CHAPTER 47
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1919
9:00 A.M.
Frank Thompson's secretary, Leonard Willis, a stoop-shouldered man who wore round, wire-framed spectacles, jumped up from his desk when he saw me coming and blocked my way to the closed door of the superintendent's office on the third floor of Central Station. When I raised my fist as if to give Leonard a good whack, he scampered out of the way. Then I threw open the double doors and barged into Thompson's office.
The superintendent was sitting behind his huge mahogany desk, his face buried in paperwork. He glanced up from his work, and when he recognized me he sprang to his feet. "Have you lost your mind, Fitzgerald?"
I limped across the office and stood between a pair of wingback chairs, then tossed the private detective's badge I had taken from the punk at Mrs. Pepitone's grocery onto the superintendent's desk. The badge landed face up, O'Malley's name clearly visible. "You can tell Dominick O'Malley that I'm coming after him."
Thompson stared at the badge for several seconds. Then he looked up at me. "Where did you get that?"
"From a jackknife who kicked open the door of the Pepitone grocery Saturday night. He and another goon were there to force the widow to sell the store to Carlo Matranga."
Thompson snorted through his mustache. "That's reprehensible, trying to take advantage of a recent widow like that, but how do you know-"
"That he works for Matranga?"
The superintendent nodded.
"Because he told me." I reached into my pocket and pulled out a yellow index card. "Then there's this." I dropped the card on the superintendent's desk. It landed face down next to the badge. "I pulled that out of the card file Saturday night before you boys could get rid of it."
Thompson left the yellow card where it lay.
"If you don't want to read it, I'll tell you what it says. Joseph Cangelosi, Italian male, thirty-two years old, lives in a tenement on North Rampart. He has a string of arrests for extortion, robbery, and battery. He did two years at the Parish Prison. He used to work on the Thalia Street Wharf." I pointed toward the badge on the desk. "Now he works for Dominick O'Malley."
Thompson glared at me. "You're supposed to find out who killed Mr. Pepitone, not worry about who's trying to muscle his widow out of her inheritance."
"Don't you think the two might be connected?"
"A lunatic killed Pepitone," he snapped, "not a petty thief."
"The Axman?" I said.
"Obviously."
"The Axman is a petty thief, or at least he works for petty thieves."
"The last time you barged in on me you told me the Axman was a policeman."
"I was wrong about that," I said, "but not about this." I pointed to the badge. "The punk I took that from told me Matranga is buying grocery stores all over the city. He sent two goons to make Michael Pepitone an offer. When Pepitone refused, Matranga had him killed. Pepitone managed to get to one of the goons first, but that didn't change the outcome."
Thompson's face had flushed. "The Axman killed Michael Pepitone," he shouted, spittle flying from his lips. "Not Carlo Matranga."
"The Axman works for Carlo Matranga," I shouted back.
The superintendent took a deep breath and shook his head. "Your logic is flawed. Post hoc, ergo-"
"Ergo propter hoc," I said.
He looked surprised.
"The nuns did their best to teach us Latin. Some of it even took. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. After this, therefore because of this."
"Then you know that two things happening coincident to one another aren't necessarily related."
"Pepitone refusing to sell his store to Matranga and then getting hacked to death a few hours later isn't coincidence. It's cause and effect. And Matranga isn't working alone." I snatched the badge off Thompson's desk and held it up to his face. "O'Malley and his goon squad of bogus private detectives are helping him. And the three of them-Matranga, O'Malley, and the Axman-are being protected by this Police Department."
The superintendent took a couple more deep breaths. The red flush drained from his face. "I'm taking you off the Axman case. Effective immediately. I should have known better than to put you in charge of an investigation this difficult, what with your war injuries and all. I think maybe an administrative job here at the station-"
"Whose idea was it to leave the five hundred on my doorstep, yours or O'Malley's?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Whose money was it?"
Thompson's eyes narrowed. His lips got tight. "I told you, I don't know anything about any money."
"Good," I said, "because I donated it to the poor."
"I think we're done here, Detective."
"How much is your cut?"
Thompson jabbed his finger at the door. "Get out of my office!"
"You tell your friend Dominick O'Malley that I know the whole damn score, and that I'm coming to get-"
"What the hell is going on here?" a voice behind me shouted.
Thompson's eyes darted past me.
I spun around and saw Captain Bill Campo looming in the doorway.
Behind me, Thompson said, "This insubordinate fool forced his way in here, shouting like a madman and scaring the hell out of poor Leonard."
In the outer office, I could see the superintendent's secretary crouched behind his desk.
Campo stormed toward me. "Detective Fitzgerald, as of this moment, you're on suspension pending a disciplinary-"
He was eight feet from me when I threw back my coat and wrapped my hand around the grip of my Colt automatic.
The captain jerked to a stop and reached for his gun.
"Don't do it," I said. "I hit a squarehead dead center with this same pistol."
Campo eased his hand away from the gun under his coat.
I backed away so I could see them both. "I know about Joseph Monfre."
At the mention of Monfre's name, a look flashed between Thompson and Campo, a guilty look that confirmed everything I had suspected.
"I'm putting you two on notice," I said, pressing forward with what I knew was a dangerous bluff. "And tell O'Malley this too. I've got witnesses and I've got affidavits. I'm taking them up to Baton Rouge to the attorney general. He's going to get the governor involved." I pointed my finger at the superintendent. "Heads will roll."
Campo and Thompson stared at each other. Their faces went pale.
I took a step toward the door.
Campo blocked me. "You're out of your mind, Fitzgerald, if you think you can threaten me in my own station and just walk-"
"Bill," Thompson said. "Let him go."
Campo glanced at Thompson. Then he stepped out of my way and pointed toward the open door, beyond which I could still see the superintendent's secretary hiding. "You've signed your own death warrant," the chief of detectives said as I limped past him.
CHAPTER 48
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1919
7:10 P.M.
"Newsroom," Emile said when he answered the telephone. His voice sounded like he was talking through a tin can at the end of a long piece of string.
"It's Colin," I said.
Emile dropped his voice to a whisper. "I hope you're calling to offer to buy me a drink after the heat I took from my editor over that piece of fiction I wrote for you."
"I'll gladly buy you half a dozen drinks, but I need some more help."
"Oh, no. I'm not writing any-"
"Not another article. Just a little research."
"What kind of research?" He sounded suspicious.
The City News, like every newspaper, had a morgue, a library of clippings going back decades. Newspapers often had better records than the Police Department. The clipped articles were indexed by name, by subject, and by date. Often a newspaper's files included articles from competing newspapers.
"I need everything you can find on a man named Joseph Monfre, M-O-N-F-R-E. Some people call him Mumphrey, either M-U-M-P-H-R-E-Y or M-U-M-F-R-E.
He also uses the nickname Doc, D-O-C. There's at least one article in the Picayune from May 17, 1912, that mentions him, but I got the impression he was already well known by that time, so there should be more on him."
After a pause of several seconds, during which I could hear Emile scratching notes, he asked, "Who is he?"
I hesitated, not sure who might be listening in. Telephone operators often eavesdropped on conversations and picked up extra cash by selling what they had heard, either as tips to the police, or as fodder for the gossip columns. "He might be the guy we've been looking for."
"Mon Dieu," Emile said. "You mean-"
"I'll tell you more when I see you."
"This is going to take a couple of hours."
"Call me when you're done. I'll be home the rest of the night."
I hung up the earpiece and sat down at the kitchen table. I glanced at my notebook. After spending most of the day at the clerk of court's office, I had several pages of notes, most of them gleaned from real estate transactions, property tax rolls, and death certificates.
Joseph Cangelosi, the badge-toting punk at Mrs. Pepitone's grocery, had been telling the truth. Just this year, fifteen groceries had been sold. Five men had bought all fifteen of them. All were cash sales. No liens, no mortgages. I recognized the name of a man who had bought four of the groceries. He was a Sicilian who lived in my wife's parents' neighborhood. He had been dead for years.
I checked the names of the other four purchasers against the death certificates. They were dead too.
Among the grocery stores sold this year was one on Second Street at South Saratoga, owned by Matthew Lamonica, and another at the corner of Dryades and Fourth streets, owned by Steven Boca. Matthew Lamonica's nineteen-year-old daughter, Sofia, had been hacked to death on August 3rd. Then on September 10th, Steven Boca was severely wounded in an ax attack. Both groceries had been sold less than a month after the attacks.
Although I was no expert on grocery stores, the sales prices of the fifteen stores seemed very low, no more than a third of what I expected, nothing but pennies on the dollar. My curiosity aroused, I decided to find out if any of the other groceries where the Axman had struck had subsequently been sold.
Working backwards from the murder of Sofia Lamonica, there was the attack on the Cortimiglia family, but since their store was in neighboring Jefferson Parish, the Orleans Parish clerk of court had no records on it.
Prior to the Cortimiglia case, the Romano and Sarrano groceries, the scenes of brutal Axman attacks just two days apart in August 1918, had both been sold in September of last year.
Before that, there was the attack on Louis Besozzi and Harriet Lowe. Mr. Besozzi's grocery had not been sold, but Besozzi had been arrested for murder and held in jail for almost a year.
On June 23, 1918, the Maggio grocery on Magnolia Street had sold, one month to the day after the brutal double slaying of Mr. and Mrs. Maggio. In January 1918, someone had bought the Andollina grocery on Apple Street, where Edward Andollina and his two teenage sons were attacked three days before Christmas by a man wielding a pistol and a hatchet.
The property records showed that each store had been bought by one of the five dead men who had purchased the fifteen groceries this year.
Superintendent Thompson's warning that my logic was flawed, that I had fallen victim to the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, still troubled me. Could some grave-skulking investor have been searching the newspaper obituaries for dirt-cheap businesses? Maybe. However, that didn't explain why Misters Andollina, Sarrano, and Boca, who had survived Axman attacks, had also sold their grocery stores.
I was convinced that the Axman was the tool of a more powerful and malevolent force, but why would a shadowy puppet master or some sinister cabal want to buy dozens of small grocery stores across the city? Extorting money from them made sense. Buying them didn't.
The shrill ring of the telephone made me jump.
I stood up and snatched the earpiece from the hook in the middle of the second ring. Only a couple of minutes had passed since I had hung up with Emile. Pressing the cone-shaped receiver to my ear, I leaned forward and spoke into the mouthpiece. "Hello," I said, expecting to hear Emile's voice on the other end of the line asking for some favor in return for digging up information on Joseph Monfre. Instead it was a stranger's voice. "Is this Colin Fitzgerald?"
"Yes."
"The detective?"
"Who is this?" I said.
"My name is Gennaro Provenzano."
I knew the name. He was the youngest of the three Provenzano brothers, who for decades had run a host of legal and illegal businesses around the city. Some people said the Provenzanos were a Mafia clan and the rival of the Matrangas. The oldest brother, Joseph, was dead. Peter and Gennaro now ran the family business. All three had been close to Superintendent of Police David Hennessy, whom the Matrangas had been accused of assassinating thirty years ago. Since then, the Provenzanos' fortunes had fallen while those of the Matrangas had risen.
"What do you want?" I said.
"Can you meet me at the corner of Thalia and Annunciation at ten o'clock?"
"Why?"
"I want to show you something."
"Show me what?"
The man on the other end of the line cleared his throat. "I read about you in the newspaper. I don't imagine you have a lot of friends left in the Police Department."
"What business is that of yours?"
"You know what is happening, but you don't know why. Am I right?"
"And you do?"
For several seconds all I could hear was the faint static of the open telephone line. I was about to ask Provenzano if he was still there when he said, "Yes. And after we meet, so will you."
For a moment I didn't say anything. The beating I had taken Friday night was O'Malley's warning to me to back off. By now, it must be obvious to him that I had not heeded his warning. He would have heard about my visits to Dantonio and Thompson. Gennaro Provenzano was a criminal, but I wasn't sure who he was in league with. Maybe he had ended his feud with the Matrangas. His surprise telephone call smelled like a trap.
"Do you know how your father died?" Provenzano said.
"Trying to arrest a fugitive."
"That is what you have been told all your life, but it is not the truth."
"What are you talking about?"
"Thalia and Annunciation," he said. "Ten o'clock."
Then the line went dead.
CHAPTER 49
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1919
10:00 P.M.
Gennaro Provenzano pulled up to the corner in a Ford. He sat in the passenger seat. There was a young man behind the wheel. I was standing under a lamppost, the collar of my overcoat pulled up against the steady drizzle and my wide-brimmed Filson pulled down low.
Provenzano peered through the open window. "Fitzgerald?"
I nodded.
He stepped out of the car and shook my hand. Dressed in a rough wool jacket and tweed flat cap, Gennaro Provenzano looked like a fifty-year-old Sicilian laborer, only recently off the boat from Palermo, which was definitely not what I had expected. The Provenzanos had been a distant second to the Matrangas for a long time, but with their bars, gambling joints, and bawdy houses, they were far from poor.
After glancing at my coat and hat, he said, "You're going to have to put on something else."
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"The wharf," he said, nodding toward the Mississippi River six blocks away. Then he opened the back door of the Ford and pulled out another wool jacket and tweed cap. "Leave your hat and coat in the car."
"Why do I need to change?"
"I want to show you something, but first we have to get past the guards."
I took off my overcoat and hat and laid them on the back seat, then put on the ones he had provided. I took a whiff of the jacket. It stunk of sweat and stale beer.
Provenzano grinned. "We're supposed to be stevedores, not French whores." He shut t
he back door and leaned in through the front passenger door. Speaking in Sicilian, he told the driver, "Come back in an hour. If we're not here, come back every half-hour." Then he reached under the seat and came out with a .38 revolver.
The driver shifted the Ford into gear and drove away.
"What do you know about my father's death?" I asked.
"I'll answer all your questions, but I need to show you something first."
Before I could say anything else, he started walking down Thalia Street toward the docks. I hurried to catch up.
"When we get to the gate," Provenzano whispered, "don't say anything and keep your hat down low. We want them to think you are Sicilian, and Sicilians don't have blue eyes."
We walked the rest of the way in silence.
A rolling metal gate, wide enough to accommodate trucks, blocked the entrance to the wharf. Beside the gate stood a small guard shack with a window that looked down Thalia Street. Through the window, I could see two uniformed security men squeezed into the guard shack. A line of dock workers stood in the rain in front of the window waiting to check in. The gate was rolled open just far enough to allow one man to pass through at a time.
"What are you going to tell them?" I whispered.
"That we are here to unload the Independence, a steamer scheduled to arrive at eleven o'clock."
My suspicion that this was some sort of trap was fading. If Provenzano had wanted to kill me, he would have shot me on the corner.
As we joined the line of workers, the last man turned around to look at us. He took off his cap and flung water from it, then said to us in Sicilian as he put his cap back on his head, "These guards, they usually stand outside and we get in quicker, but I guess they are afraid to get wet."
Provenzano opened his mouth to reply, but I spoke first, answering the man in Sicilian. "Imagine them unloading a ship."
The man nodded and let out a short laugh. Then he turned around to face the front of the line. Provenzano stared at me in shock.
A couple of minutes later, we were at the open window of the guard shack. The two guards were wedged together. The shack looked like it had been built to hold one guard comfortably. Two was a crowd. The guard at the window, who stood behind a small shelf on which was laid an open ledger, had the pasty skin and strawberry hair of an Irishman. Behind him, pressed against the back wall, his partner had the black hair and olive skin that marked him as an Italian.
The Axman of New Orleans Page 28