The Axeman’s Jazz

by Ray Celestin

  The meeting room was too small to comfortably house the pack of beat-cops and detectives gathered there, so tables had been stacked against the walls, and the windows had been opened to let out the heavy air of too many men. Anyone whose lieutenant had agreed they could be spared had turned up, happy to have a day away from their usual duties, and so the meeting had the jokey atmosphere of a classroom on the morning of a school trip. Something which annoyed Michael further.

  After the Schneider murders, Michael had been called in for yet another dressing down from McPherson. He didn’t mention Riley’s tip-off to his boss, and when the meeting was over, Michael had met Kerry and the two of them completed the search for the name Riley had given him. Everything came up blank. Ermanno Lombardi had no convictions, no KAs, no mentions on any of the bureau’s lists of informers. They left the name with the housing department in the hope they’d come up with an address; if they didn’t, as humiliating as it was, Michael would have to go back to Riley and press him for more information. So now their only hope was that the 1911 killings and the current crop had been committed by the same person. And Michael was not entirely convinced this was the case.

  McPherson had started the meeting by hooking his thumbs under the lapels of his jacket and scanning the faces of the men with his frosty blue eyes.

  ‘OK, gentlemen,’ he began. ‘As you all know, we’ve been going through the records from the state prison and the S.I.A. We’ve tallied the results and we’ve got just over eighty suspects that fit the bill. Sixty or so are parolees, the rest were let go from the loony bin. Thanks to the efforts of the parole board and the medical commission, we’ve managed to obtain addresses for most of them. Each two-man team will have four suspects to question. Pick up a list as you leave the room. I want you all out on the streets by ten hundred hours and reports handed in by noon tomorrow. Any questions?’

  No one spoke.

  ‘Good, you’re all dismissed. Happy hunting, gentlemen.’

  McPherson nodded at the men and strode out of the room. Michael put the lists on the front table and stepped back as the men stood and exited, picking up lists as they went. A bottleneck formed at the door where Michael stood, and as the men waited in a loose huddle, he half-heard a whisper and an echo of snickers on its tail.

  Nigger-lover.

  The voice was soft, cold and laced with derision. It was self-righteous, too, as if the speaker was voicing a long-held grievance, or felt he was righting a wrong. It took a moment for Michael to realize what had been said, and another moment to realize that it had been directed at him, and when he did, a tense, tightening anger exploded inside. He jerked his head up and glared at the lines of policemen in front of him, swinging a scowl back and forth, hoping to find the culprit. But the men’s faces were all impassive, or turned away from him in conversation, their eyes tracing lines in every direction but his. He thought of how the men would act once they were outside, laughing at what they had done, congratulating themselves with pats on the back, and he grew steadily angrier. But it was a frustrated, swallowed anger, a hopeless fury he could do nothing with. He wanted to defend his wife, but his enemies were invisible, snipers on a distant horizon.

  A half-hour later, as he strode out of the precinct with Kerry beside him, Michael was still stewing in impotent rage. A cloudy gloom had descended on the street, and a steady drizzle was prickling the mud in the center of the road. He turned his collar up against the rain, and handed a list of suspects to Kerry.

  ‘First suspect goes by the name of Breuer, sir,’ said Kerry. ‘Address looks like an apartment on Robertson.’

  Kerry smiled at Michael, and Michael noticed how eager he was – Kerry’s excited, boy-scout adventurousness at odds with his own self-pitying mood.

  ‘What about the other addresses?’ he asked, scanning the surroundings. Officers from the meeting were trotting down the precinct steps, heading out into the city. Their waxed raincoats and dickersons prompted Michael to examine his own shoes – rainwater was already seeping inside them, darkening the tan leather.

  ‘Ah, two in the French Quarter and one in Little Italy,’ said Kerry. Michael nodded and thought a moment.

  ‘I’m assuming the suspect in Little Italy is Italian?’ Michael asked.

  Kerry checked the list and nodded. ‘Umigliani. The other two are called Steiner and Stevens.’ He folded the paper into quarters and slipped it into his jacket.

  ‘OK, I guess we’ll go to Storyville first and check out Breuer,’ Michael said, ‘then the two in the French Quarter, then we’ll finish off over in Little Italy.’

  Kerry nodded and they turned and trudged up the street in silence. Despite the drizzle the roads were busy with hawkers, pedestrians and streetcars. They avoided the banquettes to keep clear of the shoppers and maintain their pace, traipsing instead through the manure-strewn carriageway in the center of the road. But when they reached Basin Street the traffic was so heavy they had no choice but to step onto the banquette, making slow progress as the wood was slippery from the rain. They crossed the tramlines and turned right onto Bienville, heading into the heart of the District.

  ‘What was Breuer sent down for?’ Michael asked, as they passed a gaggle of cleaners brushing mud from the entrance to a hotel.

  Kerry scrabbled the list from his pocket. ‘Theft by deception,’ he said, frowning.

  ‘Seven years for that? Must have been one hell of a con. How old is he?’

  Kerry peered at the list again. ‘Sixty-two,’ he said wearily. ‘I get the feeling this guy probably isn’t the Axeman.’

  Michael nodded. A sixty-two-year-old confidence trickster was not the type they were looking for. Yet Michael’s interest was piqued – he wondered why the man had received such an unusually lengthy sentence, and also why he lived in an apartment on probably the worst street in the red-light district. The Axeman had displayed a Ripper-like willingness to attack women, and Breuer had chosen to live among the prostitutes of Robertson Street, the most destitute working girls in the city. There could be a connection. Michael lit a Virginia Bright and brought to mind the forlorn image of Robertson Street, poverty-stricken, fogbound and insalubrious. It didn’t seem too dissimilar to the accounts he’d read of Victorian London’s East End.

  Storyville hadn’t always been such a bleak prospect, however. The District had come into being in the 1890s, when a group of reformers in City Hall thought they could curb the spread of vice by making it a crime for prostitutes to live anywhere in the city except a designated area in the very center of New Orleans – the twenty blocks contained in the square formed by Basin Street, Canal Street, Claiborne Avenue and St Louis. The legislation had been written in part by an alderman called Sidney Story, and much to the man’s annoyance, the area ended up being named after him – Storyville.

  Entrepreneurs relocated there with a fervor to rival the Gold Rush, transforming the streets of what was a working-class neighborhood of Negroes, Creoles and whites, into a pleasure quarter flooded with the bright lights of bordellos, cabarets, hotels and saloons. Money flowed in and people made fortunes. During the District’s halcyon days, the twenty square blocks of Storyville were home to over two thousand prostitutes, from those who worked in the grand maisons to those who plied their trade alone from hovel-like cribs.

  Michael remembered Luca taking him around the District when they had first started working together, back in Storyville’s heyday. There was an air of abandon to the place, a carefree energy and a joy that was at once sordid and innocent, playful and knowing. Storyville was by no means a paradise – there was violence, death and disease there. There was exploitation and a grim, brutal side to the operations that the tourists never saw. But despite all that, Michael found it hard not to remember it as a lantern in the night – bright, cheerful and warm.

  The District was officially closed down in 1917, and although what was referred to as ‘the sporting business’ still continued there, it was a lot more discreet. Except for the occasional
hints and clues scattered across the buildings – a red-curtained window, an open doorway, a sign advertising a cabaret or a show, the profusion and variety of ‘hotels’ – the District could have been any one of a number of shabby gray Orleanais neighborhoods.

  As they crossed the final few blocks to their destination, the state of the buildings steadily deteriorated, until they arrived at the nadir, Robertson Street. On one side of the road was a row of crumbling, somber buildings, home to a warren of sporting women’s cribs, and on the other side, the larger of the St Louis Cemeteries. Michael mused on the area’s bleak mix of poverty, sex and death.

  They made their way to a set of derelict red-brick tenements opposite the cemetery and Kerry nodded to Michael that this was the place. The rain had covered the tenements in a moist sheen that seeped into the brickwork and consumed the light, making the buildings look unusually dark. They found the front door of Breuer’s building unlocked and made their way inside.

  Michael sparked a new match at every flight of stairs, but the meager glow did little to dispel the darkness as they ascended. What light they did have revealed scorch marks and smoke stains covering crumbling brick walls, marking the places where tenants had left candles burning. There was a disconcerting smell of mold and gas, and through the darkness they could hear rats running about the walls, and the sound of a crying baby. Michael thought what easy prey the tenants of these building must be – all a robber had to do was walk in off the street, hide in one of these pitch-black corridors and wait for the right person to stumble by.

  They reached the fourth floor, found the door to Breuer’s apartment and knocked, but no one answered. They waited for a few minutes, listening for any sounds of movement behind the door, and when they heard nothing, they descended the stairs into the basement, and knocked on the door of the superintendent’s room.

  After a few seconds the super opened up. He was a towering man who held his chin high and his head back, preferring, Michael gathered, to look down on the world. The super informed them that Breuer had died three days earlier of a heart complication, and before that he had been in the Charity Hospital for a month. They asked to check his room on the off-chance, and the super, grumbling and muttering, led them back up to Breuer’s room with the aid of a gas-lamp.

  Michael and Kerry searched the place while the super leaned against the doorjamb and watched sullenly. The room was clean and nearly empty and after a few minutes they were sure it contained nothing of importance. They thanked the super and went on their way. Michael judged the man was telling the truth about Breuer – only fools lied about things so easy to disprove – but he told Kerry to double-check with the hospital authorities just in case.

  He was glad to get back onto the street and out of the tenement and its stifling, heavy air. They trudged along Robertson for a couple of blocks, passing the St Louis Cemetery on their left. Because of its high groundwater level, New Orleans buried its dead aboveground, encasing them in highly elaborate tombs – a section for the Protestants, another for the Catholics, another for the whites, another for the Negroes – and it was the pinnacles of these tombs that Michael and Kerry could see above the cemetery wall, scattered across the sky.

  They turned right down Conti Street and eventually reached the Vieux Carré. The next two names on their list also proved to be dead ends. Joachim Steiner, forty-seven, had been released from Angola four months previously, after serving a seven-year sentence for assault. He had smashed a man over the head with a bottle in a bar-room brawl that had, with depressing predictability, been caused by an argument over a spilt drink. On finding the man, they discovered he had been crippled during his stay in Angola and didn’t have the use of his legs anymore. They crossed him off the list.

  The next name was Barry Stevens, thirty years old, released after eight years in Angola, also on an assault charge, gained in this instance for an episode in which he brain-damaged his wife. At some point Stevens had found God, and now spent his time caring for his spouse and helping out at the local church. His priest confirmed he had been working in the church for two of the nights on which the murders occurred.

  It was past noon by the time they arrived in Little Italy. They had stayed silent for most of their slog across the city. Michael got the feeling Kerry had picked up on his mood and was leaving him alone. But over the course of the walk Michael’s mood had lifted, their journey through the city streets providing a therapy of sorts. He knew the city was gloomy and rough, but it was also somewhere in which he could immerse himself – the market stalls, the shops, the miscellany of buildings and people, the shouts and the smells, and the hum of a million lives intersecting. He suggested they stop for lunch at a delicatessen he knew, and Kerry readily accepted. The place was bright and lively, bustling with workers on their lunch breaks, and housewives and maids shopping for groceries. They found two seats at the end of the counter and let the heat warm them up a little. Michael bought them both coffees and hot po’boy sandwiches. They took sips of the coffee and after a couple of minutes the sandwiches arrived – two long baguettes cut in half, overflowing with slices of beef shoulder, pork and bacon, and salad dressed with mayonnaise, dill pickle and Creole mustard. Kerry looked at the plate in front of him with a distrustful, startled frown.

  ‘It’s enough to feed a family,’ he said eventually, before turning to Michael and grinning.

  ‘How is it?’ asked Michael after they had taken a few bites.

  ‘Grand,’ said Kerry, his voice muffled by the food in his mouth. ‘We don’t have anything like this back home.’ Michael noted the boy’s grin and that the color seemed to be returning to his face, and he experienced something of the fatherly contentment that came over him when he watched his own children eat.

  ‘You only get food like this in New Orleans,’ said Michael, who, although no gourmand, was proud of his city’s culinary tradition. French, African, Spanish and Italian influences had been brought together by generations of Orleanais cooks, and the result was a unique and exuberant cuisine.

  ‘Shame all the suspects have come up blank,’ Kerry replied, and Michael noticed a seriousness in the boy’s voice; he didn’t have the heart to tell the boy that they might well be involved in a wild-goose chase.

  ‘It’s the way of police work,’ he replied. ‘I get the feeling we’ll probably have more luck with the next one.’

  ‘On account of his being Italian?’ Kerry asked.

  Michael nodded and took another bite from his po’boy. He stared out of the windows that ran across the front of the store. Between the warmth of the people inside and the cold rain on the street, a thick condensation had formed over the glass, making the world beyond seem nebulous and soft.

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking, sir, you seem pretty sure the killer’s Italian.’

  ‘Let’s say it’s an inclination,’ Michael said, turning his gaze from the window.

  ‘How so?’ asked Kerry, frowning.

  Michael thought for a moment, suddenly realizing the answer he was about to give Kerry was nearly identical to something Luca had taught him years before. He had the sense of a chain spanning an unfathomable darkness, and the idea that he was a link in this chain somehow reassured him. He felt the need to explain to the boy what Luca had taught him over the years of their relationship – that the best solutions to any mystery were the simplest ones, because simplicity was the source of nature’s elegance, and mysteries were nothing more than nature unilluminated. The idea wasn’t something that could be taught as though from a textbook, it was a sense, an approach that was nurtured over years on the job. And Michael realized that by taking the boy under his wing, he had somehow committed to a lifelong undertaking. The realization was quickly followed by a pang of guilt – Luca had no doubt felt the same way when he had taken Michael under his wing, and Michael had repaid him with betrayal.

  ‘You know what Occam’s razor is?’ he asked, and Kerry shook his head. ‘Simplest explanations are normally the best.
Most murderers are known to the victim, and in a town like New Orleans, where everyone sticks to their own, Occam’s razor suggests if an Italian’s dead, he was killed by another Italian. Italians kill Italians, Negroes kill Negroes, Jews kill Jews. That’s the way it works round here, barring a few exceptions.’

  ‘But Schneider wasn’t Italian.’

  ‘That’s the part I haven’t figured out yet,’ replied Michael. ‘But even Schneider had tarot cards found on him. You ever heard people talk about the Black Hand?’

  ‘Sure, it’s another name for the Mafia,’ said Kerry.

  ‘It’s an old name for the Mafia,’ said Michael. ‘Back then, when the Mafia killed someone or sent an extortion note, they’d leave a small card with a drawing of a black hand on it, to let people know who was responsible. Hence the name. Sometimes they didn’t leave cards with black hands on them, they left tarot cards. Saved them having to draw the thing themselves.’

  Kerry nodded and they lapsed into silence as they finished off their food, and Michael noticed the delicatessen’s noise, heavy with the clatter of cutlery on plates, people talking and the hiss of grills and percolators. They ordered more coffees and sipped them as the lunch-break crowd headed back to work and the delicatessen grew quiet. The staff began cleaning up after the rush with a resigned weariness. Michael pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette.