But Remember Their Names

by Hillary Bell Locke

  I had nine-one-one punched in and ready to send by the time I knelt next to Paul’s writhing torso, but by then I heard something else: running steps approaching the room. If my prayers were answered a cop was coming, and he could get action a lot faster than I could. And if they weren’t I’d be dead in about ten seconds, so there wasn’t much point in complicating an operator’s evening.

  “God my ass hurts!” Paul squealed.

  “As my sainted mother told me once or twice in that situation, ‘Some day you’ll thank me for this.’”

  The footsteps slowed as whoever had been running decided to scope things out. A couple of seconds after I yelled, “In here! Gunshot wound!” a woman about my age came in. She was a cop: blue uniform trousers, regulation shoes, visored cap, and a big shiny badge on her leather jacket. And a gun. She held some kind of a semiautomatic pistol in her right hand. I wouldn’t call the look in her eyes a thousand-yard stare, but it was in the neighborhood. Maybe six-hundred yards. Cops are pros about lots of things, but live fire at living, breathing targets isn’t one of them.

  “This man’s been shot,” I said. “Nonfatal, but he’ll need an ambulance.”

  “Who shot him?”

  “I did.”

  That surprised her but it also calmed her down. The training and drills she’d gone through clicked in and she went into triage mode: Take care of people who are injured or endangered first, and then worry about chasing bad guys and arresting people.

  “Where’s he hit?”

  “Rear end.”

  She reholstered her gun and squatted to take a look. She probed the wound, and I could see that there wasn’t too much bleeding. Then, in a surprisingly gentle way, she pried Paul’s left eyelid as far up as she could with her left thumb—to check for signs of shock, I suppose.

  She must not have found any. She spoke in clipped tones into a microphone mounted on her left epaulet. I didn’t understand the code numbers she used but I picked up “ambulance” and “American History Museum.” Calling for an ambulance meant there wasn’t already an ambulance on the way. And that meant that all those shots I’d heard had either missed or produced a fatality. I don’t think Paul had thought it through that carefully, but even he seemed to have some notion of what must have happened.

  “That firing a couple of minutes ago,” he said in a trembling voice. “Did someone…?”

  The cop looked at him for a second before answering. When she finally spoke her voice was low and flat, as if she were making a report to a superior officer.

  “One of the guards here heard voices and called it in. My partner and I had just gotten inside when someone tripped an alarm trying to go through a fire door. We spotted an armed white female in a guard’s outfit running away. We shot at her, but we missed.”

  “What about the shots earlier?”

  The cop shook her head and took a deep breath.

  “We found a body—looked like he was dressed to do re-enactments here. Multiple gunshot wounds in the chest and heart. My guess is he was dead before he hit the floor.”

  “Nooooooo!” Paul’s wail wrenched my gut. “No, God, he can’t be dead! He can’t be! He can’t be!” Then he started sobbing.

  The emptiness that came back to the pit of my stomach brought revelation along for company. I’d heard love from Paul during our time together. I’d heard lust, and I’d heard passion. But I’d never heard anything from the depths of his soul like this. Paul could never have felt for me what he felt for Walter Learned. It would have been criminal to ask him to try.

  Then the cop remembered that the armed white female wasn’t the only civilian shooter on the premises. With studious calm, she looked at me.

  “So what went down here?”

  I’d been working on an answer to that one, but Paul beat me to it.

  “She wanted him dead.” He glared at me, his eyes gleaming with white-hot fury. “She shot me to keep me from helping him.”

  “Who’s ‘him?’” the cop asked.

  “Walter,” Paul said.

  “The guy whose body you found,” I added. “Paul decided that someone was gunning for him, and he was running out there with that pigsticker to try to go after them.”

  The cop looked at Paul.

  “You mean if she hadn’t shot you, you were going to run around this museum waving that bayonet?”

  “All he needed was someone on his side,” Paul said before adding, as the pain flared, “owww! Goddammit!”

  To her credit, the cop didn’t roll her eyes or look at Paul as if he were an alien species. The guy had just been shot—embarrassingly, in the butt, but it still hurt. A lot.

  “You realize,” she said evenly, “that if you’d managed to get ten feet outside this room with that weapon, you’d probably have three or four bullets in you, right? If the murderer hadn’t gotten you, my partner or I would have. And we don’t aim for the ass when we shoot.”

  I thought about what to say. Learned was dead meat from the moment he came here to save you after you attracted the attention of everyone who was looking for him by heading for Pittsburgh. He warned you and then he ran from this room to draw the killer away from you. When he realized someone was in hot pursuit inside the museum, he cut his already tiny chances of getting out alive by setting off an alarm to attract the police. Thug with machine gun or not, he might be alive right now if it weren’t for you.

  Nah, I don’t think so. “He told you to stay here because he knew he was in danger and he wanted to protect you. Getting yourself killed would’ve been a pretty shitty way of saying thanks.”

  The cop’s microphone squawked to tell her the ambulance had arrived, so I didn’t get a chance to hear Paul’s reaction. Probably just as well.

  After they loaded Paul onto the gurney the cop arrested me. After all, I’d shot someone from behind, in a place where I didn’t have any business being after closing time, with an antique weapon that a suspicious soul might have thought I had designs on stealing.

  Fortunately, Learned was a guy who’d been of interest to the FBI when he got himself hemstitched at a place in the process of being shot up by two Pittsburgh cops who had a story about an armed white female but no actual armed white female. My story backed up the cops, so they got a deputy DA to put in some overtime instead of making me spend the night in jail. Paul was a total mess during his hospital-bed interview, but he mentioned his own “dead cops” line and that made me look pretty good. By a little after eleven, Mendoza was driving me home, with the incident still under investigation but no charges pending—yet.

  “Was that your first time in handcuffs?” he asked, referring to my arrest.

  “Second. The first was foreplay during my I’ll-try-anything-once phase.”

  He proceeded to chew me out royally in a mixture of English and Spanish, riffing on the obvious themes—I was lucky that DA didn’t throw the book at me, if every Ivy League graduate was this goddamn dumb he was goddamn glad he’d gone to night school, I ought to be spanked, and so forth. I absorbed this stoically and with appropriate displays of contrition.

  Finally he ran out of steam. After a few minutes of silence, he grudgingly growled something that I interpreted as a request that I sort the mess out for him. I looked up.

  “All I have is a theory.”

  “That’s more than I’ve got right now,” he said.

  “When Learned flew the coop we all assumed he went overseas somewhere. And that was definitely his plan. But he really cared for Paul. Paul lit out for Pittsburgh, so Learned abandoned his own escape plan. He had to know there was a 99 percent chance he was signing his own death warrant, but for the sake of love he settled for 1 percent. Paul’s ‘real murder weapon’ chatter meant that he’d be coming to the museum, so Learned waited here, disguised as part of the scenery. The minuteman getup was a lit
tle baroque, but it let him hide in plain sight until Paul showed up. Maybe he figured that if he could just talk some sense into Paul he could make a run for it and hole up with Ariane Bradshaw while he worked out another off-shore exit strategy. And he might have pulled it off if not for us.”

  “It didn’t occur to him to just have a chat over the phone?” Mendoza’s tone was sarcastic, so I paid him in kind.

  “Why not take out an ad in the New York Times? A mobile phone call is basically a radio transmission. Learned had to assume that inconvenient people would be listening in.”

  Mendoza chewed on that until he pulled into Vince’s driveway. He gave me one of his sullen nods—the nod that means he got it, but he didn’t have to like it.

  “Well, at least it makes things simple. Learned killed Bradshaw, now he’s permanently out of the picture, the cops are as far away from the Gardner Museum loot as they ever were, and the two female Bradshaws came through unscathed. Case closed.”

  “Right.” I opened the door and climbed out of his Citera. “Case closed.”

  Neither of us believed it. Why should we?

  Chapter Forty-seven

  After thinking about it hard overnight, I told Phillip Schuyler the next morning that Wendy Sommers killed Learned. I told him this around 9:30 while we were strolling through Point State Park in downtown Pittsburgh, freezing our butts off because Schuyler didn’t want my name to show up on the visitor’s log for his office. I couldn’t blame him for that.

  “You can make a positive i.d.?”

  “No way. I saw her face for two-tenths of a second, while she was running, and I had other things on my mind.”

  “Yet you’re sure she did it.”

  “Yeah, but it’s logic, not eyewitness identification.” I stopped walking, half-turned and made eye contact with him, to be sure he’d get the message. “I didn’t get it completely put together for myself until I was halfway through my shower late last night.”

  “Put it together for me.”

  “She gave me an earful during a bus ride. Either she made a special trip to Pittsburgh to do a good deed or she was here stalking Learned and decided to warn me off to keep the body-count down. Learned’s killer was an armed white female and there aren’t a lot of other white females running around in this circus with access to automatic weapons. Seeing the perp sprint by in a guard’s uniform last night reminded me of seeing a perp in a maid’s uniform run away the night my hotel room was burgled, and Sommers is the most plausible candidate for the hotel thing. Plus, if the Gardner Museum thieves had had some other hired muscle on Learned’s tail all this time, you’d probably have a line on them and you wouldn’t be wasting your time on me.”

  Schuyler tilted his head first to the left and then to the right and then back again, the way you might do if you were considering some wacky theory that just might possibly be true. Then he started walking again, but he kept his face turned toward mine.

  “So it basically comes down to the bus ride. If she was really relaying a message from Learned instead of trying to scare you off for her own purposes, then she actually was working with him and your theory falls apart.”

  “Oh, she was working with him, all right—but she was working against him at the same time.” I panted a little as I picked up my pace to match his long-legged strides. “I think she was a plant, keeping an eye on him for the bad guys.”

  “Have you shared your conjectures with the Pittsburgh cops yet?”

  “No. It’s way too thin for an arrest warrant and if Sommers is going to run she’s already done it. So there’s no big hurry. I’ll save it to use in case the DA presses charges against me.”

  “Why are you telling me, then?”

  “Curiosity. Killing Learned wasn’t a federal crime, so you don’t have to do anything about Sommers if you don’t want to. Of course, the only reason you wouldn’t want to is that you think she’s a possible link to the museum thieves, and you’d rather have her out there, so she can possibly lead you to them someday, than in a squeal room getting grilled by local cops. If you want her to stay on the outside, then that means you have the same theory I do, and you had it before I did.”

  It was Schuyler’s turn to stop. I paused with him. He gave me a long, careful look. A little smile played at the corners of his lips, as if he were thinking back to a simpler time when women who came off sounding too smart got squelched. Then the smile disappeared and he got real, real serious. His expression told me he was speaking on the record, formally, with measured words, and I’d damn well better listen.

  “I can’t tell you not to give information to local law enforcement authorities.”

  “I haven’t heard you say anything like that.”

  “Good.” He hunched his shoulders, as if the raw weather were starting to get to him. “I don’t think the DA is going to press charges.”

  “I don’t think so either. Have a pleasant day.”

  ***

  By mid-March, when Vince and I met with Pro Tools’ Pittsburgh branch manager, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had officially decided not to charge me with any of the felonies that a mean-spirited prosecutor might have spun out of my museum escapade. The little insurance policy I’d bought with Schuyler probably had something to do with that and, to be fair, so did Paul. Being Paul, he got tagged as an uncooperative witness in a hurry, and even after he wasn’t strung out on Percocet he repeated his dead-cops line and gave some helpful details about my pleading with him not to go in harm’s way.

  Maybe it’s just sheer class prejudice, though, but I want to give most of the credit to an assistant DA making maybe fifty-five thousand bucks a year. I don’t know his name, but it had to be one of four people and they’re all guys. He came into the office and did a professional case assessment. After he’d read the reports, talked to the cops, and interviewed Paul one more time, he decided that I’d shot Paul to save his life and spare two police officers the inconvenience of blowing him away instead of to get back at him for jilting me. Paul still thought that I’d been trying to keep him from saving Learned—Paul can get plenty delusional without Percocet—but no one bought that.

  So, like Mendoza said, case closed. I repackaged the papers Caitlin had sent to me and returned them to her, with a self-serving cover note for our Client Correspondence folder. In case it ever comes up for you, that’s called “papering the file.” We never bothered with the ballistics test on our bullets, of course. I’ve heard rumors that the FBI duplicated the experiment Mendoza and I ran—but I’ve also heard rumors of alien corpses at Area 51. Believe whatever you like.

  I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow account of Vince’s negotiations with the Pro Tools branch manager, a shrewd, affable desk jockey named William Dhue. I figured we were at least halfway home before I ever saw the inside of Dhue’s office, when Vince explained the unpainted pinewood coffin standing upright in the lobby of the branch warehouse. Twelve or thirteen nails studded its lid at various places. Vince nudged me and pointed at the coffin.

  “Every time a Cornwell or Matco dealer goes out of business, the field manager for the area gets to pound a nail into that coffin.”

  Inference: no way Dhue was going to let either of those arch-rival companies grab the order that Allegheny County Community College was dangling. He played around with a 10 percent commission and then 15 percent just for pride, but we got to twenty before Vince was halfway through his first cup of coffee.

  That wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was parlaying that little wedge into more territory for Vince. Sal had come up with a promising negotiating ploy, but Vince had to make it work once Dhue provided the opening—which he did promptly after Vince explained why he needed a route census.

  “Look, Vince, you’re a solid dealer. Year after year. You want a route census, you get a route census. Period. But here’s the thing. Milo Sker
ritt is bringing in his truck next week.”

  “Milo’s cashing out?”

  “Yep. Just can’t make a go of it in this economy. So I’ve got an open territory on my hands until I can find someone who’ll beg, borrow, or steal a hundred thousand bucks to become a Pro Tools dealer. Good luck on getting that done in less than six months. That means your field manager, who also happens to be Milo’s field manager, is going to be spending half his time beating the bushes for dealer candidates and the other half collecting installment payments from Milo’s old customers. So it’s going to take a while for him to squeeze a census in.”

  Vince sprang the trap.

  “Billy, you’re right about everything but one. It’s not gonna take you six months to fill that territory; it’ll take you sixteen. Milo’s territory is way light.”

  “Maybe, but what can I do?”

  “Bust the damn thing up. Give me twenty of Milo’s stops, and divide the rest between Tony and Phin. We’ll take the customer accounts off your hands. That way you’ll have dealers collecting them and your field manager can do field manager stuff. Meanwhile, you have Pro Tools guys servicing the stops, so Cornwell and Matco don’t swoop in like vultures.”

  Dhue grinned, as if he actually appreciated the deft elegance of Vince stabbing him with his own sword. He took his Pro Tools baseball cap off, scratched scraggly brown hair, and put the cap back on.

  “That might work. I’ll have to run it by the suits, but I might be able to sell it. Just cool your jets for about three weeks, and then you’ll get a note from Billy Dhue.”

  “I hope it’s a love note.” As we stood up I handed him my card, which included the scariest words most franchisors ever see—Attorney at Law. A little extra motivation.