Whit had been the only member of the gang to grant an interview, with a persuasive and relentless female reporter from Chicago. Whit had called her from a pay phone one day when he and Jason were in St. Paul, a moment before they were planning to bolt for an endeavor.
“It’s a new world now,” she had quoted him. “The old rules don’t apply. How could all that’s happened have happened? But it did, and we need to survive the best we can. I don’t see us as villains or crooks or heroes or saviors or any of that,” he’d added, even though the latter part was a lie. “Those are the old definitions. I see us as survivors.”
Whit even talked to the reporter about their father, which enraged Jason. Pop’s no business of theirs, Jason said, and he’s got nothing to do with this. But how could he possibly think that?
The interview made the front page of the Chicago Tribune. They were in Peoria that morning, hiding out after another successful endeavor. It was a respectable neighborhood, yet an ominous rally of the unemployed was marching down the street that day, taking a circuitous route to City Hall. They didn’t look angry, and they didn’t carry signs, and they didn’t make much noise other than the tired shuffling of feet. The brothers were sitting in their rented parlor watching the marchers trudge by, an endless caterpillar of voiceless need.
“Thousands will read this article,” Whit had argued after Jason shook his head at the story. “We’ve given them hope, some pride. A story they can tell and hear told.”
“What good are stories,” Jason asked, staring at the march, “if people are still suffering?”
From the beginning, Whit had voiced his objections to his brother’s choice of mate. The spawn of some wealthy auto baron? And Windham Automotive was a particularly awful corporation. It had violently cracked down on strikers back in ’28, and over the past few years its workers had been suspiciously docile, apparently owing to Mob boss Frank Nitti’s takeover of the Chicago unions. How could Jason cavort with the daughter of such people? Even if Darcy wasn’t exactly on the board of directors, her entire life had been lived beneath the shadows cast by her father’s vast greed and wrongdoing.
Even beyond the politics, Darcy just wasn’t Whit’s type. She would never outright insult Whit or anyone in the gang, but her tone, and the shape of her eyes when she pretended to smile, was enough. Whenever the gang was holed up together, Darcy seemed perfectly happy to let Veronica do all the cooking and the dishes, as if she was the matron of the estate. Ronny was too decent to object, but Whit seethed at Darcy’s sense of entitlement.
“She thinks she’s better than everyone,” Whit told Jason one night the previous winter.
“Maybe she is better than everyone. Maybe that’s exactly why I like her.”
“You know what I mean. She’s using you, Jason. You’re just her little foray onto the wild side, and after she’s had her fun she’ll move back into her mansion and marry a nice banker.”
Whit’s objections went unheeded, so eventually he stopped voicing them, preferring to ignore Darcy as much as possible. They seldom had private conversations, but there was one that stuck in Whit’s mind for a very long time.
It was in late April; the Firefly Gang had recently pulled endeavors in Ann Arbor and in southwestern Iowa, and, after a time apart, the two couples had convened at a rented house in Fond du Lac, where Jason had begun planning what they hoped would be their final, masterful score, the Federal Reserve in Milwaukee. Patrick was ten months old and had woken in the middle of the night to nurse, and as Ronny did her maternal duty Whit had stumbled into the kitchen for a glass of water. He saw Darcy sitting at the table in the dining room, her right hand cradling a glass. She wore a black silk robe, the kind of thing Whit was always telling himself he should buy for Veronica. He hated how good she looked.
“Trouble sleeping?” he asked. The lamp above her wasn’t on; the only light came from the kitchen and the window behind her, through which stars and their reflections in Lake Winnebago coldly shimmered.
“A bit of insomnia, yes. I didn’t want to wake Jason.”
He poured himself some water from the kitchen sink and walked to the dining room, sitting opposite her. “Mind the company? I can’t sleep while she’s up with the baby anyway.”
Maybe it was the hour, and his defenses were lowered, or maybe he figured it was time he extended an olive branch. Maybe it was because there seemed something sad about her then, as if he’d stumbled upon an uncharacteristically vulnerable moment. He wondered why she was having trouble sleeping, what her nightmares were, but he didn’t ask. They chatted for a bit, and, at some point in a story Whit was telling, he’d mentioned offhand something about Pop’s being in jail, and Darcy started.
“Your father was in jail?”
“Yeah, of course. You didn’t know that?”
She shook her head.
“Pop was in jail when he died,” Whit said.
If Darcy had looked fuzzy from sleep deprivation, she was completely alert now. “He had a heart attack, right?”
“Yes.”
“Jason told me that, but not that he was in jail at the time. What was he there for?”
Whit found himself reassessing his brother’s relationship with Darcy. Maybe Jason was the one using her after all, and he’d never seen the reason to share such personal information with her. Still, they’d been together for months, and often seemed more like a married couple than Whit and Veronica did.
Answering Darcy’s question was more complicated a task than he normally would attempt at that hour. But, regardless of the circumstances, Whit still never knew how to tell the story. Should I start with a protestation of Pop’s innocence, or by telling her about the crooked judges and fat-cat bankers who went after him?
He told her about Pop’s heated argument with his partner Garrett Jones, which ended with Pop storming out of Jones’s house. The following night, the Firesons—minus Jason, who was off bootlegging then— had visited June and Joe for one of the boys’ birthday. The cake had barely been cut when Pop excused himself, saying he needed to visit one of his stores. It was a Sunday, Whit remembered, so the store was closed, but Pop’s departure wasn’t so unusual then; he’d been spending countless, desperate hours at work, as if he could devise a solution to this disaster. As if the clockwork devices bent on destroying him had not already been set in motion.
When Whit, Weston, and Ma returned home, Pop still wasn’t in. Everyone went to bed, waking the next morning to find Pop and Jason drinking coffee downstairs. Apparently Jason had driven to town for a surprise visit the night before, arriving just as Pop had returned from the store. Jason didn’t often visit home, and, seeing that Pop was blue, he had taken him to catch some boxing matches downtown. Jason said that Pop had begged off, claiming he had too much work to do, but Jason had insisted the old man join him for a few fights. They wound up watching the full card, and weren’t home until midnight.
The following afternoon the Firesons heard, through mutual friends, that Jones was dead, an apparent suicide the night before. Jason stayed in Lincoln City less than twenty-four hours before heading back to his “delivery work.” He was gone when, late that night, the police arrived to arrest Pop.
Whit didn’t go into much detail about that night or the subsequent trial, in which several prominent businessmen—all friends of the wealthy Jones—had clearly wanted to railroad Pop. All those bankers and speculators who would benefit from Pop’s finances collapsing like this, all those vultures attacking at last. Jason had been Pop’s alibi, as they’d been watching a local welterweight trounce a rival when Jones took his own life. But by the time of the trial, Jason was in jail again, on his second bootlegging rap, so he was shuttled under guard to the Lincoln City courthouse to give his testimony. Several character witnesses vouched for Pop, saying he was the most levelheaded guy around—a proud member of the local Boosters Club, a regular at weekly Mass, and quite simply the type of person who was constitutionally unable to raise a hand in anger.
Mrs. Jones took the stand and told her story of the second-to-last night of her husband’s life, when Pop had pleaded for a loan and allegedly had threatened Jones when rebuffed. But she had no evidence, nor did she have any evidence that Pop had returned the following night—and why would he have? The only “evidence” at all was that Jones hadn’t left his prints on the gun he’d shot himself with, but the defense attorney even got an expert to admit that fingerprinting was hardly an exact science.
The Firesons had been stunned when the jury voted to convict. Had the jurors even been listening? Had they been paid off? What kind of court was this? Pop’s lawyer had vowed to file an appeal. But with what money?
Patrick Fireson’s sentence had barely started when his heart gave up.
“It all just … made no sense. Like the whole world had been turned upside down. Crooked bankers are running around with people’s life savings in their pockets, and here a decent, hardworking guy like Pop gets pinned for something he didn’t do.”
Darcy was staring at her hands.
“I suppose I can see why Jason didn’t tell you,” Whit said, though he felt differently. “It’s not the sunniest subject to bring up.”
“I’m sorry I made you tell me. Now you’ll be the one having trouble sleeping.”
“It’s given me trouble for a while now. Telling it one more time doesn’t make it any worse.”
Whit could hear Veronica humming a lullaby. He told Darcy he should be getting back to bed. He could have asked Jason, the next day, why he’d never told Darcy. But instead, that became just one more thing the brothers never talked about.
The more time passed, the more Whit began to wonder what Jason’s reasons might be for keeping so silent about Pop. And as the legends of the Firefly Brothers spread, and different stories were passed around, there was one that caught Whit’s attention. He read it in a newspaper, not long after his talk with Darcy. With Jason allegedly responsible for so many murders during his bank robberies, the columnist wondered if it was possible that Jason’s killing ways had actually begun a few years earlier. The reporter then told the story of Garrett Jones’s death and posed a question. What if young Jason Fireson, at the time only a bootlegger, had taken it upon himself to come to his family’s aid by forcing Mr. Jones to pay up? What if Jason had been the one who sneaked into the banker’s house that night, maybe not with murderous intent but with some equally strong-armed, ill-conceived plan, and one thing had led to another, and tempers had been stoked, and then, and then … Whit’s mind reeled as he read the story. He had never conceived of such an idea before, and he tore the newspaper into shreds as if he could so easily erase such suspicions from the world.
Or from his own mind. The more Whit thought about that awful story—and the more variations of it he heard spoken aloud, sometimes by awestruck accomplices, sometimes by men on the street—the easier it was to imagine Jason in that situation. To daringly swoop by Jones’s house like that, to think that he was helping the family, to think he could play the role of hero so easily—it certainly sounded like Jason’s style. It also would explain Jason’s anger and evasiveness whenever someone talked about Pop or the trial. But if that was indeed how it happened, then surely Jason would have stood tall and admitted it, surely he never would have let Pop take the fall for him.
It made Whit sick to think of it. He only wanted to hear from Jason that it wasn’t true. But every time he thought of asking his brother a coldness descended upon him, a whitening fear of what the answer might be, of what truth might be hiding behind that story.
The brothers traded shifts through the night and reached Sedalia, Missouri, the morning after talking to Brickbat’s mother. Lies to a kind and trusting man at the post office won them the former address of the incarcerated Sanders brother. It was a large two-story house, set a good hundred yards from the road. A semicircular gravel driveway extended like a frown to its front porch. The front lawn was untended, the farmland yellow and desiccated. No cars were visible, but the barn doors were closed and the gravel in the drive appeared to be furrowed by recent passage.
Whit was at the wheel of their most recently stolen vehicle, a black Terraplane not unlike the one they’d driven before their first death. After crossing the Missouri border the previous night, they’d traded cars on the off chance the old bat had called the cops and recorded their tag numbers.
Whit drove by the farmhouse as slowly as he could without seeming suspicious. Jason scanned the empty acreage behind the buildings, half a mile of fallow farmland before some woods cropped up in the distance.
“Curtains are drawn on a hot day,” he noted. “And the windows are open.”
The country road was a long spoke off the local thruway that led to a distant hamlet and the few farms between. After driving on for two minutes, Whit turned around and made a second pass. This time Jason saw a lone figure standing behind the house, with his back to it, and close enough to the building that he was shielded from the road—unless a passerby was very persistently studying the area. The figure, standing in a bored smoker’s pose, wore dark pants and an undershirt crisscrossed with the leather slashes of what appeared to be a shoulder holster.
The brothers drove past the next town and stopped for lunch ten miles later at the one after that. They had hours before nightfall to form a plan, as if all that time would allow them to come up with any better options than the very simple one they were already considering.
XX.
It was hot that night and the mosquitoes were ravenous. The droning of crickets was occasionally interrupted by what might have been coyotes or lost dogs crying for their masters.
The grass was too dry for Jason and Whit to walk silently, but they did the best they could. They were in a small grove of elms that extended a few hundred yards, ending at what was likely the Sanders property line. They stood there and saw the building’s faint outline in the escaping twilight, as well as a few hints of illumination from where drawn curtains didn’t quite meet. There was a light breeze and they smelled tobacco and a coal stove.
They waited among the trees, sometimes hearing raised voices, though none female. Supposedly a woman and her daughter lived here, but there were no sounds of children, nor any of their playthings in the front yard. Jason wondered if Brickbat’s sister-in-law and niece had already fled the place, or if the thugs had shooed them away or worse.
The brothers decided it would be best to corner one of the kidnappers coming or going rather than storming the building when at full capacity. It would need to happen far enough away so as not to be overheard at the house. They turned and walked back to the Terraplane, which they had parked unseen from the road.
They armored themselves with bulletproof vests once again, though not without a sense of foreboding irony. Each had an automatic pistol in a shoulder holster; each held a Thompson across his chest with two hands. Their pockets were stuffed with extra clips for the pistols, but they would have to be sparing with the submachine guns. They had hidden the briefcase of cash under the driver’s seat.
They took turns on watch, one resting at the base of the tree while the other stood to guard against sleep. The sky was starless and Jason didn’t have enough light to check the pocket watch he’d forgotten to return to Marriner. He could have used a smoke but he didn’t want to risk being spotted.
Jason figured it was past midnight when he heard the car suddenly near them. He was startled—he hadn’t heard the driver’s doors shut, hadn’t heard or seen the car approaching. One moment the world was empty but for the two of them, and suddenly headlights were hurtling toward them.
Jason kicked Whit awake and rushed into the road, aiming his Thompson an inch above the headlights. After so much silence, it was hard to tell if the car’s braking sounded loud only to him or if someone in the house might have been able to hear it, too.
The car, a Chrysler coupe, had barely stopped when a bleary-eyed Whit stepped forward, aiming his Thompson at the open passenger
window. Two men sat in front. Jason told them to kill the lights, put the car in park, and step out without shutting the doors.
The men wore work clothes, denim pants and gray cotton shirts unbuttoned at the collars. Either they had little money or they were trying to disguise themselves as working stiffs as they drove into Chicago to post their latest instructions to Jasper Windham. One of them looked like a Norwegian just off the boat, blond hair and angular jawbones and ropy limbs. The other was heavier and had a face that reminded Jason that men are descended from apes.
Jason frisked them. Each carried a gat in his pants pocket, one a Luger and the other a revolver. Jason checked that they were loaded, added them to his own arsenal, then opened the glove box and made sure there were no hidden compartments beneath the floorboards. There were, but all he found was a stack of license plates. In the trunk was a sack of clothing.
“How many more men in the house?”
“Five,” the primate said.
Then the blond rushed in with, “She ain’t in there anymore—we let her go.”
“Sure you did. I’ll bet you’re driving to the papers now to tell them the good news.”
“I swear, she’s just—”
Jason flipped the Thompson in his hands and smashed at the man’s mouth with the handle. The guy crumpled. After a few seconds he sat up, leaning against the car and collecting teeth with his hands. Jason knelt down and pressed the Thompson’s butt against the man’s chest.
“The only reason I’m not pumping you now is because your buddies would hear the shots. Open your mouth again and I might as well do it anyway.”
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel Page 27
