Deadly Spirits by Mary Miley

Author:Mary Miley [Mary Miley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2022-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

Widows don’t usually wear mourning for more than a year after their loved one dies. Sure, I’ve known some to wear black the rest of their lives, but I was only twenty-eight and black was too dreary for me to go that route forever. It had been a year and four months since the North Side Gang had put a bullet in Tommy’s forehead, and I had set aside my mourning clothes, if not my mourning, months ago. But I put them on the next day hoping they would make me look more respectable in Weiss’s eyes. More sympathetic. A pitiful widow.

Schofield’s Florist sat at the corner of State Street and Superior on Chicago’s Near North Side, directly across from Holy Name Cathedral in the heart of North Side Gang territory. The area bustled with motorcars and pedestrians all day long but particularly in the mornings when shoppers surged into stores, telegram delivery boys bicycled about, and runners rushed documents from office to bank to courthouse. A streetcar carried me most of the way. My sturdy black shoes brought me the last block.

I’d left Baby Tommy with Carlotta and Freddy along with instructions to call Detective O’Rourke if I hadn’t returned by noon.

‘Tell him where I went. I don’t know that he’ll be able to do anything, but there’s no one else who has a chance of getting through to Hymie Weiss.’ I didn’t need to remind them that Kevin O’Rourke’s twin brother was reputed to be an enforcer with the North Side Gang. We had known the charming Liam O’Rourke rather well last winter when we believed he was a starving-in-the-garret artist. Then I’d learned about his real job.

Carlotta was terrified. Her memories of that cold night in December were all too vivid. Freddy wanted to come with me. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said. ‘I’ll need you to take care of Baby Tommy if I don’t come back. Which I will, of course, so try not to worry. I’m sure I’ll come home safe and sound. Hymie the Pole doesn’t want to call attention to himself with the law by bothering a poor widow.’ Confidence is everything.

I had steered clear of Schofield’s Florist ever since the day – November tenth, 1924 – when Dean O’Banion had been gunned down on the premises by members of Capone’s Outfit. Oh, it was Johnny Torrio’s Outfit back then, but everyone knew it had been his second-in-command, Al Capone, who had ordered the O’Banion killing, dispatching four thugs to surprise O’Banion, who used his florist as a sometime meeting place. They caught him completely unawares in the back room, his hands full of chrysanthemums, and plugged him with six shots, point-blank range. Supposedly it was revenge for an earlier attack that nearly killed Torrio … These payback murders went on and on until no one could remember who had actually cast the first stone. As if it mattered.

Evidently Weiss was continuing the O’Banion tradition of holding meetings at Schofield’s. Ever mindful of last year’s

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