Red grass river, p.32
Red Grass River, page 32
The windshield flies apart and Davis and White jerk and twitch and lurch like dire epileptics and blood jumps from their heads and faces and several bullets glance off the roadster and ricochet off the building across the street and one stray round makes a starburst hole in a shop window and almost as abruptly as it began the rapidfire gunblasting ceases, all thirty-two rounds of the four Colts spent. In the jaundiced haze of gunsmoke under the streetlamp Roy Matthews steps around to the passenger side and spits in James White’s ruined face uptilted against the car door. Then the shooters are gone in the darkness.
Only now do heads cautiously appear at some of the doorways to peek out at the death car. Blood runs in a thin line from under the driver’s door and pools darkly in the street as though the automobile itself has suffered mortal wound. Only now do the girls on the street who watched the whole thing in open-mouthed shock begin a hysterical wailing. And not until this moment does one of the young men with them realize he has pissed in his pants.
In a late hour of the same night…
Bo Stokes comes out of a restaurant at the north end of Biscayne Boulevard where he has dined on a superbly broiled red snapper and his thoughts now are of a particular woman he is to meet at the McAllister Hotel. She is lean and lovely with firm breasts and a pubic bush soft as a Persian kitten. He feels himself heavy in his loins as he walks along this northern portion of boulevard lit only by the narrow moon and the lights from the train depot across the street. He glances skyward to check for possibility of rain and sees none.
A car draws up to the curb alongside and a voice calls, “Hey, Bo, wait up! Look here who wants to meet you, man.”
He stoops slightly to look into the coupé and sees a man behind the wheel and a woman sitting by the passenger window and both silhouetted against the light from the depot. “Who’s that?” he says.
“It’s me, man,” the driver says. “Look here who wants to meet you.” A bare female arm extends from the interior darkness and the fingers flutter in greeting and then quickly withdraw as the woman giggles.
Bo Stokes laughs and steps up to the car and leans one arm against the car roof and peers into the gloomy interior and still cannot make out the driver’s face nor the woman’s. “Who the hell is it?” he says.
“Me, man,” the driver says. “This here’s Wanda. She been wanting to meet you. She’s seen you around, you know, at the Taft. She knows Nelson. Been telling him she wants to meet you.”
“She has, huh?” Bo Stokes says. He grins at the woman’s silhouette, “You told Nels you wanna meet me, huh?”
The woman nods and giggles. “Wanda, meet Bo,” the driver says. “Bo, meet Wanda.” She slides over closer to the driver and pats the seat beside her.
“Well now darlin,” Bo Stokes says. He opens the car door and crowds his bulk onto the seat and slides an arm around the woman’s shoulders and his hand closes on her thigh and the woman puts her hand to the back of his neck and he glances at the driver and even in the dim light sees now that he does not know him and he starts to draw back but the woman locks both arms hard around his neck and pulls him against her and the driver grabs him by the coat lapel and holds him fast and presses a pistol up under his chin and before Bo Stokes can gain the leverage to break free, before he can even believe this is happening to him—he who fought Jack Dempsey almost even for two rounds and scored several good shots before the Mauler caught him with a right hook that brought the stellar sky down on his head—he sees an explosion of stars to surpass all imagination and where the bullet goes through the car roof it leaves a dark viscid smear.
Laura Upthegrove pulls the door shut as Clarence Middleton wheels the car into the street and if anybody along the boulevard heard the pistol report there is no sign of it.
“This dress is just ruint,” Laura says as Clarence makes a right turn at the corner and heads around the block. She holds the heavy press of the dead man to her like a lover so that any who sees them might take them for such. She feels the blood seeping warmly over her breasts and down her belly, smells it ripe through the scent of cordite. “Good thing I never did like it worth a damn.”
Clarence drives back onto the boulevard and heads north. In another hour he will be dropping Bo Stokes’ mortal remains in a canal miles off the main highway and fourteen feet deep and swarming with gators.
Near midnight of yet the same evening…
Nelson Bellamy is lying supine and fondling the heavy breasts of the naked woman mounted on him and rolling her hips with expert technique. The bedside lamp is lit but the woman has draped Bellamy’s undershirt over it to effect a more subdued cast of light. So engrossed are the lovers in what they are doing—and so loud is the music booming through the open window from the dance pavilion next door—that neither hears the small clack of the doorlock Joe Ashley has opened with a ring of keys appropriated from a downstairs maid. He is masked with a bandanna and holds a shotgun with cut-down barrels and the stock reduced to a pistolgrip.
They had pulled up their masks and entered the Taft Hotel—he and Albert Miller—through the kitchen. Albert Miller put a pistol to a cook’s head and asked which room was Nelson Bellamy’s and the man said 302 without hesitation and they could see he was too frightened to be lying. Just then a maid came in from the adjoining linen room and at the sight of the key ring on her waist Old Joe smiled and said the Good Lord was making it all too easy. Albert Miller remained downstairs to hold the cooks in place as well as any other who might come to the kitchen in the interim. On the third floor landing Old Joe came on a pair of guards playing rummy, men so long without challenge they’d grown lax and dull and they sat with their cards in their hands and one asked in raised voice to be heard over the music who he was. Joe Ashley brought the cutoff up from behind his leg and cocked both hammers and the guards went still and mute. He disarmed each of them in his turn and ordered one to lie on the floor and the other to use cords off the window curtains to bind his partner’s hands tightly behind him and tie his feet together. Joe then clubbed the untied man in the back of the head with the muzzle of the sawed-off and the man fell to his knees and clutched his head and swore vehemently and said, “What the fuck you do that for?” He started to get up and turn around and Joe hit him again, harder, squarely atop his crown. The man fell on his side and gripped the top of his head with both hands and rocked on the floor and wept with the pain and swore heatedly. Old Joe gaped and said, “Son of a bitch.” And once more hit the man in the head with the shotgun—this time behind the ear—and this time the man fell still. Blood ran in a thin rivulet from his hair and stained the carpet under his head. “Shit man, you killed him,” the tied man said. Old Joe told him to shut up. He knelt beside the bleeding man and checked his pulse at his throat and felt that he was still alive. He took the cords off another window curtain and tied the unconscious man tightly hand and foot. Then checked the first man’s bonds and found that they been left just loose enough that the men might with effort work himself free, and so he tightened them. He dragged the unconscious man around and using their belts tied the two men together back to back, each man’s hands belted to the other’s feet. He pulled off their shoes and socks and balled the socks and stuffed a pair into each man’s mouth. He studied his handiwork and picked up his shotgun and saw the conscious one watching him:
“You try callin out or you make a fuss any other way before I come back though, I promise you’ll die.”
Now he gently pushes the door open and the hallway light falls across the bed within. The girl ceases her pelvic gyration to look over her shoulder and she sees a masked man with a wild tangle of white hair coming toward her with darkcircled eyes glowing like coalfires in a nightwind. He motions her away and she scrabbles off the bed and against the wall where she huddles with her arms crossed over her breasts. Bellamy rises on his elbows, his cock yet upright and gleaming, and sees a shotgun muzzle two inches from his face and at the far end of the shortened barrel and the extended left arm holding it the maniacally grinning face of Joe Ashley, his bandanna mask pulled down around his neck so the man might see clearly the agent of his death. Bellamy’s erection folds.
“I dont never care to come to this snakepit town,” Old Joe says, “but this trip’s damn well worth it.”
“Hold on,” Bellamy says in halting voice. “Let’s talk this out.”
Joe Ashley shoves the gun muzzle against Bellamy’s cheek and forces his head back into the pillow. Bellamy shuts his eyes and says tightly, “Listen, listen to me, we can work this out. We’re businessmen, you and me. We can work it out.”
Holding the gun to Bellamy’s underchin Joe Ashley withdraws an ice pick from his belt and all in one fast action shoves it to the hilt in Bellamy’s heart and slips it out and steps back as Bellamy convulses but once and then lies still with eyes wide but done with seeing in this world. Joe Ashley pulls his mask up again and heads for the door. The girl whimpers into her fist at her mouth and her eyes are shut tight as if she would subvert the memory of this horror by not paying visual witness.
He exits the way he came—past the belt-bound and sock-gagged guards who have not make effort to free themselves and down to the kitchen where the cocks are seated now and drinking coffee and Albert Miller is flirting with the maid. Albert pulls his bandanna down just long enough to give her a quick kiss on the lips and then follows Old Joe into the night.
Every couple of weeks or so Laura presented herself at the kitchen door of Miss Lillian’s to be admitted by Wisteria, the daytime head-maid who adored Miss Loretta and delighted in the special charge of conveying Miss Laura to and from her room. A few weeks earlier Wisteria had told Loretta May of seeing a scruffy one-eyed marmalade kitten wandering about in the alley behind the house and being reminded of Mister John by it. Loretta had insisted that she go find the kitten and bring it to her and the maid had done so. Loretta named the cat Johnny and it had lived in her room ever since.
Laura always arrived shortly after sunrise, at which hour Miss Lillian and the girls were just retired until the midafternoon and no one was about in the house but the Negro help. If any of the domestics were curious about her visits they kept their curiosity to themselves. She would usually stay but an hour or two, sometimes longer. Sometimes they fell asleep in each other’s arms and in those instances the good Wisteria would do as Miss Loretta had instructed and tap on her door at one o’clock to rouse so she could be one her way before the rest of the house came awake.
They never questioned their actions together, these two. They held each other close and kissed and caressed and their mutual affections now and then were of such intimacy to render them both breathless. Sometimes they spoke of John hardly at all but he was ever on their minds. As they held each other close Loretta May would tell Laura in low voice what she had seen of him in recent dreams, what she had heard him say. She told of his lonely isolation and the things he called to mind to keep a steadfast spirit. Laura smiled at her renditions of his visions of their swampland world and of the sea—thought she was fearful of the ocean even more than he was and would not venture on it. When Loretta spoke of the near-madness of his desire for them and the physical torment it caused him they both wept and Laura said she wished they could fuck him for real in his dreams and then cried the harder because they could not. When Loretta May announced one morning that John had been released from isolation, albeit he was now swinging a sledgehammer all day, Laura pulled her from the bed and danced her around the room as she sang, “Johnny’s in the sun again, Johnny’s in the sun again.” But another day when Loretta related the dream of seeing him stabbed, Laura was beside herself and demanded more details and grabbed the blind woman by the shoulders and shook her hard before collapsing in tears on her lap.
“He’ll be all right, honey,” Loretta May had crooned to her, stroking her hair. “It’s all I know for sure but it’s enough. He’ll be all right.”
“I made up my mind,” she said. “I’m moving to Jacksonville. Going next week.”
“That so?” Roy Matthews said. They lay naked under the bedsheet, the glowing tips of their cigarettes alternately brightening and dimming, a steady baybreeze belling the gauzy curtains of her bedroom window against which was framed a bone-white gibbous moon.
“My best girlfriend Rose Sharon says I can easy get me a job at the insurance company where she works because I know how to use a typewriting machine so well.”
“I thought you liked Miami. I thought you said it’s lot more lively than Jacksonville.”
“Yeah, well, it’s gettin a little too lively, you ask me. Hardly a week goes by there’s not a shooting or some other kind of murder going on. There’s no being safe here anymore, not for any respectable girl, anyhow. You can’t even walk down the street anymore without total strangers giving you the wolf whistle or saying something so awful nasty you just cant believe your ears.”
“That’s what I hear,” Roy Matthews said, snuffing their cigarettes in a bedside ashtray. “Damn town’s just chock fulla criminals and bad actors and no-counts of all kinds. It’s no place for a right citizen like me or you to live.”
“Ho ho, look who’s talkin,” she said.
He kissed her shoulder and said, “You gonna give me a number so I can call you I’m ever up there?”
“Oh you with all your girls. You wouldnt call me.”
“Sure I would. I’m gonna miss you plenty, sweetheart.”
“Oh, you.”
They lay facing each other and he slid his hand under the sheet and held her breast. “Does he know you’re goin?”
“Well of course he does. He’s not real happy about it, naturally. I told you he wants to marry me.”
Roy Matthews chuckled and lightly tweaked her nipple and she slapped at his hand through the sheet. “If he wants to marry you why you goin to Jacksonville?”
“Cause he says he doesnt wanna live nowhere except down here in South Florida is why. You know he built a house up there where the Ashleys live?”
“Sure. For his momma and daddy. Cleared and filled some ground a quarter-mile from Twin Oaks and built the place and laid down a trail and everthing. He lives there too. So what?” His feigned puzzlement was belied by his grin.
“Dont you shine me, mister,” she said. “When I first met him all he talked about was how much he wanted to travel around and see the country. That’s exactly what I always wanted to do—travel around, see things, do things, you know, while I’m still young, damn it. For more than two years he’s told me it’s what he wanted to do too. Now he tells me he wants to stay where his roots are. His roots!” She snorted with disgust. “I told him, ‘You know what I want and you know where I’ll be. You got Rose Sharon’s address and I guess you know how to write. I guess you know how to get to Jacksonville from here if you want to come see me.’ That’s exactly how I told him.”
Roy Matthews laughed and said, “Good for you, girl. Hell, you dont need that peckerwood no way. I’ll go up and see you now and then and help you keep your mind offa him.” He squeezed her breasts and nuzzled her neck.
“Oh you.” She pushed his hands out from under the sheet and drew it around her breasts and made a face at him. “You’re such a liar. You and all your girls.”
He grinned and tried to insinuate his hand under the sheet again but she rolled onto her back with the sheet held to her chest under her crossed arms and affected to glare at the ceiling. “And I used to think you were a nice fella. Jeepers!”
“I am a nice fella,” he said, kissing her bare shoulder. He pulled the sheet off her breasts and she said, “Oooo, chilly,” and put her hands over them. He pushed one hand aside and ran his tongue over the erect nipple and prickled aureole and she made a low purr and rolled into his embrace with a smile.
TWENTY
September 1923
THEY HIT THE STUART BANK FIVE MINUTES AFTER IT OPENED FOR business on a warm and humid morning. Although Hanford Mobley was disguised as a woman his voice and demeanor identified him to the two tellers on duty who had done business with him in the past. A bank patron who ran a haberdashery and had once sold Mobley a pair of trousers recognized him as well. The tellers were also certain that one of the other two robbers—both of whom wore bandanna masks—was Clarence Middleton. Neither the tellers nor the customer were so foolish as to let the bandits know they’d been recognized. The identities of the third robber and the getaway driver were yet mysteries.
They rushed from the bank with guns in hand and people fell away from their path. A rumbling green Dodge sedan waited at the curb, Laura at the wheel in overalls and large sunglasses and with her hair tucked up under a highcrowned hat of wide floppy brim. The holdup men tumbled into the car and she gunned it away northbound on the Dixie Highway.
Sheriff Bob Baker was attending an outdoor inauguration ceremony for a new circuit judge in West Palm Beach when Deputy Henry Stubbs sidled up to him and whispered that the Stuart bank had been robbed ten minutes ago. The sheriff made apologies to the judge’s party and took his leave. As they hurried to Sheriff Bob’s unmarked car Stubbs told him that Hanford Mobley and Clarence Middleton were among the robbers. “I knew that little son of a bitch would be trouble,” Sheriff Bob said. “Knew it the first time I laid eyes on him.”
He strove to affect a cool demeanor but his blood was in a fury. He had been fair with them, damn it. More than fair. After he’d put John away he’d let that peckerwood family be. He hadn’t bothered their moonshine business since way before John went back to prison. Hellfire, he’d let them hijack other bootleggers at will. He was no friend of the Ashleys and never would be (never again, anyway) but what was past was done with, and his past troubles with John hadnt kept him from doing the smart thing, which was to let the Ashleys go about their whiskey business any way they wanted, so long as they didnt upset the good citizens of Palm Beach County. As long as the Ashleys didnt make him look bad as sheriff he’d cut them slack. They knew that. It was a condition unspoken but understood. And now look how they’d gone and broken their side of the bargain. And for what? For putting John back in the pen? For not bothering to keep his pleasure a secret when he heard two of the Ashley boys got drowned during a least. Why would they wait so long to do something about it? But if thats why they’d done it—if they’d put personal feelings above good common sense, if they couldnt see that bygones were bygones and live and let live was the way to go—then they were just plain damn stupid, thats all, so damn stupid they were dangerous. Crazy goddamn swamprats. Hell, you didnt see him going around eating himself up with wanting to get even with John Ashley, and he sure enough had plenty of reason. Whoever lived in the past was dead to the present—he’d heard that somewhere and thought it was sure enough true. If he could let the past go, why in the purple hell couldnt they? (He had the briefest flash of a thumb gouging an eyeball, of a dick at a dead man’s mouth—and instantly had to remind himself of being stripped of his leg and pistol. Of being coldcocked in the jailyard in the rain. Of Julie. Julie who he loved.) Anyway, it wasn’t as though it was his doing Frank and Ed Ashley went down in the Stream. Old Joe had no reason to go and rob a bank in his county where a bank had not been robbed in years. He’d given that crazy old man no call to make him look bad in the public eye. But by God if this is how the bastard wanted it, well, they’d just see who got the last laugh. He’d put all their asses in jail or know the reason why. In jail or in the ground.
