But Remember Their Names

by Hillary Bell Locke

  I responded to that with something between a nod and a shrug.

  “Now,” Caitlin said, “can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “What if I went to the police and said that I killed Dad? You know, said he’d been molesting me or something and I shot him in self-defense. Maybe he called me from the museum to bring him some food and when I got down there he started coming on to me so I had to shoot him. Could I get off on that?”

  I wanted to slap her. I really did. Her flippant presumption that she could just rearrange the universe to suit her own convenience exasperated me.

  “No, Caitlin, you could not ‘get off on that.’ The police wouldn’t believe that you just happened to have a high-caliber pistol with you when you made an after-hours food run to the Pittsburgh Museum of American History where your father had gone to ground. They’d rip your story apart before it was completely out of your mouth. They’d assume that you were trying to protect your mother, and focus their attention on her. They’d accuse you of obstruction of justice and try to use that to squeeze a confession out of your mother.”

  “Oh. Okay then.” With a shrug she went back to work on the pacifier for a few seconds. “You’re pissed off at me, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I am, actually.”

  “I didn’t think it’d work, but I figured there was no harm in asking.”

  It seemed like a good time to find some noncontroversial territory to explore. Fortunately, a banal topic was staring me in the face.

  “I take it the pacifier is a stop-smoking kind of deal.”

  “More like a control-smoking kind of deal. An oral crutch. I’m not going to stop smoking. I really enjoy it. But I want to be one of those people who smokes socially without making a habit of it. Like maybe ten cigarettes a week, three or four during the week and the rest on weekends. That’d be okay. But I’ve sort of stressed out since our house got searched, so I’m using this pacifier to keep cigarettes from owning me.”

  “I hope that works out for you.”

  “You sound skeptical.”

  “When I started smoking,” I said, “my role model was Meg Ryan, the actress. I read that she might smoke a cigarette at a party and then not even think about smoking again for six months. I wanted to be the ultimate occasional smoker. But it got to be a daily habit, and when I finally decided to quit I went through three pretty damn tough months.”

  “That’s funny.” Caitlin shook her head. “I would have bet a thousand dollars that you’d never smoked a cigarette in your life. You’re just not the type.”

  “That’s exactly why I started: because I’m not the type.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Okay, I’m fifteen years old, right? Three weeks short of my sixteenth birthday, summer before my junior year at Kosciusko High. I’m not just an honor student with four APs on my schedule, I’m a classic grade-grubber, because I figure a full scholarship is the only shot I have. Now, Beth Fisher, a real cheerleader/prom-queen type, invites me to this end-of-summer thing at her house, because she’s hoping that I’ll ‘help her with her homework.’”

  “Meaning write some of her papers for her?”

  “Right. I know that as soon as I walk in someone is going to offer me a cigarette, and everyone will expect me to say no because I’m ‘not the type.’ And I figure that if instead of saying no I take the thing and let someone light it and smoke it like I know what I’m doing, I’ll knock their socks off. So I swipe three Salems from my mom’s purse and teach myself how to smoke. By the time of the party I’ve learned how to inhale and how to hold the thing so I don’t look like a dork and all that stuff. At the party I totally brought it off.”

  “That is so awesome.” Caitlin squealed with apparently genuine delight.

  “When I confessed to Mom about the missing Salems I got grounded for two weeks for stealing. But it was totally worth it. It was even worth the three months of purgatory when I decided to quit.”

  “You quit because it got to be a habit?”

  “I was over a pack a week, which sure won’t pass for occasional. But that’s not why I quit. I was twenty years old and I figured I’d live forever. I quit because I realized during a summer job that in the business world, smoking is a badge. It’s like walking around with a tool belt around your waist. Secretaries and keypunchers and salespeople smoke; lawyers and accountants and executives don’t. I planned to end up in the group that didn’t. So I quit.”

  “That’s, I don’t know, so analytical. I mean, you really thought it through.”

  “Analytical is one way to put it. Or you could just say that I started smoking because I was a phony and I quit because I was a snob.”

  Caitlin gave me a long, intrigued look. “You don’t cut yourself much slack, do you?”

  “You got me there.”

  Caitlin put the pacifier away—I figured that was a good sign—and drank some Gatorade. I felt a new connection with her. With a touch of amusement I wondered if some kind of bond between us had emerged from idle chatter about adolescent smoking adventures.

  “Listen.” She lowered the Gatorade bottle. “If I give you something, can you like, just store it in the file for my case down at your office?”

  “Sure. But that doesn’t mean the cops can’t get it. Any tangible thing you give me they can subpoena, or if they’re feeling really frisky they can just go after it with a search warrant.”

  “But they’re less likely to do that than they are to search our house, right?”

  “Probably true. Don’t kid yourself, though. It happens. Lawyers get their offices searched every day.”

  Caitlin came up with a sealed, brown nine-by-twelve business envelope that she had retrieved from the yellow and black sports bag at her feet. It wasn’t bulging, exactly, but it was nice and full.

  “I’d like you to take this and keep it with my file. Will you do that for me?”

  I thought about it for a second. I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t see a good reason to say no.

  “Yes.” I accepted the envelope. “I’ll take it for now and talk this over with Mendoza on Monday. Bottom line, it’ll be his call.”

  “Sure.” Caitlin nodded. “I understand.”

  I’ll just bet you do, princess. At fifteen hundred bucks a month, this isn’t on my job description.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  I figure if you go to a church on a Sunday morning you should expect a religious service, not an Apollo Theater stage show. I wasn’t the only white at the AME Church of Pittsburgh that morning, by a long shot, but I was almost the only one who took this view of things. Most of the others looked dismayed to learn that the authentic African-American gospel singing they’d come for went along with a sixty-minute side dish of scripture and hellfire and brimstone.

  The only other Caucasian exception I noticed was a woman about my height, maybe an inch taller, with hair almost as dark as mine. I would have guessed she was in her late thirties or early forties, but in your mid-twenties you can be comically wrong about age estimates so take that one with a grain of salt. She was into it. Not just the music, the whole thing. She followed the scriptural readings with what looked to me like pure joy, and I could tell it wasn’t the first time she’d heard them. When she glanced over her shoulder once I saw the kind of luminous smile you remember all day. She didn’t offer any shout-outs during the sermon, but I knew when she agreed and when she disagreed with Reverend Demetrius’ take on things. About halfway through the service, I realized that if she stood out this much, I must be pretty conspicuous myself.

  I had bargained for an hour and forty-five minutes of worship, with music and prose in roughly a one-to-two ratio. I pretty much nailed it. The sermon was a real hair-raiser. I mean old-school. In this church, Hell wasn’t a metaphysical abstraction. Hell was a r
eal place with real fire that really burned forever. It was just as real as, say, PNC Park, where the Pirates play, and it was a lot more real than, oh, Uzbekistan.

  The rev said there were all kinds of ways to get to Hell. The road to Hell was an interstate highway with no speed limit and six lanes that all went just one way. That’s right—Six Lanes! Abandoning babies you’d made was one lane. Using heroin or crack or just getting blind drunk every day was lane number two. Lane number three was joining a gang that made you kill your own brothers—Ku Klux Klanners kill black folks too, and they’ll be there burning right along with you In Hell! Abortion was lane number four—abortion might be a “choice” for white folks but for black folks it’s “genocide on the installment plan!” Lane number five was lying with your own kind—“Homo-sexu-ality,” as the rev put it, unbridled disgust dripping from every syllable. And lane number six, the express lane, the fast-track to Hell—that was pimping: letting women do your work for you, beating them if they didn’t peddle their flesh enough times every night.

  The sermon took close to forty minutes all by itself, and I’ve gotta say, at the end of it I knew right where the rev stood. No focus group bet-hedging with him. No subtle distinctions, no on-the-one-hand-this-on-the-other-hand-that, no nuances and no finesse. Just your basic Absolute Truth, putting gays in the same basket as pimps and pushers and conflating problem pregnancies with complicity in a new Holocaust. I remembered screaming “moral cretin” at Paul when he just assumed I’d get an abortion, and I wondered whether I’d sounded as scarily dogmatic to him as the rev sounded to me just now. I kind of hoped so.

  It took Reverend Demetrius and Deacon Khalid twenty minutes after the closing hymn and the last “Amen! Hallelujah!” that followed it to press the flesh in the vestibule with all the congregants who lingered for a few more words and a hug or two. I hung back, figuring that people who came to this church every Sunday had priority over a papist interloper. The other white woman I’d noticed and an African-American woman whose bushy, gray hair framed a radiant face hung back as well. After the crowd thinned a bit, they gestured to me to go first. I shook my head and made a little after-you motion with my left hand. Given what I was there to talk about, I definitely wanted the last position.

  “Sister Cecilia!” Demetrius boomed, warmly clasping the African-American woman’s hand and then wrapping her in a hug. “How wonderful to see you this glorious Sunday morning!”

  “Reverend, I want you to meet my good friend, Laurie Gramling. She’s visiting from Milwaukee.”

  “Welcome to our church!” Demetrius took the white woman’s hand. “And welcome to Pittsburgh. What brings you to our city?”

  “I do antipoverty work in Milwaukee with a private group. I’m here for a meeting of coordinators from the eastern half of the country.” I wouldn’t call her voice lyrical, exactly, but it had a confiding, serene-but-not-complacent tone that drew me in. That’s my excuse for eavesdropping.

  “Wonderful. This must be your first time in our church.”

  “It is. Cecilia came to Mass with me last night, and was kind enough to bring me here with her this morning.”

  “Well, you’re not seeing Pittsburgh at its best in this January gray, but if you visit us again during fruit-planting season, you’ll find a completely different city.”

  “Careful, Reverend,” Cecilia warned “If Laurie finds out you like raspberries, you’ll be swimming in raspberry jam and coffee cake come July.”

  “I will watch myself,” Demetrius said with mock gravity. “Thank you for coming.”

  The two women moved on to Deacon Khalil, which I took as my cue. Demetrius recognized me, but the warm hug he greeted me with came along with a wary smile. I could tell he figured I wasn’t there to find Jesus.

  “Reverend, I wonder if I could talk with you about something for five minutes or so.”

  “Certainly, child. Of course.”

  I paused awkwardly, expecting him to suggest that we meet in his office in ten minutes. He didn’t move a muscle or say another word. I figured he needed a hint.

  “Maybe somewhere inside the church, when you’re through here.”

  “We are here together in the presence of God, my child,” he said—or, rather, declaimed in a deep and resonant voice, spreading his arms wide and beaming. “He reads our thoughts and knows our hearts. Let us share with one another as we share with Him.”

  And so, a little late, I got it. He wasn’t going behind closed doors alone with a white woman. Any business we had to do would get taken care of right here, in public, with freezing January air blowing through the church door to keep us from nodding off.

  “Okay. It’s about Tyrell.” I remembered to pronounce the name ‘TIE-rell.’

  “I thought it might be.”

  “While I was still working on his case, I got a hint from the government that the reason Tyrell was killed was to keep him quiet about something.”

  “It would grieve me to hear that anyone thought Tyrell could be a snitch.”

  “I don’t think he was a snitch.” I focused on tiptoeing nimbly through the verbal minefield I’d just entered. “But you knew him much better than I ever could. If someone came to him about doing something very wrong that he wasn’t willing to do, do you think he might have spoken up about it to save another person’s life?”

  The rev gave me a long, steady look. I won’t pretend that I could read the calculation in his eyes, but he was thinking about something and it wasn’t the Epistle to the Romans.

  “It would depend on the life,” he said finally. “Tyrell lived by a code instead of the Bible, but he had a part of Jesus in him.”

  “I’m not interested in helping the government,” I said. “The government and I are on opposite sides. If the Feds were hoping that he’d open up about his source or people he worked with, I don’t care. That’s their problem.”

  “But…what?” the rev prompted.

  “But if Tyrell’s code told him to turn down money a satan offered him to kill someone who’s still a target, I won’t feel I’ve done everything I should for Tyrell unless I try to find out who that target is. I don’t care who wanted the killing done. I just want to keep the target alive if I can.”

  He looked at me thoughtfully for what seemed like thirty seconds. I thought he might be waiting to see if I had anything else to say, so I gave him sort of a that’s it head shake.

  “I am sorry, Ms. Jakubek,” he said. “I don’t see how I can help you. But I will pray on what you have said.”

  I started to say God’s will be done, but then I thought that might be a little too Catholic for the surroundings. I said the prayer mentally instead and took my leave.

  I wasn’t feeling any too chipper as I stepped outside, so I was grateful that the biting wind gave me an excuse to keep my head down. On the sidewalk I was surprised to hear Laurie Gramling’s voice, along with footfalls fast-stepping on the sidewalk to catch up with me. I looked over my shoulder just in time to see her pull alongside. She stopped, and I did too. I relaxed a little. Her serenity was contagious.

  “Wonderful sermon,” she said.

  That called for a tactful response, and I came up with one.

  “I didn’t necessarily agree with all of it, but it was stirring and he certainly got his point across.”

  “I don’t mean the one Reverend Demetrius gave. I mean yours. As St. Francis said, ‘The Gospel should be preached constantly. If necessary, use words.’ I don’t know exactly what you’re doing, but I could tell you were witnessing in a way that went beyond words.”

  It was a sweet thing to say, but I’d just killed a weekend morning with nothing to show for it, so I was having trouble being upbeat. The best I could come up with was, “That’s very generous. Thank you.”

  “He said he would pray on it.” Gramling’s tone seemed suddenly
gentle. “And he sounded like someone who means what he says. Whatever ‘it’ is, keep your hopes up. God be with you.”

  We gripped hands in kind of a sister-solidarity sort of way. Then she and Cecilia waved and walked on. I followed them with my eyes for maybe twenty seconds before heading for Vince’s Chevy. I wondered whether Gramling’s encouragement would end up being the highlight of my January. Right then I would have given you roughly even odds on yes.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  So what happened next? Well, for the better part of two weeks, aside from the Steelers making their third run for the Superbowl in the last six years, nothing much happened. Life went on. I went to work. I made a full report to Mendoza, who whistled and shook his head at the Feds getting their search warrant executed with such alacrity. With his okay I tossed Caitlin’s sealed envelope in our file. He told me not to look inside it, so I didn’t. I worked on Dad’s problem. And I beavered away industriously at grunt work for other clients so that Mendoza wouldn’t regret the fifteen hundred bucks a month he was now paying me.

  I even found the heart now and then to update Streetdreamer. A lot of the comments on Calder & Bull’s shift to a September report date were—how to put it?—less than supportive. “It’s over, Streetdreamer, time to wake up.” That kind of thing. I got to where I could shrug off the snarky cracks and even come up with a peppy retort once in awhile, the way I had before Paul cratered on me.

  And speaking of Paul, I started reading his emails—well, skimming them—before deleting them, instead of just clicking Delete without even bothering to open them. They were mostly variations on his telephone monologue. Eight days after my chat with the rev, I finally responded to one of the longer ones:

  Look, Paul, I need time and space, okay? When you say you weren’t using me, what you mean is you weren’t just using me, as Learned put it. And maybe that should be enough. It’s not like I’ve never done anything I’m ashamed of. But what I haven’t figured out yet is whether the guy who was using me but not just using me is the same one I was really madly in love with, or whether that guy never existed in the first place except as a figment of my imagination. So just back off for now. Saying the same thing over and over again isn’t helping.