foaming fits about them spending so much time in the city. He believed all cities were naught but sin pits and he was fearful his boys might get too fond of Miami’s ways. The fact is, the Ashley boys liked Miami plenty well. They liked wearing snazzy city suits and going dancing in the Elser Pier hall. They liked eating in fancy restaurants and going to the moviehouses and singing along to the music at the park bandstand. They for damn sure must of liked them big hotel beds for fooling on. As for their women, well, they loved the city. They didnt have to work while they were there. Didnt have to cook nor wash laundry nor chop wood nor nothing. They could take bubblebaths, they could wear perfume and pretty theirselfs up. Those visits to Miami were to only times Laura Upthegrove was ever known to put on lipstick and a dress.
SIXTEEN
October 1920—January 1921
THE ELSER PIER WAS AN ORNATE THREE-STORY BUILDING THAT stood at the foot of Flagler Street and extended on pilings into Biscayne Bay. It was as big as a warehouse and from its blazing confines every evening came a rich medley of smells of waft through the streets on the inshore breeze—a redolency of popcorn and roasted peanuts, hot dogs, cotton candy, pastries. This was the place to go in Miami for almost any sort of fun that wasnt illegal. The Pier contained a dancehall and an arcade comprising food stands, a shooting gallery, a tattoo parlor, game booths where fast-talking pitchmen challenged every passing fellow to win for his sweeties a teddybear or gewgaw of colored glass by throwing a baseball at a pyramid of wooden blocks or pitching a penny into a cup or tossing a plastic doughnut at a peg, by shooting an arrow at a fistsized balloon or lobbing a horseshoe at an iron stake in a box of sawdust. There were viewing machines in which one could see short loops of moving pictures by depositing a penny in a slot and turning the crank on the side of the machine—slapstick scenes, quickdraw Western gunfights, exhibitions of horseback highdiving. One viewer showed Hawaiian hula dancers in grass skirts and every night this machine did a brisk trade. Here and there along the arcade aisles were benches and small tables where one might sit with an ice cream cone or a bottle of pop and observe the passing parade. Each time the Ashley gang visited Miami with their women, the Elser Pier was where they took their fun.
The man who ran the shooting gallery would groan at the sight of them headed for his concession. The first time they’d come to Elser Pier each of the men had taken several turns shooting with the pellet rifle and they cleared the pitchman’s shelf of every prize it held. They would have required a sizable sack to bear away their booty except the man looked so dejected they took pity on him and gave back most of it. He’d suggested that thereafter they just give him their fifteen cents and point out the prize they wanted and he’d hand it over and they’d all save some time. The brothers laughed and said that wouldnt be sporting. But on every visit since, they’d made only a single trial apiece with the little rifle, each in turn always shooting a perfect score and laying claim to whatever trophy his ladylove desired off the shelf. Later the girls would give away their prizes to children in the arcade or to women in the dancehall who looked to need cheering up.
The lot of them loved to dance and would still be taking a turn on the floor when the bandleader announced the night’s final number. The dancehall was on the second floor and had tables along the walls and several tall windows to either side overlooking the bay and admitting the seabreeze to swirl the haze of cigarette smoke in the dim yellow light. From these windows the music carried out to the shadowed sidewalks to draw in happy couples and hopeful stags and the always and ever lonely. When the band was between sets you could hear the bayswells slapping at the pilings under the building. Laura loved the Elser Pier dancehall. She told John Ashley it made her feel like she was dancing on a ship at sea.
One warm October night when John and Laura came off the dancefloor to sit at a table and cool off with a glass of lemonade they were approached by a lean man wearing a seersucker suit and a white skimmer. “Pardon me,” the man said. His angular face seemed carved of stained oak. He leaned on the table and said in lower voice, “Might you be John Ashley?”
He spoke with a soft drawl that was neither of Florida nor Georgia. John Ashley wondered if he might be a cop even though his manner bespoke the city and he did not look the type common to the local police department. The Miami chief was partial to hiring beefy young crackers for his force, most of them plowboys whom he enlisted off farms all over Florida and even up in Georgia by way of itinerant agents he’d send out on recruiting missions a few times a year. The plowboys were all tough and afraid of nothing and deeply beholden to the chief for a livelihood other than the backbreaking dullness of life on a farm. They were loyal to him as dogs. And as cultural kin to South Florida crackers they spoke a common language. This lean fellow of quick dark eyes was of another tribe.
John Ashley casually leaned on the table and surreptitiously put his hand to the pistol under his jacket. The day before, he had delivered his father’s monthly contribution to the Miami Police Chief’s “civic fund,” and he did not really think this was a plainclothesman sent to serve warrant. The chief held no quarrel with the Ashleys—nor with any other association of entrepreneurs, however outside the law their enterprise might be—so long as they did not commit robberies or public violence within the city limits and so long as they made regular donation to his fund. The chief would not in any case have sent a lone man to arrest an Ashley and never mind three of the brothers at once. This one could be a detective thinking to solicit for some civic fund of his own. The world was full of fools who knew no better and John Ashley thought this might be one of them.
“Who’s askin?” John Ashley said.
“Somebody who might put you onto somethin I think you’d like to know about. Somethin that might make us some money.”
“
On the dancefloor with redhaired Glenda—more than a year older than he and two inches taller, even in flats—Hanford Mobley whispered in her ear that he couldnt wait to give Mister Cooter a kiss when they got back to their room at the hotel. Mister Cooter was their pet name for the small green turtle he’d a week ago persuaded her to have tattooed just below her navel. The tattoo artist had done the job behind a drawn curtain and had smiled the whole time he worked on her smooth belly under the skirt bunched at her waist. Now Hanford Mobley caught sight of the skimmered man talking to John Ashley and he danced Glenda over toward the bandstand in front of which Ed Ashley was whirling with Rita the Breed to the strains of “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” Some of the couples nearest Ed and Rita would gape on catching sight of her face and she’d whisper to Ed and he’d turn to the gawkers and they’d gawk no more.
Hanford Mobley tapped Ed’s shoulder and gestured toward the table. Ed looked over there and nodded and then deftly maneuvered Rita through the other dancers until they were near enough to Frank and Jenny for him to catch Frank’s eye and direct it to the stranger with John. Then all three couples danced their way toward the table.
The man made bold to sit without invitation. He removed his hat to expose freshly barbered brown hair neatly combed straight back and brightly oiled. He smelled of bay rum. His upper lip was lighter than the rest of his face and John Ashley suspected he had recently shaved a mustache. A short broad scratch was crusted darkly on his left cheekbone. “
John Ashley regarded the hand for a moment. The fellow might be city mannered but the calluses and knucklescars on his hands informed that he had known both hard work and skirmish. Any Miami policeman was likely to have such hands but something of this Matthews’ aspect and in the cast of his eyes now decided John Ashley that the man was no cop. He shook the proffered hand and leaned back and said, “If you tryin to interest me in the real estate around here, bubba, save it for the suckers.”
“What if I was tryin to innerest you in somebody who’s runnin whiskey through Palm Beach County?”
John looked at Laura who raised her brow. And now Frank spun Jenny so close to their table her skirt brushed John Ashley’s arm. Then Hanford Mobley whirled Glenda past the table and John Ashley grinned at his narrow-eyed nephew.
Roy Matthews glanced up at them too. Then said to John Ashley: “
