The Axman of New Orleans Page 3

  Fitzgerald swung on him so fast that Emile didn't know it was coming until the policeman's fist cracked against his jaw. The blow knocked him flat on his back, dumping him onto the thin strip of grass between the house and street. When Emile raised his head the world was spinning like the images in a kaleidoscope. The only thing that seemed stationary was the enraged policeman looming over him.

  After a couple of seconds, everything stopped spinning and Emile saw that the two reporters who had been slinking over to talk to Fitzgerald had stopped dead in their tracks, mouths hanging open as if they were catching flies.

  Emile wondered if maybe he was confused. Maybe the stern young patrolman had not slugged him. Perhaps he had fallen. Perhaps Fitzgerald was standing over him so he could pull Emile to his feet. Emile raised his hand for help. In it, he still clutched the half-dollar. The policeman swatted the hand away, and Emile heard the silver coin clattering along the brick pavement.

  Emile decided to stay where he was. The Irish were a thickheaded race, but what they lacked in quick wits they made up for with quick fists. In general, the Irish would just as soon knock a man down as shake his hand. And that was when they were sober. God help you if you ran into an angry Irishman when he was drunk.

  Seconds later a voice shouted, "What the devil's going on here?"

  Emile turned his head and saw Superintendent of Police James Reynolds standing in the open doorway. The barrel-chested police chief was red-faced as his eyes scanned the crowd of reporters, policemen, and neighborhood onlookers before focusing on Emile. "What in the bloody blue blazes are you doing on the ground, Mr. Denoux?"

  Emile glanced at Fitzgerald and then opened his mouth to speak. He was about to say he had tripped, but the rookie patrolman spoke first. "I hit him, sir."

  The superintendent fixed his eyes on the patrolman. Emile wondered if young Fitzgerald's nascent career might be coming to an end. Despite the sudden turn of events that knocked him on his backside, Emile hoped not. He admired the young policeman's style.

  "Why did you hit that reporter, Fitzgerald?" the superintendent said.

  Fitzgerald hesitated.

  The young cop had Emile's attention. Technically, attempting to bribe a policeman was illegal, though Emile would hardly call a half-dollar a serious bribe. More like buying a hard-working man a couple of shots of his favorite whiskey. At one time or another, Emile had slipped money into the pockets of half the men on the police force.

  "Well?" Chief Reynolds barked. "Answer up, man."

  Fitzgerald cleared his throat. "He was trying to get past me into the house, sir."

  "Before you hit him, did you warn him not to go into the house?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Behind Emile a camera bulb flashed. He turned and saw a photographer from The Daily Item grinning at him from behind his camera.

  "After you warned him, did he again try to enter the house?" Reynolds asked.

  "Yes, sir," Fitzgerald said.

  Reynolds snorted. "Good lad."

  The superintendent turned to Emile. "And you, Mr. Denoux, have you learned anything from this?"

  Emile stared up at the superintendent. "I most certainly have."

  "Are you going to give us anymore trouble?"

  "Not a bit, sir."

  "Good lad." With that, the superintendent spun around and marched back into the house.

  Emile looked up at Fitzgerald. The policeman glared back at him. For several seconds they stared at each other. Then Fitzgerald reached out his hand. Emile grabbed it, and the policeman hauled him to his feet.

  CHAPTER 3

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1919

  5:30 A.M.

  "What time did the sheriff's deputy pass by?" I asked Captain Campo while the two of us stood in the hallway outside Mr. and Mrs. Pepitone's bedroom.

  "Two o'clock," Campo said. "He was walking home after his shift at the Parish Prison."

  "Where does he live?"

  "Around the corner on South Pierce."

  "The wife said she and her husband were asleep when the attacker broke in, right?"

  Campo nodded.

  "Then why is he wearing pants?" I asked.

  Mr. Pepitone's body was splayed across the blood-drenched bed. He had on brown wool trousers and a white undershirt. His shoes were still on his feet.

  Superintendent Thompson lumbered into the hallway. "Must be a vendetta moon up there above all those clouds," he said, aiming a nod at the body on the bed. "He's the second dead dago tonight."

  I turned to Campo. "The second?"

  He nodded. "Had another one killed on North Rampart at midnight."

  "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I'm telling you now," he snapped. "Besides, that's not your case. This is your case."

  "All the Axman cases are mine."

  "Wasn't an ax," Campo said. "He got shot in the head walking home from work."

  "Who was he?"

  Campo pulled a notebook from his pocket and flipped to a page covered in penciled scratch. "A Black Hand man named Salvatore Marcello. Age thirty-seven. Worked for Carlo Matranga as a part-time banana checker at the Thalia Street Wharf. We picked him up for questioning several times. A few years ago, he shot another Italian. Only wounded him, but he did time for it."

  I pulled out my own notebook and jotted down Marcello's name the information the captain had given me.

  Black Hand gangs had come over from Sicily and specialized in extortion. They sent letters to Italian businesses demanding payment in exchange for "protection" against future misfortunes, such as property damage, injury, even death. The letters were often signed with the inked impression of a hand, thus the name. The gangs were part of criminal subculture called the Mafia.

  The superintendent pointed to the body on the bed. "I checked the card file for Pepitone before I left Central Station. He had a clean record as far as we know."

  I heard a commotion up front and recognized the voice of Sid Hirsch, the department's cantankerous photographer, griping about something. Knowing that Hirsch would soon barge into the bedroom to set up his cumbersome photographic equipment, destroying my crime scene in the process, I stepped through the door into the murder room.

  The floor was already covered with bloody footprints, most of them made by curious policemen who wanted a close-up look at the latest victim of the infamous Axman. I squatted down and studied the tracks.

  After a minute, I picked out three sets of what I took to be Mrs. Pepitone's footprints. Small barefoot smears with distinct toe impressions. The first set she probably made as she fled the room to summon help, the second as she returned to check on her wounded husband, and the third as she left the room for the final time.

  Some of the prints no doubt belonged to my superiors, Captain Campo and Superintendent Thompson, men who should know better. Some of the tracks may even belong to the killer, but it was too late to tell which ones. Trampled under some of the bloody footprints was a man's shirt.

  I leaned over the bed to examine Mr. Pepitone more closely. His wounds were horrendous. Just like the ones I had seen on Sofia Lamonica, the nineteen-year-old who had been murdered in her bedroom at the back of her parents' grocery in August; and the ones I had seen inflicted last month on Steven Boca, another grocer who had been attacked while asleep in his bed.

  There were at least six separate gashes on Mr. Pepitone's face and head, each consistent with the blade of an ax. In some places the flesh looked like it had been peeled off the bone. The two highest wounds had split his skull and spilled the spongy pink material that was Mr. Pepitone's brain onto the bed. His right arm was nearly severed above the wrist, something that appeared to be a defensive wound and was probably made as he raised his arm to ward off one of the first blows to his head.

  Turning away from the body, I pulled open the drawer of one of the two nightstands, the one nearest the door. Inside the drawer was a tube of ointment, a tin of lip balm, a bottle of patent medicine pills, a man's billfold, and a jar
of pennies.

  Inside the other nightstand, I found a Sicilian translation of the Holy Bible, a stack of letters from Sicily held together with a red ribbon, and a Colt .38 caliber revolver. I picked up the gun and sniffed the muzzle. The smell of burned gunpowder was strong.

  I thumbed back the catch on the left side of the frame and opened the cylinder. The backs of six brass shell casings stared at me. Four had been fired. I dumped all six shells into my hand and slipped them into my coat pocket.

  I laid the revolver on the nightstand, then turned around to face the door and tried to imagine what the scene had looked like a few hours ago. A curtain covered the room's only window. At two o'clock, when the intruder entered the house, the storm would have been raging outside and the only light, if there was no light on in the room, would have come from flashes of lightning that shone around the edges of the curtain.

  Based on the defensive wound on Mr. Pepitone's arm, I surmised that the first blow had not landed while he was asleep, which meant he must have seen the killer enter the bedroom. Since Mr. Pepitone was unlikely to have been lying in bed awake with his pants and shoes on, he was probably standing next to the bed, perhaps undressing, when the killer stepped through the door with the ax in his hand. That would explain the shirt on the floor.

  But Mr. Pepitone had a pistol, a Colt .38 Army, a double-action revolver with no safety. The simplest gun in the world to operate. From the bed, it would have been hard to miss someone coming through the door. But since there was no blood in the hall, I had to assume that whoever fired those four shots had missed. If the bullets didn't hit the killer, what did they hit?

  I looked at the door, my eyes searching the wall along its top and sides. In the top right corner of the wooden casement, I saw a dark spot. I tiptoed around the blood on the floor and ran a finger over the spot. It was a hole, punched clean through the frame. A bullet hole.

  By the time I stepped back into the hall, Captain Campo and Superintendent Thompson had retreated to the grocery, where the superintendent was, once again, entertaining a gang of reporters. The man loved to see his name in print.

  In the hallway, I turned around and ran my hand along the top of the doorway. The surface was unmarred. The bullet had lodged inside the wall. Next, I searched the wall on the opposite side of hall. About three feet down from the ceiling, I found a second bullet hole. Turning to look back into the bedroom, I saw that the second hole was in line with the bed.

  Just then, Sid Hirsch stepped through the doorway at the front end of the hall. He had a camera strap slung over each shoulder, and he was lugging a tripod and a heavy case. Mud covered his shoes and had splashed halfway up his pant legs. "Damned rain," he said. "Goddamned rain and mud."

  "You should have seen it earlier," I said.

  As Hirsch struggled past me in the narrow hall, one of his heavy cameras banged into my knee. "But I bet the mud wasn't as bad earlier," he grumbled.

  Ignoring him, I resumed my search of the hallway, looking for the other two bullet holes. As Hirsch was mounting one of his cameras to the tripod, I asked, "Do you have a light I can borrow?"

  He groused under his breath as he dug through his case, acting as if I had asked to borrow his liver. Finally, he handed me a two-cell flashlight. "Make sure you give it back," he said. "That's the only one I have left. Can't count the pieces of equipment I've lent to detectives that I ain't never got back."

  Using the yellow beam of Hirsch's flashlight, I retraced my search, but there were no other bullet holes. So where had the third and fourth shot gone?

  Behind me, Hirsch's flashbulb popped, and for a second a bright light flooded the hallway. I waited for Hirsch to finish his wide-angle exposures. Then I squeezed past him and his camera into the bedroom, where, for ten minutes, I searched all four walls for evidence of the remaining two bullets. But I found nothing.

  I was fairly certain that Mr. Pepitone could not have fired four shots at the killer before he was attacked, because had he fired them in such close quarters he would have undoubtedly hit the intruder with at least one, and things would have turned out differently, and I would now be standing over the body of the intruder and not Mr. Pepitone. Or at the very least, the attacker would have left a trail of blood marking his escape. And even if Mr. Pepitone had somehow managed to miss all four close-range shots, he most likely would have scared off his assailant. No sane man would press on with an ax against a man firing a revolver.

  Nor did it seem possible that Mr. Pepitone could have fired the four shots after he was attacked, because no matter in which order the blows landed, any one of them would have incapacitated Mr. Pepitone to the point of rendering him unable to fire a revolver.

  So if Mr. Pepitone had not fired those four shots? Who had?

  It was time to talk to Mrs. Pepitone.

  CHAPTER 4

  ANOTHER MYSTERIOUS MURDER;

  SLEEPING ITALIAN GROCER AGAIN VICTIM

  Wife Beside Him Also Wounded, Baby Escapes. Robbery Not The Motive. Police Suspect Black Hand.

  -The Daily Picayune

  MAY 16, 1912

  7:00 A.M.

  Emile Denoux heard a heavy footstep behind him. Then a familiar voice said, "So what do you think, Mr. Denoux?"

  When Emile turned around he found himself facing Captain George Long, the New Orleans Police Department's chief of detectives. "Think about what, Captain?"

  They were standing in the hallway of the grocery and home of Anthony and Johanna Sciambra, at the corner of France and Villere streets, in the city's 9th Ward. Moments ago, the coroner's wagon had hauled away the body of Mr. Sciambra, who had been shot five times. Mrs. Sciambra had suffered a bullet wound to her hip and was on her way to Charity Hospital.

  "Is this attack connected to the others?" Captain Long asked. The chief of detectives was a lumbering giant of a man with a well-known disdain for reporters. Yet he had allowed Emile into the murder scene only a few minutes after he himself had arrived. Even more remarkable, the captain had kept the other reporters and photographers outside.

  "They do seem to have a lot in common," Emile said.

  "I agree," Captain Long said.

  "There is one significant difference, though," Emile ventured.

  The attack on the Sciambras was similar to other recent attacks that had left three people dead and three wounded. All the previous victims had been Italian grocers, and all had been attacked late at night while they slept: Mr. and Mrs. Davi last July, Mr. and Mrs. Crutti in September, and Mr. and Mrs. Rossetti in October. Now the Sciambras. The difference was that unlike the other six victims, who had all been struck with an ax, Anthony and Johanna Sciambra had been shot with a pistol. Miraculously, the couple's one-year-old son, who had been sleeping in the bed with them, had not been hit and was now being looked after by a relative.

  "I don't consider it that significant," Captain Long said.

  "Really?" Emile said. "He is called the Axman for a reason."

  Captain Long shook his bucket-sized head. "That's just a name you gentlemen of the press made up to sell more newspapers. To us, he's a murderer. His choice of weapons isn't important."

  "But the other attacks were certainly consistent on that point."

  "In the other attacks the axes all belonged to the victims," the captain said. "He carries a pistol but uses an ax when he can because it's quieter."

  "Do the Sciambras have an ax?"

  Captain Long nodded. "There's one on the back porch, but it has a busted handle. The missus said her husband was planning to fix it, but he hadn't gotten around to it yet."

  "You talked to her?"

  "While we were waiting for the ambulance and for her sister-in-law to come fetch the baby. She was in a lot of pain, but she was pretty clear-headed."

  "Did she get a look at the man who attacker her?" Emile asked.

  "She was asleep when the shooting started. When she woke up, all she saw were flashes of gunfire. She said it was too dark to see his face."

&nb
sp; "Could it have been a robbery?"

  "Not likely," the captain said. "The register still has cash in it, and there was a sockful of money in the bedroom, along with her jewelry box. None of it touched."

  "So what was the motive?"

  "Look at the connections, Mr. Denoux."

  Emile wasn't sure where the captain was going with this. "Grocery owners, night-time attacks, three of them with an-"

  "Italian grocery owners," Captain Long said.

  Emile shrugged. He knew that the prevailing theory within the Police Department was that every Italian was part of a secret criminal society called the Mafia, and it was the Mafia that controlled the Black Hand gangs; but what the cops couldn't get through their thick, mostly Irish, heads was that every ethnic group had a small percentage of criminals hiding within it, so in that regard the Italians were no different than the Irish, or the Germans, or the Spanish, or even Emile's own people, the French.

  Of course, the Italians weren't doing themselves any favors by refusing to mix with anyone else, by never cooperating with the police, and, in many cases, by even refusing to speak English.

  "Her father is Antonio Monteleone," the captain added.

  Emile didn't understand that connection at all. "Are you talking about the hotel owner?"

  Captain Long nodded.

  "I don't understand," Emile said.

  "How do you think he got that hotel?"

  "I have no idea," Emile said. "I suppose he bought it."

  The chief of detectives frowned. "A few years ago Antonio Monteleone was a shoe cobbler with a little shop in the French Quarter. Now he owns one of the biggest hotels in the city. And you think he bought it with the dough he earned from fixing shoes?"

  "I don't know how he got his hotel, but I don't see what that has to do with his daughter and her husband being shot this morning."

  "It's Black Hand business. Some dago gang probably wanted a piece of her father's hotel. He refused, so they sent someone to attack his daughter."

  "But it was her husband who got killed."