He wore an open-necked silk shirt and dark pants, and he did not rise as we approached. His face was lean, dominated by a big nose, and I glimpsed a livid scar on one temple.
“Deputy Chief Kelso,” he said with a wry smile, offering his hand. “I heard you was dead.”
Kelso laughed, and shook the mobster’s hand. “I heard the same about you, Mr. N. I heard you was murdered.”
“That day will never come,” Noto said in a wheeze. “I’ll die of the quack doctors first.” He jerked his head in my direction. “Who’s this?”
“This is a friend of mine, Micah Dunn. He does investigations.”
“A peeper, huh?” Noto said, wrinkling his nose. “Who’s he peeping on? Or have you got a new job?”
“I got a curiosity, that’s what. We thought maybe you could help us.”
“Why I wanna help you?” Noto asked. “Since when was I in the business of doing the cops’ work for ’em?”
Kelso’s look turned stern. “Cut the shit, Tommy. We go back, remember? I never hassled you except when you gimme some smart mouth on the beat and I had to break your head for you.”
“You gonna try and break my head again?” Noto’s brows arched.
“Naw. I figure you learned your lesson. Look, I ain’t here to give nobody trouble. You know I’m fair: I never tried to hang anything on you you wasn’t guilty of.”
“You never hung nothing on me, period,” Noto sneered.
“True enough. So maybe you owe me. I wanna ask questions about something happened forty-three years ago. Won’t hurt nobody to answer about something that old.”
“Hell,” Noto muttered, “who gives a damn about anything that old? I thought you was gonna ask what happened to Jimmy Hoffa.”
The two goons cracked smiles and Noto laughed quietly. “So what is it you want?”
“Max Chantry,” I said quietly. “They found him the other day.”
Noto’s head moved slowly to regard me as if I were an insect.
“Who?”
“Chantry,” Kelso repeated. “The reformer. Don’t you read the paper?”
“Just the sports.” Noto’s eyes closed for a second, and when he opened them again he nodded. “Chantry. I’ll be damned. Sure. I haven’t thought about him for forty years. He was gonna put City Hall in jail. He was one of Chep Morrison’s cronies. Gonna be the big D.A.”
“That’s right.”
“But he got too big for his britches.” The gangster’s hand rose, as if he were a student about to ask a question. “So he’s alive or dead or what?”
Kelso looked over at me.
“Bones,” I said. “That’s all there is.”
“Where?”
“Ship Island,” I said.
“Ship Island?” Noto wheezed out a chuckle. “That’s a hell of a place to plant somebody. So, what—you think I had something to do with it? I wasn’t nobody then. I never met the man.”
“You don’t have to meet a man to put a bullet in him,” I said.
Noto seemed to contract slightly.
“Kelso, your sidekick here could piss me off real easy.”
The Irishman smiled. “Sorry, Tommy. No intent to piss nobody off. I think what Mr. Dunn here means is you have a certain reputation. From your younger days, of course, and probably unearned. We all know you were never convicted of any murders.”
“Damn straight I wasn’t. And you know why?” He jabbed a bony finger in my direction. “Because I never done any. But if I had, and this is just a big if, I wouldn’t of buried ’em where anybody could dig ’em up later on. I’d of sent ’em where the fishes swim. Or chopped ’em into little pieces.”
He gave me a big smile.
“You understand what I’m saying?”
“I understand,” I said.
“But Chantry gave Big Al some trouble, didn’t he?” Kelso asked.
Noto shrugged. “Lotsa people give Al trouble. And Al give it right back. But you don’t blow up people for no reason; they got to do something to you. And this Chantry wasn’t nothing but a bunch of air. Why would Al worry about him?”
“Who said anything about blowing anybody up?” I asked.
“ ’Cause he’s the one who got his fucking car blowed up, ain’t he? I remember now. Only some friend of his got killed instead. And afterwards this Chantry was a one-man gangbusters. He had lotsa balls for a gimp.”
“You know anything about a list?” I asked.
“A list? A list of what, groceries?”
The two guards rendered the obligatory laugh.
“Crooked politicians,” I said. “He had somebody who was supposed to have been the bagman between City Hall and your friend Al. This man told him the name of everybody he took payoffs to downtown.”
Noto snorted. “That’s bullshit. Them politicians wasn’t on no payroll. They was only too happy to help out Don Silvano. They help him, he helps them. No payoffs. Just a mutual working relationship.”
“Chantry’s still dead,” Kelso said then, “whoever got paid off.”
“Yeah, and Kennedy’s dead, too. Oswald shot him. Not the CIA, not Castro, not the Family. If somebody killed Chantry, look somewhere else. Maybe his old lady and him had a falling-out.”
“And she took him all the way to Ship Island and buried him,” Kelso said.
“Just a fucking example, paisan. What I’m saying is I didn’t ice him and I don’t know who did. It was probably them guys at City Hall. They was the ones he was after.”
“Any of ’em still around?” Kelso asked. “They’d have to be pretty old.”
Noto passed a hand in front of his eyes. “Yeah. You might try Gene Hoffman, though. I think I seen him at a funeral a while back. Somebody else’s.” He wheezed the laugh again. “He was some kind of assistant city attorney or some damn thing. Until he spent a couple of years at one of them government farms, pruning rosebushes.”
Kelso nodded. “Thanks, Tommy. We’ll try him.”
“Good luck. Is there anything else? My income tax return, for example?”
“No,” I said, “but I thought maybe you could tell me what Mr. Righetti died of.”
“Anselmo Righetti? He died in his bed of old age, may he rest in peace.” The gangster made a quick sign of the cross. “What’s it to you?…
“I went to pay my respects but they asked me to leave. It’s the only funeral home I’ve ever seen with a bouncer.”
“Kelso, I think your friend’s got a oar outa the water.”
“You know the place, do you, Mr. Noto? Run by a fellow named Gillis, bald hair and glasses.”
“I know a lotta people. Kelso, this guy’s got a warped sense of humor. Get him outa here.”
Kelso nodded. “Sure, Tommy. Thanks for your time. If we need anything else we’ll be back.”
“Don’t bother.”
I started out, then turned:
“By the way, good luck with the license application for the casino,” I said.
“How …?” the old mobster leaned forward.
“One of those things you read in the paper,” I said.
Noto glared at me and made a contemptuous gesture to his goons, who showed us out the front door.
“Sorry if I spoiled it,” I told Kelso. “But I wanted to see if he knew Righetti.”
“Well, you found out. What’s this about a funeral home, anyway?”
I told him. “I have Sandy checking the ownership records right now, but my guess is it’ll turn out to be in the name of a corporation and that’ll be owned by another corporation. But I think we just talked to the real owner.”
“Maybe so. Tommy has a lot of businesses. Some of ’em are even on the up-and-up.”
We got back into the car. “But I’ve got to say I’m impressed. Not everybody gets an immediate audience with a Mafia don.”
Kelso roared. “Tommy ain’t half the don he thinks he is. Don Silvano was the don, the real capo. No Toes has always been trying to get out from under his shadow. And he d
id some stupid things trying. But we got a sort of truce, and he knows I ain’t on official business these days. So what’s he got to lose? Last thing he needs is another murder laid to him, while he’s trying to spend his declining years gracefully on all the money he stole.”
We started back away from the house and its aging gangster. He was old and failing, but he probably had the best doctors and home care. It was another reminder that, contrary to the old expression, crime does pay. And very well, at that.
“Well, I guess we got another stop,” Kelso said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “All we’ve got to do is find this Gene Hoffman. And hope he’ll talk to us.”
CHAPTER 9
We ate in a Chinese restaurant on Carrollton, and Kelso told me about the old days. Then, there’d been gang violence and extortions and plenty of vice, but the gangs had been Italian and Irish. The black gangs, with headquarters in the ghettos, were a phenomenon of the last twenty years.
“Sometimes,” he said, spearing a piece of moo shu pork, “I think they just oughta dynamite the city and start over. I mean, these guys like No Toes, at least you could talk to ’em. Now, it’s dog eat dog, and the cops can’t even go into one of them projects without an armored personnel carrier. They’re like their own little nation, foreign soil.”
I nodded. I’d heard the analogy before.
The old man’s eyes pinned me. “What’s eating you, son? You’re quiet.”
I managed a smile.
“I feel like we’re chasing a ghost,” I said finally. “I saw his bones, but there isn’t any flesh on them. I keep having the feeling that if I could see Max Chantry in the flesh, see him walk and talk and how he moved, I’d have a better idea what happened to him.”
“I know what you mean. I had a case like this back in the late fifties, when I was working homicide. Eighteen-year-old girl. They found nothing but her torso. Nobody could figure who she was, where she came from, even how she was killed. Boys fishing pulled her out of the bayou. Everybody else gave up. Except me. I made a special file. Not the one at the department. One at home. I put in everything I could think of. Even my own thoughts. I’d just wake up and jot ’em down. My wife, Mary, bless her soul, she had to put up with a hell of a lot. She told me later she thought I was going crazy. It eats on you. Gets to be a personal thing.”
He hunched over his plate, eyes seeing through me from under the craggy brows.
“I called her Helen, after Helen of Troy. Because nobody knows what she looked like, either, or really anything about her, except she caused a war and some of the world’s greatest literature. Helen …” He looked down into his plate.
“I guess I sent flyers to every police force in the civilized world. I personally visited every madam, and every pimp in the parish. Nobody knew nothing.”
“How about the butcher marks?” I asked. “Was she hacked, or cut, or sawed, or what?”
“Very good question. I remember thinking, If it’s just a nice neat job, maybe we can find a doctor or a medical student or even a fucking meat butcher. But it wasn’t. She’d been hacked apart, probably with an ax.”
He shoved his plate away and leaned back. His hand went into his pocket and emerged with a pipe.
“I kept trying to form a picture in my mind of that girl, to see what she really looked like, how she must have talked, walked, what color hair she had. And nothing would come.” He packed the pipe with tobacco. “Months passed. A year. A year and a half. I had other cases. But I never could forget the girl I called Helen.”
He flicked a match and lit the pipe tobacco.
“I remember in 1959, I think it was, I had some vacation time coming. I’d been working overtime a lot and Mary was worn out with taking care of the house and the kids. I’d promised her a nice vacation. We even had the time blocked out and I’d put in for leave. We were going to the West Coast.” He puffed thoughtfully. “Then somebody called me from up east. Some drifter had confessed to kidnapping, raping, and killing a girl he’d picked up in Louisiana, hitchhiking. He said he’d cut her in pieces. That year we took our vacation in Massachusetts instead of California.”
“And the drifter?” I asked.
“He didn’t do it. Nothing he said matched. I asked him if he carved the initials on her back and he said he had. Of course, there weren’t any initials. His story was all bullshit.”
He puffed on the pipe and exhaled a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke.
“So what finally happened?” I asked.
“Nothing. I moved up to administration after that. Captain. Inspector. Deputy chief. And I never knew who Helen was or who killed her or why. I just knew that if I’d ever seen her in the flesh, or even had a decent picture of her, it would’ve turned out different.” He jabbed his pipe at me. “That’s why I say there’s a chance with this Chantry. It happened forty years ago, sure, but there’s lots of people still alive who can remember. And those are the people we got to find.”
“Like this Hoffman,” I said.
“That’s right.” He reached into his pocket. “You got some quarters? Let’s see how many Hoffmans there are in the directory.”
I watched him lumber over to the pay phone in one corner of the dining room.
Somebody, probably Mancuso, told me once that every cop has one case that stays with them. Either they solve it and it becomes their triumph, or they fail and it becomes their nemesis. The Helen case was obviously Kelso’s. And he was telling me that the Sandman was going to be mine.
Because Max was still the Sandman, and might always be—unless I could make a real person of him, somebody living, breathing, sweating, and not just a pile of bones in a tidal marsh.
I felt cold all of a sudden. The man had been dead forty-three years. What chance was there of bringing him back to life? He wasn’t Lazarus and I wasn’t Jesus Christ.
Kelso’s voice drifted over to me but it was too low for me to make out the words. He seemed to be on to something, judging from the length of the conversation, and when he finally hung up the phone I saw him write something on a slip of paper.
“Nursing home near Harahan,” he said. “I talked to a nephew; said I was an old friend. He said not to expect much.”
We took I-10 to Kenner and then went south on Williams, crossing the Airline Highway. The airport was to our right and I tried to shut it out, because it brought back memories of seeing Katherine off and knowing in my gut that it might be the last time.
Ahead of us was the train station. The Kenner city fathers had restored the main street and all the buildings, all the way to the levee, where they had created a park. It was a nice park, and Katherine and I had stopped there once to eat a sandwich on one of our weekend outings. There were a few people out now, with blankets spread on the levee, and I looked away as we swung left down the river road.
In the old days the river frontage had been taken up by plantations. Today, most of the plantations were gone, replaced by a series of towns that over time had melted together into a single settlement that stretched back to New Orleans.
Kelso pointed to a drugstore and I stopped while he went in. When he emerged it was with a box of candy.
“Never go in empty-handed,” he said with a wink. I nodded. It was a good idea.
We drove another mile and then came to a road that entered from the left. Kelso motioned for me to turn.
“I had an aunt in this place,” he said. “It costs an arm and a leg. I’ll eat my gun before they ever put me in a place like that.”
We came to a wrought-iron fence that defined a manicured lawn and a scatter of live oaks. Set back a hundred yards was a two-story building with pillars; it had probably once been the big house of a plantation. The sign said OAK ACRES; we turned up the drive, passing a croquet game in progress, and stopped in the small parking lot that had been carved out of the lawn.
The inside smelled like lilacs, the kind that come from a spray can, and I figured it was a handy coverup for the medicinal smell normally ass
ociated with such a place.
The woman at the front desk smiled. She was sixtyish, trying to look forty, but despite a carefully sculpted figure, the lines around her eyes gave her away.
“We’re friends of Mr. Eugene Hoffman,” I said. “Is he having visitors?”
The woman’s face brightened. “Mr. Hoffman? Yes, of course. It’s so nice for you to come see him. Are you family? No? Well, they really don’t come here very often. It has such an effect on them, you know. You can just tell the ones that have families that care and those that are just put here. Not that his family doesn’t care, you understand. I never meant to imply that.” A hand flew to her throat.
“No, of course not, darlin’,” soothed Kelso. “We never thought that at all. To tell the truth, the fault has been ours. We were so close to the man at one time and then we just kind of let it slip away. But today we had to be out this way and I said, ‘I wonder if Gene would want to see us.’ ” He held up the box of candy. “You see, we brought him something. I hope he can have ’em.”
“I’m sure he’ll appreciate that. Let me call back and have someone show you to his room.”
I heard her ask somebody if he was having a good day. The answer seemed to be vague because she oohed and ahhed a lot and her brows rose and fell. She hung up the phone and gave us another smile.
“Mr. Gordon will be with you in a minute.”
We stood aside, watching some of the tenants come and go. They seemed happy enough, I thought, except that that their smiles were a little too fixed, their eyes a little too glazed. Or was that just my imagination? Maybe I was finding what I expected to find in the first place.
Mr. Gordon was a wiry, bald man in his late forties, dressed in hospital whites. His tattoos told me he’d been at sea and I pegged him for a retired chief petty officer.
“Interesting job?” I asked, as he whisked us along the hallway and up the stairs, humming under his breath.
“Keeps you busy,” he said cheerfully. I caught a glimpse of a dayroom and people watching television. “Of course, we’ve got an elevator, if that’s what you’re wondering. This house used to be a mansion or something, and they had to alter it for the old folks. We even have an annex behind the house. It’s real nice.”
The Last Man to Die (The Micah Dunn Mysteries) Page 7