The Axeman’s Jazz

by Ray Celestin

  An hour later Luca was rapping his knuckles on the glass-paneled door of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. A distinctly female voice asked him to come in and he entered the office to see a beautiful girl in her late teens or early twenties sitting behind the front desk. Beautiful except for a bruised eye and a cut on her forehead. Something about the girl reminded him of Simone, the upright posture, the litheness, the depth in her eyes. She turned her head slightly and met his gaze, and he could tell straight away she thought him suspicious.

  ‘Hello, sir, how may I help?’ She spoke in a silky voice, and Luca got the impression the girl was shaken, a little scared maybe.

  ‘Is Lefebvre in?’ Luca asked, pulling the flat-cap from his head.

  ‘I’ll just see if he’s free. Who may I say is calling?’

  ‘Tell him it’s an old friend.’

  The girl nodded, got up and straightened her skirt with the palm of her hand, then disappeared into the adjoining room. She reappeared a few seconds later and ushered him into Lefebvre’s office.

  The old man peered up and smiled at Luca as he entered. Lefebvre had aged ten years in the five Luca had been away. More blotches on his skin, more yellow in his eyes – the man was a slow-motion suicide suspended in alcohol. He gestured at the chair opposite and Luca sat and pulled from his pocket the bottle of rye he’d purchased at the liquor store. He held it in his palm a moment, as if checking the weight, then he placed it on the desk next to the bottle Lefebvre already had open.

  ‘For the collection,’ Luca said.

  Lefebvre gave him a look, then bent to his right to rummage about a drawer in his desk, the rolls of fat around his midriff straining against his shirt.

  ‘I heard you got out,’ he said, returning to an upright position with two glasses in his hand. ‘I heard you’re back working for Carlo. In an unusual capacity.’

  Luca stayed silent and Lefebvre poured them both double measures. They raised their glasses and drank, Luca knowing he’d regret it when the pains started shooting through his gut.

  ‘To what do I owe the honor?’

  ‘I came to ask you about a man named Schneider,’ Luca said. ‘I heard you two did a little business not too long ago.’

  ‘I tell you about that, you tell me how you found out,’ Lefebvre countered, raising an eyebrow.

  Luca nodded and Lefebvre took another sip from his glass.

  ‘He came to see me about some protection. Told me he was worried someone was after him and he wanted to hire a bodyguard. I told him we didn’t really do that kind of thing anymore, but for a small fee I could give him a name. So he paid me a small fee and I gave him a name.’ Lefebvre lifted his hands into the air to signal the end of the story.

  ‘When was this?’ asked Luca.

  ‘A couple of weeks before he got killed.’

  Luca nodded. ‘Seems like the name you gave him didn’t work out too well for old Schneider.’

  ‘Didn’t work out too well for the name either,’ said Lefebvre. ‘The cops found him pushing up daisies in the Audubon Park last Saturday week. Two bullet holes in his head.’

  Luca nodded again, sifting through the angles. Schneider had been expecting the killer. He had seen the grocers getting killed and had gone out to hire a bodyguard.

  ‘Did you tell anyone about Schneider’s visit?’ he asked.

  Lefebvre took another sip of the rye. ‘Not a soul,’ he said. ‘Although the police came visiting yesterday. I told them what I told you, except I said to them I told Schneider I couldn’t help him and that was that.’ Lefebvre sighed melodramatically and shook his head. ‘Things ain’t like they used to be,’ he said ruefully, resting his hands on the wide expanse of his stomach. ‘That old bond between us and the police. It don’t exist no more. Times have changed for the worse.’

  Luca wasn’t sure who exactly Lefebvre meant by us, but he nodded in token agreement. The Creoles were always bemoaning the passing of better times. They saw the history of New Orleans as nothing but a steady decline from the pinnacle of French rule, a slow, vulgar Americanization that had first marginalized and then dismantled their culture. Lefebvre, like many of the other white Creoles Luca had met, spent his time lamenting the loss of a gilded age that, as far as Luca could tell, was only ever a myth in the first place.

  ‘So who was the name?’ he asked.

  ‘You don’t know him. Some kid from Baton Rouge. Schneider wanted an out-of-towner,’ Lefebvre shrugged. ‘You know, a ghost.’

  ‘And did Schneider tell you why he thought someone was after him?’

  ‘What do you think?’ said Lefebvre. Luca nodded and thought for a moment. Before Luca had been convicted, Lefebvre was an informer for the detective bureau; client confidentiality meant nothing to him. But when Lefebvre’s old partner Hess found out what he was up to, and threatened to tell Pinkerton headquarters and the District Attorney’s office, Lefebvre had ordered a hit on him, and Luca had helped arrange it. It was then that Lefebvre had scurried into a bottle, pickling himself in guilt. Back then Luca thought the whole affair pathetic, and didn’t waste a second thought on it. But now he couldn’t help but feel sorry for the regret-stricken mess of a man sitting in front of him. The really sad thing was Lefebvre didn’t have the guts to end it all quickly. A shotgun would have been kinder and quicker than the bottle.

  ‘Well, it’s been good to see you again,’ he said, running the edge of his flat-cap through his fingers. He put the half-drunk glass of rye on the desk and stood.

  ‘You gonna tell me who tipped you off?’ asked Lefebvre.

  ‘Nothing to tell, old friend,’ Luca replied with a grin. ‘I found one of your business cards in Schneider’s office. You need to be more careful who you hand those things to.’

  ‘Sonofabitch.’

  Luca grinned and sauntered out of the room. He nodded goodbye to the girl in the reception area, trotted down the stairs and through the ground-floor lobby. He stood under the building’s portico while he buttoned up his coat and noticed a tall, heavy-set colored man staring at him from the other side of the road, his image flickering through the gaps in the traffic that sped between them. Luca frowned, trying to place the man’s face, an angry, hurt-looking face that he’d seen somewhere before – Angola, maybe? He turned his collar up and stepped into the street, heading north towards the nearest tram stop.

  When he reached the stop he lit a cigarette and turned to see if the tram was on its way. As he peered down the avenue he noticed the heavy-set man had followed him and was waiting at the stop, too. Luca wondered about the man – if he did indeed recognize the face, or if paranoia was getting the better of him.

  The tram arrived a few minutes later and Luca hopped aboard. He cast a look after him as the tram pulled off – the man was still at the stop, waiting for a car on a different route. Luca relaxed a little and took a seat by the window. He watched the world go by all the way until the City Park, where he got off and took the long muddy path up Bayou St John, mulling over the case as he went. Schneider was onto something and he’d hired a bodyguard. His insistence on a bodyguard from out of town meant whoever he was scared of had links to the New Orleans underworld. And then the bodyguard was executed. Professionally. Either the Axeman was also good with a gun, or there were other people involved, clearing the way for him. Again Michael’s insinuations about Carlo forced themselves to the front of Luca’s thoughts, and he prayed that Sandoval would keep his word and deliver the box to him without telling anyone.

  28

  Against his better judgment Michael had gone to the courthouse that morning to watch Luca’s case be heard. He wasn’t sure why he had gone – everything had been arranged with the District Attorney and the judge in the small hours, but he felt as if he might miss something important. He didn’t think his old mentor had seen him; he had arrived late, sat on the very last row of the gallery and left as soon as the bail had been confirmed. Luca had struck him as old and frail in the prison cell, on the back foot. But in
the courthouse he looked assured, smiling with Sandoval and lying back in his seat with a cockiness that brought back memories of his trial five years previously. The display had made Michael wonder if it had been the right decision to let him go so easily. He ran through all the angles in his mind as he made his way back to the precinct. Was Luca really looking into the killings for Carlo? If he was, then Michael was wrong about the Family being involved – or was Carlo duping Luca, setting him up for something down the line?

  When Michael got to his desk at the bureau, a bleary-eyed Kerry was waiting for him. They sat at his desk and Kerry went through the wad of papers in his hand.

  ‘Jones and Shippey are on first watch at the courthouse,’ he said, reading from a message at the top of the stack.

  ‘Good. Search reports?’ Michael asked, lighting a cigarette.

  Kerry fumbled through the papers.

  ‘Detective Hessel did the search on Schneider’s office, two days ago. Came up with nothing incriminating. Except this . . .’

  Kerry handed Michael a couple of clipped sheets of paper.

  ‘Hessel wrote them up yesterday while we were out.’

  Michael scanned the papers – Hessel had found a business card in Schneider’s office for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. He had followed it up and the man at the agency claimed Schneider had been in there hunting for a bodyguard and had left empty-handed.

  ‘Lefebvre,’ Michael said to himself. He remembered the man, an associate of Luca’s, a tremendously fat Creole, drunk and crushed by worries. It didn’t make sense that he’d turn away a job as easy as finding someone a bodyguard. Michael thought of the gun they had found under Schneider’s pillow, and now it turned out he had been looking for a bodyguard. If Schneider had told the Creole why he wanted the protection, and if Michael could make him talk, he would be one step closer to finding a reason for the killings.

  ‘Ask him to come in for a chat,’ Michael said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Kerry. ‘Detective Jones checked Schneider’s filings at City Hall for the last five years. No cases involving known Family associates or any of the victims. Carter did a re-search last night. Found nothing, too, and there didn’t seem to be anything missing.’

  Michael thought for a moment, and rubbed his fingers across his face. As each new clue presented itself, it just as soon proved worthless. Maybe when the reports from the manhunt came in that afternoon a new lead might spark into life, but Michael didn’t feel too optimistic about it.

  He looked up and noticed Kerry was smiling at him.

  ‘What’s to smile at, son?’ he asked.

  Kerry held up a telegram triumphantly.

  ‘From the housing department. Ermanno Lombardi’s address.’

  Lombardi’s lodgings were in a slender, Creole town-house on an oak-lined avenue in the 7th Ward. The building was wrapped in pastel-colored stucco and set behind a tiny garden of night-blooming jasmine and persimmon trees. The street itself was quiet except for a few old Creole women who were busy cleaning their porches.

  Michael and Kerry trotted up the path to Lombardi’s lodging and rang the bell. A chubby old Creole woman, dark-skinned and wearing an apron, opened the door and looked them up and down through the mosquito screen. The women of the 7th Ward had a reputation for being house-proud and fastidious, the matrons of a black middle-class that was over a century old. The appearance of policemen on one of their doorsteps was as shocking to them as it would be to a society belle.

  ‘Yes?’ The woman’s voice was wary and soft.

  ‘We’re from the Police Department, ma’am,’ Michael said. ‘We’d like to speak to Ermanno Lombardi.’

  The woman frowned and a look of concern crossed her face.

  ‘I haven’t seen him for days,’ she said in a thick French accent. ‘He does this sometimes.’

  ‘May we check his room?’ Michael asked.

  ‘For sure,’ she said with a shrug.

  She wiped her hands on her heavily starched apron and pushed open the screen door.

  ‘Your feet,’ she said, stern and haughty.

  They wiped the mud from their shoes onto a tawny-colored welcome mat just inside the door and filed through the porch. The house was spotless and well-decorated with houseplants, paintings and rosewood étagères holding china vases, porcelain statuettes and other objets d’art. The aroma of mint julep wafted through the air. The woman smiled at them proudly and led them up a creaking carpet-covered staircase.

  They approached a door on the fourth story and a disconcerting smell of decay caused the woman to grimace as she took a key from her apron pocket and turned the lock. When she swung open the door the smell wafted towards them in a much stronger form, a putrid, excremental stench. They caught a glimpse of Lombardi splayed out on the bed, naked, a garrote wire around his neck, brown stains on the white linen.

  The woman shrieked and backed away from the door, a hand over her face. Michael pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, covered his nose and mouth and stepped into the room. He approached the body and inspected it. The dead man had a look of anguish on his face, the muscles in his neck contorted, pulling his chin downwards, making it look as if he were smiling. His fists were balled up, clenching the sheets in frozen knots. Michael turned to Kerry and told him to call in the murder. Kerry took a last look at the body, turned and hurried down the stairs, leaving Michael alone with the remains of Ermanno Lombardi.

  Half an hour later the house was bustling with people. In the room itself, a squad of policemen was busying itself with the usual crime-scene duties. The doctor had arrived and after a brief examination had estimated the time of death as at least a week beforehand. Lombardi was the sole lodger on the top floor and the landlady had a bad leg, so she rarely went up there to check on him. She claimed he often disappeared for days at a time, and she had put his final absence down to this.

  Her character statement fitted what Michael had heard from O’Neil – Lombardi was quiet and anxious and kept to himself, and the only complaint she had about him was that male visitors came knocking for him a little too frequently. She said one man visited him more than any of the others, but could only give a vague description – a big Italian-looking man in his thirties.

  There was no sign of a struggle in the room and the landlady said the last time she had heard Lombardi come in was the previous Monday, and that he might have been accompanied by someone, but she wasn’t sure. Michael thought of the naked body and checked with the doctor, who confirmed there had been intercourse shortly before the death. Michael reconstructed the chain of events: Lombardi had been talking about the Axeman, and to shut him up, a man had been paid to kill him. The man had picked him up, taken him back to his lodgings, and after they’d had sex and Lombardi had fallen asleep, the man had wrapped a garrote wire round his neck.

  When the men had removed Lombardi’s body from the room and the windows had been opened to let out the fetid air, Michael looked through Lombardi’s possessions. There was nothing suspicious in the room – no guns or stacks of money or bags of contraband, no ledgers written in code, or even a diary. In a chest at the bottom of the bed, however, he found Lombardi’s washbag, a Twinplex razor, a bottle of macassar oil, another of Guerlain Mitsouko, a folding Brownie snapshot camera, and lastly envelopes full of photographs stamped by the Eastman Kodak Co of Rochester, New York.

  Michael sat on the bed and went through them all. There were no photographs of family, just pictures of Lombardi’s friends, and occasionally of the man himself. The same few faces kept reappearing in the photographs, five or six men, all athletic-looking, fresh-faced. There were holiday snaps from days at the Lake, from a picnic, a bandstand, some of inebriated gatherings in people’s houses. The photographs had an intimacy to them and Michael felt as if he was trespassing when he looked at them.

  He came to a photograph of Lombardi and a second man, a medium shot taken somewhere by the river, he guessed. The two men had their arms over each other’s shoulders, smil
ing at the camera, the wind whipping their hair about.

  Michael took the snapshot into the downstairs living room. The landlady had called her friends around for support, and was now in the midst of a gaggle of old Creole women consoling each other and lamenting the state of the world, one talking over the other in a wailing wall of prayers and sorrow. Gumbo ya-ya, he thought, and shouted to make himself heard.

  When he had their attention, he showed the landlady the photograph and she confirmed what he had been thinking – the man in the snap with Lombardi was the man who visited him more than all the others. The man must know enough about Lombardi to give Michael a clue as to why he had been killed. Michael took the photograph back into the bedroom and he and Kerry went through the envelopes all over again, finding every photograph in which the man appeared. They laid them on the floor in a crooked, topsy-turvy grid, and when they had completed it they stepped back and studied the black-and-white mosaic in front of them.

  Michael picked up the photograph he had shown to the landlady and inspected the stranger with his arm around Lombardi. Short nails. Right hand markedly bigger than the left. The left hand with cuts all over it. The man worked in a job where he used a knife. A butcher or a chef? He scanned through the other photographs and found one that showed a group of men at a gathering in someone’s house. The stranger was seated at a table at the back of the room. He had a peacoat on and underneath it some grimy work overalls. On the breast of the overalls was a patch with a word that could only be partially seen under the shadow of the coat. Michael guessed at the word from only the first few letters: Normanson’s. A fish-processing factory over in the docks.