to the comer and the boys threw everything in the back, willy-nilly. Then we hauled ass out of there. We averaged forty-five miles an hour all the way back to Morgan, back roads or not, and either Scollay’s goons must never have bothered to tip the cops to us, or else the cops didn’t care, because we never heard from them.
We never got the two hundred bucks, either.
She came into Tommy Englander’s about ten days later, a fat Irish girl in a black mourning dress. The black didn’t look any better than the white satin.
Englander must have known who she was (her picture had been in the Chicago papers, next to Scollay’s) because he showed her to a table himself and shushed a couple of drunks at the bar who had been snickering at her.
I felt badly for her, like I feel for Billy-Boy sometimes. It’s tough to be on the outside. You don’t have to be out there to know, although I’d have to agree that you can’t know just what it’s like. And she had been very sweet, the little I had talked to her.
When the break came, I went over to her table.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” I said awkwardly. “I know he really cared for you, and—”
“I might as well have fired those guns myself,” she said. She was looking down at her hands, and now that I noticed them I saw that they were really her best feature, small and comely. “Everything that little man said was true.”
“Oh, say now,” I replied—a non sequitur if ever there was one, but what else was there to say? I was sorry I’d come over, she talked so strangely. As if she was all alone, and crazy.
“I’m not going to divorce him, though,” she went on. “I’d kill myself first, and damn my soul to hell.”
“Don’t talk that way,” I said.
“Haven’t you ever wanted to kill yourself?” she asked, looking at me passionately. “Doesn’t it make you feel like that when people use you badly and then laugh at you? Or did no one ever do it to you? You may say so, but you’ll pardon me if I don’t believe it. Do you know what it feels like to eat and eat and hate yourself for it and then eat more? Do you know what it feels like to kill your own brother because you are fat?”
People were turning to look, and the drunks were sniggering again.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
I wanted to tell her I was sorry, too. I wanted to tell her ... oh, anything at all, I reckon, that would make her feel better. Holler down to where she was, inside all that flab. But I couldn’t think of a single thing.
So I just said, “I have to go. We have to play another set.”
“Of course,” she said softly. “Of course you must ... or they’ll start to laugh at you. But why I came was—will you play ‘Roses of Picardy’? I thought you played it very nicely at the reception. Will you do that?”
“Sure,” I said. “Be glad to.”
And we did. But she left halfway through the number, and since it was sort of schmaltzy for a place like Englander’s, we dropped it and swung into a ragtime version of “The Varsity Drag. ” That one always tore them up. I drank too much the rest of the evening and by closing I had forgotten all about her. Well, almost.
Leaving for the night, it came to me. What I should have told her. Life goes on—that’s what I should have said. That’s what you say to people when a loved one dies. But, thinking it over, I was glad I didn’t. Because maybe that was what she was afraid of.
Of course now everyone knows about Maureen Romano and her husband Rico, who survives her as the taxpayers’ guest in the Illinois State Penitentiary. How she took over Scollay’s two-bit organization and turned it into a Prohibition empire that rivaled Capone’s. How she wiped out two other North Side gang leaders and swallowed their operations. How she had the Greek brought before her and supposedly killed him by sticking a piece of piano wire through his left eye and into his brain as he knelt in front of her, blubbering and pleading for his life. Rico, the bewildered valet, became her first lieutenant, and was responsible for a dozen gangland hits himself.
I followed Maureen’s exploits from the West Coast, where we were making some pretty