"Pulizia ," I shouted. "Open the door."
No answer. I beat on the door again. "Pulizia ! Open the door, or we'll break it down." No sense announcing I was alone.
The chattering and stomping from the children at the far end of the hall stopped. The only sounds were the frying pan next door and the hard bocce ball, temporarily forgotten, rolling along the floor.
Seconds ticked by. No sound came from Monfre's apartment.
A thin woman with an olive complexion stuck her head through the open doorway of the next apartment. She was in her fifties, with long black hair streaked with gray and tied in a ponytail. "He's not there," she said in English.
"Monfre?"
She nodded.
"Where did he go?"
"The Pulizia arrested him."
"When?"
She disappeared inside her apartment.
I holstered my pistol and waited.
Half a minute later, she came back and handed me a copy of The Daily Picayune. It was folded to page four. She pointed to an article on the bottom half of the page.
MONFRE ARRESTED IN KENNER
Alleged Black Hander Joseph Monfre was arrested Wednesday afternoon in Kenner and lodged in the parish jail in Gretna on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon after Deputy Sheriff O.B. Stiles found a revolver in Monfre's pocket.
At the time of his arrest, Monfre was campaigning for Peter Leson, currently chief of police in Gretna and a candidate for Jefferson Parish sheriff. Leson is trying to unseat long-time Sheriff Lucien Marrero in the Nov. 15th election.
In addition to the revolver, Deputy Stiles found a satchel in Monfre's possession that was stuffed with ballots already marked as votes for Leson.
Monfre, as readers may remember, is the notorious Italian who once served as a New Orleans policeman, but who was later convicted of dynamiting a grocery and sentenced to 20 years at Angola. He was paroled two years ago after serving only five years of his sentence.
Sheriff Marrero said that possession of a gun is a violation of Monfre's parole.
Many years ago, while Monfre was still a policeman, he and his brother Stephano were implicated in the kidnapping and brutal murder of 8-year-old ...
I unfolded the newspaper and looked at the date on the front. It was this morning's edition. Monfre had been arrested yesterday afternoon. Just hours after he murdered Emile and tried to kill me.
I handed the newspaper back. "Grazi "
She nodded then ducked back inside her door and closed it. For a moment, I stared at Monfre's locked door. Then I drove my shoulder into it and smashed it open.
The single room was ten feet by ten feet. A collapsed bed and a beat-up wardrobe were the only furnishings. A cast-iron sink stood against one wall. Beside the sink was a small wooden counter with a gas burner on top. Across the room, a pair of French doors opened onto a balcony overlooking Jackson Square.
The floor was clean. Nearly spotless. Evidently, for all of his faults, Monfre was neat.
I began my search with the bed, which, although it sat on a busted frame, was made up neatly enough to have passed an inspection by my old drill sergeant. The wool blanket and sheets were tucked into tight hospital corners. Monfre's Camorra father must have been a strict disciplinarian. I yanked the covers off the bed and pulled off the pillowcase. Then I lifted the mattress and pushed it against the wall.
Under the bed I spotted a shoebox. The mattress kept buckling in the middle and refused to stay against the wall, so I dragged the bedframe a couple feet toward the middle of the room and shoved the mattress over onto the floor. I bent down to pick up the shoebox.
Over my shoulder, I heard a shoe scrape the wooden floor. I spun around, my hand leaping for the butt of my forty-five. The four kids I had seen playing in the hall were jammed in the open doorway staring at me. Two of the boys and the girl had astonished looks on their faces. The third boy, the one with the scarred lip, eyed me with hatred.
Reaching into my pocket, I found a quarter and flipped it over their heads into the hallway. It bounced off the far wall and fell to the floor. I heard it rolling down the hall as the kids chased after it. "Buy some ice creams," I yelled.
I knelt down and pulled the lid off the shoebox. All I found were old family photographs. I shuffled through them. The one that seemed the most recent was of two teenage boys, one a couple of years older than the other. They were standing with their backs to a body of water that I recognized as Lake Pontchartrain. The younger boy looked like Joseph Monfre. The older boy was probably his brother Stephano, who was still a fugitive in the Lamana kidnapping and murder case.
A wicker basket at the foot of the bed was half-full of dirty clothes. I dumped them on the floor and kicked through them. I found nothing.
Next, I pulled open the wardrobe. Four shirts and two wool jackets hung from wooden hangers. Beneath them, neatly folded and stacked, were several pairs of trousers. I shook out each pair of trousers and turned the pockets inside out. Then I threw them on the floor. I pulled the shirts off their hangers one by one and dug through the pockets. When I finished with each one, I threw it on the floor. If Monfre could blow up my house, I was certainly entitled to trash his apartment.
I pulled down one wool jacket and searched it. There was nothing in it, so I dumped it on the floor with the pants and shirts. Then I pulled out the second jacket. There was something hanging behind it, at the back of the wardrobe.
A black raincoat.
I dropped the wool jacket and yanked out the raincoat. I had one just like it. It was a New Orleans Police Department uniform raincoat. Gripping the wooden hanger, I held the raincoat high and ran my fingers down the line of brass buttons.
One button was missing.
CHAPTER 56
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 1919
11:30 A.M.
I shoved the door open without knocking.
John Dantonio was sitting in the same spot on the same tattered sofa and wrapped in the same dingy bathrobe. He even smelled the same, like impending death. If anything had changed, it was that he looked worse. His cheeks were more sunken, and his skin had turned the color of parchment.
When Dantonio saw me coming through the door he reached for his gun, but I managed to cross the small den in time to snatch the Colt revolver from his hand just as he was bringing it up. Whether he would have shot me, I have no idea. But I think he was scared enough that he might have.
Monfre's raincoat, which I had been carrying rolled up under my arm, had dropped to the floor. I picked it up and took a seat in the chair next to the coffee table. I ejected the five cartridges from Dantonio's revolver and tossed them and the pistol on the table.
"What do you want?" he demanded. His eyes were droopy, with a yellowish tint and brownish-green crust caked along the bottom lids.
I doubted he had much time left. "Why didn't you tell me Joseph Monfre used to be a policeman?"
Dantonio looked away.
"You know him," I said. "When he was a cop he was a suspect in the Lamana kidnapping. That was your case. After he was fired from the Police Department, you questioned him about the Sciambra murders. And Emile was right, you saw Monfre kill Teddy Obitz and you lied about it."
Dantonio sank back into the sofa. "Why are you here?"
"It's time for you to tell the truth, John. About Joseph Monfre and why you and everyone else are protecting him."
Dantonio started coughing, a fit of wet lung-rattling hacks that doubled him over in pain. Between coughs, he managed to pull a handkerchief from his pocket. He pressed it to his mouth and spit into it. When he pulled it away, the handkerchief held a thick gob of bloody phlegm.
When the attack subsided, Dantonio reached for the open medicine jar on the coffee table and scooped four spoonfuls of the white powder into a glass. He dumped in water from the metal pitcher and gulped down the concoction. The last time I had seen him, just four days ago, he had only taken two spoonfuls of the powder.
"What does your doctor s
ay?" I asked.
Dantonio's breath wheezed through his lungs. "That I'm dying."
"What about a sanatorium?"
He shook his head and coughed again, then spit into the handkerchief. "I want to die here, where my wife died."
"Tell me about Monfre," I said.
"They'll kill you."
"They've already tried."
He stared at me with his yellowed eyes. "The Axman is just a delivery boy. He carries the message. He doesn't write it."
"Who does?"
"Who do you think?" he said, the air rattling in his chest.
"I need names, John. I can't indict a political party."
He shook his head. "You're not going to indict anyone, because the people you're talking about own the Police Department, the D.A., the judges. Everybody."
I leaned closer. "You're wrong. I'm going to indict them, and I'm going to bring them down. All of them."
"On what evidence?"
I held up the rolled raincoat.
"What is that?" he asked, though I noticed he was careful not to touch it.
"I found it in Monfre's apartment."
"You went to his apartment?"
I unrolled the raincoat so the brass buttons faced up. I pointed to the broken threads where one had been torn loose. "One's missing."
"So what?"
"I found that button in the hallway outside the Pepitone's bedroom, spotted with fresh blood."
"Where is it now?"
"In the evidence room," I said.
Dantonio let out a wheeze of laughter, which triggered another coughing fit. When he finished hacking he shook his head. "And you think it's still there?"
My mind flashed to Carl Schilling, the department's one-armed evidence custodian. A former train engineer who had lost his arm in a rail yard accident, Schilling was a close friend of Frank Thompson.
"And how about those bullets that Dr. Delachaise supposedly matched?" Dantonio said. "Did you put them on the books too?"
I nodded.
"Then there is no evidence," he said. "Not anymore."
Dantonio was right. I had been a complete fool. A naive idiot. I hadn't thought twice about booking the button or the bullets into the evidence room. As a detective, that's what I did with evidence I collected. That's what I was supposed to do.
"So now that you've lost your evidence, what do you have left?" he asked.
"I know Monfre is the Axman."
"Of course Monfre is the Axman. But so what? Even if you arrest him-even if you kill him-nothing is going to change. Teddy Obitz and I had him back in 1912, but the fix was in even before the ink was dry on our arrest report."
"What are you talking about?"
"We arrested Monfre for blowing up Carmelo Graffagnini's grocery on Palmyra Street, and once he was in jail, a solid witness came forward on the Rossetti case from the year before. We had him dead to rights on a double ax murder that tied in with the Crutti and Davi cases earlier that same year. Plus, we had information from neighbors putting him near the Sciambras' house just before the shootings."
"What happened?"
Dantonio coughed again. "The D.A. refused to accept the charges. Then the chief of detectives read me and Teddy the riot act. All we were allowed to charge Monfre with was dynamiting the grocery."
I looked at Dantonio, weak and frail, perched on the end of his sofa in a threadbare robe, waiting for death to take him. Then I thought about the man I had known, the broad-shouldered detective with the thick head of black hair, a policeman who had earned more citations for bravery than almost anyone else in the department, the man I had looked up to the most after my father died. I couldn't reconcile the two images.
He seemed to sense my thoughts. "It wasn't the criminals in front of me I was afraid of. It was the policemen behind me."
I knew what he meant.
Dantonio reached between the sofa cushions and pulled out a pint of whiskey. He pulled off the cap and took a long swig. He coughed as he swallowed, but he managed to keep most of the whiskey down. He looked at me. "I would offer you some, but it's best not to drink after me."
I nodded.
He wiped his mouth with the back of one hand. "Do you know why Terrence Mullen shot Chief Reynolds?"
"Reynolds suspended him and was about to fire him," I said. "I also heard Mullen was undergoing some kind of treatment, that he'd gone crazy."
"Mullen wasn't crazy. He was dying."
"What?"
"Chief Reynolds was a loyal Ring man," Dantonio said, "but he was uncomfortable with the Axman killings. He thought that once Monfre went to prison for dynamiting the grocery, the killings would stop. A few years later, Reynolds found out that Dominick O'Malley was making arrangements on behalf of Carlo Matranga to get Monfre sprung on an early parole. Reynolds threatened to go to the governor to stop it. That's what got him killed."
Dantonio leaned forward and rested his elbows on his bony knees. He took a couple of ragged breaths. "Up until then, the Axman killings had been about extortion. Matranga wanted every Italian businessman in the city paying tribute to him, to render unto Caesar what was Caesar's. But after it started to look like the Drys might get Prohibition passed, Matranga came up with a new idea."
"Hooch from Central American," I said, "and a network of speakeasies."
Dantonio nodded. "Chief Reynolds knew that once Monfre got out of Angola, the Axman killings would start again."
"What do you mean Mullen was dying?"
"Cancer. His doctor gave him a few months, at most. Mullen started drinking, telling everybody who would listen that he was dying. O'Malley heard about it and promised Mullen five thousand dollars for his family if he killed Reynolds."
"Why did he do it in Central Station?"
"Because Matranga wanted it done publicly so that everybody would know who the killer was. He didn't want a repeat of what happened after he killed Hennessy."
I looked at Dantonio for a long time. He had just mentioned something that, although it happened six months before I was born, had shaped my entire life: the assassination of Police Superintendent David Hennessy. "So it's true then, Matranga killed Chief Hennessy?"
Dantonio smiled and picked up the glass medicine jar, which was now down to less than a quarter full. "This stuff is worse than alcohol as far as loosening a man's tongue."
I kept looking at him.
"Matranga gave the order," Dantonio said. "But it was O'Malley who actually pulled the trigger. Him and two ex-special officers Hennessy had recently fired. They used three old luparas , the short shotguns the Mafiosi like to use. Matranga thought he could blame the chief's murder on the Provenzanos, but his plan fell through, and he barely escaped with his life during the riot at the Parish Prison. So when it came time to kill Reynolds, Matranga wanted to make sure no Italians got blamed. Especially him."
"So he found a patsy."
Dantonio took another pull of whiskey. This time he coughed half of it back up. "Did you know that Frank Thompson was actually in the building when it happened?"
"What was Thompson doing there?"
"He had an appointment to see the chief that morning. Nothing unusual in that. He was a big railroad man and a member of the Choctaw Club, just like Chief Reynolds. Thompson's appointment with the chief wasn't until eleven o'clock that morning, but he knew Mullen was going to come in shooting at ten. And he knew he'd been picked as Reynolds's replacement."
"So why was he there?"
"I guess he wanted to see it for himself."
Dantonio looked at me for a long time. Then I saw a tear spill from one crusted eyelid and run down his cheek.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"He killed your father."
For a moment I sat very still, staring back at Dantonio. He and my father had been close. "Who killed my father, John?"
Dantonio took a wet breath. "Dominick O'Malley."
The floor under me seemed to shift. What Gennaro Provenzano had been trying to tell me
was true.
"There never was a fugitive," Dantonio said. "The cop who gave that tip to your father did it to lure him to that abandoned house on Terpsichore Street. O'Malley was waiting inside to ambush him."
"Why?"
After another ragged breath, Dantonio continued, "Your father had Chief Hennessy's diaries. He also had affidavits that Hennessy had collected from brothel and gambling joint owners. Those diaries documented years of payoffs to crooked cops, cops with ties to the Ring. Hennessy had been conducting a secret investigation for Mayor Shakspeare that was going to crush the Ring. He also had letters from the Italian government proving that many of Matranga's men were wanted for crimes in Sicily. He intended to go pubic with everything he had before the opening of the second Provenzano trial."
"Chief Hennessy died six months before I was born," I said. "And I was almost ten when my father was killed. What possible relevance could any of that information have had after all those years?"
"In 1900, right after the Robert Charles riots, the governor set up a special commission to investigate the Police Department. Everyone knew your father had those diaries and affidavits. That's what gave him the leverage to stay on as chief of detectives so long after Hennessy was gone. And even though the documents were eleven years old, a lot of the policemen mentioned in them were still around. Several were captains. One was the assistant superintendent. Another one had been elected to the City Council. And one was a judge. When your father said he would cooperate with the governor's commission and turn over everything he had, he made a lot of important people very nervous."
"How do you know all this?"
Dantonio coughed up another glob of bloody phlegm and spit it into his handkerchief. Tears were running down both cheeks, and he used the backside of the handkerchief to wipe them. "I suspected some of it for a long time, but I didn't find out for sure until a year ago."
"How?"
"I had a friend who left the department and went to work for O'Malley. He was a good man, so I was surprised he agreed to work for that son of a bitch. He said he needed the money." Dantonio gestured to his own humble surroundings. "That was something I could understand. Anyway, my friend stayed with O'Malley's outfit for ten years. Last year he quit and moved to Seattle. Before he left town, he came to see me. He told me that for a while he had been O'Malley's driver, and that sometimes when O'Malley was really boozed up he bragged about killing Hennessy ... and your father."
The Axman of New Orleans Page 33