The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (7 page)

He made it to the table and Pop extended a hand. They shook, which felt formal
and strange, then he sat. Pop asked how he was doing.
Jason shrugged. “How are Ma and the boys?”
“They’re fine. They wanted to come, too, but I thought I should
come alone this one time.” Jason didn’t say anything as Pop looked
around. “You know, I’ve worked awfully hard in the one life
I’ve been given. Built a strong business, got a good house for my family.
And you chose this instead.”
“This
wasn’t exactly what I was choosing, Pop.”
“You knew the risks.”
Jason reminded himself that he would have a week, at least, until he could
entertain another visitor. That meant one week to replay this conversation in
his mind, so he should try, despite the difficulties and temptations, to play
it well the first time.
“I guess I made some mistakes, Pop.”
“Yes. I guess you did.”
“I should have driven faster that one
time,” he said, grinning. Pop’s face tightened.
“I’m so glad you have your sense of humor. That should make the
months fly by.”
“Did you drive all this way just to tell me how I messed up? The judge
already told me that. And the prosecutor, and the cops, and half the guys in
this room, to be honest.”
“Yeah, what about these guys?” Pop looked around again.
“I’ve been thinking about them, studying them a bit as I waited for
you. You know, when you’re a parent you can’t help but look at the
other kids, think of the different choices the other parents made, the
different people your kids are all becoming. I thought about that at your high
school graduation, looked at the caps and gowns, wondered where they were all
headed. And now I look at your new cohorts here …. Are these your people
now, Jason?”
“Pop—”
Patrick Fireson leaned forward, lowered his voice. They were still the only two
at this table. “You’re better than these people, Jason.”
“I know that.”
“You’ve got a head on your shoulders and you know how to succeed,
you know right from wrong. I
taught
you that. You’re
better
than these people.”
“I
know
that,” Jason said, raising his voice.
“Then what are you doing here?”
Jason stared at the wall. He would have punched it if it weren’t cinder
block.
They spent most of their thirty minutes that way, trying to talk casually but
always forced back to these moments of reckoning. Jason couldn’t tell if
his father was trying to help him or torture him.
When the thirty minutes were up, they shook hands again and that was that. The
conversation, as he’d expected, didn’t get any better as he thought
about it during the week.
The next Sunday the whole family came. Ma didn’t cry, for which Jason was
thankful, and Weston and Whit kept staring at the other prisoners, apparently
wondering which were ax murderers and which ate children. Jason’s eyes
occasionally trailed his father’s, to the two younger
sons and back to himself, and he felt worse, not
necessarily for what he had done but for what he was forcing his brothers and
his mother to see. He sat up straighter that day, smiled more, did what he
could to show that this wasn’t so terrible. He joked with his brothers,
told Ma how he was teaching some of the men to read, mentioned to Pop that he
was studying the Bible a bit (failing to explain that the Good Book was the
only reading material prisoners were allowed).
The Sunday after that, it was just Pop again, and Jason tensed, anticipating
another browbeating. But it didn’t come. They just talked—about the
family, the store, Pop’s real-estate plans, baseball. Eventually Jason
realized that Pop was done with the lecturing. He didn’t know if Pop felt
he’d pointed out his son’s flaws enough by then or if the old man
was silently assessing what fault in this was his own. Over time, Jason learned
to let his guard down.
“Tell Weston and Whit that they don’t have to come if they
don’t like … seeing me like this,” Jason said one of the
times when they were alone. “I’d understand. I don’t want them
looking at me in this place and thinking, I don’t know, that this is
their future, too.”
“They miss you, Jason.”
Jason nodded, looked away.
“They don’t want to talk about it, but I can tell. They missed you
before, when you were out doing all
that
. But now, too.”
“I’m a lousy brother.”
“Brothers usually are.”
“I’m a lousy son, too.”
“You have your moments.”
Jason let a grin pierce through his self-loathing. Then it faded. “Look,
I know I haven’t been … who you want me to be, but—”
“It’s not about what I want. We are what we
do
, Jason.
I’ve tried to show you that. I guess I failed at it. But we are what we
do, the choices we make.”
“I know I made some wrong decisions.”
Pop seemed struck by the admission. This would have been, what, the second
month? The third? How long had Jason’s reserve of pride and cockiness
held out?
“So when I get out of here … could I work at the store again? Or do
you have a policy against hiring guys with records?”
Pop smiled. “That policy doesn’t apply to
blood relations. And I can always use the cheap labor.”
And that’s what Jason was after his term ended, cheap labor, the prodigal
son returned. Smiles all around. The good feelings lasted a few weeks.
Eventually Jason got over his guilt at having been a lousy son and he admitted to
himself how incredibly bored he was to be back at the store, performing the
same tasks he’d done as a schoolboy, standing behind the same counter,
making the same idle talk with the same customers. The onset of Pop’s
money troubles only made things worse—the stock crash and the new
supermarkets undercutting his business, and the debt Pop had rung up investing
in real estate just before the crash. Jason was tired of hearing about it,
tired of inheriting someone else’s problems. He told himself he had a right
to live his own life. So finally, when Weston was working at the store
full-time and Whit was in his final year of school, Jason broke the news as
delicately as he could. He thanked Pop for taking him back in and told him no
hard feelings this time but he was moving in with some friends to try
“something new,” something for himself. Pop said he understood,
acting as if his son had not broken his heart again.
But “something new” wound up being something old: bootlegging
again. And things didn’t work out quite as Jason had hoped. He would soon
do a second stretch in jail for it, but this time there would be no visits from
his old man.

Years later, the resurrected Firefly Brothers were driving just north of
Lincoln City to the quiet town of Karpis. Even the most devastated of cities
seemed to have at least one gleaming suburb like this, the lawns watered and
mowed, the Cadillacs washed and waxed. People out here had heard of the
depression but didn’t entirely believe the stories.
At the edge of town, where a few restaurants and taverns clung to the one
narrow road leading north into emptiness, sat the safe house run by
Jason’s old bootlegging mentor, Chance McGill. Chance did a little of
This and a little of That. He’d been jailed for This during the early
twenties, but he was acquitted of That a few years back, and these days he
operated his popular restaurant-nightclub, Last Best Chance, with minimal
interference. There were bands three nights a week and dancing showgirls
twice, and the card playing that went on in back rooms was
permitted by the brass buttons as long as they got their take. A veritable
House of Seven Gables of the Midwest underworld, Last Best Chance was as
sprawling as its owner’s many pursuits; a dance room had been added a few
years back, and then an outdoor patio, and then another bar over here, and some
rooms for the ladies over there, until the building was a nearly block-long
labyrinth of pleasure and deception. Rumor had it that Chance had designed the
floor plan to be as confusing as possible should he and his special guests ever
need to elude raiding cops.
Chance and his chatty wife lived on the top floor; also on that floor were
several bedrooms that hot boys could stay in, for prices ranging from five
bucks to thirty, depending on exactly how much heat was on them. Dillinger had
once stayed here, as well as Baby Face Nelson and even Pretty Boy Floyd, far away
from his southwestern territory. But no one had doled out more hide-me money
than Jason and Whit, until Chance had regretfully told them, back in May, that
the volcanically hot Firefly Brothers should start bunking elsewhere.
Jason and his gang often communicated through Chance, leaving messages about
when and where they should regroup. Chance knew anyone worth knowing and never
seemed to have trouble locating them when the right person asked.
Jason idled in front of the building. A bottle-blond zaftig was strolling
toward the entrance.
“Say, doll, do me a favor,” Jason called to her. “Tell Mr.
McGill that Officer Rubinsky would like a word. And to bring some
smokes.”
She gave him a look as empty as an alcoholic’s shot glass. Then her heels
clacked away. It was burlesque night, and the Firesons were treated to a blast
of tarnished horns when she opened the door.
Two minutes later another brass blast, longer this time because one of the men
was holding the door open. A second was beside him, and the third, Chance
McGill himself, was holding a box of cigars and a level gaze aimed cautiously
at the Pontiac.
Officer Rubinsky was one of the cops Chance paid protection money to; Chance
could see this wasn’t the cop’s wheels.
“We look like a couple of Syndicate torpedoes,” Whit said under his
breath. “Probably scaring the hell out of him.”
“Good. It’ll make him easier to read.”
Chance was in his early fifties but had managed to age
with the grace of a silent-film star. Usually he moved with a thespian’s
confidence, fluidity to every gesture, but now he stepped slowly, as if under
water. A thin man, his gray hair was trimmed short and his wrinkles were ironed
flat in the neon light. Then his blue eyes lit red.
“Jason?” He was ten feet from the Pontiac.
“Not so loud.” Jason grinned. “Tell your loogans you’re
okay. And get in—we have a crazy story for you.”
“You weren’t followed?”
“Only by the Grim Reaper—he tailed us leaving the cemetery.
C’mon, get in.”
Chance waved off his men and opened the back door. Jason eased off the brake
and began driving the calm streets of Karpis.
“How’s tricks?” Jason asked. Whit had turned halfway in his
seat to keep an eye on the restaurateur.
“Not so good as they are for you two, apparently. Jesus. I even offered a
prayer for your eternal souls.”
“I’m sure our souls appreciate it.”
“What happened?”
“Look, Chance,” Jason said. “No one needs to know about the
crazy hallucinations you’ve been having. Everyone can just go on mourning
the dead Firefly Brothers, got it? They can send us all the prayers they
like.”
“Understood. That Houdini you pulled in Toledo was impressive, boys, but
this one is by far the best.”
“Thanks. And we aren’t going to tell you how we did it, no
offense.”
“I wouldn’t ask.”
Jason pulled into a small park and turned around to face his passenger as
Chance handed out cigars. Jason hadn’t had a smoke since before the
cooling boards, and just by biting off the end he saw that Chance knew how to
keep his cops happy.
“Heard anything on Owney?” Jason asked.
Chance produced a lighter and that produced light. “What kind of
anything?”
“We were supposed to meet him last week in Detroit.” Jason left it
at that. He still couldn’t remember if the meeting had occurred, but the
fact that the Points North cops had found the full seventy thousand dollars on
the brothers meant that they’d never paid Owney his
share, so either the meeting hadn’t happened or it had gone very badly
indeed.
“He hasn’t been arrested,” Chance said. “And he
ain’t ratted that I know of.”
Even with the windows down they were consumed by delicious smoke.
“Know where he is?”
Chance didn’t answer.
“We still owe him his stake,” Jason explained, not mentioning that
they no longer had the money.
Chance exhaled a cloud. They were like three bored dragons in a too-small cave.
“There’s a cottage he and his wife have used.”
“In the U.P.?” Jason raised his eyebrows. Chance made an expression
that was not fully a confirmation. “Jesus, then he’s an
idiot.”
Jason had met Owney Davis in prison during his second bootlegging rap, before graduating
to bank jobs. Let out two weeks after Jason, Owney became a part of the Firefly
Gang from the beginning. He was a loyal friend whose life ambition was to form
a new church, in the hope of spiritual as well as financial enrichment. Jason
found it difficult to believe Owney would turn Judas. But he also found it
difficult to believe that, with all the heat on them, Owney and his wife would
run to the same Michigan lake house they’d used as a hideout months
earlier, when the heat had first intensified.
“What’s the word on Marriner, Brickbat, and Roberts?” Jason
asked.
“Look, Jason,
if
someone did stooge on you, it coulda been anyone.
Ten grand is a lot of money.”
Ten grand was the most recent reward the Justice Department had posted for
information leading to the Firefly Brothers’ arrest. It had started at
fifteen hundred, then doubled after two cops were killed during a November bank
job in Calumet City, then doubled again in the early spring, when the feds
belatedly realized that a fatal February bank job in Baton Rouge had actually
been pulled off by the Firefly Brothers. Louisiana was far outside their usual
territory, of course; after a busy autumn in the Midwest, the brothers had
spent much of the winter hiding out, first in Florida and then in New Orleans.
It had been a wise time to hide: the U.S. attorney general and a bureaucrat
named J. Edgar Hoover
from something called the Bureau
of Investigation were making speeches about the need for a stronger national
police force, something capable of investigating the complex cases that
bumbling state squads couldn’t handle. A federal crime-fighting agency
would conquer gangsterism just as the New Deal would conquer the depression,
Hoover claimed. When the Firesons’ money grew scarce—and the
exoticism of the South was overpowered by their nostalgia for home—Jason
had started scouting banks in Baton Rouge, leading to the reunited gang’s
first endeavor in more than two months. After that, the price on the
brothers’ heads continued to rise as stories proliferated about their
escapades, some of them accurate and some of them the falsely attributed crimes
of other, less famous outlaws. Finally, the feds had rounded the price off to
an even ten, causing the brothers to wonder if that number would continue to appreciate
for as long as they drew breath, or if it would eventually crash like the stock
market if people lost interest. Or if they simply disappeared.
“Well,” Jason said now, “we’re hoping to narrow the
list of suspects.”
“You should have too many other things on your mind to be interested in
revenge, boys.”
“We didn’t say anything about revenge. We’d just like to know
if someone did rat on us, so we can avoid that someone in the future.”
“Well, if anyone did they didn’t tell me.”
“I never asked if they did. I just asked if you knew where our boys
are.”
“People haven’t been using the Chance McGill line the way they used
to, but—”
“Because you wouldn’t let us,” Whit said.
“Damn right I wouldn’t let you!” He held the cigar away from
his face and extended a reproachful finger. “I’ve worked my way up
inch by inch, son, and I’m not gonna let it get torn down by a couple
brothers who’ve managed to get ten state police forces, Pinkertons,
postal cops, the National Guard, and the fucking federal government after them,
no matter how goddamn charming
one
of them happens to be.”
Jason put a hand on Whit’s shoulder. “We’re not blaming you
for anything, Chance. We’re just—”
“Your brother sure as hell is.”
“Whit didn’t mean anything by it. Anyway, back to square one.
You’re saying you don’t know hell’s first whispers about
where our boys are?”
Chance managed to move his eyes from Whit to Jason.
“Marriner’s still living the good life, far as I know.”
Marriner Skelty, Jason’s bank-robbing mentor with decades of endeavors to
his name, had possessed the good sense to retire after the Calumet City job in
November. “As for Brickbat and Roberts, nix.”
“Brickbat was never my biggest fan,” Jason said, to draw him out.
“I always did notice an added degree of tension in the room when he was
in it. Crazy bastard. Never shoulda gotten involved with him, Jason.”
“I got wise eventually.”
The brothers had kicked Brickbat and Roberts out of the gang after the bloody
Baton Rouge job. Brickbat was as his nickname implied, all stubborn force and
no thought. He was only five-six, but his thick frame contained the coiled rage
of three generations of doomed Iowa homesteaders. Still, if you were at least a
few feet away from him you stood a reasonably good chance of outsmarting him
before he got close enough to break your face. Unless he was packing, which he
always was. Starting out as the muscle guarding cigarette shipments in St.
Paul, he’d worked a few bank jobs with the Barker Gang in Minnesota.
According to the police, he’d rubbed three cops in the process; according
to Brickbat, the body count was seven. He’d been in the opening months of
a permanent holiday courtesy the state of Illinois when he was liberated during
the same jailbreak that freed such now-infamous hoods as Henry Pierpont and John
Makley, of the Dillinger Gang. Brickbat knew Owney through some work
they’d done on a Minnesota bootlegging line, and at the time Jason needed
an extra torpedo and figured the man’s brand of pugilistic cockiness
would make him a natural for the job. Thus was a regrettable relationship born.
Jason quickly tired of the way Brickbat’s palsied trigger finger made
bank jobs more violent affairs than they needed to be. Jason had handed
Brickbat an extra cut when he booted him from the gang, in the hope that it would
constitute ending on good terms, but something in the man’s demeanor had
left Jason with the uncomfortable feeling that this was not yet a farewell.
Elton Roberts, Brickbat’s only friend, was a heavy drinker, a trait the
Firesons distrusted. A little here and there was fine, but a man who
couldn’t be counted on to drive straight or think straight was an
unnecessary risk. Fortyish and debonair, Roberts was a grifter who’d
spent the
past few years ripping off the hopeless
jobless across the Midwest. Decked out in a dapper suit and possessing a smooth
voice, he looked every bit the trustworthy businessman, or at least what a poor
egg thought a trustworthy businessman would look like, if there were any. He
would troll the breadlines and find a few suckers, preferably immigrants or
farmers who had lost their property and were overwhelmed by their urban
environs. He’d tell them he was the manager of a new building in town
that needed four elevator operators; the job paid thirty a week— not bad
at all—and all the fellows needed to do was front him fifty each for
their uniforms. The fellows usually didn’t have that much cash, but
they’d ask for a day or two to rustle the funds from their cousins or
in-laws or dying grandparents. Once Roberts had their money, he’d tell
them the building’s address and ask them to show at eight the next
morning. When they did, they would find that Roberts wasn’t there and
that the building had no elevator. Roberts bounced from city to city working
that grift and a few others before the cops got wise. Then, while doing time,
he met a jug marker with a list of banks to hit once he got out. Like a
skittering asteroid, Elton Roberts eventually came into Jason’s orbit.
Because Roberts looked straight and could talk his way out of trouble, Jason
had taken him on as a faceman. He learned about Roberts’s jobshark scams
only after a few weeks of working together, when Elton got drunk and boastful.
That’s when Jason realized he’d never liked the man.
“Look,” Chance said, “I know Brickbat’s crazy, but I
don’t see him for a finger-louse. Last I heard he was gearing for some
big job. Was trying to get the Barkers involved, but they wouldn’t
bite.”
“What was the job?”
“He wasn’t that talkative.”
Jason eyed him. “You’re not telling us everything.”
“It’d take a week to tell you everything, and you never seem to
have enough time. But I’m telling you the important parts.”
Jason turned around and started the engine. “You’re
right—I’d love to chin with you all night, but, yeah, we’ve
got to go.”