THE BARREL MURDER - a Detective Joe Petrosino case (based on true events)

by MICHAEL ZAROCOSTAS

  “You mean we,” Steffens said. “We think three men control the Syndicate, like the ancient triumvirate of Rome. And, sure enough, shifting the alphabet by three did it!”

  Petrosino finished his sherry and tried to wrap his mind around the idea. “Can you puzzlers show me how it was solved?”

  “Cryptographers,” Tarbell said. “Here let me show you our codex for the three-letter Caesar Cipher.” She reached into a satchel next to her and spread out a sheet of paper that had a box chart filled with letters:

  A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

  D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C

  Petrosino said, “So the person writing a word with an ‘A’ would use a ‘D’ and so on?”

  “That’s right. Here’s the note you gave us. I knew we were onto something when I deciphered the first word. I thought it was English at first, but you’ll see.” She took out another page with each of the three sentences solved:

  F R Q V H U Y D C L R Q H

  C O N S E R V A Z I O N E

  D O O D Y R U R. P D F R P X Q L F D U H

  A L L A V O R O. M A C O M U N I C A R E

  H G L I H W W R V D S H U O D Y R U R.

  E D I F E T T O S A P E R L A V O R O.

  L O E X H G H Y H I D U H X Q

  I L B U E D E V E F A R E U N

  H V H P S L R G H O E X I D O R.

  E S E M P I O D E L B U F A L O.

  “It’s Italian.” Petrosino mumbled the message, “Conservazione al lavoro. Ma comunicare è difettosa per lavoro. Il bue deve fare un esempio del bufalo.”

  “Well, what in the name of the Sphinx does it say, Joe? We waited for you.”

  “Something like, Keep at the job. But talking is bad for work. The ox must make an example of buffalo.” Petrosino shook his head, thinking it over. “The structure is odd, the way someone who’s not Italian might word it.”

  “Sounds like a message for a cattle farmer,” Steffens quipped.

  “No,” Petrosino said. “The ox must make an example of buffalo. That’s the order to kill. The gang calls Petto ‘The Ox.’ And the barrel victim is from Buffalo. The Ox made an example of the man from Buffalo.” A chill knifed through Petrosino.

  “My Lord.” Tarbell held her hand over her mouth. “Then this is a fine clue.”

  “Maybe. They made it hard to prove. Look how many layers of secrecy they used. Someone writes the note in Italian, in block print so we can’t use a handwriting expert. Then they use your Caesar Cipher to encrypt it, and they pass it anonymously, and on top of it, they’re using generalities and nicknames in the message itself.”

  “You’re right,” Steffens said. “The cipher is simple, but the method is devious. And I bet they never thought a cop would understand it either. How many speak Italian?”

  “In the whole city? Maybe a dozen cops.”

  Petrosino took out his butcher book and flipped to the page where he had copied down the second note that Schmittberger found.

  Petrosino said, “This is a another one we found.”

  Steffens and Tarbell leaned in, watching as he consulted the codex and wrote down each letter. He groaned when he was done and pushed the translation on the table in front of them:

  FRJOLDPR O’HUED SHU OD YROSH.

  COGLIAMO L’ERBA PER LA VOLPE.

  Petrosino smiled as he thought of the two men who had been harassing him. “It says, Cogliamo l’erba per la volpe. ‘We pluck the herb for the fox.’”

  “That’s more of a riddle than the last one,” Steffens said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Petrosino mumbled. “The gang’s nickname for me is Pitrusinu. That’s Sicilian for ‘parsley.’”

  Tarbell nudged Steffens. “Parsley is an herb.”

  “And they intend to ‘pluck’ me, whatever that means. Maybe they don’t like how close I’m getting.” Petrosino poured himself a full glass of sherry and took it down.

  “I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  Petrosino brooded and took yet another shot of sherry. The note and the sweetness in his mouth irritated him. “It’s easy for you,” he said. “This barrel murder is a story, and the Syndicate is a theory of corruption. After you publish your work in a magazine, you’ll be done with it. But now I have to deal with looking over my shoulder.”

  “Are we in danger?” Steffens asked.

  “Nope. They won’t come after you. All the same, I should get on with my work.” Petrosino checked his pocket watch, slowed by the drinking, but focused on the next task. Salvatore Sagliabeni and the Morgue. He looked at Steffens and Tarbell. A somber veil darkened their faces. “If either of you are leaving, I’ll walk you to a carriage.”

  They walked downstairs into Washington Square and said their good-byes in the street.

  “I can walk you, Minerva,” Steffens said.

  “I think I’d be safer with Detective Petrosino.”

  “Suit yourself, I’m a little scared myself, truth be told,” Steffens said. “Joe, ring me tomorrow and tell me what happened with the victim’s son, would you? We should stay close now that the fires of evil are stoked.”

  Petrosino nodded, and Steffens waved good-bye.

  Tarbell took Petrosino’s elbow and tried not to falter as she walked, leaning against him. He tried not to look at the tall stalk of a woman on his arm. She had seemed content in her cups, but now an air of worry and loneliness followed her. Maybe that was what drew him to her. That was what drew him to the few people he liked. The loneliness they shared. He and Max were alone in the PD, an outcast and a squealer. Adelina was a young childless “widow” in a Ghetto where women were as prolific as barn cats. And here was this modern woman on his arm who had given up old notions of companionship for achievement. Tarbell was maybe the most tragic of them all because she’d chosen her path.

  “Every night as a child, I prayed to God to spare me from marriage and send me to college instead. Maybe I’m not suited for it. What do you think?”

  Petrosino looked at her and smiled without a word.

  “I don’t know why I said that.” Tarbell sighed as they walked toward a hansom cab on Sixth Avenue. “You remind me of a friend in college. There was a certain way he’d look at people. It would make you wonder what he was thinking, and then you’d just start talking to break the silence. You’d say things you’d never say to family or friends.”

  “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.” He opened the cab door and politely shook her hand. “Thank you for deciphering that note and for the sherry.”

  She was so close he could see the ridges of her lips. She held his shoulders, closed her eyes, and kissed him. He watched her, and she eventually opened her eyes slowly. Then her hands pulled away from his shoulders. The cab driver’s horse pawed at the ground in the silence. He kissed her again and felt sad for her.

  “You must have a gal already,” Tarbell whispered. “Please be careful with those threats.”

  She stepped into the cab, and he closed the door as she groaned from inside. In a city of so many, they shared the loneliness of ghosts, he thought. Maybe that was what this murder was about for him, too. The poor man died alone without ever saying good-bye to his wife and boy. Left by himself in the street to bleed to death in a barrel.

  “I’ll fix them, Benedetto,” Petrosino mumbled as he walked to Headquarters.

  Chapter 27

  He found Salvatore Sagliabeni asleep on the soft side of a plank in a police lodging room. The eighteen year old had just gotten in from a long train ride, and his dark boyish face jiggled as he snored. His shriveled mouth resembled that of his uncle, Giuseppe De Priemo. The rest of him wasn’t so boyish. He smelled of coal and had a wiry frame and the large knotty hands of a manual laborer.

  As soon as Petrosino entered the room, the boy’s snoring halted, and his eyes opened.

  Salvatore quickly sat up on his haunches and rubbed cheerless eyes at Petrosino.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” Petrosino s
aid in Italian. “I’m Detective Sergeant Petrosino. It’s a little late to go to the Morgue. We can put you up in a hotel and go at first light?”

  Salvatore planted his feet on the floor, yawning and shaking his head. “No, I’m ready now, sir. The police told my mother, but she doesn’t want to believe it’s him.”

  “As you wish, Salvatore.” Petrosino sighed. He’d seen this futile hope a thousand times before. “We’ll take a carriage. Put your coat on, it’s cold.”

  Outside, the horses were snorting steam into the cool stillness of the streets. Petrosino and Salvatore got inside the carriage, and Petrosino lifted the hatch to tell the police driver they were going to the Morgue. He studied the boy in the shadows as a gauze of clouds dimmed the moonlight and crows cawed from trees.

  “When was the last time you saw your stepfather?” Petrosino lit a cigar to warm up. The stupor from the sherry dwindled like coals of a dying fire, and the veins in his head thrummed.

  “Before he went to New York to help my uncle in Sing Sing. My stepfather wanted to see if he could be transferred to another prison closer to us in Buffalo.”

  “When did he leave for New York?”

  “In early April. He wrote my mother on April 13, saying he was coming home, but we never heard from him again.” Salvatore’s eyes glistened in the carriage’s grey light. “Do you think it’s him?”

  “You’ll have to tell me, kid. Did your mother ever write back to him in New York?”

  “She wrote him a note to come home quickly.”

  Petrosino nodded gravely. “We found a note like that on the victim. I’m sorry.”

  Salvatore turned to the window, looking out the carriage in silence the rest of the way.

  When they entered the Morgue, Petrosino led Salvatore up to a haggard attendant at a desk and flashed his badge. The attendant wrote down their names and Petrosino’s badge number 285 in an entry book. They quickly moved through dark corridors, not a soul in sight. Petrosino shoved open the door to the freezing mortuary chamber, and the poisonous air of the charnel house made them both gag. They could see their breath, and the hair on Petrosino’s wrists unfurled in the cold air. Salvatore was trembling and staring at the body.

  One electric globe shone down on the rotting and mangled body. The corpse had turned ghastly shades of green and violet, the face shrunken like melted wax, and the hole in the pubic mound grotesquely alien. Petrosino cursed under his breath and pulled a sheet across the body, so only the head could be seen. When the sheet settled on the body, putrid smells wafted up.

  Salvatore took three short steps toward the slab and let out a gasp, “Papa.” The boy crouched over Madonnia and kissed the forehead where the skin was the color of a robin’s egg. His voice wailed like a funeral dirge, “I loved him very much.”

  Petrosino felt like crying himself. He tried to console the boy and, after a few minutes, he pulled Salvatore into the hallway. The kid stood shakily, exhausted from weeping.

  “Stop crying,” Petrosino whispered. “Listen, you’re the man in the family now. You want justice now, don’t you?”

  Salvatore wiped his cheeks against his jumper. “Yes.”

  “You’ll stay at Bettini’s Hotel tonight. I want you to get some rest, because the District Attorney will want to talk to you, okay? We need you for the Inquest.”

  Salvatore took a deep breath and nodded. “Can I have my watch back?”

  “What watch?”

  “He borrowed mine because his was broken. He gave it to me for Christmas.”

  “You’re sure he had it with him?”

  “I’m sure. He looked at the watch at the Lehigh Valley depot before he came to New York. You must’ve found it with him? Please, it’s all I have to remember him.”

  Petrosino hugged the boy and patted his back. He thought of the evidence bins. It must’ve been deep into the night by now, but he wasn’t going to catch a single wink.

  Petrosino got Schmittberger out of bed at the officers’ quarters in Eldridge Street Station and told him about the pocket watch. They walked back to the Marble Palace and sneaked inside while the desk sergeant was nodding off. They were hoping to find Salvatore Sagliabeni’s pocket watch before McClusky or any of his Irish dicks would be awake.

  “The kid said it was a gold filled, hunting case watch,” Petrosino said. “There’s a locomotive engraved on the case, and scratches on the neck where he used his thumbnail to tighten a loose screw.”

  “Okay.” Schmittberger yawned.

  Petrosino unlocked what they needed from the evidence locker, and they went in search of a quiet room where they could dig through the evidence, somewhere other than the general assembly room for detectives. In the basement, there was a storage room that Petrosino thought would do just fine. They opened the door and heard the stilted breathing and snores of heavy slumber. Schmittberger turned on the lights, and two patrolmen blindly flailed their arms in the sudden brightness. Each was splayed across a table in his undershirt and uniform pants with brogans on the floor. It was a “cooping” nest known to every cop except the brass.

  One of the patrolmen sat up and muttered with a German accent, “Dis is our coop. Find somevhere else.”

  Schmittberger threw a bluecoat at the stout patrolman. “Rise and shine, girls!” Then he said in German, “Stehen sie, sie schweine auf!”

  The two patrolmen hurriedly dressed, whispering at each other, and tore out with cursory salutes against their crooked helmets. Schmittberger sat down at one table with his Baker’s Breakfast Cocoa, and Petrosino sat down at the other with a steaming cup of black coffee. Schmittberger had the evidence bags from the mafia gang, and Petrosino had a box of letters collected from Morello’s apartments. Petrosino wanted to read them himself to see if they connected The Clutch Hand to Madonnia and the murder. One of the naked bulbs overhead began buzzing and fading in and out as they began working.

  “I hope that’s not a message from above,” Schmittberger said. “I oughtta throttle you, by the way. When you poked me up, I was dreaming of the Fischbein twins. They were wearing red garters and brassieres and nothing else, and they kept saying they were Little Red Riding Hood, and I was the Big Bad Wolf come to eat them. Whispering the most vile dirty talk, too, like experts. I had an erection the size of an iceberg, and you had to go and ruin it for me.”

  “You need to go back to that sanitarium in Queens.”

  Petrosino scanned through the letters and glanced up from time to time to see Schmittberger pulling out jewelry and trinkets and pocket watches. Each sack had a tag scrawled with the name of the suspect’s belongings. Schmittberger stopped and looked perplexed, his face grey and heavy with lines from lack of sleep.

  “What’s wrong?” Petrosino asked.

  “We don’t have Lobaido’s belongings anymore. They took his traps when he killed himself.”

  “Well, you told Piper that he had a fancy watch with his initials and garnet stones, remember? That’s not the watch we’re looking for.”

  Schmittberger heaved a sigh. “I knew that. Just a little test.” He took out a pocket watch from Domenico Pecoraro’s bin and held it up. “What about this one? It’s gold. Look.”

  Petrosino walked over to the other table and studied the timepiece. It was a hunter’s case, in gold, but there was no locomotive engraved on it. Instead a fancy ‘P’ with seraphs and swirls adorned the cover. He looked closely at the pin to be certain. “Different watch,” Petrosino concluded. “We can ask Salvatore later to be sure, but there’s no locomotive engraving, and see there on the neck where that screw is. Not a scratch on it.”

  Schmittberger nodded dourly, and Petrosino sat back down to the letters. Several were from Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and kept referring to ‘making pastries.’ Petrosino wondered if it were a term for printing counterfeit money. It didn’t make much difference to him, because he was after murder clues. After two hours, he found nothing in the letters and grew frustrated while dawn broke with the sounds of roosters and
dogs and wagons rattling outside. He kept tasting the grit in his empty coffee cup, thinking about sleeping for a few hours.

  Schmittberger grew giddy from exhaustion and pulled out some of the useless papers found on the gang. He was trying to read in Italian, fumbling over the words, making Petrosino smile. “Say, Joe, this is a love note from Petto The Ox. What’s it say? Read it.”

  “How do you know it’s a love note if it’s in Italian?”

  “Well, someone drew hearts on it and a cupid’s bow, and it’s addressed to a ‘Cara Federica.’ I’m guessing that ain’t his dear old mudder.”

  Petrosino looked at the note. “It says, ‘Dear Federica, oh how I’ve missed your sweet kiss. Your belly is like bread dough and your hair smells like beer. I would like to get drunk in it Saturday.’ What a poet. ‘If you’ll be my gal, I’ll go to an artist on Division Street to have your initials tattooed on my arm. But he said he can’t do anything to remove your sister Marie’s initials. I’m sorry, do you forgive me? Kisses and embraces, The Ox.’”

  “Boy, that Petto’s a regular Mark Twain in love.” They burst out laughing. “Let’s find another one.”

  “Wait a minute, isn’t that the names of the two gals we questioned next door to the Star of Italy? Federica and Marie?”

  “That would make sense. Morello’s humping one, and Petto the other.”

  “We oughtta pay them another visit.”

  Petrosino hovered over Schmittberger’s shoulder as he thumbed through the documents in the bins. They went through all the suspects, finding licenses to carry concealed weapons, train schedules, Sicilian Union circulars, meal tickets, a flyer to attend barber college, a theatre program and ticket stub, advertisements for massage parlors and cheap men’s suits, newspaper pictures of chorus girls and motorcars, a government form to obtain a pushcart permit, and then something caught Petrosino’s eye in Petto’s belongings.