Vieux Carré Detective

by Vito Zuppardo

  “Is that so?” he paused, then asked. “Does he ever come to visit?”

  “Mr. Nazario? No. I believe the only family who visits is her brother, Robert,” Alma said.

  Howard gave up trying to convince Gloria that Ben Stein had died and left her in a delusional state of mind, under the trusted care of Alma, who was handpicked by Ben.

  Howard was off duty, but once a cop always a cop. Police officers are never off the job; they listen and observe 24/7, it’s what they’re trained to do.

  The name Nazario rang a bell. Before leaving, Howard checked in at the business office with Carol, a homely clerk he’d become friends with over the years when visiting Gloria. Howard leaned forward across the counter and gave Carol a few flirtatious words, a smile, and a pat on her hand. She gave up data on Virginia, not realizing it was criminal to give up patients’ personal information. Howard persuaded her, as he had done others to obtain information considered confidential.

  Carol went into detail and spilled her guts to Howard, stopping for an eyelash flicker every now and then. “Her married name is Virginia Hoffmann Nazario, wife of deceased Tony Nazario. She was admitted under the name Virginia Hoffmann by her sister, Sharon, who has come by little since that day. Every three months, her brother, Robert Hoffmann, visits and pays the hospital bill in cash.”

  Howard had a few minutes before his meeting at police headquarters. He found Alma in Gloria’s room, getting her comfortable for an afternoon nap. Gloria, now in good spirits, saw Howard. “Now, Benny, you come to see your mother real soon.” He gave her a smile and a kiss on the forehead.

  Alma walked Howard to Virginia’s room. He chatted with the elderly woman, while she spurted random thoughts, not relating to the conversation.

  “Virginia, between you and me,” he whispered, “when was that bank job that Tony pulled?”

  Virginia thought for a second and said, very believable, “April 8, 1943.”

  Alma got Howard’s attention to let him know that no matter what you asked Virginia regarding dates, it would always be the same date as her wedding day, April 8, 1943.

  “Ms. Virginia,” Alma asked, to prove a point, “what’s your birthdate?”

  “April 8, 1943,” she said confidently, with a motion of her head up and down.

  Howard couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was some truth to what Virginia remembered. He just needed to dig further and jolt her memory.

  Howard spoke softly. “Virginia, you think Tony could loan me some money?”

  “I can ask him,” she said.

  “Good, you ask him,” Howard said, giving Virginia a smile as he backed out into the hallway, pointing for Alma to follow. He handed Alma a business card. “Call me if her brother visits, any time, day or night,” Howard said. “I’d like to meet this guy.”

  Alma, wide-eyed, whispered, “Sure thing.”

  Before leaving, Howard thanked Carol again for her assistance and gave her a kiss on the cheek, making her blush like a sixteen-year-old. A wave to the other ladies returned a smile, but the peck on the cheek made Carol special, and she ate it up. The kiss secured his relationship with her and guaranteed her assistance should Howard need to call on her again.

  Howard sat in the limousine, feeling terrible for using Carol to get information on Tony Nazario, most of all for making a spectacle of her with wild gestures, in front of her coworkers. He convinced himself it was all in a day’s work, gathering information and catching bad guys.

  Chapter 6

  Howard, the first to arrive at police headquarters, maneuvered his massive fingers around the small numbers on the touchpad and entered his security code. A door popped open to a single elevator that opened on the top floor, leading to Chief Parks’ private waiting area. It even bypassed her receptionist. It gave undercover cops, snitches, and political leaders of the community privacy from the hundreds of cops running around on the main floor of the building.

  Chief Parks opened the rear door to her office and welcomed Howard. He took a seat, and soon after Mario showed. The three met weekly for case updates, the only way Howard working undercover could communicate face to face. The chief clarified that until Olivia’s attacker was brought to justice, this was a priority case.

  The chief then started the meeting. “Anything new?” she asked.

  “You mean other than the two stiffs we have at the coroner’s office?” Mario replied. “Both killed with two shots to the back of the head. Got mob wrote all over these two.”

  “Lorenzo Savino?” Chief Parks asked.

  “That’s the only mobster I know,” Mario stepped to the rolling cart in the corner of the room. “Coffee?”

  The chief waved him off, and Howard gave a gesture. “Black, one sugar.”

  “I don’t know about Savino,” Howard said. “I’m close to him, and he still thinks Mario is a dirty cop. I would have heard something if he was involved.”

  “Okay, maybe not Savino. Some lowlife punk,” Mario said, placing two cups of coffee on the table.

  The chief briefed them on a few items she wanted them to follow up on and suggested for both to get closer to Savino in a relaxed atmosphere, someplace he might let his guard down. Maybe he’d open up and say something he shouldn’t.

  “You think Lorenzo is just going to give up that he tried to off one of our own?” Mario said, making a disgusted face.

  “Let’s shake the tallest tree and see what falls in our hands,” she said. It wasn’t the way Mario would have played it, but she was in charge.

  “One more thing,” Chief Parks added. “Olivia will get out of the hospital tomorrow. Then a few days’ rest, and she’ll be back on the job.”

  “Great,” Mario said. “She’s a lucky gal.”

  “Yes, she is,” Parks said. “I want you to head to the hospital and see if you can make Olivia remember the little things she might have left out of her story.”

  They agreed. It was the first time Mario would have a chance for a one on one with Olivia since the accident. He sucked down his coffee as the chief spewed out a few more orders.

  Mario and Howard drove to Mid-City to the medical campus of Mercy Hospital. They entered through different doors, one taking the elevator and the other the stairway to Olivia’s floor. This was the first opportunity since her attempted murder for Mario to look her in the eyes and get her side of the story. Howard interviewed nurses, doctors, the police securing her room, and some employee guards, just trying to get new information that might help.

  Olivia gave a smile when Mario entered, then put her hands over her face. “You should have told me you were coming. My hair is a mess and no makeup.”

  “You look beautiful,” Mario said.

  “And you’re a lying cop,” she said, stroking her hair in place.

  “Okay, maybe you could use some makeup, just a little.” He smiled.

  He pulled a chair closer to the bed, and Olivia began with details from the time she walked into the Library Sports Bar until she was fished out of Bayou St. John. Her story stayed intact, almost verbatim. She paused for a while, then sat up in the bed wide-eyed. Mario was sure he was about to learn something new on the case, when she leaned toward him.

  “I do have something I want to run by you. It has nothing to do with the accident.”

  Mario exhaled. “That’s disappointing,”

  Mario let Olivia talk uninterrupted about a wedding she went to in St. Francisville, Louisiana. The wedding took place on a plantation, and it sounded beautiful the way she described the property. As the evening proceeded, she and Cynthia, a friend who worked at the estate, broke away from the reception and walked along a path following a fence separating two properties. A vegetable garden ready for harvesting grew across the wired fence. Big creole tomatoes hung from their vines, with cucumbers and colorful red and yellow bell peppers.

  A man strolled, selecting vegetables, placing them in a basket. He stopped and cooled his head, fanning it with a straw hat. Robert Hoffmann, o
wner of the property, stood in front of her. Around town, he was known as a strange man. Hat, sunglasses, and a handkerchief around his neck when in public, summer-like winter. The gossipers had opinions why he dressed foolishly. Some say he was a burn victim with scars, others think he protected himself from the sun or was hiding his face. Either way, he was odd.

  This day, he looked the two women straight in the eyes and smiled. Lifted a tomato and asked if they wanted some. They declined, but Olivia got up close and smelled the fresh creole tomatoes. They brought back childhood memories of her father’s garden.

  A nurse came into the room and checked Olivia’s vital signs. “You’re looking good, Olivia,” she said. “I think the doctor will let you roll out tomorrow.”

  “Thank you,” Olivia smiled. The nurse’s squeaky shoes sounded on the freshly waxed floor when leaving the room.

  Annoyed, Mario’s hands roamed his face. “Olivia, does this story have an ending?”

  “Yes, hang on. When I got close to Mr. Hoffmann to smell the tomatoes, I got a good look at his face. The man’s face bugged me for a week.”

  “Why? What was so special?” Mario asked.

  “Do you remember your first big case, your first arrest? Something that defines the start of your career?”

  Mario laughed. “Actually, I do. I arrested a pickpocket on Bourbon Street. On the job two days and caught collar; I was one pumped rookie. In the jail, she stood in front of the cage as the sergeant processed her. She gave her name as Tara James. That’s when the sergeant said, ‘Please state your real name.’ She repeated her name as Tyrone James. I can still hear the squad room laughing. She was a dude.”

  “A man?” Olivia asked.

  “Honey, in the French Quarter, you better check all the body parts before taking a woman home,” Mario chuckled. “She was beautiful; I still see her face when I close my eyes.”

  “That’s my point,” Olivia said. “Remember that armored car robbery downtown? The company pressured the mayor and the police to keep the robbery under wraps because of so much money stolen.”

  Mario nodded. “I do remember, it was a truckload of money.”

  “Well, that was my first week on the job at Orleans Parish morgue. I did the forensic work on Tony Nazario, the mastermind behind the armored car takedown.”

  “Wow!” Mario said. “That’s a case to remember.”

  Olivia paused like she was lost for words. Mario noticed right off.

  “What?” he prompter her.

  “The guy who handed me the tomatoes,” she paused again, “is Tony Nazario.”

  “Come on?” Mario laughed “You’ve been on some heavy drugs.”

  She came back confident, “No. It was Tony.”

  Mario’s eyes bugged out. “It might have just looked like him.”

  Olivia lowered the boom on Mario, remembering her first big case.

  At the morgue, her supervisor had rolled a body to her station to confirm the cause of death, one of her first autopsies. The supervisor could have put anyone in front of her, it didn’t matter. In a morgue, the only identification is a toe tag. This one read Tony Nazario. The body was naked under a sheet with a towel over his face—a standard practice, so rookies don’t get freaked out. Once the sheet layer and cloth were removed, it revealed the cause of death. One bullet to the chest blew out a vital organ. The face, a pale color, showed a hairline cut across his lower neck, possibly an old scar, but a piece of skin was turned up. She picked at it with a fingernail; it peeled off. One thing for sure, it wasn’t skin. About to rip into what appeared might be a rubber mask, her supervisor, Tim Marks, stepped in and covered Tony’s face.

  Directed to prepare the death certificate, she followed Tim’s orders, while he took a face picture of Tony, then removed the body from the morgue to a waiting hearse. The body was taken to a mortuary and cremated.

  Later, at a bar on Magazine Street, Olivia and friends celebrated with a round of drinks, congratulating her on confirming how Tony Nazario died; it was all over the news. The biggest armored car robbery to date and an unidentified amount of cash stolen. Tony was found dead in his car off River Road. Police thought Tony took a bullet from the guard at the robbery scene, while his partner got away with the money. She gave all the graphic details of the autopsy and her friends, mostly doctors or medical students, enjoyed the gory details. There were jokes and laughter until Olivia looked up and the TV displayed a picture. The caption read Tony Nazario, only it wasn’t the face she saw during the autopsy.

  She reported her uneasiness to Tim, her direct supervisor, about the body not being Tony Nazario. Olivia accepted his explanation that no one on a gurney in a morgue looks the same as in life. Even her question regarding a possible wax mask got a chuckle as a rookie mistake.

  Olivia, who wanted to start her career as a forensic detective, had six months left at the police academy before she could make a move out of the Orleans Parish morgue. She dropped her suspicions about Tony, a lowlife guy she’d never met nor cared to and focused on her career.

  But then at the wedding, Olivia’s fifteen-year theory about Tony stood in front of her, handing tomatoes across a fence. Tony Nazario was very much alive.

  Mario, dumbfounded at the details, listened while she spilled her guts.

  The tomato man opened a floodgate of memories, and she promised herself she’d follow up this time. When she returned to work, Chief Parks asked her to pull a file on an aged, closed case that had been through the system. The case convicted Billy Jean Ravis of armed robbery of a liquor store, leaving the owner dead.

  That was Olivia’s window of opportunity, and she took it by looking at her computer for Billy Jean’s case number. Then she pulled Tony Nazario’s number. The full hard copies were kept as evidence in a building across town. Although she had pulled records often from the building, this time her hands were sweating, he heart pounding, and she was a nervous wreck like she was committing a crime.

  The guard, Alton Simmons, took her request form and typed it on his computer. A slight head nod and eye twitch occurred when Alton saw Tony Nazario’s name pop up on the top line of the inquiry. Olivia’s police identification number was recorded in the logbook, and she signed under her name, a requirement to take any documents from the storage room.

  A nurse walked into the room, and Mario waved her off, telling her they were discussing police business. She took the hint and closed the door behind her, as she backed out of the room.

  Mario’s head spinning, he asked Olivia, “When was this?”

  “Two days before by accident.”

  “Are you telling me Tony Nazario is alive?”

  Olivia was silent. She didn’t want to say the wrong thing and cause an investigation or even think that her life might be in danger. “All I know is the man I confirmed dead on my autopsy table appeared to have a wax mask and very well could not have been Tony Nazario.”

  A knock at the door before opening was a doctor with Olivia’s chart, ready to discuss her discharge for the next morning.

  Mario used the doctor as a reason to get back to work. “This discussion is far from being over,” he said, giving Olivia a kiss on the cheek before leaving the room.

  Howard contacted Mario, and he agreed to meet for a quick lunch. Mario, first at the café, tried to clear his head of Olivia’s bizarre story. Crazy as it seemed, Tony had pulled off dozens of jewelry store robberies, cracked the most secure safes, and was the mastermind behind the armored car hit. Even if he died during the process, it took balls and detailed planning to take down a twelve-thousand-pound truck, basically a rolling vault,

  Howard, in street clothes, looked like an everyday customer as he sat with Mario. They ordered before exchanging updates, not wanting to discuss business without the chief. It’s a detectives’ code to protect their superiors and explain only encouraging findings in a case. Even if most of the time they’re waiting for a break to make their boss look good in the eyes of the suits upstairs, sometimes the
y pushed the truth.

  “You know Ben Stein died,” Howard said.

  “I heard,” Mario replied. “Sorry to hear. I know you two were close.”

  “I tried to tell Gloria,” Howard said, interrupted by the waiter standing tableside with their lunches. He paused while the waiter served the food, which seemed to take forever.

  “Like I said, I tried to tell Gloria,” Howard continued. “It was like talking to this sandwich.”

  “She’s probably better off in her own world,” Mario said, taking a bite of his lunch.

  Howard, wolfing down his lunch, asked between bites, “Do you remember the Tony Nazario armored car heist?”

  “You been talking to Olivia?” Mario said.

  “No. Why?”

  “She brought him up today.”

  Howard questioned, “She was around then? That’s like fifteen years ago.”

  “She was a rookie working at the morgue. Claims she was the one who did the autopsy,” Mario said, finishing the last of his lunch.

  “Tony’s wife has a room down the hall from Gloria. I met her today. She said something odd, but interesting, and after checking details,” Howard paused, “let’s just say I’m not sure Tony is dead.”

  Mario pushed his plate away. “Are you kidding me? You’re going to believe a woman with dementia?” he questioned, but his stomach made a flip. This had to have some truth—first Olivia, now Howard, talking about the same man who’s been dead for years.

  “I’m stone serious. I talked to a gal in the business office. Something isn’t right,” Howard took a sip of water. “It’s worth looking in to.”

  “Hold that thought,” Mario said and got up. “You’re not going to believe what Olivia told me.” Mario dropped two quarters into a wall phone and dialed the chief’s direct line.

  She answered.

  “Chief, I need two details at Mercy Hospital. Olivia might be in danger. Let me rephrase that, Olivia is in danger.”

  “Mario, you’re sure,” Chief Parks grilled him.

  “Chief, trust me. One unit at her room, and the other at the elevator,” Mario blurted out. “No one goes into her room, not a nurse, doctor, no one! I’m on my way to the hospital.”