Crescent City Detective

by Vito Zuppardo

  “Yes, I’m a fucking madman. Now get working.”

  The three men started ripping sheetrock off the wall, looking back at Mario wild-eyed. Truman was in shock at Mario’s demands and pulled him to the side.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  Mario stepped back and shook his head. “I hope I’m wrong, but I think Dante picked up some old habits of his brother.”

  Mario’s words finally jolted Truman’s memory, and he couldn’t believe it took him so long. He remembered the story Mario had told him years earlier on how he caught Felipe in the middle of disposing of his latest victims’ bodies. That was when Felipe’s killing spree ended and his vendetta against Mario started.

  Bodies of gang-related deaths were usually left on the streets so that people would fear them, knowing the same could happen to them if they talked. When a gang member got arrested, the group leader had their attorney get them out on bail—anything to get the prisoner back on the street before the police cut them a deal to testify. That was what kept Felipe and Dante out of jail for years. Felipe was caught in the act putting his victim in plastic and placing the body in a wall, then covering the wall with sheetrock. That process worked for years until Mario caught Felipe in the act—that started Felipe’s hatred for Mario, and it would not end until one of them was dead.

  “You think Dante killed Charlie and Sammy?” Truman said to Mario, who just observed the workers ripping the sheetrock off the wall.

  The mind of a criminal was complex, but Mario had followed Dante from his first arrest. He wanted the police to continue looking for Charlie and Sammy. When the cops couldn’t find the body, they would think they were on the run and in time could be brought to justice. That would keep the case open for years and have the cops running around in circles. Dante wanted the police to think they jumped bail. Dante killed Charlie and Sammy, that was why their attorney couldn’t get in touch with them. Mario was betting there were two bodies inside that wall.

  The workers came to the opening where the original closet door hung. Mario stepped in looking up and to the sides. All he could see were studs. “Pull every piece of sheetrock that was up before you started the room.”

  “That is the rest of the wall,” one of the workers said. “Who is going to pay us?”

  “Do it!” Mario shouted, putting his hand on his gun.

  “Te dije que está loco,” another worker said.

  Mario grabbed him by the neck and slammed the guy against the wall. “Say I’m crazy one more time.”

  “Mario!” Truman called out.

  “Just pull the sheetrock,” Mario said, taking a deep breath and releasing the worker.

  It didn’t take long for the rest of the wall to come down. There was nothing in the walls but necessary studs and installation on the outside wall.

  Mario stood gawking at the empty wall for a few seconds, grinned, and said, “Sorry to have put you through this.” Then he stepped over pieces of sheetrock and walked out.

  Truman and Mario sat in the car for a few minutes before Truman broke the silence.

  “You know you are loco.”

  “Borderline,” Mario replied.

  “You have to stop. You’re letting Felipe get under your skin,” Truman said, trying to make some sense of what had just happened.

  Mario picked up his radio and called Olivia at police headquarters. He asked her to pull the file on Felipe Cruz. She was good at finding information other people had overlooked.

  Olivia was to read his notes on Felipe’s arrest when Mario found a woman’s body in a wall. It might help having fresh eyes looking it over. Olivia agreed and pulled the file.

  The sun was shining directly in their eyes as Mario pulled the car away from the curb. As the car made the turn in front of the picnic shelters at the West End Park, he stopped and got out. Mario stood on a concrete wall that acted as a bulkhead and separated the boathouses from the yacht slips. He just stared at Boathouse 72. It was built half on land and the rest extended into the lake. Maybe he was too absorbed with Felipe and Dante, and the sheetrock wall brought back old memories—memories that Mario had kept buried deep inside for years. Something triggered them today, and now that they surfaced, he needed answers.

  “Hello! What the hell are you doing?” Truman yelled.

  Mario broke his trance and stepped off the concrete barrier. “I’ll drop you off at the station. I’ve got to go see Zack.”

  Truman gave a disgusted look. “Please do. One of us has to get some work done today.”

  Mario called ahead and met Zack and Dave in the back of the garden area, an area Andrew deemed as his outside living area to his two-room apartment. Andrew set up some coffee cups on an old table he refinished and had the coffee brewed by the time Mario arrived.

  “Is this official police work, or can I sit in?” Andrew asked.

  Mario nodded for him to take a seat. Andrew poured the three of them coffee.

  “You ever have one of those cases that keep surfacing on you? Out of nowhere it pops up and takes over your mind?” Mario said, looking at Zack.

  “Been there many times. I’m out of the police force twenty-something years, and I still wake up and some case pops into my head,” Zack said. “How I could have handled it differently.”

  Dave fiddled with a tree leaf that fell on the table, hesitant to add to the conversation, but did anyway. “You know, you two have chased bad guys for years. You have witnessed some horrifying things. You can’t expect your mind to filter those images from ever surfacing again. They are going to keep coming back.”

  Zack took a sip of coffee. “I found the only things that kept coming back were the unsolved murders.”

  “Or the guy that you knew was guilty, but some hotshot attorney handpicked a jury, and the asshole walked,” Mario added.

  “That too,” Zack agreed.

  Mario explained how he went crazy in the boathouse and had the workers rip sheetrock out and in the end found nothing. The nail gun sound in the background of Darrell’s phone call brought back memories of seeing the lady buried in the wall of a Frenchmen Street flophouse. Mario raddled on while they all listened intently to every word, including Andrew, who took a seat at the table.

  Zack went into detail of a case when a woman was shot and killed in her living room. He always suspected the husband, but several people at work vouched for him. It was about ten at night, and a gunshot came through the room, killing her. People heard the shot, but no one saw anything. A neighbor confirmed seeing the husband come home about twenty minutes later. The conclusion was a drive-by shooting.

  “The house was backed up to a highway service road, giving easy access to the house and a lot of noise from the highway. The husband had reported his gun stolen out of his truck about three months earlier. The woman died from a single 22-caliber bullet, the same type of weapon the man had reported stolen.The gun was never recovered, so we had no case. It haunted me for two years, and then we got lucky.

  “Two years later, the husband, on a bowling team, went to a five-day tournament out of town. A lady neighbor friend came in to look after his dog. The friend came in and cleaned up after the dog and flushed his business down the toilet. The lady admitted she must have used too much paper when picking up the dog poop and the toilet overflowed. When she couldn’t stop the water from flooding, she turned the water off and called a plumber.

  “Bottom line, the toilet has to be pulled, and the plumber ran a line down the pipe on the floor and hooked onto a thin chain that secured at the top of the pipe. It was pulled up, and a small handgun was attached to the end.”

  “Are you joking?” Mario said. “The guy buried the weapon at his house.”

  Zack took the last sip of his coffee and finished his story. “The guy confessed that he parked his car on the service road. Came in through a back gate, hid behind bushes, and shot his wife through the front window. He ran through the bushes back to his truck and drove to work, waited for twenty minutes and
, making sure his fellow employees saw him, drove home. Once in the house, he put the gun in the pipe under the toilet. He figured it was safer there than on the street buried someplace.”

  “No one ever accused criminals of being smart,” Mario said, getting a chuckle from the others.

  A call came through on Mario’s radio. It was the pleasant voice of Olivia Johansson. “Go ahead, Olivia.”

  “Detective, I’m not sure if I have information worth disturbing you with, but I would rather talk on a landline.”

  Mario looked at Andrew, and he motioned there was a phone in his apartment.

  “Olivia, I’ll call you back in a minute.”

  Andrew pulled the landline phone on a long cord from the apartment and placed it on the table. Mario dialed Olivia back, and she answered on the first ring. Olivia was correct in talking on a landline. The call was clearer and there was no chance of someone in the area picking up their conversation on a two-way radio. Scanners were becoming more popular every day by police enthusiasts and criminals.

  Olivia didn’t find anything new based on another review of Mario’s report. She cross-referenced his description of the woman found buried in an abandoned house in the Cornerview Gang’s compound area. The case never went to trial.

  At the time Mario was in Gang Enforcement, and the case was handed off to the detective division.

  Olivia continued, “A witness was to testify in a murder trial—the lady disappeared before the start of the trial. The criminal died in a prison cell. The case was closed, and the eyewitness was never found. Until the old house was torn down and not one body but several were discovered in the same place.”

  “A serial killer?” Mario asked.

  “No, just a thug that killed his witnesses.”

  Olivia explained that years later the house was torn down and they found a rope that was connected to a rafter in the attic and lowered down between the walls. The demolition crew ripped the side of the house open, and four decomposed bodies were hanging from a rope in the wall wrapped in thick plastic.

  “Are you sitting down?” Olivia said, and paused a few seconds. “Felipe Cruz, Senior was charged with four murders a few years back and had one witness ready to testify in each case. All four were found dead in the wall when the house was demolished.”

  “So what is the connection?” Mario asked.

  “I talked to Truman, and he told me about you ripping the sheetrock off the walls in the boathouse, and finding nothing.”

  “Yeah, not my finest hour.”

  “The Cruz family likes to hide their victims in the walls. It looks like it started with the father. Maybe Dante is following his father and big brother’s footsteps. Did you look in the attic for a rope hanging—maybe down into the walls?”

  Mario thought for a second. Then Zack’s story clicked in.

  “Olivia! That helps a lot. Thanks.”

  “Detective, in researching Felipe, I found some pictures and notes in his file. I’m not sure if it means anything, but I copied them. It’s in an envelope on your desk. And Detective, you never got this from me.”

  “Not a problem, Olivia. I’ll check it out later. Thank you for all your help,” Mario said, hanging the phone up.

  Mario asked Andrew, “Do you have a chainsaw in your workshop?”

  “Yes,” he said, and went to the tool room. He wasn’t sure why, but he followed the detective's directions.

  Mario rushed out of the garden area, taking Zack and Dave with him. Jumping in the police cruiser with the lights flashing overhead, the car rolled down Dumain Street. Andrew followed with the chainsaw strapped down in the bed of his old pickup truck.

  “What are you thinking, Mario?” Dave said from the rear of the car, looking through the steel partition separating the front and back seats of the police vehicle.

  “Maybe I was looking in the wrong place all along.”

  Mario didn’t remember the boathouses having much attic space. Knowing Charlie and Sammy were big guys, he knew it would have been hard getting their bodies in the attic.

  The vehicles rolled up on Boathouse 72, double-parking on the side of other cars on the narrow street. They rushed into the house and Andrew followed with the chainsaw. The workers were still in the house, cleaning up the sheetrock Mario had made them take down. They stepped aside seeing Andrew with a chainsaw.

  “If you wanted to hide bodies from ever being found, the closet is not the best place,” Mario said, bending down on the floor of the closet.

  The entire time Mario had looked in the closet’s walls for bodies, like Felipe had done before. He brushed sheetrock dirt off the floor with his hand, uncovering the nailheads on three boards. They were shiny new nails. The rest of the nails were rusty from the salt water washing up under the house.

  Mario directed Andrew to cut the boards along the back of the shiny nails. Andrew cranked the chainsaw, and it started on the first pull. Cutting both sides of the first board, it fell about four feet into the water below.

  “Do the next board,” Mario shouted over the chainsaw motor running on idle.

  As the second board fell into the water, Andrew cut the chainsaw engine off.

  They were looking at a chain strapped to a support beam on the floor. Mario was getting his sick feeling back again.

  He made peace with the workers and asked for their help. Tying a thick rope to the chain and looping it over a board nailed to the closet door opening, the men pulled the cable up. It was weighty and was only coming up a matter of inches at a time. Finally, a good hard pull by all three men moved the chain higher, and something surfaced at the waterline.

  With a flashlight, Mario got on his knees and got a glimpse into the darkness of lake water. “Hold it there—drop the rope,” Mario said. He had seen enough.

  The men responded, and you could hear the ripple of water as the chain lowered back down. Mario got up and dusted the white dust off his pants. They all waiting for an explanation.

  “Olivia did well. She put the thought in my head along with Zack’s story that there could be a body hanging from the rafters. In this case, it's the floor joist. There is a body attached to the chain hanging in the water.”

  Mario sat on the floor staring at the hole in the floor. Zack put his hand on Mario’s shoulder.

  “That was one hell of a hunch. Excellent work, Mario. In time, the flesh would just deteriorate from the salt water, and with the help of lake crabs feeding, it would be nothing more than a skeleton in a few weeks,” Zack said, looking at the shocked expressions on the faces of the men in the room.

  Mario saw Sammy’s face surface and was sure Charlie would be down there too. It was a great move from the criminals’ part, he thought. If you didn’t want a witness to talk, you killed them and planted the body where it could never surface again. Ten times more efficient than murder and leaving the body in the woods.

  Zack shook his head. “Sick bastards. They just wanted the police to keep looking for the witnesses. It’s a power play.”

  “Yes, and it’s going to stop,” Mario said, reaching for his radio clipped to his belt.

  Mario called the crime scene into dispatch, and a patrol car arrived within two minutes. There would soon be a cluster of people working the scene. The first step was getting the body or bodies out the water, for which the police would call the Fire Department for assistance. Then photos of the crime scene would be taken, and interviews held with workers in the area, especially the three working on Boathouse 72. Most of all would be the countless hours of forensic work by Olivia. The big slow down on the case would be the chief directing her thoughts on how to address the two murders to the public. After all, an essential element of the crime for her and the mayor was to protect the City of New Orleans’s image.

  Mario had a better idea. He was going directly to the source and have a sit-down face to face. He called Truman on his radio.

  “Partner, I found one witness, maybe two. They won’t be doing any talking.”


  “So I heard,” Truman replied. “Congratulations.”

  “I need you to make arrangements for me to visit Calabar tomorrow,” Mario said.

  “Not a problem. Who is the lucky guy you’re visiting?”

  “Felipe Cruz.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Mario arrived at his condo sometime after eight at night with his favorite pizza in hand. The crime scene took longer than expected to process and needed the assistance of the New Orleans Fire Department as expected. Four men and a power winch worked for an hour getting Sammy out of the water, and it didn’t take much searching to find Charlie chained next to him, both with concrete blocks attached to their legs. There was no doubt that whoever killed Charlie and Sammy didn't want them discovered. Between the big blue crabs of Lake Pontchartrain and hardhead catfish, they would have had a feast eating the flesh off the bodies. The salt water would have deteriorated the bones until they finally detached from the body, leaving them to rest at the bottom of the lake forever.

  It was time to sit and relax with a cold beer and dig into Mario’s favorite pizza from Venezia Restaurant, a local pizza hotspot that had been on Carrolton Avenue for as long as he could remember. It took something as simple as a pizza and a beer to get his mind off such a horrifying day, even if it was just for the length of time it took to eat the pizza.

  No matter how tough a homicide detective was, investigating brutal murders and viewing the scene for hours at a time would chip away at your mind, body, and overall well-being. Mario’s best outlet for diversion was pizza and beer or jogging through the French Quarter, but it was getting harder to find a few minutes of peace for himself in a day. He finished his beer and half the pizza, put the leftovers in the greasy stained box, and placed it in his mostly empty refrigerator.

  It had been two days since the conflict with Kate at her parents’ home. Busting in the front door with guns drawn wasn’t his finest hour, but what if the phone call had been real? Thinking about it got his blood boiling, knowing Felipe could fuck with him from miles away in prison.