Kiss Me, Kelly

by Mary Kay McComas

  Kelly practically lived for the victory stories. To watch a cop’s face light up with pride, to see him grin with the surety that his convictions were sometimes achievable, made all the worry, depression, and anxiety she felt right along with them more bearable.

  In response to Baker’s comments, however, she merely shrugged and stated the obvious. “This is a cop’s bar. And when they’re together, cops talk shop.”

  “There is no American Mafia!” Michael Branigan bellowed from his perch on the far side of the bar. “There was organized crime in America before the Mafia was even born. The Mafia is strictly Sicilian. And while they may occasionally do business with certain members of the mob, they have no influence over organized crime in the United States.”

  Kelly and Tommy exchanged long-suffering glances before they both turned their heads to look at Mike Branigan, the world’s self-appointed authority on organized crime in North America.

  “Oh, the Syndicate Sermon,” Tommy said gleefully. “You’re going to love this, Baker. Old Mike gets red in the face and takes a couple of swings at guys twice his size and half his age, and then old Bailey comes out of the kitchen and scares everybody in the bar half to death and then Kelly—”

  “Shut up, Tommy, or I’ll send you down there to break it up,” she said, knowing that he was aware it was no idle threat. He’d done his share of refereeing over the years. “You’d think a bar full of cops could handle one old man…”

  She wandered off in her grandfather’s direction, muttering under her breath.

  Baker watched her go. She was as tempting from behind as she was face-to-face, this Kelly Branigan. With an experienced eye he considered her usefulness to his scheme. Then he considered her with no usefulness to his scheme whatsoever. She was well worth every consideration.

  Aside from the fact that her body was tall and slim with soft rounded curves in all the places he liked soft rounded curves to be, she had a spark in her eyes that intrigued him. She was sharp and savvy. She took in everything and revealed little. She was free with her quick and easy bartender banter, but he could tell by the way she watched the room, and in particular the old man at the end of the bar, that she was very serious.

  The old man’s antics irritated her, but Baker had seen the affectionate expression on her face when she’d watched him earlier. There was a lot about Kelly Branigan that interested him and aroused his curiosity.

  “So, what’s her story, Shaw?” he asked, indicating Kelly with a nod of his head.

  “I was wondering how long it was going to take you to ask about her,” Tommy said, grinning as if he’d just eaten a small yellow bird.

  The expectant expression on Baker’s face was not humorous.

  “What do you want to know?” Tommy asked with an ineffectual attempt at being reflective and sincere.

  “Everything.”

  “Well, I guess most important, she’s not married. Everybody she knows is a cop or the relative of a cop, but—should you decide to accept this mission impossible—she never dates cops.”

  “Why not?”

  Tommy shrugged. “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “She has a degree in sociology, and sometimes I think she’d like to get out from behind this bar, but she’s still here. She’s godmother to all three of my kids, and she introduced me to my wife. I’ve known her forever. And she just might be the best person I’ve ever met.”

  There was a short silence as Baker assimilated the information, then he asked, “Anything else?”

  “Hell, what else is there? What do you want to know?”

  “I told you, everything. Does she own this bar?” He watched Kelly slip her arm around her grandfather’s neck and whisper something in his ear.

  “Not yet. Not technically, anyway. It still belongs to old Mike over there, and he thinks he’s still running it. But Kelly does all the work.”

  The old man’s expression grew more stern as he turned his head and spoke to his granddaughter. She smiled at him, unintimidated, and said something else that Baker couldn’t hear or make out as he watched her lips move. He liked her mouth. It was expressive, sensual.

  “What about fun? What does she do for fun?” he asked absently, engrossed by every move she made.

  Tommy frowned, then said, “I don’t know anymore. She used to like to dance, and we used to go to the beach every chance we got, but that was…” He paused to shake off his memories. “She plays racquetball with Angie pretty often.”

  “Racquetball?” It was a mindless question as he continued to study the auburn highlights of her hair, the way the hair curled like crazy all over her head and how soft it looked. She looked soft. Even in the black pants and vest she wore with a white blouse, she looked soft.

  “Mmmm,” Tommy hummed in confirmation. “Angie says it’s more therapy than exercise, though. I guess she really beats the hell out of those balls.”

  “Who?”

  “Kelly,” he said, casting Baker a disgruntled look.

  “You dated her?” Baker asked as if the notion had just occurred to him.

  “High school stuff. We were friends more than anything else. She was taller than most of the other guys and it bothered her for a while, and I was ugly as hell in those days, so we sort of hung out together. Nothing much came of it. We were good little Catholic kids and knew we’d go straight to hell if we tried anything. So, mostly we necked and did a lot of heavy breathing and—”

  “Jeez. I didn’t ask for details,” Baker said, disgust written all over his face. He turned away, unable to look at either one of them. He felt strangely sick at the thought of the two of them together, innocent as it sounded. Punching Shaw was an idea that flickered through his mind and confused him. He didn’t care who’d kissed Kelly Branigan in high school. He didn’t even care who’d kissed her last night. He turned back to look at her and knew that all he did care about was who she’d be kissing before this particular night was over.

  Two

  STRAGGLERS. THERE WERE always stragglers. Just once Kelly would have liked to see two A.M. roll around and find the bar empty. She wiped off the last of the tables and set two chairs on top of it.

  “That’s it, Imogene. Go on home. I’ll finish up here,” she said when she turned to see that the weary-looking barmaid had finished her group of tables as well.

  “It was busy for a Tuesday, wasn’t it?” she asked, pulling her tip money out of her pockets to begin counting it.

  “I think it had something to do with Wonder-Cop over there,” Kelly said, nodding at Baker who was engrossed in conversation with her grandfather.

  “You think he’ll come back next Tuesday?” Imogene asked hopefully.

  “Beats me.”

  Kelly felt like everything was beating her. The heat was oppressive, even as the night stretched into the wee hours of the morning. She had weekend feet on a weeknight because of the unusually large crowd that had come to meet Tuesday’s hero. And he had her feeling so confused and off center, she couldn’t tell which end was up.

  There hadn’t been a lot of time for talking after she’d gotten her grandfather settled down and pontificating on another subject. Business had picked up and the customers had started eating, so that between the bar and the kitchen, Kelly, Imogene, and Bailey, their cook/bouncer, had been hopping for the last few hours. But not a second had gone by when she wasn’t acutely aware of Baker’s presence.

  He’d watched her all night. Every time she’d sneaked a peek at him, she caught him looking at her, studying her. It made her extremely nervous and conscious of her every move. Once or twice he’d smiled at her, and her hands had shaken.

  Bailey closed the kitchen at ten and took up his usual spot at the bar, on the stool next to her grandfather. Kelly had always suspected the man of being deaf in his left ear, for he would sit night after night, hour after hour, listening to her grandfather talk. What was more, he’d done so every bar night for over fifteen years. He
would nod occasionally and always appeared to be listening, but she’d never seen him say a word in response.

  Tommy, Del Rio, and a few others had left a little after the kitchen closed. Tommy hadn’t seemed at all surprised when his new partner opted to stay a while longer.

  So there they were, she and Baker, with business slowing down and no Tommy to act as buffer. With nothing to do but talk to each other. Kelly’s mind was a blank.

  She busied herself behind the bar, cleaning and restocking the glasses, collecting cans and bottles for recycling, wiping and cleaning the drain board…

  “How long has The Library been here?” he asked, startling her even though she’d been waiting for him to say something.

  “Seventy years,” she answered. “It’s never made anyone rich, but they haven’t gone broke either.”

  “Has it been in your family all that time?”

  “No.” She glanced at her grandfather before she said, “Papa bought it in nineteen hundred thirty-three, after Prohibition. He was mad at the mob because Bugsy Seigel shot him and he wouldn’t…” She stopped herself with a self-conscious laugh and shook her head. “This is crazy. You don’t want to hear all this stuff.”

  “If it has anything to do with you, I want to hear it.”

  Their eyes met and held, and a brief struggle of wills ensued. She tried to break away from him, to cover and hide her innermost self from his probing gaze, but he wouldn’t let go. Silently she tried to warn him that they were incompatible, and just as silently he disagreed.

  “What was that about?” Mike shouted. “What was that I heard about Bugsy Seigel?”

  “Nothing, Papa. I was telling Detective Baker here, when you bought the bar,” Kelly said, finally able to look away, to pull free of the hold Baker had on her.

  “That was nineteen hundred thirty-three,” he told Baker in a loud voice. “A year after that worm-eating Seigel shot me in the leg.”

  “It was an accident, Papa,” Kelly reminded him.

  “I don’t care. He damn near blew my leg clean off. I’ll never forgive him for that.”

  She sighed and shifted her weight impatiently. “He’s dead. Papa. They’re all dead.”

  “Don’t you believe it, little girl. They’re like weeds. You pull one and two more pop up to take its place. It’s always been that way. Always will be.” He paused to give Baker a calculated stare. “Baker, is it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re not from around here. I’ve never seen you before.”

  “No, sir. Chicago.”

  “Chicago, huh? Well, then you know the way of it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Baker said. He picked up the drink he’d been sipping on and walked to the end of the bar. “I grew up on stories about ‘the Big Fellow.’”

  “Ah. Capone.” The old man spoke the name with a certain degree of respect. “I met him once in Red Hook, when I was a boy. Ten or eleven years old, I was. It was right before he had to leave Brooklyn for beatin’ up the politician’s kid.” Mike paused, then added almost defiantly, “I liked him.”

  Baker chuckled and nodded. “Lots of people did. I’ve heard people say that Al Capone was a better man than some of the senators and congressmen we’ve had.”

  The old man nodded, pleased with Baker’s answer. “All you ever read about is their bad side. But they were men with mothers, like the rest of us. There were some crazy mean ones, but most of them were only in it for the money.”

  “I knew this old judge once who used to tell stories about the gangsters he knew. He said they were merciless when they had to be to maintain their power, but that they also had a capacity for understanding and kindness and generosity that never got into the history books. Of course, he was probably on somebody’s payroll too. But this was long after he’d retired, so I believed him.”

  “Hell. We were all on the payroll back in those days. That’s how it was. You did it their way, or you didn’t do it any way at all,” Mike Branigan said, admitting his own guilt. “That’s why I got so steamed when Bugsy shot me. Accident or not, it kept me off the force and that hurt worse than getting shot. We were all cops back in those days. My old man and my three brothers and me. Come on over here, boy, and I’ll show you a picture of all five of us in uniform.”

  Baker got up to follow Mike to a group of pictures on the far wall. He caught Kelly’s eyes and winked at her, and she thought he looked like a man who had accomplished the first few steps of a large undertaking. She got the distinct impression that his plan had something to do with her, which made her very jittery.

  Now an hour later. Baker and her grandfather still had their heads together. No voices had been raised, so Kelly assumed they had been getting along like two little boys who’d read the same comic books.

  She’d never dream of eavesdropping on their conversation, of course, but she did resent their hushed tones and low chuckles, and the fact that her grandfather had so much to say to Baker.

  She opened the front door and leaned against the frame, wishing she had someone to talk to. Someone like Baker.

  He piqued her interest, and he attracted something deep within her. He wasn’t like anyone she’d ever met before, she decided, her mood weary, speculative, and a little quixotic. She breathed in deeply of the hot, muggy air, convinced that if she had a man like Baker in her life, they wouldn’t talk about the mob, his work, her job, the weather, or any of the other bar topics that were talked to death on a routine basis. There was an openness about him and a depth of perception in his eyes that led her to believe he would understand if she spoke to him of her fantasies and dreams. She exhaled on a note of reality. What she dreamed of was a man like Baker—but Baker was a cop.

  She pushed away from the doorjamb to finish the clean-up routine that she was certain she could accomplish in her sleep. Some things never changed, she decided, throwing a derisive glance at the old jukebox that sat like a big, fat Buddha in a prominent corner opposite the bar.

  Kelly would have wagered her last dime that it was the only jukebox east of the Mississippi that could play “Sixteen Tons,” “Who’s Sorry Now?” “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” and “The Time of My Life” in succession. Her own contribution to the mish-mash of multigenerational music was a melancholy B. B. King tune that hardly ever got played.

  “Have you got any B. B. King in that thing?”

  Baker’s voice was so close and so unexpected, it scared Kelly half out of her wits. She spun around to face him, veering back against the jukebox to keep her nose from bumping into his chin.

  “You like B. B. King?” she asked, breathless, reaching automatically to calm her thundering heart. A quick glance over his shoulder told her they were alone in the bar.

  “Yeah. You got any?”

  “No,” she lied, wishing he’d leave, or at least take a step backward so she could breathe. The smell of him assaulted her nose with the strength of ammonia, but it was a much more enjoyable scent and had quite a different effect on her senses.

  “This is a nice song too. We can dance to it just as well,” he said, stepping closer. Their faces weren’t six inches apart. He was so close, she could see that his eyes were green with a thin circle of brown around the edges.

  The song was a mid-seventies favorite by Bread titled “Make It With You” that brought all sorts of erotic and totally uncalled for images to her mind.

  “No, we can’t,” she said, still short of air as she turned to pull the plug on the jukebox.

  “Why not?” He stayed her arm and carefully turned her back to face him.

  “It’s late. I should have thrown you out a half hour ago.”

  “But you didn’t, and as long as I’m still here and the song has already started, why don’t we finish it together?”

  “I don’t dance with the customers,” she said. Her mouth felt like it was full of cotton and she was breathing too fast. She tried to swallow but couldn’t. He’d been intimidating earlier in a room packed with people and with a twe
nty-eight-inch mahogany bar separating them. Up close, he was larger than life and overwhelming.

  “Not with any of the customers, or not with me?” he asked, his gaze boring into her like a torch through a metal shield.

  “Look, Just Baker,” she said, feeling cornered and defensive, “I’m the bartender here, not the entertainment. If you’re looking to have a good time, don’t look at me. I never get involved with customers.”

  Humor lit in the depths of his eyes, and they sparkled merrily. “Who said anything about getting involved? It’s only a dance,” he said, slipping his arms around her waist and gently pulling her toward him. “Unless, of course, dancing is some pagan Brooklynese ritual that binds a man and a woman together forever.”

  “Watch what you say about Brooklyn, Baker.” She paused as another thought occurred to her. She allowed her body to sway with his a little, then she said, “Okay. One dance on one condition.”

  “What?”

  She could tell by his expression that he was enjoying her challenging attitude. So, she smiled coyly and said, “You have to tell me your first name.”

  His smile drooped and his brows gathered in the center of his forehead. He wasn’t happy with her condition, which made it all the more fun for her. She stopped moving, to impress upon him that she was serious. Well, semiserious, anyway.

  “Come on, Baker. It can’t be all that bad,” she said, laughing at his reluctance.

  With arms still around her waist, he flattened her pelvis against his and began to dance slowly. His intent expression wiped out all of her confidence. Though she’d thought she had the upper hand with him for a moment or two, it was clear she had nothing of the sort.

  “Right now,” he said, his body pressing hard and close, his voice soft and deep, “I’m thinking that there might not be a price too high to pay to dance with you.” He held her with an air of ownership. “Two dances and it’s a deal.”

  “Two dances.” She wondered if she should raise her stakes as well, to get his social security number. She might need it before the night was over.