A hotel with no rooms. I didn't wonder. But I could hear the distinctive sound of clinking glassware around the corner and followed it to the expected barroom.
The room was dusky with heavy wood and dull sidelights on the walls sheathed in smoked yellow glass. A mahogany bar ran the length of one wall. It was backed by an impressive ten- foot-long mirror set in a scrolled wood frame that matched the hue of the mahogany. Two men sat at the bar. A broad circular table held four more and I could not see around into the darkest end of the room where booths and at least one other table sat. There were no windows to the outside.
I sat down on a stool and the bartender ignored me for a full five minutes. She was a thin woman with bleached blond hair pulled back in a tufted ponytail held by a red rubber band. She wore belted jeans with a cowboy buckle and the kind of white insulated shirt with three-quarter sleeves that up north we called long underwear. Finally she moved down the bar to me, a damp rag of a woman.
"Can I get ya?"
I had already checked the bar preference.
"Bud," I said.
"Three fifty."
Her face was white and stern. Her only makeup was a smear of lipstick and she kept her dull brown eyes turned away. She didn't move until I put a ten-dollar bill on the bar top and only then went to get me a cold bottle and a wet glass. She didn't even grunt when she made change. The other patrons two seats away never looked up from their cribbage game.
I propped my elbows on the bar. My arms and shoulders ached from the big boy's hammering. When I looked in the mirror across from me I could see swelling already lumping up the side of my face from the other one's cheap shot and I could feel where my teeth had gouged the inside of my mouth. I took a mouthful of beer, swished it around and swallowed the mixture of cold alcohol and blood. A sweating, shaking stranger with a fresh knot on his face didn't seem to draw even a second look from the regulars.
I swiveled around on the stool. An alligator skin that had to be eleven or twelve feet long was tacked on a side wall above a row of booths. A stuffed, mangy-looking bobcat was snarling from his perch above the coat rack. I drained the beer and figured that when the bartender got around to granting me another overpriced drink I'd take a chance and ask for Nate Brown.
My back was to the entrance when the boys from the parking lot came in. They'd apparently gulped a few more shots of courage from a bottle in their rusty truck. They shuffled up and took up positions around me. No one else bothered to look up.
"You're fuckin' meat," the skinny cheapshot announced. The big one stood back out of range, his face still a shade pale, his breathing still raggedy.
The men at the bar turned and rag woman crossed her arms and watched like they were viewing a half interesting rerun of an old TV episode.
"Get up, meat," the big boy rasped.
I tightened my grip on the beer bottle in my hand and felt suddenly tired, the adrenaline glands confused.
"Don't you boys go breakin' stuff in here again, Cory Brooker," the bartender offered, but made no move to come closer.
The circle tightened. Cheapshot sucked in his breath and his right arm started to come up. I was a split second from bringing my foot up into his crotch when a brown wizened hand reached in and clamped the boy's forearm. He tried to fight it but when he turned to see who had hold of him, he blanched and stepped back.
The owner of the hand stepped into the circle and all eyes fell on him. His close-cropped steel-gray hair bristled up from a deeply tanned scalp and his eyes were so pale as to be nearly colorless. He still had a grip on the skinny one and I could see the ridged muscle, taut as wound cable, running up his forearm.
"Cain't have it," he said, and the tone of authority caused all four of us to flinch.
"B-But, Mr. Brown, this…," the big boy started to whine.
"Shut up," the old man explained.
All three of them exchanged glances and backed away, their necks in hangdog position. The old man watched the group move out of the entrance before turning to me.
"Nate Brown," he said, extending what I now considered a magical hand. "You're the one pulled Fred Gunther out of the swamp?"
"Max Freeman," I answered, shaking the hand, which felt for all the world like a bunch of rolled pennies wrapped in old leather.
"Walk with me, Max."
I followed him to the far corner of the room while those at the bar turned back to their card game. Back in the recesses of the room, at a round wooden table, Brown introduced me to three middle-aged men who rose to their feet in a polite fashion and shook my hand.
Rory Sims, Mitch Blackman, Dave Ashley.
I took the last wooden chair without comment. As I watched them sit I noted that all but Ashley were wearing the same small knife scabbard on their belts.
Brown settled and filled a heavy, cut-glass tumbler with two fingers of sipping whiskey and pushed it in front of me. My glass matched the other four at the table. After he refilled his own, Brown reached down and set the bottle on the floor next to his chair leg.
"Fred Gunther is a good man. And we all call him a friend. So first off, we thank you for what you done," Brown started. "And goin' on Fred's advice, we agreed it would maybe help to speak with you."
The others nodded, with the exception of Ashley, who sat staring into the amber light of the whiskey in front of him.
Brown went on. His voice had a slow Southern cadence that made me want to sip from my glass.
"Ain't none of us too fond of the law out here, least of all me. But these here chile killins got a lot of folks stirred up and we are thinkin' it might do us well to have some kinda, you know, go-between."
I looked from man to man until I was convinced they were waiting for me to answer an unasked question. I slowly turned the tumbler of whiskey in a circle on the polished table.
"I'm not sure how I can help," I said, finally giving in to the temptation and taking a drink. The whiskey burned the open cut inside my mouth but slid warm and easy down my throat. The others followed suit.
"Gunther gave us reason to believe you might be in the same sort of, uh, position that we think many folks out here are in," said Sims, a balding, bearded man whose collared shirt and manner made him seem the odd man out in the group. "That is," Sims said, "he indicated you may have been a suspect yourself at one time but seemed to have proved your way out of that."
Billy must have said more to Gunther than I knew.
"Look, Mr. Freeman," Blackman said, pronouncing my last name like it was two words. "They're riding folks mighty hard out here and we just don't want to see an innocent man get caught in some damn government frame-up."
I took another sip of whiskey and looked over the rim of my glass at him. There was an agitation in his eyes that none of the others carried.
"I mean, look. I'm in the guide business just like Gunther. I spent my whole life out here and we don't need the bad publicity either," Blackman said, in a calmer tone.
"We thought maybe you might be a sort of liaison with the authorities, you being a former officer and all," Sims said. "Our expertise may indeed be helpful."
"Do you have any guesses who might be involved?" I said, looking at Ashley, who was the only one who hadn't spoken.
"If we knowed who it was, we'd of taken care of it already our ownself," Brown said, reaching down for the bottle.
"A lot of work has gone into protecting the traditions of these Everglades, Mr. Freeman," Sims said. "Something like this can do more damage than good."
Brown was filling glasses but I put a hand over mine.
"I'm not sure that I have the kind of access to the people investigating this that Gunther thinks I do," I said. "But I'm sure anything you might offer could easily be passed along."
The table went silent for several seconds. I had played snitches and informants and hustlers too many times not to see that we had hit a delicate moment. These men too had tracked and hunted and waited patiently with lures and bait too many times to jump be
fore they were ready. I waited a few more calculated seconds before standing up. A chorus of scraping chairs joined me.
"Well, Mr. Gunther obviously knows how to reach me."
As I walked through the room, rag woman watched me from behind the bar where my change from the single beer lay untouched. I tipped my head as I passed her and I swear she tried to smile.
When I got outside the western sky was streaked in purple and red and the remains of a rain shower was dripping off the porch roof. The big boy's truck was gone, but as I walked across the lot I could see they hadn't left easy.
The passenger side of my front windshield was smashed, a spiderweb of fissures running out from a deep divot in the middle. Three separate scratches ran down the driver's side from the front cowling to the tailgate. I figured the only reason they didn't bust out the headlights was so I could find my way out of their part of the world.
CHAPTER 16
I waited until I was back on the Tamiami Trail and then called Billy, giving him a brief description of my meeting with the Loop Road group. I left out the encounter with the welcoming committee. I gave him the names of the four men at the table, knowing he could not resist his natural inquisitiveness.
Driving east into Miami, headlights and overhead streetlights flashed and splintered through my broken windshield and hampered my view of the skyline after dark. When I got up onto the interstate, I could see a curving neon light that snaked through the city, an artistic addition to the Metrorail line. The Centrust Building stood bathed in teal spotlights, a tribute to the Florida Marlins baseball team. Against the blackness of Biscayne Bay, the lights in the high-rise towers took on the look of manmade constellations. The contrast to the weathered pine of the Loop Road Hotel was not lost on me.
When I got back to Billy's apartment he was waiting for me with a fresh pot of coffee, a take-out order of jerk chicken and black beans and rice, and a sheaf of computer printouts, dossiers he called them, on Brown, Sims, Blackman and Ashley. He also had company.
He was on the patio with a woman he introduced as Dianne McIntyre, "a lawyer w-with an office in the s-same b-building as mine."
She was as tall as Billy and had a swimmer's figure, broad shoulders and narrow hips, and was dressed expensively in a pure silk blouse and a charcoal skirt. She was comfortable enough to have taken off her heels and was padding about in stockings.
As I ate at the counter they stood in the kitchen area, sharing a bottle of wine. When I looked up Billy was staring at me.
"W-What happened to your face?"
I self-consciously touched the swollen cheekbone.
"Door," I said.
The woman raised one of her fine dark eyebrows and indelicately probed at a molar with her tongue. Billy accepted my reticence and picked up the first page of the stack of papers.
"Dianne actually kn-knows this f-fellow Sims. S-She worked w-with him on an environmental case."
I could tell how hard Billy was trying to control his stutter and it made me anxious for him. But the woman seemed completely inured.
"It was several years ago in a dispute between a very influential developer who wanted to build some kind of mega sports complex in an area of the Everglades that had never been touched," she said, turning the wineglass in her hands. "Sims had been working with the naturalists and environmental groups for years and had marshaled some fairly strong support against the project. One of the shrewdest things he'd done was elicit the favor of the old Gladesmen by convincing them that their way of life would be threatened as much as the flora and wildlife of the area."
"N-No doubt men l-like your Mr. Brown," Billy said, leafing through the stack of papers.
"Apparently things got ugly and some of the developer's backroom people allegedly threatened Sims," McIntyre continued. "Shortly after, handmade posters started showing up at the public fishing ramps and even in some outlying suburban stores that if anyone harmed Sims, those responsible would be gutted and fed to the gators."
The attorney again seemed unruffled by the circumstances. Neither shocked nor amused. Just the facts, ma'am. I watched her closely.
"The project finally died and Sims seemed to move away from the mainstream. I haven't heard much about him for the last few years." When she finished, she sipped again at her wine.
Nate Brown's was a story in itself, much of it untold.
Billy had found some archived newspaper clippings and legal transcripts online that shed a little light on the wizened old man who could back down three pumped-up thugs with only the slightest flick of his Loop Road respect.
Nathaniel Brown had been born in the Glades and learned the skills of the back country with one motivation: survival. There was no record of his parentage and no official documentation of his life until a war record placed him in an infantry division in the army in WWII. There were notations of his award of two silver stars, for bravery beyond the call when he had taken out a group of specialized German mountain troops during an ambush, "single-handedly causing a number of casualties upon the enemy." He had then doctored a group of his own squad members wounded in the fight and kept them alive in the woods for nearly two weeks until they were found.
After his discharge, his name didn't surface again for more than a decade until he was arrested and charged in the death of a game warden. By then Brown had built a small reputation as an alligator poacher whose knowledge of the Glades made him impossible to catch.
But court transcripts showed that on a night in the early 1970s a warden was chasing Brown, whom he suspected of carrying several fresh gator skins in his outboard runabout. The boat chase led into a series of twisting tributaries on the edge of Florida Bay, and Brown reportedly lured the warden into an area of sand bars. Even in the dark the Gladesman was able to read the fine currents, water he had grown up on and traveled his entire life. The game warden was not. The officer ran his boat into a sand spur at high speed and was thrown from the boat, breaking his neck. Brown disappeared into the mangroves.
Three days later, after supposedly hearing of the warden's death, Brown turned himself in. His public defender pleaded him out to a charge of involuntary manslaughter. He served six years, his final two at a road prison near the isolated Ten Thousand Islands section of Florida's southwest coast. After his release, his official tracks again disappeared. No driver's license. No property holdings. Nothing.
"And you saw this guy?" Dianne McIntyre said, her first true sign of piqued interest. "He'd have to be near eighty."
Billy filled the wineglasses and I watched the woman cup her hands around the crystal. She had a near-perfect profile and her auburn hair fell across her cheek as she bent to the glass. She was oddly standing on one foot, her other brought up behind her like one of those 1950s movie starlets during a kiss. I guessed she liked her wine.
"This B-Blackman I actually kn-know of," said Billy, paging through the documents. "He is, or w-was, a guide like Gunther."
Billy said he'd tried to depose Blackman when he was handling the client suit against Gunther.
"Fred said he was w-working with him at the t-time. That he was the b-best guide in the G-Glades, but had an attitude."
Billy had sent several certified requests to Blackman's business P.O. address but got no response. When the people suing Gunther dropped the suit, he never pursued it.
Blackman had the typical paper trail of licenses, social security and business permits, but court records showed little in the past. But in the last few years he had had a handful of complaints filed against him by clients, including a charge of aggravated assault in which an upstate New York man accused Blackman of whipping him across the face with a fly rod during an angry outburst on a fishing excursion.
Blackman said it was an accident. The New Yorker settled for a plea of no contest to a misdemeanor assault charge and court costs. I set Blackman's face in my mind, recalled the agitation in his voice and the almost mocking pronunciation of my name.
Dave Ashley was an unknown. The
silent member of Brown's cabal had no paper trail. Variations of his name and my estimate of his age in the early forties brought nothing. No licenses, addresses, court appearance, nothing. In this day and age, the blank sheet stunned the attorneys. It was difficult to believe any person could exist without leaving some imprint in the modern electronic tracking of every soul from birth to school to work to death.
"There was an Ashley gang, a notorious criminal family that roamed the South Florida region in the early nineteen hundreds," McIntyre said.
Both Billy's and my faces must have taken on the look of blank dumbness. A crinkle came to the woman's eyes, she took a sip of wine and began.
The Ashleys were a family of Crackers who had come to Florida near the turn of the twentieth century and found work providing the muscle and sweat to build Henry Flagler's railway line into then frontier South Florida. While the father and older boys chopped railroad ties, young John Ashley became a skilled hunter and trapper in the Glades. Then came a day in 1911 when the body of a Seminole Indian named DeSoto Tiger floated up in a canal. Word had it young John was the last one seen with Tiger, who was on his way to Miami to sell twelve hundred dollars in otter skins. The skins were eventually sold- by young John.
Ashley was eventually arrested and jailed but escaped and for the next ten years he and his family took up the business of robbing banks, running illegal rum from the Bahamas, and using their criminal wealth to buy off the local law.
"Then some old-time Palm Beach sheriff became the Ashley gang's sworn nemesis," McIntyre said. "He tracked them down for years and once came close, but one of his deputies, his cousin, was killed in a shootout.
"Then sometime in 1924 he laid an ambush on the Sebastian River bridge. When John and three of his gang went for their guns, all four were cut down. The rest were eventually killed or captured or run out of the state. But who knows about their descendents?"
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