But Remember Their Names

by Hillary Bell Locke

  “Okay, Cindy.” He used the kind of exaggeratedly calm tone that men have been using with angry women since about fifteen minutes after Adam and Eve left Eden. “Listen. I want you to just sit down for a few minutes and get a grip on things. Just think things over and calm yourself down a little.”

  I would like the record to show that, furious as I felt, I had been doing a pretty good job up to this point of keeping my temper. Not quite a self-control poster girl, but no over-the-top, Hell-hath-no-fury stuff either. That comment from Paul, though, pushed me right over the edge. I spun around and thrust my face at him so aggressively that he actually backed up a step, even though he could have put me in the hospital with one arm.

  “Are you giving me a time-out, you pompous bastard?” I snorted. “Why don’t you just go back in the closet, you weak, sniveling, chickenshit, supercilious, self-involved, egomaniacal faggot!”

  “Now, Cindy, wait a minute,” Paul said, retreating toward the shelving.

  “If she throws something at you,” Learned said, “for God’s sake don’t duck. The marble miniature bust of Napoleon on that shelf behind you is priceless.”

  Paul moved out from in front of the shelving to within reach of the pale blue flag, mostly furled around its pole in a polished brass flag stand on the floor. I took another step toward Paul, just because I got kind of a kick out of watching him back up.

  “Don’t tell me to ‘wait a minute,’ goddammit!” I spat the words, feeling my hair swish against my neck. “You used me! Every ‘love’ out of your mouth was pure bullshit! I was just your ticket to New York. I wasn’t your lover, I was a fellowship—a brunette fellowship.” I flicked my hair with that last comment, in case Paul didn’t get it.

  “That’s not fair.” He got it.

  I stretched my left arm out full-length to point at Learned.

  “And you gave me up for a white fellowship because it came with an agent instead of just grocery money and a decent apartment.”

  “Now you’re getting hysterical. This is just a lot of linear, left-brained thinking. You’re letting yourself get trapped by your own logic.”

  I suddenly wanted to hurt him. No, something richer than that. Not just hurt. Not even mainly hurt. Hurt-plus. I wanted to reach him. I wanted to shred the cocoon of fatuous smugness that enclosed him, and rattle him. Really shake him up.

  “I’m pregnant, you asshole!”

  A barefaced lie, but it did the trick. I’d reached him, all right. The pregnancy worried him vastly more than being caught cheating on me did. His eyes snapped repeatedly in flustered confusion. He raised two finger on his right hand to his head as if he’d suddenly gotten dizzy. His nostrils flared and his chest swelled in what looked like the kind of rhythmic breathing exercise you learn in classes on panic attacks. Then he closed his eyes, took one deep, cleansing breath, and looked at me with his arms raised and his hands palms outward in a classic calm down signal.

  “Cindy, I didn’t know. I swear I had no idea.”

  “You were clueless? Well, there’s a shock.”

  “Look, we can get through this. I’ll be there for you. I’ll help you arrange the procedure and I’ll be there with you—”

  “What ‘procedure’?”

  “You know. The abortion.”

  “There isn’t going to be any abortion, you moral cretin! I’m not going to kill a baby just because his father is a prick!”

  “Oh, God, Cindy,” he said in a despairing plea. “Try to think rationally about this.”

  “It’s a little late for rational. The time for rational was when you gave me pajamas that made me look like a twelve-year-old boy. But I wasn’t ‘thinking rationally’ then, so why start now? You’re looking at twenty-one years of child support, buddy. Seventeen percent of your gross. That hotshot agent of yours gets you a hundred thousand dollar advance, 17K goes straight to Cindy, right off the top. That’s before the agent gets his fifteen percent commission, not after.”

  “Twenty percent,” Paul mumbled in a deeply worried tone.

  “Every royalty check, every advance, every honorarium from now until this little brat in my tummy finishes college—seventeen percent to me.”

  I was playing fast and loose with the law, but Paul didn’t know that. Color drained from his face. His shoulders drooped. He sighed. He bowed his head and dropped his hands to his side. Even his moustache sagged. Then, suddenly, he brightened and brought his face back up with a tentatively hopeful expression.

  “Wait a minute. What if—”

  “Don’t say it,” Learned instructed him firmly.

  Paul said it.

  “—what if the baby isn’t mine?”

  “You Bastard!”

  I leaped at him like an Amazon with PMS, right fist cocked and eyes shining with feral fury. The veneer of Harvard Law School and Duquesne University evaporated in a heartbeat. I was back on a parochial school playground in a working class parish. There are certain things you don’t say, and he’d just said one of them.

  If he’d just stood there he could have taken my best shot without a whimper and then swatted me away like a bug. The pure savagery in my eyes, though, seemed to awaken some primitive terror in his soul, as if I were a wild animal attacking him instead of just a scorned lover. He retreated toward the foyer’s near corner, making a panicky grab for the flag on his way. He held the thing horizontally in front of him, like a quarterstaff, ready to swing it or point it or thrust it or do whatever he had to do with it to keep me from making physical contact.

  “Stop this idiocy!” Learned yelled, as I heard his feet hurrying toward us.

  Two strides and a bound and I was on Paul. My left knee smashed his right thigh, not by design but because that was where it happened to land after I left my feet. I aimed a solid right fist at his face and landed it on his collarbone. Paul grunted, but that was about as much satisfaction as I got out of the exchange. Planting the flagpole against my ribcage and pivoting a bit to his left for leverage, he used his one-hundred-pound-plus weight advantage to shove me upward and brusquely away. I flew through the air for half-a-second or so before crashing into the shelving nearest the door.

  Pain lanced through my kidneys and the back of my head. The sound of splintering wood and shattering porcelain would have filled my ears if the desperate keen of Learned’s “nooo!” hadn’t drowned it out.

  My butt hit the Oriental carpet before my feet did. Learned must have cheaped out on the padding, because it hurt. I saw stars for just a second. When my head cleared, Paul was still crouched in front of the door, flagpole ready. He looked genuinely worried that he might have hurt me, and at the same time terrified that I might jump up and come after him again. Learned was on his hands and knees, scampering away from us across the entryway floor.

  I did not bounce up for a rematch with Paul. Decent punch, hard fall—catharsis. I may work that into a haiku some day. Anger still coursed through every fiber of my being, but at least for the moment my primal need for violence had spent itself.

  Learned got up, a bit laboriously. He was clutching something shiny in his right hand. He turned worried eyes toward me, and for an instant I felt touched by his concern. But he wasn’t worried about me.

  “Napoleon?” He almost whimpered this question, in a little voice that was scared and hopeful at the same time. How deflating.

  I felt around tentatively among the shards and splinters. My hand closed on something cold and hard under a slab of shattered pine. I picked it up and chanced a quick look at a palm-sized head-and-shoulders under a bicorne military hat in exquisitely blue-veined marble. The miniature size emphasized a striking precision of detail that made this lump of stone seem to throb with power and passion—a guy who’d kill a million Frenchmen for half of Europe without thinking twice about it. It was either Napoleon Bonaparte or his twin brother.
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  I held the thing up for Learned to see. He sighed with what I took to be a combination of relief and happiness. Then he walked over to Paul.

  “Apologize to Ms. Jakubek. It was quite ungallant to insinuate that she has slept with someone else.”

  “Sorry.” Paul tried to look contrite but it came off as sullen.

  I choked back a two-syllable response and just looked at him with eyes colder than the ice in my bourbon-and-sweet earlier that afternoon.

  “If you stay here much longer,” Learned said then to Paul, “I think she really might kill you—and it’s hell to get bloody brain tissue out of an oriental carpet. Go down to the bar and have a little Glenlivet on the rocks while Ms. Jakubek and I finish our stimulating conversation.”

  Paul looked confused for a couple of seconds. Then he dropped the flagpole, opened the suite door, and slipped out. The last thing I saw before the door closed behind him was a pipe in his back pocket. I swear on the Magna Carta that he had a pipe.

  Learned picked up the flagpole and started fitting the shiny thing onto the top. It must have come flying off when Paul was muscling me around. Interesting that Learned had given that priority over the priceless miniature Napoleon I was holding. He gave me a controlled, unhurried look. When he spoke he used a soothing, sympathetic tone.

  “I don’t know if it helps, but I think he really does love you. Your line about the brunette fellowship and the white fellowship was inspired, but he wasn’t just using you, the way he is me. He was using you. You were right about that. Artists use everybody. That’s their nature. But that’s not all there is to it. He loves you.”

  “Well he can take his ‘love’ and shove it up his ass.”

  I said this on automatic pilot. Ninety percent of my mind was somewhere else. Specifically on my little tirade about Paul’s generous offer a few minutes ago to hold my hand during an abortion. I didn’t know why I was thinking about it as I gazed at Learned, but I figured the reason would come to me.

  “Are you hurt much?”

  “Abortion,” I muttered thoughtfully.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He killed my brother.” Caitlin said that Ariane had looked like she was putting on a little weight a few months ago, but the extra weight was gone by the time of their dad’s-in-trouble talk. Bradshaw somehow forced Ariane to get an abortion—at least Caitlin thought so. Why? Because she was pregnant with Learned’s kid instead of Bradshaw’s?

  “Nothing.” I gave him an I-don’t-have-any-more-time-for-you headshake. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to get an AIDS test.”

  Hurting like hell, I stood up and brushed myself off. I resisted the temptation to toss Napoleon at Learned, and instead politely handed it to him on my way to the door.

  I had lots of things to do before going to bed that night: change my flight to the next morning; a little TLC for my bumps and bruises, which turned out to be not all that bad, considering; check in with Mendoza; forty blistering minutes on the elliptical in the fitness center; scorching shower; call Stacy after work to tell her I’d just joined the oldest women’s club in the world; and get drunk.

  But before doing any of that, I went to confession. I checked the Internet, figuring that even during Advent I’d have to go halfway across Manhattan to find a church where confessions were being heard on a weekday afternoon, but I lucked out: St. Pat’s had them. After a bit of a wait in line I was slipping into a confessional by four thirty.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been about four years since my last confession. I just had a huge fight with my ex-fiancé. I called him a faggot. And I threw in a couple of goddamns while I was at it.”

  The priest behind the grill waited with the patience of someone who heard stuff worse than this from grade-schoolers every month. I could hear steady, quiet breaths before he finally responded.

  “Are those the only sins you’ve committed in the last four years?”

  I thought about that for a second.

  “Those aren’t even the only sins I’ve committed in the last four hours. But they’re the only ones I’m sorry for.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  “You look like hell.”

  “Bad hangover, early flight,” I told Mendoza. Throbbing head isn’t an acronym for laconic, but it might as well be.

  “I thought you weren’t all that much of a drinker.”

  “I’m not. This is what happens when someone who isn’t all that much of a drinker makes an exception, like I did last night.”

  “I hope you weren’t drinking alone.”

  “Most of the time I had a friend from clerkship days on the phone with me.”

  “Must be a good friend.”

  “Yep.”

  We were at the Pittsburgh Airport’s Three Rivers Café, drinking black coffee. It was just after 9:30 on the morning after—the morning after Paul became my ex-fiancé. When I’d checked in with Mendoza yesterday afternoon he’d insisted on picking me up at the airport this morning. I think he’d figured out that something pretty damn serious had gone down, and he wanted to spare me the humiliation of falling apart in front of the entire office if it came to that.

  “Okay. Your getting drunk is none of my business, and why you got drunk is none of my business—”

  “Actually, it is. As soon as I get through explaining why I got drunk I’m going to tell you some important stuff, and you’ll need to figure out how much to discount it for bitterness and rage.”

  He shrugged eloquently. “Shoot.”

  I told him about Paul and Learned and then I told him about me and Learned. This was therapeutic. Trial lawyers will tell you that if you have some really shocking pictures or video to show a jury, you don’t show it over and over. The first couple of times it makes an impact, but then it starts to numb the jury’s reactions. The same thing works in reverse. By going over the trauma and betrayal again and again I was gradually reducing its power to keep on hurting me.

  I had Mendoza’s attention. He listened carefully, and he looked like he was getting not just the facts but the subtext and nuances as well. He nodded soberly when I finished.

  “We’ve got a problem.”

  “We sure do.”

  “If half of what you say is right, Learned is up to his eyebrows in fertilizer, including a possible murder rap. If things get too tight for him, he’ll do everything he can to pin Bradshaw’s murder on our client, because the only other possibilities are him, or someone he’s sleeping with, or people who are probably already trying to kill him.”

  “Yep.”

  “So here’s the money question.” Mendoza paused to make sure I was really focusing. “Do you think he’s really trying to recover the Gardner Museum stuff?”

  “I think he’s trying to move it—or help whoever has the stuff move it. I think his effort to get it back is cover for trying to fence it.”

  “Or maybe the other way around,” Mendoza said. “One way to get a line on the loot would be to put the word out that you could turn some of it into cash. After all, how do you fence art that’s world famous for having been stolen? The thieves had to assume that they’d take the stuff and then quietly negotiate with an insurance company to return it for, say, twenty percent or twenty-five percent of its value. But it turns out the Gardner didn’t have insurance.”

  “Which means that after this gang of Ocean’s Eleven types pulled off the caper of the century, they were stuck with a ton of hot art and no way to unload it. So how does Learned convince them he could move it for them?”

  “Maybe he invents some oil prince who can groove on having a Monet in his Saudi Arabian palace and showing it to his four wives and close friends.”

  “As long as we’re making stuff up,” I said, “let’s say that the thieves buy Learned’s line. He fakes a couple of relatively small
sales to build confidence with the crooks, hoping to get to the point where he can tell cops enough to let them swoop in and recover the art. No insurance, but the Gardner has put up a five-million dollar reward, so he’d be in line for a nice payday.”

  “And if the bad guys catch on, he’s in line for a forty-five caliber hole in his heart.”

  “Maybe with some collateral damage along the way—like Tom Bradshaw. In other words, you’re right: we’ve got a problem.”

  Mendoza leaned back. He glanced at his watch. He surveyed the enlarged pictures of Ford Trimotors and Boeing 727s and Constellations that hung on the café walls. I couldn’t figure out our next move so I asked him.

  “What do we do?”

  “Smoke out the Feds.”

  “Huh?”

  “If Learned was doing this sting we’re dreaming about, maybe he was doing it on spec, but it’s more likely he was working with people who have badges—and money. The Feds are the most obvious choice.”

  “That fits in with them not being the cops involved in the search of Bradshaw’s house. But ‘smoke them out’ how?”

  “Give them enough dope to support a search warrant. If they don’t bite, that means they’re in bed with Learned. If they do, then at least the spotlight is on him and off of our client. Either way, we’ve diminished Learned as a credible source of testimony against Caitlin.”

  “The raw material for the search warrant has to come from me,” I said.

  “You’re the only one who can sign an affidavit about what you’ve told me this morning.”

  “Great. I’m game. Let’s get downtown and get to work.”

  That was not pseudo, ain’t-I-a-trooper enthusiasm. I meant every word of it. I relished the idea of getting busy practicing law again. Banging out a statement detailing all my New York stuff—well, most of my New York stuff—and having coy telephone conversations with Phillip Schuyler at the U.S. Attorney’s office were exactly what I needed. Twenty hours of hard work in the next two days would let me pour all of my hatred into constructive channels.