Father Christmas (11 page)

“
What’s the
difference?”

“
A bribe is before the
fact. You give a cop a bribe if you want him to do something for
you. A pay-off is after the fact, after he’s done something for
you.”

“
I see. And what did you
do for those two ladies?”

“
I refrained from calling
them idiots. And I didn’t keep the pay-off, either. Everything in
the kettle goes to Higgins House.”

“
Such integrity.” Molly
hugged the bulging bag to her. In her thick down parka she looked
shapeless. But he’d seen her out of her jacket. He knew where she
had curves, where she was slim. “I’m getting an education.
Yesterday I got to see you catch a pick-pocket, and today I got to
see you do the right thing with a bribe. I mean, a pay-off.” Her
smile shimmered.

He caught a whiff of a peppery aroma rising
from her bag. “Lunch?” he asked.

“
Clam chowder. Cara said
this place—” she waved toward the deli “—has the best clam chowder
in Arlington. I volunteered to buy some for the staff. I’ve got two
quarts. I hope it’s enough.”

“
It’s going to get cold,”
he noted, then gave himself a mental kick. Reminding her it could
get cold was as good as inviting her to leave.

Fortunately, she didn’t accept the
invitation. “I was planning to zap it in the microwave when we’re
ready to eat it. Lunch time isn’t for another hour.”

He considered the evidence with a small
degree of professional detachment. Molly had driven all the way
across town to buy two quarts of clam chowder that wasn’t going to
be consumed for an hour. The director of a preschool was running a
lame-brained errand—and that story about the deli’s having the best
clam chowder didn’t wash, either. The best clam chowder in
Arlington came from Moise’s Fish House on the West Side. Everybody
knew that.

Molly had come to the shopping district for
some other reason. He was curious, but he couldn’t question her. He
wasn’t in an interrogation room down at headquarters; she hadn’t
been charged with anything.

“
How’s Mike?” he
asked.

“
He’s having a good
day.”

“
No tears?”

“
No problems.” She angled
her head, studying John intently. “What does he say at home, John?
Does he talk about school? I know this is only his second week at
the Children’s Garden, and he doesn’t seem upset about being there,
but at home...is he stressed out? Does he tell you about his
day?”

“
He seems happy,” John
said.

“
He doesn’t mention any
problems? Anyone he doesn’t like?”

“
No.” But now she had his
suspicions revved up. “Who doesn’t he like?”

“
No one in particular that
Amy and I have noticed. I wanted to know if you were seeing
anything at home that we aren’t seeing at school.”

John thought for a minute. If he told her he
wasn’t seeing anything at home, she might think he was ignoring his
son. “I think he’d be happier if you let the kids eat cookies.”

She grinned. He practically heard the whoosh
of heat flaring inside him as the pilot light ignited. Her smile
was warm enough to melt the universe.

He didn’t want this. Not now. Not with
her.

“
I’d better get back to
work,” he said, giving his bell a perfunctory swing.

“
I’d better get back, too.
I’ll see you later,” she said, still wearing that radiant grin,
still glowing warm enough to thaw the polar ice-caps. Cripes. He
didn’t want to want her warmth and her smile, he didn’t want to be
able to visualize her shape inside her parka, and imagine how she
would feel.

If it were only sex he wanted, he knew
enough places to find it, and those places were not the Children’s
Garden Preschool. But when he looked at Molly, smiling at him even
as she backed away toward Bank Street, he understood that sex
wasn’t all he wanted. And that scared the hell out of him.

***

BY FRIDAY, HE’D FIGURED OUT that it wasn’t a
coincidence. She was following him.

Well, not exactly following him, but finding
him in his various Santa posts around the city. By the end of
Monday, he’d stopped an attempted mugging and nabbed a drug dealer
doing a brisk retail trade in loose joints in the alley between a
stationery store and a sporting goods place, and with those two
collars he had pretty much doomed himself to more Santa duty on the
streets of Arlington. He got a day off from the red suit and fake
beard on Tuesday, when he had to testify in court on an attempted
homicide. It turned out to be not much of a reprieve, though. The
defense attorney was a sharp-witted woman in a gray suit, with a
machine-gun mouth and blond hair and, oddly enough, the same last
name as Molly. She’d looked a little like Molly, too, except for
the fair coloring. She’d done her damnedest to slash John’s
testimony to ribbons.

John was used to being flayed alive by
defense attorneys. Nothing the Saunders attorney did to him rattled
him much. He just recited his testimony and tried to guess whether
such a sharp-shooting lawyer could be related to the woman who had
held his son on her lap when he’d been crying.

He would have asked her Tuesday evening when
he’d gone to the school to pick up Mike, except that she wasn’t
there. One of the other teachers was standing guard by the front
door, dismissing the kids. John hadn’t met her before—she was in
charge of the Tiny Tots group, she told him—and she’d made him show
her two pieces of identification. “One of the children in the Pre-K
class is the object of a difficult custody battle,” she’d explained
once John had shown her his police badge and driver’s license. “I’m
sure as an officer of the law, you know how messy those can be. The
non-custodial parent has made some threats, so we have to be very
careful whom we release the children to.”

If John had had more energy, he would have
told her she ought to be more careful whom she talked to about the
students’ personal business. But he’d been wiped out from his long
day on the witness stand, and vaguely disappointed that Molly
wasn’t behind the front desk when he’d arrived at the preschool to
get Mike, and irritated to think that the following day he was
going to have to put on the Santa outfit and stake out Arlington’s
busy streets once more.

Despite the warnings of Erin Murphy, the
seven-year-old accessory to bank robbery, Santa probably wouldn’t
mind John’s impersonation. The saint of Christmas would likely be
very happy with the crimes John was shutting down on the busy
winter streets of Arlington. In four days of undercover Santa work,
he’d accumulated a handful of collars—drug deals, shoplifting,
muggings, one misdemeanor assault and an attempted car theft.

But he was bored. He was grossly
under-utilized, and under-challenged, and if Coffey didn’t let him
get back to his real work soon, he was going to be a lot closer to
snapping than he’d ever been before.

The only thing was, Molly kept showing up.
No matter which end of Hauser Boulevard he was on, whether he was
in the shopping district or the banking district, she found him.
Central Avenue, Newcombe... She found him.

By Friday, he realized that it wasn’t just
coincidence. She was actually looking for him.

“
Hi,” she said, emerging
from an office supply store with a carton of printer paper. “How’s
the Santa business today?”

“
Same as yesterday,” he
said with a smile. The truth was, he’d been looking for her,
waiting for her to show up, wondering what excuse she’d have for
him today. He’d spent the morning searching the crowds for crooks
and punks, but also for a petite, hatless woman with luminous eyes
and a smile that never failed to turn on the furnace inside him.
He’d been waiting for the rush of heat, and the instant he saw her,
it came.

“
Well, now I can refill my
printer,” she said, gesturing with the cartridge. “We’re down to
colored construction paper, and—”

“
Are you stalking me?” he
asked. It was a rude question, a crude one. But he had to know. He
was tired of trying to guess what she was up to, and until he knew
for sure, he wasn’t going to be able to figure out how to control
his reaction to her. This much heat was a dangerous thing. John
didn’t know how to deal with it. Maybe she could explain it for
him, the way her teachers at the Children’s Garden explained the
alphabet or the rules of sharing to their students.

“
Stalking you?” She
hesitated, then tossed back her head and laughed. “Yes, I think I
am.”

He closed his eyes. For a
moment, he couldn’t feel the blustery air, the frizz of his fake
beard, the weight of his wig at the nape of his neck. All he felt
was
her
, the gutsy, joyful force
of her.

“
You aren’t going to
arrest me, are you?” she asked, then laughed again.

“
No.” The word came out
low, almost choked, and he coughed to cover. He wasn’t used to a
woman pursuing him—at least not a woman like Molly. Sherry had
pursued him, true, but she’d been different. She’d been the kind of
woman who went after what she wanted when she wanted it and then,
if she discovered it was no longer what she wanted, she discarded
it. She’d pursued John until she had him, and then she’d left him
to pursue someone else, even though leaving him meant leaving Mike,
as well.

Molly might cut a man down, but he couldn’t
imagine her abandoning a child.

“
It’s just that you look
so funny in your Santa Claus outfit,” she explained. “I know if I
see you in it, it’ll have me smiling for the rest of the day. And
there’s always some errand that has to be run at the school, so...”
Her smile faltered slightly. Her eyes grew more intense, the brown
darker, the gold speckles brighter. “Maybe you aren’t going to
arrest me. You’re going to have me committed.”

“
You’re not crazy,” he
said, unsure what to add. He was sort of insulted—she thought he
looked
funny
in his Santa
disguise?—but mostly he was flattered. He’d never before been
accused of making someone smile all day.

“
I’m being a pest,” she
murmured. “I’m sorry.”

He caught her chin before she could lower
it, and tilted her face up so he could gaze into her eyes. He
wished he wasn’t wearing gloves and he could place his fingers
against the smooth skin of her jaw. It would feel like velvet, he
was sure. “Don’t apologize.”

She didn’t speak. Neither did he. He
couldn’t imagine how she could stare at him in his goof-ball
camouflage without smiling right now—if not erupting in hoots and
guffaws. She was right: dressed up as Santa, he looked like a
dweeb.

She looked...she looked like the most
honest, natural woman he’d ever met.

“
Will I see you tomorrow?”
she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

Tomorrow? She’d see him tonight when he
stopped by the school to pick up Mike, if she stuck around the
school late enough. Tomorrow wasn’t a school day, though. It was
Saturday.

“
The Daddy School,” she
reminded him.

If she’d been asking him for a date
tomorrow, he’d have had to say no. Only because he knew dating her
would be a mistake. He wasn’t right for a woman like her. He wasn’t
warm the way she was. He wasn’t open and affectionate. He was a man
who occasionally started his day with a murder-suicide, and when he
was done scrubbing the blood off his psyche, he didn’t have much
left to give a woman.

But she wasn’t asking him for a date. She
was asking him to come to her school and learn how to develop
Mike’s sharing skills.

Maybe he was standing too close to her.
Maybe the curve of her cheek against his gloved hand, and the
dazzling faith that shone deep in her eyes, sapped him of the
ability to think clearly. Because even as he cautioned himself that
he shouldn’t let her warmth reach too deep inside him, even as he
comprehended that he had to keep his distance from her in every way
he could, he heard himself say, “Sure, I’ll be there.”

“
IN A WORD,” Gail said,
“you’re crazy.”

“
Thanks for the
unsolicited advice,” Molly shot back. “And you obviously can’t
count. That was
two
words.”

Gail shoved a limp lock of wheat-colored
hair from her forehead and slumped in her chair. She and Molly were
seated at the table in the small eat-in kitchen of Molly’s
condominium. Molly had invited Gail over for dinner so they could
discuss what to send their parents for Christmas. But a long time
ago, they’d stopped debating whether their parents would prefer a
year of weekly house-cleaning service—Gail’s suggestion—or a
flat-screen television set—Molly’s idea. Over a supper of broiled
salmon steaks and salad, they’d somehow drifted from the subject of
Christmas gifts to the subject of police officers. One police
officer in particular.

“
I’m telling you, the man
was like ice on the witness stand. I can’t believe you could be
blushing over him. He was cold enough to give a polar bear
frostbite.”

“
Well, that’s his job,
isn’t it?” Molly pointed out, not daring to voice her fear that her
sister could be right, and John Russo could actually be as cold as
Gail claimed. He wasn’t effusive. He didn’t wear his heart on his
sleeve. But she had sensed heat inside him. She’d seen flickers of
flame in his eyes, glimmers of warmth in his too-rare
smile.