The Axman of New Orleans

by Chuck Hustmyre

  "Exactly," the captain said. "They only wounded her so the old man would still have a reason to pay."

  "What about the others?" Emile said. "Their families didn't own big hotels."

  "They all owned groceries," Captain Long said.

  Emile stared at the captain. "You want something from me, don't you, Captain? That's why I'm in here and all of my colleagues are still outside."

  "We all want something, Mr. Denoux."

  "So what is it? What do you want?"

  "A story."

  "What kind of story?"

  "One that links this attack to the others," Captain Long said, "and ties them all to the receipt of Black Hand letters."

  "Did Mrs. Sciambra say she got a Black Hand letter?"

  "She dodged the question."

  "Dodged it how?"

  "She said they weren't that kind of Italians."

  "What kind was she talking about?"

  "Beats me," Captain Long answered. "But she said they were the Greek kind."

  "What does that mean?"

  "Dago nonsense, as far as I know," the captain said. "But I took it as her way of claiming that she and her husband weren't involved with the Black Hand gangs or the Mafia."

  "Maybe they aren't," Emile said.

  "You might be right. They may just be a couple of innocent victims. But even if that's so, she knows why this happened. She knows why her husband was shot five times. She just won't say. Same as every other wop I've ever dealt with. None of them know nothing, not the family, not the neighbors, not even the milkman. They'd all rather get killed than talk to the police."

  "That's probably because in their country, the police-"

  "Well, this ain't their country," the captain snapped. "It's our country and we get to say what's what. And I say these killings are the work of a Mafia assassin."

  Emile turned away and stared at the blood-smeared floor inside the Sciambras' bedroom. The extreme violence of the recent spate of attacks was shocking, like nothing he had ever seen. "The murders probably are connected," he said. "But they look more like the work of a lunatic rather than an assassin."

  "What do you know about lunatics?" Captain Long said. "Or assassins, for that matter? I'm in charge here, and I say these murders are the work of a Mafia killer." The captain stepped closer to Emile, so close that Emile could smell his sour breath and the hint of whiskey on it. "And that's exactly what you're going to print, or you'll never set foot on another crime scene as long as I'm a member of this police force."

  Emile backed up a couple of steps. "Won't a story about a Mafia assassin murdering people in their own beds spread panic?"

  "No," the captain said. "In fact, it'll do the exact opposite. It will reassure people, at least the ones who count, that there's nothing to be afraid of."

  "How do you figure that?"

  "If the decent people of this city think there's a deranged madman on the loose randomly attacking married couples in the middle of the night while they're sleeping in their beds, they'll be terrified. But if your newspaper reassures them that these attacks aren't random at all, that the killer is, in fact, a hired assassin, attacking only a specific class of people, those involved with Black Hand gangs or other types of underworld activity, they'll know they're safe."

  Emile thought about it for a minute. He was sure the attacks were linked, but he wasn't sure at all about this so-called Mafia connection. "I've got to have something more than just similar circumstances," he said. "If you want me to write that these attacks are part of a Mafia conspiracy, you've got to show me ... some kind of proof. Otherwise, it's not reporting, it's speculating."

  Captain Long smiled and slid a Moleskin notebook from the inside pocket of his coat. "I'm glad you asked, Mr. Denoux. Because I have what you're looking for right here." He folded the cover back and flipped through the notebook until he found the page he was looking for. "While my detectives were canvassing the neighborhood, they turned up two witnesses." He consulted the page. "A German woman by the name of Mrs. E.B. Wegener, who lives at 1340 France Street, said she was recently in the Sciambra grocery and saw two suspicious Italian men enter the store. One was tall. The other was much shorter. When the two men entered the store, the tall one called out to Mrs. Sciambra, 'Good morning, Mrs. Tony.' Mrs. Wegener reported that Mrs. Sciambra greeted the men rather coolly, and when Mr. Sciambra saw the two men, he sent his wife into the house while he spoke to the men in Italian. Naturally, Mrs. Wegener didn't understand their conversation."

  Long flipped to the next page. "Another witness, Mrs. William Stegelmeyer, also German, who lives at 4215 Villere Street, said that a couple of weeks ago Mrs. Sciambra seemed very worried about an Italian man who had been hanging around the store. The man looked dangerous, according to Mrs. Stegelmeyer."

  Emile scratched his head. Then he flipped to a clean page in his own notebook and jotted down what Long had just told him. He had to admit, knowing something of the way the Black Hand gangs operated, the story sounded as if Mr. Sciambra may have been the recipient of one of the notorious extortion letters. "Did you find a Black Hand letter?"

  "The people who get those letters burn them," the captain said. "They don't hold onto them as keepsakes, Denoux."

  Emile looked at his notes. "Mrs. Wegener said one of the Italian men told Mrs. Sciambra, 'Good morning, Mrs. Tony'?"

  Captain Long nodded. "She also confirmed that people in the neighborhood called Anthony Sciambra 'Mr. Tony,' so maybe they call his wife 'Mrs. Tony.'"

  "Did you ask Mrs. Sciambra who the men were?"

  "My detectives didn't talk to Mrs. Wegener until after the ambulance took Mrs. Sciambra to Charity Hospital. We'll ask her about them when she comes out of surgery."

  Emile weighed his options. He could write the story the way the captain wanted and have the chief of detectives in his debt, or he could refuse and never be allowed near a crime scene again. The fact that the Police Department was willing to sacrifice the Sciambras' reputation to calm the fears of the city's more affluent white residents didn't surprise Emile one bit. Like other immigrant groups before them, the Italians now occupied the bottom rung of the city's social and economic ladder, except for the Negroes, of course.

  Captain Long's view of Italians, especially from his German-Irish perspective, was highly prejudiced and fatally flawed, Emile thought, but it wasn't entirely wrong. Concealed among the thousands of hardworking Sicilians who had flocked to New Orleans over the last twenty years, most of whom were looking for nothing more than the opportunity for a better life, was a small band of cutthroats, like wolves hiding among sheep, that had come to be known as the Mafia.

  Emile had run across them before. The first time was in 1907, when, as a new reporter working for his father's French-language daily, La Fois d'Orleans, he had covered the sensational Lamana kidnapping case.

  "Give me an answer, Denoux," the captain demanded. "Because if you're not going to help me, then you've got no more business here."

  "I want to talk to Mrs. Sciambra," Emile said.

  "Impossible."

  Emile turned toward the front door. "No deal then."

  After a couple of steps, Emile felt Captain Long's meaty hand grab his shoulder and spin him around. The captain leaned close to him and looked him hard in the eyes. "You write the story exactly the way I want ... and I'll get you in to see her."

  Emile considered the offer. He really wanted to talk to Mrs. Sciambra before he wrote the captain's story, but there wasn't time. He had a deadline coming up, and the woman had not even gone into surgery yet. He was going to have to trust the captain.

  "Do we have a deal?" Captain Long asked.

  Emile hesitated. Then he nodded. "Yes."

  CHAPTER 5

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1919

  6:00 A.M.

  I found Mrs. Esther Pepitone alone in the kitchen, seated at the dinner table. She was an attractive woman, about thirty years old, with long black hair that spilled over her shoulders. She
wore a pale blue housecoat over a white nightgown. The front of the gown was splattered with her husband's blood.

  The damaged back door stood wide open, and the kitchen floor was covered with the muddy footprints of policemen. For some reason I was embarrassed that my colleagues had made such a mess.

  "Tu parra Inglisi?>/i>" I asked in Sicilian. Do you speak English?

  She looked at me in surprise.

  I pointed to the chair across the table from her. "Mi posso assittari?" May I sit?

  "Si."

  "Grazi," I said.

  "Unni ti zignazzi a parrari Sicilianu?" she asked. Where did you learn to speak Sicilian?

  "My wife's family was from Palermo," I said in English. "Her maiden name was Palmisano."

  "I know some Palmisanos," she said, also in English. "Who were her parents?"

  "Riccardo and Lucia. They lived on North Roman Street."

  "I knew them," Mrs. Pepitone said.

  I nodded. "Mi dispiaci pi la morti di so maritu," I said. I am very sorry for the loss of your husband.

  "Grazi."

  "Ti dispiaci si parramu Inglisi?" I asked. Would you mind if we spoke English?

  "No."

  "Signura, please, tell me what happened to Signuri Pepitone?"

  She sat quietly for a moment, looking down, hands in her lap. She took a deep breath. "My husband closed the store at about eleven o'clock. We locked up and turned off the lights. Then went to bed."

  "Did you go to bed right after you closed?"

  "Si."

  "What happened then?"

  "I woke up when I heard my husband shouting."

  "What did you see?"

  "A man standing over our bed." She raised one hand to her throat. "He was beating my husband."

  "What did you do?"

  "I started screaming and he ran away," she said. "Then I went to check on my children and to summon help."

  "Your children, are they all right?"

  She nodded and rested her forearms on the table.

  I looked at her hands. They were worn rough from hard work, but the nails were well cared for.

  "Are you sure it was your screams that scared him away and not the gunshots?"

  Her eyes widened. "That is my husband's gun."

  "But you were the one who shot it."

  She looked down at the table. "I don't remember."

  "You don't remember firing it, or you don't remember putting it in the drawer?"

  "I don't remember anything."

  "I found the bullet holes."

  "My husband ..." She kept her eyes downcast.

  "You can't get into trouble for trying to defend your family, Mrs. Pepitone."

  She didn't answer.

  Her refusal to talk about having shot at the man who was murdering her husband didn't make sense, unless she was concealing something else, something she thought would reflect poorly on her husband. "Where was the gun when you picked it up."

  "I told you, I don't remember."

  Time to change tack. The idea during an interview is to come at the person from different angles, to keep the interviewee off balance and surprised by the next question. That gives him-or her-less time to fabricate a lie.

  "Did you see his face?" I asked.

  She looked up. "It was too dark."

  "Do you remember anything about him, anything at all?"

  She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "He was tall, taller than my husband." She held her hands out beyond her shoulders. "And he was grande. How you say ... big. A big man."

  "What about his clothes?"

  "He wore a coat ... and a hat."

  Another trick is to ask the same question more than once, but separated by several other questions. Lies are harder to remember than the truth.

  "When did you go to bed?" I asked.

  "I already told you that."

  "Tell me again."

  "We went to bed after my husband closed the store, a little past eleven."

  I watched her face carefully. "You went to bed together?"

  For a brief instant, her eyes darted downward, toward her hands resting on the table, then back up to meet mine. One sculpted fingernail scratched at the wooden surface of the table. "Yes."

  "Then why was your husband still dressed?"

  She looked away and shook her head.

  "Answer my question, signura. Why was your husband still dressed at two o'clock if he went to bed at eleven?"

  "I don't know."

  "What was he wearing when he went to bed?"

  She hesitated. "His night clothes."

  "Are you telling me he got up in the middle of the night and got dressed?"

  She started crying. "I don't know."

  Behind me, I heard footsteps in the hall, accompanied by the voice of Dr. Louis Delachaise, the Orleans Parish coroner.

  I turned to face the door as Superintendent Thompson led Dr. Delachaise into the kitchen. The doctor was tall, well over six feet, with the rail thinness of a chronic boozer. Somewhere in his late fifties, he had a balding head and a long thin nose, on which were hooked a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles.

  "Getting anywhere, Fitz?" the superintendent boomed. To me, he always sounded like a stumping politician.

  I stood and nodded toward the hallway. The three of us stepped out of the kitchen and walked to the far end of the hall.

  "Some of what she's saying doesn't jibe with the crime scene," I said, my voice low.

  "Like what?" Thompson asked.

  I pulled the six shells out of my pocket. "I found a Colt .38 in one of the nightstands. Four rounds have recently been fired."

  Thompson picked one of the empty shells from my hand and sniffed it. He nodded then dropped it into my palm. I shoved all the shells back into my coat pocket.

  "She claims not to remember who fired them," I said. "Something else, I only found two bullet holes."

  Dr. Delachaise fixed his watery blue eyes on me. "In which nightstand did you find the revolver?"

  "The far one," I said. "Which, judging by the other contents, I'd say was hers."

  Thompson looked at the doctor. "Who cares where he found it? In fact, who cares who fired it? They were being attacked by a madman with an ax."

  Delachaise shot me a knowing glance and then looked back at Thompson. "You're missing the point, Superintendent."

  "I'm missing the point?" Thompson said, his voice carrying a hint of sarcasm. "I doubt that, but go ahead, Doctor, enlighten me. Just keep in mind, this isn't a parlor game or one of your books full of theories."

  Delachaise winked at me behind his glasses. "If I understand the detective's hypothesis, the question is not where the gun ended up, but rather where it was when the killer's presence was first discovered."

  I nodded, although I didn't think anyone noticed it.

  Delachaise continued, "If, as Captain Campo told us a few moments ago, Mr. Pepitone was sleeping beside his wife and she did not become aware of the intruder until her husband's cries woke her, then how did she reach past her husband while he was being murdered with an ax to get the revolver from his nightstand?"

  "It ended up in her nightstand," Thompson said, "so maybe it started out there too."

  "Mrs. Pepitone told me it was her husband's revolver," I reminded the superintendent.

  "Maybe he kept it in her-"

  The doctor cut Thompson off with a wave. "Superintendent, do you keep your revolver in your wife's nightstand."

  Thompson's face reddened. "Listen here, Doctor-"

  "Gentlemen," I said, "let me make this simple. If we agree that in all likelihood Mr. Pepitone kept his gun in the nightstand on his side of the bed-in the same drawer in which I found a man's billfold-then we have to agree that Mrs. Pepitone could not have gotten to it after the killer began to attack her husband."

  "I am also certain that Mr. Pepitone did not fire those shots," Dr. Delachaise said.

  "Why not?" Thompson asked.

  "My preliminary examina
tion of the body indicates the first blow struck Mr. Pepitone's right arm as he raised it in an attempt to defend himself. That same blow, which nearly severed his arm, then struck him in the forehead causing severe trauma. Even if the gun were already in his hand, he wouldn't have been able to fire it, not after the first blow fell."

  "And if he had fired it before the first blow," I said, "he would have stopped the intruder."

  "What does it matter if the wife grabbed her husband's revolver?" Thompson demanded.

  Delachaise arched his eyebrows behind his gold-rimmed lenses. "And reached around her bleeding husband to retrieve said revolver, past the man chopping him to death with an ax?"

  "So what are you suggesting?" Thompson asked.

  "That the revolver wasn't in either nightstand when the attack occurred," I said.

  "Mr. Pepitone already had it," Delachaise said. "Either on his person or very nearby."

  "He was still dressed," I said, "except for his shirt."

  Delachaise nodded. "Which means ..."

  "Either he was getting dressed to go out," I said, "or he was getting undressed after coming home."

  "The shirt on the floor would indicate he was undressing," Delachaise said.

  "At two o'clock in the morning?" the superintendent said.

  "With a revolver close at hand," the doctor added.

  "Then how did it get in her nightstand?" Thompson asked.

  "Reflex," Delachaise said. "Assume for the moment that Mr. Pepitone usually kept his gun in his nightstand. They have children. After firing the gun at the killer, Mrs. Pepitone's instinct would have been to put it up, but to reach her husband's nightstand, she would have had to crawl over his mutilated corpse. So she simply did the next logical thing. She dropped the revolver into her nightstand drawer. But that still leaves us with two questions."

  "What?" Thompson said in a tone that made clear his exasperation.

  The doctor looked at me.

  "Why would Mrs. Pepitone say she and her husband went to bed shortly after eleven o'clock?" I said.

  "And ..." Delachaise prompted.

  I nodded. "Where did the other two shots go?"

  CHAPTER 6

  GROCER'S WIFE SUCCUMBS TO

  SAME BULLET THAT SLEW HUSBAND