by Ray Celestin
‘Into the madding crowd,’ he mumbled to himself.
‘Say what?’ Perez asked, glancing up from the notebook with a frown and a dart of his eyes in the rearview mirror. But Michael had already opened the passenger-side door, flipped his homburg onto his head and stepped out into the street.
He strode towards the far end of the cordon, hoping to avoid being noticed by taking the longer route, but Michael was a lurching type, singular and easy to spot. He was a head taller than most other men, with gangly, awkward limbs, and a face razed red and bumpy by smallpox. As he approached the cordon, he pulled the homburg low, but a beady-eyed reporter happened to turn his way at just the wrong time. Michael saw him nudge one of his colleagues and whisper, and in an instant the crowd erupted. Cameras swung towards him and a riot of flashbulbs strobed and popped, sending little clouds of soot into the air that mottled the fog. The paper men shouted his name and bellowed out questions. Angry Italian phrases flew his way. He carried on pushing past the throng, and after a few seconds of jostling he made it to the cordon and through to the other side. He nodded hello to a few of the patrolmen that he recognized, stony-faced, annoyed-looking men, none of whom bothered to respond. A young, earnest beat cop in a starched blue uniform trotted down the front steps to greet him.
‘Morning, sir. The victims are this way,’ said the beat cop, a greenhorn called Dawson, freshly returned from the war and eager to prove his worth. He held his hand up to the storefront with a smile, and Michael thought there was something of the maître d’ about the gesture. He nodded his thanks and Dawson led him up the front steps and into the dim interior of the grocery.
The store was lined on all sides with neat pinewood shelves crammed with tins of fish, meat and assorted Italian delicacies that Michael had never heard of. Drums of olive oil were piled high along one wall, and festooned from the rafters were upturned bunches of dried oregano that to Michael’s mind lent the store a grotto-like air.
At the far end was a glass counter filled with breads and foul-smelling cheeses, and a Dutch meat-slicer, its cranks and disc-blade gleaming, a leg of pork still lying in the tray. The cash register stood next to it, and as Michael expected, it was completely undamaged. Beyond it was the door into the domestic part of the building. They approached, and Dawson held up his hand again. Michael, unsure of what to make of the boy, nodded and smiled. He took off his homburg and stepped through the door.
The living room was cramped, illuminated by a greasy light, and made smaller by the officials drudging away in it. Two patrolmen were taking an inventory, a doctor from the Coroner’s Office was bent over one of the bodies, and a photographer, a Frenchman with a portrait studio in Milneburg, readied a new roll of nitrate for his camera.
Michael inspected the room – a dark wood table and a sideboard filled most of the space, a window looked out onto the side of the neighbors’ house, and at the back a door led into the kitchen. None of the furniture had been upset or overturned, and a gospel book still lay at one end of the table. The walls were covered in floral wallpaper, yellowing and ancient and spotted with mold. Photographs of somber old Sicilians competed for wall space with an accumulation of cheap religious images – crucifixes, Madonnas, postcards of cathedrals and pilgrimage sites. In the space that led into the kitchen were the bodies of the two victims, splayed out on the linoleum floor in a pool of dark, resinous blood.
Michael crossed the room and knelt next to the bodies. The wife was short and plump, with aged skin and salt-colored hair. Dried blood had glued her nightdress to the rolls of fat around her midriff, marking out the curve of her figure. Michael could make nothing of her face, which had been so viciously attacked with a sharp object that it resembled less a human head than some kind of crater, around the lip of which a handful of flies buzzed frenetically.
The husband was slumped by the window. Most of Michael’s view was obscured by the doctor who was still examining the body, but he could see the man had wounds similar to his wife’s. His right arm was outstretched and pointed towards the sideboard, whose lower drawers were streaked with finger-wide lines of blood.
Michael shook his head and took a last, sorry look at the two corpses. He had learned it was best not to dwell on the savagery his job confronted him with, so he crossed himself, a token gesture that somehow helped insulate him from it all, then he stood and stretched the tension out of his knees. Behind him the photographer took a snap and the flashbulb popped in the stillness.
Michael wiped the blood from the soles of his Florsheims onto an already ruined Persian rug, stepped over the wife’s body and entered the kitchen. An axe had been left by a cupboard, propped up on its rough-hewn handle. Michael noticed fragments of bone speckled along the blood-encrusted blade. In the sink there was more blood and a few crumbs of mud. The door from the kitchen into the yard behind the house had been forced open from the outside, the frame around the lock an explosion of jagged wood. Michael stepped into the yard and the morning cold pressed itself against his face. On all three sides, high wooden fences cut off the view and gave the yard an eerie stillness. Next to the door was a haphazard pile of firewood, and beyond that, a barren space occupied solely by weeds and rusting metal trash. Michael looked around for a moment, then returned to the clammy warmth of the living room.
‘Dawson? What have we gathered so far?’ He pulled a chair from under the table, sat, and motioned for Dawson to do the same. Dawson sat and read from a polished leather notebook. ‘Victims were Mr and Mrs Joseph Maggio. Fifty-eight and fifty-one years old respectively. Sicilian immigrants. Owned the store a couple of years. Neighbors said they moved in from somewhere in Gretna. I called headquarters – neither of them had any convictions.’
Michael nodded. Mr and Mrs Maggio fitted the profile – Sicilian shopkeepers with no criminal ties, seemingly picked at random. In the preceding attacks, the killer the press had dubbed the Axeman had entered the victims’ residences at night and, as the name would suggest, dispatched them with an axe, showing considerable relish in what he was doing, and no interest whatsoever in burglary or molestation. Aside from the Maggios, the Axeman had already attacked three households, killing among others an infant and its mother. And with each attack the violence had increased, becoming more gruesome and crazed.
‘The neighbors saw nothing unusual,’ continued Dawson, ‘no one arriving; no one leaving; no screams or shouts; no noise of a break-in.’
‘Means of entry?’
‘No clues whatsoever as to how he got in, or left. And here’s the kicker, sir – the room was locked from the inside when the bodies were discovered.’
The killer had a habit of leaving rooms that way. Either he exited from windows which slid closed after him, or he picked locks shut from the outside after he’d finished. These explanations hadn’t stopped the press from painting the Axeman as some kind of supernatural being with the ability to float through walls. New Orleans was a superstitious place at the best of times, and now a sizeable portion of the city believed they were under attack by some form of demon.
‘Who kicked in the kitchen door?’ Michael asked, remembering the scene at the back of the house.
‘That’d be . . .’ Dawson flicked through his notebook. ‘Patrolman D. Hancock, sir. The wife’s niece discovered the bodies. She helped out in the shop. No one was answering when she arrived this morning so she walked round the back. Spotted the wife’s body from the window. Hancock was first to the scene.’
‘Any tarot cards?’ asked Michael.
Dawson nodded, reached over to the sideboard and handed Michael two bloodstained cards. Michael inspected them – the Justice card and the Judgment card. Like the ones they’d found on the previous victims, they were expensively made, hand-painted, bigger than normal playing cards, and rendered in lurid reds and purples, with outlines in black and gold ink. The Justice card portrayed a robed man sitting on a throne, sword in one hand, scales in the other. The Judgment card showed an angel flying high above a hellish
, barren landscape, while a crowd of naked sinners pleaded to it from the ground. On the reverse was the usual intricate, monochrome pattern found on all playing cards, but this one had depictions of tiny animals weaved into the design. The animals seemed to be calling to each other, crying out against their geometric prison.
‘Where were they found?’ he asked, handing the cards back to Dawson.
‘In the victims’ heads, sir,’ said Dawson bashfully. ‘Inserted into the wounds.’
Michael nodded. He knew the Mafia sometimes left tarot cards at execution scenes, calling-cards to let people know what happened to those who didn’t toe the line. But Michael also knew the Mafia didn’t butcher grandmothers and children. And if the attack was an execution, what had a God-fearing elderly couple done to deserve it?
Most homicides were committed by people known to the victim, and in New Orleans every community stuck to their own. If a Sicilian had been killed, the most likely person to have done the killing was another Sicilian. And since the victims had all been shopkeepers, and Sicilian shopkeepers were invariably mixed up with the Mafia, it all pointed in one direction – the Family. But the savagery of the attacks and the scattering of tarot cards, with their links to voodou, had convinced half the city that the Axeman was a Negro – despite the fact that not a single person had actually seen the killer. In neighborhoods all across town, colored men were being chased through the streets by mobs. It was only a matter of time before there was a lynching.
The Axeman was stoking up distrust in a city already full of suspicion. Each of New Orleans’s communities fenced itself off from its neighbors: the Creoles of color to the north; the Irish to the south; the Negroes to the west; the Italians in Little Italy in the center; with enclaves of other groups – Chinese, Greeks, Germans, Jews – scattered about like pawns on a chess board. Only in the very center of town, in the French Quarter, in Storyville, in the business district, was there any intermingling. The segregation caused suspicion, and the suspicion furthered the segregation. And now there was an Axeman lighting a flame under it all, causing all these closeted people to rub and spark against one another, and Michael was the man the city had entrusted to put a stop to it all.
From somewhere in the backyard, the noise of a woodpecker drilling its head into a tree floated into the room. The doctor stood at this point, groaning as he did. He was an old man with a rusty complexion and a portly physique. An elaborate white mustache adorned his upper lip, combed in the Victorian style into two great walrus arcs.
‘Knees ain’t what they used to be,’ he said in a rough, cigar-smoker’s voice. He tottered over to the table, slumped into a chair next to Michael and fumbled through his pockets for a three-pack of Fonsecas. He offered one to Michael, who refused with a wave of his hand.
‘I’ve got my own,’ he said, taking a silver cigarette case from his pocket. He opened it and took a Virginia Bright from inside. The doctor struck a match and the two men shared it.
‘It’s the same old story, son,’ said the doctor, shaking the flame from the match and dropping it onto the table. ‘Victims were dispatched by the usual means. I’d estimate the time of death as between eleven and one last night. No signs of rape. Can’t say much more for now.’ The doctor shrugged and took a long puff on his cigar. ‘What do you say?’ he asked Michael, raising his eyebrows. It was the same expectant look Michael had been seeing increasingly since the murders had started. He peered over to the two corpses lying on the floor, barely a yard from where he and the doctor were chatting.
‘I’d say at about eleven or twelve o’clock last night the Maggios were sitting here in their living room. Wife was sitting over there, reading scripture.’ Michael motioned to the gospel book on the far side of the table. ‘Not sure what the husband was doing. Maybe she was reading it to him. Anyways, he was sat over here, near the sideboard. Killer entered the property from the backyard, because the front’s on a main road, and from the back he just needs to climb the fence. He picked the lock of the kitchen door. What with the yard-fences being so high he could have taken his time. He grabbed the axe from the pile of firewood because I didn’t see any axe there, and the man would have been a fool to carry a weapon with him when he knew there’d be one waiting. The wife heard a noise when the killer stepped through into the living room. She stood up because she’s closest to the kitchen. See how she’s lying on the floor?’ He pointed to the wife’s body. ‘Killer attacked her first. The husband sees what’s happening, tries to grab for something in the sideboard, maybe a gun, in the second drawer down. But he’s too slow. He carries on trying to open the drawer while the killer attacks him, hence the blood on the sideboard. Killer took his time mutilating them. Then he goes to the kitchen and discards the evidence. Leaves the axe, and I guess he washes the blood off his hands and clothes and boots, because there’s specks of blood and mud in the sink. He steps out into the backyard and locks the door from the outside with a pick. ’Course, that’s just conjecture, on account of Patrolman D. Hancock obliterating a crucial piece of evidence in his rush to get in. The killer leaves the property with not a single piece of evidence on him. Not even a bloodstain on the underside of his boot. That’s about the sum of it.’
Michael took a drag on his cigarette and stared at the two bodies again. ‘What I can’t figure out,’ he said slowly, ‘is how the killer got from the wife to the husband without either letting off a scream.’
‘Maybe he struck the wife,’ Dawson suggested, ‘then threw the axe across the room at the husband, you know, Injun style.’ Dawson mimicked what he thought the over-arm action of an Apache might be, to illustrate the point.
Michael and the doctor shared a look. ‘Maybe,’ said Michael. ‘Whatever he did, he did it quick.’
He turned to the two officers who had been taking an inventory of the room but had stopped to listen to Michael’s theory.
‘You two checked the sideboard yet?’ he asked.
‘No, sir,’ said one of the men.
‘Well, let’s see what Mr Maggio was grabbing for.’
He stepped over to the sideboard and opened the bottommost drawer to reveal two stacks of neatly folded linen. He frowned, rummaged around underneath the stacks and came out with a shoebox. He opened it to find a mound of papers – invoices, receipts, the couple’s naturalization papers, and several wads of crisp five-dollar bills.
‘Guess he was trying to buy the killer off,’ said the doctor.
Michael flicked through one of the wads and frowned. The treasury seal was in red ink, a design used exclusively on Federal Reserve notes that hadn’t been issued for nearly five years.
‘These notes are unused,’ said Michael. ‘Crisp as the day they were printed.’
‘So?’ said the doctor with a shrug.
‘So either Maggio got these out of the bank five years ago and they’ve been sitting here ever since, or they’re counterfeits.’
Michael took the shoebox out of the drawer and handed it to Dawson.
‘Get hold of someone from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and check the serial numbers. No one keeps that much money in a sideboard for five years. Specially not in New Orleans.’
Dawson took hold of the shoebox and nodded. Michael lost himself in thought for a moment, and in the silence the sound of the woodpecker rose again to fill the room.
‘What about the graffiti?’ said the doctor.
‘What graffiti?’
Dawson led Michael out to the back yard and round to the side of the building. Scrawled in foot-high spidery brown letters on the side wall of the store were the words:
MRS TENEBRE WILL SIT UP LIKE MRS MAGGIO WHEN I’M THROUGH.
Michael stared at the words and shook his head. Had the Axeman stopped to write them a message? Was he telling them who was next on his list? Was he goading the police for his own amusement, or trying to scare a future victim?
‘Get the Frenchman to take some photos,’ Michael said to Dawson, pointing at the graffiti, ‘t
hen drape something over it before any of the jackasses out front see it. Then get back to the precinct and run a search on every Tenebre in the city, male and female. I want a list on my desk by this afternoon.’
Dawson tipped his hat and rushed off. Michael stood for a moment, hands on hips, then turned around and scanned the yard for a second time. Trash was scattered everywhere: tin cans; newspapers; broken wood from packing crates; an outdoor grill rusted in a corner, warped and unused. All across the space, a carpet of weeds and bushes had grown tall and choked the ground. There was something sad and forlorn about the whole of it. The Maggios had failed to insulate themselves from the dirt of the streets. He thought of his own home briefly, of the crowd outside the store, of the weight of the city’s expectations on his shoulders. Two more victims, and a foot-high message from the killer letting them know another was on the way. Michael shook his head, crossed himself once more, and stepped back inside.
3
Just to the north of New Orleans, in scrubland outside a farming town called Boutte, stood a handful of barnlike structures surrounded by rings of razor-wire fences and dust-bowl courtyards. The buildings were made of heavy wood and blacked-out windows and were used by the State of Louisiana as a halfway house – a stop-off point for convicts in transit. The prisoners’ barracks were located at the compound’s very center, and when the door of the building was swung open, a sharp clang reverberated across the labyrinth of huts, enclosures and fences.
Two men stepped out into the morning chill and shuffled single-file towards the edge of the courtyard, their shoes crunching a rhythm on the gravel underfoot. The first man was a convict on his way to freedom, having the night before completed a six-year sentence. His hands were cuffed in front of him and he was dressed in a crumpled, moth-eaten suit of sky-blue cotton. He had arrived at sunset the previous day, on the convict transport wagon that journeyed between Boutte and Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary a hundred and twenty miles northwest.