Kiss Me, Kelly

by Mary Kay McComas

  Something deep inside her knew he was right, but it took her several more seconds to convince the rest of her mind and heart. In the meantime, the phone stopped ringing.

  “Whoever it was will call back in the morning, if it’s important,” he said, looping his arm around her shoulders. “Right now, I think it’s important for you to get some sleep. Come on. You get ready for bed and I’ll tuck you in. Then I’ll tell you a wonderful bedtime story, guaranteed to give you sweet dreams.”

  “What’s the story about?” She didn’t mind being babied occasionally.

  “It’s about a gorgeous girl bartender and a dashing, hero-type cop, who fall in love at first sight and live—”

  He halted quickly and turned as the phone began to ring again.

  “It’s not him, right?” she asked, needing just a little more convincing.

  “Right. It’s some other idiot calling at three in the morning.”

  Kelly retraced her steps and picked up the phone.

  “Hey, Kel,” Tommy said. “You weren’t already asleep by any chance, were you? I’m gonna feel real bad if you tell me I woke you.” His voice was strained beneath his attempt to sound chipper in the middle of the night.

  “Tommy? Are you all right? Is something wrong?”

  “No, no. Everything is fine. I—Are you alone, Kelly?”

  Elgin had squeezed in on the conversation the moment she’d identified the caller. She didn’t like lying to Tommy, but Elgin’s nod was so insistent, the words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.

  “Yes, I’m alone. Why?” she asked.

  The line was quiet except for a long, reluctant sigh on the other end. “I need to talk with you. I…I’m in trouble and I need your help. Can I come over right now?”

  “Of course you can. I’ll wait in the bar and let you in the front door,” she answered without the slightest hesitation, even though Elgin was shaking his head furiously.

  “Why the hell did you agree to meet with him?” Elgin shouted the moment the receiver was back in its cradle. “Now I’ll have to bust him and all I’ve got is superficial evidence.” On a second thought he added, “Well, that’s all right. With any luck at all he’ll see the light and turn over on Del Rio and the others. It’ll save us a lot of time. What?”

  Kelly was staring at him with her mouth open. She was sure her fall had affected her hearing.

  “What are you talking about? You can’t arrest Tommy. He hasn’t done anything. And he’s coming here to talk to me, not you. That doesn’t make him guilty of anything but lousy timing.”

  “Kelly,” he said, as if talking to a simpleton, “Shaw is the one person who knows this bar and your routine well enough to break in and attack you. I won’t let you walk into the same room with him, let alone talk to him face-to-face by yourself.”

  She gasped and sputtered, but not for very long. “You won’t what? Listen, Detective Baker, because I don’t plan to tell you this again. Tommy Shaw is no thief and never, never would he in any way hurt me. You got that?”

  “Kelly—”

  “Now I’m getting dressed and I’m going down to the bar to wait for my oldest and dearest friend to drive up outside the front door. Then I’m going to let him in and we’re going to talk for as long as he needs to talk, and that’s that.” She pushed her way past him and stomped into her bedroom, slamming the door like an exclamation mark.

  Elgin wasn’t impressed. The force with which he flung the door open again held a few unspoken remarks of its own.

  “Wear a wire then,” he said.

  “A what?”

  “A wire. So I can listen and be there if you need me.”

  The expression on his face told her he’d meet her halfway, but no farther. If she wasn’t willing to do the same, he’d do whatever he had to, to keep her away from Tommy.

  “That’s…” She was about to say it was an insane idea, but reconsidered. “Okay, hotshot. I’ll wear your wire. And when I’m done talking with Tommy, I want you to come in and tell him what you made me do and apologize to him for all the rotten things you’ve ever thought or said about him.”

  “Deal,” he said, so confident that he didn’t pause for an instant.

  Eleven

  KELLY SAT ON the back of one of the booths near the front windows, craning her neck to peer out at the darkness, watching for a familiar car to pull up.

  “What kind of interference did you arrange for, Elgin?” she asked out loud. Even though she was alone in the bar, she knew he could hear her through the tiny microphone he had personally placed inside the right cup of her brassiere. “He should have been here ages ago.”

  In order to get a sound man over to the bar with a listening device before Tommy arrived, Elgin had made arrangements for Tommy to be waylaid a few minutes. It hadn’t gone over too well when Kelly discovered that her friend was under twenty-four-hour surveillance, and that a call to the men watching him was all it had taken for the distraction to occur.

  “You didn’t have him hit by a bus, did you?”

  She was silent as she watched a car slow down. It continued up the street, and she went on. “I hope you like crow, Baker, because I’m not going to let you forget this. I’ve never felt so sleazy or dishonest in my life. If Tommy doesn’t forgive me for doing this to him, I may never forgive you. Can you hear me?”

  The swinging door at the back of the bar squeaked as Elgin popped his head into the room.

  “Will you shut up? He may try to sneak in the back way and there you’ll be talking to yourself.” His head disappeared, then quickly reappeared. “And I’ll eat crow every day for the rest of my life, so long as I know you’re safe. Now, shut up. He’s on his way.”

  “Hey, Elgin?” she called.

  “What?” he said, back in the doorway, exasperated.

  “You’re wrong this time, but I love you, anyway.”

  “I love you too. Now, will you please shut up.”

  Five minutes, then ten minutes went by before one of the new cars that had gotten Tommy into so much trouble pulled up in front of the bar. Kelly scooted off her perch and deactivated the alarm on the front door.

  “Hi,” he said, stepping past her into the bar. “Sorry it took me so long. I got held up by a taxi driver.”

  “You were robbed?” she asked nervously, finding it hard to believe that Elgin would go so far.

  “No, no. He was from the city and got lost. I kept trying to explain to him how to get back, but he had to be the dumbest driver ever. Completely disoriented. Didn’t know east from west.” Tommy slid onto a bar stool as he had a thousand times before. “He begged me to drive to the bridge and let him follow me. He was so weird, I figured it was either that or he’d follow me here. There ought to be a law against them coming over here.”

  Kelly laughed, but only to ease some of his tension. He looked ready to break loose at the seams with worry and stress. “You want something to drink? I made coffee.”

  “No. Thanks. I’m sorry about all this. I just didn’t know who else to talk to about it. I don’t want Angie to know yet, and I thought maybe you could help.”

  “I will if I can,” she said, smiling her encouragement as she perched on the stool next to his.

  “You might not want to.” His eyelids lowered, as if he needed to hide himself from her gaze.

  “We might not ever know, if you don’t tell me pretty soon.”

  After several fleeting glances in her direction, a sigh, and some difficulty swallowing, he finally admitted, “I’ve been…taking money. During drug busts. A few hundred here, a couple there. Never enough for anyone to miss at the time, but over the past few years, it’s added up to thousands.”

  Kelly felt salt and bile accumulating at the back of her throat. She was physically ill and numb. She’d heard every word he’d uttered, knew what each meant, and didn’t believe a single one.

  When no comment was forthcoming, he hurried to fill the silence between them.

&nbs
p; “At first, it was to pay off a couple of hospital bills, the kids’ doctor bills, then to pay off a couple of credit cards. Only enough to get us back on track so we weren’t constantly in debt, ya know? But then, it seemed like it was one thing after another and I was taking more and more money. The schools, the house, the cars. I didn’t want to have to wait or make Angie and the kids wait another ten or fifteen years before we could afford it all. Not when it was so easy for us to have it now.”

  “Aw, Tommy,” she said in misery, fully conscious that she had led him into a trap and that he had confessed his crimes to a police tape recorder. “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “Because it’s coming back at me now, that’s why!” he shouted, losing the tenuous control he’d had on his emotions. “Del Rio says there’s been somebody snooping around the station house and that I.A.D. is asking a lot of questions about him and me, and Benson and Crowly and a few others.”

  He stepped off the stool and began to pace. Kelly watched him helplessly, acutely aware of his future. Inside, she felt shredded, yet, as disappointed and disillusioned as she was in him, she couldn’t remember ever having loved him more.

  “You said you thought I might be able to help,” she said quietly. “How?”

  He stopped and looked at her in amazement. “You don’t hate me?”

  She searched her soul for anything that even resembled hate, then shook her head.

  “I thought for sure you’d show me the door,” he said with a wry smile. “You’ve always been so idealistic about cops, even when we were kids. I know how you feel about bad cops. Hell, you’d praise a crook before you’d offer a kind word to a bad cop.”

  “At least crooks are honest about what they’re doing. They don’t hide behind badges.”

  His shoulders were low enough to touch the floor. “You won’t ever be able to see past this and forgive me, will you?” he said, unable to look at her.

  “I’m disappointed, Tommy, and I think you’re pretty stupid. But I don’t hate you. And it’s not up to me to forgive you.” She touched his face and waited for his gaze to meet hers. “I’m your friend and I love you. What can I do to help?”

  He studied her for a long, thoughtful moment, but didn’t question her feelings again.

  “Del Rio says our friend Baker is a Fed. Is that true?” he asked point-blank.

  What am I supposed to say now? she wondered, though she knew what Elgin would want her to say. Was she to lie to her oldest friend or betray the man she loved?

  “Does it make a difference?” she said. “You know I won’t do anything illegal for you.”

  “I know. And I wouldn’t ask you to,” he said, undaunted. “But if he is a Fed, you could go to him and tell him that I want to make a deal.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “Information for a clean slate.”

  Oh. The conversation was getting more curious all the time. This wasn’t the Tommy Shaw she’d known all her life. This was a stranger she was talking to. All along she’d suspected Tommy probably was aware of the skimming, but she knew as well as she knew her own name that he’d never rat on another cop. Now she found out that he not only knew about the thefts, but he’d been participating in them and he wanted to give up his comrades to save his own skin.

  She was floored and Tommy saw it.

  “I can’t go to prison, Kelly. Who’d take care of Angie and the kids?”

  “What a family man.” Tommy and Kelly jerked their heads around to see Del Rio holding the swinging door open with one hand and a gun in the other. “Too bad little Angie isn’t oriented the same way.”

  “Shut up, Del Rio,” Tommy hissed angrily. “You leave her out of this.”

  “No way, man. If it weren’t for her, we wouldn’t be in this mess. And we are in a mess together, aren’t we, partner?”

  “If that’s the way you want it—but leave Angie out of it.”

  Kelly’s mind was confused and wandering. Where was Elgin? How long was he going to let Del Rio wave that gun around in her presence, before he came charging in with the cavalry? How had Del Rio gotten in? And what did Angie have to do with all of this?

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Del Rio said in a deceptively pleasant voice. He let the door swing closed and took slow, deliberate steps in their direction. “As long as we’re broadcasting, we might as well tell the whole story, huh, pal? That way your oldest and dearest friend here can get her cut and she and your wife can go to Jamaica together.”

  “What are you talking about?” Tommy asked, casting a quick glance in Kelly’s direction.

  “Well, I gotta admit, Kelly’s smarter than Angie. She’s getting evidence, while your wife only threatened to tattle on us.”

  “What?”

  Del Rio had come to within a foot of Kelly, and the gun was now nestled securely in her ribs. He jabbed her once, twice, saying, “Show him, sweetheart. Show him what a good friend you are.”

  She wasn’t brave enough to pretend she didn’t know what he was talking about. She slipped her hand up inside her loose-fitting T-shirt and withdrew the thin metal disk Elgin had placed inside her bra.

  “You’re wired?” Tommy gasped. “You set me up?”

  “You called me, remember?”

  “You always thought you were so smart, didn’t you, Shaw?” Del Rio sneered. “You always thought you were so much better than the rest of us. And now here you are, knee-deep in the garbage. Pretty ironic, wouldn’t you say?” He turned to Kelly again. “By the way, I turned off the tape recorder upstairs. I’m sorry, but I’m a little tired of doing all the work and splitting the profits with blackmailers.”

  “Blackmailers?” she asked, wondering if Del Rio had gone off the deep end. She’d always thought he was a little strange.

  “Aw. Poor baby. I’ll bet you thought your idea was original. I’ll bet you listened to that boyfriend of yours and put two and two together, then decided to make a little killing before they could gather enough evidence to put us behind bars. I’ll bet you thought you were real clever. But I bet you never dreamed that innocent little Angie beat you to the punch, now did you?”

  “Angie?” She looked to Tommy for verification.

  He nodded dejectedly and slumped onto the stool next to hers, seeming not to care whether she had planned to blackmail him or not. He was a man without hope.

  “When I found out Del Rio and some of the others were pocketing money at the sites,” he said in a monotone, “I told them that I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I didn’t want to see it, know about it, or find evidence of it, or I’d turn ’em in. Then one night Angie and I were doing the bills, wondering where the hell we were going to get enough money to pay for the baby’s hospital bill and the braces.” He sighed. “I made the mistake of telling Angie about the guys and what they were doing.”

  He covered his face with his hands and pushed the skin on his forehead up and down several times before continuing.

  “She did it for me, Kel. I was going to take a second job for a while, until we could get caught up. Then one day, she told me not to. She said I worked too hard as it was, I was hardly ever home. She thought she’d figured out a way to pay off the bills. I didn’t question her,” he said, as if to do so would never enter his head. “She’s always taken care of the finances and managed things at home. I just figured, that she’d…figured something out.”

  “She went to Del Rio and blackmailed him?” Kelly was again stunned. Who were these people? she marveled, wondering if she’d ever really known any of them.

  Tommy could only nod his head. Del Rio answered for him.

  “Imagine my surprise when Wife-of-the-Year calls me to the old apartment and tells me that she’ll blow the whistle on me if I don’t cut her in for a full share, Shaw’s share, of the profits. Why, you could have pushed me over with a feather.”

  “Tell her the rest, you bastard,” Tommy said, glaring at his partner.

  “Is there more?” Del Rio pulled
a guileless expression.

  “You know damned well there is.” Tommy turned to Kelly. “It was like I told you before, she was only going to take enough to get us caught up. But when she tried to stop taking the money, he was afraid she’d carry through on her threat. But if he kept giving her money, she was as guilty as he was and couldn’t turn him in without going down herself.”

  “That’s when she started getting stupid,” Del Rio tacked on.

  A half-smile quivered across Tommy’s lips. “I think she wanted to get caught, to tell you the truth. She feels like hell.”

  “She should. She’s the one who brought I.A.D. down on us. Buying that damned house and then the cars, spending money like there was no tomorrow. I told her to knock it off, that someone would get suspicious, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “Didn’t you wonder where all the money was coming from?” Kelly asked Tommy.

  “Sure I did. She said we were using time payments and I…Well, hell, she’s the one who’s always been tight with money, not me. I figured she knew what she was doing. If we couldn’t afford something, we went without it. It never occurred to me that she was spending anything other than my paychecks. You know her. Can you picture her doing something that she knows is illegal?”

  “No.” Kelly had to admit she was finding it all hard to believe.

  “I didn’t even question it until this afternoon, when you were asking about investments and how we’d managed to accumulate enough money for down payments on the house and the cars. I didn’t exactly forget about down payments, I just assumed…Hell, I don’t know what I assumed. If I’d questioned her sooner, none of this would have happened. One question and she confessed the whole thing like I was her priest.”

  Several seconds of silence passed as the three of them evaluated the situation from their different perspectives.

  “You know,” Del Rio said in a philosophical tone, “when you think about it, I’m the one who’s getting the dirty end of the stick in all this. Here I do all the work, take all the risks, and all I’ve got to show for it are two blackmailers and a stoolie. What do you think I ought to do about that?”