The Axman of New Orleans Read online

  The boy started to tip his cap. Then he stopped and whipped out a crooked salute. "Thank you, sir."

  I eased the door shut as the boy hopped over the gutter to his bicycle. Then I brushed my hand against the wall until I found the light switch. I twisted it and the overhead light flickered to life. The bare bulb hung from the ceiling at the end of a two-foot electric cord and cast a dull glow over my small den. I crossed the rough plank floor, its coarseness scraping the soles of my feet, and sat down on a wooden chair.

  Holding the envelope up to the light, I saw in the top-left corner the printed words FROM THE SUPERINTENDENT OF POLICE. I turned it over and tore open the flap. Inside was a folded piece of stationary. The note was typed. Superintendent Frank Thompson always typed his notes. In them, he got straight to the point, using clipped language mostly devoid of articles and pronouns. They reminded me of telegrams. I read the note.

  Murder at grocery, Ulloa and S. Scott.

  Axman suspected. Meet there.

  -Thompson.

  I remained seated, feeling a slight quivering in my belly, and not just from last night's whiskey. I had wanted this case, wanted it badly. For six years before the war, as a patrolman, I had been on the periphery of it. Now I was back from the war, promoted to detective, and the Axman case was mine.

  Since I had taken over the case in March, this was the third Axman attack. Sofia Lamonica was dead. Steven Boca had barely survived. This latest attack was the thirteenth overall. Twenty-two victims so far, eleven killed, eleven wounded, and that wasn't counting whatever had happened tonight at Ulloa and South Scott streets.

  The note from Superintendent Thompson fluttered between my fingers. I looked down and saw my hands shaking. I took a deep breath. After a minute the shaking stopped. I reread the note, pausing on the word Axman.

  For the life of me, I couldn't remember why I had wanted this case.

  ***

  If Superintendent Thompson had wanted me to get to the murder scene quickly, he should have sent a car. The Police Department owned nearly two dozen of them now. The new storm hit before I finished getting dressed, and by the time I stepped onto my porch it was attacking the city with lightning and thunder and great slashes of wind-driven rain that came down like a butcher's cleaver on a side of raw beef.

  Wrapped in a long coat and with a Filson rain hat pulled down low across my forehead, I stepped into the storm. Leaning into the wind to keep my balance, I wound my way through the French Quarter to Rampart Street, where I stood under the overhang of a building for ten minutes until a streetcar stopped. The ticket man looked dog tired and only nodded when I showed him my brass detective's badge instead of handing him a nickel. On-duty policemen ride free.

  At Canal Street I transferred to another line. Then at South Carrollton I jumped onto a moving streetcar that was headed uptown. A few minutes later, I shoved my badge into the brakeman's face and made him pull up at Ulloa Street, a block before his regular stop at Tulane Avenue. Then I slogged through the long two blocks toward the murder scene at the corner of South Scott.

  I stood on the porch of a small house across the street from the corner grocery where the killing had taken place and lit a cigarette. Smoking was a habit I had picked up during the war, one I couldn't seem to stop now that I was back. Given the condition of my lungs, smoking was a terrible idea. I knew that, but it helped calm my nerves and stopped my hands from shaking.

  Across the street at the grocery, two uniformed policemen stood under the cover of the porch, trying their best to stay dry. The most violent part of the storm had passed, leaving nothing but a steady rain. Through the clouds to the east, I could see a hint of the coming sunrise.

  As I expected, Superintendent Thompson had beaten me to the scene. His Ford was parked in front of the grocery. Behind Thompson's motorcar, which was dented and splashed with mud, stood a shiny new Ford Model T touring sedan. The only mud on it was on the tires.

  I saw the dark shapes of two men in the front seat of the Model T and the silhouette of a third man standing on the far side talking to the passenger. I watched them as I smoked my cigarette, the Turkish tobacco stinging what was left of my lungs.

  After a couple of minutes, the driver put the Model T in gear, and the man who had been leaning into the passenger window backed away and tipped his hat. Then I saw a flash inside the car as the passenger struck a match to light a cigarette. In that instant, as the light from the flaring match reflected off the man's face, I recognized him.

  His name was Dominick O'Malley, a man I knew mostly by reputation, although I had seen him around town a few times. O'Malley ran the biggest private detective and security agency in the city, but this was a poor Italian neighborhood. I doubted anyone here ever hired security guards or had need of private detectives.

  After the Model T drove away, I saw that the man who had been talking to O'Malley was none other than Superintendent of Police Frank Thompson. I knew that the superintendent and O'Malley were well acquainted. Both were members of the Choctaw Club. But what was O'Malley doing here at this hour? While I finished my cigarette and pondered the question, Thompson disappeared into the grocery.

  I flicked the butt into the overflowing gutter and limped across the street, my left leg aching from the damp air and all the walking, something else left over from the war. As I stepped onto the grocery's porch, I nodded to the two policemen and got a couple of nods in return. The older one had been my sergeant when I was a rookie patrolman assigned to the 8th Precinct. "It's a bad one, Fitz," the sergeant said as I walked past him.

  The building was narrow and long, about twenty-five feet wide and seventy-five feet deep, what New Orleanians call a shotgun house, because, at least in theory, a shotgun blast could be fired from the front door to the back door without hitting anything in between. The front room was the grocery. Beyond that, I knew, would be two or three rooms where the family lived-a bedroom, maybe two, and a kitchen. There were a thousand groceries just like it scattered across the city, one on almost every corner.

  Superintendent Thompson stood in the center of the front room with five newspapermen arrayed in a semicircle around him. I glanced at their faces, hoping to see a friend of mine, but I didn't. I hadn't really expected to.

  "About time you showed up," Thompson called out to me as soon as I stepped through the front door.

  The newspapermen looked at me.

  I took off my hat and shook the rain from it. "I couldn't fit on the messenger boy's bicycle."

  The reporters glanced back at the superintendent to see if he was going to make one of his signature barbed comebacks. After a few seconds, it became apparent he was going to let my comment pass, so the newsmen, recognizing the suddenly dimming prospects of a fiery exchange, lost interest in me and resumed questioning the superintendent about the murder.

  Frank M. Thompson was a big round man with a nearly bald head and an old-fashioned handlebar mustache, the tips of which he kept waxed and twisted into fine points. He and I didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things, including the long-running series of brutal attacks attributed to the so-called Axman, but I was a recently returned wounded veteran of the Great War, a fact that somewhat limited what he could say to me, at least in public.

  I peeled off my overcoat and hung it and my hat on a coatrack in the corner.

  "The family's name is Pepitone," Thompson said, turning to me as I passed him. "The wife and children are in the back with Captain Campo. The body is in the first bedroom."

  The superintendent turned back to his audience of newsmen and continued his sensational description of this most recent Axman killing. I suspected Superintendent Thompson secretly wanted to succeed Mayor Martin Beauchamp, although no one knew if Beauchamp was ever going to leave office. He had been the mayor since 1904. I was thirteen then. Now twenty-eight, I could barely remember another mayor.

  As soon as I opened the door to the family's living quarters, I heard children crying. A narrow hallway ran down the left s
ide of the house. On the right side of the hallway were two doors. At the far end was the kitchen. The nearest door was open, and light from an electric bulb spilled into the hall. The second door was closed.

  I stepped into the first room. A man's body lay sprawled across the four-poster bed under a raised mosquito net. I guessed him to be somewhere in his thirties. I had to guess at his age because his face had been chopped into pulp. Blood saturated the sheets and blanket. More blood had leaked onto the floor and congealed into a sticky red puddle. The wall behind the headboard was splattered nearly to the ceiling. The killer had turned the couple's bedroom into a slaughterhouse.

  "We let the ambulance go and sent for the coroner," a voice behind me said. I turned around and found myself facing Captain William Campo, chief of detectives and my direct superior. Wild Bill, as he liked to be called, had made detective the hard way, by solving cases, but he had been promoted to chief of detectives because he had friends at the Choctaw Club, the real seat of political power in New Orleans.

  "Did you find the murder weapon?" I asked.

  Campo nodded. "An ax on the back porch. The wife said it belongs to her husband."

  Although Campo's name was Italian, the chief of detectives claimed to be French-Corsican. To back up his claim, Campo liked to point out that he didn't speak a word of Italian, though he did speak passable French.

  Hatred of Italians, who had taken over the French Quarter to such an extent that a lot of locals now called it Little Palermo, still ran high in New Orleans, even thirty years after the assassination of Police Chief David Hennessy. Being saddled with an Italian name was a barrier to promotion, especially in a Police Department where the standing joke was still, "Who killa da chief?"

  "What else did the wife say?" I asked.

  Campo shrugged. "She's jabbering in eye-talian. Won't barely speak English, though her oldest, the eleven-year-old, says her mother speaks it well enough when she wants to."

  "She identified the ax," I said. "So she must have being speaking some English."

  Campo's eyes narrowed. "I said she was barely speaking English, Detective."

  I kept my mouth shut.

  The captain continued, "From what little she did say, looks like they were in bed asleep. She woke up when she heard her husband shouting. There was a tall man standing next to the bed, had something in his hands and was beating her husband with it. The ax we found out back was covered in blood."

  "How did the killer get in?"

  "Kicked open the back door," Campo said. "Went out the same way. There's a fence out back, looks like he jumped it."

  "Footprints?"

  The captain shook his head. "Too much rain."

  "Any other witnesses?"

  "In this neighborhood?" Campo said. "Are you kidding?"

  I was about to say something, but the captain talked over me. "A sheriff's deputy on his way home from work heard the missus screaming and came over to investigate. He banged on the front door, which is probably what scared the killer away. Else we wouldn't be looking at just one body."

  I looked into the bedroom again, at Mr. Pepitone lying on the blood-soaked mattress. Something about the scene didn't make sense. I couldn't figure it out. I stared at the body for what must have been a full minute. Then I realized what was wrong.

  CHAPTER 2

  GROCER SLAIN WITH AX

  Wife Nearly Killed But Expected To Recover.

  Police Find Few Clews.

  -The Daily Picayune

  JULY 4, 1911

  8:55 A.M.

  By the time Emile Denoux arrived at the murder scene, several other reporters from competing newspapers were already there, peppering policemen with questions and cornering neighbors for commentary. One reporter from The Times-Democrat was interviewing the Negro who drove the coroner's wagon.

  Emile didn't see an ambulance, which meant the injured wife had already been taken to Charity Hospital. The body of the dead husband was probably still inside, where he had fallen under the blows of his attacker.

  The city editor at The Daily Picayune was going to be livid that Emile had taken more than an hour to get to the murder scene. But Emile didn't consider the delay to be his fault. He'd had the best of intentions, and as soon as the messenger had delivered the handwritten note from Emile's editor dispatching him to the crime scene, Emile started to get dressed, but Colette, his ever-amorous wife, had other plans and pulled him back into bed.

  Afterward, Colette had fallen into a sated slumber from which she would probably not awaken until noon. While Emile, on the other hand, without even time to wash up, had to throw on a rumpled linen suit and rush to the scene of what his editor had described as a possible ax murder. "Get police confirmation of ax as murder weapon!" the editor had scrawled.

  The gruesome attack had been carried out inside a shotgun house at the corner of North Galvez and Arts streets, the business and residence of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Davi. The house stood on low piers, with a narrow set of brick steps leading up to the door. Through the open doorway, Emile glimpsed several detectives milling around inside the grocery.

  Knowing he needed to make up for lost time, Emile decided to try the direct approach. The reporters outside were fighting over crumbs. The real action was inside. He marched toward the door and had almost reached it when a young patrolman stationed at the bottom step reached out a hand and held him back. "You can't go inside," the patrolman said.

  Emile had never seen the young man before, which was unusual since he knew nearly every policeman in the city, including most of the supernumeraries, the so-called special officers. Emile tipped the brim of his homburg so the policeman could see the PRESS card stuck in the band. "It's okay," he said. "I'm with The Daily Picayune." Then he tried to brush past the policeman, but the young cop pushed him back. "No reporters allowed," the patrolman said. "Chief's orders."

  Where brashness hadn't worked, perhaps congeniality would. "Must be a bad one," Emile suggested.

  The policeman didn't respond, just stood there, stone faced, blue eyes fixed ahead, back straight. If the cop had been older, Emile would have thought he had served in the Army, but the kid barely looked old enough to shave.

  "How old are you?" Emile asked.

  The policeman frowned. "Old enough."

  Something about the cop's demeanor was unsettling. He wasn't a typical insecure rookie. Emile was curious. He stuck out his hand. "My name is Emile Denoux."

  The policeman hesitated, his eyes narrowing. Evidently he had been warned never to trust a reporter. Finally, common courtesy overcame his reluctance and he shook Emile's hand. "Colin Fitzgerald."

  Emile smiled. "Pleased to meet you, Officer Fitzgerald. Are you by chance any relation to Connor Fitzgerald?"

  The patrolman nodded and there was a hint of a smile on his face. "He was my father."

  Emile remembered Connor Fitzgerald well, as did most residents of the city. Connor Fitzgerald was one of the New Orleans Police Department's fallen heroes. He had been chief of detectives, promoted to the post by legendary Superintendent David Hennessy, and was shot dead ten years ago while trying to arrest a fugitive. Hennessy's and Fitzgerald's photographs hung side by side at Central Station.

  Emile looked at the younger Fitzgerald, seeing a definite likeness between father and son. Colin Fitzgerald had the same steely-eyed look of determination that peered down from the photograph of his famous father.

  "I believe I met your father once when I was a boy," Emile said. "My father knew him." Emile wasn't sure that was true, but he thought it likely. Brashness hadn't worked. Congeniality hadn't worked. Perhaps flattery could get him through the door. "He was a brave man."

  The cop's eyes narrowed again. "Who is your father?"

  "Henri Denoux. He owned the French newspaper La Fois d'Orleans. He passed away last year."

  The steel in Fitzgerald's eyes softened slightly. "I'm sorry about your father."

  Emile nodded. The seconds ticked by. Neither of them said an
ything else. Even though Emile couldn't get inside the house, he still had a story to write. A run-of-the-mill murder barely rated a mention in a city where murder was so commonplace. But an ax murder, now that might be a story. If he could just get official confirmation ... maybe from this inexperienced patrolman.

  Emile cleared his throat and said in the most casual tone he could muster, given the deadline looming over his head, "It's not every day somebody gets killed with an ax."

  The policeman shrugged. "I guess not."

  Voila, Emile thought. Just like that, he had police confirmation that Joseph Davi had indeed been killed by a man with an ax, the murderer later to be described in Emile's article as an ax-wielding maniac.

  "Did they find the murder weapon?" Emile asked. Then added as a seeming afterthought, "Perhaps I will take a photograph of it for tomorrow's edition."

  Fitzgerald looked him over. "You don't have a camera."

  "I can send for one."

  The policeman shook his head. "I don't know what they found." He nodded toward the door behind him. "This is as close as I've been."

  A couple of other reporters had noticed Emile talking to the patrolman and were sidling over. He was running out of time and needed to get inside the house so he could describe the crime scene in his article. He felt inside his trouser pocket and pulled out a silver half-dollar. Patrolmen only made three dollars a day, so fifty cents was not a bad bribe for doing nothing more than letting him through a door. Emile hoped his editor would reimburse him.

  He held out his hand to Fitzgerald, the liberty head half-dollar lying in his open palm. "How about letting me in to talk to a detective." Nodding toward the two approaching reporters, he added, "Before these vultures get here."