The Axman of New Orleans

by Chuck Hustmyre

  "And he and his newspaper were destroyed because of it. I'm not going to let that happen to this newspaper."

  "Don't put it in the passive voice," Emile told the editor. "At least have the guts to say who did it. It's not that my father and his newspaper were destroyed. It's that Dominick O'Malley destroyed them."

  "The Jekyll and Hyde angle is a legitimate theory," Langenstein said. "Supported by a retired detective who is an expert on Italian crime. Maybe Dantonio is right. Maybe the attacks have nothing to do with the Mafia."

  Emile picked up the newspaper and shook it in Langenstein's face. "This article is hogwash, released to dampen the public's expectations that the Axman will ever be caught. It's the new narrative."

  The chair creaked again as Emile turned. He flattened the article on his desk and picked up reading aloud where he had left off. "'Criminals such as the one in question are on the order of Jack the Ripper, who some years ago terrorized London,' Dantonio said. 'They are cunning and hard to catch. The police seldom run them down. Jack the Ripper never was caught. That his criminal work came to an end probably was because of his death.'"

  Emile glanced up at Langenstein. "Can you believe that?" he demanded. "The Axman is now Jack the Ripper. He can't be caught because he's a lunatic who disguises himself as a normal man. But hold on. Listen to what Dantonio said next."

  Emile continued reading. "'As in the cases of seven years ago, the recent ax murders appear to have been committed without motive. Although practically all the victims were Italians, I do not believe the Black Hand or the Mafia had anything to do with any of them. I have never known the Black Hand to kill women or children. In fact, you could not get a Mafia agent to murder a woman or a child under any circumstances.'"

  Emile spun his chair around and faced the editor again. "He says the Mafia doesn't kill children. That's a bald-faced lie. Walter Lamana was eight years old when he was kidnapped and murdered. And by who, Gene? An eight-year-old boy kidnapped and murdered by who? The Mafia. And Dantonio worked the case!"

  Gene Langenstein rubbed his eyes and put his glasses back on. "I'm assigning you full time to the shipping news."

  "What are you talking about?" Emile leapt to his feet so fast he almost knocked over his chair. "Don't you see what they're doing? That's exactly what they-"

  Langenstein raised a hand to silence Emile. "From now on I don't want to see any stories from you that don't come from the port. And no Axman stories at all. Not for this newspaper."

  CHAPTER 31

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 1919

  5:55 A.M.

  "Maria!"

  I woke up screaming my dead wife's name. For an instant I saw her at the edge of my vision, in the shadows of our bedroom, but when I looked directly at her she disappeared.

  The room was cold, but the sheets were wet with sweat. My leg was throbbing. I crawled out of bed and stumbled into the kitchen. After lighting a fire in the stove, I put a pot of water on to boil. When it was lukewarm, I stripped off my nightclothes and used a cloth and a cake of soap to wash myself. There wasn't time to warm enough water to fill the bathtub. I needed to get to Central Station.

  Sometime during the night, it had occurred to me that I should look for a yellow card on Michael Pepitone. Two days ago, Superintendent Thompson said Pepitone had a clean record, meaning he had never been arrested, but maybe Pepitone had been the victim of a crime, or a witness to one. Or maybe the superintendent had been wrong.

  The bells of Saint Louis Cathedral were striking seven o'clock as I stepped out my front door and nearly tripped over a dog lying on my doorstep, a mongrel with short tawny hair, floppy ears, and only half his tail. He sprang up as I stumbled over him and stared at me with big brown eyes. He looked hungry.

  I turned around and searched the kitchen cabinets until I found an old tin of hard biscuits. I took a couple of biscuits out to him and watched him gobble them down. Then I brought out two more, and he scarfed those down without pausing for a breath. Finally, I brought out the whole tin and poured the rest of the biscuits into a pile on the porch.

  I scratched behind his ears as he finished them off. "Keep an eye on the house for me, will you, boy?"

  He didn't answer.

  In the street, the gutters were still full from yesterday's downpour, but overhead the sky was clear. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees. I decided to forego the streetcar and walk to Central Station, despite my still-throbbing leg.

  By the time I got to the station, I was practically dragging my left leg behind me like a sled. I hobbled up the stairs at twenty minutes to eight and found the second story still dark and deserted.

  At the card cabinet, I pulled open the drawer labeled Pa-Pn and searched for a yellow card on Michael Pepitone. I sensed that the key to solving his murder would be to understand why a businessman with no criminal record, with a wife and a passel of children, would sneak out at midnight and murder a Black Hand thug.

  There was no card for Michael Pepitone, but there was one for a Pietro "Peter" Pepitone. Judging by his age, Peter Pepitone could be Michael's father.

  Below the name and address was a single one-line entry:

  7-7-14, murder of Paul Di Christina. 14-3489. A.

  Pietro "Peter" Pepitone had been arrested on July 7, 1914 for the murder of Paul Di Christina, whose name I had seen yesterday listed as one of Salvatore Marcello's criminal associates. The case file number was 14-3489. Five years later, Michael Pepitone, whom I now had no doubt would turn out to be related to Peter Pepitone, killed Salvatore Marcello.

  I pulled the yellow card from the drawer and copied the information into my notebook. Then I slipped the card into my pocket. To hell with the rules.

  Mrs. Thibodeaux arrived at five minutes past eight. Officially, the Records Office was open from 8:30 to 4:30, but as the chief clerk, she usually arrived early and stayed late. Sometimes she came in after hours or on weekends if a detective had an urgent need for a file. I suspected that Mrs. Thibodeaux, like me, didn't have much of a life outside of work. She was the widow of a detective and had worked in the records room since her husband was killed in the line of duty in the 1880s.

  "Top of the morning to you, Mrs. Thibodeaux," I said as she unlocked the door to the Records Office. Like always, she wore a dark dress with a high, stiff collar and had her steel gray hair pulled into a tight bun.

  She shoved her keys back into her purse and stepped into the small office. "Don't try your Irish charm on me, Colin Fitzgerald. I've known you were a rascal since you were just a teenager. Tell me what you want, or it's off you go. I have plenty of work to do."

  Standing in the doorway, I placed a hand on my heart, my brogue growing thicker. "Well, if you'll not surrender to me charms, I reckon I'll have to look elsewhere for a date to the Policeman's Ball."

  She blushed. "You're a scoundrel, young Fitzgerald, just like your father, and I have no doubt that with those blue eyes and that blarney tongue of yours you'll have no trouble getting a date to the ball, but what do you really want?"

  I stepped across threshold. "If I can't have a date, then I'll settle for an old case file."

  She smoothed her dress and sat down behind her stout wooden desk. "Do you have an file number?" she asked, picking up a pencil and holding it over her writing tablet.

  I consulted my notebook. "Fourteen dash three-four-eight-nine."

  A flash of surprise showed on her face.

  "What is it?" I asked. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

  She shook her head and jotted down the number. "Nothing. Just wondering why a busy detective would spend time on such an old file."

  "Background information," I said.

  She sat still for several seconds, looking down at the file number scratched on her tablet. Then she stood and said, "I'll see if I can find the file," and disappeared through the door behind her desk that led to the cramped file room.

  While I waited for Mrs. Thibodeaux to retrieve the Di Christina murder file, I glance
d at her neatly arranged desk, on which stood a single photograph in a silver frame. The photograph was of a uniformed policeman who looked to be in his late twenties. His coat bore sergeant stripes on the sleeves. Her dead husband.

  "It's not here," Mrs. Thibodeaux said as she stepped out of the file room a moment later.

  "Where is it?" I asked.

  "Checked out, I suppose. Maybe for court."

  "It's a five-year-old case."

  She shrugged.

  I noticed she wasn't looking directly at me. "I'd like to check the logbook to see who has it," I said.

  "If you want." She was looking down at her desk. I couldn't be sure, but I swear she glanced at her husband's picture.

  Mrs. Thibodeaux pulled a cloth-bound ledger from a bookcase beside her desk. The pages were printed with horizontal lines, to which had been added hand-drawn vertical lines that formed columns. Whenever a policeman checked out a file, for court or to review, he filled out a new row, noting in the corresponding columns the date, the file number, his name, and the reason for removing the file from the Record's Office. The last column was the return date, which was left blank until the officer returned the file.

  The system wasn't perfect. Entries were listed by date of removal, not by file number. To locate the most recent entry for a particular file, you had to scan the column of file numbers from the bottom up until you found the case you were looking for. I had to go back nearly five years before I found an entry for the Di Christina murder file.

  Detective John Dantonio had checked it out on September 18, 1914, listing "Court" as his reason. He checked the file back in a week later. According to the log, no one had removed the file since then.

  I knew John Dantonio. For a long time, he had been the Police Department's expert on Italian criminals, and he had a national reputation as an authority on the Mafia. Many years ago, immediately after the infamous Robert Charles riots, my father had promoted Dantonio to detective as a reward for his heroism in the gunfight that ended Charles's five-day killing spree, a killing spree that included the murder of four policemen. Cops didn't come any better than John Dantonio.

  John retired last year, not long after his partner, Teddy Obitz, was killed in a shootout. Since then, I heard that John had fallen ill with consumption and was barely getting by on his pension.

  I told Mrs. Thibodeaux, who seemed to be quite busy doing nothing much at all except not looking at me, what I had read in the logbook.

  "Someone else must have taken the file and forgotten to fill out the log," she said. "It happens all the time."

  "And also forgot to bring the file back?"

  She didn't answer.

  I handed the logbook back to her. "Has anyone else asked about that file recently?"

  She turned away to return the ledger to the shelf. "Not that I remember."

  I had known Mrs. Thibodeaux a long time, since my days as a teenage messenger for the superintendent. Plenty long enough to know she was lying to me. I thought again about Emile's theory, the one I had so recently dismissed as crazy.

  Maybe my friend wasn't so crazy after all.

  CHAPTER 32

  ALL CHURCHES, SCHOOLS, THEATERS ARE ORDERED CLOSED TO FIGHT INFLUENZA EPIDEMIC

  Cases In The State Total 100,000. In New Orleans More Than 14,000 Infected, 1,000 Dead.

  -The Daily Picayune

  OCTOBER 29, 1918

  1:20 P.M.

  The priest spoke first in Sicilian, then in English.

  Considering the epidemic sweeping the city, the funeral was well attended. Every family Emile Denoux knew had already suffered at least one death from the Spanish flu. While most of the mourners at today's funeral service were Sicilian, there was a strong contingent of Anglos, whose ranks included several policemen.

  The crowd formed a semicircle around the open grave and the wooden casket lying on the ground beside it. Emile stood on the outskirts, sweating under his black suit and felt derby hat. It was unusually warm for late October.

  The priest, hands raised in supplication, continued his prayers in Sicilian and then English: "We commend the body of our sister Maria Palmisano Fitzgerald to the ground and her soul to our heavenly father."

  Moments later, the funeral ended and the crowd began to disperse. Several of the Italians walked past the casket again. An older woman, probably one of Maria's aunts, wailed as she bent down and brushed her hand along its polished surface.

  Maria's parents, Riccardo and Lucia Palmisano, had died of the flu two weeks ago, their deaths coming just one day apart. Now the flu had killed Maria too. Emile wondered if Colin knew. He had not heard from his friend since the end of August, when he received a letter dated July 23. He had been receiving a letter about every four weeks. Then nothing for the last two months.

  Emile said a silent prayer for his friend, in French, of course, because he believed God preferred French and was, therefore, more likely to grant a prayer in French.

  Following his humiliating reassignment to the shipping news, Emile had been making the best of his new beat by covering the burgeoning flu story.

  According to Dr. Thomas Robin, chief surgeon for the city's Board of Health, what had become known as Spanish influenza first landed in New Orleans aboard the oil tanker Harold Walker, which arrived from Tampico, Mexico, on September 5. When the ship docked, fifteen crewmembers and passengers were sick with the flu. The ship's wireless operator, a young New Orleanian named John Orthman, had already succumbed to the disease.

  After twenty-four hours of quarantine, the sick crewmembers and passengers were taken off the ship and sent to Charity Hospital. The disease spread quickly to the hospital staff and their families.

  Then more ships arrived in New Orleans carrying more infected people. Soon hundreds of people in the city were infected with the virus. Then thousands. Statewide, cases of Spanish flu reached one hundred thousand. Nationally, the number was in the millions. The disease had ravaged military camps across the country and forced the cancellation of several draft call-ups, delaying for weeks the deployment of much-needed troops to the war in Europe.

  Following the funeral service for Maria Fitzgerald, the cemetery cleared out fast. Everyone wanted to get home and try to lock out the disease. But several policemen lingered near the grave. There were five of them, smoking and talking quietly among themselves. Emile walked over to them. "Do any of you gentlemen know if the Army has notified Colin Fitzgerald about his wife's death?"

  The policemen glanced at each other. Then the oldest one, a wide man with a bushy mustache that was starting to show some gray, said, "I heard the superintendent talked to someone at Jackson Barracks this morning."

  "Are they going to let him come home?" Emile asked.

  The same policeman shrugged. "I don't figure it, not with the shortage of troops over there. There's nothing he can do here. She's already passed."

  Emile nodded. He noticed the youngest cop in the group was glaring at him. The man was on the small side, no more than five and a half feet, with pale blue eyes, a face dotted with freckles, and a pinched overbite that made look almost rat-like. The badge pinned to his uniform was oval, not the traditional round star and crescent, and identified him as a supernumerary officer.

  Supernumeraries, also called special officers, were hired to augment the Police Department's authorized compliment of regular officers. The City Council controlled how many regular officers the department employed, but the superintendent could hire as many supernumeraries as he wanted or could afford. The supernumeraries worked cheaper than regular officers and weren't part of the pension system. Most were political appointees, given their jobs by elected officials who handed them out as favors. Some good cops had started out as supernumeraries, but so had a lot of bad ones.

  "You have something to say?" Emile asked the young cop.

  The rat-faced man's mouth twisted into a grin. "I hear you've been looking for an ex-cop named Tobias Conrad."

  Emile was surprised. While i
t was true that he had been looking for Tobias Conrad, one of the two detectives Superintendent Frank Thompson had assigned to take Miss Harriet Lowe's dying declaration back in June, he hadn't exactly been advertising it. Nor had he had much luck.

  The superintendent had fired Conrad in August, a little more than a month after Miss Lowe's death. Since then, the former detective had been arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct after an incident in a bar in which he had singlehandedly drank an entire bottle of whiskey and then threatened the other patrons with a revolver. Thinking that the ex-detective might be willing to talk about the interview he and his partner had conducted with Miss Lowe, Emile had been looking for him in a couple of bars the man was known to frequent. He thought his inquiries had been discreet, but judging by the supernumerary policeman's question, they had not been discreet enough.

  "Do you know where he is?" Emile asked.

  The cop shook his head. "No, but I want you to stop looking for him."

  The four other policemen looked uncomfortable, but they said nothing. Evidently, whoever bought this kid his badge had some influence.

  "Why?" Emile asked.

  "Tobias Conrad is a friend of mine, and he's got enough problems without you sticking your nose into things that don't concern you."

  Emile felt his face getting hot. "You look too young to be his father."

  The older policeman Emile had spoken to a minute ago coughed into his hand. Then he patted the supernumerary on the shoulder. "Time we get back to the station, Jimmy."

  The young cop, Jimmy, knocked the older policeman's hand away. "Let me handle this." He took a step toward Emile.

  Instinctively, Emile retreated a pace. When he realized what he had done, he felt embarrassed.

  The rat-faced cop had noticed it too. "You don't have to wet your pants. I'm not going to hurt you. Not as long as you do what I tell you, and that's to quit looking for Tobias Conrad. He's got nothing to say to you."

  When the cop advanced another step, Emile forced his feet to stand firm. "I would like to hear Mr. Conrad tell me that himself."