The Axman of New Orleans Read online

  The sounds of the attack and his wife's screams had awakened their sons, who shared the bedroom nearest the kitchen. The two boys pulled the attacker from their parents' bedroom, which undoubtedly had saved their father's life, and then engaged the would-be murderer in a brutal fight in the narrow confines of the hallway, yet despite their attacker being armed with both a pistol and a hatchet, and the wounds they themselves suffered, the two boys had fought their foe to the point that he quit his attack and ran away.

  "How do you like those two sons of his?" Emile asked.

  "They're brave lads, that's for sure," Colin said.

  "Maybe they should join the Army and you could stay here."

  "I'm not sure they're old enough," Colin said.

  "I wasn't being serious."

  "Oh."

  "You really don't have much of a sense of humor, do you?" Emile said.

  "No, I guess not."

  "So about this case ..."

  "What about it?"

  "Do you think it was the Axman?" Emile asked.

  "Sure looks like his work."

  "It's been five years since the Sciambra case."

  Colin grunted. "Was that when I slugged you?"

  "No, that was the Davi case, when you knocked me down for simply offering to buy you lunch."

  "You were trying to bribe me."

  Emile grinned. "One man's bribe is another man's free lunch."

  "I figured the killer was either dead or in prison," Colin said. "If this is really him, then he must have been in prison."

  "So the Axman has finally resurfaced and you're quitting the police force."

  Colin stomped his feet to warm them. "I'm not quitting. I've been granted a leave of absence to join the war, to fight for my country."

  "What did Maria say?"

  "She's not happy."

  "If you're trying to live up to your father's reputation, I've got news for you. You're already a hero."

  Colin shook his head. "I want to do something that matters."

  "You're a policeman," Emile said, frustrated at his friend's stubbornness. "That matters."

  Colin snorted and blew vapor from his nose. "If they had left Captain Boyle in as superintendent, if they had given him the permanent post instead of appointing this railroad conductor, then maybe he could have changed this department. But when they put Thompson in, that told me all I needed to know."

  "Thompson might have some good ideas of his own."

  "They didn't appoint him superintendent for his good ideas. They appointed him because he'll do what he's told. He's a puppet for those bastards at the Choctaw Club. Just like the mayor."

  "So you're running away."

  Colin jerked his hands out of his pockets. They were balled into fists. "I'm not running away. I'm going to France to fight a war. Something you should be doing too, considering they're your people."

  Emile held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. "Take it easy, my friend. I was just testing you. I had to make sure that before you left for the war your Irish temper was still intact."

  Colin relaxed and smiled.

  Emile pushed his hands down into his pants pockets and nodded toward the door. "Do you think there will be more attacks?"

  "I'm just a patrolman. What do I know?"

  "Is that why you're really leaving, because you know that with another Ring man as superintendent you'll never make detective?"

  "I told you a long time ago that I'd never get promoted," Colin said. "But that's got nothing to do with it."

  A minute passed. Neither man spoke.

  "When do you leave?" Emile asked.

  "The day after Christmas."

  "That soon?"

  Colin nodded.

  "I was hoping you would still have time to come to your senses."

  "This is something I have to do."

  Emile was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "In that case, I have something for you."

  "How can you have something for me? You didn't know I was leaving until a few minutes ago."

  Emile pulled his left hand out of his pocket. "It's something I always carry with me." He opened his hand and in his palm lay the silver liberty head half-dollar with the tiny hole drilled through the top edge.

  Colin picked up the coin. "Is this the same one?"

  Emile nodded. "The same one I tried to give you five years ago. This time I want you to take it."

  "Why?"

  "As a reminder not to do anything stupid while you're over there."

  Colin cleared his throat a couple of times. For a moment, he seemed unable to speak. Finally, he said, "Thank you."

  CHAPTER 17

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1919

  8:45 A.M.

  After a sleepless night spent wrestling with the implications of the brass button I had discovered at the Pepitone grocery, I walked into the detective squad room on the second floor of Central Station and found Detective Bernard Blanchard seated at the small desk on which sat the squad's one typewriter. Blanchard's glasses were perched midway down his long nose and he was using his index fingers to peck out a report. Two more detectives sat at the big table in the center of the room, reading through case files.

  I walked up behind Blanchard and peered over his dandruff-flaked shoulder. He was typing a preliminary report on the Salvatore Marcello murder. "Mind if I take a look at that when you're done?" I asked.

  Blanchard stopped typing and craned his neck to look up at me, peering over the tops of his glasses. "I thought you were working the killing on South Scott."

  "Ulloa Street," I said. "The Pepitone murder."

  Blanchard nodded. "Yeah, that one."

  "I am working it, but I thought since your man was killed only a couple of hours before mine, maybe there's a connection."

  Blanchard turned his chair halfway around to face me. The metal legs shrieked on the wood floor and made my hair stand on end. "Don't you have enough of your own cases to worry about," he said, "without getting involved in mine?"

  His sudden hostility surprised me. Though not exactly friends, Bernie Blanchard and I got along fairly well. Right before I left for the war, we went out after work and downed a few drinks together.

  Most of the detectives on the squad considered Bernie our weak sister because he wasn't much of a lead investigator. He was, however, an adequate backup. If you told him what to do and how to do it, he usually got it done. Not necessarily on time, but eventually. Bernie owed his position on the squad to his father, a longtime member of the Police Board, the five-man committee that controlled the department's budget, hiring and firing, and promotions.

  "I'm not trying to steal your case, Bernie. I just want to compare notes. If there's a chance these two cases are connected, then maybe there's something about one that will help solve the other."

  From the corner of my eye, I saw that the two detectives at the big center table had lifted their noses out of their case files and were watching us.

  Blanchard must have felt at a disadvantage with me standing over him because he stood up. He was half a head taller than me but bone thin. I had him by an easy twenty-five pounds. I couldn't imagine he was going to take a swing at me, but I felt my right hand clench into a fist just in case.

  He noticed it. "Relax, hero," he said. "I'm not a kraut, so try not to shoot me." Then he yanked the report he had been working on out of the typewriter, even though it wasn't finished, and walked away.

  I followed Blanchard across the squad room, talking to his back as he marched toward the desk he shared with a detective on the other squad. "What's the matter with you, Bernie? I just want to see what you have on the Marcello case, so I can figure out if it relates to the Pepitone murder."

  Blanchard kept walking. When he reached his desk, he spun around to face me. "I don't have anything on the case. It's a whodunit. An Italian hoodlum got shot dead in the street, one bullet in the chest, one in the face. No one saw anything, and there are at least a hundred people with a reason to ki
ll him."

  The squad room was unnaturally quiet. The windows were open but even the street noise seemed muffled. "What does his yellow card look like?" I asked.

  Blanchard tossed the half-finished report on his desk and dropped into his chair. He looked down and busied his hands straightening a couple of pencils. "I haven't had a chance to look at it yet."

  "Then how do you know he was a hoodlum?"

  Blanchard threw up his hands. "He works, worked I guess I should say, on the fruit docks for the Matranga brothers as a part-time banana checker. No one in the neighborhood where he lived would even acknowledge knowing him."

  "Any dago older than twelve has a yellow card," said one of the other detectives.

  I turned around and glared at him, a fat slob with stains from breakfast dribbled across his tie. Everyone knew my wife was Sicilian. Everyone knew she was dead. He looked away.

  I rested my fists on Blanchard's desk. "Marcello was killed Sunday night. This is Tuesday. What have you been doing?"

  The door banged open on the other side of the squad room. I glanced over and saw Captain Bill Campo step in. The captain had already told me that the Marcello case was none of my business. When I looked back at Blanchard, he had a smirk on his face that I wanted to wipe off with my shoe.

  The Detective Division was a political battlefield. Patrolmen became detectives based on influence and patronage. To trade in the tin badge of a patrolman for the brass shield of a detective, you had to have powerful friends or rich relatives. If you had both you could become chief of detectives.

  I liked to pretend that I was different. But I wasn't. I owed my position to my dead father. Him and a pretty good war record. And it hadn't taken much longer than the first day after my promotion for me to realize that the second-floor squad room was not a place where serious men went about the important work of criminal detection. Instead, it was a powder keg of personal conflict and political maneuvering, where alliances formed and dissolved so quickly it was impossible to keep track of them.

  The fighting was as vicious as anything I'd seen in France. Daily battles were waged, and someone usually ended up with a knife in his back. It was trench warfare without the blood.

  So when Bernie Blanchard stonewalled me about Salvatore Marcello and got that smirk on his face when Captain Campo walked into the squad room, I knew something was going on. I just didn't know what.

  CHAPTER 18

  AXMAN STRIKES AGAIN!

  Italian Grocer And Wife Hacked To Death While Sleeping. Police Find Cryptic Message From Killer.

  -The Daily Picayune

  MAY 23, 1918

  8:55 A.M.

  The bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Maggio lay sprawled across the bed, tangled in the mosquito netting, their heads split open, their throats slashed almost to the spine. The couple had no children and lived alone in one side of a double shotgun house on the corner of Magnolia and Upperline streets, where they also operated a grocery and saloon. Two of Mr. Maggio's brothers, Andrew and Jake, lived in the other side of the house. The brothers told police they had discovered the bodies shortly before 5:00 A.M., just after the storm that had rolled through sometime past midnight had finally let up.

  Emile Denoux stood in the small saloon, the second room from the front, drawing a diagram of the house for tomorrow's paper.

  "Coming through!" a voice shouted from the front room.

  Emile looked up from his notepad and saw two sturdy men carrying an empty canvas and wood stretcher through the door that connected the grocery and saloon. Walking in behind them was Detective John Dantonio. Emile stepped out of the way as the two coroner's men angled the stretcher through the next door, leading into the bedroom where the tragedy had occurred. Dantonio stopped in the saloon with Emile to wait for the men to remove the bodies.

  "It appears I was right," Emile said, fishing for a quote from the detective for his article in tomorrow's edition of The Daily Picayune.

  "Right about what?" Dantonio said.

  "That the Axman has returned."

  "Returned from where?"

  "I don't know," Emile said. "Wherever he was for the five years that he wasn't killing people. Colin Fitzgerald said he thought the man might have been in prison."

  "Fitzgerald?" Dantonio said. "Are you talking about the kid who left for the war? Connor Fitzgerald's son?"

  Emile nodded. "He's a friend of mine."

  "He's a good kid, but he's just a patrolman, or was, until he joined the Army."

  "It's an interesting idea, though. Don't you think?"

  "Maybe."

  In the next room, the coroner's men dragged the body of Joseph Maggio off the bed and laid it on the stretcher. Emile cringed at the squishing sound the body made.

  "I read your article," Dantonio said. "The one you wrote after Edward Andollina and his sons were attacked."

  Considering in what little regard John Dantonio held all members of the press, the very idea that he had read one of Emile's articles came as quite a shock to Emile, although he tried not to show it. "What did you think?"

  "About what?"

  "About my article."

  The detective shrugged.

  "I think it's pretty obvious," Emile said, "that the same killer from six years ago attacked Mr. Andollina and his sons and ... did this." He pointed into the bedroom where the coroner's men were picking up the stretcher bearing the body of Mr. Maggio.

  Dantonio removed his derby hat as the two men maneuvered the body through the narrow doorway into the saloon. Emile hurried to also remove his own hat. Then he and Dantonio stood in respectful silence as the coroner's men carried the body past them into the front room on their way outside. The men would be back in a few minutes for Catherine Maggio.

  "I think you're right," Dantonio said. "But just because I agree with you doesn't mean I think you reporters are anything more than a pack of jackals."

  High praise, indeed, Emile thought. "If that is true, and you believe I am right, then why did I see Mr. Maggio's brothers being led away in handcuffs?"

  Dantonio settled his derby back on his head and smoothed the wax on his mustache. "That was Captain Dunn's idea. He's got it in his head that one of the brothers, maybe both of them, committed the murders, so he intends to hold them at the Seventh Precinct station until one of them confesses."

  "Does he have any proof?"

  "We found the ax in the bathroom," Dantonio said. "Along with some bloody clothes. Looks like the killer changed before he left."

  "But the brothers live right next door," Emile said, pointing at the common wall that divided the two halves of the double shotgun house. "They wouldn't need to change clothes."

  "We also found a bloody razor on the floor," the detective said. "Next to the bed."

  "How does that incriminate Mr. Maggio's brothers?"

  "The older brother, Andrew, owns a barbershop."

  "You're kidding," Emile said. "A razor was used in the attack, and one of the brothers is a barber? Every man owns a razor. Am I a suspect because I have a razor in my bathroom?"

  Dantonio shrugged. "It's Captain Dunn."

  Emile understood. Dunn had not risen to the rank of captain, the second highest rank within the Police Department, because of an abundance of brains. He had attained his position as a precinct commander based on his willingness to dispense justice with his fists and through the barrel of his revolver. He was rumored to have shot nine men in the line of duty. His father was also a member of the Choctaw Club.

  Just after the murder of Superintendent Reynolds last year, there had been some speculation that Dunn might leap over a few more senior captains and be named as Reynolds's replacement, but with the Police Board's naming of the retired railroad man, Frank M. Thompson, to the department's top post, Dunn's dreams had been dashed.

  "So do you agree with Dunn?" Emile asked.

  "He's a captain. I'm just a detective. He doesn't need my approval."

  "What about the message outside?" Emile a
sked, referring to a scrawled note a patrolman had found, written in chalk on the sidewalk less than a block from the Maggios' house. Emile had copied it verbatim into his notebook, including the misspellings. The message read: Mrs. Joseph Maggio is goin to sit up toniht just like Mrs. Toney.

  "What about it?" Dantonio asked.

  "Who do you think wrote it?"

  "I have no idea."

  "If Captain Dunn is right, it had to be one of the brothers."

  "Or some punk from the neighborhood."

  "I think I know who Mrs. Tony is," Emile said.

  "Who?"

  "Mrs. Tony Sciambra."

  "I didn't work that case," Dantonio said, "but I remember it."

  "The day the Sciambras were attacked, two Italian men came into their grocery and one of them called out to Mrs. Sciambra, 'Good morning, Mrs. Tony.'"

  "The Sciambras were shot."

  "The husband owned an ax but it was broken," Emile said. "And we know the killer carries a pistol because he used one when he attacked Edward Andollina and his sons."

  Dantonio shrugged, but Emile could see that the detective was considering the idea. "How would Joseph Maggio's brothers even know about Mrs. Tony?" Emile asked. "Much less a punk from the neighborhood."

  "By reading your articles, probably," Dantonio said.

  "Tony Sciambra and his wife were murdered six years ago."

  This time Dantonio nodded.

  "But the killer would know who Mrs. Tony was," Emile said. "Especially if he's the one who called her that."

  "The two men you mentioned, the Italians, what were they doing in the Sciambras' grocery?"

  "Your old boss, Captain Long, said the Sciambras were mixed up with the Mafia."

  "Why?" Dantonio said. "Just because they were Italians?"

  "So it would seem."

  "And what about you?" Dantonio asked. "What did you think?"

  "I ... wasn't so sure."

  "But you wrote it that way, didn't you?" Dantonio said, his dark Sicilian eyes staring into Emile's. "I remember your article from back then. You accused the Sciambras of being involved in some kind of underworld business that got them killed."

  Although embarrassed to admit it, Emile said, "I did."