But Remember Their Names

by Hillary Bell Locke

  “What did he have on his mind?”

  “Atonement.”

  “I think atonement may be a low-percentage play for him.”

  “That’s not really your call. Atonement is between him and God.”

  “Which in Paul’s case means it’s between him.”

  “I think he’s serious about it, sis. Maybe he doesn’t believe in God, but he has a deep need to make up somehow for what he did. At some level, he’s genuinely sorry—and he wants to do something about it.”

  “It’s a good thing he called you instead of me. Because I think the only thing he’s really sorry about is getting caught—and being SOL now that Learned is out of the picture. When it comes to making up for what he did, I wouldn’t have had a lot of ideas for him.”

  “He has some ideas of his own. That’s why I thought I’d better talk to you.”

  Up to now I’d been leaning back in my chair with my ankles crossed, like a smart-ass undergraduate in a dorm lounge bull session. I sat up straight in a hurry.

  “You have my undivided attention.”

  “He’s sorry about being a phony. He reproaches himself bitterly for treating you in a way the man he thought he was wouldn’t have. He wants to do something to prove that the Paul he’s been holding out to himself and the world isn’t a fake.”

  “‘Do something’ like what?”

  Ken took a deep breath, suggesting that I was about to hear a biggie. With a panicky shiver, I wondered if Paul had played the suicide card with him.

  “He told me he was going to find the real murder weapon—the gun that was actually used to kill Thomas Bradshaw.”

  “Last I heard, that was in an evidence locker in Quantico, Virginia.”

  “He apparently has a different opinion.”

  “Namely?”

  “He didn’t share his theory with me.”

  I bowed my head and closed my eyes. This put a new slant on things.

  “Okay,” I said then. “This is very bad. The only way what he said makes sense is if he knows something dangerous that he picked up from Learned—maybe something Learned told him to try to manipulate him into reckless behavior.”

  “You’re right. This may be really bad.”

  I waited through a few seconds of silence, then got impatient and spoke up.

  “Go ahead. Ask the obvious question.”

  “We have a bad situation. The obvious question is, what are you going to do about it?”

  Obvious questions usually have obvious answers. Even so, my response was slow in coming and grudging when it arrived.

  “I guess I’ll give him a call. I guess I owe him that much.”

  “I don’t think you owe him a thing, but I hope you call him. The reason to forgive our enemies isn’t to liberate them from guilt; it’s to liberate ourselves from hate.”

  “Paul was sweet to me and he got his butt kicked defending me from that burglar in New York,” I said. “He’s more of a disappointment than an enemy.”

  “Well, if Paul isn’t your enemy, you’d better figure out who is—because someone is really beating you up over this.”

  “Got it.” I sighed. “I’m my own enemy. I’ve been punishing myself for being a sap by getting all hard-case with everyone involved. I have to forgive myself.”

  “‘Forgive your enemies—but remember their names.’ God be with you, Sis.”

  I dialed Paul’s number as soon as I’d hung up with Ken. I figured that it wasn’t going to get any easier, so I might as well just get it over with. It’s funny, after Paul’s weeks of desperate efforts to get through to me, I somehow imagined that he’d be staring at his phone, ready to answer on the first ring if my number popped up on his caller i.d. He wasn’t and he didn’t. My call went through to voice mail.

  “Paul, this is Cindy. We should talk. Soon.” I recited my number and hung up.

  I stayed at my desk until almost six thirty, doing document reviews that Mendoza could bill clients for—and waiting for Paul to return my call. Didn’t happen. Interesting to get a taste of your own medicine. I buttoned things up, turned my computer off, and got ready to hustle downstairs for the last bus. As I headed for the door, I couldn’t help wondering what in the world Paul even thought he was talking about with that “find the real murder weapon” stuff. Obviously, Learned could have handed him a load of crap and Paul would think it was gold dust, but science is science. The marks on the bullets match up or they don’t. Like anything done in an honest lab. The numbers—

  I froze with my hand on the door handle, ready to pull it closed. Lab. Caitlin had said that Bradshaw had killed her brother. Back into the office. I hurtled for the bank of file drawers where we had Bradshaw, Caitlin re: Investigation stashed. I pulled out the envelope Caitlin had given me. I ripped it open. By this point, I halfway expected to see a gun inside. I didn’t, of course. Just paper—something that has killed a lot more people than guns have. I carried it over to my desk so that I could turn on my lamp and examine the contents carefully—the way I should have in the first place. I should have pushed back on that one, I thought, recalling my acquiescence in Mendoza’s instruction to stow the thing without looking inside.

  Prenup, check. No surprise. In case of adultery all bets were off and Ariane could theoretically end up with nothing but the house and half-a-million bucks. A laid-off steelworker praying for one more extension of unemployment benefits would have taken that in a heartbeat, but it would look like a catastrophe to Ariane. Caitlin was kidding herself if she thought she was going to hide that from anyone by giving it to me, but clients kid themselves all the time. Letter on Schwartzchild’s stationery—presumably the cover note for the prenup. I put that aside without reading it. Then the document I’d really expected to find: a lab report. This one came from Boelter Laboratory Services. Confidential screamed at me from the top of page one.

  It took me a good twenty minutes to read it through carefully, but I knew after thirty seconds that it was about more than the abortion. This was a report on a paternity test. Not a blood test. A comparative DNA analysis. No, wait, two DNA analyses.

  The never-born male fetus whom Caitlin had called her brother and whose body had ended up in a medical waste bag was not the son of Candidate A but of Candidate B. No names, but unless Caitlin was full of it Bradshaw had bullied Ariane into aborting this baby. And if he’d paid several hundred dollars for the test I was looking at, it figured that the test had something to do with his decision. Which pretty much made Bradshaw Candidate A. As to Candidate B I was speculating, but my guess was Walter Learned. Because Candidate B was also the father of a female child whose DNA was the subject of the second test report. That baby had been born a little over seventeen years ago. Had to be Caitlin.

  I picked up the letter I’d discarded. It was addressed to Thomas Bradshaw alone, and it was not a cover letter for the prenup. Schwartzchild had sent it only a few months ago. I would have tried to remember whether the attorney–client privilege survives the death of the client, but I was going to read the damn thing anyway so I didn’t bother:

  Dear Tom:

  Confirming the information that I provided to you during our telephone conversation, Fletcher & Peck will not be able to represent you in connection with the matter we discussed. Inasmuch as we have represented both you and Ariane on tax and estate planning matters over the years, providing the help you are asking for would represent a direct conflict of interest. If you decide to pursue the matter, I will be happy to provide you with contact information for several highly qualified attorneys in the Pittsburgh area who could assist you.

  However you choose to proceed, I remind you that the impending return of the federal estate tax on January 1, 2011 makes it advisable for you to act promptly on this and on the other matters we have discussed. Measures that would continue the estate tax m
oratorium are now pending before Congress, but there can be no assurance that Congress will act on them between now and the end of the year.

  Yours very truly and so forth.

  I tapped the stiff, rich paper idly with the nail of my right index finger. This was your basic CYA letter, the kind that lawyers write to keep their malpractice insurers from getting cranky. Sam Schwartzchild was documenting the fact that he’d refused to help Tom Bradshaw with something bad for Ariane that had to do with estate planning—wills and trusts, for example. I couldn’t blame Caitlin for trying to hide the thing. If I were Caitlin, and I loved my mom, I would have burned it.

  Chapter Forty-two

  “Okay.” The Vintage Firearms rep at Cumonow’s took a critical look at the flintlock pistol that I’d just loaded under his supervision and that I was now holding with both hands. “You’re good to go. Just try to hold steady during that fraction of a second between the hammer falling and the shot.”

  I leveled the replica weapon that I’d rented with the gift certificate Vince had given me for Christmas. I aimed it at the chest of the human body outline thirty feet away. I took a breath and let half of it out. I squeezed the trigger and tried not flinch when the hammer fell. The shot sounded like a cannon, and the fragrant blue smoke I remembered from before blocked my view of the target for a second. The rep saw the result before I did.

  “Gut shot him!” The rep seemed way too enthusiastic about this result. “Way to go!”

  “I was aiming for his heart.”

  “Well, it’s a smooth-bore weapon. You’re not going to get the accuracy you’d have with a modern handgun that has rifling inside the barrel.”

  “Okay. I think I can take it from here for awhile.”

  The rep took my hint and wandered out of the shooting gallery, back into the main part of the store. It was exactly eleven o’clock Wednesday morning, some sixteen hours after I’d finished going over the stuff from Caitlin’s envelope. If I’d had my way I would have been at Cumonow’s two hours ago, but it took me a while to talk Mendoza into it. He’d pointed out that I was proposing to improvise a complicated plan on short notice. He’d added that if it was as important as I thought it was we ought to take the time to do it right. He was, of course, absolutely right on both counts. Unfortunately, time was the one thing we didn’t have because my idiot ex-fiancé was threatening to run around like a cowboy on catnip. To his credit, when I reminded Mendoza of that he signed on for the little experiment I’d dreamed up the night before.

  Which is why he waltzed through the door right about then with a Colt .45 semiautomatic pistol. Cumonow’s rents weapons for thirty-five bucks an hour to people who just get a kick out of plinking with something heavy duty. I wasn’t sure a .45 would be exotic enough for inclusion in the store’s rental inventory, but Mendoza had come up with one. He took his place at the shooting stall next to mine while I favored my paper target with another ball in the short ribs. As the smoke cleared, Mendoza looked over at me.

  “You billing this time?”

  “Every minute.”

  “Let’s see how your experiment turns out. Might have to take a write-off.”

  I dug a thick, square sofa pillow that I’d found in Vince’s basement out of my backpack. I propped it up on the counter at Mendoza’s slot on the firing line. Mendoza stepped as far back from it as he could—about eight feet, I guess—and I scurried to get behind him. Cumonow’s had posted a Shooting Range Safety Protocol on the wall and we were violating it by the numbers, so it’s a good thing we had the place to ourselves. Mendoza took an FBI-guy stance—arms extended and slightly bent at the elbows, both hands on the gun, leaning forward with his hips back and his knees flexed—and squeezed off a shot into the pillow. It blew the thing a good three feet onto the target side of the firing line counter. I scrambled underneath the counter—another big protocol breach—and retrieved it.

  We anxiously examined it. Major holes on both sides. This was not the plan.

  “Hmm,” Mendoza said.

  “I really should have thought of that,” I said.

  “We’re lawyers, not engineers.”

  The door to the shooting gallery slammed against the wall. Mendoza and I looked up, guilty as a couple of sophomores caught with pot under the bleachers. Sol Cumonow strode in.

  “What in the hell are you people doing back here?”

  It struck me as a reasonable question. If one of us managed to get our silly butts clipped by a ricochet, even if we were too embarrassed about it to file a lawsuit, the store’s insurance rates would go through the roof.

  “Well, basically,” Mendoza said, “what we’re doing back here is, we’re trying to fire a bullet from this forty-five and then retrieve it.”

  “Oh.” Cumonow nodded, as if this were a halfway sane remark. “Wait right here. But don’t fire anything else until I get back.”

  He was gone a good fifteen minutes. When he came back he was wheeling a rolling picnic cooler behind him. He lowered the front end gingerly, and even so the lid popped up and water slopped over the edge and onto the floor. Then he opened the lid all the way, revealing a cooler sloshing to the brim with water. He looked at Mendoza

  “You’re buying the cooler, right?”

  “I guess we are. How much?”

  “Sixty-nine ninety-five. There’s a special this week, just for you.”

  “This idea of yours better prove something, Jake,” Mendoza said, glancing at me, “or we’re going halvsies on this thing.”

  Cumonow gestured for the pillow and I handed it to him. He laid it on top of the cooler crosswise, with its ends supported by the cooler’s sides. Then he stepped well away.

  “You may fire when ready, Gridley.”

  Mendoza did the FBI-guy thing again, with the pistol aimed at the cushion. He fired. When he picked up the pillow, I saw a lump of lead resting on the bottom of the cooler under about two feet of water. Mendoza gave me a this-is-why-God-created-associates look. I took off my jacket, rolled up the sleeve of my blouse, and fished the thing out. Mendoza had pulled a baggie from one of the side pockets in his suit coat. I dropped the spent bullet into it.

  “Now what?” Cumonow asked.

  “Now we do it again,” Mendoza explained.

  We did it again. I fished the bullet out again. We didn’t put this one in a baggie. Instead I took the thing over to the counter and started the ritual of loading the flintlock with it. I put the measured powder down the barrel. I picked up what was left of the bullet Mendoza had fired from the .45. It wasn’t a sphere, that’s for sure. It wasn’t close to a sphere. I’d call it an ovoid lump, but I’m not sure that’s a recognized geometric shape. The important thing, though, at least for the moment, was that it was smaller than the muzzle diameter of my pistol.

  I shrugged. I dropped the lump down the barrel with some wadding. I picked the ramrod up, thrust it down the barrel, and seated the load solidly against the powder. I wondered why Pirates of the Caribbean hadn’t used this as a phallic metaphor. I dolloped a little powder on the hammer plate. I took a deep breath. I carried the pistol over to the cooler. Then, pointing the barrel downward at the cushion in case there was a mishap, I cocked the hammer. I had to use the heel of my hand to rack it back two snaps to full cock.

  “Can I shoot that, Jake? I’ve always wanted to fire one of these.”

  What Mendoza meant was that if the damn thing blew up he wanted it to take his hand with it instead of mine. Macho gallantry. I’ll take it.

  “It’s all yours.” I handed the pistol to him.

  He took it in his left hand (he’s right-handed), pointed it at the pillow, closed his eyes, and fired. When I opened my eyes I saw a third hole in the pillow, which was still on top of the cooler. I grabbed the pillow and pulled it out of the way so that I could look for the slug in the bottom of the cooler. I c
ouldn’t see anything except water and cooler.

  “Pillow.” Mendoza snapped his fingers at me.

  I traded it to him for the pistol. He checked the bottom of the pillow. Two exit holes instead of three. He flipped it over, dropped it on the floor, fell to his knees, put two fingers from each hand through the third hole, and ripped the pillowcase fabric. Then he started tearing and pawing through the batting underneath. Feathers, or whatever they were, flew into the air and floated around. He swatted through them, cussing a little manically in Spanish. He was suddenly more in love with my theory than I was.

  “Hah! Gotcha, you stinking little sonofabitch!” Mendoza raised the lump triumphantly between the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand. Then he pulled a second sandwich bag out of his suit coat pocket and dropped the slug into it.

  “So this would be about the Bradshaw killing a couple of months back, I’m guessing,” Cumonow said.

  “No comment. That’s privileged information.”

  Mendoza was smiling. So was Cumonow.

  After Mendoza had settled up I wheeled his brand new rolling cooler out to the parking lot, where he helped me dump gallons of water out of it. Then, shivering a bit but not hideously cold, we paused between his Citera and the Chevy I’d borrowed from Vince. (We’d driven separately because part of my brilliant plan was to pretend that Mendoza renting a .45 and me getting my first free session with a vintage flintlock had nothing to with each other.)

  “If your theory is right,” Mendoza told me, “Paul is on his way to Pittsburgh.”

  “For all I know, he may already be here.”

  “He hasn’t gotten back to you?”

  “Nope. He’s playing if-you-can-be-a-bitch-I-can-be-a-bitch. But I doubt it would make any difference. Paul is on a mission. He thinks Learned is being framed for Bradshaw’s murder and that the real murder weapon is here.”

  “In theory, he could be right. Ariane has been cheating on Bradshaw with Learned—maybe for seventeen years, maybe off and on, who cares? Bradshaw finally finds out, threatens divorce, and she ices him to avoid downward social mobility.”