Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (16) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

June 1912 – May 1914

Joe Ashley drove the department issue Model T through the night, cursing the dragline crew who’d found the body of Desoto Tiger. He’d planned it with John that the young men would go trapping together, John would kill Desoto, and the ’gators that plagued the New River would take care of the body.
    He hadn’t counted on the dragline crew poisoning the water with arsenic. They were extending the canal to Okeechobee, right through the swamp. It was getting more common that, rather than taking chances on getting snakebit, mostly, but ’gator bit too, swamp crews would dump arsenic in the water. They didn’t care that it killed everything, the snakes and gators sure, but the fish, the birds, turtles, hell the fuckin’ frogs. It was a sin and a crime, how these citified folks just destroyed every natural thing they touched.
    Even worse, the alligators hadn’t eaten Desoto Tiger’s body, because the fuckin’ ’gators were dead. Desoto’s body had had a perfect hole in the back, where John’s bullet had entered, killing him. And now John was on the run from the very Sheriff’s Department that his daddy worked for.
    Two deputies who’d been sent to collar John had been bushwhacked by John and Bob in a palmetto thicket in Hobe Sound. John had disarmed them, humiliated them, and sent them back to Sheriff George Baker with their tails between their legs, and threatened the Sheriff to boot. That shit would go over at headquarters like a lead balloon, he thought.
    Joe couldn’t believe he’d let Geneva sucker him into her deal, but it was clear that his relatively short career as a lawman in Palm Beach County was over.
    He didn’t even go into the station when he got to town; he’d probably have been arrested. He parked the T in the back lot, dropped his badge inside, and set off walking. The Short Colt belonged to him, although the shoulder holster was department issue. Fuck ’em.
    He had an idea things were going to be a lot different from now on. Time to find out if Geneva’s plans on makin’ money were real or just talk.

They started small. Through her society connections, Geneva put him on to a shipment of jewelry to a particular store on Lake Worth Avenue. Joe crashed a stolen car into the delivery vehicle and robbed it.
    She sent a rented limousine for him to duck into around the corner, and no one would imagine a robber would be riding in a 1910 Daimler Hooper town car.

Such jobs became regular affairs

    Such jobs became regular affairs, each one painstakingly planned, from Miami all the way to Jacksonville. They began to make a lot of money, just as Geneva had promised. The scheme paid for Lugenia’s treatments, and Joe had money left over.
    He took to wearing fancy clothes to fit in with the various luxury sedans his partner in crime sent to retrieve him. One day he picked up a copy of the Miami Daily Metropolis where they headlined him as the “Dapper Bandit.” Soon others followed suit.
    Fort Lauderdale’s Sun Sentinel called him “cunning and sophisticated.” The Palm Beach County said he must have been a member of the upper classes, to have knowledge of jewelry shipments, payrolls, cash consignments and bearer bond transfers the way he did.
    He was a ghost, the Stuart Times claimed, appearing from nowhere, clean shaven with a waxed pencil mustache, in a vest and suit with matching tie and in winter a long light overcoat, all very stylish, spotless and crisply starched. He wore a small, sharp fedora and talked like a Palm Beach socialite. No one who had known him as County Deputy Julius Ashley, or as the rough trapper and fisherman Joe, would have recognized this slick stranger.

The rich snowbirds were easy pickings

    His targets were always high-class establishments or rich snowbirds down for the Season on The Beach, loaded with cash and wearing their finest flash. Easy pickings.
    He never shot anyone with the Short Colt automatic pistol he carried, still in the shoulder rig he’d nabbed from the Department.
    They never struck in the same town twice in a row, preferring to wait at least six months before going over the same ground again. And if last time was a jewelry heist, the next would be a payroll, or a lawyer with a briefcase full of bearer bonds.

Now and then a mobster’s bagman would get clipped, but Joe didn’t need the trouble, and Geneva wasn’t as connected to the crooks as she was to the hoi-polloi. One such victim begged him, he had a wife and kids, and his boss would surely murder him for losing his bag.
    But it was the boss’s identity that made Joe’s decision. He was a Yid named Solly Rothenberg, who he’d heard had connections with wise guys in Chicago, Scarface Capone and that other Hymie, Meyer Lansky. Them Jews stuck together tighter’n Dick’s hatband, and Lansky had a casino down in Miami which Solly worked for him. He apologized to the driver, gave him the money back, and told him to tell Solly Rothenberg that the Dapper Bandit wanted no trouble with him.
    The very next day the Palm Beach County headline brayed “Dapper Bandit A Gentleman Too!” Rothenberg had actually called the paper and told them the story, by way of letting “dat Dapper guy” know he’d gotten the message and appreciated the professional courtesy.
    Shaking his head over the paper, drinking coffee with Geneva, Joe allowed as how Rothenberg must have several ounces of brass between his legs to go bragging in the news about a “criminal enterprise,” as Joe thought of it from his days as a deputy. That Hebe sure as shit wasn’t worried about getting pinched. Probably had every cop right up to the chief on his payroll.

He alone would decide whether to nab or reel in

    Geneva wasn’t happy about the lost score, but then she seldom was. Joe had stated flatly when they started that he was the one taking the risks, and he would be the one calling the shots. If anything went wrong, if he didn’t like the setup for any reason or no reason, he and he alone would decide to go through with the nab or reel in his trot lines and go home.
    Adding to Geneva’s sour mood was the fact that Vienna had returned from the Hamptons, having racked up more debt than Germany in the Great War and caused another scandal, this time with a married man. But not just any married man, oh no, it had to be the son of the God damn Secretary of War, Henry Stimson Junior!
    Geneva’s ravings about her little sister’s shenanigans had begun to wear on Joe. They’d been in business for a couple years now, and he suffered her moods and fended off her advances with equal resignation, and equal resistance. The money was good, in fact it was better than good. Between Geneva’s friends in the higher reaches of Palm Beach’s rarified atmosphere and Joe’s boldness and anonymity, they had become moderately rich.
    Geneva had been paying her back bills and was returned to good graces. Rich socialites still loved to brag and one-up about the latest necklace or bracelet crusted with diamonds, emeralds, rubies. “Oh, huge gray pearls from the South Pacific, my dear, very rare, very expensive…the poor man can’t get enough of me! But he’s very rich…they’ll be here on Monday, you simply must come see….”
    Considering that such shipments were always combined with those of others for security, and knowing one delivery schedule invariably led to a significant combined shipment, led to very profitable takings from the pampered ladies of rich, decadent Palm Beach. And so, the Dapper Bandit continued to find easy pickings, up and down the east coast of Florida.

After some two years of this

After some two years of this, in May of 1914, Julius Warren Ashley was making quite a name for himself, both with the newspapers and Johnnie Law, when his son upstaged him.
    John Ashley turned himself in to the Palm Beach County Sheriff, for the murder of Desoto Tiger. His trial was set for July.
    It had knocked the unknown Dapper Bandit right out of the headlines. He and Geneva capitalized on this by hitting several targets they had held off from before because of the possible publicity, and made a nice windfall, but soon security on their normal targets was increased so they had to lay off for a while.
    All the papers wanted to talk about was the Indian-murdering John Ashley. But the county prosecutor knew John’s reputation in Palm Beach and knew he would be condemned by a local jury for killing an Indian the same day pigs soared gracefully over the frozen crust of Hell. He requested a hearing with Circuit Judge Greyson Stikelether to move the trial to Miami. The judge granted the order in record time. John would stand trial in Miami, where, they both intended, he would get what was coming to him.
    When Joe Ashley showed up at the Palm Beach County Jail after that hearing, he no longer looked like either Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Deputy Julius Ashley or the Dapper Bandit. He dressed and looked like the woodsman, trapper, and fisherman he’d always really been. He carried a plate of home-cooked food for his son John.

Joe dropped the plate at the last second

    When Sheriff George baker’s son County Deputy Robert Baker was escorting John to his cell, Joe handed the deputy the plate, but dropped it at the last second. He lunged forward as if to catch it, colliding with Robert Baker and preventing him from stopping John as he climbed a ten-foot fence and disappeared into the swamp.
    Bobby Baker was enraged. He knew who Joe Ashley was; he’d been a deputy until about two years ago. He had no idea Joe was the Dapper Bandit, and no one but Joe’s family ever did either.
    He should have known better, but he’d worked with Joe. He’d never thought he’d break the law, even for his son. Worse, they had nothing concrete to hold Joe for, and had to let him go. Bobby Baker learned a lesson that day he’d never forget. You could never, ever trust an Ashley.

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens