The Axeman’s Jazz

by Ray Celestin

  He had stayed late in the precinct, waiting for Talbot to leave, and then he made his way to the beanery through the wind that had picked up that night. The diner was abandoned apart from a forlorn-looking waitress sitting on a stool at the counter, filing her nails and occasionally glancing at the door. Hatener called her over and ordered two coffees. She picked up the plates, wiped the table and slunk off towards the kitchen.

  The front door opened and Luca sauntered in. He grinned as he approached the table and Hatener stood and the two men hugged.

  ‘Good to see ya again,’ said Hatener, slapping Luca on the back. They sat and the waitress brought them their coffees. Hatener was surprised at how well Luca looked. He had always had an ageless quality to him – when they were cadets Luca had the air of someone much older, commanding and knowledgeable. Now he was in his fifties, he somehow still looked boyish.

  ‘You look better than I expected,’ said Hatener, who had known younger men than Luca leave Angola with crooked postures and the sun-burnt, leathery skin of old farmers.

  ‘How’s Mary?’ asked Luca.

  ‘She’s good,’ Hatener lied. ‘Sorry you couldn’t come by the house.’

  Luca waved away the apology and they set about catching up. Luca spoke to Hatener about his time in Angola, about the beatings, the guards, the insect-infested food that left him half-delirious. He told him about the stench of the place, a rancid mix of sweat and mold and excrement that no amount of scrubbing could dislodge from his clothes and hair. Hatener listened and in return he told Luca his own stories, about changes in the city and the Police Department, about the young men who went off to the war in Europe and had flooded back into the city, jobless, bitter and shell-shocked. He told Luca about his own son, who had gone to the war and never returned, obliterated by a German shell in a field outside Reims. Not even a casket for them to bury him in, Hatener lamented, just a pair of dog-tags and a typewritten letter from the government. Hatener had never really spoken to anyone about his son in the year since they had received the letter. He even told Luca about the rift that had developed between him and Mary since their son’s death, about Mary’s silent spells and endless weeping.

  The two men looked at each other, contemplating the tricks life had played on them. Hatener called the waitress over for refills, and it was only then that he noticed Luca hadn’t finished his coffee.

  Hatener gestured to the cup and Luca rubbed his stomach by way of an explanation. ‘Something I picked up in Angola.’ Hatener nodded. Most of the men who returned from Angola came back with ulcers or twisted guts or other stomach complaints. When the waitress arrived at the booth, Hatener ordered a coffee for himself and a hot milk for Luca. He watched the waitress leave then he slid a dossier across the table.

  ‘I need ’em back first thing,’ he said.

  Luca smiled, picked up the dossier and flicked through the pages. It had been five years since he had really read anything, and he realized with a panicky sense of loss that his eyesight had deteriorated.

  ‘What do you want them for?’ asked Hatener.

  ‘Carlo asked me to look into it,’ said Luca flatly, and Hatener frowned at him.

  ‘You only been out a few days.’

  Luca shrugged. ‘My savings were in Ciro’s bank.’

  ‘Ah,’ Hatener nodded, ‘we woulda given Ciro a tip-off if we knew, but the orders came from up high.’

  Luca made an expression to suggest there was no point dwelling on the thing, and then he turned his attention to the dossier in his hands. Hatener peered at him, finding it sad that his friend was already back at work for the Matrangas.

  ‘You need some money?’ he asked, and Luca looked up and shook his head.

  ‘I’m good,’ he said, and returned to the files – every report Michael had on the Axeman case, swiped from the precinct for the night by Hatener: witness statements, coroner’s statements, scene-of-crime reports, photographs, newspaper clippings – enough from each attack to get Luca started. Luca spotted Riley’s name on one of the newspaper clippings and a memory surfaced.

  ‘Heard they made the District illegal,’ he said, referring to Storyville, the licensed prostitution district that had for years made New Orleans the tourist center of the South.

  ‘Sure,’ Hatener replied with a grimace, ‘for all the good it did.’

  Towards the end of 1917, the War Department’s Commission on Training Camp Activities forced Mayor Behrman to close down the District on account of the large numbers of Navy men from nearby training camps who were contracting venereal diseases there. The mayor’s administration fought the War Department all the way to Washington to keep the District open, but amidst claims that Mayor Behrman was undermining the war effort, Storyville was reluctantly closed in November 1917, another victim of the Great War.

  ‘Wasn’t the only thing,’ said Hatener. ‘They made mary-jane illegal too, and the babania, and now they’re doing the same for booze. Imagine that, can’t buy a woman, a beer or a smoke anymore. Call that America?’

  Luca smiled. ‘So what’s going on in the old district now? Ghost town?’ he asked.

  Hatener smiled and shook his head. ‘Everything’s going on exactly the same. ’Cept maybe the runners gotta pay a bit more protection. Behrman wasn’t too keen on the idea anyway, so he lets things slide. You hear about the night with his car?’

  Luca shook his head and Hatener told him an anecdote about the mayor’s car being stolen during a Sarah Bernhardt performance at the Dauphin. As he told the story the two men settled into their old rhythm, and for a few minutes they stopped feeling like old men and became instead the youngsters they were years ago, when they were strong and carefree and life had none of its current weight. When Hatener got to the end of the story, they laughed and lapsed into a warm silence. Hatener stared about the diner and noticed the waitress had fallen asleep on her stool, her head canting dangerously towards the bar in front of her.

  ‘I’m glad you’re back,’ said Hatener, still grinning. ‘Things ain’t the same at the bureau. Specially since this Axeman thing. We’re running backwards and forwards between McPherson’s office and the Family trying to get warnings out.’

  Hatener shook his head, and Luca nodded, acknowledging that times had indeed changed for the worse. He flicked through the dossier again and came across an envelope, opened it up and took out a handful of bloodstained, ghoulish-looking tarot cards.

  ‘The killer leaves ’em at the scenes,’ explained Hatener. ‘That’s one of the reasons why Talbot’s pushing the Family angle.’

  Luca flipped the cards over and held them close to his eye, inspecting them minutely.

  ‘These cards aren’t Italian,’ he said.

  ‘You sure?’ replied Hatener.

  Luca nodded. ‘My mother used to read the tarocchi in Italy. You only get these animal designs on French cards,’ he said.

  ‘A Creole?’ suggested Hatener.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Luca, putting the cards back in the envelope. He had seen similar tarocchi cards years before, when he had arrested the Haitian priestess on Canal Street, after her boyfriend had been caught shaking down her customers’ houses while they were with her. A man whom nobody knew was killing Italian grocers and leaving French tarot cards at the scenes. Either the killer was a Creole with a grudge, or somebody trying to make it look like a Creole with a grudge.

  Luca took a cigarette from his pack and lit it.

  ‘Thanks for the files, Jake,’ he said. ‘I’ll have ’em back to you first thing tomorrow morning.’

  The two friends smiled at each other, clinked cups and downed the last of their drinks. Hatener put some bills down on the table and they left the diner. The waitress was still sleeping when they walked past her, her head lilting as if to the music of her dream.

  On the street outside they hugged and arranged a six o’clock meeting the next morning and then they said their goodbyes. Luca sauntered off up the windy street, and as Hatener buttoned up his coat agai
nst the chill he watched the retreating figure of his old friend, and couldn’t stop himself from thinking what a shame it was that Luca D’Andrea cut such a lonely figure.

  14

  A brittle wind blew down Magnolia Street, swaying the shop signs and shooing a tin can along the road like a clanging, rusty tumbleweed. In a spot opposite the Maggios’ store, just a couple of yards from where Patrolman Perez had parked a few days previously, Ida and Lewis huddled in the moonlight shadows of an abandoned half-built house. Little Italy was littered with such unfinished buildings, pinewood remnants of interrupted dreams. Immigrants who had scrimped together the paltriest of savings would buy a cheap plot of land and begin construction of a family home. But these newcomers’ financial situations were ever-precarious, and more often than not circumstances changed for the worse, and projects had to be abandoned, leaving Little Italy scattered with weed-choked shells of houses.

  Ida had found the place when she’d scouted the area the day after they’d talked with Millicent Hawkes. She’d reasoned that if someone had searched a previous crime scene, they would probably search the most recent one, too. So she’d looked around the neighborhood for an appropriate spot from which to conduct a stakeout, and after not too long she had found what would have been, in better times, the homestead of some ambitious family or other. The building had walls, a floor, roof beams that segmented the moonlight, and most importantly, an unobstructed view of the Maggios’ store. And although the place didn’t keep the cold out, it stopped them from being seen, and gave them somewhere to sit.

  Ida had guessed from what Hawkes had told them that the last break-in occurred three or four days after the preceding set of murders, so Ida had let the same amount of time elapse, and had come down to the house for the first night of surveillance the previous evening. She had come alone that time as Lewis was booked for a gig, and she had sat on her own, in what she guessed was supposed to be the living room of the dream house. From just before midnight to just after dawn she’d kept watch, leaving as soon as it was light to grab a few hours’ sleep before work. Although she was a little disappointed that nothing had happened during the first night’s watch, she was also relieved that she wasn’t called into action without Lewis there to help.

  She had met him earlier that evening in the French Quarter, noting he looked a little sheepish, and that he was hiding a bruise under his hat. When she had asked him about it on the walk over, Lewis had eventually admitted the bruise was an embarrassing trophy from his latest argument with Daisy. Ida had guessed the situation at the house in Gretna was getting steadily worse, but she hadn’t realized it had descended into violence. She tried to talk to Lewis about it, but he acted bashful and she gathered he didn’t want to discuss it, so they sat in the empty, roofless house in silence, Lewis mulling over his personal life, Ida fighting off her sleepiness.

  ‘Why did you think the woman we interviewed was lying?’ Lewis asked abruptly, breaking a fifteen-minute spell of silence. Ida turned to look at him, frowned, and then shrugged.

  ‘A bunch of things, I guess,’ she said. ‘Hawkes said she got employed cuz Mrs Romano’s union helped ’em out. But I checked up. Mrs Romano weren’t on no union lists I could find. The factory owner was paying them off for some other reason.

  ‘Then she said the Romanos were flat broke. But that didn’t make sense either, cuz they were slinging counterfeits,’ she continued. ‘Then she said she went back to get her stuff from the house at night. Why’d she go back at night? If your boss just been murdered, you really gonna go get your stuff from the crime scene in the middle o’ the night?’ As Ida talked and she warmed to the subject, her sleepiness wore off and she began to speak faster and faster. ‘Why didn’t she go in the day? Also, why’d she wait so long before going? Then she said the guy she saw breaking in had a funny look in his eye, and he walked right past her. But when I asked her to describe him, she said she only saw him from a distance.’

  ‘Ida,’ interrupted Lewis, ‘if everything she said was a lie, why are we sitting in a derelict house in the middle o’ the night?’

  ‘Not everything she said was a lie, just most of it. Here’s how I reckon it happened,’ and Ida began to spell out her theory in a Gatling-gun staccato. ‘Hawkes didn’t go back to get her things from the house. She went back to get money. Counterfeit money. I don’t reckon the Romanos ever stopped distributing counterfeits like she said. Otherwise, how else they pay for the wife’s heroin bottles? If they were still distributing, then there was still fake money in the house, and I don’t mean in the till like Hawkes said, I mean somewhere where the police would never find it. She figured after the police had cleared out, she could go back and collect it for herself. That’s why she waited a few days before going back. That’s why she went back in the nighttime. And that’s why she told us the Romanos were broke and they stopped counterfeiting.’

  ‘OK,’ said Lewis, ‘but if she was trying to keep all this secret, then why’d she tell us she went back at all?’

  ‘Because she wasn’t sure what we knew – which is why the bit about seeing the kid breaking in is true. She went back that night and got the money, but on the way out she sees someone else breaking in. Naturally she assumes it’s one of the counterfeiters looking for what she just took.’

  ‘Naturally,’ echoed Lewis, with a sarcastic grin, and Ida gave him a sideways look before continuing.

  ‘Then we turn up on her doorstep, and she’s wondering if we’ve been sent by the counterfeiters to see if she took the money. So she feeds us the story about “collecting her things”.’

  Lewis frowned. ‘Then why’d she tell us she saw the kid? If she thought we were counterfeiters, that’s just asking for trouble.’

  ‘I know,’ said Ida. ‘I still can’t figure that one out either. We ain’t exactly the kind counterfeiters would employ, and she didn’t ask us how comes we knew about her selling info to the Pinkertons.’

  Lewis thought for a moment. ‘You sure the kid she saw wasn’t just a porch-climber?’ he asked. ‘Some sap-head that heard the Romanos’ was empty on account of the murders?’

  ‘Hawkes said he left the building without a bag. If he was a thief then how comes he didn’t steal nothing?’ said Ida. ‘And Hawkes said he was in the house a half-hour – you ever hear of a second-story man taking a half-hour to shake down a house? He was searching the place. Here’s how I see it. All the victims are in a counterfeiting gang. Something goes wrong, I dunno what, and they fall out. So someone goes round ’em all getting revenge. Then someone else figures he needs something from the victims’ houses, so he pays some sap to go and check the crime scenes after the police have gone, and Hawkes stumbled into it all.’

  Lewis mulled over Ida’s theory and in the silence the sound of alley-cats caterwauling rose up in the distance and continued for a few minutes. Lewis was about to speak when he spotted, a block further down the road, a sticklike figure loping towards the Maggios’ store. He nudged Ida in the ribs and she turned to see the figure too. As he got closer they saw him more clearly – a wiry, stooped boy barely out of his teens, clad in poor stuff, a flat-cap pulled low over his brow. He approached the Maggios’, looked around him, then trotted up the front steps. Half-hidden in the shadow of the lintel, he removed some kind of tool from his jacket and set to work on the door. After a few seconds, he slid the door open and entered the store.

  ‘He ain’t no Axeman,’ whispered Lewis. ‘Boy’s so thin I can count his ribs.’

  Ida nodded in agreement and watched as a faint light arched through the Maggios’ for a few moments before it faded out completely. Half an hour later the faint light reappeared briefly then died out, and the boy emerged through the shadows of the porch. He looked about him and skulked off up the street, shoulders hunched, pace quick. Ida and Lewis waited till he was a block away, then they stepped out of the house, and followed him at what they gauged was a discreet enough distance.

  The boy took them on a snaking walk out of Lit
tle Italy and through the city center, towards the industrial yards by the docks. The roads around the area were empty and silent, many of them without any lighting whatsoever, and the dank smell of the Mississippi hung heavy in the air. After leading them through a labyrinth of alleys, the boy made his way down a narrow footpath and approached a high double-gated wooden fence. He banged on the gate, and after a few moments it was hauled back with a metallic groan and the boy stepped through the opening and into the yard beyond. Ida and Lewis caught a glimpse of the building inside before the gate shut again – a sprawling Victorian warehouse slumbering in the shadows of a wide, empty yard.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ asked Lewis.

  ‘Let’s take a look around,’ Ida replied.

  They turned and began to wind their way around the perimeter. On a street that backed onto a brewery opposite, they found a place where some barrels had been piled up next to the fence. With a strong jump from the barrels, a hand-hold onto the top of the fence was possible.

  Lewis went first and he hauled Ida up after him. They sat on the top of the fence and peered into the yard below. Lewis pointed to something moving on the far side of the yard, and after a few seconds Ida realized what it was – two guard dogs, wide-jawed hulking Dobermans, lolling about in the shadow of a wooden enclosure. Ida looked around some more and noticed a light shining from a set of windows on the far side of the warehouse. The windows were at a spot where the yard-fence curved around close to the building, and Ida suggested they walk around the perimeter a little further and see if they could look in.

  They hopped down off the fence and continued along the road until they reached the point where the warehouse light was shining out of the windows. There were no barrels this time to allow them to jump onto the fence, so they peered through the gaps between the fence-panels instead. This afforded them a sliver of a view across the yard to the warehouse and its illuminated windows, through which they could see a work area full of boxes and sewing machines. Fur coats on hangers lined one side of the space and in the middle were tables overflowing with pelts, furs and wraps in various stages of creation. In one corner, by a davenport, was a safe, and a table where the boy they had been following was sitting. In the light they could make him out properly – a drawn face, a dope-head’s complexion. On either side of the boy were two swarthy-looking men in gabardine suits, with square, stony builds and dark eyes.