But Remember Their Names

by Hillary Bell Locke

  “The business-getter.” Pence looked Braun right in the eye as he spoke. “You can always hire an administrator.” Ouch. Well-played, Mr. Smooth.

  Hoffman’s turn. “I’d ask for a business plan from all three and let those drive the choice. You’re going to have to fill in gaps regardless of whom you pick, so you might as well make sure you have your ducks in a row on the fundamentals.” What, you went to law school because you couldn’t spell ‘MBA’?

  “I like the business plans,” Drexler said. “But I’d factor in diversity concerns, given the importance that clients place on participation of women and non-whites.” That was subtle.

  After about five seconds of silence, Braun turned toward me.

  “What about you, Cynthia? What do you think?”

  I felt no pressure at all. I was in a zone where time moved more slowly for me than for everybody else. After what I’d just figured out, I simply did not care at that particular instant what happened to Calder & Bull, or to my job, or for that matter to me.

  “Well, Hank, I think I’d offer three compensation alternatives. One would guarantee the new-office managing partner’s current compensation for three years. The second would guarantee fifty percent of current compensation, plus ten percent of new-office net profit for the first five years. The third would have no guarantee but offer twenty-five percent of new-office net profit for the first seven years.”

  “Then, assuming each of the candidates picks one of the three, which partner would you choose?”

  “The one with the biggest…suggestive pause…risk tolerance.”

  Dempster didn’t actually do a spit-take, but he came close. He slapped the table with his right hand and laughed out loud. Then he pointed a mock-menacing finger at Braun.

  “You make any pitch you like to anyone else, Henry, but leave this little lady alone.” Then, turning toward me, he added, “I’m looking forward to September, Ms. Jakubek. You and I are going to get along just fine.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Unlike Calder & Bull, I didn’t have a plan. I was improvising, scrambling, reacting, making it up as I went along. So far I’d only come up with step-one: the Hilton New York.

  “Excuse me, Terry,” I said to Dempster as we were making our way out of the room. “Is there a phone I can use for a few minutes? I need to change my travel plans and my Droid is about out of juice.”

  “Certainly.”

  I expected him to show me to a secretary’s desk, but that was because I still hadn’t come close to assimilating big-firm culture. He pointed me toward the far corner of the room, where I saw—a phone booth. I’m not kidding. Exactly the size of old-fashioned phone booths from the fifties like the ones Superman used to change clothes in on TV, it was enclosed in the same dark mahogany as the credenza and the wainscoting. Smiling my thanks to Dempster, I stepped in. A tiny light came on, and I had a telephone and complete privacy.

  I got the Hilton’s number from Information, but I turned down the offer to patch my call through. I dialed it myself instead. I wanted “CalderBull” to show up on the Hilton’s caller-i.d. screen. In what seemed like a heartbeat I reached a woman with a winsome English accent who identified herself as Guest Reservations.

  “Hi. This is Cindy at Calder & Bull. We have a client in the city this afternoon, and we need to get her a room for the night.”

  “Not a problem. Any special accommodations?”

  “Preferred guest status.”

  “Not a problem. Name?”

  “Jakubek.” I spelled it for her. “Cynthia.”

  “Will Ms. Jakubek be paying herself or should we bill the firm?”

  “She’ll be responsible for her own bill.”

  “Not a problem. Done and done. Here’s your confirmation number.”

  I wrote down a code that seemed long enough to launch nuclear missiles, thanked the Brit, and hung up.

  Okay, what next? Get to the Hilton. I’d left my TravelPro in an ample closet off Calder & Bull’s reception area, so I didn’t have to circle back to the Sofitel. By pure good luck the closest thing I had to a dress winter coat was a raincoat with a liner, so I was actually prepared for the weather. Heavy rain meant no cabs, of course, but I’m not afraid of subways so when I got to the Hilton I was only wet instead of sodden.

  The Calder & Bull juice worked like a charm. Less than an hour after stepping out of the phone booth I was ensconced in a room that made the one I’d occupied on Thanksgiving weekend seem like a closet. I thought seriously about pumping my brains out on an elliptical in the fitness center, on the grounds that that would slightly reduce the chances of my committing homicide in the next four hours, but I decided against it. I figured if I killed someone, I’d just take my chances with the jury. Instead I took a blistering hot shower, washed my hair, dried it, and pulled on my sweats only long enough to press my skirt, jacket, and blouse.

  I dressed and did my hair as carefully as if I were going on a job interview. When I was through I stepped back and took a long, objective look in the full-length mirror: Not bad; borderline badass if you get right down to it and, frankly, that was the idea.

  Okay. Droid—not low on juice, by the way—check; laptop, check; purse, check; attitude, check.

  My Preferred Guest key-card persuaded the elevator to take me up to the top floor, and then it let me in to the Hilton Club there. Just after two o’clock in the afternoon, not quite Christmas week, the Hilton Club had plenty of space. I took a table near the door and sat with my back to the window so that I’d have the best possible view of the corridor and the elevators. I opened my laptop up on the table, made sure the Wi-Fi switch was on, and put a legal pad beside it, with half-a-dozen pages folded over the top. That was my unsubtle way of telling any male who wandered in that I was working and no, he had not met me somewhere before.

  A waiter came over, deferential and as whispery as if we were in church. Would I like anything to drink? Oh, yes, I would really like something to drink.

  This was definitely not a chardonnay situation. Scotch was out; bad associations. A martini would have been an uptown choice but, frankly, I wasn’t in a particularly uptown mood. I don’t have much experience with vodka, so I didn’t want to take a chance with it. Besides, a defiant streak of hard-core, blue collar cussedness had been rising in me since halfway through Dempster’s talk this morning.

  “Bourbon and sweet. Light on the sweet, plenty of ice.”

  He said “Yes, ma’am” in a deeply approving voice, as if this were the savviest drink order he’d taken that month. I brought a blank e-mail screen up on my computer and stared at it. After about thirty seconds of deep thought, I typed in Paul’s e-mail address and stared at it for awhile. I had a pretty good idea of what I was going to say, but this was definitely one of those times when it was more important to do it right than to do it fast. The Hilton, coincidental meetings, complicated burglaries arranged at the speed of light, a superstar agent popping up out of nowhere for a wannabe novelist, pipes, sunshine and rain, pajamas and passion—that’s what had all just fallen into place during lunch. I’d been running on cool fury ever since. Now was the time for a little more cool and a lot less fury.

  I started to type:

  My plans have changed. I’m going to stay in the City overnight. Any chance you could run up from Philly?

  Cindy

  I hit send. The waiter brought me Jim Beam diluted with Coke. I took a sip. Oh, yes! Yes, yes, indeed! I could get used to this, all right, oh yes I could. And I waited. I finished the bourbon-and-sweet, switched to Snapple, and kept on waiting. I had been at it for about forty-five minutes when my Droid started vibrating on the table. I glanced at the number. Stacy.

  “Hi, Stace.”

  “Hey, Cin. Good news. Calder & Bull has a plan.”

  “That’s what the head of Litigation
said.”

  “He was telling the truth,” Stacy said. “In the last two months our modest little two-hundred lawyer firm here in Philadelphia has gotten résumés from six Securities-slash-M-and-A partners from Calder & Bull, and three from partners in Commercial Transactions.”

  “They’re firing partners?”

  “You bet. Thinning the herd. The fastest way to increase profit-per-partner is to cut the number of partners—as long as you can do it without losing any high-profit clients. Calder & Bull is slashing partners one department at a time, presumably to keep The American Lawyer from running a headline about ‘Bloodbath at C & B.’”

  “They’ve decimated Securities and Commercial, so the Litigation Department is next.” I thought about the implications of that as I spoke the words. I have a job because someone else is about to lose his.

  “That would figure. They’re picking partners who don’t control client relationships and throwing them to the wolves. Then they’ll downstream the work those partners were doing to senior associates, and downstream the senior associates’ work to junior associates.”

  “E.g., me.”

  “E.g., you. Come September, I would say you are in like an off-color simile.”

  It took me a good ten seconds to wrap my mind completely around this. The Calder & Bull job was real. It wasn’t a mirage that would recede perpetually into the distance each time I thought I was getting close to it. In September, 2011 I was going to start getting a lot of money to practice law in New York City. When Stacy spoke again, her voice seemed far away.

  “You still there?”

  “Yeah, I’m just slowly processing the data. I mean, I have a job.”

  “Right. You have a job working for people who dump their partners overboard as soon as the sea gets a little choppy, but you have a job. So, congratulations—I think.”

  I heard a You’ve Got Mail! bing from my laptop, but resisted the urge to brush Stacy off.

  “I didn’t think I’d be working with an order of Franciscan nuns.” I tried to sound lighthearted. “I knew the score coming in. Anyway, thanks, Stacy. This is exactly what I needed to hear right now.”

  “You’re welcome, Cin. I just hope you feel the same way a year from today.”

  On that bracing note we said goodbye. Only then did I glance at my screen. The e-mail was from Paul. I closed my eyes and said a quick prayer: Please let me somehow be wrong. I opened Paul’s response:

  Wow! No kidding? That’s Great! I’ll try to cadge a ride from someone and see if I can meet you at the Sofitel at, like, 8:30 or 9.

  P

  I answered immediately:

  AMTRAK leaves Philly at 4:30 and gets in just before 7. I could meet you at Grand Central.

  CJ

  Send. Wait. I didn’t think I’d have to wait long. I slipped my legal pad back into the computer bag and signaled for the tab. I was feeling pretty confident. Also pretty berserk but, refined by the bourbon, it was a good berserk.

  Bing!

  I didn’t open Paul’s response immediately. The waiter brought the check. Sixteen-seventy-five for one bourbon-and-sweet and one Snapple over ice. I added a two-fifty tip and charged it to my room. Then I opened Paul’s e-mail:

  If I hustle, I can just barely make it. I’ll call you if I miss the train.

  P

  I closed my computer and shoved it in the bag as soon as I was sure my reply was hurtling through cyberspace. I walked out of the Hilton Club and straight down the corridor, past the elevator bank, toward the brace of Executive Suites at the far end. If my theory was right, Paul would hustle compulsively downstairs to check with the concierge about Amtrak’s schedule. As I strode along the deep-pile carpet, I felt a tiny surge of doubt in my belly. Doubt Is Good! Let me be wrong! Even assuming I was right, I might have a bit of a wait on my hands, but I figured the worst that could happen was that I’d waste some time and feel silly. Neither of those would be a new experience for me.

  I was still walking when the last door on my right opened about twenty feet farther down the hall. I kept walking. Please let it be Learned and not Paul.

  It was Paul.

  I let him see me, and gape, and stop dead in his tracks. Then, almost on top of him, I spoke.

  “Tell you what. Let’s say your place instead.”

  Chapter Thirty

  “That’s a new look for you, isn’t it, Tiger?” I brushed past Paul into the suite. “Goodbye proletarian chic, hello GQ.”

  Fair comment, if you ask me. He was wearing a French blue dress shirt and blue jeans that cost $400 if they cost a penny. Paul sputtered semicoherent clauses—I don’t think any of them rose to the dignity of a full sentence—that all included “Cindy.” I couldn’t make out any of the other words, but then I didn’t try very hard.

  The suite was an eyeful. The foyer by itself—it had a foyer—was close to the size of a normal hotel room, and what I guess you’d call the living room looked at least twice as big as that. I’d describe the décor as early-modern Eurotrash, but by this point I had a pretty jaundiced attitude, so don’t go by me. Dove gray leather furniture, shelving here and there bearing what looked like high-end art objects, and—I’m not kidding about this—a pale blue flag near the door with embroidered bumblebees on it.

  My interior decorating survey didn’t take long. I turned back to Paul.

  “Thanks for the flowers.”

  “Look, Cindy, I’m not sure where you’re going with this, but—”

  “It’s not always sunny in Philadelphia, Paul, but it’s sunny there today, when you were blaming your phone’s static on heavy rain. That’s how I knew you were in New York. Which is okay. You don’t need my permission to come to New York. But you lied to me about it.”

  “I was hoping to surprise you.” He managed an expression of utter and poignant sincerity that wouldn’t have fooled a novice nun.

  “No, Paul, you lied to me because you’re doing something that you knew would piss me off and you didn’t want me to know about it.”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions.”

  “I would say that I stumbled to that particular conclusion, and none too nimbly. If I were jumping I would have figured out three weeks ago that you don’t just happen to come upon someone at the Hilton the same afternoon she checks in and then arrange two burglaries from scratch in a couple of hours. You only manage that if you already have a network of useful relationships in place at the Hilton. That’s the kind of thing you might develop over time if you live here permanently, like Eloise did at the Plaza. Clear as glass, but I didn’t put it together until you rubbed my nose in it.”

  “Rubbed your nose in what?”

  “In your association with me.” The voice came from my right. Enter Learned, strolling around from behind the not-quite-ceiling-height wall separating the entryway from the dining area. “Now that you’ve demonstrated your belated deductive brilliance, Ms. Jakubek, please sit down. We have some serious things to talk about, and they directly implicate your client.”

  “Explain.” I did not sit down.

  “Assuming that Thomas Bradshaw was shot the Monday night before Thanksgiving,” Learned said, “I was in bed with Ariane Bradshaw at the Monongahela Hotel at the time of the murder. Therefore, she didn’t kill him and I didn’t kill him. Because most murders are committed by relatives of the victim, that makes Caitlin Bradshaw the prime suspect.”

  “Only if you overlook the thugs who were afraid Bradshaw had a line on the Gardner Museum loot and might get too chatty with the cops once he was arrested.”

  “True. But cops are lazy. Some speculative group of anonymous criminals is a much less promising source of suspects than the victim’s own family.”

  “Okay.” I shrugged. “So what?”

  “So. You figured out where I live. Congratu
lations. You can safely assume that the FBI already knows. If they have any business with me, they know where to find me. But the nasty people who killed Tom Bradshaw, assuming that Caitlin didn’t, do not know where to find me. I’d like to keep it that way. If you spread my whereabouts around, you’ll not only hurt your client—you could become complicit in another murder.”

  “Murder?” Paul yelped.

  “Take notes.” I gave him this instruction without bothering to look at him. “Maybe you can squeeze some of it into your next chapter.”

  “I take it you’ve got at least a general idea of what was going on,” Learned said to me.

  “Up to a point. You had been working with Bradshaw for a couple of years at least to follow some kind of a lead on the stuff swiped from the Gardner Museum. Or maybe to arrange to move a piece or two of it. You used your media connections to get him quoted for publication. A shady buyer who couldn’t risk a legitimate appraisal might want some kind of authentication before dropping, say, twenty million dollars on a hot Monet. Media credentials would help. You were using Bradshaw as a cat’s paw.”

  “No comment on any of that imaginative palaver.” Learned spoke rather sharply, with a this-isn’t-just-clever-banter edge to his voice. “But know this, Ms. Jakubek: Tom Bradshaw was a friend of mine. He was in serious trouble with nasty people. He came to me for help, and I did everything I could to help him. I drove him from New York to Pittsburgh because he was afraid that if he drove his own car he’d end up bullet-riddled at some rest stop along the way.”

  “Friend?” I raised my eyebrows—which is something I do rather well. “Do you always sleep with your friends’ wives? What do you do to your enemies? Sodomize their children?”

  Paul stepped toward me. He took very measured, deliberately nonthreatening paces, as if he were a grown-up. He seemed upset about getting caught, but not about anything else. I was looking for some kind of emotional reaction proportional to blowing up the last three years of my life. Instead I was getting Frat Boy of the Year. It was starting to piss me off—and I was already pretty hot when I walked in.