But Remember Their Names

by Hillary Bell Locke

  Chapter Twenty-four

  That Friday, promptly after being advised by Assistant United States Attorney Phillip Schuyler that his boss couldn’t be bothered to oppose my motion in the Tyrell Washington case, the honorable judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit granted it, just the way I had written it. The mandate was less than one page long, counting the caption.

  Over my lunch hour I found a halfway decent frame for it at a place called The Great Frame-Up. I fit the mandate into place behind the glass, packed it in an envelope with lots of protective padding, and mailed it to my former client’s mother. I guess it was a little like fishing for an encore bow, but it brought back warm memories and it made me feel good.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Sal Brentano called me just after I got back from lunch on Monday. He was stage-whispering, and he sounded excited.

  “I can’t believe what I’m seeing. Your dad is about to sell a giant toolbox on wheels for eighteen hundred bucks to a guy who works in a bicycle shop!”

  He had a point. Making a sale like that to a car mechanic is impressive enough, but at least a car mechanic could expect to use enough different tools in an average working quarter to fill the thing. A bicycle repairman, though? That was impressive.

  This was the day I’d arranged for Brentano to take his ride with Vince. Actually getting the ride done required some complex logistics. Vince’s route wasn’t a geographic area; it was a list of business addresses. Wednesday’s share had thirteen stops, with forty-one mechanics all told. So if Sal just met Dad somewhere on the route, say at his first or second stop, there’d be no convenient way for him to get back to his car whenever he figured he’d gotten enough face time with Vince.

  The solution we worked out was for Sal to stop by chez Jakubek at 6:45 and ride with Vince right from the get-go. I would then drive Sal’s car to work. Sal was to phone me when he was ready to call it a day, and I’d drive out to pick him up at the next stop on Vince’s list. Sal would drive back to the office with me. Hence the early afternoon call.

  “So, you know all about the door-to-door tool business now?” I asked.

  “I know enough. Look, Vince’s next stop is Cumonow’s Hunting and Fishing at, like, sixtieth and Babcock. Can you meet me out there in forty-five minutes or so?”

  “Sure.”

  I made it in a little over twenty-five minutes, so I had some time to kill. I wandered around the place, trying to figure out why anyone who worked here would have to buy high-end professional hand tools. I saw fishing rods for spin-casting and fishing rods for fly fishing and reels for both, but I couldn’t figure out why you’d need anything more than a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers to work on them. Outboard motors? Okay, yeah, maybe outboard motors. Still…

  Then I came to the guns. I’m not a gun-wimp. Hunting is a huge deal in western Pennsylvania. Vince has a deer rifle—Remington thirty-ought-six. He made sure I went through hunter-safety classes when I was thirteen because anyone living in the same house as a firearm should have someone show them movies about what happens unless you “Keep the safety on until you have the target clearly in sight!” and “Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire!” and “Always maintain muzzle control!” After he finished Advanced Infantry Training, Sergeant Mike even took me to Howars Target Range a couple of times to shred paper targets with the current U.S. military sidearm, which is a nine-millimeter something-or-other. So I shouldn’t have been overwhelmed.

  But I was. I mean damn! Most of the back wall and half the intersecting wall were lined with long guns racked as close together as they’d fit: bolt-action, lever-action, and semiautomatic rifles in every caliber from twenty-two through forty-four/forty; pump action, semiautomatic, and double-barreled shotguns in twenty gauge and twelve gauge and even a couple in ten gauge.

  In front of the rifle and shotgun racks were glass cases displaying handguns in an even more dazzling variety. I mean, okay, you’re out there in the woods trying to blow away Bambi’s dad, connecting with your hunter-gatherer DNA—fine, I get that. Count me out, but I get it. But what in the world are you going to do out there with a snub-nosed .38? Or, excuse me, a derringer? Not that that’s all Cumonow’s had. Not by a long shot, so to speak. You could buy all kinds of stuff with four-inch and six-inch barrels, not to mention a couple of toy cannons with eight-inch barrels.

  That’s when I got the first great marketing insight of my career: Men don’t buy guns to go hunting or to get ready for the Olympic Biathalon. They buy guns for the sake of having guns, the same way women buy shoes, and then they invent a need to justify the purchase. And it’s just a short step from there to Men don’t buy tools to fix things; they buy tools etc.

  I was shaking my head and muttering as I approached the end of the actual gun display, just before the telescopic sights and clay pigeon catapult. Cumonow’s devoted the last section to replicas, starting with trap-door Springfields like Custer’s men carried into their last fight at the Little Big Horn and going back through Civil War-era rifled muskets all the way to Kentucky rifles and Brown Bess muskets used in the American Revolution. I got all this from typewritten four-by-six index cards taped inside the tops of the display cases. Once you got past the Springfields the only difference I could see among the guns was that some had longer barrels than others. Naturally, there were replica handguns too. Same pattern: six-shooters like John Wayne used in all those movies on down to what I would call pirate pistols.

  “Can I help you, miss?” The voice was simultaneously friendly and skeptical.

  Startled, I looked up to see a guy only slightly taller than I was. He looked like he was in his sixties, and what was left of his hair was bright orange. I started to stammer that I was waiting for someone when a booming baritone from twenty feet away preempted me.

  “Get that little lady a Smith and Wesson, Rusty!”

  Rusty’s brown eyes sparkled under arching eyebrows.

  “You know Vince?” he asked me.

  “He used to send me to my room.”

  Trailed by Sal, Vince strode up and warmly shook hands with Rusty.

  “Can we make it fifteen instead of twenty-five this week?” Rusty pulled a thick wad of bills from his pocket as he asked the question. “Things are a little slow lately.”

  “Sure.” Vince pocketed the money, set a tool bag he was carrying on the floor, and started printing out a receipt from a handheld thingie about the size of my Kindle. “But have you got five minutes? I’ve got something in the truck you can’t live without.”

  “I’ve never gotten off your truck in less than twenty minutes in all the years you’ve been coming by.”

  “Five minutes. Scout’s honor.”

  “All right.” Rusty ostentatiously checked his watch. “You’re on the clock.”

  I expected them to head for the front door, but Rusty turned around and strode briskly toward the stockroom entrance. I figured out later that Vince had parked his step-van by the loading dock in back in order to save curb space for customers. Sal and I looked at each other, shrugged, and followed them. I knew Vince was going to pitch Rusty one of those high-priced tool carriers and I wanted to see him in action.

  I would have, too, if it hadn’t been for the gunshot.

  The sharp, reverberating roar came from my right. It was nothing like “gunshots” I’d heard on TV or in movies, and it was even louder than I remembered the live fire with Mike out at Howars being. I jumped out of my skin. So did Sal. Vince and Rusty just kept on walking toward the building’s back door, as if they hadn’t heard a thing.

  My head had jerked reflexively toward the sound of the shot, so it only took me a second to realize what the deal was. On the other side of a half-glass, half-sheetrock wall I saw what I guess I’d call a shooting gallery. It was a room about thirty feet long, with space for maybe four people
to stand side by side at the near end and plink targets at the far end. Right now one guy was in there. He wore a pair of ear protectors that looked like cheap stereo headphones. He hunched over a narrow, waist-high table, fussing with the weapon.

  WTF? Was he firing a single-shot pistol?

  “Let’s go watch the master in action.” Sal nudged my elbow toward the back door.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the shooting gallery.

  “You go ahead.” I started walking toward the gallery entrance.

  I stepped inside a little shyly. I’m sure my body language showed that I knew I didn’t have any business there. I don’t really remember much about the guy fussing with the gun, except that he could have been basically any white guy in late middle age: hedge-fund manager, college professor, insurance salesman, whatever. My eyes were on his gun. It looked vaguely like the pistol Johnny Depp had used in Pirates of the Caribbean. The guy glanced over at me, smiling, apparently pleased by my interest.

  “Afternoon,” he said.

  “Good afternoon.”

  “You a shooter?”

  “Not really. I’ve just never seen a gun like that actually fired before. I would have thought it was a movie prop.”

  “Functional replicas are actually the fastest growing segment of the recreational firearms market,” the guy said. “Of course, some people would say that’s like saying downhill skiing is the fastest growing sport in Somalia. Growth rates can look real impressive if you start with a low denominator. Hi, I’m Frank Cumonow, Rusty’s partner.”

  He held out his right hand and I shook it.

  “I’m Cindy Jakubek. I’m a lawyer.”

  “Vince’s daughter? No kidding.”

  Right. Not ‘a lawyer.’ ‘Vince’s daughter.’

  “Absolutely.” I knew I was about to get a sales job, but I figured if I kept my ears open and my mouth shut I might learn something.

  “This is actually pretty interesting.” He carefully handled the gun so that the barrel was pointed at an upward angle away from the two of us. “It’s a muzzle-loader, of course, so you start by putting this little packet of powder down the barrel.”

  He did what he’d just described, and then picked up a pocked gray sphere a little bigger than a large marble and a little smaller than a Jacks ball, packed into some paper wadding. He dropped it down the barrel. Then, very carefully, he picked up a small ramrod, stuck it down the barrel, and tamped the bullet home.

  “So now you’ve got the load in place, but there’s one more thing you need to do before you’re ready to fire.”

  He sprinkled a dollop of powder on the plate under the gun’s hammer. With that, he lifted the gun up in the air with both hands, rather like a bartender who’d just made an elaborate cocktail with an umbrella in it. He glanced over at me and grinned. He had me hooked and he knew it.

  “Wanna try it?”

  “Sure.”

  I used two hands to take the gun from him, terrified that I’d drop the thing and blow one of us to hell. It must have weighed eight pounds, and it felt heavier than that. Cumonow pointed his index finger at a target at the other end of the room. It was a lifesize, white-on-black outline of a human figure that already had one impressive hole in its paper chest.

  Still using both hands, I started to lower the gun.

  “First you have to cock the hammer.”

  Feeling like an idiot, I found the notch on top of the hammer with my thumb and pulled back. It was harder than I thought it would be, but I was determined that I wasn’t going to ask the big strong man to handle this chore for the little lady. I put some muscle into it and pulled like I meant it. I heard a satisfying CLICK! as the hammer snapped into the cocked position.

  “Ready to go,” Cumonow said. “Ready on the left, ready on the right, ready on the firing line.”

  I switched the gun to my right hand and started to level it. I decided against using two hands on the grounds that I’d look like a dork if I did. I know how to sight a gun; so do you—it’s intuitive. The barrel didn’t have any bead on it, but I lined the front of the rim up with the cartoon valentine heart drawn on the outline. I found it hard to hold the thing steady, so I took a breath and let half of it out, which is one of the two things Mike taught me. Then I squeezed the trigger, which is the other one.

  The hammer fell. I saw a bright orange spark and felt a slight burn on my right hand, like you might get if you’re holding a sparkler at a July 4th celebration. But the gun’s report wasn’t instantaneous, as it had been when I shot with Mike. A moment’s delay intervened between that spark and the explosive Bang! I wasn’t ready for that. During that moment the barrel probably moved two inches.

  I realized that I had unconsciously squeezed my eyes shut as the hammer fell. I opened them to discover that my right arm had jerked up to about a forty-five degree angle when the gun fired. I also felt a tingling little throb from my elbow to my shoulder. I squinted at the target through a blue-gray cloud of smoke to check my marksmanship. I saw a ragged hole above and just to the outside of the outlined body’s right shoulder.

  The next thing I heard was Vince’s commentary from the doorway of the shooting gallery. He and Rusty and Sal must have watched most of my performance. They were all grinning like idiots.

  “Not even a flesh wound,” Vince said in mock disgust.

  “It was a warning shot,” I protested, which produced a couple of good-natured guffaws.

  “So,” Cumonow said to me, “what do you think?”

  “You know what? I’m going to think about it. I’m actually going to think about it.”

  “What a coincidence,” Rusty said. “That’s what I told Vince about the toolbox.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “Have you opened the attachments yet?” These were the first words of Paul’s 9:00 call on Tuesday night.

  “It’s still loading. It must be a monster.”

  “It’s worth it. Eight hundred words by the way.”

  My hard drive finally got ambitious enough to bring six thumbnail-sized, head-and-shoulder Pauls up on my screen. I clicked on the first one, which promptly turned into a screen-sized Paul. I caught my breath. This photo had not been taken by Paul’s brother on his $400 Panasonic Lumix digital camera.

  “Whoa. You look magnificent. I mean, you always look magnificent, but this thing is off the charts. Where’d you get the turtleneck and sport coat?”

  “Wardrobe. The photographer had a closetful of cliché writer clothes in his studio.”

  I clicked on the second thumbnail. Same basic shot, except studied calm instead of intense glowering. The third and fourth replicated the first two but with a left profile instead of a right. I whistled.

  “I can’t tell which is your ‘better side.’ Left and right both look great.”

  “You don’t really need to look at five and six,” he said. “They added a prop. I’m a little embarrassed about them.”

  I instantly clicked on the fifth thumbnail.

  “A pipe? A pipe? Have you ever smoked a pipe in your life? And bongs don’t count.”

  “We were going for a Faulkner look.” He had the grace to sound sheepish.

  “So Widget is going to see a farm boy gratifying himself with cows?”

  “You can’t seriously be reducing William Faulkner to a handful of gothic southern stereotypes, Cindy, he—”

  “I’m just goofing on you, lover. You actually look natural with the thing. So this is your agent’s first step to marketing you?”

  “It’s kind of a preliminary thing. He’s still thinking me over. But I’m starting to feel pretty good about it.”

  “Okay. Fingers crossed. And keep yours crossed for me. The preorientation at Calder & Bull is on Thursday. I’m flying to New York tomorrow. They’re putting us up at the
Sofitel. If you find your way there, look me up.”

  “If there’s any way I can get there I will.”

  “Only if you can do it without hitchhiking. You have the great American novel to write. Henry Widget is a jealous mistress.”

  “You are the absolute best.”

  I went to sleep that night remembering the dreamy wistfulness in his voice and anticipating that unforgettable blend of carbon monoxide and ozone that blasts your nose the second you hit the sidewalk in New York City on a weekday morning.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  I brought my TravelPro to the office Wednesday morning and caught a cab for the airport over the lunch hour. When Vince wished me good luck and Godspeed that morning he’d kept his tone light, but I could tell from his eyes that he felt like I was going away for good instead of for about thirty-six hours. And in a way, of course, I was.

  The trip to New York was painless. As the plane moved away from Pittsburgh at five hundred miles an hour, my spirits rose at roughly the same rate. I spent the flight plowing through the Times and brushing up on the cheat sheet I’d made with all the dope I could find about everyone who was important at Calder & Bull. The cab ride was a breeze and the Sofitel had my room ready for me. The fact that it had been reserved by Calder & Bull instead of by The Law Office of Luis Mendoza probably had something to do with that.

  The first thing I saw when I walked into the room was an array of white, yellow, and red roses set off prettily by baby’s breath in a clear glass vase. I couldn’t believe it. I caught my breath, realizing that I was looking at two days’ wages at McDonald’s. I ran over to bury my face in the rich scent and retrieve the card:

  The Greeks sent a thousand ships to Troy over a woman who couldn’t shine your shoes. Good luck tomorrow—and take no prisoners.

  Love, Paul

  By now, I was way, way up there. I didn’t have a net, but I didn’t think it mattered.

  Chapter Twenty-eight