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| Saint Sebastian River Bridge [Click image to call up all published instalments] |
Thursday,
June 3, 1915,
9:00 AM
The searing pain in John Ashley’s jaw and eye had subsided, in the last few months in the Miami city jail, from a screaming agony to a background ache he could live with. He’d grown awful fond of Dr. Agramonte’s morphine in a surprisingly short time and had resolved to watch out for that shit. No wonder people couldn’t give it up.
The warm, loving arms of Morpheus matched even the call of the Everglades, and that fact scared John Hopkin Ashley more than anything he’d ever faced. Get shot, get hung, hell it’d be over in a minute, but sink into that shit? It would be like going under quicksand, only it didn’t kill you right off. It dragged it out, made you suffer, like you had really died but just weren’t quite done with the job.
No, he’d seen the “old” morphine addicts, all of thirty or thirty-five years, losing teeth and waking up starving in gutters. Sometimes not waking up, ever.
It was the crowd in front of the jail that had woken him up. They’d gathered in the street the night before, but the mosquitos of summer had driven them home. By dawn they were back. They wanted him dead. In a noose. They’d have his head if they could get it.
He looked out the barred window onto the side street and could just see the right end of the mob of upstanding Miamians who wanted to string him up.
He lit up a store-bought a friendly guard had given him and hung his hands out the window while he smoked. His breakfast had been brought by a different guard, about to go off shift, one not so friendly. It was a metal Army issue food tray, with bacon, scrambled eggs, toast, and a cup of coffee in a depression made for it.
The guard spit in John Ashley’s eggs |
John actually laughed at him, and he glared some more before trudging off.
Been a long time since he’d laughed. Whatever the hell had happened last evening had sure as hell got everybody in a lather.
John ate the entire tray, didn’t even think about the spit. Fuckin’ dumbass, he thought, I’ve eat spoilt rattlesnake better’n’is. Way better. Shit you wouldn’t eat on a bet, city boy.
The coffee, however, had been a singular pleasure. Despite his rearing as a woodsman, fisherman and hunter, not to mention a bootlegger, John Ashley had a solid education, a sharp mind, a discerning palette, and perfect manners. That is, when he wanted to display them. And a good cup of coffee of a morning, to John’s way of thinking, was as a noble a pursuit as any man of discernment could ask for.
He was, in fact, a coffee snob. Most cafés served what, in his opinion, was either dishwater or paint remover. When he could, he got a certain kind of bean from Costa Rica. Those particular beans, from the La Empressa Negocios de Café Rey in Curridabat, outside of the capital, San José, were available locally at only one store, Tico Traders, on 35th Street in the northwest section of West Palm Beach.
John Ashley not only had no idea what had happened yesterday, that his brother and two lawmen lay dead; he also had no inkling that his preference for an exotic brand of coffee would help lead to his undoing.
The crowd had gotten louder, and they were spilling down the side street where both John’s hands and his cigarette smoke hung out the third window down. Some upstanding citizen must have spotted him, because the mob now rushed down Avenue K and came right up to the barred window, shouting and cursing, as John backed up to the far wall, which was nowhere near far enough.
Marl rocks flew in through the bars |
The crowd bayed like hunting hounds, energized by his suffering. Men and women shoved their faces between the bars and screamed curses at him.
One, a dark-haired woman in a smart frilled white blouse and black skirts, shocked him with her screams. She grabbed the bars and yanked back and forth, like she would pull them out of the wall to get her hands on him if she could. “Your brother killed my husband, you God damn son of a bitch! I’m glad he’s dead!”
John’s mouth hung open, until an empty flask slammed into his jaw and busted his bottom lip. Some in the crowd were already half bagged, which made John that much more nervous. Blood spilled down his dingy white shirt.
He stared, dumb. His brother? “What brother?” he screamed back.
He rushed the bars, his face a mask of fury, and the woman and her fellow rioters stepped backward in fear. His left arm shot out and snatched her by the cuff, and she screamed, trying to pull away. It took two townsmen to get his hand to let go, and only after bending his thumb back so far it cracked.
“What brother?” |
An old farmer in the back spoke up. “Big slab of a fella, overhauls, Army haircut. Packed a rifle and three pistols. Started out tryin’ to make me or my grandson start a car for him, some model I never seen. You didn’t know he was a’comin’?”
The woman John had grabbed screamed, “He started out killin’ my husband for no damn reason. Wilber would have give him the damn keys, just to protect us! I just wish I’d have kilt him myself!”
She glared him in the eye, just out of reach. “I God damn sure tried.”
A murmur ran through the crowd, at first shock that a town matron would curse so, then anger at what she’d said.
John backed up a step. Bob, then. Fuck. “No, God damn it, I didn’t know anything about it! Bob never did know shit when it came to cars.”
They should have sent Hanford, he thought. He didn’t know that Bob, Kid Lowe and Shorty Lynn had been set the task of breaking him out, by none other than Hanford Mobley himself.
The mob quickly worked itself up again, screaming, cursing, and throwing anything they could get their hands on.
A deputy came to the front of the cell, yelling at the crowd to disperse, through two sets of bars, and not being heard or obeyed one bit.
A solid pounding came from John’s left, on the front door of the jail. A deep, penetrating voice called through the door from outside. “Sheriff Dan Hardie! Open up, this is William Barnwell Brickle, and I demand you open the door!”
The scuff of a chair scraping slowly back on the battered wood floor sounded from down the hall, and booted heels strolled, clacking, toward the door. Apparently Sheriff Dan Hardie was as unimpressed with this Brickell fella as John himself was.
John Ashley, in fact, had no idea who he even was. He most certainly did not know that Brickell’s niece and brother-in-law had been killed in a shootout with Bob as the star of the show.
Having taken his sweet time about it, which made John grin just hearing it down the hall, Hardie didn’t open the door, just shouted out grumpily. “Whadda ya want?”
John actually snickered under the hand holding his busted lip. He thought he might could get to like this Hardie fella.
“We want John Ashley!” |
There was a tedious pause, and John could imagine Brickell fuming outside the door.
“Whadda ya want him fer?”
John laughed out loud.
The crowd outside the window had mostly drawn away to the front, hoping to get in, but the few still there were shouting. “That devil is laughing about killing Annalee!”
Oh shit, John thought, this isn’t workin’ out too well. He turned his back to another barrage of curses, rocks and bottles, and one hit his back and clattered to the floor without breaking.
He noticed a good inch still left in the hip flask. He laughed again. He couldn’t help himself. He snatched up the flask, the larger type that went in the back pocket, hence the name. To shrieks from the reduced mob outside the window, he popped the cork, tipped it up and gargled it down. He let out a satisfied “Ahhhh!”
He then stood, gave a sweeping bow with a flourish of his arm to the screeching faces outside the bars, and said, “Thank you very much, you stupid son of a bitch! Might be my last drink ever.”
Several of the people standing around laughed at that. One man gigged his companion in the side with an elbow. “Yeah!” he laughed, “Ya stupid son of a bitch!”
Must’ve been the clown who’d thrown a flask with good rum still in it, John thought, while the crowd pointed at the clown and laughed.
The mob at the front of the building had grown, and was rallying behind Brickell, trying to force the door. Their roaring filled the morning street.
“Give us Ashley!”
“Open up! We mean to hang the son of a bitch!” This last was Brickell himself.
The Sheriff bellowed impressively from the inside. “This is Sheriff Dan Hardie, and if you all don’t disperse right now, I’ll arrest every God damn one of you!”
While John could hear him clearly from his cell, he doubted much of his hollering was heard above the growing din outside.
The crowd must have filled 12th Street in front of the jail, because it was now spilling onto Avenue K and had rediscovered John at the window. It seemed in no time they filled the avenue, screaming, pushing, shaking fists and shouting for his blood.
The Sheriff kept up his bellowing but was obviously getting nowhere.
The Sheriff’s Office shared the jail |
With the mob literally foaming at their mouths outside his window like a pack of rabid dogs, John was getting pretty worried his damn self. These men would be extremely reluctant to arrest or shoot their own neighbors, especially to protect a criminal that no one in Miami gave a shit about, and whose brother had just killed two of their own to boot.
He heard the Sheriff shouting again, but now he was giving orders to his men. The local policemen were happy to do whatever he wanted to calm the situation, even though he wasn’t technically their boss.
Chief of Police William J. Whitman, who had just been re-elected two days before on the first of June, had taken a celebratory week off, riding Henry Flagler’s railroad up to Jekyll Island, Georgia. Whitman was a notorious woman-chaser, and his favorite brothel was operated out of the Jekyll Island Club Hotel and Resort. He’d been in hot water just the year before for entering a woman’s home while drunk and “approaching her amorously.” He’d survived a vote of the City Council, even gone to court and been absolved, but the Council had ordered him never to drink again, so he had to do his drinking and whoring in another state.
John was plastered against the wall away from the barred window, dodging more rocks and bottles and glad it would take a champion spitter to hit him from that far. Some of ’em were sure tryin’.
Finally a deputy came and unlocked the cell door. He pulled his Colt New Police .32 and stepped well back. It was the one who’d spit in his food, and he looked like he’d love a reason to use the long-barreled pistol.
“We’re movin’ you to another cell” |
John stepped out, and the officer pointed down the hall to the next cell on the right, one with no window.
Once he had John safely locked inside, he holstered the pistol and shook his head. “Criminal piece of shit like you, we oughtta let ’em have you. Wilber Hendrickson was my friend, you son of a bitch.”
The mob still screamed and jeered, John could see them through the bars and window of the next cell down from where they’d moved him.
They could see him, too, and now he was no threat they stuck their arms in and shook fists at him, shouting curses on him and his whole family.
“Yer mamma is a whore!”
“Yer daddy fucked a goat and got you!”
“Your mamma didn’t bear you, she shit you out…”
He could hear the Sheriff yelling into the telephone, then he hustled out the back door with several officers from both departments in tow.
The police officer who’d given him the cigarette stepped up in front of the bars and said in a low voice, “They’re going to get your brother’s body. They’re going to show it to the crowd, try to calm them down. It won’t be pretty. Just thought I’d warn ya.”
As he turned to go, John stopped him. “Thanks, pal. But why? Why would you help me?”
He was a small man, wiry and fresh-faced, though the wrinkles around his eyes when he smiled betrayed his age, maybe forty-five, John thought, same age as Pa. The tiny shrug he gave seemed to be a characteristic movement for him.
“Innocent until proven guilty” |
John allowed as how that was mighty white of him and stuck out his hand. “John Ashley. Pleased to meet ya.”
The man looked over his shoulder, but the crowd seemed to have been distracted. Wouldn’t do to have them see him “collaborating.” It was a word the Great War had burned into the language. He took John’s hand and gave him a good solid shake.
“Harry Lee. Whatever you done is between you and your God, son. Lord knows I’m a sinner m’self, hell almost got fired a couple months ago for drinkin’ on the job with Frank and Gordie.”
John smiled. “Sounds funny, you runnin’ in drunks and then drinkin’ on duty.”
Lee looked pensive and said, “Well, we all fall down sometimes, I’m just glad the Lord forgives. And Frank and Gordie McDade been getting’ me in trouble since we’s kids.”
John pursed his lips and nodded. “Been thinkin’ some, on forgiveness I mean. I’m a bad man, and I reckon I’ll prob’ly go to hell for the things I done.”
Harry Lee heaved a big sigh for a little man, his eyebrows up, and tucked his thumbs in his belt. “Well let’s hope not, John Ashley. It’s never too late to get right with the Lord.” He turned then and went back to the front offices.
The crowd went wild |
On a wooden plank across the bed lay the body of Bob Ashley, his white undershirt and the front of his overhauls black with blood. His head seemed too flat against the plank to John, then with a gasp of nausea he realized about half of the back of it was gone. His mouth was shattered where the bullet had entered his chin, his teeth smashed apart, blood caking his dead face. His bare arms were bone white instead of the healthy tan Bob had always carried.
Tears ran down his face, but John stayed silent. He loved his family, and Bob had been like a rock since his childhood. The stupid big fuck, John thought, he had always been just a little too softhearted to be a real gangster. Why the hell did Pa send him?
John had figured without thinking that it was Joe Ashley calling the shots in his absence. He didn’t realize that with him gone the power structure in the gang had rearranged itself, and many of the decisions were being made by Hanford Mobley, and increasingly, John’s wife, Laura Upthegrove.
By now the truck carrying Bob’s body had rounded the block and was coming back. Sheriff Hardie sat on the roof this time, shouting through a bullhorn for people to come look. The killer had been shot down by the brave Miami police officer, Bob Riblet, he yelled to the cheering crowd, even as he had been killed in turn. As the first Miami city cop to killed in the line of duty, his name would go down in history. Even as the mad dog Ashley had killed, he had made him famous for all time.
John thought he was laying it on a little thick, even through his own grief. Some Miami beat cop famous? He shook his head. Nope. He was famous. His gang was famous. He was sorry for the man and his family though, and for the other fella and his, too.
If he hadn’t missed his guess, someone else in the gang had set off the explosion he’d heard while the commotion was already going on last evening. While Bob was busy getting his dumb ass killed, a diversion that could have saved him and them lawmen both, went on unnoticed. Why the hell had Bob jumped the gun?
Eight times |
It was past noon, the heat and humidity were fierce, and the southern sun burned the faces and bald pates in the crowds. As they got hotter and hungrier, they seemed to accept that this was all they were going to get today. There would be no hanging but seeing the killer himself dead seemed to take the fire out of them as much as anything else.
As the last of them walked away to get a late lunch, John thought, Bob, you poor bastard, you couldn’t break me out, but you saved me from a lynchin’, even after gettin’ yourself kilt deader’n last Tuesday. Thank you, brother. You done all right.
| Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens |
My favorite paragraph today:
ReplyDeleteThe coffee, however, had been a singular pleasure. Despite his rearing as a woodsman, fisherman and hunter, not to mention a bootlegger, John Ashley had a solid education, a sharp mind, a discerning palette, and perfect manners. That is, when he wanted to display them. And a good cup of coffee of a morning, to John’s way of thinking, was as a noble a pursuit as any man of discernment could ask for.
And it's true in my humble opinion!
ReplyDelete