Dear Santa

by Alice Orr

  “I still want to know what you’ve really got to do with this scene,” the young cop was saying.

  Vic’s sigh stretched out long enough to make his exasperation unmistakable.

  “I’ve been through that with you twice already,” he said. “How many times do you have to hear it?”

  “Till my gut stops warning me you’re not telling everything you know.”

  I couldn’t give a damn less about your gut, Vic would have liked to shout. He could feel his face redden from the strain of repressing that outburst. The kid flatfoot was right, of course, but he’d have been guessing all the same. He looked as if he might have been on the force about a week and a half, or not anywhere near long enough anyway to have acquired the instincts he was crediting himself with. He’d heard Vic’s name before around the station house, his last name in particular. That was the only special insight this rookie had going for him. Anybody on the local force, or in the police departments from any number of area towns and counties for that matter, could have come to the same conclusion just by hearing Maltese. What Vic had happening to him here was a roust, plain and simple. He’d been through this same routine, or some variation of it, so many times he scarcely paid attention anymore. Except that, on those other occasions when one of Albany’s finest—or Schenectady’s or Troy’s or whoever’s—decided to get his jollies from giving Vic a hard time, Katherine hadn’t been on hand to witness it.

  “Why don’t you just come clean, Maltese?” the cop was asking.

  “Why don’t you just cut me some slack?” Vic hissed back at him from between gritted teeth, once again restraining himself from adding “jerk” or “squirt” or any of the many slurs he would have thought suited this rookie to a T.

  “Vic, is something wrong here?”

  Katherine was at his elbow now, and she sounded sincerely concerned.

  He turned quickly toward her. “Nothing,” he said, more sharply than he’d meant to do.

  She backed off a step. He could tell from the way she was studying his face that it must still wear the scowl he’d intended for the pain-in-the-neck policeman. Vic did his best to relax.

  “Everything’s under control here,” he lied. “Why don’t you go back to the car and wait for me?”

  The breath from those words was still white on the frigid air when he realized he shouldn’t have said them.

  “I don’t think so,” she answered in a tone that rivalled the weather for coldness.

  “I just meant that you’d be warmer in the car, and nothing much is going on here.”

  So much for Vic’s lame attempt to cover the mistake of suggesting that Katherine, a professional at least as fully accredited as himself, shouldn’t be as much involved in this case as he was. Arrogance might have seemed like the right attitude to use with her last night, but he’d changed his mind—or maybe some other part of himself—about her since then.

  “There’s someone you need to meet,” she said, still with enough chill in her voice to frost his heart.

  Vic glanced at the short, hefty black woman at Katherine’s side. He thought about mentioning that this might not be the best time for introductions. He decided it had to be an even worse time to question Katherine’s judgment Her facial expression was now about as dark as he’d imagined his own to be a couple of minutes ago.

  “This is Tooley Pennebaker,” she said indicating the woman next to her.

  Vic understood that Katherine had his mind running haywire at the moment. Plus, he was rattled by the very upsetting fact of how strong an effect she had on him. Still, something even beyond that confusion made him aware that her last statement wasn’t right somehow.

  “You know,” Katherine went on. “The Bellamy children’s aunt.”

  The still-wet-behind-the-ears police officer had been watching this exchange with obvious interest.

  “What children would those be, miss?” he chimed in now.

  “A boy and girl we work with at the Arbor Hill Children’s Center, Officer,” Katherine said, and favored him with a smile so dazzling and sweet that Vic could see the rookie blush straight through the peach fuzz he probably called five-o’clock shadow.

  “Do either of those kids have a record of vandalism?” the rookie managed to ask without his voice cracking as Vic half expected it to do.

  “Oh, no,” Katherine said, even more sweetly. “These are very young children.” She held out her gloved hand to illustrate a height much shorter than Coyote’s, or Sprite’s either, for that matter. “Way too young to be involved in anything like that.”

  Vic had to bite back a smile of his own, though not quite what you’d call a sweet one. The woman was smooth as silk. She could lie like a trooper and get away with it, too. That angel face of hers, complete with a halo of blond mist around it, did the trick for her. He couldn’t help wondering if he’d be as susceptible himself as the rookie was sure to be.

  “Good. Then they probably had nothing to do with tossing the apartment in this building,” the young policeman said in a tone as cooperative as it had been the opposite when he was talking to Vic.

  Katherine had charmed the rookie into submission just the way Vic had figured she would. In the meantime, Tooley Pennebaker didn’t look to Vic like she was in the least bit charmed.

  “What’re you talkin’ about?” she cried out, grabbing a hunk of the rookie’s coat sleeve. “Which apartment you sayin’ got tossed around here?”

  “That one on the front right, ma’am.” The rookie pointed.

  “No!” Tooley wailed. “That’s my place.”

  This woman, who up till now had appeared to be very substantial, even formidable, all but crumpled on the spot. Katherine wrapped her arm around the much broader woman.

  “It’s not so bad,” Katherine said. “Just things tossed around, as far as I could see.”

  “You saw this happen?” the police officer asked.

  “No, no. Nothing like that,” Katherine assured him. “I’ll explain in a minute.”

  The cop would never have taken that kind of delaying tactic from Vic. Katherine was apparently a different story as far as this officer was concerned. The rookie nodded and waited, just as she’d requested him to do. Meanwhile, her companion was pulling away in the direction of the apartment she’d said was hers. Katherine held fast to the larger woman’s waist and moved along with her up onto the stoop.

  Tooley fumbled in her coat pocket and pulled out a set of keys. She rattled through them a couple of times, visibly confused and shaken, then finally selected one and opened the front door to the building. Vic watched as Katherine followed Ms. Pennebaker into the entryway hall.

  “Is it really that woman’s place that got ransacked?” the rookie asked. A shriek from inside the building answered the young cop’s question for him.

  “Yeah,” Vic replied anyway. “I’d say it’s her place, all right.”

  “The kids she was talking about, they live here too?”

  “The kids live here too,” Vic affirmed.

  He knew, for Coyote and Sprite’s sake, he had to keep this cop from nosing too deep into what was going on here.

  “Where are those kids?” the rookie asked.

  Vic was listening to the cop with new attentiveness now. Vic took note especially of how curiously the rookie was watching the door to Tooley Pennebaker’s building. The less he figured out about what was actually happening to the Bellaway family, whatever that might be, the better the children were likely to end up. That’s how Vic saw it, anyway. He’d learned a long time ago, when he was still not much more than a child himself, that it paid to keep family business in the family.

  “They’re over at the center working on setting up for the Christmas pageant,” Vic said, lying yet again and taking a chance that the rookie wouldn’t check the story. “They didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “Who do you think did have something to do with this?”

  The rookie sounded like he was thinking Vic wa
s mixed up in the break-in somehow.

  Vic shrugged. “A street punk looking for goods to sell would be my guess.”

  “In this dump?”

  Vic shrugged again to hide how much he agreed with the cop’s assessment. The likelihood of this rundown building, or the even more rundown Pennebaker apartment, holding anything very salable was slim to none.

  “Desperate people don’t always think too clearly,” Vic said.

  The rookie nodded. “I’ll write up an incident report.”

  “You do that,” Vic said.

  He knew how little official action would actually be taken as a result of this guy’s investigation and report. Vic might be disgusted by that, but he was also relieved. He didn’t want this cop or any of his buddies in blue poking around any further. Vic especially didn’t want them nosing into the relationship between Tooley Pennebaker and the two children who were supposed to be her niece and nephew.

  Vic had already figured out that Katherine had been trying to get a message across to him before about the racial improbability of that aunt-offspring pairing. Of course, there were a number of possible explanations, intermarriage or adoption to name two. Katherine’s raised eyebrows when she mentioned Tooley and the kids suggested to Vic that the story might be different than either of those. He also had the feeling that this issue, as well as a couple of others, made it all the more crucial that they find Coyote Bellaway, and find him fast.

  COYOTE WATCHED the whole scene from the top of the building across the street from Tooley’s apartment. He’d even been up there, crouched down behind the short wall that bordered the roof, long enough to see the big man from the alleyway the other night—the one who’d chased Coyote with a gun—drive up in a black car and go inside Tooley’s building. A half hour or so later, the man came out and drove away. Coyote snuck down to the street after that, crept across Ten Broeck and let himself into the apartment. He’d had his own key ever since he and Sprite started calling the place home almost a year ago. It looked more like a junk heap than anybody’s home now. Coyote tried to keep the tears from sliding down his face. They slid down anyway. This was all his fault. All Tooley’s stuff had been tossed around because of him.

  Coyote was sniffling so loud by then that he nearly didn’t hear Miss Fairchild and Mr. Maltese outside in time to make it out of the room before she was at the window looking in. Luckily, he’d locked the door behind him after he came in. Coyote knew that they couldn’t get into Tooley’s place without forcing the lock, which gave him the few minutes he needed to run out the back way and sneak over to his rooftop watching post without being seen. He watched as the policeman came, then as Tooley showed up a little later on and started into the building. After that, he couldn’t get himself to watch anymore.

  Instead, he busied himself gathering up the things he’d collected in his makeshift lean-to of double-layered cardboard shipping cartons. Some boosted blankets and a stack of newspapers from the recycle pile outside one of the stores on North Pearl Street had kept him pretty warm these past nights. He couldn’t drag those boxes and papers away with him now. He’d attract too much attention if he tried to do that. But he did have to get out of here. The police showing up let Coyote know that was how things had to be, no question about it. He’d need to come up with some other way of keeping warm tonight. At the moment, he didn’t have a clue what that way would be.

  Chapter Eight

  On their way back to the center in Vic’s car, Katherine shook her head and chuckled at herself. She often felt like shaking him in exasperation when they were alone together. Yet, as soon as she sensed that he was under attack from the police officer, she’d leapt to champion him like a shebear at a threat to her clan.

  “What’s so funny?” Vic asked in response to her chuckle.

  “Oh, nothing,” she replied.

  She was correct about that, of course. There wasn’t anything the least bit funny about withholding information from the police or about what could happen to her, and maybe to the center as well, if she were to be caught in the act of doing so. Equally lacking in humor was the question that had been niggling at the corner of her brain ever since she’d started across Ten Broeck Street toward Vic with Tooley Pennebaker at her side. Why had that young policeman been treating Vic so rudely?

  The officer had been sneering at Vic in the most disrespectful manner she could imagine. She’d been on the defensive on Vic’s behalf from the instant she saw the expression on the young policeman’s face as he and Vic talked together, or snarled at each other, to be more exact

  The officer behaved quite politely to Katherine once she’d introduced herself. He’d been gracious, even gentle, with Tooley, doing his best to comfort her in her distress over what had happened to her home and belongings. He’d even assured her that the police department would do its level best to find the person who committed the break-in. Katherine suspected that was an empty promise on the policeman’s part. Vandalism cases like this one more often than not remain unsolved, but he was trying to make Tooley feel better, anyway. Still, when he turned to talk to Vic, the sneer reappeared on the officer’s face, and the challenge was back in his voice. Katherine had to assume some previous history there. So, what was Vic’s relationship with the police? And, how did it come to be so antagonistic? She might have put it down to something personal between him and this particular officer if it hadn’t been for what happened as she and Vic were walking back to his car.

  “Cops,” he growled. “They’re all alike. I can’t stand any of them.”

  She might have asked her questions about Vic and the police right then, except that a dark frown had descended across his brow. She couldn’t remember ever having seen a person look quite so fierce before. She’d decided that wasn’t the moment to begin an interrogation, or to talk to him at all for that matter. They drove the few blocks from Tooley Pennebaker’s place to the center in silence, other than for that brief exchange over Katherine’s chuckle.

  She was back in her office pondering the possible reasons for that silence when a knock sounded at her door. For an instant, she thought it might be Vic. Her heart made a little flip, as disconcerting as it was unexpected. Just as unsettling was the stab of disappointment when she glanced up to discover someone definitely not Vic outside her office waiting to be invited in.

  The woman at the door was tall, what one might refer to as statuesque. She was also beautiful. She was, at first sight at least, all but perfect, the kind of woman other women look at and say, “Why can’t I put myself together like that?”

  Katherine realized she was staring and hurried out from behind her desk to open the door.

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  “I do hope so,” the woman replied, in the closest thing to a purr Katherine could ever recall hearing in real life.

  “Please, come in and sit down.”

  Katherine stepped aside and motioned toward the chair facing her desk.

  “I’m Lacey Harbison.”

  “Katherine Fairchild.” She extended her hand. Ms. Harbison took hold of only Katherine’s fingers and gave them a restrained, ladylike shake.

  “I know,” she said. “I’ve been following the accounts of your good work in the Chronicle. I am most favorably impressed.”

  “Thank you.”

  Katherine had the definite impression she was being charmed, and wondered why.

  “It’s that work I’ve come to talk to you about,” Ms. Harbison said.

  “What aspect of what we do interests you in particular?”

  Katherine wished she could stop sounding like an oral report.

  “Your Most Needy Cases Fund has struck my husband’s fancy, and mine also. We would both like to become involved with the program.”

  “We welcome community support,” Katherine said.

  Maybe the Harbisons wanted to make a contribution. Katherine estimated that Mrs. Harbison was wearing the equivalent of several holiday dinners with all the trimmings
and some presents besides, and that was without counting the fur coat she had draped over her arm. Katherine widened her own smile to match her visitor’s.

  “We would like to take two children into our home for the Christmas holiday,” Mrs. Harbison said.

  Katherine hesitated a moment. “That’s a rather unusual request,” she said.

  “It’s for my husband more than myself.” Lacey Harbison’s voice had gone even softer, as if she were sharing an intimate secret straight from her heart. “He was raised in an orphanage without a true family of his own. Now, as it turns out, I can’t have children.”

  She cast her gaze downward. Her posture, suddenly not so statuesque, suggested the grief caused by her childless state. Katherine wanted to sympathize, but she held back.

  “What, specifically, did you have in mind?” she asked.

  “We would love to have a boy and girl with us for the holidays, the boy about ten, the girl about eight. Those are the ages the two babies I lost would be if they had lived.”

  She looked up again, and Katherine could see the pleading in the woman’s face. Still, Katherine’s heart didn’t respond. She was surprised by that. When she heard the sad stories of the families applying for Most Needy Cases Fund grants, she’d been close to tears with each one. Maybe she was prejudiced against Mrs. Harbison because of her expensive clothes. Katherine hoped that wasn’t true. She knew from her own experience that material comforts were no protection against pain. Yet she continued to watch Mrs. Harbison from a cool distance.

  “Do you have two children who fit that description? A brother and sister would be perfect, if that’s possible.”

  “Tell me again exactly what you and your husband are proposing.”

  “Well, we have a large home, which we plan to fill with gifts and decorations and maybe even a party for your other children.”

  As Mrs. Harbison went on, Katherine nodded, but she was only partly listening. Her instincts kept telling her not to believe a word this woman said.

  “This is a very interesting idea,” she responded finally, just as Mrs. Harbison was launching into a description of the party she and her wealthy husband would throw for their holiday charges and their friends. “Let me go and get the files for our program applicants and see if we have two children who match what you’re looking for.”