Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (15) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
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all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Monday,
August 14, 1911

Julius Warren Ashley sat stiffly on the brocade “canape’” in the “salon” of Geneva Pitt’s mansion in the North End, Palm Beach, not half a mile from Henry Morrison Flagler’s Whitehall digs. The ocean breeze sailed in open floor-to-ceiling windows, belling out heavy, embroidered curtains. Fans turned languidly high overhead while massive gilt-framed portraits and forest and ocean scenes imposed from the walls. Heavily decorated yet insubstantial furniture strategically graced the room, like the tea table before him and the “divan”—no, the “canape,” he reminded himself—upon which he sat.
    Joe Ashley was nervous as a whore in church in a place like this, where even the names of things made no sense. Especially when such place was occupied by the scheming, greedy, fire-breathing Venus from Hell, Geneva Pitt.

She smiled sweetly at Joe

    She sat primly across from him in a decorative, insubstantial chair, sipping tea from a cup while holding the saucer in her left hand. She smiled sweetly at Joe.
    Outside in the garden, one of the peacocks she’d had imported, back when the money flowed like champagne, started its eerie screeching. Some said it sounded like a baby crying, some a woman in distress.
    A chill ran up his spine. It sounded like someone dying to him, crying out in sorrow and pain.
    He had to admit she still looked good. He was now forty-three, so Geneva had to be pushing forty herself. She wore a frilly layered something-or-other in pastel peach, quite in keeping with the summer color fashion, Joe had no doubt. It hid just a touch of thickness in her waist while brazenly showing off her considerable bosom. Pearls adorned her still-smooth neck, bangles flashed from her white arms, and rings sparkled from her delicate fingers. Her light-brown hair curled fashionably about her lovely face and the diamonds in her ears in the latest trend.
    Joe stretched the seams of a black suit shiny with wear, which he had last worn to a funeral in 1908. As a Palm Beach County deputy, he had his badge pinned to his coat pocket and wore his self-loading Short Colt 1900 .38 in a crossover holster under his left arm.

She was a bad little rich girl

    They had been lovers, back when her father, Byron Bingham Pitt, had been the master of a much smaller but still grand house, in a much poorer but still grand neighborhood. She was a bad little rich girl slumming the swamp-side dives with the Everglades trash that washed up like dead fish on the tide.
    He was a dirt-poor young woodsman scraping a living from hunting, fishing, and selling his fine home-made white lightning.
    They danced and drank till many a dawn, with plenty of hanky-panky thrown in, sometimes by moonlight and mosquitos in his mule wagon. One of those nights some bark-skinned trapper had grabbed Geneva from behind, while Joe was pissing on a tree twenty yards away.
    The silk-dressed city girl produced a straight razor like magic and proceeded to cut the hapless trapper up one side and down the other, and his screams had drawn a crowd. When he went down, she kicked him in the face, and they’d had to search the bushes for her shoe while the trapper nursed a broken jaw.
    Nobody fucked with the city girl after that, including Joe. It was the first but not the last time he would see her temper turn like lightning into some very, very bad shit.
    Had Byron Bingham ever had the slightest notion such a liaison existed, he would have made short work of it indeed. He was a man with a highly classical education and a middling business ability and had made a respectable trade out of shipping higher-quality furniture and art from Europe and the North to sell to the rich Palm Beachers, who were escaping the cold grey environs of New England in their thousands. He was the kind of man who christened his daughters after the capitals of “civilized” European countries, hence her name: Geneva. Her younger sister was Vienna. His daughters would marry rich men and increase the family fortune.

The idea would have set his hair afire

    The idea of her dropping her drawers outside some speakeasy for a swamp rat like Joe Ashley would have set his sparse hair afire. Joe was head over heels, and it made him blind to just how bad she would become.
    Joe’s tea sat untouched on the table, which he knew also had a fancy name, but he couldn’t recall it. Time was, she had dreamed she would teach him to be a gentleman, and, somehow, they would sneak him into the family, which was why he knew any of this at all.
    Of course, that had never happened, said plan having about the same chance as a fart in a hurricane. Joe grew bored and more nervous. He’d been sitting here must be five minutes now and fidgeted to know why she’d called him. He pulled a flask from his coat pocket and took a long gulp.
    Geneva’s smile didn’t waver. It was enough to give a man the heebies.
    He rolled a smoke.
    Geneva said nothing.
    He lit it up, blew out smoke.
    She smiled on.
    He was exasperated. “What is it, Geneva? You know I got a family now, and things to take care of. Why bring me down here?”
    Geneva Pitt smiled. He was about to jump up and leave, but of course that’s when she spoke, to throw him off. She could always do that. Geneva ran the show, and with Geneva it was always a show.

He should have known

    Joe Ashley shook his head. He should have known.
    Geneva’s smile vanished. Finally. “I need money. Daddy pissed a lot of it away, and Vienna spends like the Czar of all the fucking Russias.”
    Joe took another drag from his home-roll and played her game. He said nothing. He took another slash from his flask.
    Geneva glared; she didn’t like it when you didn’t go along with her little productions. “I need a man like you to get me money. I have some ideas as to how both of us can become very, very rich.”
    Joe’s eyebrows rose. He fought the urge to speak. She’d played him into this, and now he would make her spell it out. He had just about convinced himself he had gained the upper hand when she threw him another curve ball.
    “First, I need you to do something for me. I’ll pay you. But it has to stay just between us old lovers, forever never amen, got it?”
    Joe’s eyebrows felt like they might meet his receding hairline at some point.
    She set her teacup down. The brown maid who’d brought the tea earlier must have heard the cup clink on the saucer and breezed in like a summer squall in the Bahamas. The tea service and the brown girl disappeared as if by magic. “Got it.”
    She watched his face. The silence stretched. A table clock chimed faintly in the hall.
    He said nothing. Took a sip from his flask. It was running low.
    Geneva, irritated, tapped her fancy shoe. She had tiny feet. He loved her feet. Beautiful little babies, he’d used to call them.
    He said nothing.
    She gave him the ugly eye and finally gave in. “Will you give me that?” She snatched the flask from his hand and turned it up. Two gulps and it was gone. She slammed it down on the table.
    The brown maid did not appear like magic.

“I’ll pay you two thousand dollars”

    “God damn it, I need you to kill someone for me. I’ll pay you two thousand dollars.”
    Joe thought his eyebrows might fly off into the sky. He leaned forward into her face. “Who?”
    Geneva looked out the windows, to where the ocean rolled mildly in from the east.
    Joe got a bad feeling; she never looked away.
    “Desoto Tiger.”
    Joe’s bad feeling turned to horror. “Are you fucking crazy? The chief’s son? Why in the God damn flying fucking hell would I kill the son of the Cow Creek Seminoles? Forget it. Tommy Tiger would cut every piece and particle off me before he even got started! There isn’t enough money.”
    She was shaking her head, crying. “No, you have to help me, you have to…” She pulled him from the couch and threw her arms around him. Her breasts pushed into his chest, she smelled so good.
    “No. No. I got Lugenia and the boys, we have a life, hell they’s grown men…”
    She was hugging him, crying into his shoulder.

What a deputy made in four months

    He never could resist her. God damn it, two thousand dollars. He ran a few high-class call girls, took a little protection money; a deputy in Palm Beach who didn’t make a comfortable living on the side was a fool. But two grand was what a deputy made in four months.
    He frowned. “Why?” She stopped crying immediately.
    “Well…Vienna’s fucking him. She’s fucking an Indian. Says she loves him! That girl never had the sense God gave a dumb piss ant. We have almost no money left, and if it got out she was fucking some Seminole buck, our credit would dry up so fast it would’ve happened yesterday. And,” she hesitated, something else she never did. “He sent me a message. Said he would tell the Palm Beach County if I didn’t give him money.”
    Joe’s jaw clenched. The new local paper was a shameless tattle rag. She knew he hated a man who would treat a woman so, and a God-damned Indian at that. He knew, if he let her, Geneva would talk him into sleeping with her. It would bind them, and she knew that, it was the kind of thing she did, she roped a man in.
    But he wouldn’t do it. He had Lugenia, and though he’d run around a lot in his younger days he’d never run around on her. He’d married her, and a man wants to run around oughtn’t get married. He was mad as hell, but he damn sure needed money, and he needed it bad. Lugenia wasn’t well. He wasn’t sure what ailed her, but the treatments ate up a deputy’s narrow pay and his little bit of payola quicker’n you could say shit.
    He pushed her from him and scowled. “Three.”
    Her eyes narrowed for a split second, but she nodded.
    He pushed it. “Half now. The rest when it’s done.”
    She nodded again. “Come upstairs with me. It’s in a safe in my room.”
    There it was. Her play. They said God put hair on a pussy to hide the hook, and he knew it was the truth.
    “I’ll stay right here. You go get it yourself.”

Fifteen hundred stuffed inside his coat

    On the way out to his 1915 Model T patrol car, fuming, with fifteen hundred in cash stuffed in his inside coat pocket, one of the peacocks strutted in front of him. He swung a boot at it in spite, but it scooted out of the way, and he almost fell. God damn them fuckin’ birds anyway, they were filthy, noisy critters. He wondered how they would taste roasted up. Might have to find out, he thought, when he came back for the rest of his money. Serve the bitch right.

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens