The Axeman’s Jazz

by Ray Celestin

  She looked from Ida to Lewis and back, and Ida nodded.

  ‘What’s up with him?’ the woman said, shaking a finger at Lewis. ‘He don’t talk?’

  Lewis smiled. ‘Whatever you say is in the strictest confidence,’ he said, in what he hoped was his warmest pulpit voice.

  ‘OK,’ said Mrs Hawkes, folding her arms over her considerable chest. ‘Romano was involved with some counterfeiters. Used his cash register to palm off fake notes to his customers. That’s what I tried to sell to the detective.’

  ‘And how long was that going on for?’ asked Ida.

  ‘Few years,’ said Mrs Hawkes airily.

  ‘And who did he get the notes from?’

  Mrs Hawkes shrugged.

  ‘I dunno,’ she said, ‘a couple o’ dagos. Never caught their names, but I figured they were Black Hand. Used to come by the store every Monday, leave a wad of cash. All the cops had to do was turn up and check the till.’

  ‘And Romano was working for these counterfeiters right up till he died?’ asked Ida.

  Mrs Hawkes paused for a moment.

  ‘No. I think he stopped doing it a while back.’ Lewis peered at Ida, who was staring into space and tapping her pen against her chin.

  ‘Mrs Hawkes,’ Ida said, ‘I was wondering how the Romanos could afford a nurse. I mean, they were just grocers and all.’

  ‘They were broker than the ten commandments most of the time,’ replied Mrs Hawkes with a grunt. ‘The insurance company paid my wage. On account of Mrs Romano’s accident.’

  Ida frowned.

  ‘Mrs Romano used to work in a garment factory,’ Mrs Hawkes explained. ‘One day the machine she was working on broke up and took her eyes out, so she could only see shadows. That’s how I come to work for them. The union arranged a cost-of-care stipend.’

  Ida frowned once more, and Lewis got the impression she wasn’t entirely convinced.

  ‘And how long were you working for them?’ asked Ida.

  ‘Five years coming up September.’

  ‘And what were they like? Decent folks?’

  Mrs Hawkes shrugged. ‘Decent enough,’ she said. ‘Mrs Romano could scream the house down when she hadn’t had her fix, but other than that they was fine.’

  ‘Her fix?’ asked Ida.

  ‘Heroin,’ said Mrs Hawkes, sighing. ‘Woman was fixed on it since the accident. Got hooked after the doctors gave it to her in the hospital. Had to go pick up those little bottles Bayer used to sell from Katz and Besthoff on Canal. Three bottles a week. Apart from that they were just normal folks. Like I told the police.’

  Ida smiled and nodded. ‘And is there anything you didn’t tell the police?’ she asked, and Mrs Hawkes paused for a moment.

  ‘There ’s one thing I didn’t tell ’em. And it ain’t cuz I hid it neither – I’m a law-abiding citizen,’ she said, her tone a little uppity. ‘The night after I’d spoke to the police, I went back to the house. See, I had a few bits ’n’ pieces I left over there – work things, you know – and I went back to get ’em. I let myself in and gets my things as fast as I could. The place felt creepy, you know. They took away the bodies but the blood was still there. Lord knows what they went through. Anyway, as I’m walking back down the street, I see this ratty, lil’ white kid hanging ’bout outside. Looked like a dope fiend – all jittery and leery looking, you know. Well, he gave me an odd kinda look as I walked past him, kinda like he was waiting for me to go.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ asked Ida.

  ‘I can’t say, it was kinda dark – tall, skinny, white,’ she said, shrugging. ‘I turns the corner and gets to thinking how strange the whole thing is, and maybe I’m going crazy on account of recent events. So I stop, and I peek back around, and I see this kid walk right on up to the house, jimmy the door, and go inside. Now I know this ain’t right, so I hang ’bout outside to see what happens. He’s in there for a good half-hour, then he comes back out and hauls hips down the street.’

  ‘A burglar?’ asked Lewis, frowning.

  ‘That’s what I couldn’t figure out,’ said Mrs Hawkes. ‘He walked outta there empty-handed, no bags, no bulges in his jacket. Nothing.’

  Ida jotted down the last of Mrs Hawkes’s comments in her notepad, tapped the end of the pen against her chin thoughtfully, then looked up and smiled.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Hawkes, you’ve been most helpful,’ she said brightly.

  Mrs Hawkes led them out of the house, and after she’d closed the door on them, Ida turned to peer at Lewis with a pleased look.

  ‘Well, that was the biggest pack o’ lies I heard all year,’ she said with a smile, before descending the front steps at a clip, and striding into the street.

  12

  Of the three leads Michael had to follow, two petered out within a few days. The search through the city records for people with the name from the graffiti came up blank. They located fifteen residents called Tenebre, seven of them women. Only three of them were Mrs and none of them were employed as grocers. A team of five detectives had interviewed all of them anyway, and raked through their histories. None of them had any connections with the previous victims or could explain why a madman might target them. Michael had spent a whole day double-checking the reports himself, and could find nothing to spark a connection in his mind. The seven women were put under armed guard, just in case.

  A day later he heard back from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. A message had arrived on thin, slippery rice-paper, fresh from an underling’s office in Washington, stating in telegram type that the currency found at the Maggios’ was authentic. The revelation left Michael confused as to why two shopkeepers had had so much fresh money in their house for so long. It pointed to some kind of illicit activity, but Michael wasn’t sure what kind.

  The only lead left was the eight-year hiatus between the current crop of killings and those Kerry had uncovered from 1911. McPherson had recruited a trio of bluecoats to sift through the prison records, while Michael had divided the folders from the state insane asylum between Kerry and himself. The trawl through the asylum records was unsettling. Each commitment entry had a ruled box next to it with the cursory remarks of the doctor approving the committal, and Michael felt inevitably drawn to read the comments:

  William Kernig, male, white, single, 32 yrs. old, native of N.O. La., recommended his committal to the S-I-A at Jackson, on Sept. 17th ’11, finding him insane, suffering from Chronic Mania.

  This man is in rags, barefooted and bareheaded. Says his name is Duke. Replies foolishly to some questions and cunningly and correctly to others. He has been insane for over two years, with lucid intervals. Suspect a syphilitic affection of the brain.

  Name after name of Orleanais who had lost their minds while living in the city. A creeping idea had formed in Michael’s head that in some way it was the city itself that had driven these people mad. Someone once told him New Orleans was the kind of city that made gluttons out of monks, and murderers out of saints, and now he wondered if it wasn’t also a place that made lunatics out of the sane. He had noticed a pattern while reviewing the files – many of the city residents committed were not native Orleanais; it was the newcomers the city was turning insane.

  People arrived in New Orleans in their thousands every month, mostly from the countryside, mostly poor, mostly Negroes, all of them looking for a better life. He guessed they didn’t realize until it was too late that all they were doing was swapping one form of poverty for another, trading in shacks and barren earth for tenements and street violence. Over the years, Michael had thickened his skin against the city. He knew it to be perilous and dirty, a place where the most dangerous people brushed past him every day. But he had externalized the danger, built a wall. New Orleans and all its ills had become an abstract, something he likened to the city fog: he passed through it daily, and in some sense it was real, but it left no mark on him whatsoever. Perhaps it was inevitable that people arriving fresh from the countryside took leave of their sanit
y, brought low by slums, poverty and the everyday violence of city-living.

  Mary Cecilia, female, colored, married, 48 years old, native of N.O. La. Recommended her committal to the S-I-A at Jackson on Sept. 18th ’11, finding her insane, suffering from Hallucinations with Delirium of Persecutions.

  Claims she is being poisoned by the Mayor. Her left leg is amputated above the knee.

  Michael looked over to the desk where Kerry was at work. A task lamp was shining a cone of light onto the boy’s shoulders, casting his face into high relief. Michael wondered what was so bad about Ireland that made Kerry seek a new life in New Orleans, and what the Big Easy had in store for the boy. Glutton, murderer or loon? The boy had done well in the short time he had been working for Michael – he was literate, diligent and clever, more than Michael could say for the majority of the Police Department. He had arranged for a proper uniform to be assigned to the boy, and had even offered him money so he could move into the officer’s barracks until he found a place of his own. But the boy said he preferred sleeping in the camp beds in the basement that the night shift used.

  Claudette Robicheaux, female, Creole (col.), married, 59 yrs. old, native of N.O. La., recommended her committal to the S-I-A at Jackson, on Sept. 18th ’11, finding her insane, suffering from delusions and Chronic Paranoia.

  The woman cries repeatedly for her ‘children’ yet has never given birth. Threatened her Doctor with a knife and accused him of killing her ‘babies’. Recommend isolation.

  Michael closed the folder and checked the time. It was gone ten thirty. He looked around and noticed the bureau had emptied while he’d been working. The place was silent except for the buzzing of the lights overhead, illuminating pools of the floor in a sharp, burnt-out yellow. He stood and stretched and wondered where the day had gone. As he put his hat and coat on, he noticed Kerry was still bent over his desk, squinting his way through his files.

  ‘Call it a night, son,’ said Michael.

  Kerry peered at him, bleary-eyed from the paperwork, then he smiled and nodded at Michael, wishing him a good night. Michael tipped his hat back at the boy and made his way towards the exit.

  As he snaked his way around the floor he noticed Jake Hatener was, unusually for him, working late as well. The old man was slumped in a chair in the rec area, his considerable belly almost pinning him to the seat. He had a coffee in hand and some kind of witness statement on his lap. Their eyes met and Michael nodded without breaking stride. As he turned the corner into the stairwell, he caught a glimpse of Hatener in the distance, lazily scratching his great belly.

  The tram came within a quarter of an hour, and Michael took a seat near the front, glad to get out of the wind blowing through the street. The car was empty save for a few other tired-looking men, returning home after a long day of work, staring out of the windows at the storefronts and lights speeding past.

  When the streetcar reached his stop Michael rang the bell, descended and ambled up the quiet avenue of colonial houses where he lived. He noticed a man pacing about in the shadows outside his house, flicking in and out of the darkness beneath one of the sprawling oaks that lined the sidewalk. Michael slowed his pace, sizing the man up. He was too well-dressed to be a stick-up kid, but something about his slouch suggested he was waiting for someone, and he had been waiting for a while. When Michael got closer and realized who it was, he stifled a grimace – John Riley, the reporter from the Picayune. Riley exuded a smugness that grated on Michael, a sense that the reporter thought dealing with the work-a-day world was somehow beneath him.

  Riley caught sight of Michael and grinned. He detached himself from the shadows under the tree and approached.

  ‘Good evening, Detective. You’re a very hard man to get ahold of.’

  ‘You should have tried the precinct.’ Michael brushed past Riley to the front steps to his house.

  ‘I guess you heard about D’Andrea getting released,’ the reporter continued. ‘What’s your view on that, by the way?’

  Michael turned and looked down at Riley. Hollow-faced and wearing a sand-colored sports jacket he’d long ago grown too thin for, he had something of the scarecrow to him, a meager scraping-together of cloth, flesh and bone. Michael noted the darkness around the eyes, the oily skin, and he thought of the emaciated Chinamen he saw getting dragged through the precinct every now and then.

  ‘My view is if you’re gonna make up quotes, at least make ’em believable.’

  Riley smiled. ‘I’ve something you might be interested in,’ he said. He took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, flipped one into his mouth with practiced nonchalance, and offered one to Michael.

  ‘I got my own, thanks,’ Michael said, on seeing the brand Riley was smoking.

  Riley shrugged, struck a lucifer against the heel of his shoe and lit the cigarette. He exhaled leisurely before flicking the match onto the sidewalk.

  ‘I heard Mayor Behrman and Captain McPherson were happy to leave you out in the cold on this Axeman business. The sacrificial lamb has already been anointed, and you’re it. Or is the term “scapegoat”? I get confused by these animal metaphors.’ Riley shrugged again, acting playful, and Michael stared at him with what he hoped was a blank look. ‘I also heard they might let your, uh, domestic arrangements,’ said Riley, nodding towards Michael’s house, ‘put you in an awkward situation.’

  Riley was repeating McPherson’s threat from a few days before. Michael’s heart jumped and he stared at Riley.

  ‘I heard the same,’ he said, making no effort to hide his concern.

  ‘So it looks like you could use an ally. I’d like to propose an agreement. How about it, Talbot?’ said Riley, his tone plain and free of his usual sarcasm.

  ‘The Picayune’s been dragging my name through the mud for the last six weeks,’ Michael retorted. ‘Why in the hell would I wanna buddy up with you?’

  ‘Because it looks to me like the only hope you got for your career is solving this case. You fail and you lose your job, everyone finds out about you-know-what, and the only work you’ll be getting is as a security guard. If you’re lucky.’ Riley paused. ‘I don’t wanna see that happen. I’d like to help you. In return, you feed me a few scraps, let me know when you’re making the arrests.’ Riley smiled. ‘We’ve had some pretty good mileage with the Axeman, be a shame if we weren’t there all the way to the end.’

  Michael eyed Riley. ‘And what do I get?’

  ‘A tip-off,’ said the reporter. ‘Something to help you on your way.’

  He took a business card from his jacket and held it up. Michael deliberated, feeling he was being tempted into making some tawdry, Faustian pact. But in the cold night air, on the porch of his house, the card seemed like a life raft of sorts. He walked back down the steps and accepted it.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. If, and only if, the tip pans out.’

  ‘It’ll pan out,’ Riley replied with a smile. He flicked his cigarette into the empty street and the two men watched it for a moment as it bounced and sparked against the asphalt.

  ‘Ermanno Lombardi. Look him up.’ The reporter winked and smiled. ‘Have a good night, Detective,’ he said, before turning and sauntering off down the street. Michael watched him go, the wind flapping at his jacket, the man’s figure dissolving into the grain of night.

  He inspected the business card and wondered how Riley knew the Police Department was going to ship him out when the case was over. Michael would run a check on the name first thing in the morning, and if nothing came up, he’d haul Riley in for another chat.

  He put the card in his pocket and entered his house. He proceeded along a hallway and through a door at its far end, into a high-ceilinged room which occupied most of the first floor. On one side was the kitchen area and, connected to it on the near side by a wide arch, the living room. The lights were on, and a fire glowed orange in the hearth. The apartment had been decorated simply but with warmth and care, carpets lay scattered across the floor, two couches and an armc
hair snug by a fireplace.

  Michael strode through the room with a smile on his lips. He was home, and despite Riley propositioning him outside, he felt like he was safe, away from the grime of the city and his job. He walked through the arch and entered the kitchen. Sitting at the kitchen table, darning a child’s jacket, was a slender black woman roughly the same age as Michael. Her hair was pulled back, and she wore a simple gray skirt and a white lace blouse. She worked at the stitching in her hand with an easy concentration.

  ‘Annette.’

  The woman smiled without looking up.

  ‘You’re late.’

  Michael approached her and she put down her work. They smiled and shared a tender kiss, then Michael sat opposite her, took his hat off and tossed it onto the table. Annette yawned, then stood and stretched her arms out catlike.

  ‘You eaten?’ she asked, her voice sleepy.

  Michael shook his head.

  ‘I’ll heat up the stew.’

  She made her way to the heavy copper stove in the corner and hauled a casserole dish onto one of the open hobs. Michael leaned back in his chair and peered into the living room. On one of the couches by the fireplace, curled into the cushions, two children were sleeping, a boy and a girl.

  ‘They wanted to stay up till their daddy got home,’ Annette said, and they shared a smile.

  13

  Detective Jake Hatener sat in a booth in a gloomy late-night diner mopping up the last dregs of cream sauce from a steak au poivre with the corner-end of a baguette. He had planned on waiting for his friend before ordering but boredom overcame him. Food had always distracted Hatener, stopped him from brooding on a life whose unfolding had become dull, predictable and irksome. At some point in middle age he had grown tired of the things that as a young man gave his days an edge – the alcohol and narcotics, the freebies from the whores on his protection route, the sudden, searing bursts of violence. He was reaching the last stretch of service before retirement, had seen everything imaginable, and somehow had lost what it was that made it all enjoyable.