Eight New Cases Reported by City in Week
New Orleans Times-Picayune, 2/27/19:
DOCK BOARD SELLS NEW SIX MILLION BOND ISSUE
Expenditure Will Permit New Orleans to Complete the Industrial Canal
A $6,000,000 bond issue to be used in completing the Industrial Canal was authorized Wednesday night by unanimous vote of the members of the Board of Port Commissioners.
The board also voted to sell the bonds immediately by private sale, offered by the Hibernia Bank and Trust Company.
This bond issue of $6,000,000 is in addition to the $6,000,000 of bonds recently issued to finance the Industrial Canal.
“We are constructing a great waterway system which will take the lid off the development of New Orleans,” said President Thompson of the Dock Board. “With the canal, New Orleans can become one of the great manufacturing cities of the United States and one of the greatest world ports; without, we must content ourselves with a position of mediocrity and a reputation for incapacity.”
Mr. Thompson reviewed the history of the canal project from its inception, characterizing those who had opposed it as “a small minority of moss-backs, doubting Thomases and selfish private interests.” He charged that the former bond terms had caused “vicious and spectacular” attacks by hostile private interests. Revised costs estimates convinced the members of the board, said he, that the original $6,000,000 would not be adequate for the work. He stated that material benefits from the canal have already accrued to the city, employing thousands of men at the site. However, said Mr. Thompson, illustrating the need of additional funds, the people of New Orleans cannot expect a “gusher” if they insist upon “boring with a gimlet.”
MARCH 1, 1919—THE INDUSTRIAL CANAL—UPTOWN—SEVENTH WARD
They found the body in the canal. It made no sense. The corpse was buried twenty-five feet underground. But it wasn’t a skeleton. The man was barely dead.
They were alerted by the choking of the Texas. The body—the pelvic bone, to be precise—caught in the teeth of the dredge. From a forensic perspective, it was a miracle. Though the machine had digested the lower body, everything above the pelvis remained intact. The diggers found this half of the body dangling upside down from the teeth of the dredge like a mouse from a cat’s mouth. The coroner sent four men from his body squad to the scene. They pried what they could out of the teeth and covered it to the neck with a blanket. Bill noticed that the man’s mouth was stretched open. He had seen that before, in the Forest of Purroy. It meant the man died screaming.
“Don’t figure,” said Charlie, shaking his head. Since the July 4 shooting he had developed a strange way of shaking his head: using both hands, he rotated the cranium, as if trying gingerly to crack his neck. Bill couldn’t tell whether this was an affectation or the result of nerve damage but he didn’t want to ask in case Charlie was unaware of it.
They stood on the rim of the canal, which was more like a canyon. The body squad had erected four stakes around the corpse. The laborers, just a few yards away, had resumed their digging. There was no thought of taking a break. The dig had fallen far behind and Hercules couldn’t find enough able-bodied men. The conditions were unwholesome, hospitable to the plague, the mud attracting mosquitoes, blackflies, chiggers, opossums, rats—scourges that only multiplied when the project’s scope was doubled to accommodate the larger ships built since the war began. The deepening of the canal forced the diggers to go back over their tracks. That’s when they found the body.
Bill realized that his partner had been staring at him for a long time. Charlie had been speaking too, but Bill hadn’t heard any words.
“You shaking?” asked Charlie.
Bill looked down at his arms, his legs. He was as still as the corpse.
“I’ll admit it. I’m shaken myself.”
Bill caught the meaning. No, he wasn’t shaken. One more corpse meant nothing to him but more footwork, more questioning, more reports. If it turned out to be a homicide, as seemed likely, they would find the murderer or they wouldn’t. What difference did it make? Another corpse would appear the next day, or the next week. And so on. After Maze left, days, weeks merged. He wondered whether this was what immortality would feel like. As you rounded your first centenary and approached your second, your loved ones long dead, your interests curdled, novelty impossible, what could happen that had not already happened many times before? Ten, twenty, thirty decades in: at a great enough distance, all terrestrial concerns squiggled over the horizon. All, that is, but loss. Loss couldn’t escape beyond the horizon. It was the horizon.
Charlie put a clumsy hand to Bill’s forehead. “You don’t feel hot.”
“Tired.” Bill shook him off.
“Ever try sleeping?”
Bill did not know whether the fatigue had begun the day in October when Maze finally quit her job and her parents took her across the lake to their camp in Abita Springs, ostensibly to hide out from the influenza, or on July 4, the night Leonard Perl died. Or perhaps it began when he had seen Perl in the grandstand at the Pelicans game. Or beneath the Forest of Purroy.
“A laborer.” Charlie waved at a dive-bombing mosquito. “Guy gets tired—like you—and he falls down during the dig. No one sees. Mud falls on top.”
“He don’t look like a laborer.” The corpse was white. None of the diggers were white.
“He gets preserved in the mud. Like one of those monsters they find buried in ice at the North Pole.”
The body squad had borrowed tools from the diggers: pickaxes, a trenching shovel, a bucket of water that they poured over the torn flesh to loosen the soil.
“Why would anyone bury a man so deep?” said Charlie. “People would anyway notice a man digging a twenty-five-foot ditch.”
Bill had nothing to add. What detective instincts he once possessed had been siphoned by his investigation into the only mystery that still mattered to him: When had Maze decided to leave? The night of Perl’s death? He didn’t think so. She stayed another three months. They spoke most of that time—or at least she spoke, asking questions. He wanted to answer. But he couldn’t think of an answer that would reveal him as anything but a coward. I thought there might have been a flash of manhood in you. But you don’t have any fight and you probably never did.
He searched his memory for clues, behavior that might seem suspicious in retrospect. But he found no hard evidence, only circumstantial fact: the evaporation of sexual desire, which began shortly after his return from Europe; an awkward, silent supper on the night of his birthday in April, heavy with unspoken accusation; a subtle but persistent decline in the tidiness of the home. Perl’s death marked a turning point, and by October neither of them could take it anymore. They must have been the only two people in New Orleans relieved by the outbreak of the Spanish Death. It gave Maze’s parents an excuse to quarantine her across the lake, where they could nourish their vital humors with springwater, fresh air, and ample ventilation. He had not seen her since, apart from a single disastrous visit in January. He had often tried to determine when everything had turned between them but maybe that was the wrong question. A better question: When had everything turned inside him? Turned from strong to weak, brave to craven, alive to … whatever this was.
A man on the body squad waved up at them, trying to get their attention.
“I don’t see why we bother,” said Bill.
“The stink ain going to mellow with time,” said Charlie.
A ladder leaned against the lip of the artificial cavern. Bill let Charlie go first. Since the hospital, Charlie moved slower; he had lost some coordination and had gained weight. The buttered beans and fried chicken served in the Charity commissary, combined with a month of bed rest, had contributed about ten pounds, but since his release the weight gain had accelerated. His appetite, always healthy, had become violent, as if he were desperately trying to fill the hole that the bullet had made. Bill didn’t want to be beneath him.
But the ladder barely cre
aked, and Bill followed. He had descended only a few rungs when the smell swaddled him. Sour, ripe, thick, it sought out his eyes and the back of his throat. He paused halfway down, blinking. “Hell.”
“That ain the body,” said Charlie. “It’s the mud.”
Bill knew how mud smelled. Every New Orleanian did. After a rain the sewer gates clotted with it and the streets caked like the floor of a dried lake. But this was a different mud. Its stench was like a protest. The mud was outraged, violated by exposure to fresh air after hiding underground for millennia.
One of the coroner’s men pulled back the sheet. The corpse wore a torn undershirt through which bloodstains bloomed like roses from the stomach, heart, and shoulder. A whitish organ of some kind, a shrinking sea anemone exposed from beneath an overturned rock, oozed from a laceration in the neck. The pink nub of a cracked rib protruded from the chest. Blackflies danced on the skin, crawled, fed. The eyes were still obscured though Bill could tell from the position of the eyelashes that they were open. The body man tried to shut the jaw but it had hardened stiff.
“I’m not fixing to break it,” said the man. He had rubber plugs stuck in his nostrils. Bill asked if he had extras.
The body man nodded toward a sack on the ground. “I’d get ’em for you but—” He held up his hands; they were stained with blood and mud and worse.
“Nah,” said Charlie, when Bill offered him a pair. “I’m used to it already.”
Bill removed his jacket, rolled up his cuffs. He didn’t mind touching corpses but couldn’t afford to ruin his shirt. He wasn’t much for laundering since Maze left.
“Looks like an Albanian,” said Charlie. “Has the nose at least.”
“I wouldn’t assume the nose always looked like that.” Bill felt inside the mouth. The tongue was a dead salamander. The gums were dry, tacky. He found a few loose teeth enclosed in clods of mud.
“Maybe a Arab,” offered one of the body men.
“Anyone check the pockets?” asked Bill.
“Eighty-three cents. A pair of spectacles, shattered. A notepad, blank. A timepiece, ticking.”
“Cute.”
The man spat.
“Cause?”
“Cain say until the autopsy. But looks like death by sharp object.”
“You don’t need to be a coroner to figure that.” Purplish streaks had begun to form on the fleshy mass oozing from the neck.
“You don’t think—?”
“Not necessarily,” said Bill. “Could be a knife.”
“A big damn knife.”
“Or the teeth of that thing. The dredge.”
“That’s what the diggers seem to think.”
The machine slumped fifteen yards distant. It was still but its open mouth, crowded with sharp blades, gave it a grinning, predatory aspect, as if it were hungry for its next snack.
“The diggers are superstitious,” said the body man.
“They think it’s alive?” asked Charlie.
“They don’t think it’s alive. But they don’t think it’s dead.”
Bill considered this.
“Probably an ax,” Charlie concluded.
“Copycat?” said the body man.
Charlie pulled Bill aside.
“Mooney isn’t going to want to hear about this,” said Bill.
“Maybe not,” said Charlie. “But we better start asking questions.”
“The diggers won’t know a thing.”
Charlie looked at Bill blankly. “Why do I hafta keep explaining our job to you?”
Bill wasn’t ready to climb out of the canal. He wanted to look again at the corpse. Its eyes, specifically.
“Can you clear the mud off his face?”
The lead body man signaled to one of the others for the bucket. He poured what was left of the water over the head while another man brushed the corpse’s cheeks and nose. The mud flowed off. The eyes were open. They stared at Bill.
“He’s not Albanian,” he said.
“Dago?”
“I’d wager.”
“C’mon, Billy. Let’s get.”
Something itched at him. He thought it was the mud-clotted eyes, but that didn’t scratch it. He tried to remember the last time he did any police work beyond the exact minimum. Not since the Besemer attack; maybe as long ago as the highwayman case. “His pockets.”
The evidence bag was produced. There were the coins; eyeglasses, which not only had smashed lenses but bent frames, as if stepped upon; gum wrapper; notepad.
“Forgot about the gum wrapper.”
“Don’t worry about it.” They had overlooked something more important. The notepad wasn’t blank, not exactly. There was no handwriting but each page was embossed with the words ROSETTA’S GROCERY CO., 3241 COLISEUM ST. in light brown ink. Bill showed it to Charlie.
“Hell.”
“Thirty-two forty-one,” said Bill. “Where’s that?”
“Below Louisiana. Toledano about. You think he lived by there?”
“I don’t think he lived near the grocery. I think he lived in it.”
Charlie shook his head. “What now?”
“Do I have to explain our job to you?”
“There’s Detective Bastrop.” Charlie slapped Bill’s back. “I thought I’d lost him.”
Bill didn’t smile but he thought about smiling, which was something. He turned to the body men and pointed at his nostrils. “Mind if I keep these?”
* * *
In all but a single aspect did Rosetta’s resemble exactly every other Uptown corner grocery. Here was the chamfered corner, the porticoed doorway, the deep basins of olives, swimming in their blackish juices, all but blocking the entrance, and the rectangular side window filled with hanging salami, bronze cans of mustard, stacked anchovy tins. The name of the previous owner was visible under the single layer of paint slathered above the entrance. Inside, preserved vegetables floated like apothecary specimens in glass jars behind the counter and tubs of sweetly fragrant, fresh produce lined the wall. Charlie was immediately distracted by a pallet from a California farm containing white figs, black Mission figs, brown turkeys.
“A new shipment came today,” said a salesboy, approaching from the recesses of the stockroom, with its wine-stained kegs of zinfandel, Chablis, and sauterne, on sale for twenty-five cents a fifth.
“Where’s the grocer?” said Bill.
The boy puffed up. “I’m the grocer.”
Bill looked at Charlie, but he was fixated on the figs. “There an officers’ discount?”
Bill interrupted before the boy could respond. He thrust in the boy’s face the notepad with the grocery’s name. “Where do you keep these?”
“Right here.” The boy grinned sheepishly. “Behind the counter.”
“Show me,” said Bill.
When the boy turned, Charlie crammed a fistful of brown turkeys into his mouth.
Only in one way did Rosetta’s Grocery not resemble any other corner grocery: there was no grocer. Sometimes a grocer took on a stock boy, usually a son or a nephew, but no grocer in New Orleans would leave the operation and protection of a store to a child. The boy couldn’t have been more than twelve years old.
“Who do you give the notebooks to?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“Good point. Where is Mr. Rosetta?”
The boy’s tone turned formal, practiced. “Mr. Rosetta left on a trip, sir. Family emergency. It’s not known when he’ll be back.”
“Not known. And Mrs. Rosetta?”
“She’s with him.”
“You don’t say.”
“Trouble back home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Contessa Entellina.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s in Sicily.”
“Since when did they go back there?”
“Since when do I answer your questions? You want to buy something or nay?” The boy glanced at Charlie. “Sir? You owe me for four figs. That’s eigh
t cents.”
Bill flipped the boy a dime. “Rosetta said he was taking a trip? Or he just left?”
The boy took the dime to the register. He pulled the lever, the change drawer clanged open, and he removed two pennies.
“I got nothing left to tell you, sir.” The child smacked the pennies on the counter. “Gentlemen? I have a business to run.”
* * *
No one in the neighborhood seemed to know the kid’s name or how long he had been running the store. Old men feigned senility; old women crossed themselves or claimed incomprehension of English. A young man three doors down just smiled idiotically.
“I have nothing for you.”
“You shop at Rosetta’s?”
He smiled some more. “What’s Rosetta’s?”
This behavior was familiar. During the summer a source reported that the grocer Arthur Recknagel had his ax stolen from his yard. When an investigator called, Recknagel claimed he never owned an ax and could not explain why a panel was missing from his back door. Another grocer, Joseph LeBoeuf, called for police when he was awoken at night by a man chiseling a panel in the back door of his grocery. He told the beat officer that the suspect was tall, with a heavy build. But the next day, when Superintendent Mooney himself visited, LeBoeuf described the intruder as short, with a medium built. A couple of Negroes were arrested but after enthusiastic interrogations they were released.
It did not take a professional to see the similarities between the Recknagel and LeBoeuf cases and the attack on the Besemer couple. Or the earlier Maggio case, in which a grocer and his wife had their throats opened by an ax. More confusing was the August attack on poor pregnant Mary Schneider. Her sister found her bashed over the head with her own bedside lamp. Four teeth lay on the floor and a laceration traced the length of her scalp. As soon as she regained consciousness, she went into labor. There appeared to be no grocery connection. Schneider’s husband, who was not home at the time of the attack, was a downtown businessman. The crime seemed to be a burglary: seven dollars were taken from Mrs. Schneider’s wardrobe. But when Mr. Schneider searched his backyard, he discovered that his ax was missing.
The journalists got carried away. The Times-Picayune claimed an “ax-man” was on the prowl. The States ran an item mocking “sensational stories in other newspapers about the ‘ax man at large,’” but it was too late. By linking the crimes, and giving a name to the bogeyman, the States had legitimized the story. The “Axman” was born.
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