The Last Man to Die (The Micah Dunn Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  I told him I understood. I’d have to drop work on the Gourrier case. But that didn’t mean I had to drop work on the death of Max Chantry.

  It was dark by the time I got back. Sandy was in the office, a worried look on her face.

  “I heard there was some excitement,” she said. “You been playing target again?”

  “Looks like it.” I told her about the shooting.

  “Just goes to show what happens when I leave you alone,” she said. “I was following the girl and when I saw her come to your place I dropped her so I could make some more calls about the funeral home. I didn’t have much luck with the secretary of state.”

  “No matter. I think I know who owns it.”

  “A family business?”

  “You got it. The question is, Why they were selected to bury Max Chantry, when they’re the ones who everybody thought killed him?”

  “Could be chance,” she replied. “Who knows who chose the funeral home?”

  “His widow knows,” I said.

  “You going to ask her?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not even sure her son will let me in. And if he does, how will I know if she’s telling the truth?”

  “Maybe the son’s the one you need to ask. Maybe he made the arrangements.”

  “You don’t know Julius.” I reflected for a moment and then wrote some names on a sheet of paper. “Tomorrow, see what you can find out about these. They were connected to City Hall around 1948 or ’49.”

  Sandy picked up the list and read out loud:

  “LaMatta, Fortier, Dennehy, Landry …” She shook her head. “Jesus, Micah, do you have any idea how many Fortiers and Landrys there are in New Orleans? And probably quite a few LaMattas.”

  “I know,” I said. “Just do the best you can on the phone. And get hold of Carol Busby, tell her who you are and tell her I said you were going to spend the night with her.” I scribbled out a note. “Give her this. Things are getting too dangerous for her to be running around without protection.”

  When Sandy had gone I sat down at my desk and stared at a blank sheet of paper. Finally I wrote the names of the people I had talked to so far.

  “Madeline Gourrier,” I wrote, and put an X by her name. Then I drew a line to the name Betty Martello beside it. By “Martello” I placed a question mark. On the other side of “Gourrier” I wrote, “Joe Hunt,” and connected it to “Gourrier” with a dash.

  Under “Gourrier” I printed “Ted Frake” like the axle of a wheel. Under Frake’s I put my own name, and next to it “Carol Busby.”

  It took me a long time to decide where to put the next names: Tommy Noto, Eugene Hoffman, and the man at the funeral home, Harville Gillis. Finally I decided on a separate sheet of paper. I arranged them in a roughly triangular fashion and at the center, in capital letters, I wrote “MAX CHANTRY.”

  Beside MAX CHANTRY I wrote “Lydia Chantry Goodfather” and under them, in genealogical fashion, “Julius.”

  I considered the two pages for a long time and then I taped them together, side by side.

  Then it occurred to me that my name and Carol’s should be on both sheets of paper. Or should Max’s be on both? Was the link our names, or Max’s, or both?

  The more I looked at the two sheets the blanker they seemed. Surely there were other names that belonged there, the names of people like LaMatta and Dennehy and Fortier and Landry and Angelloz and a small-timer named Angelo Marconi who was found in the river a month after Max Chantry’s partner died.

  I stirred in the chair. His partner. What was the name? Levinthal? Herb Levinthal.

  I wrote it down under Max’s. Of course. He must have had a family, someone I could talk to. So far I’d only gotten the view of an adoring wife and a couple of crooks who’d had no use for him.

  There were over a dozen Levinthals in the directory, but only one Herbert. I called and got a male voice.

  “My father,” the man said. “You must be talking about my father. But he’s been dead for forty-odd years.”

  He had a regional accent, leaving off his terminal rs and giving a slightly Germanic flavor to his diphthongs. I wondered if his family came from Gretna, across the river.

  “He was killed in a car accident, I believe,” I told him, reminding myself to go slow.

  “It wasn’t exactly an accident,” the man said. “Do you mind telling me what this is about?”

  “It’s some historical work I’m doing,” I told him. “It might be easier to explain in person.”

  “I see. Is this about Max Chantry? I read the newspaper story about his being found.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re …?”

  I gave him my name.

  “Is this for another newspaper article, or what?”

  “I don’t know what form it will ultimately take,” I said truthfully.

  “Really. Well, why don’t you drop around my office tomorrow morning, say about ten-ish? I work in the engineering division, Corps of Engineers, down on the river.”

  “I know where it is,” I said.

  “Just give your name to the guard at the gate and tell him you’re there to see Herbert Levinthal.” There was a hesitation and then the phone clicked.

  I had another strange dream that night. In it I was limping down a city street, knocking on doors, but every time a door opened they told me the person I’d come to see was at another address. And when I got to the last door, they invited me in and I saw all the faces of the people I’d been looking for, smiling at me. That was when I realized that they were dead and that the door behind me was locked shut and there was no way out.

  CHAPTER 12

  The headquarters for New Orleans District, Army Corps of Engineers, is a contiguous series of three, three-story boxes of prefab steel and glass that scowl down from the levee at the uptown section of New Orleans like a beached ark. Until the 1980s the Corps worked out of temporary buildings, but then their sense of mission got the best of them and they built something that, like most Corps projects, you couldn’t miss. No matter that it wouldn’t win any prizes for originality; nothing much the Corps does would.

  I crossed the railroad tracks and stopped at the gate, where a private security guard took my license number and asked me who I was going to see. When I told him, he said it was on the second floor and handed me a visitor’s pass, good for any of the marked slots in front of the building. I wound my way through the vast parking area. To my right was the river, a quarter-mile expanse of gray and brown, and just a few yards off the near bank was a piece of wood with marks on it and numbers. The famous Carrollton Gage. If the water level ever got to 24 feet, it was time to evacuate the city.

  I found a parking spot in front of the central building and went up the steps and through a set of glass doors into a marble lobby. A stand-up display extolled the Corps’ mission, and a poster on one wall insinuated that everything good in America was enclosed by these walls. I quickly found the elevators and punched in the number 2.

  When the elevator stopped I found myself in a mazelike hallway that wound past endless doors, identical except that each had a different sign: WATERWAYS, LEGAL, ENGINEERING.

  I opened the one that said ENGINEERING and found myself confronting a beehive of tiny cubicles. Beyond them I could catch a glimpse of blue sky, but for those stuck in the middle I thought it must be a dreary existence. I asked the woman in the closest cubicle where I could find Herbert Levinthal.

  She pointed to a door on one end, which seemed to be about the only private office in the place. “Is he expecting you?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  I threaded my way back, wondering if a government sinecure was worth the punishment of looking at a blank wall all day.

  The door at the back said HERBERT I. LEVINTHAL, JR., P.E. CHIEF ENGINEER. I knocked and a few seconds later I heard a voice tell me to come in.

  The man behind the desk rose as I approached. Maybe fifty-five, he wore a bow tie and had hair that wa
s fast turning white. He stuck out a hand and I saw his fingers were stained yellow from nicotine.

  “I’m Micah Dunn,” I said. “We talked on the phone.”

  He beckoned me to a chair, placed so I could share his view of the river.

  “You’re a private detective,” he said and waited for my response.

  “That’s right.”

  “I looked your name up in the business pages and there you were. Mind telling me what this is about and how you’re involved with the Chantry business?”

  When I’d finished he got out a cigarette and struggled at lighting it.

  “This is amazing,” he said. “I had no idea.”

  He stared out the window at the brown surface of the river, where a tugboat fought its way upstream with a string of barges.

  “I hadn’t thought about Uncle Max for ages. Not since my mother died, anyway, and that’s been twenty years.”

  “Uncle Max?”

  He nodded. “That’s what we called him, my sister and I. I was fifteen when he disappeared and she was ten. He was always like an uncle to us, buying us little things. He even gave me a slide rule when I said I might want to become an engineer.”

  “Your family was close to him.”

  “God, yes. Dad met him while Max was still in law school. Dad had Uncle Max do some work for him and was so impressed he offered him a job when Uncle Max got out, which was, I think, in about 1940. Of course, they didn’t practice for more than a couple of years before the war came and Uncle Max went away.”

  “Your father stayed?”

  “He had a heart murmur. They wouldn’t take him, and he had a family, too, but he wanted to go. He’d heard what Hitler was doing to Jewish people.”

  “Max must have been pretty sharp.”

  “He was a fireball. That’s how Dad used to describe him. ‘Your Uncle Max the Human Fireball.’ Max and Dad agreed on most things, but Dad wasn’t at all like Uncle Max was. With Max, it was always, Plunge in, take the bull by the horns. I remember Mom saying that Dad let him do what he wanted because he wouldn’t listen to anybody, anyway.”

  “He was a hothead?”

  Levinthal smiled. “I think he had that tendency. He was a puritan, in any case. And he just couldn’t stand what he felt was an injustice.”

  “I think there was one case that got him into the fight against City Hall,” I suggested.

  “Right. Something about a man Max thought they were trying to frame. He got the man acquitted but then something happened to the man right afterward. Max never forgave the politicians and mobsters. He was sure it was something they ordered. After that, Max was the man on the white horse. He was always making speeches about the corruption in the city and how it ought to be cleaned up. I remember one day Dad said, ‘Well, Max, if you’re going to make all those speeches, you might as well run for office.’ So Max did. And Dad helped him.”

  “That was the D.A.’s race. Tell me, was Max a serious candidate?”

  “Who knows? Everything’s possible in politics. But I got the impression Max wouldn’t have won, at least from Dad’s comments. You see, in politics, especially here, you’ve got to make deals. Even a reformer like Chep Morrison made deals. You can’t just stand up and claim purity. People in this town expect results and they’re suspicious of saints. The guy in the hair shirt who throws out the bums downtown one day may be looking at his own little sins the next.”

  “Was your mother as fond of Max as your father?”

  The engineer shrugged. “Sure. But sometimes Max kind of unsettled her. She was Jewish, like my father, and she was sensitive to how rough politics could get. She thought Max didn’t always realize what he was getting into.”

  “What about Max’s wife? Were you all friendly with her?”

  “Miss Lydia? Sure. But you know, she was different from Max.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Sonniers were old New Orleans money. Her father was a prominent obstetrician, a king of Rex back in the thirties. Max wasn’t exactly his type. He was a newcomer, a poor boy from the Irish Channel who worked his way through school. His father drank himself to death when Max was ten and his mother died of overwork, from scrubbing floors, five years later. Here was Max always talking about the Spanish Civil War and the fight against fascism. And he picked a Jew to practice law with.” Levinthal laughed. “I heard Lydia’s family had him down as a secret Communist. It must have been hard on Lydia, like she was walking a line. At least, that’s what I picked up from my parents.”

  “But Max and Lydia got along.”

  “Oh, I think they were very much in love. That’s what my mother used to tell me afterwards. We all went on vacations sometimes to Mom and Dad’s cottage on the Gulf Coast. Mom used to say they looked like lovebirds.”

  “What did your mother think about Max? I mean, it was his crusade that got your father killed.”

  “If she was angry at him she never showed it. I remember, after the car bombing, she said that Max had done what he felt he had to do and my father had tried to help him, and she just wished Max would be able to bring to justice the people behind it. If there was bitterness, it was at the system that kept these people safe.”

  The tugboat had moved what seemed a few feet, and the first of its barges was already out of sight.

  “Do the names Fortier, LaMatta, Landry or Dennehy mean anything to you?”

  “I know a Bob Fortier. He’s in Planning here. And I’ve known several Landrys. Why?”

  “Their names came up from the Chantry case.”

  “I don’t think the people I know are connected with that.”

  I tried another shot in the dark: “How about a Nick Angelloz or an Angelo Marconi?”

  “No.”

  “Al Silvano?”

  “No.”

  I changed the subject: “Did Max have brothers or sisters or any other relatives?”

  “He had a brother who died in the war and I think one who died of alcoholism in the fifties. Mother always spoke of him as if he were an orphan, completely alone. I looked up ‘Chantry’ in the phone book once; there weren’t any.”

  I was trying to decide which way to go from this dead end when Levinthal spoke again:

  “You know, I remember Uncle Max quite well. Especially after the bombing. He was burned going after my father. When he got out of the hospital we went over to the house to see him. It was the family home on Fontainbleau, the one Lydia inherited. Max never liked it—too ostentatious—but he agreed to live there for her sake. Anyway, I’ll always remember: when he came out of the bedroom to see us, he had his arm in a sling. He told us that our father had been killed by some bad people, and that they were really trying to kill him, and they’d missed, and that he was promising us they wouldn’t get away with it. He took out a little Torah Dad had given him and held it up for us to see and he said, ‘I swear I will bring these people to justice.’ I believed him, too. We all did.”

  “Chantry was in the office when the bomb went off, I understand.”

  “Talking to some reporter on the phone. Fortunately, the secretary wasn’t there. Her desk was right by the window. She would’ve been shredded.”

  “Do you think she—”

  “—could’ve had anything to do with it? Good God, no. She was completely trustworthy.”

  “I hear the person most likely responsible for the bombing was found in the river.”

  Levinthal smiled. “That’s true. Some hoodlum. Or, at least, that was the story we heard. Of course, you’ve got to understand, I was only fifteen at the time. I wasn’t completely aware of all the nuances. Mother told me about a lot of it later on. By then my father had become a saint and Max was St. George slaying dragons.” He managed a chuckle.

  “Max went after the brains behind the bombing, though, right?”

  “That’s what I heard. But he never had a chance. This gangster, Silvano, was too well insulated. They always are. Max had to try to get to him through underlings,
the people on the famous list. But before Max could prove anything on any of them, poof! Max was gone.”

  I nodded. “Your sister, is she living here?”

  “She was killed in an accident five years ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him.

  His head inclined in acknowledgment.

  “How do you like the view?” he said suddenly, catching me by surprise.

  I looked through the glass at the river, where the tugboat was almost out of sight now.

  “I like it a lot better than those cubicles out there.”

  “Yes. I do, too. I fought to get this corner office when the new building was put up. There’s something about looking out at the river that puts everything into perspective.”

  He rose and went to a wall map; I saw that it was the lower Mississippi valley.

  “In 1926 people in the Corps of Engineers and the government thought they’d pretty well tamed Old Man River. All you had to do was build the levees higher and make more of them. We had a levee system going all the way to St. Louis.” He leaned back against the wall, a wry smile on his face. “Late that year, there were heavy rains, and early the next year more rains. People downstream, in New Orleans, got worried, and they asked the Corps of Engineers what would happen if there was a flood. The major at Vicksburg District said, ‘We can hold all the water in sight.’ The officer in charge of the New Orleans District said pretty much the same thing. What they didn’t realize, of course, was that by building the levees higher upstream, and by putting levees everywhere there was a river, they were preventing the normal seasonal flooding and sending a single superflood right toward New Orleans.” He pointed out the window. “For a while it was touch and go with the Carrollton Gage. People didn’t know if they were going to have to evacuate the city or not. But finally they dynamited the levee south of here and that relieved some of the pressure. The next year the Corps started building the floodway system and everybody breathed a sigh of relief. And it’s a pretty good system. But you know what?” He turned around to face me. “I don’t take a damn thing for granted. That old river is stronger than the Corps of Engineers. The river is a force. It’s something you can tinker with, but in the end it’ll have its way.”