+J.M.J.+

My Funny Valentine

Or, St. Valentine's Day Massacre

By "Matrix Refugee"

Author's Note:

I have to mention this: I named one of the supporting characters in this in honor of my friend "Ruby Tuesday O'Neil", who I virtually met through the Yahoo! Group "AI_Fanfiction", and who gave me one of the most glowing reviews I've ever gotten for any fic, ever, for the prequel to this, so if you're reading this, yes, Ruby, I chose that name on purpose….and THANKS! The rating climbs a little, for a semi-attempted non-consensual intercourse bit that turns semi-consensual for just a moment. "Now what the heck does THAT mean?!" you're asking. Read on and find out….

Disclaimer:

See chapter I

II: Your Looks are Laughable, Unphotographable

As the sleep slowly retreated from Maguire's head the next morning, he detected an odd beat to the bangs and clunks from the radiator. He stuck his head out from under the bed-covers, feeling the cold on his face as he listened to the sounds: thumpety-thumpety-thumpety-thumpety-thump-thump ping-whizz-clonk…thumpety-thumpety-thumpety-thumpety-thump-thump ping-whizz-clonk…thumpety-thumpety-thumpety-thumpety-thump-thump ping-whizz-clonk…

That wasn't a radiator: that was a typewriter. But who in the building had a typewriter?

He crawled out from under the covers, pulled on his pants and shoved his feet into his shoes. He peered into the front room on his way to the bathroom, careful to keep out of sight. Bridie the intruder was still there, fully dressed, and clacking away on a small Royal portable typewriter she'd set up on one end of the table.

He went back to the bedroom to dress. The chill in the air tempted him to stay put for the day and keep warm, but if he hibernated, he'd risk missing a good shot. His rent was due and he hadn't had any special jobs from Nitti, so he couldn't fall back on that. Clean up jobs made more than his regular line of work, but he couldn't expect much of that since the Moran gang had shot at McGurn, Capone's third in command, some weeks back.

He got up from the edge of the bed and peered out the window that overlooked the alleyway. Snow fell steadily. Today was bound to bring some good shots: car accidents, mishaps with snow plows, who knew what else.

His resolve returned as his sluggish blood warmed in his veins.

Bridie was still typing when he passed through the front room, on his way out. She stopped and looked up.

"Good morning," she said.

"'Morning," he replied, a little absently. "You still hanging around?"

"Yeah, with it snowing like mad out there, I figured I'd wait for it to blow over. No sense getting myself stranded somewhere."

"You have breakfast already?" He wondered if he could bribe her to leave by getting her a meal, but decided that might backfire.

"Yeah, I found some eggs in the back of your icebox; I'll pay up before I leave."

"Nah, what's mine is yours," he said, not sure if he meant it.

Unless the weather was really bad, he rarely ate in: he couldn't stand his own cooking. Camera case in hand, he trudged along the snowy street to Cappy's Kitchen, a storefront restaurant a few streets over.

The snow had kept away all but the diehard regulars like himself and a few others, as he discovered when he went in. Ruby the waitress—small, dark hair, an almost Spanish look to her—sat at one end of the counter, reading a copy of True Crime, one of his photos on the cover.

He set his camera case on the floor and perched himself on one of the stools. "Hey, where's the service?" he demanded, pretending not to notice Ruby sitting one stool over.

She reached out and baffed his shoulder with the newspaper. "Storm didn't keep you away, camera-boy," she said, stepping behind the counter.

"It's either that or cook it myself, and I didn't feel like suicide on toast today."

"'Suicide on toast', you're a classic, mack. So what'll it be, the usual?"

"Might as well, so Cappy won't be busting his skull trying to remember it, or trying to figure out who the new guy is."

"You're full of it this morning," she said. In a peahen screech, she called through the kitchen window to the cook, "Hey, Cappy! Wrecked hen fruit with an oink!"

She took down a mug from the shelf behind the counter, filled the mug with coffee and set it in front of him. "So, you keepin' warm these cold nights?" she asked.

"Marginally," he replied, adding sugar to the coffee. "My landlord barely keeps the furnace lit, which doesn't make it any easier…Hey, mind if I ask you for a bit of advice?"

Her eye was on the sugar shaker in his hand. "I got one bit already, but you'll probably ignore it: I'd go easy on the sugar if I were you, or you might end up with that sugar disease."

"Not likely: I burn it up carrying my rig—or staying warm these days. Seriously…say you had an uninvited guest in your apartment and you wanted to get 'em out as quick as you could. What would you do to drive 'em out?"

"Funny you should ask that: Hank's aunt Sarah came to visit us at Christmas, and she decided to stay on into the New Year. Had to put up with her parakeet cheep voice well past Little Christmas and taking down the tree. I mean, even Hank got sick of having her around. We both asked her very, very nicely could she get the heck out of our apartment? But no, she starts whimpering about how Hank is her only nephew and she rarely gets to see him and she wants to be close to us when the baby comes—not that there's one coming, she just keeps pesting me about having a kid. So we both agreed to start pulling a few stunts to get her to leave. Hank asked the kid across the hallway to practice his violin more loudly than usual."

"Uh, oh, the landlord must have liked that!"

"His father IS the landlord, so he was in on it. That didn't do any good as far as getting Auntie Sarah to leave was concerned: she just stuffed cotton in her ears. Then Hank shut the water off in the kitchen sink so she couldn't make her tea. But what did she do? She just went and filled the kettle in the bathroom sink. But I came up with a loo-loo: I took a used sanitary napkin and stuffed it under the radiator. Boy, that made a nice stink. She packed her bag that day, saying she couldn't stay in a place that smelled like a pigsty."

"And so the witch got on her own broomstick and flew away…Gee, you mean the radiators work in your place? Maybe it's time I pulled up stakes."

"I'd put in a word for you, but there's nothing free. So…who's the uninvited guest, your sister again?"

"No, it's just some girl I know, said she got thrown out of her place so she just needs some place to crash until she can go home to Rock Island."

Ruby's caramel-colored eyes danced. "Ooh! Maybe y' should just let her stay. Y' need someone keeping an eye on you, and I can't do it: people are starting to talk anyway."

"It's not like I couldn't use a ladyfriend, but with my profession, it's hard to extend my household," he said. "I had one dame try looking in on me once in a while: first time she put her face in my door, she saw some of my work; she stopped coming around after that."

"Maybe you just hadn't found the right girl yet," Ruby insinuated. Cappy stuck a plate piled with steaming scrambled eggs mixed with chopped ham through the window. She took it and set it down on the counter.

"I find it very hard to believe someone as nice-looking as you didn't get snapped up a long time ago," she added, in the same tone, leaning over the plate and looking him in the eye.

"Hey, Hank's not gonna like it if he hears you been hitting on me," Maguire snarled, mock-menacing. She only smiled and moved on to serve the next customer who'd come in.

He didn't think of himself as being much for looks. His hair was already thinning and he was only thirty-five, plus he had a few badly placed moles on his left cheek. But he had to admit, his face was well shaped, thought nothing extraordinary, and he had one of the slimmest physiques in the city. He was the best-looking of the five boys in his family—of the ones that survived or they knew about, at least—which made a lot of his relatives question who'd actually sired him in the first place, since the menfolk of their tribe weren't known for their looks. But even then he'd be the first to say his looks weren't worth wasting film on.

The last thing he needed was a wife, if that's what Ruby meant. Marriage might be good for her, but her husband was a plumber—when he could find work—nice, normal guy with a nice, normal job, no dodgy little side-jobs for that youngster. He'd heard that Mike Sullivan, better known to journalists as the "Angel of Death", old man Rooney in Rock Island's enforcer, supposedly juggled his profession with taking care of a wife and two kids. That baffled Maguire: why mix interests like that? Did his wife know how her husband brought home the bacon? What if the kids found out?

Fortified, he paid his bill, leaving behind a two-dollar tip for Ruby, and ventured out into the snowfall again.

He got a few "human interest" shots: kids building a snow fort in a vacant lot, a woman towing twin toddlers stuffed into an orange crate bolted to a sled. He got lucky and came upon a three-car pile up in front of a vegetable market, all three drivers unhurt, two shouting at each other, the third trying to cool the other two down.

His method for finding suitable subjects was simple: look for a crowd. Wherever the vultures were, there was bound to be a body. But with the cold, the biting breeze, and the snow sifting down, few were likely to congregate.

For some reason, his eye kept straying to the displays in the shop windows: the penny Valentine cards in Woolworth's; ruby bracelets and diamond pendants at Tiffany's; roses in a flower shop window. When was the last time he'd given any girl a Valentine card anyway? Oh yeah, when he was twelve: Jessica Perkins, the cute blonde, very mature for her age; she got so many cards she'd just about needed a second satchel to carry them home. She hadn't noticed his and she certainly hadn't given him one. Somehow, Brutus Ketchum, the fourteen year old ox who'd been kept back in the seventh grade twice, had gotten wind of Harley "the Runt" Maguire's attempt at romance and had given him a drubbing. He'd limped home with the beginning of a tremendous shiner: Pa had said he'd never amount to much if he couldn't even defend himself; Ma had said he just needed to grow a little. And worse still, next day, he'd seen Jessica sitting near Brutus at lunch, the little minx.

The things you worry about when you're only twelve, he thought with a smile. They loom large then, but they shrink to their proper size when you've lived to be nearly three times that age.

Midafternoon, he went home on the El, to develop his shots and get the prints off. This way he could get out of the cold and he wouldn't have to pass any more wretched St. Valentine's Day displays. He just had to keep the camera case out from under every clodhopper's feet.

Bridie was still in his apartment, writing something in another of her small notebooks, when he came back.

"You have lunch?" she asked. "I saved half of a corned-beef sandwich for you."

"I rarely eat lunch," he said.

"So that's how you keep that knock-out figure of yours," she said, sultry-voiced, but with a mocking glint in her eye.

He headed up to Buchner's office later that afternoon, dropping off the morning's work.

"Slow day, eh?" Buchner remarked, leaning back in his chair as her perused the photos.

"'Fraid so: people are staying inside keeping warm, not tearing each other's throats," Maguire admitted.

"Looks like Harmon Maxfield got more work than his better-known alter-ego Harlen Maguire," Buchner said. "Something's bound to blow soon."

"I certainly hope so," Maguire said.

"Valentine's Day's a couple days away. There's bound to be a rash of crimes of passion: women getting back at their husbands for spending the afternoon with their girlfriends, guys catching their girls with someone else."

"I get the picture," Maguire replied, grinning at his own pun before he went out

"Hey, Maguire!" an all-too-familiar youthful bass-baritone called from another office.

"Hey what?" Maguire asked, half-ignoring the bulky young man who stepped out, approaching him. Oh no, not Cunningham the cub. The kid was only a copywriter, but he fancied himself the next big thing in journalism.

"I couldn't help overhearing," Cunningham said, sticking his thumbs in the armholes of his vest. "You losing your edge? Y' wanna switch jobs for a while? Mind if I pounded the pavement for a change?"

"You wouldn't last out there," Maguire said. "It's more than just pounding pavements and chasing paddy wagons. It's knowing exactly where to look and having to go into places nice young guys like you don't belong. I don't think you'd last."

"If a skinny runt like you can stand it, a moose like me might take it better than you," Cunningham said, flexing his shoulders. Cunningham was about ten years Maguire's junior, outbulking him by at least fifty pounds and standing about half a head taller, but the kid already packed a spare tire of flesh around his middle and he wheezed walking up and down stairs. If there was one guy Maguire hoped Nitti would put in his gunsights, if there was a bullet-riddled corpse he wanted to see inverted through the viewfinder, it was Cunningham's. But if Cunningham ever had to lug around the forty-pound camera case fully loaded with a Kodak, a small Leica, film, flashbulbs and tripod, he'd die of the strain and save him the trouble.

"I got a better idea: Keep to the copydesk, kid," Maguire said at length. "It's a jungle out there, and the cannibals would love to put a nice fat fellow like you in their kettle. They leave me alone because they ain't interested in someone with dry bones that'll stick in their throats." He started to walk away

"You're jealous, that's what," Cunningham retorted. "You're afraid I might find something big and you'd miss out on it."

Maguire stopped. Over his shoulder, he added, "You might find something big, but something bigger might find you. And even if you did find good material, none of the shots would be usable because your thumb would be in the way." He walked away before Cunningham could come after him.

He had his supper at Cappy's: roast pork with mashed potatoes and peas. Fortunately—or unfortunately—the evening waitress was Maxine the frump, who pretty much left him alone. She preferred the cattle truck drivers at the other end of the counter, but he caught her eying him when she thought he wasn't looking. Well, if she preferred guys of that bend, she could have 'em; he wasn't interested in a dame old enough to be his mother.

He wracked his brain over his meal, trying to think of a way to get the intruder out of his digs. Eating was a necessity he discharged of in an utterly perfunctory manner, his mind a hundred miles away, or in this case, three streets over and one floor up.

He shouldn't think of Bridie Rooney while he was eating, he tried to tell himself. The thought of her would give him indigestion. But he had to think of some way to get rid of the bore. Snow or no snow, she should have been out of there this afternoon. The very thought of her raised the kind of emotions in him he'd rather not have to deal with. He'd lose his touch. He'd seen other guys in his field (pick one) who'd lost their touch after they let a woman get under their skin, and he wasn't about to fall ill of that disease.

Bridie was still there when he got back, only now she was asleep, curled up on the couch in a cocoon of blanket, her glasses set on top of an up-ended suitcase within arm's reach.

In the washroom, he'd found what he guessed was Miss Rooney's overnight bag on the ledge of the sink, a sure sing she was trying to settle in.

He knew he should have told her to move on, find some excuse why she couldn't stay, and he kicked himself for not being more firm with her in the first place.

But he thought of one way he could drive her out, one utterly unmistakable gesture, something her mother had doubtlessly warned her about. What was she doing lingering in a bachelor's apartment? Didn't she know what could happen to her…?

He wasn't given to violence against women, unless he had his .38 in hand. Nitti had once sent him to permanently shut up the blabbermouth girlfriend of a lower-tier member of Capone's outfit, who could have compromised the whole gang, and he'd threatened a few other similar types who'd become troublesome. He decided in this case a threat would be enough.

The idea amused him. Too bad he couldn't capture it for the papers, it would make a great cautionary tale, what with St. Valentine's Day a few days away. Maidens, don't let this happen to you…

But first he had to develop and deliver his latest work: a guy being arrested for busting a jewelry store window, a car wrapped around a telephone pole, a couple being arrested for disorderly conduct. He walked right into that one. The dame, who was higher than a kite, had started screeching a blue streak when the cops were shoving her into the paddy wagon: "We were just standin' here! Leave us alone! Why doncha 'rest some other folks what ain't doin' nothin'?! The goon with the camera, he looks shady t' me!"

His blood had run a little colder at that, but he didn't betray it; he was too practiced.

There was nothing more lurid than that, which meant he'd be calling on Buchner, leaving the packet with the secretary.

His lingering irritation with the noisy skirt fuelled his intent when he returned home.

Even before he unlocked the hall door, he slipped off his shoes, then tiptoed through, carefully closing the door behind him. He deposited his gear in the bedroom and slunk out into the hallway, approaching the front room.

This would be easy, so easy he could do it with his hands tied behind his back. She'd barely even feel him until it was too late.

He padded into the front room slowly, careful to avoid the squeaky boards and creaky spots in the floor.

She lay on the couch on her back, wrapped in a blanket, breathing quietly, serenely, sleeping like the proverbial baby. Well, here comes a nightmare…

He lifted the blanket over he legs. Good, she was wearing a nightgown. He'd had a moment's concern that she might be sleeping in her clothes. What was more, the nightgown had ridden up over her thighs. Now what was she wearing for undergarments…

She gasped. He looked her in the face. Her eyes had opened. Great, she was gonna start shrieking her head off. He'd have to go for the full frontal assault. He grabbed for her throat with one hand, just to scare her, his hand groping with the fly of his trousers.

But she pulled him down on top of her.

"Thought I'd be the scared maiden, eh?" she asked, her lips against his. He had no idea what got into him, but he kissed her, wide-open, lip bruising hard.

He tried to tear himself from her grip, but she'd hooked one leg around his hip, holding him against her.

He tried to logroll himself off her, hoping that the fall off the couch would break her grip on him.

But he only ended up flat on his back on the floor, her on top of him. He got some leverage with one knee and pushed her off, breaking her hold on him.

He jumped to his feet and bolted for the back bedroom.

"Best way to take a punch is to lean into it!" Bridie yelled after him, taunting, gleeful.

He slammed the bedroom door shut and wedged a chair under the knob. He certainly hadn't expected that from her.

To be continued…