by Delynn Royer
Murphy had moved up in the underworld from his early days along the docks. His new pals made the worst waterfront thugs look like pussycats. Baseball bats, brass knuckles and lead pipes had been traded up for submachine guns, automatics and shotguns. Some of those guys burned powder before breakfast. None would look kindly on the possibility of being ratted out.
Next, the medical examiner gave the autopsy results, after which Carter reclaimed the floor to give a rundown of what they knew to date. Much of what he presented was thanks to Sean’s legwork. The rest centered on Carter’s idea that Big Nose Benny had done Murphy in over the death of his brother.
There were other suspects as well, all of them crooks and gangsters that had rubbed elbows with Johnny in the past few weeks.
Nell Murphy was still missing. Neighbors had been questioned with no leads. Her female friends revealed that Nell and Johnny had kept in contact throughout their separation, but whenever a reconciliation seemed imminent, another flare-up would occur and Nell would blow out of town for a month or so to cool off.
While Nell had been seen in the company of other men from time to time, there was no serious romantic attachment. Her friends didn’t know where she could be, and she had no immediate family still living.
Detectives had canvassed the neighborhood near Scholars’ Gate with nothing new to show for it. Only three names appeared on the board, Edith Evanston, William Harris and Trixie Frank. Last on the witness list was the word “Boy” followed by a question mark.
Sean said nothing as Carter announced that there were no leads on the identity of the child.
Carter distributed mimeographed sheets listing a timeline of John Murphy’s movements during the last days of his life. It contained only one new item, a phone call Johnny had received at eleven-thirty through the hotel’s switchboard. The operator identified the caller as a woman.
After divvying out assignments, Carter dismissed the group. Sean was almost out of the room when Carter stopped him. “Hey, Costigan, stick around.”
Though Sean had expected as much, he was annoyed at the delay. He wanted to be out on the street. He glanced at his watch as Carter finished a conversation with another detective. Soon enough, he and Carter were alone.
“Have a seat,” Carter said, pulling out the chair nearest to Sean.
Sean sat. This close, he could smell Carter’s cologne, not cheap. Did the man take a few bribes on the side to afford such fancy cologne and glad rags? If he did, he wasn’t alone. Sean didn’t care for the practice personally, but he lived with it. The old ways died hard.
Carter lit a cigarette and offered one to Sean, who shook his head. They were burning daylight.
Carter flashed a cool smile, slipped the cigarette pack into his coat pocket, and leaned back in his chair. “So...tell me about Trixie Frank.”
Sean was ready for the question. He didn’t break eye contact with Carter. “Your bull put a hell of a scare into her last night.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Neither did Carter’s benign expression flicker. “But between you and me, maybe she deserved a little scare. It’s not nice to lie to the cops. You never know when you might need one.”
Bastard. Sean remembered how the blood had drained from Trixie’s face when she’d seen her brassiere in the icebox. It was a tribute to his self-control that he kept his expression neutral.
He’d already decided how much to tell Carter. Only enough to stay in his good graces. After leaving Trixie’s apartment, he hadn’t immediately gone home. There were too many things about her break-in—the timing, the boldness, the slickness—that smelled fishy.
He’d headed toward the bridge, then, once sure he wasn’t being followed, doubled back. He parked a block away and returned on foot. An unmarked master car had been parked one building up from Trixie’s rooming house.
Inside was a plainclothes officer. No doubt the detective had jotted down the time Sean had arrived and left. That and Sean’s license plate number.
Sean would have some explaining to do in the morning.
“Find anything useful in her address book?” Sean asked.
Carter’s smile broadened. “What address book?”
“I thought not.”
“So, what were you doing at her place?” Carter flicked a loose ash into an ashtray. “She’s a nice bit of goods. You’re not itching for her, are you?”
“She was spooked and called me.”
“I gave her my card too. She didn’t call me.”
“I’m better looking than you.”
Carter smirked at the joke, but he didn’t wear self-deprecation well. He took a drag off his cigarette. “She tell you anything?”
“It wasn’t the time to ask.”
Carter eyed Sean for a long minute, plainly measuring his veracity. “I’m still waiting on a list of people she gave business cards to. I called that scandal sheet she works for yesterday, and she was out. Then she turned up at your old precinct. Okay, I’m easy to get along with. I gave her an hour to get back and called again. I got her editor. He said she was working on it and would call me. Still no call. You get the idea she’s hiding something?”
“Yeah, but it’s hard to tell if it’s anything important. Her editor is an old hand at this. He may want some leverage.”
“Possible.”
“Look, she called me when she got spooked. If I play along, she might talk or at least come clean on what her editor wants. Maybe we can throw them a bone.”
Carter appeared to weigh this and nodded. “See what you can get, but don’t waste too much time. Rich pop or not, we can haul her in for questioning. What else you working on?”
“I want to go back to the old neighborhood, see if anyone knows where Nell Murphy is. She hasn’t lived there in a long time, but it’s worth a shot.”
Carter shook his head and jammed his cigarette out in the ashtray. “The reading of the will is Monday. With what she’s got coming, I’m betting she’ll turn up then.”
Sean knew Carter was under terrific pressure to produce an indictable suspect. This case could make or break his career. No doubt that was the reason he remained so fixated on the least complicated suspect of the bunch, Big Nose Benny. It also explained why he was so reluctant to divert resources toward locating the widow.
Sean threw out his last card. “Sure, but if she doesn’t turn up, her whereabouts will suddenly be big news. Is the chief going to like those headlines?”
Sean could tell by the subtle change in Carter’s expression that he’d struck pay dirt. He pushed back from the table sharply and stood. “Okay, sure. Take the day. While you’re at it, see if you can get a line on Johnny’s brother, Egan. His last address was in Liverpool, but our sources there came up empty. The guy’s a seaman, moves around a lot.”
“Right.” Sean stood too. He didn’t like to admit it, but Carter had thought of a detail that hadn’t occurred to him. He hadn’t thought about Egan Murphy in years.
“And take a patrol car,” Carter added as Sean moved for the door. “Call in every few hours. I may need to pull you off.”
“You bet.” As Sean closed the briefing room door, he let out a sigh. All in all, he’d gotten what he wanted. Autonomy for one more day. He would use that time to start looking for Nell and the boy. It was time to go meet Trixie Frank.
* * *
A cold drizzle fell as Trixie and Sean walked down Broadway as far as 55th Street. In a few hours, the theaters would open for their weekend matinees, piano music would mingle with the calls of pushcart vendors, and the crowds would thicken. For now, though, the dance halls, cabarets, lobster palaces and gewgaw shops were closed, and only a thin stream of pedestrians moved along the sidewalks.
Sean savored the slower pace. It had been so long since he’d worked an early shift, he’d a
lmost forgotten what a weekend morning in this part of town looked like.
“I have a good feeling about this,” Trixie said brightly. Despite a hint of sleepless shadows beneath her eyes, she was chipper and flushed with nervous excitement. It made Sean squint just to look at her. “Golly, I know the odds are against us, but it feels like Danny’s close, like he’s just around the corner...you know?”
Sean didn’t reply. There was no need to. She hadn’t stopped bumping her gums since they’d left the McClintock Building.
“Sometimes I think I must have a sixth sense. I can’t tell you how many times it’s paid off. Call it a woman’s intuition or a newshound’s instincts...”
Sean was no longer listening. He was planning his search strategy for the day. He would concentrate on the south end of Hell’s Kitchen. It was the area he knew best, and it was the neighborhood where he, Nell and Johnny had grown up.
It was also pretty rough.
He figured the lovely but naïve Miss Frank might last maybe two hours before he’d have to call a cab to take her back uptown to her cushy newspaper office.
“You don’t like me much, do you, Detective?” she posed lightly.
It took a few seconds for him to realize she required an answer. She was looking at him, eyes all bright and shining with amused curiosity. “I don’t know you well enough to like you or dislike you, Miss Frank.”
“That’s true. You don’t, but you think you do. You know who my father is, don’t you?”
He should have seen this coming. Was he supposed to be so impressed with her pedigree that he would agree to be her source? Or would she throw in a bribe?
But she didn’t offer a bribe. She skipped right over that sore spot only to sail blithely on to the next. “And you mentioned yesterday that you read some of those articles that I wrote for the Eagle.”
She was right. He’d read several. It was less than a year earlier that Trixie had reported on the exploits of the Brooklyn Bobbed Bandit, Cynthia Koons.
Cynthia was a young shop girl and newly married when she and her husband decided to rob their first grocery store. Trixie had not only reported on the girl bandit’s exploits but opined on the inability of the Brooklyn police to apprehend one petite “bob-haired gun girl.” It was an angle that had been snapped up by other newspapers in the five boroughs.
That winter, the pistol-packing newlyweds brazenly pulled off several more robberies. They even sent taunting notes to the police. By spring, their luck ran out, but not before the NYPD took a massive beating in the press.
Like every other cop in the city, Sean had not been amused. Enough time had passed, though, that he was able to temper his response to her question. “Making monkeys out of the cops may sell papers, but it kills respect. It makes it tougher to do our jobs.”
“Hmmmmm. So, you’re saying then that the police are above reproach and should never be questioned or criticized?”
Score one. Sean bit back a less than diplomatic retort involving sleazy tabloid reporters. Luckily, by then, they’d reached his parked radio car.
Trixie exclaimed in delight in a way that Sean had never seen a female gush over an automobile. She asked to drive, he refused, she asked again, he refused, she pouted, he refused, and within five minutes, they’d joined traffic heading south on Broadway.
“I think you should get more sleep,” she said when they’d traveled a block listening only to the crackle of static over the police radio. “You’re very cranky in the morning. I noticed that yesterday.”
“You have that sketch of the kid?”
Trixie opened her purse and handed it to him. Tousled blond hair, pug nose, a scattering of freckles. The artist was talented, able to capture a glint of mischief in the boy’s eyes, but he’d still worked only from a verbal description.
“What do you think?” Sean asked, handing the sketch back. “Is it him, or is it just close?”
“Close. It should give people a good idea.”
Sean throttled down and braked at a traffic light on Times Square. When the light turned, he took West 42nd past the Ziegfeld Follies and Republic Theatre to find an auto park near their first stop, Bickford’s.
The popular cafeteria served good food cheap and thus catered to a wide variety of clientele, businessmen, dockworkers, tourists, bootleggers, showgirls and everything in between. However, it wasn’t the food that interested Sean today. It was information. The day manager, Joey MacDermott, had grown up with Sean in the old neighborhood and still called it home.
Within ten minutes, Sean had found a parking space and they were inside the eatery, working their way through the serving line.
“So, what’s your pleasure today, sheik? Scrambled? Sunny-side up? Me?”
The attractive brunette behind the counter stood with a serving spoon in hand, wearing a come-on smile. Her name was Mabel. New on the morning shift. Spectacular breasts, tiny waist, easy on the eyes. She’d been flirting with Sean for a couple weeks now.
He flashed a smile. It probably wouldn’t kill him to ask her out one of these—
Trixie piped up, teasing. “Sheik?”
Sean lost the smile. She stood so close to him in line that he could detect a hint of that damnable rose-scented perfume mingling with every other aroma in the room, eggs, sausage, bacon, snippy sarcasm.
He made like he hadn’t heard. “Uh, that sounds swell, Mabel, but no time. Is Joey on today?”
“Sure, he’s in back.”
Sean moved his tray down the line, grabbing a pair of warm blueberry muffins from a pastry rack and adding them to a coffee order for two before he paid the cashier.
They found an empty table near the back. He motioned to a busboy. “Bobby, go find your boss, will you?”
The kid caught the quarter Sean flipped his way. “Sure thing, Detective.”
By the time Sean took his seat across from Trixie, he’d decided that it was the best time to broach the subject of last night. If things got sticky, he could handle it. And besides, Joey would be out soon enough.
He kept his tone casual as he took a sip of his coffee. “So, you manage to get any sleep last night?”
Trixie added a teaspoon of sugar to her own cup and stirred. “Not much. Did you come up with any ideas about who’s so curious about me?”
“Maybe.”
She stopped stirring. “Really? Who?”
Sean was still debating over how much to tell her. He didn’t want her to be frightened, but he didn’t trust her either. “Let’s just say, they won’t be back.”
Her gaze sharpened and she leaned forward, suddenly all girl reporter. “How can you know that?”
“I just know it.”
“How? Why? Are they locked up? Who was it?”
Crap. He was making a mess of this. “Yeah, they’re locked up.”
“That’s a fib.”
Sean looked past her shoulder toward the door to the kitchen. No Joey. What the hell was taking him so long? “Fine, think what you want. I’m not at liberty to say one way or the other.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s confidential police business.”
“Confidential police business my patootie. It wasn’t your undies in the icebox. Besides, I thought we were partners.”
“Sorry, kid.”
“Spill it, Detective. Is there a story here?”
Sean squinted at her from across the table. She was a beautiful girl, no getting around it, but he felt like he’d just been sucker punched about six times in the head. All of them delivered by a flyweight, no less. It was humbling.
Too late to do much more than scrape Sean off the floor, the kitchen door finally opened and Joey MacDermott emerged. Short, wiry and scrappy as a junkyard dog, he wore a soiled apron, plaid bowtie, rolled up shirtsleeves a
nd a spanking-white cook’s cap tipped to a jaunty angle.
Sean met Trixie’s expectant gaze head on. “Trust me, kid. You’re safe to sleep in your own bed tonight.”
“But—”
“Hey, Costigan! You dirty rat bastard!”
Trixie’s frown changed to surprise at hearing Joey’s boisterous greeting. She turned to take stock of their new arrival and flashed a smile when Sean’s old pal let out a wolf whistle that turned heads.
“Say there, Costigan, it looks like you’re hanging with a better class of dame these days.” Joey winked at Trixie. “Welcome to Bickford’s, doll. They call me Joey Mack.”
Sean absorbed his old pal’s ribbing in good humor and served a dose back. “Trixie Frank, meet Joey MacDermott, the meanest, ugliest company cook ever to serve in the Fighting 69th. They say he killed more doughboys than the Germans and influenza combined.”
“An overstatement,” Joey said. “Me and the Germans called it a gentleman’s draw by Armistice Day.” He grinned at Trixie, who laughed. “So, what can I do you for, gorgeous? I’m a man of many talents. Not only do I cook, I dance, I sing, I even play the flute.”
“You can put out the fire, Don Juan,” Sean said. “Miss Frank is a reporter. She’s got a picture for you.”
Trixie pulled the sketch from her purse and handed it to Joey.
“You know this kid?” Sean asked.
“Yeah, yeah. I seen him around. Davey... Nah, Danny, that’s it.”
“You know how to find him?”
“Nah, he only started turning up last spring. He shows up sometimes begging for scraps or with change in his pocket. Panhandles over on Times Square.”
Trixie’s smile at Joey’s earlier antics faded. “Where does he sleep?”
“Don’t know. Some of the girls asked but he won’t say. One time they called an agent from the Children’s Society to come in for breakfast in case the kid showed. He showed, all right, but as soon as he got a load of that dame, he skinned out like a pack of devil dogs was after him.”