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