by Delynn Royer
“Did you see him today?” Sean asked.
“Nope. Try the square or the train station when it gets busy. Maybe that burly joint down on the corner. They let kids in for the night if they sweep up after the shows.” Joey handed the sketch back to Trixie. “Sorry I can’t be more help.”
“Maybe you still can,” Sean said. “What’s the dope on Nell?”
Joey’s eyebrows shot up. “Nell?”
“You hard of hearing?”
“She ain’t been around here for years, you know that.”
“Uh huh.” Joey looked innocent enough—“looked” being the operative word. Sean took a last swallow from his coffee cup. “And Egan too?”
“Johnny’s brother? Last I heard he was quit of the Merchant Marines and living somewheres over in England.”
“Funny, that’s what I heard too.” Sean inclined his head toward Trixie. “You done?”
* * *
Trixie nodded. She still had half her coffee, but she didn’t care about that now. Her reporter’s instincts were stirring. Who was Nell?
Sean stood. “Do me a favor, Mack. If Danny shows, keep him here. Feed him a side of beef if you have to. We’ll check back later. And keep your ears open for news of Nell. I just want to be sure she’s safe.”
That name—Nell—suddenly clicked and Trixie knew who Costigan was looking for. John Murphy’s wife.
“Sure thing, Sean.” Joey gave Trixie a parting wink. “Come back again, doll, only next time, lose the dead weight, huh?”
Trixie winked back. “Sure thing, sheik.”
She waited impatiently as Costigan got their coats. Naturally, she had familiarized herself with Murphy’s history. The Examiner’s crime reporters were her best sources. The gossip columnist had come in a close second. Johnny had grown up in Hell’s Kitchen before amassing a fortune from his illegal pursuits. There had been stories about his beautiful wife too, about their volatile relationship, his infidelity, their public quarrels and reconciliations. Johnny Blue Eyes had earned his underworld nickname for good reason. It was said that no woman he ever pursued was able to resist his charm and good looks. That might have been true until two years before when his wife finally got fed up and left him for good.
Rumor had it that Johnny had never gotten over Nell, but maybe that was a two-way street—neither had taken the final step of filing for divorce. At least, not until a month ago. It was Johnny who had filed, supposedly to clear the way to marry his latest flame, a Ziegfeld girl, but there were many who believed the lovely hoofer was just a flash in the pan and that the divorce would never have been finalized.
It was all Trixie could do to contain herself until they stepped outside. “You didn’t tell me you were looking for Nell Murphy. Johnny’s wife, right? So, does that mean she grew up around here too?”
Nowhere in her research did Trixie recall any mention that Nell Murphy was from Johnny’s old neighborhood, but it made sense. She and Johnny had been married for fourteen years. Had they been childhood sweethearts?
It was an angle that would interest female readers.
Sean ignored her questions. He headed west, moving at such a brisk pace that she had to trot to keep up.
“So, let me get this straight,” she continued. “Johnny and Nell grew up here and so did you, and you’re all about the same age. Did you know them both?”
“You assume a lot,” he said curtly.
She wouldn’t let him put her off. This was too good. “Do you think she’s hiding out? I certainly would be if my gangster husband just got bonked.”
Sean gave her an annoyed look. “Bonked?”
“They said her apartment was ransacked. Someone was searching for something. Do you think she knew too much? Johnny’s wake is tomorrow night. If she doesn’t show up, then she probably got bonked too.”
Sean stopped so abruptly, Trixie almost tripped over her own feet. He pointed a finger at her nose. “If you print so much as one word of that baloney, I’ll have your pretty keister in a sling. You understand me?”
She’d struck a nerve. He didn’t like talking about Nell Murphy. Why? Trixie grinned. “You think my keister is pretty?”
“It won’t be when I get through with it.”
She was too jazzed up to pretend to be chastised. “You may be a big scary policeman, but that’s not why I wouldn’t go to print without telling you first.”
He started walking again, eating up the cracked pavement with his long strides. Trixie followed gamely. “I’ll tell you why. It’s because you’re my source. You’re my bread and butter. You’re my ticket out of—” She almost said “rewrites.” She shut her mouth instead.
They stopped to wait at the corner of 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue to cross. Sean spared Trixie a glance. “And you are a pain in my—”
“Ah. I warn you now. In my business, we take that as a compliment.”
At the first break in traffic, Costigan moved, resuming his breakneck pace across the street. She should have worn shoes with no heels, but she figured her discomfort and his annoyance with her were well worth the trouble. Thanks to him, she was finally onto something juicy. What an angle. Her editor would eat it up.
Chapter Seven
Trixie let the subject of Nell Murphy drop as they stopped at the burlesque house that Joey mentioned. The show bills tacked up under dirt-streaked glass featured fleshy, generously endowed young women dressed in stockings, garters and what looked like a dozen giant ostrich feathers and half as many bath bubbles. HURLY BURLY GURLYS! The place wasn’t yet open for business, but a bleary-eyed proprietor cracked open the door in response to Sean’s pounding.
Trixie showed him the sketch of Danny. The man squinted around a curl of cigarette smoke. Sure, he knew Danny. He let the kid in to sweep up some nights, but not lately. Sean left a card with his number at the Alhambra Hotel scrawled in pencil.
“My instincts are right,” Trixie said as they left. “Danny’s here. He’s close. I can feel it.”
Sean adjusted his fedora. The rain had let up, but the sky remained an angry gray. The wind coming off the river was icy. “Just one step ahead of us, huh?”
“Yes, but we’re bigger and smarter than he is. This will be duck soup. How hard can a ten-year-old be to find?”
She should have known better than to ask.
As they moved west toward the river, Trixie’s buoyant spirits began to deflate along with the character of their surroundings. There were fewer shops, restaurants and theaters and more warehouses, factories and tenements. For the next hour, they worked their way slowly down 42nd Street to Ninth Avenue.
This was a part of the city that had been up since dawn and going about its clamorous, messy business of life. More women than men were out sweeping the stoops, shop fronts and sidewalks. The men, Sean told her, worked mostly on the docks or for the railroad. On this Saturday morning, children of all ages were out in the streets.
Sean and Trixie stopped at a dilapidated candy store where Trixie became uncomfortably aware of three brawny men lurking in the corners. Costigan spoke with the middle-aged owner behind the counter, a man he called “Moose.” Mr. Moose acknowledged that he’d seen Danny, but when Sean asked about Nell Murphy, he looked convincingly blank and shook his head.
When they emerged from the store and were out of earshot of yet another tough-looking character who loitered near the storefront, Trixie spoke. “What were those men doing in a candy store at this time of the morning?”
Costigan looked at her like she was an idiot. “That’s not a candy store.”
“But the sign says—”
“It’s a bookmaking joint.”
“Oh.” Trixie absorbed this with a certain sense of disillusion, though she tried not to let on. Likewise, when they entered a cab company next and descended a se
t of rickety stairs to the basement where Costigan banged hard and long on a padlocked door, she shouldn’t have been surprised when it finally opened to reveal an underground speakeasy that bore little resemblance to the tony cabarets off Broadway.
Wall sconces with etched glass globes cast more shadows than light over an antique bar. A dozen empty tables draped with dingy red-checked tablecloths formed a horseshoe around an empty dance floor and stage. The air reeked of mold and stale tobacco smoke but there wasn’t a drop of liquor in sight.
Except for a scowling barkeep with a broom, the place was deserted.
That interview went much differently from those that preceded it. The barkeep, who Costigan addressed as Whitey, was clearly not fond of cops but he could do little more than sneer and swagger. Like any dispenser of illegal spirits, he was dependent on the tolerance of the police to conduct his business.
Costigan was impressively intimidating. He asked about Nell Murphy and then accused Whitey of lying when the man denied any knowledge. Not that the accusation produced anything useful. Sweating bullets, Whitey reiterated his ignorance and Costigan abruptly backed off.
“You think he’s lying?” Trixie asked as they climbed the steps back up to the cab company.
“Of course he’s lying.” Sean unwrapped a stick of gum and popped it into his mouth. “They’re all lying.”
“Who? You mean Moose too?”
“Sure. And Joey.” He offered her a stick.
She shook her head. “But Joey’s your pal.”
“Yeah, but he’s no snitch. Joey doesn’t know exactly where she is, and I doubt Moose does either, but they both hear things. There aren’t many secrets in this part of town.”
“A fat lot of good that does you. That fellow, Whitey, why bother to ask him questions if you know he won’t talk?”
“He’s got a big mouth. The news that I’m looking for Nell will be out within the hour. We’ll see what shakes loose.”
The sky darkened as they continued down Ninth Avenue as far as 39th Street to canvass the area called Paddy’s Market. Here, scores of Irish and Italian housewives haggled with food peddlers of all nationalities as the Ninth Avenue El roared past three stories overhead, showering the cobbled street with soot and burning cinders.
Costigan and Trixie questioned pushcart vendors as well as the grubby-faced children who darted among the carts, scrambling for every dropped potato, head of cabbage, or rotten tomato. It was here, seeing so many of the children dressed in little more than rags for coats, that Trixie’s heart constricted.
This was Danny’s world.
The children were reluctant to talk at first, but they were amenable to the coins Costigan offered. Their stories were similar. They knew Danny, but they didn’t know where he slept. Danny bragged that he’d traveled to faraway places by train and he often splurged on subway rides to Coney Island.
It was from one of the Italian pushcart vendors that they gleaned their first useful lead. “Yeah, yeah, I remember that kid. He come with his mamma and baby sister. Long time ago. The mamma, she died. Is too bad. Didn’t see the boy for a long time, then he come back around. Sticky fingers.”
“Where did they live?” Sean asked.
“Eh.” The man shook his head and waved them off before turning away to squabble with a customer. “Don’t know. Check the butcher shop on the corner. The mamma, she go there.”
As it turned out, a lot of mammas went there. Trixie had never seen so many pregnant women in one place. She and Sean waded through a thick crowd of them who were awaiting their turn at the butcher counter. Only one customer proved helpful, a slim young mother barely out of her teens who held a plump and squirming infant perched on one hip and a whining toddler boy by the hand.
“Sure,” the girl said, unsmiling but friendly enough considering she looked like she hadn’t slept since giving birth the first time. “That’s Maggie O’Roarke’s boy. He’s grown, but that’s him. I’d swear it.”
“How do you know him?” Sean asked.
“Our families shared rooms. I looked after my brothers while our ma worked at the soap factory. Maggie worked there too, so I took care of Danny and Leah. Smart as a whip, that little Danny. When he was four, he knew his sign of the cross, his ‘Glory Be,’ and his ‘Hail Mary.’”
“Have you seen Danny around lately?”
The girl let go of her little boy only long enough to shift the baby to her other hip. “No, how could I? Those kids went to the orphanage after Maggie died.”
“Which orphanage?” Sean pressed.
She shrugged before losing patience with the freckled offspring that howled and yanked at her skirt. “Ah, begod! Stop it now!”
“What about the father?” Trixie cut in, seeing they were about to lose the girl’s attention.
“Gone.”
“And no other family?” Trixie asked.
The young woman shook her head and suggested they talk to one of the priests at Holy Cross Church. Trixie took down her name, address, and an address in 38th Street where Maggie had last lived with her two small children.
By the time Sean and Trixie left the butcher shop, the wind had shifted, bringing with it the fetid odor of the slaughterhouses. The thick gray clouds that hung over Manhattan began to leak again in a slow relentless patter.
How hard could it be to find a ten-year-old boy?
As they continued doggedly south another block, Trixie was beginning to wish she’d never posed the question.
* * *
With his dark countenance and palpable air of barely suppressed violence, six-foot-two Detective Lou Grottano was not a man who could walk the streets of any neighborhood without attracting notice. Still, he had eighteen years on the job, and he knew how to shadow a suspect, mostly by keeping his distance. Of course, it also helped if the subject didn’t suspect that he was being tailed.
Today, as Lou meandered through Paddy’s Market with his coat collar turned up and the brim of his hat pulled low, he figured this was the case with Costigan. His fellow detective had no reason to take a good look behind him.
As his two subjects left the market area, Lou decided to report in. He stopped at a call box on Ninth Avenue and was put through to Carter immediately.
“Carter here.”
“It’s Lou.”
“What do you have?” Carter spoke in that South Boston accent that, even after partnering with him for two years, sometimes made Lou grit his teeth.
“He’s working Hell’s Kitchen like he said,” Lou reported, “but he’s got company.”
“Who?”
“Some dame.”
“What’s she look like?”
Lou pictured her. “Tasty.”
“And?”
He sighed. Carter never got his jokes. “Blondie redhead type, twenties, five-five.”
There was a pause. “It has to be Trixie Frank. What the hell’s he doing with her?”
Lou didn’t bother to respond. It was what Carter would have called “rhetorical,” and what Lou would have called “Who gives a crap?”
“They asking about Nell Murphy?” Carter continued.
“Yeah.” Lou had confirmed as much by chatting with some of the birds Costigan had talked to, in particular the saloon keeper at the speak in the basement of the cab company. Lou had never patrolled that neighborhood, and so the man didn’t recognize him. He’d been rude.
His surly attitude might have been because Lou was the second cop to visit him in one morning, but the reason was immaterial. Lou threw a punch to the guy’s gut that left him sprawled on the saw-dusted floor. He’d then promised to break one finger for each lie or evasion that followed. Thereafter the fellow proved to be a fountain of information.
“All right, this is no surprise,” Carter said. “We knew Cost
igan would be a pain in the ass. What we need to find out now is what he’s doing with Trixie Frank. What’s she got to do with Nell Murphy?”
“Maybe nothing,” Lou said. “They been showing around a picture of a kid, asking if anyone’s seen him.”
“What? What picture?”
“The kid’s name is Danny, street trash.”
Silence.
Carter was thinking. Lou had no great love for his partner, but they worked together in all the right ways. Carter had the finesse and political connections to get ahead, but he hated to get his hands dirty. Lou knew the streets and loved getting his hands dirty.
Finally, Carter spoke. “So maybe Costigan isn’t as interested in Nell Murphy as he is in this kid.”
“What do you want to do?” Lou was out of patience.
“Keep tailing them,” Carter said firmly. “If they split up, stay on her. She’s the key. Whatever they find, I want to know about it.”
Lou grunted his assent and hung up.
* * *
A steady drizzle continued to fall as Trixie and Costigan canvassed the stoops and shops along West 38th Street. It was a noisy Irish neighborhood where Sean was greeted often and warmly on sight. Not so, though, when they stopped at Maggie O’Roarke’s last address. They spoke to an unkempt, belching, cigar-puffing building superintendent who seemed to recall Maggie O’Roarke mainly for her “nice bubs.”
As the man waxed poetic over Maggie’s dual charms, his gaze slithered to Trixie, who was glad that she’d buttoned her coat up to her chin. He didn’t recall the two children and was otherwise extraordinarily unhelpful.
“Ugh,” Trixie muttered as they departed.
By the time they reached Tenth Avenue, her feet were screaming to be shot and she was all but huddled inside her wet coat, trying to ignore the frigid cold. After all, it should have been easy to dismiss her own discomfort amidst her bleak surroundings. Depressed tenement buildings loomed against the overcast sky on either side of the avenue. In the street, the Tenth Avenue train belched gray smoke as it huffed past on its northern circuit.
Trixie felt Costigan’s doubtful gaze on her when she stepped off the curb to go around a reeking pile of garbage and then hopped back up again to avoid a dead horse in the street. “Getting cold?” he asked. “Want me to find you a taxi?”