Father Christmas (12 page)

Gail’s antipathy toward John had nothing to
do with him in particular. She hated all cops. That he had been a
prosecution witness, testifying against her client, only made her
resentment specific to the occasion. “Did you break him?” Molly
asked, not sure what answer she hoped for. “Did you destroy him on
the stand?”

Gail pursed her lips and shook her head. “It
wasn’t for lack of trying,” she muttered. “I’m still going to get
my guy off. A lot of their evidence is circumstantial. The fact
that your boy Russo didn’t crack under pressure doesn’t mean I
didn’t make headway.”

Molly suppressed a smile. She was glad John
hadn’t cracked—and she felt disloyal for being glad.

“
So, what exactly is going
on with you and Detective Russo?” Gail asked.

“
Nothing.”

Gail took a sip of chardonnay, lowered her
glass and shook her head again, this time in disbelief. “Every time
you think about him, your face turns red.”

“
It does not,” Molly
argued. Her cheeks instantly betrayed her, growing warm with a
blush. “Anyway, I can’t help it if he’s gorgeous. You saw him
yourself. Tell me you didn’t think he was gorgeous.”

Gail snorted. “He’s a cop. Enough said.”

“
Absolutely. Enough said.
Let’s talk about that high-def TV for Mom and Dad.”

Gail refused to take the hint. “Let me tell
you about cops, Molly. Forget about the homicide case I’m
defending, where your buddy testified for the prosecution. Let me
tell you what happened with a case I took on today. A kid is
walking down Center Street after school, okay? He’s drinking a
beer. A cop yanks him aside and asks to see some proof that he’s
legally old enough to drink. The kid is only seventeen, so of
course he can’t show any proof of age. So the cop, without a
warrant, reaches into the kid’s pocket and discovers that the kid
is carrying a piece. And now they’re trying to lock the kid up on a
weapons charge.”

“
Forgive me if I say this
client of yours doesn’t exactly sound like a candidate for ‘Most
Likely to Succeed.’”

“
That’s irrelevant. In my
opinion, the boy
can
succeed.
He’s got to clean up his act, get some counseling, and stop the
underage drinking.”

“
And his gun?”

“
I don’t like guns any
more than you do,” Gail noted. “But the cop had no right to search
for it. He didn’t have a warrant. Instead of helping the kid to
work out a drinking problem, the cop is trying to put the kid in
jail.”

“
I’m sorry,” Molly said,
“but I’d rather see that kid in jail than shooting some innocent
person.”

“
The point,” Gail
lectured, “is that cops think they’re above the law. They have the
power of the badge, and they think that exempts them from the Bill
of Rights. You know it’s true, Molly. It happens all the time. And
your pal Russo is no better or worse than the rest of
them.”

“
Not all cops are bad,”
Molly argued, amazed to hear herself defend police officers to her
sister. “I saw John Russo stop a pick-pocket from stealing an
elderly gentleman’s wallet. And he straightened out some kids, too.
Seven-year-old bank robbers.”

“
Seven years old?” That
shut Gail up.

“
And he didn’t send them
to jail.”

“
Seven years old?” Gail
took a hard slug of wine. “Jesus. What’s the world coming
to?”

“
I don’t know. But I do
know that as a cop, Russo did something good for those
kids.”

“
Seven years old,” Gail
muttered under her breath. She shook her head. “At seven years old,
your biggest crime was stealing my Barbie doll.”

“
I didn’t steal her. I
just borrowed her,” Molly said with a smile. “And I forgot to
return her for a long time.”

“
Yeah, like years.” Gail
leaned back in her chair and sighed. “I will concede that on
occasion, a cop might do something right. Even a blind squirrel
finds a nut sometimes. But there’s something about that uniform
that alters most cops, like Superman only in reverse.”

“
Russo doesn’t wear a
uniform,” said Molly, trying to will the heat out of her cheeks.
“Unless a Santa suit counts as a uniform.”

Gail chuckled. “A Santa
suit? Well, it doesn’t matter what he’s wearing. He’s got a shield
and a gun. That’s all he needs. It’s very nice that Russo helped
Jamie McCoy gain permanent custody of his daughter and saved an old
man from a pick-pocket—and two primary-school kids from jail. But
the bottom line is, he’s a cop. He’s one of
them
.”

Molly reached across the table and patted
Gail’s hand. When they were children, the fact that Gail was three
years older than Molly counted for something, but not anymore. They
were equals now, and Molly was as likely to comfort her sister and
give her advice as to be on the receiving end of the comfort and
advice. “I know you’ve got a good reason to hate cops. But that was
a long time ago, Gail. Ten years.”

“
Ten and a half,” Gail
corrected her with a wry smile. “But it’s not just that.” Her jaw
tensed, throwing the tendons in her neck into relief. Shadows
darkened her eyes. “I work in the public defender’s office. I see
what cops do every day. I see how they abuse their
power.”

“
John Russo doesn’t abuse
his power.”

“
How do you know
that?”

Molly bit her lip.
She
didn’t
know that. She didn’t
know what he did with his gun when she wasn’t around. She didn’t
know whether he searched suspects without warrants or, for that
matter, whether he took advantage of innocent young college
students with broken tail lights. There was so much she didn’t know
about him.

But she knew his eyes were sad. She knew he
loved his son. She knew he was trying to cope with a difficult
situation, doing his best and worrying that his best wasn’t
anywhere near good enough.

She also knew she was spending too much time
thinking about his brooding gaze, and his capacity for love, and a
whole bunch of other things about him. Like his height, and the
breadth of his shoulders, barely visible inside his Santa tunic,
and the length of his legs. And the depth and darkness of his hair.
And the way his lips fought against the smiling reflex—and on a few
blessed occasions lost the battle.

“
You’re blushing again.”
Gail pursed her lips in obvious disapproval. “He hasn’t kissed you
or anything, has he?”

“
No. I’m sure he has no
interest in me, anyway.” Molly stood and cleared the plates from
the table, tired of having to face her sister and her own troubling
thoughts. “I’m just the lady who runs the day-care center where he
sends his son.”
It doesn’t matter that he touched me. It
doesn’t matter that he cupped his hand around my cheek and gazed
into my eyes and sparked a few unfamiliar fantasies to life.
“He probably doesn’t think much of me at
all.”
He thinks I’m a stalker.
“And he didn’t even want to come to the Daddy School
tomorrow. He agreed to come only because we’re going to deal with
how to help children to become better sharers. His son doesn’t
share well.”
John Russo thinks I’m a twit, Gail. Don’t
worry. Your little sister is safe from the Big Bad Cop.

“
Better that kids learn to
be sharers than bank robbers,” Gail murmured, obviously mystified.
“Seven years old? It’s hard to believe. Were they
armed?”

“
I don’t know.”

“
I wonder if my office got
a call on it. They were probably some poor kids trying to find the
money to pay their families’ heating bills.”

Molly chuckled. “How romantic, two noble
little second-graders saving the world by scamming an ATM
machine.”

“
An ATM machine?” Gail
crossed to the counter beside the sink and lowered the dishwasher
door. Molly started rinsing the plates, then handed each plate to
Gail to place in the dishwasher rack. They knew each other’s moves
perfectly; they had the timing down pat. “Maybe these kids are
computer whizzes. Geniuses—or is it genii? Maybe they robbed the
bank out of boredom. They need a good gifted-children
program.”

Molly’s chuckle expanded into a full laugh.
“Have some more wine, Gail. I like what it does for your
imagination.”

“
No more wine for me. I’ve
got to drive home. So what are we going to do about Mom and Dad?”
she asked, clicking the dishwasher door shut and pivoting to face
her sister. “The TV is a nice idea, except they’ll complain about
it.”

“
They’ll complain about
the house-keeping, too.”

“
But they’ll love
it.”

“
Like they’ll love the
TV.”

Gail grinned and gave Molly a hug. “Gotta
go. We’ll work this out later.” Her smile waned as she drew back
and studied Molly. “Keep your guard up around Russo, okay? I know
Clint Eastwood was sexy in all those Dirty Harry movies. But his
regard for the Constitution was less than zero.”

As if Molly was going to lie awake all
night, tossing and turning while she thought about the
Constitution. As if Molly had ever dreamed about Clint Eastwood the
way she was dreaming about John Russo.

As if she ought to be dreaming about the
father of one of her students. As if there was a chance in hell
that such a dream could possibly come true.

***

MOLLY SEPARATED THE FATHERS from their
children Saturday morning. John watched Mike, the other children,
and a teacher vanish up the stairs to the playroom on the second
floor of the Children’s Garden. Seven fathers remained downstairs
with Molly, searching the partitioned rooms for adult-size
chairs.

She barely smiled at him, which was fine.
They’d both taken a chance yesterday, Molly by admitting she’d been
searching for him downtown each day and John by touching her.
They’d both risked something, and while John couldn’t speak for
Molly, he knew he couldn’t afford such risks.

Half of him believed he was attracted to her
only because, six months after Sherry had walked out on him—and
more than a year after their marriage really entered its death
throes—he was just plain hungry for a woman. But the other half of
him kept dwelling on the thought that if all he wanted was a woman,
without regard to who the woman was, he could find one easily
enough.

He didn’t want just any woman. He wanted a
woman who could comfort and teach his son, a woman who could
verbalize her concerns and express her feelings instead of fleeing
to Las Vegas and leaving her family behind. He wanted a woman who
could warm a room with her smile.

Molly’s smile that morning was meant for all
the fathers, not just for him. Even so, it thawed the permafrost in
his soul. It made him feel as if he were taking steps, doing
something for his son, moving in the right direction.

“
The tables will hold
you,” she assured the seven full-grown men in the room, leading
them into the Pre-Kindergarten section and gesturing for them to
make themselves comfortable on the small furniture. John wasn’t the
only man who looked awkward surrounded by pint-size chairs,
knee-high cupboards and low tables. He felt like Gulliver in the
land of the Lilliputians, and he bet the other fathers did,
too.

Molly appeared totally at home in the
enclosed space. Dressed in a textured beige sweater, blue jeans and
loafers, she looked like a college sophomore, young and idealistic
and brimming with energy. But she was a woman, someone who’d
admitted to following him around town all week. Someone whose eyes
danced with light, whose curves did wicked things to his
libido.

“
Today’s class is about
sharing,” she said, perching herself on one of the tables and
surveying the men, some of whom sat gingerly on a table facing hers
while others, like John, took seats on the carpeted floor. Her gaze
skidded past him, as if she was afraid to meet his stare. He was
disappointed and relieved at the same time. He didn’t know if his
face gave anything away, but he sure as hell didn’t want her to
pause long enough to read lust in his expression. Or, for that
matter, doubt. Or panic.

“
Gordon, I know we talked
a bit about this last week,” she said, addressing one of the men
balanced precariously on the broad Formica-topped table near John.
“You mentioned that ever since your baby was born, Melissa has had
a lot of trouble sharing.”

Gordon nodded. “She has all these toys she
hasn’t played with since she was a year old. But the minute her
brother reaches for them, she snatches them away and insists that
they’re hers and he can’t have them.”

“
Baby toys?” Molly
asked.

He nodded again. “She’s
three and a half years old. She outgrew those toys ages ago.
Stacking rings, squeaky toys, push-toys—she’s way past those things
now. But the instant she sees Justin go for one of them, they’re
hers, hers, hers. I just don’t know what to do. They
are
hers—or at least they
were
. But she ought to be sharing
them.”

“
Ideas?” Molly asked, her
gaze circling among the other fathers.

“
I’d say you’ve got to be
firm,” suggested a stocky man in a plaid flannel shirt. “Just tell
her she hasn’t got a choice.”

“
Yeah, but then it’s
forced,” another man argued. “It doesn’t come from inside her. I
want my kid to be generous from his heart, you know? You can’t
impose generosity on a kid.”