Red Grass River (9 page)

August 1914—January 1915

F
OLLOWING HIS ESCAPE FROM
B
OBBY
B
AKER HE SENT MOST OF HIS
days in the Everglades for months thereafter where none of any race or purpose could close on him without warning. He moved from one to another of his father’s whiskey camps and carried skiffloads of Old Joe Ashley’s hooch to Indian villages in the depths of the Devil’s Garden. He hunted and took hides and feathers and his brothers carried them to sell in Stuart or Pompano or on the New River or Miami docks.

Every few weeks he drove a load of his daddy’s whiskey down to Miami, going to restaurants and pool halls and hotel kitchens and pleasure houses to make the deliveries and collect the money. Now and then his brothers sojourned to Miami with him to have a high time—always less Bill, whose sense of adventure seemed bounded by account ledgers and whose lust knew no object but his wife. As the town had grown, its pleasures had become plentiful and ever more varied, and the Ashleys found the local attitude toward law enforcement far more amenable than that of Palm Beach County. Both the chief of police and the county sheriff were good old boys largely indifferent to victimless and bloodless violations of the criminal statutes—so long as they received their respectful portion of the profits from all such enterprises. Both men had come to be on first-name acquaintance with the Ashley boys.

In Miami the Ashleys would check into a hotel and bathe in porce
lain tubs and dress in new suits and sport with the prettiest whores in town and gamble with the sharps and dine on restaurant glassware and sleep on soft beds with fresh linen. These periodic Miami visits both sated their yen for city wickedness and renewed their appreciation of their natural wildland life. They each time asked Old Joe if he would accompany them and he each time fulminated anew against the failings and follies of all cities and loudly lamented the sins of his youth for which God was punishing him by way of sons too ignorant to recognize a city for the shithole it was.

Gordon Blue had by now opened an office in the Biscayne Hotel on Flagler Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, routinely thick with motor vehicle traffic and flanked by a multistoried architectural motley of gables and oriels and turrets and verandahs and balconies, lined with arcades and awninged sidewalks heavily overhung with black electric and telephone lines depending from tall cross-beamed poles smelling of creosote. Crooning pigeons nestled on Blue’s windowsills. From those widows he would watch pelicans gliding in V-formations over the bay where tall-masted ships lay at anchor. Seagulls wheeling and shrilling over the city. Turkey buzzards roosting on the roof ledges, nodding their ugly red-naked heads and chuckling as though at dirty jokes, putting him in mind of judges he had known and done business with.

Blue had not approved of John Ashley’s escape from Bobby Baker’s custody, not after they had promised Sheriff George Baker that John would not try to get away. “Your promise not to try a break was why he left the cuffs off you when you went to court,” he said to John Ashley. They were in his office and it was the first time they’d seen each other since John’s escape. “They catch you again, Johnny, they’ll lock fifty pounds of chain on you and throw away the key.”

John Ashley had to laugh. “They didn’t
catch
me the first time. I gave myself up, and thats some different. And I did it because they said the trial would be in Palm Beach County. Then those bastards tried to get it moved to Dade. Only a sonofabitch tries to changes a deal after it’s been agreed on, and only a damn fool things he ought keep his word to a sonofabitch. Hell, it aint givin your word that counts, Gordy, it’s
who
you give it to. If George Baker was fool enough to leave the chains off me while they were tryin to crawfish on our deal, thats his damn fault and nobody else’s.”

“The judge hadn’t decided yet that the trial was going to Miami,” Gordon Blue said. He heard the defensiveness in his own voice. “I think I could have kept that from happening.”

John Ashley narrowed his eyes at Gordon Blue and smiled.

Gordon Blue let the matter drop, partly because it would have been fruitless to argue the point—what was done was done and could not be undone—and partly because he believed John Ashley could be right.

It was Blue who introduced the Ashley boys to Miami’s backroom gambling spots and hotel poker games frequented by some of the highest rollers in town. Rather than the four of them competing directly against each other, the brothers would split up into paired teams and gamble in different locales—Frank and Ed going to one place, John and Bob playing at another. At the end of the night they would pool whatever winnings they’d pulled in and divide them into equal shares. As far as Gordon Blue knew none of them ever held out on the other, a circumstance that flew in the face of his experience with human nature where money was concerned.

At one of these poker sessions in the Biscayne Hotel on a late fall Friday evening Gordon Blue introduced John and Bob Ashley to someone he called the nephew of an old friend, a freckled young man named Kid Lowe, just arrived on the train from Chicago. The fellow seemed to the Ashleys aptly named: in both stature and visage—and in his white boater and red bowtie—he looked about fourteen years old, even though he chainsmoked cigarettes and played a good game of poker. Only his eyes were parcel of a grown man—wary and quick and mistrustful. But as soon as he spoke and they heard his accent they knew him for one of their own. He was not shy in telling of himself and over the course of the next few hours they learned he’d been born in Tallahassee to a footloose mother, herself a native of Tally Town, but he’d been reared from infancy by maiden aunts in Leesburg till he was eighteen. Then he went to Chicago to work for an uncle in the stockyards and eventually became a bodyguard for a man named Silver Jack O’Keefe, whose trade consisted of acquiring high-interest loans from private sources and then lending the money to somebody else at higher interest yet.

“Bodyguard?” John Ashley echoed. He gave the diminutive Kid Lowe a pointedly appraising look.

Kid Lowe scowled and said, “It aint the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog. I’da figured you all to know that.”

Bob Ashley grinned. “That’s sure enough true about dogs, cousin, is sure enough is.”

At the game’s conclusion John and Bob Ashley accepted Gordon Blue’s invitation to join him and Kid Lowe at a brightly-lighted cafe on Miami Avenue for pork chop sandwiches and beer. There Gordon
Blue informed the brothers that Kid Lowe was in difficult circumstances with business associates in Chicago. He did not get specific beyond saying that the matter concerned Silver Jack O’Keefe’s failure to meet a certain financial obligation and that Silver Jack was now said to be at the bottom of Lake Michigan with one end of a rope around his neck and the other tied to a hundred-pound bag of bricks.

“What’s that got to do with young Lowe here?” John Ashley said.

“I paid a visit to the sumbitch responsible for that sack a bricks,” Kid Lowe said. “I mean, hell, it made me look bad, them snatching him out of the restaurant like they did while I was taking a piss. Made me look like a didnt know how to do my job.”

John Ashley nodded and studied the Kid more closely. “That sumbitch in the lake now too?”

“Ask me no questions,” Kid Lowe said, “I’ll tell you no lies.”

John Ashley laughed and said that was fine by him.

Gordon Blue was sure the matter would be cleared up in a week or two, but until then Kid Lowe needed a safe place to lie low. The Ashley boys grinned at the little fugitive and said any friend of Gordon’s was a friend of theirs and they’d be happy to put the boy up for a time, so long as he kept to himself all complaints about mosquitoes or the lack of city amenities he might be used to—such as running water or electricity. Kid Lowe smiled shyly and thanked them and said he’d be proud to get back to country living after three years of the big city life, which he had lately come to lose all fondness for.

They returned to the hotel to meet with Ed and Frank Ashley and then at Gordon Blue’s suggestion they all packed into a taxi and headed for the city limits and Hardieville. One side of Frank Ashley’s face was yet puffed and patched with purple from its impact with the windshield when he ran the Dusenberg squarely into an oak. A drizzling rain had fallen through most of the early evening and the limestone streets shone pale under the rattling taxi’s headlamps and in the cast of the infrequent streetlights. A cat’s-eye amber moon rose out of the Atlantic. The air had cooled and the wind was to seaward and carried on it the scent of wet earth and ripe foliage and was free of the usual stink of dredged bay bottom.

At this late hour of a Friday night the Hardieville sidewalks were raucous with revelers and with drunks doing the hurricane walk. From its brightly blazing doors and windows came the smells of whiskey and cooking grease, sweat and perfume, the sounds of laughter and shouting and badly sung songs, the plinking of ragtime pianos and the blatting of brass bands. They went into the Purple Duck, a supperplace
offering three musical floorshows per evening, one of which was in progress before a sparse crowd as they made their way past the dining room—a trio of boaters and peppermint jackets softstepping on a tiny stage and singing “On Moonlight Bay.” A woman in a green satin dress came forth to greet Gordon Blue with a kiss that left its cheerful lipsticked imprint on his cheek. Her smile was warm but her eyes quick and assessing and John Ashley figured her for nobody’s fool. Gordon Blue introduced her as Miss Catherine, the proprietress, and she smiled around at them all and bade them have a swell time.

Gordon Blue led the way through a curtained doorway in the rear of the room and down a narrow hall to yet another door. He grinned at his friends and delivered three sharp raps and then two lesser ones. A small peephole opened in the door for a moment and then closed and there was the sound of a latch working and the door opened and a short broad man in a red bowtie and black vest nodded at Gordon Blue and permitted them to pass into a room hazy with dim yellow light and cigarette smoke and loud with ragtime music and laughter and talk. There were crowded tables all about and a small dance floor at one end of the room and beside it a bandstand and on it a Negro pianist playing his rag tunes in a sweat. A brass-railed bar ran the length of the room and the backbar was resplendent with a tiered array of every variety of bottled spirits. Whores everywhere—in shimmies and in filmy Arabian pantalettes and vests and in white cotton bloomers and beribboned lace bodices cut low on their milky breasts—whores plying the tables and bantering with the patrons at the bar and here and there twining arms with a grinning man and the pair making for the stairway leading to the rooms above.

They wended their way to the bar and each man called for bourbon. As the bartender set them up John Ashley scanned the crowd and marveled happily at the great allure of vice. He turned to Gordon Blue and said, “I’ve heard tell it aint no fruit so sweet as that which is forbidden, and ever time I come in a place like this I do believe I heard tell correctly.”

Gordon Blue grinned and said, “Spoken like a true philosopher, Johnny.”

John Ashley smiled. “I do hope and pray the damn Saloon League gets the federals to outlaw spirits. Hellfire, Gordy, we’ll all be rich in no time.”

Gordon Blue raised his glass high and said, “To the Saloon League! May its high moral principles enrich us all!”

Four hours later they’d each of them made a trip upstairs with a
girl and Frank and Ed told their brothers they would see them back at the hotel and then departed for The Pair-’O-Dice down the street to see what it was like. John and Bob Ashley, Kid Lowe and Gordon Blue then posted themselves at the bar of The Purple Duck’s backroom and were shortly joined by Miss Catherine who clearly had a special fondness for Gordon Blue. Each man bought a round in his turn and they talked and told jokes and finally agreed to call it a night.

The crowd had grown larger now and the air was thick and warm with body heat and gauzed with cigarette smoke and the front door seemed very far away at the other end of the room. Gordon Blue asked Miss Catherine if they might use her special side door and she led them to her office and shut the door behind them and pulled back a heavy set of curtains against the wall to reveal her private door. It opened into a dark alley thick with mud on which a walkway of planks had been laid end to end from Miss Catherine’s door to the street some forty yards distant to their right. Immediately to their left was a cul-de-sac. A light drizzle yet fell in a mist and the alley reeked of rot and human waste and the only light in the alleyway was the dim glow from the streetlamps.

While Gordon Blue said his private goodnights to Miss Catherine, John Ashley stepped out onto the plank walkway and the others followed behind. Now Gordon Blue came out and Miss Catherine waved from the brightly lighted doorway and said, “You boys take care now, you hear?” and closed the door behind them.

They began to file along the boards, one behind the other, just as a trio of men in derbies came round the corner at the far end of the alley and started toward them on the planks, stark black silhouettes against the yellow backlight of the street, their shadows stretching before them like shades loosed of the graveyard.

“This might could get interestin,” Bob Ashley said.

Near the midpoint of the walkway, John Ashley and the other point man halted with three feet between them and regarded each other. John Ashley felt himself clearly illumined in the glow of the streetlights, but the other man remained indistinct, a backlighted silhouette. One of the other men raised a bottle to his mouth and it gleamed brightly against the light and John Ashley caught the redolence of rum.

“Well now, I guess you lads will be getting a bit of mud on your shoes now, wont ye?” the front man said, and John Ashley felt rather than saw the man’s grin.

“We was on this walk before you boys,” John Ashley said. “Anybody gone get their shoes muddy it’s you.”