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Wednesday,
June 2, 1915
6:35 PM
Deputy Sheriff Wilber W. Hendrickson Sr. sat at his dinner table with his wife, Marion Platt Hendrickson, and his son, Wilber Jr. Wilber wiped his face with one of the nice new cloth napkins he’d bought his wife on sale from Sears and Roebuck catalog.
Wilber loved his wife of thirteen years and liked to indulge her when he could. She had come from the Lake Worth Platts, who were not rich but “comfortable,” as the saying went, and her family had been less than enthusiastic about her choice of the young fellows who had sought her hand. He’d been a shopkeeper at his uncle’s store in Lake Worth for ten years when they met in 1899. He was set to inherit the business as his uncle had no children, but the old man was hale and hearty yet so that was a distant dream. In 1904 the store had burned down, but his uncle was a sharp businessman and had purchased insurance.
He’d convinced her to marry him in 1901, despite her parents’ misgivings, and come August the twenty-first was their fourteenth anniversary. He had been considering taking the family on a short vacation for that happy occasion, someplace away from the beach.
They could go to the beach any time they wanted, and after a while it got boring. Then too there were the mosquitos and sand flies or “no-see-ums,” vicious, invisible little biting things that left tiny red dots on the skin that itched like crazy. He was thinking of some cabins he’d seen once, when he’d gone to Union Correctional to give a deposition in a parole case, at a place called Suwannee Springs. It was on the Suwannee River, and there was an old slave quarters there that connected to the water. It was a great place to swim, and this time of year the cabins under the oaks and bay trees were blissfully, blessedly cool.
He had no idea |
Wilber complimented his wife on the fine dinner of pork roast, potatoes fried in bacon grease, and fat ears of sweet white corn from Zellwood, Florida. No one knew why, but the best corn in Florida was grown in the sandy soils around Lake Apopka, over by Orlando. Hendrickson was the son of a corn farmer back in Fair Port, Ohio, and he knew good corn. Zellwood, he also knew, was about as far south as decent corn could be gotten from Florida’s poor soils, nothing like the rich brown and black loams of home.
He excused his son from the table to do his homework after seeing to it the boy finished his corn. He was nine and a little picky, but he was a good boy, the father thought fondly.
Marion asked if he was done, and he nodded, checking his pocket watch as she stood and gathered the dishes. She smiled lovingly at her husband’s innate conscientiousness. She considered it a sign of good character. It was now six-forty-two PM, almost time for dear Wilber to go next door and perform his rounds as the night jailer for the Dade County Sheriff’s Department.
This job was doubly important now, as John Ashley had been extradited from Palm Beach County to face charges of murder for the death of Desoto Tiger. The Cow Creek Seminoles were celebrating a rare victory over the White Eyes, but everyone knew the Ashley Gang was more than likely to attempt a jailbreak. Patrols had been stepped up, but Dade County only had so many deputies and they were spread thin. The rich folks on the Beach demanded a third of all deputies patrol their neighborhoods, and since they paid the bills, not to mention the graft, a third of all county deputies did just that. The fact a stone-cold killer was in town only made them demand more.
Bob Riblet dearly loved a nice cut of pastry |
The aroma of the percolator on the stove permeated the kitchen where they ate, awaiting the men’s habitual coffee and ten minutes of man-talk. They did well on Wilber’s salary, she thought, but not well enough to have a house with a dining room. But this house, which they got as part of his pay, was just fine, and right on Twelfth Street, literally next door to the jail. This allowed Wilber to spend a good part of his twelve-hour night shift right there at home, and he often helped with baby Elizabeth to give Marion a bit more sleep in the late watches of the night. Wilbur was the best of husbands, she thought.
Bob walked his beat from seven until three in the morning, then had as much as two hours of paperwork. Sometimes he and Wilber would be back after midnight for another pot of coffee, and when she could, Marion left out a bit of pastry or cake for the menfolk. You had to be careful in Florida because the roaches and ants would attack any food, given any chance. She could have left it in the new electric icebox, but Wilber considered the icebox as her own inviolable domain as the woman of the house and would not open it. If Elizabeth needed changing or Wilber Junior called for water or just a hug, he would be there and let Marion sleep.
The keys to the jail lay on top |
Halfway across the room, he heard a banging on the door. That wasn’t like Bob; he usually stuck his head in the door and hollered, like anyone else. Had they forgotten and locked the door? They never locked the door. Nobody did.
Marion yelled from the kitchen “Who’s that?” She came from the kitchen door, wiping her hands on a towel.
The last words Deputy Sheriff Wilber W. Hendrickson ever said to his wife, or anyone, were “I’ll get it.”
He opened the door to a big man, his head down on his shirt, overalls faded and torn at the knee. He seemed to be leaning with his left arm on the wall to the right side of the door.
“Are you Hendrickson?”
Wilber W. Hendrickson appeared to fall dead instantly, while right behind him his wife Marion began to scream.
Bob had grabbed the keys and was turning to run when Marion, with a shout of rage, pulled Wilber’s Police Super .38 from the holster and began firing wildly. Twisting and dodging, Bob dropped the keys and ran for his life.
Bullets kicked up dirt and shell from the marl street at his feet as he pounded west on 12th Street. At Avenue L he jinked right as the last shot from the crazy woman’s revolver smacked into the brick column of the building across the corner.
Better luck next time |
He pulled the key to the garage where the getaway car was parked from the pocket of his overalls. He’d checked before going to the jail and the Chicago boys hadn’t let him down. There was a nice car in there, nothing special, a stock vehicle that wasn’t souped up or remarkable in any way, so as not to draw attention. They’d all counted on success, because as many times as John had done it, it seemed like breaking jail was a piece of cake.
Now, though, Bob realized he didn’t recognize the type of car. It was a 1908 Fuller, and it was started very differently from a Model T, which style of automobile was as far as Bob Ashley’s experience with automobiles went.
By now he could hear shouting, coming closer. The lock on the door was open, and sooner or later they would be bound to come looking for him and notice it.
Bob tried starting the vehicle the way you did a Model T; you primed the cylinders with gas by cranking it three or four times with the right hand at the front, the key off and the choke on full, and the spark retarding lever all the way up. Then you turned the key on, went back to the front of the truck and with the left hand (never the right to start; if it kicked back it could break your wrist), you gave it a hearty single half-crank clockwise, and that should start the motor. From twelve o’clock to three o’clock was the real traction point, where the starter was engaged and spinning the crankshaft. Finally, you jumped in and opened the choke and advanced the spark until the motor ran smoothly.
A Fuller was primed by a small T-shaped handle on a shaft under the dash to the right of the steering wheel, which operated a fuel pump when pulled out and pushed in several times, with the choke on full. Then with the key on and the spark only retarded about a third, you cranked right-handed, counter-clockwise, a full rotation, and the real traction came on the upswing, from six o’clock to nine.
Bob tried again and again to start it, but the Fuller wouldn’t even crank. He tried cranking it what he thought was backward, but since the starter didn’t engage until the six o’clock position and he didn’t turn it that far, he felt no resistance and gave that up too. He was frantic, turning the key on and off, stomping the accelerator, finally pounding on the machine with his fists and cursing at the top of his lungs.
“You okay, mister?” |
Bob grabbed the rifle and drew down on the young man in overalls much like his own. “Git your ass over here and start this here car!”
The boy fell to his knees, cowering. “Please mister! I didn’t mean nothin’!”
Bob was shaking his head, “No, git up! Come here an’ start this mother or fucking car!”
The boy was crying. “I-I can’t! I never started a car in my life!”
Among the distant shouts a man called, “Morty! Where’d you get off to, Morty-huh?” He stepped into the door, saw the rifle in Bob’s hands and threw his hands in the air. “Jesus God, mister! What’re you doing to my grandson?”
Bob switched the rifle to the man’s middle, and he gulped. He wore overalls too, but brown, with a brown-checked shirt of thin cotton. The masses of grey-blond curls on his forearms shone in the light from the door, and the dust swirled around his outline in the slants of sunbeam. They stood like that for a heartbeat, the man with the rifle, the shocked grandfather at the door, the teenage boy between them on his knees as if praying. They all poured sweat in the summer heat.
“Get over here and start this car” |
The farmer rushed to the car and looked at it for about two seconds. “I never seen a car like this before, mister. If’n it don’t start like a Ford I got no idea. Please don’t hurt us, we just can’t do what you want. Please.”
Bob believed him. That was his problem, too; the damn thing didn’t start like a Ford. “All right, go on, git.” He pointed the Springfield at them. “Run!”
They ran.
The dust swirled and danced, alone now, like him, in the afternoon glare. If he was going to get his ass shot off soon by a gang of townies with blood in their eyes, which seemed pretty damn likely, Bob didn’t want to get some stupid old sodbuster and his homo grandson killed too. Nope, didn’t make sense. Robert Ashley was a bad man, but he wasn’t a mean man. He’d shoot a man if he had to, but he’d never kick a dog. His brother John wouldn’t hold with robbin’ or hurtin’ women, ner elderly folk ner kids, and Bob agreed with that. He never would have shot the kid. And the kid probably wasn’t a homo, either. He was just scared. Bob felt bad; just thinkin’ that had been mean.
It was time to make a move |
The shouts, and now police whistles, were getting closer, sounding more organized. He heard cars and trucks, a few gunshots. Cops yelled at the men to go home, then someone shouted “He killed Wilber Henderson! It was one of them Ashleys, tryin’ to break John out!”
In the moment of near silence that followed, Bob Ashley stepped out the door of the garage with its useless getaway car, and looked north and south, up and down Avenue L. On the east side of the avenue, he stood in the bright sun coming in from the west, a glare that blinded him for a few crucial seconds. To his right, where he’d looked and seen nothing a few ticks of the clock before, now teemed with armed men striding boldly down the street.
A bull-necked man in the leading ranks in a white shirt open to his hairy waist pointed the fishbat in his hand and roared. “There he is! Get ’im!”
They were coming from the north, so Bob had little choice but to take off south like his ass was on fire.
| Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens |
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