It Had to Be You

by Delynn Royer

  Danny’s attention flagged when they started the second book. “How many more?”

  Sean gave Trixie a look over Danny’s head that told her their prospects were dwindling. “Just a few more. You’re doing real good, kid.”

  “Can I see my surprise?”

  “Soon.”

  When Sean closed the second book, it was still without a sign of recognition from the boy. “Now?” Danny asked.

  Sean smiled faintly. “Sure.”

  Trixie waited as Sean pulled the last item from the paper sack. It was a Tinkertoy set.

  Danny took the red, white and blue tube, opened the lid and peered inside. “What do I do with this?”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  Intrigued, Danny sat on the floor and spilled out a plethora of spools, sticks, cardboard propellers, and an instruction booklet. “Fun alive,” he whispered, and, like so many kids before him, instinctively began to fit the pieces together.

  Sean watched Danny as he played, but he said nothing. His expression was clouded, his thoughts elsewhere.

  Although she was still miffed at him, Trixie was curious enough to put aside her pride. “You were expecting him to recognize one of them, weren’t you?”

  “I don’t know what I was expecting, but he just looked at most of the thugs I know who might have done a job like this, either for revenge or for hire. There were even a few who worked for Johnny.”

  Trixie’s interest was piqued. “You think one of Johnny’s own men might have betrayed him?”

  “Not the birds in this book anyway, and that includes Arnie Cavanaugh.”

  Trixie knew Arnie had been John Murphy’s driver and bodyguard. “So where does this leave the police department’s case?”

  Sean gave her a sharp look. “Off the record?”

  It was all Trixie could do not to scowl. If she needed any more proof that their kiss had meant nothing to him, his continued distrust of her good judgment cinched it. “Say that to me one more time, Detective, and I’m going to sock you right in the schnozzle.”

  He cracked a smile. “Now, that would be interesting.”

  “Oh, I’m tougher than I look, and smarter too. Here’s my guess. This could set the department’s investigation back to square one. Am I right?”

  Sean looked like he was about to deny, but then changed his mind and stood. “It’s late. I gotta pick up Nell in an hour. Any chance I can talk you out of going to this thing tonight?”

  Trixie refused to indulge a stab of irritation at the mention of Nell’s name. “Nope.”

  “Thought not.” Sean donned his hat. “Do me a favor, kid. There’s a guy parked across the street in an old tin lizzy. He’s got a face only a mother could love. His name is Moe. Let him walk you to the train station.”

  Trixie’s curiosity stirred. “Why?”

  “Then take a cab home.” Sean reached for his coat. “By the time you get here, there’ll be another guy, uglier than the first. If you need anything—”

  “I don’t understand.” Trixie refused to be put off. “Who are they?”

  “A couple of pals from the gym. Stay alert tonight. Be aware of who’s around you and don’t go anywhere alone. Nowhere.” He paused, took a step toward her and touched her cheek. “Not so much as the ladies’ room. I mean it.”

  He was serious. Trixie had to sort through a fruitless jumble of thoughts when he touched her. The memory of his lips pressed against hers, his hands sliding down over her—Stop. She was being a fool. Sean acted like he expected some harm to come to her. She could read the concern in his eyes. But that was ridiculous. Wasn’t it?

  “You never told me who broke into my apartment,” she reminded him. “Should I be worried?”

  At first, Sean said nothing. Then, he dropped his hand away and stepped back. “Cops.”

  “Cops?” she echoed. Cops? She was too surprised to think past the word much less the image. Fidelis ad Mortem and all that. “Why?”

  Sean picked up the mug shot books and tucked them under one arm. “They thought you were hiding something. Now you’ve come clean, so you shouldn’t be getting any more unannounced visits.”

  “But— Are you sure? Isn’t that against the law?”

  Sean gave her a flat look and she knew she was being naïve. “You asked. I told you. Just keep it under your hat. You should feel better now that you know your visitor won’t be back.”

  Better? Trixie wasn’t sure what she was feeling. Safer maybe, at least from physical harm at the hands of some shady criminal intruder, but...better? Not by a long shot.

  “Just because you got nothing to worry about from the cops doesn’t mean you can let your guard down.” Sean moved for the door. “There’ll be a lot of nasty characters there tonight. Just remember what I said.”

  Trixie stared after him when he left. How could she forget?

  * * *

  Trixie figured Finn was uncomfortable with the idea of women drivers. Why else would he turn down an opportunity to take Julius’s coupe to the Murphy wake rather than the trolley?

  “I think you should let me teach you how to drive,” Trixie said as they stepped down off the trolley in the 700 block of Madison Avenue. “If you knew how easy it is, you wouldn’t be such a ‘fraidy cat.”

  Finn gave her a rueful look as he stepped off after her, shifting the weight of his plate-case and turning his coat collar up against a gust of wind. He’d dressed warmly if not elegantly in a thick wool coat, a scarf knitted by his mother, and a pair of fuzzy earmuffs that made him look like a giant Cocker Spaniel.

  Trixie knew that Danny would be well cared for by Mrs. L and she’d also met the fellow Sean had posted outside to watch over them. Moe Rothstein was an ex-boxer who worked as a desk clerk at Sean’s residential hotel. She’d liked him immediately and was now free to concentrate on her assignment.

  Leaving it to Finn to catch up, she walked briskly toward a building half a block north where a marquee sign read Campbell’s Funeral Church. Twilight was setting in and there were few pedestrians about. If she wasn’t mistaken, the pair of walkers up ahead was a reporter and camera man from the Daily Mirror.

  “We gotta make it snappy,” she said as Finn fell into step beside her. “That’s Jasper Cunningham and his camera, ‘Lucky Shot’ Gordon.”

  “Lucky Shot,” Finn muttered. “What a wise guy. I’m as good a camera as he is.”

  Finn was right about Lucky Shot, and Trixie had heard enough about Cunningham to know that the two made a formidable pair. They’d been known to do just about anything to get a good scoop. Lying, sneaking, bribery. And now they were on the Murphy story. Nuts. “We’re over an hour early and they’re already beating us to the punch,” she said.

  They stepped up their pace, but Cunningham and Gordon still reached the funeral church ahead of them. Trixie halted as she spotted a patrolman outside the entrance and put up a hand to stop Finn. She gestured to the deserted front of a haberdashery store two doors down. “Let’s see how they do.”

  “Jumping Jehosaphat, it’s cold.” Finn pulled mittens from his coat pockets.

  Trixie watched Cunningham pass by the patrolman with a jaunty wave. He tried his luck with the front door, which was apparently locked, then rang a bell. The door opened and Cunningham began speaking and gesturing.

  Trixie edged closer to the funeral church until she was able to eavesdrop. The funeral director’s chilly formal tone reminded her of her father’s butler.

  “...our apologies, sir, but this is a private gathering for close friends and family. If you’re not on the list, I’m afraid you can’t be admitted.”

  “But no one’s here yet,” Cunningham insisted. “Come on, old boy. Just a few shots of the casket and we’ll scram. We can make it worth your while.”

  “I’m sorry
, sir.” The director tried to close the door, but Cunningham inserted his foot in the threshold. The patrolman moved toward the commotion and Trixie scooted back to Finn.

  “Immune to bribery,” she said grimly. It appeared that the fifty dollars from petty cash that Julius had given her would not be greasing any wheels tonight.

  “Figures,” Finn said. “We’ll be stuck out here till people start to arrive. There’s not so much as a coffee shop open. We’re going to freeze our arses off.”

  “That’s not the worst of it. They have a list.”

  With his bulky camera and plate case, Finn was obviously press, but Trixie had come dressed for the occasion in a dark coat over a black dress. She’d even borrowed a hat with a partial veil from her neighbor. The hat was now tucked inside her purse along with her press card.

  She’d hoped to wait until friends and family began to arrive, then join the procession. The plan was to blend in with the other mourners long enough to get a view of the casket and the guests. However, if there was a guest list, that idea was scrapped. Now what?

  “So, who’s on the list?” Finn asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Who’s on the list?”

  “How do I know?”

  “You’ve been following this story like a blood hound, haven’t you? What’s your guess?”

  Trixie gave this some thought. “Johnny’s wife is lying low, so Lenore Stewart and Arnie Cavanaugh planned the wake.”

  “Then Lenore is on the list,” Finn said.

  “Yes, obviously.”

  “But the director already knows her.”

  “Right.” Trixie began to warm to the subject. “So who else would Lenore invite?”

  “She got a sister? Any friends?”

  “What about the girls she works with?”

  Finn gave her a goofy grin. “All them showgirls, you mean.”

  Trixie closed her eyes, trying to think of some of the names on Ziegfeld’s show bill. Some were better known than others. They might be recognizable even to a funeral director, but there were plenty who were less known, ingénues who had just made the grade. Trixie smiled. “Eunice Gibson. She’s low-profile, doesn’t make the gossip columns.”

  “You think she’s friends with Lenore?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s worth a shot.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  Trixie glanced in the direction of the funeral church, still deserted except for the Mirror’s boys. Cunningham was now arguing with the patrolman, who held him firmly by the collar. She didn’t want to call attention to herself by arriving too early. Better to wait until some mourners arrived to make her move.

  “Now,” she said, “we wait.”

  * * *

  Sean took his own sedan to pick up Nell at the apartment building where she was staying with an old school chum on Ninth Avenue. That morning, when Nell had given him the woman’s maiden name, Elizabeth O’Malley, he’d remembered the days when Elizabeth and Nell had been inseparable. He’d forgotten about Elizabeth and berated himself for not thinking of her when Nell had first gone missing.

  “It’s just ahead, one more block,” Nell said. She sounded anxious.

  Sean glanced at her, noting the plush fur collar of her coat, the black hat with its veil turned up to reveal in profile the sculpted curve of her cheekbones. Mascara enhanced her eyelashes and a vivid shade of red drew attention to her mouth. She looked as ravishing as any screen siren. The comparison was particularly apropos since he’d had the feeling ever since picking her up that she was preparing for some kind of performance.

  They could see the crowd outside the funeral church long before the sign came into view, and the occasional flash of a photographer’s camera confirmed the presence of the press. This did not make Sean happy. He couldn’t drop Nell off in front to go unescorted through that crowd and neither did he want to park too far down the street, leaving them open for a long walk through a gauntlet of press. “I’m going to circle around and see if there’s some way in from the back,” he said.

  Nell balked. “I don’t want to go in the back.”

  “It’s not safe to go in the front.”

  “I don’t care. I’m his wife. I have to be seen or it’ll look like I’m unfeeling or I’m too spooked to be in public.”

  “You are too spooked to be in public,” Sean reminded her. They were approaching the funeral church. “Turn your head,” he ordered and she obeyed as they neared the crowd.

  There might have been as many as a hundred people jamming up the entrance, many of them just curiosity seekers, jostling for a good view of some of the more notorious mourners as they arrived. Was Trixie out in that mess calling attention to herself? Of course she was, and it made Sean wish he could lock her up for her own good, but there was nothing he could do about her now. His immediate problem was Nell.

  “I’m not afraid as long as I’m with you,” Nell said, letting out a breath as they swept past the worst of the crowd.

  “That’s nice but I’m not bullet proof.”

  “Please, Sean.”

  “Nope.”

  “Then I won’t go in.”

  “Fine.” Sean was losing his patience. “We can go straight down to headquarters.”

  “I won’t cooperate.”

  Sean gritted his teeth. “Nell—”

  “Please, Sean. Just let me do this one thing. If we don’t go in the front, it’ll be all over the papers tomorrow that I didn’t show up, that I don’t care, that I’m an unfeeling—”

  “Why is this so damn important to you?”

  “I can’t explain it, and you can’t understand unless you’ve had horrible lies about you splashed all over the papers.”

  Sean’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. The sheets? That’s what she cared about in all this mess? Gossip? But her tone was earnest and pleading.

  “Please, I’ll do anything you want. We’ll go down to headquarters, I’ll answer all their questions, I’ll make sure you get the credit for finding me—”

  “Ah, hell.”

  “Up there.” She jabbed a scarlet fingernail at an open parking space along the curb ahead of them.

  “Damn it,” Sean muttered, but he acquiesced, slowing the sedan to a crawl and then letting out the clutch to back in.

  When he shut off the engine, he looked at her hard in the shadowed interior of the closed sedan. She’d pulled a rosary from her handbag. “All right, we’ll do it your way, but the rules are that you do everything I say. If I tell you to turn, you turn, if I tell you to duck, you duck. If I tell you to run, you run. Do not let go of my arm and do not stop moving ahead. No comments for the press. I don’t care what they shout at you. Understand?”

  For the first time since he’d picked her up, some of the tension that he’d sensed building inside of her seemed to relent. The ghost of a smile played at the corners of her lips as she adjusted her veil to hide her eyes. “Yes.”

  Sean refused to relax. His worries were just beginning. “Let’s go.”

  They were almost a block away from the spectacle, and for several minutes as they approached on the deserted sidewalk, no one seemed to notice them. Nell said nothing, but Sean could sense her nerves winding tight again. Her grip on his arm was fierce.

  When they drew near, a flashy Packard Phaeton pulled up, drawing the crowd’s attention. A driver alighted and Nell tugged back on Sean’s arm to stop him.

  “Bugs Doolin,” she said when the passenger stepped out. “What a thug. Who invited him?”

  A thug? Who did she expect would show up? The Sisters of Charity? Bugs Doolin was a thug, all right, one with an entertaining rap sheet. Rumor had it he was lately occupied with hijacking booze shipments for one of Johnny’s uptown competitors.

  A tall redhead
emerged from the automobile after Bugs, causing an audible stir among the male press corps. Flashbulbs popped and sizzled as the two made their way to the funeral church entrance.

  “I guess his wife’s at home knitting,” Nell said wryly. When Bugs and his statuesque tomato had cleared the entrance, she tugged again on Sean’s arm. “Now.”

  As soon as they started forward, a spectator spotted them. “It’s Nell Murphy!”

  That was all it took. The crowd converged as one in their direction. A dozen reporters pelted questions. Photographers scrambled to run and load new plates at the same time. Sean scanned what he could of the raucous crowd for Trixie, but the series of flashes that followed almost blinded him. Pop! Chink! Pop! Chink!

  Hell. He’d been involved in sensationalized cases before. He knew better than to look at the cameras.

  He bent his head and cursed the black splotches and clouds of magnesium powder that obscured his vision. The crush of bodies that closed in around them was suffocating. It was precisely this kind of noisy, pushing crowd that served as ideal cover for someone waiting to pull a concealed weapon.

  Knowing they had to keep moving, Sean placed his hand over Nell’s and pushed ahead through the crowd.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Nell! Where ya been?”

  “Who’s your new fella?”

  “When was the last time you saw Johnny alive?”

  The crowd had parted for Bugs to pass through, but their appetite for Nell was insatiable. Sean was having a hard time pushing through the mob without letting go of Nell.

  Finally, two patrolmen waving nightsticks waded into the melee. “All right, fellas! Break it up. Let ’em pass.”

  Reporters continued to shout their questions, but there was now an opening in the crowd ahead. Sean took it, pulling Nell through the gauntlet in seconds. When they reached the funeral church, Sean pounded on the door, released Nell, then stepped behind her to shield her back.

  An older man dressed in an elegant black suit stood in the doorway. He was safe from the fray but clearly horrified at the uproar. He admitted Nell and Sean and swept the door closed behind them, muffling the noise from the street. “Unconscionable. No respect for the deceased.”