Though legend had it that the Firefly Brothers had occasionally robbed multiple banks in a single day, Bureau records said otherwise. As Cary had come to know the outlaws’ habits and personalities, he had found them too circumspect for such moves.
Nonetheless, he had to admit that the jobs’ MO was startlingly similar to the Firesons’: a getaway driver at the wheel of an idling car, one Thompson-armed torpedo standing watch in the back or side alley and a second in front of the bank, one man to manage the staff and the hostages, and one to enter the vault. (The Firesons initially had used a second car and an additional torpedo, but records showed that their final jobs had been attempted with fewer men, evidence of the gang’s dwindling numbers.) Unlike that lunatic Brickbat Sanders and so many copycat criminals, yesterday’s crooks hadn’t fired a single round until the Hudson Heights police fired on them: there had been no bombastic “warning shots” into the ceiling or at startled pedestrians outside. The Lincoln City job had occurred at nine o’clock. An attractive man in a dark fedora had appeared at the bank’s entrance precisely when the teller unlocked it. The man chatted with her about the weather as they walked toward the teller cage, during which time two other men followed. He then revealed an automatic pistol, and the two others brandished submachine guns. One of these men was thin and “angry-looking;” the other was much older. Only the handsome man in the fedora spoke, calmly instructing the tellers to sit on the floor, then ferrying the bank manager into the vault. After it was over, the bank manager checked his watch as the men hustled into a nondescript black car, possibly a Plymouth. The entire procedure had taken seven minutes, the police had never been alerted, and the thieves had escaped without the need for hostages. The Hudson Heights job had occurred later that afternoon, minutes before closing time, and though the robbers had managed to escape with a sizable, still undetermined score, two of them had been shot, perhaps lethally, while running into their car. They had been chased as far as the Indiana state line.
Cary noticed that eyewitness descriptions of one of the robbers were a possible match for Marriner Skelty, a longtime Fireson associate who had disappeared a few months ago.
He dialed Third National of Lincoln City and questioned Ronald Schooner, the assistant manager.
“I understand you’ve been saying the Firefly Brothers are the ones who robbed your bank.”
“Yes, sir. That’s because they did.”
“It’s my understanding, Mr. Schooner, and the understanding of most of this country, that the Firefly Brothers were apprehended and killed earlier this month.”
“I read the papers, too, Agent Delaney.” Schooner’s voice was a wide Midwestern hammock of politeness and flexible consonants. “But I’m telling you that, God as my witness, the Firefly Brothers are the ones who robbed this bank yesterday. Them and three other fellows.”
“Could you tell me what you’re basing that identification on, sir?”
“On the fact that I went to school with them.”
Cary sat up straighter. “I’m sorry?”
“I was in the same class as Jason, through high school. I crossed paths with him a few times after that—before he became a real outlaw, of course. I know his face, and his brother’s.”
This information wasn’t in either of the newspapers, but somehow Mr. Hoover had known.
“Mr. Schooner, Jason Fireson was twenty-seven when he died last week,” Cary said. “If you knew him from school days, that’s going back, what, ten years? People change over a decade—particularly when they’ve done time, and have been in hiding.”
“I understand that, which is why I doubted myself at first. To be honest with you, there were quite a few things going through my mind at the time, what with armed gunmen ordering me into my own vault.”
“Of course.”
“But after I’d showed him to the stacks—it was Jason leading the way, with Whit and the older fellow waiting back by the entrance—I’d calmed down just a bit and had a moment to get a close look at him. He’d grown a mustache, but I could see it was Jason, and he seemed to notice me noticing him. See, everyone knew Jason—even back in school, he was a popular one.”
“I understand, Mr. Schooner. I also understand you were undoubtedly under quite a lot of stress, as you say, and what with all the recent attention the Firefly Brothers had been receiving, the pictures in the paper and whatnot, it’s perfectly understandable for you to have felt that way. But now that the dust has cleared I need you to understand that it couldn’t possibly have been Jason or Whitman Fireson. I think the investigation will proceed much more smoothly if you refrain from making such … incendiary comments to the newspapers.”
“Look, I’m being as clear as I can possibly be. It was them. And, as I was saying, he was about to leave the vault when we looked at each other and I said to him, ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were Jason Fireson.’ He smiled, like I’d given him a compliment, and said, ‘You don’t say. So would I.’ So then I said something about how he’s supposed to be dead, and he said, still smiling, ‘Yeah, that’s what the people who killed us said.’ You believe that?”
“No.”
Unfazed, Schooner continued. “Then he started backing away again, and he said, ‘You can tell the cops if you’d like, but I doubt they’ll believe you. Have a good day.’” Cary heard a loud exhalation. “Looks like he was right.”
“Mr. Schooner, even if we wanted to pretend the Firesons were still alive, they never would have robbed a bank where they knew someone. They were very careful, they spent days researching their targets, and they wouldn’t have—”
“I was out sick for over a week. Yesterday was my first day back, so they wouldn’t have known I worked there.”
They continued to parry with decreasing gentleness. Finally, Cary repeated his warning and assured the assistant manager that the Firefly Brothers would be robbing no more banks. He hung up.
Cary had not seen the Fireson’s bodies. He and the Chicago SAC had been pursuing a lead on one of Dillinger’s associates in Davenport when they received word of the farmhouse shootout. The Points North police had failed to alert the Bureau during the lengthy stakeout, calling only when the bodies were cooling. Cary and his superior had tried to fly to the nearest airstrip, in Gary, but a thunderstorm forced their plane to land in Springfield. By the time they’d made it to Points North, the bodies had been stolen—before any member of the Bureau could view them.
Though Cary and the SAC had been willing to shrug off the missing bodies as a strange footnote to an otherwise triumphant chapter in their War on Crime, Mr. Hoover was outraged. Part of the Bureau’s job, the Director had always explained, was to dictate reality—to investigate reality, fully understand it, and then, under the aegis of Mr. Hoover’s vigilant public persona, explain that reality to a public cowed by the depression and frightened by stories of gangsters and increasing lawlessness. It was the Bureau’s job to reassure people that these shockingly hard times were merely speed bumps along the shared path to prosperity, and not a sign that the nation was spiraling into anarchy and madness.
Still, there were other reasons to doubt the bank manager, weren’t there? Cary tried to suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Points North police really had killed the wrong men. If Jason Fireson was alive but knew that he was believed to be dead, why would he so cavalierly rob a bank in his hometown? Why would he make those comments to Schooner? He should have used the smoke screen of his purported death to help him disappear forever. On the other hand, Cary knew that Jason was brash and confident, playful and vain. He may have felt a need to let people know he was alive, a need—inadvisable but irresistible—to demonstrate his superiority, smirking all the while.
Cary allowed himself to consider the impossible for a moment. Then he dug out the report from Points North and read it through, looking for the holes and not liking how many he found.
He dialed the Points North police and got the same officer as the last time. He wondered h
ow many cops they even had out there.
“Any progress on those corpses?” he asked, less friendly than before.
“I thought you said you’d be taking that over for us?”
“That seems to be happening by default, doesn’t it? Let me talk to whoever identified the Fireson bodies that night.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m looking at your report here,” Cary said. “What of it you’ve filed thus far, that is. I just want to make sure there’s no chance you might have shot up two crooks who were not the Firefly Brothers.”
The officer started to say something, then stopped. “Agent Delaney,” he said, starting again, “I was there that night. We’d been told they were in the building, so after we surrounded it we warned them on the bullhorn to come out and surrender. They ignored us—didn’t fire at us, didn’t call out, didn’t make a peep. We shot in tear gas, still nothing. We waited a few hours, then we decided to go in. That’s when they started firing. If there was any chance that we had the wrong guys hemmed in there, wouldn’t they have yelled out at some point and said so?”
This was all wrong. What Cary was asking the officer was insane, after all—of course it had been the Firefly Brothers; how could it not have been? Cary would have preferred it if the cop had simply laughed, but instead he was responding with extreme care.
“Thank you, Officer. I’d just like to speak to whoever identified the bodies.”
He was put on hold again before being connected to a sergeant who also served as the county coroner.
“Sorry to trouble you with this, Sergeant, but I wanted to ask you a few questions about the Fireson Brothers. The bodies were identified as those of Jason and Whit Fireson based on—?”
“Fingerprints and mug shots.”
“But we don’t have any record of your having sent the prints to our Washington office for verification.”
“Well, I guess we’ve been a bit slow on the paperwork aspect. Figured it was just a formality, since we never really had any doubt it was the Fireflies.”
“We’re pretty strict on formalities here, Sergeant. What about scars? Jason had been shot on his left arm a few months back—did you confirm that the body had a scar there?”
“I honestly don’t recall whether we bothered to check that, because, as I say, we really had no doubt. There was all the money we found on them, for one, and the guns they had …”
Still Cary found himself dragging the reluctant sergeant down the checklist of police procedurals. “No known associates were able to ID them, because the bodies were stolen before that could be arranged, correct?”
“Unfortunately, yes. But—”
“Now, these prints that you haven’t shared yet—how certain are you that they match the Fireson Brothers’ on file?”
“Ninety-nine percent.”
Cary put down his pencil. “Why not a hundred?”
“Fingerprinting is not an exact science, as you surely know. Matches are never perfect. We all have these whorls and—”
“Mr. Hoover makes it my job to look for perfection, Sergeant. I don’t mean to be rude, but we’d like to get those prints sent to Washington so—”
“Look, I’ll do that, but in the meantime I say the fingerprints matched. Plus, for goodness’ sake, the men looked just like their mug shots, and they had seventy thousand dollars and a dozen weapons on them! Are you actually worried that we killed two men, one of whom happened to look just like Jason and the other happened to look just like Whit? The odds of that are microscopic.”
Unlikely things seem to be happening lately, Cary thought. Dillinger’s escape at Little Bohemia, and his wooden-gun jailbreak from Crown Point before that. Jason’s vanishing act in Toledo, and now the flawlessly executed copycat crime in Lincoln City. Breadlines, dust storms, men jumping from skyscrapers.
“I understand, Sergeant. I’m only saying that if it’s my job to look for certainties, for concrete facts, then the fact is, you’re saying that there’s at least a chance it wasn’t them.”
Cary could visualize the man shaking his head. “Agent Delaney, I don’t think I should continue this conversation.”
“Excuse me?”
“I think you should be speaking with Chief Mackinaw.” Cary leaned back in his chair as the sergeant explained that Chief Mackinaw was away until the day after tomorrow.
Jesus Christ, Cary thought as he hung up the receiver. They are hiding something. What the hell happened at that farmhouse?
XIV.
First Darcy lost track of hours, then days. She feared weeks would be next, and that eventually her entire life would slip past her. She would not be able to grasp it because her hands were bound, would not see it because her eyes were covered. She would only hear it: Crows berating one another. Wind through heavy boughs. Bottles clinking, glass breaking. The echoing scrape of a coal shovel in the oven’s bin and scuttle. Floorboards creaking beneath the pacing of kidnappers losing their patience. A single, daily airplane, so many miles above, its engine humming and fading out in such an accursedly linear pattern that it certainly wasn’t circling in search of her.
She couldn’t remember how many notes they’d had her sign. Her captors didn’t dictate them anymore, only forced her to sign them to prove to her father that she was still alive. Which she herself was beginning to doubt. Was this life? No freedom, no vision, no food, save the same sandwich for lunch and a crumbling baked potato for dinner, sometimes offered with scraps of dry meat.
At least she could walk—after the fourth day they had untied her from her chair and fitted her into handcuffs that were chained to some anchor around which she was afforded five feet of wandering space. She could reach the room’s perimeter and had traced her cell with her fingertips. Wood paneling on the walls, cracked in places. Heavily repainted windowsills. Nailheads protruding from the old, talkative floor. Surely she would be able to identify this room if the police ever found it once she was released. If she was released.
For the first few years after the sanatorium, she had been plagued by nightmares. Those nightly terrors were returning. Even while awake, she feared she was in some semiconscious state, combining her memory of that long-ago internment with her sorrow over Jason. Ever since that mysterious voice had mocked her that night—how long ago had it been?—she had been terrified that it was right, that Jason was indeed dead. That doubt had been exacerbated by fear and boredom, but she tried to fight it. She conjured Jason into life, visiting with him in the dusty rooms of her shuttered mind.
He had tried to protect her from something like this. One night in Chicago, during their whirlwind courtship, Jason was unusually silent during the drive back to the apartment. He had pulled to the curb and made no motion to turn off the engine and get out. Instead, he’d looked at her with a grave face and told her that they shouldn’t see each other any longer.
“Excuse me?” She had known he was between jobs, so to speak, and he had made allusions to future engagements, but she had not expected a brush-off. “I’m not some precious vase, Jason. I know what I’m getting myself involved in.”
“No. You don’t.”
“Oh, you have girls in other cities? Is that what you’re saying?” Darcy Windham was not vindictive, except where rivals were concerned—those she would mash beneath her bare feet.
“No, I don’t have anyone else. I don’t have anyone. That’s what I’m telling you.” Quickly he looked her up and down as if he were committing her to memory. She felt crumpled, stuffed in a pocket. “It was a mistake to come looking for you—”
“You’ve made your share of mistakes, Jason Fireson, but I am not one of them.”
“—and I need to correct it. For your sake. If you steer yourself right, you’ll have a nice and prosperous life.”
“Oh, don’t give me any paternalistic—”
“Then for my sake. Darcy, please get out. Please go back to your life.”
“My life is sitting right here, looking at me,” she said,
trying not to let her voice break. “Being a tad impetuous, perhaps, and not thinking very clearly beneath his persecution complex, but he’s—”
“Sweetheart, please. Before I have to do something regrettable. Get out of my sight.”
Her eyes had burned and finally it was her determination that he not see her crying that propelled her out the car door. She didn’t even close it, just clasped at her shawl with both hands as she walked into her building. She heard him close the door, then pull away, engine revving as if he were afraid of being pursued.
But how afraid? It took her only three days to find him, after all. He had dropped enough hints that she had deduced where he was headed: Springfield, the home of one of his confederates, a so-called jug marker blessed with the gift of determining which banks would make the easiest victims. Refusing to pout, she drove to Springfield the next day, rented a room downtown, and methodically visited every tavern, nightclub, and bar that seemed even remotely like a venue Jason and his mates might frequent. At every one she asked the bartender if he knew Jason Fireson, receiving responses varying from nonplussed to paralytic. She was blowing his cover to the extent that his gang would have to cancel the Springfield job, surely, but she didn’t care. He could find another bank, but he would not find another girl.
And what fun it was, slinking about, quizzing the sorts of men that a respectable girl was supposed to steer clear of. If the choice was between this and resuming her life as a typist at a downtown law firm, between this and becoming the smiling bride of some Miracle Mile financier, then there was no choice.
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