The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (23 page)

Jason usually stored his extra guns in the toolshed in
the backyard. She hoped they hadn’t thought to look there. There was no
sign that they’d checked for fingerprints, either.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry to trouble you, but could I see some
identification?”
“Of course.” She reached into her purse and removed the ID,
apologizing for the fact that she hadn’t yet changed her old Illinois one
for an Iowa one with her married name. Collins read it slowly and handed it
back.
One of the other cops finally spoke, motioning to her scrapbooks. “So
what’s with all this Firefly Brothers stuff, Mrs. Tenley?”
“I’m rather interested in them, I must say. I’m a Chicago
girl, you know, so I must confess that I’ve grown perhaps too …
accustomed
to the existence of crime. And these Firefly characters intrigue me. I’ve
been compiling all I can find on them, as I was thinking I might like to write
a book about them. After they’re caught, of course. It would be better
for me if they were taken in alive, so I might be able to interview them in
jail, but I suppose if they’re killed it will only increase the interest.
That is how it tends to work in our society, sad as it is.” She went on
like this for a bit, even flipping through the pages to point out some of her
favorite pieces. The cops who had been sitting stood up and shot Collins angry
glances. One of them went over to the window and waved the squad car off.
She let her voice trail off and looked at Collins as if noticing him for the
first time. “Wait, you don’t mean that you … that you thought
my husband
might be Whit Fireson?”
“Ah, um, no. Jason Fireson, actually.”
Darcy laughed. “Oh my, I can’t
wait
to tell him. Honestly,
he looks a bit more like Whit, I think—he’s not quite so handsome
as Jason, but
don’t
tell him I said that. Oh my, that’s
funny. My husband, a Firefly Brother. I’ll have to tell Daddy that; he
thinks I married poorly enough, but at least I didn’t marry a dangerous
criminal!
”
She kept the banter going even though she could tell they were dying to leave.
Then the phone rang, and she excused herself to the kitchen.
“Tenley residence,” she said.
“How are you, sweetness?” Jason asked.
“Oh, Sally,
so
good to hear from
you.”
It took him a second. “Who’s over there?”
“Yes, yes, I’ll be there. I’m actually entertaining at the
moment, but I believe they’re on their way out. Anyway, I’m
so
looking forward to it, and I’ll bring the cakes.”
“Local cops? Feds?”
“Oh, the first, of course. Nothing to worry about—I was afraid I
was going to burn them, but everything came out just fine.”
“Did you just get home? Were they waiting for you there?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Then don’t leave yet—no matter how good you are,
they’ll probably still watch you. Make it two hours. Take the bus to the
diner where we ate on Wednesday. Leave the clothes and whatever you can’t
stuff into a small bag. We’ll drive to the front of the restaurant ten
minutes after you get there. Order something and leave money for the waiter and
walk out without explaining why.” He hung up.
She had been watching the cops exchange accusatory whispers the whole time.
When she walked back into the parlor, Collins offered her a smile so forced
that it seemed to pain him.
“I’m sorry to have troubled you, Mrs. Tenley. Please wish your
husband good luck from us. When did you say he’d be back in town?”
She repeated her lie, and she didn’t skip a beat when he asked for the
name of the hotel where he’d be staying in St. Paul.
“Well, again, he’ll be staying with the local sales director while
in St. Paul to save on costs. I believe the man’s name is Mr. Johannsen?
Something Nordic like that.”
She started packing a small bag as soon as they had driven away. She would have
to leave most of her things behind, but no matter. She packed the scrapbooks,
of course, all those reports and exaggerations and flat-out falsehoods. They
had almost caused the brothers’ capture, but she preferred to think that
they instead had made possible her ingenious escape.

XV.

WINDHAM DAUGHTER KIDNAPPED
Ransom Demanded from Stunned Auto Magnate

CHICAGO—Darcy Windham, daughter of Jasper P. Windham, President and CEO
of Windham Automotive Manufacturing, was abducted from the streets of Chicago one
week ago by an unknown ring of gangsters.
Mr. Windham has received notes believed to be written by his daughter along
with typewritten instructions from the perpetrators instructing him to pay a
steep ransom to prevent harm from befalling his eldest child. Although Chicago
law enforcement and the federal Department of Justice immediately offered their
services to Mr. Windham, the magnate wishes to make clear that he is not
working with the authorities, in accordance with the kidnappers’ wishes.
“We are following the instructions laid out by the people in
question,” Windham explained.
It is believed that the kidnappers are demanding a ransom of $200,000.
Witnesses claim that last Friday afternoon Miss Windham, 20, was on the
sidewalk outside a downtown apartment building where she allegedly had been
renting a flat under an assumed name. An unknown number of men wearing dark
hats spirited her into a waiting
automobile,
identified only as a black sedan with dirt-covered tags. Some witnesses claim
to have seen firearms, including submachine guns, brandished by the captors.
Miss Windham has been rumored to be a past associate of the Firefly Brothers,
though she and her father have repeatedly denied such allegations. Police would
not say whether they suspect any connection between this crime and the
remaining, at-large members of the Firefly Gang.
In what police believe to be an unrelated matter, Third National Bank of
Lincoln City, Ohio—the hometown of the deceased desperadoes—was
robbed yesterday morning by armed bandits who apparently modeled their
appearance on the Firefly Brothers (see
story
).
Mr. Windham would offer no further comment on his daughter’s kidnapping
and is said to be …
The article jumped to a back page and Jason read it twice without making a sound.
Finally, he dropped it on the motel bed.
They had left the hideout an hour earlier, while Marriner was still out. Randy
had locked himself in one of the bedrooms, terrified. The brothers had dressed
in spare outfits that weren’t bullet-riddled and counted the loot. It
wasn’t as fabulous a take as they’d been hoping, since they’d
rushed the Hudson Heights job—though obviously they hadn’t rushed
enough—but they cleared twenty-five thousand dollars. After Marriner’s
expenses for the cars and the guns, and figuring in the lesser percentages the
brothers had imposed on the two rookies, Jason and Whit were left with a total
of twelve grand. Jason had stacked their share in a beige suitcase, and in a
second case he had stuffed assorted weapons and, after some hesitation, two
bulletproof vests that had emerged unscathed.
After mopping their blood out of the car—which they would soon need to
exchange for another one, assuming it had been spotted by the cops after the
second job—they had checked into a motel across town to clear their
heads. Then Whit had gone out to buy the paper.
“I’m sorry, Jason,” Whit said as his brother scanned the
article again.
Jason stood with arms folded tight as he pondered various angles and arranged
the events into the best timeline he could figure.
“Think it’s a real job?” Whit asked.
“I don’t know.” Thinking,
I was off planning a goddamn
endeavor while this was happening to her
.
“She might not have gotten the telegram,” Whit said. “She
still thinks we’re dead, so she figures this is her only chance to make a
score off the old man. That makes sense….”
“Which is what I don’t like about it. Nothing else has been making
sense lately.”
After letting his brother think for a bit, Whit asked Jason what he wanted to
do.
“I want to know what her father knows.”
“But he’s probably surrounded by police right now.”
“And he never much liked me anyway.” Jason shook his head.
“Let’s make a call.”
At an earlier point in his career, it had occurred to Jason that bands of
criminals rarely stick together for long periods of time for the same reasons
that bands of musicians don’t. Robbing banks was similar to the
musician’s craft, in that it involved taking the wild ideas flying
through your mind and transmuting them into reality. A jazz or ragtime band was
formed because the seven or so guys were possessed by similar spirits, but as
time passed they would come to realize that their inner visions were no longer
concentric. Either the band would dissolve or, worse, they’d take the
stage while their minds were set to different rhythms and tempos. The result
would be unsyncopated disaster at best, drunken fistfights at worst. Gangs of
bank robbers were much the same, Jason realized, only they carried firearms.
In his months of pulling endeavors, Jason had taken on and jettisoned nearly a
dozen associates. If Darcy had been kidnapped by any of their former allies,
then Jason and Whit had a long list of suspects.
It would have been even longer if not for the fact that, as Jason had told
Marriner, so many of their cohorts were now in jail or dead. The
Firesons’ associates liked to joke that the brothers had become folk
heroes, but the end result of such notoriety was not good. Hiding in obscurity
was far more difficult when your cartoon-colored face was all over
National
Detective
magazine and your mug shot ran in dozens of midwestern
rags. Running across state lines made little difference
now that the feds were knitting the nation’s various municipalities,
cities, and states into a cohesive whole. Officers in towns Jason had never
heard of had studied his MO, memorized his height and weight. Despite the fact
that many people embraced their Robin Hood aura, others were tempted by the
reward money.
And thus the Firefly Gang was picked off, piece by piece. During the Federal
Reserve job in Milwaukee, a brawny high schooler had tackled the street
torpedo, and an old tax lawyer had shot at them from his second-story window,
killing Jake Dimes, a former racecar driver and the best wheelman Jason had
ever known. Dimes had steered nearly every Firefly heist, but that damned
lawyer had taken some ancient revolver from a wall display and lodged one
behind Jake’s left ear, from across the street. When Jason emerged from
the bank, Jake’s body was slumped on the dash, blood and gray matter
strewn across the inside of the windshield. Jason’s only option had been
to pull Jake’s body onto the road, wipe at the windshield with his
handkerchief, and steer the Buick himself.
There had been a time when you could show up at a fellow’s funeral;
funeral-home directors never wanted to disrupt a service by calling the cops,
and usually the families in whichever small town were happy to have a famous
outlaw pay his respects. But, with the wanted posters and the steep rewards,
observing such rituals was unthinkable. Jake facedown on the Milwaukee pavement
was the last image Jason had of his trusty wheelman.
Only days later, Gordy McGeorge, an old school chum Jason had known since his
first bootlegging rap, had been ambushed by two plain-clothes in Peoria, where
his twist had an apartment. Gordy had been pining after his girl and had swung
by for a visit despite Jason’s advice to hold off. Feds had been staking
out her apartment and spotted Gordy his second day in town; they followed him
as he walked her to the local bowling lanes. Gordy had felt their presence and
run off, but they gave chase and cornered him in an alley. He got off four
shots, hitting brick walls and the windshield of a parked car, but the
cops’ rounds were more numerous and better placed. He’d been gone
three days when Jason saw the story in the paper.
Which was why the twice-resurrected Firefly Brothers needed to figure whether
this was a real kidnapping or something Darcy herself was
orchestrating.
Darcy had once floated that idea, but Jason had vetoed it. For days Owney and
the others had needled him to reconsider, arguing that it would be safer than
an endeavor. Maybe Owney had gone forward with it as a strange favor to
Darcy—with Jason and Whit dead and their money vanished, Darcy and
Veronica had been left with nothing. Owney would help her stage a kidnapping as
a way of assuring the dead men’s girls of a comfortable widowhood, a
criminal variation on laborers at a wake slipping twenties to the lady in
black.
If it wasn’t Owney, then it wasn’t a fake kidnapping at all. In
which case the top candidates would be Brickbat Sanders and his shady sidekick
Elton Roberts, who also had been present when Darcy proposed her idea. Brickbat
and Roberts could have turned rat, somehow causing the brothers’ initial
apprehension. Or they might have been lying in wait all this time for the
moment they could grab Darcy. Or maybe both: first they point the feds in the
right direction so the Firefly Brothers can be vanquished, and then, with Darcy’s
protective shield removed, they move to score a ransom.
Still debating the angles, Jason and Whit walked to the outdoor pay phone that
hid in the far corner of the motel lot. Jason shouldered the booth open,
dropped a nickel, and gave the operator a number he had committed to memory but
hoped never to use.
Two rings later, a young secretary informed him with a tone bordering on joy
that he had reached the office of Windham Automotive Manufacturing. He asked
for the boss, and in turn was asked what this was regarding.
“His daughter.”
“Sir, Mr. Windham thanks everyone for their concern and good wishes, but
he must—”
“Sweetheart, I’m not a well-wisher, and I’m not some bounty
hunter or clairvoyant wasting his time. He’ll want to take this call, and
he’ll blame you if he doesn’t get it, so go get him, please.”
A pause, and then Jason was asked to hold. He looked at Whit, who was carefully
eyeing the drivers of the few cars that passed.
A new voice, gruff and already annoyed. “Who is this?”
“Someone who wants to find your daughter a lot more than you probably do,
you crooked bastard.”
“Excuse me?”
“We’ve never had the pleasure of meeting face-to-face, though
we’ve shared words a couple times. But never mind past history. Usually
someone in your position doesn’t get the cops involved, but because you
never really cared about Darcy I’m betting you’re letting them
monitor this. Since you’re willing to share information with them, share
it with me: what have the kidnappers told you so far?”
“This … this can’t be who I think it is.”
“Of course not. That would be ludicrous.”
“Then … to whom am I speaking?”
“The archangel Gabriel. I want to find Darcy before the kidnappers get
impatient with your hedging on them. Which I’ll bet you’ve been
doing. I’ll bet you even tried to bargain them down, you crooked
bastard.”
“This is … most unusual.”
“You don’t know the half of it. But here’s all you need to be
concerning yourself with: I’m a guy that can help you out. And it
won’t cost you a cent, because I don’t want your crooked money. I
just want to find Darcy. So tell me whatever they’ve told you so
far.”
Jason heard voices whispering on the line. He visualized half a dozen cops and
maybe even reporters scribbling away in their notebooks. Windows open, fans
blaring, pages fluttering in the wind.
“They want two hundred thousand, in tens and fives. They
don’t—”
“I don’t care what they
want
from you. Of course,
you’d start with the money. Tell me what they’ve said, what
they’ve hinted, how they’ve communicated—pen or type,
postmarks, carrier mail or people showing up at your door, that sort of
thing.”
Windham stuttered for a moment. He was the kind of person who dictated the
dimensions of his universe, not the type who gazed heavenward to interpret some
greater power. He was having difficulty adjusting to his new position in the
spinning infinity.
“I, er, I received a phone call when they first took her. I didn’t
even know it had …
occurred
until they informed me, so I sent a
man to her apartment to look for her.” So he’d already known about her
Chicago apartment. “The police confirmed that—well, that there had
been a scene at—”
“What’d the caller sound like?”
“He was whispering, raspy. It was a short
conversation. I didn’t—I didn’t quite understand at first. He
might have been an Italian.”
Wealthy victims of extortion always thought the kidnappers were Italian or
German. Any hick kidnapper knew enough to fake an accent to throw them off.
“Any other calls?”
“None. They instructed me to choose an intermediary, and I picked my
business partner, Septimus Grant. He’s been receiving the notes: once by
post, with a Chicago postmark, and the other two were left on his
doorstep.”
“Which is why you’ve been going about business as usual while
waiting for word, you crooked bastard.”
“I am not accustomed to being spoken to this way, Gabriel.”
“Yeah, I’m sure the kidnappers have been real polite.”
The titillated operator interrupted to request more coins from Jason, who fed
the machine.
“Who are the cops looking for?” Jason asked.
“I, er, I have not involved myself in all of the detecting details. I
don’t feel I sh—”
“Of course not; you don’t care.” Already he was looking
forward to the satisfaction of hanging up on the old man, but not until he
learned more from him. “Read me the first ransom note. Have whichever
dumb cop is standing next to you go fetch it.”
Jasper Windham had once telephoned Jason, months ago, to warn him against using
Darcy for any moneymaking gambits. The old man had startled and impressed the
bank robber with his ability to procure the number of one of Jason’s
hideouts; Darcy had mentioned that her father had Mob connections. Windham
wasn’t calling out of love but self-interest. “She’s been cut
out of the will already,” the auto baron had informed him then, “so
marrying her will yield nothing. And if you or anyone you know is considering
kidnapping or some other con, don’t bother, because I won’t pay a
dime for that hussy. I’m telling you now only because I’d rather
not have my good name dragged into the papers by such foolishness. Do with her
as you please, but don’t expect to involve me in any of it.”