Red Grass River

Tampa who he’d sorely missed these past few weeks on the road and couldnt wait to see again. The sheriff nodded as though seriously considering this explanation and then, asked his name. “Murphy, sir,” John Ashley said. “Art Murphy.”

A man laughed loudly behind him and John Ashley abruptly felt a great sagging weight in his chest. He turned and saw him standing there, large and beaming, his thumbs in his gunbelt, his yellow grin showing teeth the size of thumbnails.

“Hey, Johnny,” Bob Baker said. “How you keepin?”

Hardee County Sheriff John Poucher relinquished custody of the prisoner to Sheriff Robert Baker who’d brought him the tip about the hooch drop at Goren’s fish camp and who had a handful of outstanding warrants to serve on the bootlegger. By the following sunrise John Ashley was once again in the Palm Beach County Jail.

The jail had just begun to undergo renovations and the clamor and dust of construction was daylong. He was manacled by both wrists to the solid-piece iron bunnk in one of the windowless isolation cells along the back wall of the block, the chain just long enough to allow him to sit up but not stand fully. The single other furnishing was a half-gallon tin can for his waste. The only light was a black-crossed yellow shaft angling in through a small barred window in the door. Just outside the cell a pair of guards with shotguns were stationed round the clock. They were under Sheriff Baker’s orders to shoot the prisoner dead if anybody tried to break him out. Two more guards were posted in the outer room and two more just outside the front door. The reinforced fence around the jail was patrolled by a dozen cops with carbines. For the whole time John Ashley was in the Palm Beach County Jail Bob Baker put most of the sheriff’s department on duty there. It was a plum time for robbers and burglars and holdup men working in other parts of the county.

He was permitted no visitor but his lawyer, one Ira Goldman, who’d been recommended to Joe Ashley as the best criminal defense attorney in Miami. Goldman was at his side at every court session and filed a steady progression of motions and briefs all of which were rejected just as quickly as the judge scanned them. Goldman forth-rightly informed Joe Ashley that there was no chance of keeping John from going back to prison to serve out the rest of his original sentence—plus time added for his escape. Old Joe refused to believe he couldnt buy John out of jail one way or another. “Just find out who we got to grease,” he told Goldman. “The judge, the guards, whoever. No matter how much they want, I’ll get it.”

Goldman told him to forget it. There wasnt a thing the judge could do. As for the guards, their fear of what Bob Baker would do to them if John Ashley should escape was even greater than their greed. No payoff of any size, Goldman said, not to anybody, would suffice to get John free. Not right now anyway. He’d heard they even planned to shut him up in solitary confinement at first—and no, they couldnt buy him out of that, either. There had been too many escapes off the road gangs the last few years. Too much written in the papers about corruption in the penal system. John Ashley was the perfect example for them to show they meant business up in Raiford. In a couple of years, Goldman said, they might be able to make some arrangement with somebody up there. “When our chance comes,” Goldman said, “it’ll cost us plenty. But first John’s going to have to do some time.”

Old Joe glared at Goldman and nearly quivered under the urge to kick him until he hollered that yet, there was a way to get John Ashley out of jail. But he held his fury in check. In his bones he knew Goldman was right. John Ashley wasnt just a captured fugitive from the law—he was a political issue. The newspapers were crowing about the arrest of Florida’s most notorious desperado. Politicians from Fort Pierce to Miami were blowing hard about this being the beginning of a long-overdue effort to rid South Florida of its festering criminal element. Day after day Bob Baker smiled for the cameras and reminded reporters that he’d sworn to bring John Ashley to justice and now he’d done it. He wanted to thank the people of Palm Beach County for putting their trust in him by electing him to office and he hoped they would continue to support him in his fight against crime. Up at Raiford the warden awaited the desperado’s transfer and told reporters it would snow peach ice cream in hell before John Ashley was assigned to a road gang again where it would be easier to try another escape. Mister Ashley, he said, was going to become very familiar with the penitentiary’s walls.

To avoid crowds of gawkers and the possibility of confederates trying to free John Ashley in transit, Bob Baker made no announcement public or private of when he would move the prisoner to Raiford. One humid morning an hour before first light ten armed sheriff’s deputies escorted him from his cell to the train depot. The only witnesses on hand besides cops were the station agent and the train crew. He was hustled aboard a prison car which on the outside looked no different from the other boxcars but whose interior contained a cell with bars as thick as baseball bats and a padlock the size of a bible. He looked around for Bob Baker as he boarded the car, curious to see his expression of the moment, but he did not spot him among the policemen milling in the station platform’s weak lamplight. During the weeks he had been in county custody they had seen each other only at the court sessions and had not exchanged a word since his arrest. He’d expected Bobby to say something about the pictures of his brother in the morgue, to at least make some allusion, and he’d decided to try to strangle him with his manacle chain if he did. In court he’d a few times caught Bobby staring at him, his expression each time unfathomable in the instant before he realized John was staring back and his face broke into a yellow grin.

By sunrise he was miles to the north and bearing for the penitentiary. The transfer detail planned to arrive at Raiford at midmorning of the following day and the officer in charge so notified the warden by telegraph from the Titusville station. The warden and his assistant met them at the prison’s front gate. They had tipped local reporters to the infamous desperado’s arrival and now smilingly obliged the photographers by posing for a picture of themselves aflank the prisoner. In their black suits and smiling pallors they looked like celebrant undertakers. Dressed in white and his aspect rueful John Ashley looked bound for the grave.

EIGHTEEN

Liars Club

A FEW MONTHS AFTER JOHN WENT BACK TO PRISON ED AND FRANK Ashley went on a whiskey run to Grand Bahama like they’d done a hundred times before, only this time they didnt come back. Nobody was sure where that story came from but at first nobody believed it. We all thought it was a phony rumor put out by the Ashleys themselfs for some reason of their own. Ed and Frank were hiding out from somebody and the Ashleys wanted everybody to think they were dead—that was what we told each other.

But the story persisted and picked up a little more detail as it made the rounds. After a time we had to believe it. We heard Old Joe sent Clarence Middleton to West End to ask after Ed and Frank. Clarence was told they’d been there and bought the biggest load they’d ever taken on—more than seven hundred cases of Canadian whiskey done up in burlocks. The Ashley boys packed the hams into every foot of space in the Della’s hold. With that much whiskey on board, the Della’s gunwales couldnt of showed hardly more than a foot of freeboard. To make it worse a black storm was bearing in from the northwest. The harbormaster advised the boys to wait it out. They just laughed and said the Della was sealed tight as a cork and they were old hands at crossing the Stream in ever kind of weather. They cast off and set for home and that was the last anybody saw of them. The storm was a rough one and tore through West End a half-hour after the Ashley boys left. The harbormaster told Clarence it likely caught up to them before they’d cleared the Gulf Stream and took them down.

They said Old Joe refused to believe the boys had drowned. He said they were too good a sailors, Ed and Frank, and the Della was too good a boat. What they’d done was, they’d taken the load someplace else for some reason and would show up any day and explain things. They say Joe Ashley held tight to that idea for more than a month. Then one night everybody at Twin Oaks was woke up in the dead of darkness by what sounded like a yowling panther got into the house. It wasnt but Old Joe, wailing with realization that his sons were dead at the bottom of the sea.

All the happened in the fall of nineteen and twenty-one.

Bobby Baker was reelected sheriff in 1922. He campaigned on his record for cutting crime in Palm Beach County and as the man who put John Ashley back behind bars. Even some of the folk who liked the Ashleys couldnt help liking Bobby Baker too. The man was becoming a real smooth politician. He gave talks to political organizations, to women’s clubs, to classrooms full of schoolchildren. He showed up at ever damn civic function in