schwartzchild vouching for us, she quickly concluded that we weren’t there to clean the pool and we stepped into the great room.

  “Great room,” not “living room” or “parlor.” It’s something you only see in newer houses, and more often in the West and Midwest than the East. Basically, except for a bathroom and maybe a laundry room, you have no inside walls on the first floor. There’s an open kitchen defined by waist-high cabinets and counters taking up maybe an eighth of the floor space, and then a big open area broken up by nothing but the staircase. Put the dining table, the electronics, the computer station, and the couch, chairs, and coffee table anywhere you want to. You can make the whole thing one big dining room if you’re having a dinner party, or one big den if you’re having a cocktail party. Or, I suppose, one big bedroom if you’re having an orgy.

  I braced myself for the first scene of an imaginary ballet I’d like to compose someday based on John Cheever’s short stories: WASPS Closing Ranks. Dry-eyed, stiff-upper-lipped, clipped-toned, stoic, they would be gathering protectively around one of their own the instant a breath of scandal whispered through the delicately scented atmosphere.

  One good look around refuted this particular outbreak of my resentful class prejudice. True, one guy stood there in a navy blue suit with a dove gray vest and gold pocket watch, looking like T.S. Eliot getting ready for tea with Virginia Woolf, if T.S. Eliot had stood six-two and been rail thin with hair that was wedding-gown white; and the clergyman he was talking to looked like your basic, standard-issue Presbyterian who didn’t overdo the blessed-are-the-poor stuff in his sermons. But there was also at least one yarmulke other than Sam’s. One of the women was African-American and a man and woman just inside the door looked South Asian. Another woman had gotten her genes from someplace a lot closer to the Mediterranean Sea than the English Channel. This wasn’t WASP, it was human. In a backhanded way, the gathering was the distilled essence of American equality: the only color that really mattered was green.

  I spotted Ariane Bradshaw sitting at a writing table in the front corner of the room, down to the left from the front door. There was no mistaking her: Caitlin’s face, matured by age and challenge. Another woman was sitting opposite her, taking notes on a mini legal pad, presumably making a list of shopping and various other chores she could take care of while Ariane dealt with the complications of a sudden death in the family. On the continuum running from prostrate-with-grief to merry-widow, I put Ariane right in the middle. She wore a sober expression, and I could see a puffiness at the corner of her right eye, suggestive of recent tears. But there was no distracted vacancy in her gaze. She didn’t look like she was in denial, expecting all of this to disappear when she woke up from a bad dream. And there was no way she’d popped a Valium in the last two hours, which meant that Sally Port had been kidding the cops just now.

  I made my way to the kitchen area and stowed the meat loaf in a black, top-of-the-line Sub-Zero side-by-side that no one would think of calling a “fridge.” Then I kept my back to the crowd so that I could check my Droid without seeming too insensitive. I didn’t have to wait to get back to the office to answer Mendoza’s little trivia question. He was on the far side of a generational line between people who associate the Internet with big-box, desk-top technology and people who grew up knowing that you can carry it around in a holster on your belt. It took me forty-two seconds to verify that British racing green isn’t on the official Prius palette. Whoever drove that car here from New York had paid for a custom paint job. Hmm.

  I figured that my job here, other than chauffeur, was to keep my eyes and ears open and my mouth shut. Anyone glancing at Mendoza would figure he was getting paid to be here, but I could pass myself off as part of the furniture. I was just about to start doing that when the Droid vibrated. I would have ignored it, but a quick look at the screen showed my lover’s number. My pulse quickened, I got a major rush through my upper body, and I answered.

  “Is this a good time for a quick question?”

  “Absolutely,” meaning that it was the worst possible time but that he could have basically anything he wanted. I started making my way toward the back door. Quickly checking the net is one thing, but a personal conversation in this setting would have been over-the-top rude.

  “I’m looking for a cheap plot device. Would it make any sense for someone to time his death for just after the first of the year, to cut down on the death tax?”

  “Depends on the year.” I kept my voice low as I approached the clergyman and the guy in the gray vest on my way to the door. “This year it would be just the opposite. Thanks to President Bush there’s no estate tax at all this year, but in 2011 it clicks back in unless Congress does something in a hurry—and right now you can get bets either way on that.”

  The guy in the gray vest looked at me in what I took to be reproof. I did my best to come up with an apologetic expression as I stepped out onto the driveway.

  “Just the opposite!” Paul said. “That’s p
erfect! And I can blame it on the Busher!”

  “We aim to please. How are things otherwise?”

  “Six hundred words. I’m in the zone.”

  “Fantastic.”

  We spent about five more minutes love-chatting. I glanced at the tiny, gold-mounted diamond on my right ring finger. It cost $225. Paul’s first professional publication was a short story that he sold to an e-zine three years ago for $75. He cranked out three more submissions and a couple of reviews as fast as he could, but the e-zine didn’t bite. So he spent a weekend whipping off a little piece of cheap porn that they snapped up for a hundred-and-a-half. He used those two checks—his first earnings as a writer—to buy the ring. I was feeling soft and dreamy when we ended the call so that he could return to the adventures of Henry Widget.

  Just as I was turning to go back inside I heard tires whining on the driveway. I looked up to see a red Ford Focus rolling up with Caitlin behind the wheel. She pulled into the third port of a four-car garage.

  I’m not obsessed with protocol, but I decided to take this one through channels. I did not hang around to chat up a vulnerable young woman who’d just become a semi-orphan. I hustled back in, wound my way through the crowd to Mendoza, and whispered to him that Caitlin had just gotten home. He murmured the news to Schwartzchild. Schwartzchild padded up to the writing table and quietly shared the information with Ariane Bradshaw. I read “thank you, Sam” on her lips as she stood up, offering a brave smile to him and a hand pat to the lady with the mini legal pad.