I Got You, Babe (37 page)

The prospect of stuffing her bra did nothing to improve Paula’s mood. “This is crazy.”

“Paula. I need you.”

“Come on, Renee! This sounds like something Lucy and Ethel would do. Lucy would come up with something goofy, like wanting them to dress up like men who dress up like women, and Ethel would tell her uh-uh, nope, not gonna do it—”

“And then she’d do it anyway.”

Paula sighed.

“Because she loves Lucy.”

“You’re killing me, Renee.”

“It’s my only shot at getting out of this mess. You have to help me.”

“I know, I know.” Paula closed her eyes. “Bad taste, huh? Okay. I guess I can do bad taste.”

“Go to my apartment and get that red dress of mine. The one with the slit all the way up the thigh. And get the black one with the sequins for you.”

“I can’t wear that dress! You’re two sizes smaller than I am!”

“It’s stretchy.”

“A fabric hasn’t been made that’s that stretchy. And I’m not exactly the sequins type.”

“Trust me. It’ll be fine. We’ll wear the highest heels we’ve got, and maybe stockings with seams. Do you have a feather boa?”

Paula looked at her pointedly.

“Okay. Forget the boa. But find us some hats. I’ve got to hide this hair of mine. And dark glasses. I don’t want anyone recognizing me.”

“Come on, Renee. How many people do you know who go to places like that?”

“I don’t want to take any chances.” Renee eyed her friend carefully. “Paula? Are you with me?”

Paula sighed and buried her head in her hands. “Tom would die if he knew I was doing this.”

“But Tom’s not going to know, is he?”

“He has an evening lecture at school tomorrow night. We’re not even planning on seeing each other.”

“Promise me you won’t tell him.”

“Believe me—this is one thing I’d just as soon he not know.”

“Good.” Renee took a deep breath. Her headache had subsided a bit, and she didn’t feel like crying anymore. Those were definitely steps in the right direction.

But then she leaned back against a pillow, and all at once she pictured lying not in this bed, but in John’s. Hazy images played through her mind—images of his hands and his mouth and the feel of his softly spoken words fanning against her ear, and she desperately wanted to go back a few days in time and experience it all over again—right up to the time Alex had barged through the door.

Paula patted her arm. “You’ll get over him, sweetie. It just takes time.”

Renee started to protest that she wasn’t thinking about John at all, but Paula knew her too well.

She sighed softly. “Do you know I’ve never been in love before?”

“Never?”

“No. Not really.”

“But you were in love with him?”

It seemed so silly now, but just for a while, when they’d been together...

“I think I could have been. If he’d been the man I thought he was.”

Renee knew that Paula, being that glass-half-full kind of person, wanted to tell her that everything was going to be all right. Instead, she just patted her hand again and gave her a bittersweet smile.

“You look tired. Get some sleep. I’ll stock up on what we need and come back tomorrow night about seven o’clock.”

She gave Renee another hug and slipped out the door. Renee locked it behind her and collapsed on the bed again, trying not to think about how thin the thread of hope was that she was hanging on to, because if she thought about it, she’d go crazy. Then she decided it was less painful to think about that than it was to think about John.

She might be able to prove her innocence tomorrow night. But nothing she did would ever bring John back.

At eight-fifteen the next evening, Paula pulled her car into a parking space along Colfax Street and killed the engine. She turned to Renee, an expression of abject terror on her face.

“You look...great,” Renee told her.

“No. I look like a cheap hooker. A hooker so cheap she can’t afford to buy new clothes when she outgrows the old ones. That’s what I look like.”

“The hat’s nice.”

“I have a peacock on top of my head!”

Renee patted the fashion statement on her own head. “I said you could wear this one if you wanted to.”

“Purple satin with pearls? Now, there’s a choice. I can either look like a big-tailed bird or Barbara Bush at a state dinner.”

Renee couldn’t help smiling. Tension really brought out the sarcasm in Paula. “Where did you say you got them?”

“The thrift store down on Market Street. They had lots of hats. These were the attractive ones.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Tell me again about how we’re going to find the guy who committed the robbery and get you off the hook.”

“It’s my only hope, Paula. And I’m eternally grateful to you for putting on that god-awful outfit to help me, even if you wouldn’t stuff your bra.”

“Okay, then. Let’s get this over with.”

They simultaneously slid their sunglasses on, and Renee had visions of a high-security undercover operation. Which she guessed was pretty much what it was.

They got out of the car and approached the club. Even standing on the sidewalk outside, Renee heard the music pulsing inside, and when she opened the door, it took a minute for her eardrums to accept the assault and stop rattling around inside her head.

Once inside, she glanced around and saw a window that looked like a box office. It appeared there was a cover charge. They went to the window, where a guy clad in a blue-sequined dress and big hoop earrings sat behind it counting money. His blond-tipped black hair stood out from his head like a mutant dandelion.

“Ten dollars, ladies,” he said, in a voice a few octaves higher than the one he was born with. Paula stood over to one side to avoid even looking at the guy. Renee handed him twenty dollars to cover both of them, then gave Paula a little smile. They were in.

With a mutual sigh of relief, they turned to walk through the door leading to the main room.

“Wait just a minute!” the guy at the window shouted.

They froze, casting sidelong glances at each other. Renee waited for him to fly out of the booth, clamp a hand on each of them, and drag them back out the door, telling them they had the wrong plumbing to be admitted to a place like this.

Slowly they turned around, and the guy motioned to Paula with a crook of his finger. Renee saw her swallow hard, as if a Ping-Pong ball were lodged in her throat. She took a wary step or two back toward the booth. The guy leaned out the window, his eyes narrow and intense.

“Where did you get that
marvelous
hat?”

Paula stood there frozen, her mouth hanging open. Renee came up beside her and gave her a nudge.

“Uh...the thrift store down on Market Street.”

“Damn! Then it’s one of a kind!”

“Afraid so.”

He shook his head. “The great stuff always is.” He gave them a big smile. “You’re lucky you’re here a little early so you get a good table. Enjoy the show.”

Renee literally had to drag Paula by the arm to a table along one wall, where they had a good view of the entire room. The place was already in motion, with the strangest assortment of gender-questionable people roaming around that Renee had ever seen. Up front was a large stage draped with a thick maroon curtain. The music throbbed as multicolored lights swarmed around the room, and so much cigarette smoke hung in the air that breathing was a chore. A cocktail server came immediately to their table and took their drink order.

“See, we made it,” Renee said. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Paula’s face was still ashen. “I think I wet my pants.”

“Just be cool,” Renee said, dropping her shades down her nose a bit and furtively scanning the club. “And stay on the lookout. If you see anything suspicious, we’ll take a closer look.

John sat on his sofa, the television turned on but muted, staring ahead at nothing. He missed Renee. God, how he missed her. Compounding that was the guilt that had been eating away at him since the moment he’d left her at that tacky motel last night and watched her walk away. He hoped she took his advice and ran far and fast, because the very thought that she could end up behind bars amid the scum of the earth was just about more than he could tolerate.

He remembered the look on her face as she’d stepped out of his car—that lost, lonely expression that said she’d trusted him to help her, and he’d let her down. Now she was going to spend the rest of her life wishing she’d never laid eyes on him.

He checked his watch. Eight-thirty.

The talent show started in thirty minutes. It was possible that the person who committed that robbery would be a part of that crowd, the person who’d either accidentally or deliberately framed Renee and was going to walk away a free man.

But maybe they’d been one hundred percent wrong, and the robber was some anonymous person he’d never hope to find in a million years. After all, how many crimes in this town went unsolved every year? This was probably going to be one more.

He tossed the remote down to the coffee table and rested his head against the back of the sofa. He’d done the right thing by making her leave. He knew he had. So why did it feel so wrong?

Then he heard a hard, rapid knock on his door that sounded like machine-gun fire.

Alex.

John stayed on the sofa for a moment, willing him to go away, only to hear another knock, this one more intense than the last. And he would continue knocking until John let him in.

He finally got up and opened the door. Alex stepped inside, glanced around the room, then looked back at John.

“Where is she?”

“Gone.”

“You took her in, right?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know where she is.”

Alex glared at him accusingly. “You let her go?”

“Yes. I let her go. She was innocent.”

“You don’t know that for sure. And even if you did, it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference!”

“Christ, Alex, she was going to spend years in prison for something she didn’t do! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“Listen to me, little brother,” Alex said, pointing a stem finger. “Once you start down this path, there’s no going back.”

“What path?”

“The one where you think you’re above the law. The one where you start second-guessing everything instead of doing your job.”

“Don’t you understand? I knew what was going to happen to her if I took her in. You know as well as I do that the system doesn’t always get it right!”

“Listen to me,” Alex said. “I know what she was like back then. They never change. Never. If she gets thrown in jail, believe me, there’s a good reason for it.”

How could Alex know that? How could he know that a woman like Renee couldn’t decide to make a better life for herself?

Alex huffed with disgust. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe that you’ve made a fool out of yourself over a woman like her.”

A woman like her.

John felt a sharp bum of anger start in the back of his throat and spread through him like wildfire. Suddenly it struck him that Alex didn’t know a thing about Renee. He knew about some girl who existed eight years ago, who’d just as soon spit in a cop’s eye as look at him. But that girl was gone. The woman he wanted to protect was someone else entirely.

Someone he was in love with.

He’d felt it last night when she’d gotten out of his car at that motel, but he’d instantly shoved it aside, guarding his heart against the possibility that he could have fallen in love with a woman he’d never see again. But now the truth leaped into his mind with such force and such clarity that he couldn’t help but acknowledge it.

He was in love with Renee.

But how could it be? How could he be in love with her? The situation was too crazy. He barely knew her.

But was that really true? The pressure she’d been under these past few days had revealed more about her than if they’d known each other for years. She had faced her biggest fear and had trusted him to help her through it.

Yes.
She’d trusted him to help her, and he’d turned his back on her. How could he have done such a thing?

Because he was afraid of screwing up his career, afraid of what Alex thought, afraid of what his family would think. Hell, he’d even been afraid of what his dead father was thinking as he stared down at him from heaven. How foolish could he possibly have been?

All this time he’d been berating himself for his failure to become the man his father thought he ought to be, for his inability to reach that place in his life where he could finally do that one thing to make his old man proud.

Then Renee had come along, and in just a few days he’d finally understood something that had eluded him for as long as he could remember. He didn’t need his father’s approval. He needed to live according to his own rules and not give a damn what his father thought.

As of right now, he didn’t.

He felt a surge of energy, accompanied by a sudden, overwhelming need to right the wrongs that his misconceptions had caused. He could feel his brother gearing up to berate him some more, but all he could think about was Renee. Right now he was the only thing standing between her and either a life on the run or a prison sentence.

He knew what he had to do. He had to get to that club.

He turned to his brother. “I did something really stupid last night, Alex.”

“Damn right you did.”

“I didn’t throw you out of my house when I had the chance.”

Leaving Alex standing there with his mouth hanging open, John went into his bedroom and grabbed his gun from his closet and his cuffs from the dresser. He stuck the gun into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back, then returned to the living room and grabbed his coat from the front closet. He put it on, then stuffed the handcuffs into his pocket.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Alex asked.

“Aunt Charlie’s. Renee is innocent. And I’m going to prove it.”

He started toward the door. To his surprise, Alex stepped in front of him. “You’re not going anywhere.”

John blinked. “What did you say?”

“I said you’re not stepping foot out of this house.”