The Axman of New Orleans Read online

  "I know how to do a neighborhood canvass."

  "She lives at 505 South Cortez," Emile said.

  "I'll take it to my grave."

  "Now it's your turn."

  "My turn to do what?" I said.

  "What did you say to Mrs. Pepitone that frightened her so much?"

  "Manu Nero."

  "What's that mean?"

  "Black Hand."

  CHAPTER 10

  ASSASSINATED BY OLD ITALIAN RIVAL

  Di Christina Shot Down Outside Grocery.

  Fired Upon From Window By Peter Pepitone.

  -The Daily Picayune

  JULY 7, 1914

  4:40 P.M.

  The body was still in the street where it had fallen when Emile Denoux reached the murder scene less than three-quarters of an hour after the shooting. Someone had thrown a bed sheet over the dead man, Paul Di Christina. Policemen and reporters stood in tight clumps in front of Di Christina's grocery at the corner of Howard Avenue and Calliope Street.

  Emile could hear the widow wailing inside.

  Across the street, two burly detectives stood over an old man sitting on the steps of another grocery, hands shackled in his lap.

  Emile tapped a reporter he knew from The Times-Democrat on the shoulder and pointed at the old man. "Who's that?"

  "Peter Pepitone," the Times reporter said. "He owns that grocery."

  The man looked at least sixty. "He's the killer?" Emile asked.

  The other reporter shrugged. "Looks that way."

  Emile recognized the two detectives, long-time partners John Dantonio and Theodore Obitz. Dantonio was born in Sicily and had come to New Orleans as a boy. He was a good detective, one of the best in the city, and since the murder of New York City Police Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino in Palermo five years ago, Dantonio was regarded as the nation's leading police expert on the Mafia. Obitz was a local boy whose father had been a policeman. He was a big man and had muscled his way into the Detective Division because of his strength and courage.

  Emile had interviewed both detectives several times and knew that neither man liked the press. This wasn't going to be easy, he thought.

  A tall patrolman standing under the awning of Di Christina's grocery held a shotgun in each hand, two old sawed-off double barrels, both beat up and rusty. The patrolman gripped the guns by the stocks, the twin muzzles hanging toward the ground. Clearly, they were not police shotguns. The department used pump-action Winchesters.

  Emile sidled over to the policeman. Keeping his voice low, he said, "Dantonio says both of those were used in the shooting."

  The patrolman turned toward Emile. "They were still warm when I got here."

  "You found them across the street?"

  The cop nodded. "One at the bottom of the steps, the other inside the store beneath the front window."

  Emile looked at the grocery across the street. Next to the door was a large window enclosed by a pair of storm shutters. One shutter was open a couple of inches.

  "Who was the second shooter?"

  "From what I hear, Mr. P. says he fired both guns, all four shots."

  Just a few feet from the patrolman, the edge of one awning post was freshly splintered and the front of the store was peppered with buckshot-sized holes.

  Emile thought about the patrolman's use of the term Mr. P. It was more familiar than he expected from a white policeman. "Do you know him?" Emile asked. "Mr. Pepitone, I mean."

  The patrolman nodded. "I been patrolling this neighborhood going on five years. Mr. P. runs a clean store. I stop in a couple times a week for lunch. His English is good. We talk sometimes. He's a nice old man. I'm sorry to see this happen to him."

  Emile glanced at the dead man, lying on the plank sidewalk, covered with a bloody bed sheet. He was curious why the veteran patrolman seemed to consider Pepitone the victim. Emile pointed at Di Christina. "What about him?"

  The patrolman looked around, then dropped his voice to a whisper. "You didn't hear it from me ..."

  Emile nodded.

  "... but Di Christina there was a first-rate asshole."

  "How do you mean?" Emile whispered.

  "He was always smacking people around. Why just last week, he beat old man Pepitone in the street, right out in front of God and everybody."

  "Why?"

  The patrolman shrugged. "Italians. Who can understand them?"

  Emile's gut told him he had gotten everything he was going to get from the patrolman. To find out more, he was going to have to persuade one of the detectives to talk to him.

  Stepping over the rain gutter onto the brick pavement of the street, Emile caught the attention of Dantonio and Obitz. The latter raised his hand, palm out, a clear gesture that he didn't want Emile to bother them. Emile ignored him.

  Halfway across the street, Emile said, "Good afternoon, detectives. I see you have this case just about wrapped up."

  "Not now, Denoux," said Obitz, the bigger of the two men.

  "I just have time for one or two questions," Emile said.

  "Not now," Obitz repeated.

  Peter Pepitone sat on the steps between the two detectives, his head hanging nearly to his knees.

  "Is he under arrest?" Emile asked.

  "Not yet," Dantonio said. "But I'll arrest you right now if you take one more step."

  Emile stopped. He was already where he needed to be, just three steps from the detectives. "Who fired the second gun?"

  "I did," Peter Pepitone said, looking up. "I fired all the shots. My son was asleep in the back. He had nothing to do with it. I shot that animal across the street."

  "How old is your son?" Emile asked.

  Obitz took a step toward Emile. "You're going to push me to do something I don't want to do."

  "I'm just asking the man a-"

  "Michael is thirty-one," Pepitone said.

  Obitz spun toward the old man. "Keep your mouth shut," he barked. "You don't answer no questions unless they come from us."

  Dantonio leaned down and jabbed his finger in front of the old man's face. "Capisci?" Do you understand?

  Mr. Pepitone nodded.

  But Emile had heard enough. He wasn't buying the story that old man Pepitone's thirty-one-year-old son was in the back taking a nap at four o'clock in the afternoon while his father was up front pumping four loads of buckshot into his neighbor.

  He needed to talk to Michael Pepitone.

  As Emile turned to walk back across the street, Mr. Pepitone stood up. He raised his manacled hands over his head. "I'm glad I shot him." The old man spit on the ground. "I would shoot that dog again," he said, "for the way he treat the people of this neighborhood."

  Most of the thirty or so Sicilians standing around the edge of the crime scene started clapping.

  CHAPTER 11

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1919

  7:35 A.M.

  I walked down Ulloa Street toward South Cortez one block away. The rain had stopped and the brick street was beginning to dry. Halfway down the block I heard a low whistle. I stopped to look around but didn't see anyone. The street was deserted. Everyone knew there was an ax murderer on the loose.

  I heard the whistle again.

  Then I saw a slim hand beckoning me from a darkened doorway on the other side of the street. I crossed over and approached the shotgun house.

  An old Sicilian woman stood in the doorway. A shawl covered her head. Her dress was black. She whispered to me, "I was in front of the grocery. I saw what you did to that young policeman who would not take off his hat. Thank you."

  "Pregu," I said. You're welcome.

  "I saw them."

  "Who?"

  "The two men arguing yesterday with Signuri Pepitone."

  "Do you know them?"

  She smiled. "I know who you are. I saw your photograph in the newspaper when you came back from the war. Your wife was a Palmisano."

  "Maria," I said.

  "Riccardo and Lucia's daughter?"

  "Yes."


  "She died of the flu?"

  I nodded. "While I was overseas."

  The 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic had killed so many people, hundreds of thousands in the United States and millions around the world, that it no longer needed to be fully identified. Just calling it the flu was sufficient. According to the city's Board of Health, the virus killed more than 7,000 people in New Orleans last year. My wife was one of them.

  The old woman cleared her throat. "The paper said you were wounded."

  "I didn't get home until February."

  In August 1918, as my regiment attacked the French village of Fismes, the Germans blanketed us with mustard gas. The gas destroyed one of my lungs and damaged the other. As I writhed on the ground, barely able to breathe, a kraut stabbed a bayonet into my left thigh. The blade stuck in the bone, and as the squarehead was trying to yank his bayonet free, I shot him in the face with my forty-five.

  I spent the next six months in an Army hospital near Rouen. Just before Christmas, I got a letter informing me that my wife had died in October. She had been caring for her parents, both of whom had died of the flu a week earlier.

  An Army doctor told me I would have to get by for the rest of my life on about one-third of my normal lung capacity. He said steady exercise might build it up to one-half.

  "I'm sorry for your loss," said the old woman.

  "Grazi," I told her.

  "I recognized one of the men arguing with Signuri Pepitone."

  "Who was he?"

  "I'm afraid to say. Because he's ..."

  "Mafia?"

  She shook her head. "That is what the politicians and the police call it."

  "What do you call it?"

  She hesitated for a moment. "Cosa Nostra."

  "Do you know his name?"

  "I only tell you because you showed respect."

  "I understand."

  She took a deep breath. "Salvatore Marcello." She pronounced it Mar-chello.

  I knew the name, having only recently heard it from Captain Campo. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my notebook, then flipped the pages until I found it: Salvatore Marcello, a Black Hand man who worked as a part-time banana checker for the Matranga brothers, shot in the head on North Rampart Street at midnight, two hours before Michael Pepitone was killed.

  I looked up at the old woman. "Are you sure?"

  "I've known Salvatore Marcello for many years."

  "And he was ...?"

  "Cosa Nostra," she said.

  "What does that mean?"

  "In English, it means Our Thing."

  From up the street I heard the clang of metal against metal. I turned around. A block away I saw an old man driving a battered wagon creaking along behind an ancient mule. He was turning onto Ulloa from Tulane Avenue. Pots and pans dangled from the sides of his wagon. He was the neighborhood knife sharpener, a Sicilian who also sold kitchen wares. In a singsong voice, he called out, "Bring out your knives. Bring out your scissors. I sharpen them. I clean them. I have the best sharpening stone in the city."

  I turned back to the old woman. Her face had tightened. She looked scared. "You have to go," she said. "I have said too much already."

  "What were they arguing about?"

  "I don't know."

  "Who was the other man?"

  She shook her head.

  Behind me, the knife sharpener's call and the rattle of the pots hanging from his wagon grew louder. "Bring out your knives. Bring out your scissors. I sharpen them. I clean them. I have the best sharpening stone in the city." The last word sounded like cee-tee.

  I glanced down the street. The Pepitone house was fifty yards away. If the old woman had spotted Marcello entering the grocery, I knew she must have seen the man with him. "What did the other man look like?"

  "Big."

  "Why were they arguing?"

  "I told you, I don't know." She tried to close the door but I held. She looked over my shoulder in near panic. I could hear the clatter getting closer. The knife sharpener's wagon was already in front of the house next door. "You must leave," she said.

  I turned to look at the wagon, and the old woman yanked the door from my hand and slammed it shut. The bolt shot into place.

  The knife sharpener rolled past her house, the wooden wheels of the wagon grinding across the brick pavement. "Bring out your knives. Bring out your scissors. I sharpen them. I clean them. I have the best sharpening stone in the city." He didn't even look at me, which meant he had been watching me since he turned onto Ulloa Street.

  As I trudged the rest of the way down Ulloa Street to South Cortez, I realized that the early start this morning and the booze last night were taking a toll on me, so I took a breather and sat down on the stoop of a house on the corner.

  The old woman had confirmed what Captain Campo had said, that Salvatore Marcello was involved in the extortion racket known as the Black Hand, and I knew from his record that Marcello had also served some time in prison for shooting a man. Yet, according to Superintendent Thompson, Michael Pepitone had a clean record and no known Mafia ties.

  A Black Hand man and an honest Sicilian grocer. What did they have in common that could get them both killed within two hours of each other, the night after they got into an argument? And what had they been arguing about?

  I felt the answer right in front of me, but just out of reach. If I could just get my hands on it, it could be the key that would unlock all the mysteries of the Axman case.

  Nothing about this case was what it seemed. Even the apparent randomness of the attacks hinted at a pattern hidden just below my line of sight. I wondered if the problem was me. For most of the past year, I had felt as if the German gas had left me a little duller than I was before. I could no longer put things together as quickly as I used to. I had to concentrate harder. I doubted the whiskey helped, but I couldn't sleep without it.

  I needed to talk to someone who knew a lot more than I did about the Black Hand and the Mafia. Fortunately, I knew just the man.

  CHAPTER 12

  ITALIAN DI MARTINI KILLED IN REAL MAFIA WAY

  Man Mixed Up With Various Feuds Butchered At High Noon In Open Street.

  -The Daily Picayune

  NOVEMBER 4, 1914

  1:00 P.M.

  The body lay face down on the floor of Ike's Taproom, at the end of a trail of blood that ran back to the middle of Bourbon Street. Edward Di Martini had been shot once below his left armpit and twice in the back. Then he ran into the bar and died.

  "You know who shot him, don't you?" Emile Denoux said to Detective John Dantonio, who was bending over the body, examining the holes in the dead man's back.

  "No, I don't know who shot him," the detective said. "I just got here."

  Emile dropped his voice to a whisper. "You know exactly who did this."

  "I don't know any such thing. Unlike reporters, police detectives deal in facts, not speculation."

  Emile had reached the scene a half-hour ago, ten minutes before Dantonio and his partner, Theodore Obitz. During those ten minutes, two patrolmen had been the only ones guarding the crime scene. Emile knew them both. In the past, he had bought them each a couple of lunches and more than a few drinks.

  Before the detectives arrived, the patrolmen had let Emile question the bartender and the four men who had been inside Ike's drinking when the mortally wounded man ran through the open French doors. All five men claimed not to have seen who fired the fatal shots.

  Two laborers who had been on a scaffold working on the roof of the building directly across the street from the taproom also claimed not to have seen the killer.

  Although the two laborers were Italian, the men in the bar were all white and therefore might reasonably be expected to possess keener eyesight in such matters than the Italian workmen. Emile, however, suspected that the Italian reputation for retribution had grown so fearsome that no one who had been nearby when those three pistol shots were fired would ever admit to having seen anything.

&nbs
p; Dantonio tiptoed around the body, careful not to step in the blood that had leaked out of it.

  Emile sat on a stool at the bar. "Old man Pepitone was convicted six weeks ago and given twenty years, mainly on the testimony of this man." Emile pointed to the body. "Now he's dead. Doesn't that sound like a vendetta to you?"

  "Sounds like it," Dantonio said as he combed his fingers through Di Martini's hair looking for hidden wounds, "but I can't swear to it. And if I can't swear to it, I can't get a warrant."

  "Are you going to question Michael Pepitone?"

  The detective stood straight. "Of course, I'm going to question him."

  "I called on him at the grocery several times," Emile said. "I even tried to talk to him at his father's trial, but he wouldn't speak to me."

  "I tried to talk to him too," Dantonio said, "in English and Sicilian. He wouldn't say anything to me either." The detective squatted beside Di Martini's shoulder and lifted his left arm to examine the bullet hole beneath it. "What did you think he was going to say, that he helped his father commit murder?"

  Emile shook his head. "I wanted him to tell me what happened between his father and Di Christina."

  "You know what happened. It was in Peter Pepitone's statement. Di Christina beat him in front of their neighbors."

  "But why?" Emile asked. "What prompted the beating?"

  Dantonio stood. "He'll never answer that question, not for you, not for me. Sicilians don't talk to the press or the police. Even Di Martini here." Dantonio pointed to the body at his feet. "If he were on his deathbed and gasping for his last breath, he would look me straight in the eye and use that breath to tell me he had no idea who shot him or why. Even if I dragged Michael Pepitone in here so they were face to face, Di Martini would claim he had never seen Pepitone before in his life."

  "Why would he say that about a man who had just shot him?" Emile asked in frustration.

  "Omerta."

  "What does that mean?"

  Dantonio just shook his head.

  CHAPTER 13

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1919

  8:00 P.M.