Clarence Giarrusso was driving to the airport when he learned of the shooting and the fires at the Howard Johnson’s over his police transmitter. Alone, he was on his way to catch a flight to Washington, D.C. to attend a conference on drug abuse. Pulling over to the shoulder of the interstate, he called head quarters and ordered that portable radios be sent to the hotel, for he knew there were going to be communication problems. He also talked to Major Anthony Duke, who was already at the scene. Giarrusso told Duke to gather all the ranking officers he could. That done, he turned around and raced for the center of the city. He could feel his chest tightening as he drove. Their man — he was sure of it — had “finally surfaced.”
Giarrusso parked on Loyola Avenue, two blocks south of the Howard Johnson’s. Squad cars and fire engines, most with lights and sirens still on, blocked the four streets that bordered the hotel: Loyola to the west, Rampart to the east, Gravier to the north, and Perdido to the south. Located in the heart of the central banking district, barely a block from the department stores and shops of Canal Street, it was valuable real estate. Across Loyola, and directly in front of the hotel, were the state office building and the Louisiana Supreme Court. Both were set back about fifty yards from the street on a grassy mall called Duncan Plaza. City Hall faced the plaza and the Howard Johnson’s at a slight angle and was separated from the state building by a street which intersected Loyola. Of the three buildings, the Supreme Court — three stories of white concrete — was closest to the hotel. City Hall, a relatively new, tenstory expanse of glass and steel, box-shaped and sterile, was farthest away. There was a large pool and water fountain just in front of the state building and, to the right of the fountain, a bronze monument to the late Chep Morrison. Trees lined Loyola in front of the plaza.
Giarrusso surveyed the scene from his car and then started to walk slowly toward the hotel. Police were crouched behind cars on Loyola, shooting at the hotel’s upper floors with pistols and shotguns. The heavy gunfire bothered him, for it was undisciplined — this soon proved to be a chronic problem — and he resolved that one of his first priorities would be to get control of it. As he crossed Loyola to Perdido — still walking slowly — he heard the deep report of a very heavy-caliber rifle. The sound was distinct from the other weapons and seemed to be coming from high in the hotel. Then he realized that it was the sniper’s rifle. The ringing loudness of the shots made him wince. It also reinforced his belief that the sniper who had killed Harrell and wounded Hosli had gone back to work, this time choosing a position from where there would be little chance of escape.
Giarrusso decided to walk around the hotel to see the entire battle zone. Instead of running from one hiding place to another, he walked out in the open to the corner of Perdido and Rampart and, standing there, stared at the rear of the building. He could see that a patio was built onto the eighth floor. Smoke was coming from several rooms that faced the patio, and as he watched the flames shattered a large plate-glass window. There was no shooting, however, and he continued walking up Rampart to Gravier. A fire engine was parked there, and when he came closer, a cop ran to him.
“You’re in the line of fire, chief,” he cried. “He’s shooting this way.”
Giarrusso ducked behind the truck and sat down on the running board. His legs felt weak. For the first time, he realized what had been doing — parading slowly through an open area controlled by sniper fire. “It was,” he would say later, “the dumbest thing I have ever done. I guess that the only thing that saved me was that I wasn’t wearing a uniform.”
Giarrusso was joined by Tony Duke, an aging veteran who combed his Indian-black hair straight back from his forehead. Though he looked like a lean, well-worn woodsman, Duke was considered the department’s most subtle diplomat, a skill well honed by countless policy debates with city officials. Duke was out of breath, for he had been running hard, trying to warn Giarrusso to take cover.
“Good Lord, Clarence,” Duke said. “Are you trying to commit suicide? There’s a sniper up there, boy.”
“I know, Tony, I know,” Giarrusso said. “I was trying to get the lay of the land. Did you notify the rank?”
Duke had already made the necessary calls. Majors Thomas Drake and Henry Morris — stopped en route to Perniciaro’s grocery — were on their way, as were Louis Sirgo and Louis Turner. Duke had also called a long list of captains and lieutenants, and, when Giarrusso arrived shortly after eleven, an estimated one hundred policemen were there. Within hours, their number would swell to over six hundred and would include state troopers, deputies from surrounding parishes, cops from as far away as Texas and Mississippi, as well as Treasury, FBI agents, and other federal officers. A list of the participants was later assembled; it had the names of twenty-six state, local and federal law enforcement agencies. Most of the men — almost four hundred — were from the New Orleans Police Department. Their mobilization was often haphazard. (What happened to Joseph Giardina, for example, was not unusual. Giardina, a sergeant on duty that Sunday in the Seventh District, was in the station house when the call came in that police were under fire at the Howard Johnson’s. Half an hour later the situation was still deteriorating, and now a fireman and a policeman were shot. Giardina asked the ranking officer whether he could take a group of men downtown. Only if they were requested, he was told. The call never came, and Giardina and others in the station house became restless. The radio reports were grimmer than ever. Finally the telephone rang and Giardina snatched it up. It was a woman with a complaint about a derelict car. Giardina cut her off. Speaking very loudly so that the captain who was in an adjoining room, could hear, he said, “Yes, sir. I understand. We’ll get moving right away.” Then he hung up and told the captain the Seventh District was instructed to send a contingent of men to the hotel immediately. Giardina — he was nicknamed “the Goat” — was authorized to take one carload, so he picked the largest car in the parking lot, a Buick station wagon, and after crowding in ten men, most of them armed with carbines and shotguns, he set out for the interstate, the shortest route to the hotel.)
Giarrusso and Duke ran from their cover behind the fire engine as soon as the shooting subsided. They went to the front of the hotel and stood on the sidewalk, where they were sheltered from the upper floors by an overhang. More cars were arriving, and police were fanning out and taking cover wherever they could, their weapons pointed skyward. the shooting would rise suddenly in intensity, then, just as suddenly, drop off to an eerie silence. As Giarrusso watched, five men ran to the Demontluzin Building, which was on the corner of Loyola and Gravier, just across from the Howard Johnson’s. One of them carried a .30-caliber rifle, a scarce weapon during the early fighting. He knelt down where he could look around the corner at the side of the hotel that faced Gravier. From there he also could see part of the patio wall. The hotel was very narrow on that end and there were no windows.
“He’s back here,” the cop shouted. “I can see him leaning over the patio.” The sniper fired two shots then, and the cop with the rifle returned it.
Watching intently, Giarrusso was startled when someone touched his shoulder. It was Father Peter Rogers, the police chaplain. He had been notified of the fire at the hotel as he prepared to celebrate the eleven-thirty mass at Our Lady of Guadeloupe Church. The church, once a funeral chapel for yellow fever victims, was across Canal on Rampart Street, less than five blocks away. The priest had arrived just after Tim Ursin was placed in an ambulance.
“What in hell is going on, Clarence?” he asked.
“It’s a madman, Father,” Giarrusso said. “Everything is breaking loose. Some floors in the hotel are on fire. I’ve got word that some people inside may be shot, and a fireman has been seriously wounded. That’s just for starters.”
To get a better view, Giarrusso and the priest ran across Gravier Street and crouched in front of the Demontluzin Building. Police, strung out along the wall single file, had given them a heavy cover of fire before they sprinted into the open. Once across, Giarrusso learned that an elevator operator in the building said he could see the sniper from the eighth floor.
Patrolman Charles Arnold of the Seventh District was one of the men who went up to investigate. They had stopped at an office that was opposite the patio of the Howard Johnson’s. Deciding that it would be better to try to get above the gunman, they continued on to the tenth floor.
“We went into a room facing the hotel and pushed out one of the windows,” Arnold recalled. “They were heavy plate-glass windows and they opened about two feet — straight out. When we opened them the sniper must have seen us, but we couldn’t see him because of heavy smoke blowing across the patio. The guy next to me said he thought he saw someone, and I asked if it was a cop. I don’t remember what he said, but there was a shot — one shot — and I got it in the face.” The bullet struck the barrel of Arnold’s shotgun and fragmented. Pieces of lead hit his left jaw, tearing it open and knocking him into a desk and onto the floor.
“Good Christ!” someone yelled. “He blew your whole face off.”
Arnold remembered hearing that and thinking, “Well, if he did, I guess I’m still alive.” He began spitting out jawbone, teeth, and blood. He touched the left side of his face. It felt, he said, “like mush. Someone was trying to hold my cheek together with a handkerchief. He kept telling me to wait for the ambulance but I said, ‘The hell with that. I’m not going to wait here and bleed to death.’ It was hard to talk because I was choking on the blood. I finally got up and walked out of the place. Whoever shot me was still blasting. I could hear the glass in the windows breaking as some of our guys returned the fire.”
It was the second time that Carolyn Ann Capel had awakened that morning. She recalled later it was ten-forty. Lying in bed in room 809, the twenty-year-old woman heard a strange noise outside and got up to investigate. She opened a glass door that separated her room from the pool deck and saw a woman in a green uniform standing on a balcony on the tenth floor. The woman was screaming for help and a man leaned over the balcony railing above her and told her to be quiet. Thinking it was a “private thing,” Capel went back into her room. Recounting afterwards what happened, she said, “I stayed inside for maybe a couple minutes more, and then I looked back through my curtains facing the pool deck and that’s when I saw the smoke blowing past my window. I went back outside and looked and saw the smoke coming from above me, from a room at an angle; and I assumed that this was what the woman was screaming about. It looked like it was a small fire, so I didn’t panic. I figured they could put it out because I had heard sirens by then. I walked back in the room and waited for a few minutes to see what was going to happen. I still heard the sirens. The woman was quieter by this time, but she was still whining. After a few minutes, I walked back outside and the smoke was still coming down from the room, and then I looked all the way to my right, completely across the pool deck . . . and I saw a man standing on a ledge piece of the building. He was standing with his knees slightly bent, as if he were balancing something on one of his knees. I only saw the top, and at first I thought it was a broom, but then he turned some more towards me and I could see it was a rifle . . . It looked like he was pulling on it. He turned his head and he could see the housekeeper and he could see me; but he didn’t point the gun at us, he kept pointing at the sky. It just looked as if he kind of smiled and then he turned his head back to what he was doing. . . . “
Capel re-entered her room and tried the telephone; the line was dead. She looked into the hallway and saw thick smoke. Making her decision at once, she wet a towel in the bathroom, got her purse, and stepped into the hall. As she held the towel to her face, she edged along the wall until she could see the red glow of the exit sign through the smoke. After fumbling in the murky darkness for the right door, she found the fire stairwell and ran to the bottom.
David Moyers — in room 1110 — had also smelled the smoke and opened the door. “The lights were out and the hall was filled with smoke,” he told police afterward. “So I went to the balcony that overlooks the swimming pool, and I saw the maid on the balcony below me. I got my stuff together and climbed over the railing and slid down to where she grabbed my legs and helped me get down. I tried to calm her; . . . that’s when she pointed to a man with a rifle. He was on top of a roof with air ducts on the eighth level. I could see that he had some type of rifle. . . . He pointed it at me and the maid; we were about sixty or seventy feet away from him. When I saw he had pointed the gun at me, I told the maid to lie flat on the floor and I did the same thing. While we were lying down, we heard one shot and a man’s voice say that he was hit. About ten minutes later, I looked up and saw that the man with the gun was gone. We climbed down to the eighth story by using the balcony railings. When we got to the eighth story, we saw a white male running, holding his side, and we could see that he was bleeding. He was throwing his clothes onto a chair, and then he jumped into the swimming pool. The maid ran onto the ledge of the pool level and called for help. I laid down behind a huge flower pot on the patio. . . . “
Robert Beamish, a forty-three-year-old California broadcasting executive, was the man who had been shot while Moyers and the maid hid on the balcony. Beamish had arrived in New Orleans on Thursday — the day it had been predicted his hometown of San Francisco would be destroyed by an earthquake.
“I had just completed ordering breakfast when the television went out at about eleven,” he told police. “This was followed by what sounded like a series of explosions in the hallway outside my room, but farther down the hallway toward the end. I didn’t put too much emphasis on it and opened the room door. The hall was already filled with smoke. I went into the hall as far as the elevators, I decided that this was a pretty dumb way to get out of the building, particularly since all I had on was a robe. So I then walked back toward my room . . . and I started gathering up my suits and things which were on the clothes rack. I threw those into my large brown (suitcase) and took my briefcase. Meanwhile, I had slipped into a pair of slacks and a raincoat, and I then opened the patio door of my room which leads to the swimming pool area. I walked out and set the stuff that I was carrying down and was getting ready to go back to my room when a man stepped out from the bushes at the end of the swimming pool. I thought he was another guest, and I was about to tell him, ‘Hi,’ and he raised a rifle, which he apparently had been carrying at his side because I didn’t see it at first. He cocked it on the way up and took aim at me, and I had started to turn away from him, and I felt something hit me in the stomach. I moved backwards. I guess the force of the shot pushed me, but I then fell into the pool. When I came up, I was cursing myself because I thought that the bullet would move around and cause more damage. I started watching the water to see how bad I was bleeding and observed that I wasn’t bleeding too bad. Since I was in the pool, I thought it good sense to remain in the pool, and I worked myself into a corner . . . by the deep end. My raincoat had filled with air when I hit the water, and it held me up. . . . “
The bullet, which Beamish compared to a “red-hot poker,” passed through his stomach laterally, blowing out his belly button. He floated in the pool for almost two hours, getting out once to warn a young couple from Nebraska that he had been shot by a black man on the patio and then returning to the water. Beamish told the police that the man was “about fiveeight, rather slim. He was wearing a low, neatly clipped Afro, (had) light-colored skin, and I think he might have had a small goatee, but I am not sure about this.”
Beamish had warned Timothy Carew and his fiancée Kathleen McGee, who were staying in room 807. Essex had apparently intended to shoot Carew; instead, he let him take shelter on the patio. As Carew remembered it, “I was awakened by the bellboy knocking on the door about 10:10 A.M., and I went to the door and it was Kathy’s breakfast. Then I went back to sleep. I was half asleep when I heard loud noises coming from the pool area, and I woke up. A few minutes later I smelled smoke and I got up and went to the door. I saw the woman on the ledge screaming for help and I saw the fire. On the way back in the room, I spotted the guy behind the bushes with the gun; . . . he pointed the gun at me and I went back inside. I tried to exit into the hallway, but it was dark and full of smoke. We stayed in the room for a few minutes until the smoke was too much, then I opened the door to the patio and asked the man with the gun if we could come out. The man told me, yes. We went over to the ledge by the lady, and we stood there for about ten minutes so the firemen could see us. I didn’t realize that they couldn’t come up. Then I saw all the police down below running with rifles. We then heard gunshots and we pulled a tree plant away from the wall and got behind it. We laid there for about two hours. . . .”
Police volleys from the Demontluzin and Rault buildings eventually drove Mark Essex from the patio. Patrolman John Darsam, one of the men who did the shooting, had, like Arnold, been called to the Rault Center by an elevator operator. Kneeling by a window on the eighth floor, he saw a man with a rifle in the corner of the patio. He asked the elevator operator to go back for some men with rifles and shotguns, for he felt he was too far away to risk a shot with his revolver. He was soon joined by J. Ramon Stalnaker who had a rifle and three other men armed with shotguns and carbines. Among them was David Munch of the Jefferson Parish sheriff department. Now, suddenly, the sniper stepped into the open.
“There he is!” Darsam shouted. “Let’s get him.” An officer next to him fired a shotgun through half an inch of plate glass.
Everyone fired then, and Munch, who was standing near a window, was hit by glass fragments and pellets in the leg and neck. He tried to hide from the shower of glass by squeezing behind a file cabinet.
Stalnaker had fired as the sniper bolted into a room facing the patio; the bullet broke the door glass just behind the fast moving target. A minute later he saw smoke coming from the room, then fire. Then there was silence. He and the others watched the patio. A heavy-set man was floating in the pool, and two couples lay behind garden planters with their arms over their heads. The sniper had disappeared. Stalnaker carefully scanned the patio. He was a good shot and knew that he would not miss again. A member of the elite Urban Squad, he had had to qualify as a sharpshooter with the thirty-ought-six. Now, instead of shooting at silhouette targets that were so far out they looked like raisins, he was aiming down across a street — the range less than fifty yards. He was angry with himself; it had been an easy shot.
Stalnaker momentarily lowered his rifle to adjust the rear sight, just long enough to take his eyes off the patio. In those seconds someone leaned out from a room next to the one in flames, fired three shots at the Rault Center, and ducked back inside. Caught off guard, Stalnaker and the others returned the fire savagely, their rounds riddling the doorway. They kept shooting until the magazines of their weapons were empty.
“Did you see that?” someone said. “There must be two of the bastards. That guy was in green. I thought the first one was dressed in black.”
As they reloaded, they saw Beatrice Greenhouse stand up on the patio. Facing them, she pointed in their direction, trying to get their attention.
“What is that woman doing?” said Stalnaker.
Before anyone could answer, the sniper opened up again, this time from the far corner of the patio where he was shielded by a small table. One of the bullets hit a window in the room where Stalnaker and the others were hiding. Again, they returned the fire, and the man who was crouched behind the table leaped over a hedge and ran into a room. He was not hit.
Soon after he arrived, Giarrusso decided to use the hotel as the “command post” for what he was beginning to think might be a long siege. He was already getting conflicting reports on how many gunmen were loose in the building, with some of his men insisting that they had seen two blacks — one tall, the other short — shooting simultaneously from different balconies. He had men in the hotel, but he didn’t know how many, or where they were. He didn’t know whether the gunman had hostages. He had been told that at least four persons were being held prisoner. And there were the fires. They were burning fiercely in several rooms on the eighteenth floor, and smoke was pouring from rooms on the eighth, eleventh, and sixteenth floors as well.
Giarrusso knew that he would be criticized for putting his base inside the hotel. That wasn’t in the book; you never set up a command post inside the enemy’s camp. For this one, though, all the rules were thrown out. Besides, there were people trapped on the ground floor, afraid to leave for fear they would be shot. Some of them, Giarrusso reasoned, had been upstairs and may have seen the sniper, or snipers. More than anything, he wanted to find out what was happening inside the hotel. So at approximately eleven thirty in the morning, accompanied by Duke and Drake and other officers, he ran in the front door of the Howard Johnson’s.
“Did you see those idiots across the street by the library?” Giarrusso said as soon as he was inside. “They must think they’re cowboys. We’ve got to get them to stop firing their damn weapons unless they’ve got a target.”
The public library was across Loyola on a corner opposite the Demontluzin Building. Five sheriff ’s deputies were concealed behind the pillars which shaded the front door. Each of them had a rifle with a scope, and they were firing round after round into the upper floors of the hotel.
“I also want Loyola closed to traffic. And for Christ sake, let’s move those civilians out of the way,” Giarrusso barked. “Look at that out in front. Jesus!” He pointed to the neutral ground on Loyola. There, in front of the hotel, their heads bent back, mouths open, stood a group of men, women, and children. They were trying, evidently, to see the sniper.
Lieutenant John Hughes entered the hotel carrying a large portable radio that he kept at home. He also had a heavy-duty, dry-cell spotlight.
“John, let’s put that radio on a table in the restaurant,” Giarrusso said. “I called headquarters an hour ago for all the portable radios they could round up. Find out what the hell happened to them.”
As he moved from the lobby to the restaurant, Giarrusso asked desk clerk Robert Ardoin for the hotel’s blueprints. “I’ve got to find out what those floors upstairs look like,” he said. “How many exits there are. How many elevators. How many rooms. Where the stairwells are — all that.”
Ardoin offered to sketch the hotel’s basic floor plan. Sitting next to Giarrusso in a booth in the restaurant, he drew a diagram on the rear of a place setting. “All the other floors are like this one,” he said when he finished. “They’re identical.” He handed the crude drawing to Giarrusso.
“That’s the first break we’ve had all day,” Giarrusso said, studying the drawing. “So they’re the same all the way up — great.”
Constructed in the mid-1960s, the Howard Johnson’s was of a sturdy rectangular design and was one of the few high-rise buildings in the city regarded as invulnerable to hurricaneforce winds. The ground floor had a lobby, a restaurant, and a large room facing Loyola that was often used for art exhibits and other displays. A lime-green, $13,500 Citroen sports car was parked there now. Giarrusso asked the guests to assemble in the restaurant for questioning. Then he moved to the display room. That would be his command post, and in it he had two large folding tables set up. On one of the tables, he mounted the portamobile, which would permit him to transmit and also to monitor all of the police frequencies.
Turning to Sergeant Frank Hayward, Giarrusso said, “Frank, see if you can get the telephone company to set up some open lines in here.” Hayward was an administrative aide to Louis Turner. He was considered a good organizer, and Giarrusso asked him to stay close by. Under Hayward’s and Mayor Moon Landrieu’s prodding, a network of telephones was installed.
“What about those radios, John?” Giarrusso asked. Hughes had just finished checking. A dozen of the battery-charged, pocket-sized radios had been loaded into a police van. Even as Giarrusso spoke, the van pulled up outside.
A sergeant approached Giarrusso’s table. “Chief, someone’s trapped in an elevator,” he said. Like Hayward, he was in plain clothes, his badge pinned to the lapel of his jacket. “It sounds like a cop. We’re trying to get the doors pried open in the lobby.”
“Shit, there’s probably a whole squad up there,” Giarrusso said. He tuned in his radio and asked that any units inside the hotel report their positions. He did not use his name, identifying himself instead as Car Two.
If he had had a radio, Detective John Hansel would have been happy to report, for he had much to talk about. He and three other men had climbed the Perdido stairwell before Giarrusso entered the hotel. They had passed the eighth floor because of the smoke and gone on to the eleventh floor, where Hansel became separated from the others in the darkness. After warning guests to evacuate, he climbed the stairwell to the roof; he tried the door that opened onto the roof, but it was locked and so he started back down. The stairwell was dark and filling with smoke. On one of the lower landings — he wasn’t certain which — he stumbled over a body. Thinking it was a wounded cop, he put the man’s arms around his neck and began to carry him downstairs. At the seventh floor, he met a small party of police and firemen. “I asked them to shine a flashlight on the guy I was carrying,” Hansel said later. “He wasn’t saying anything, and I wanted to see how badly he was hurt. The light went on and I thought I would faint. The poor bastard was missing most of his head and with that bright light shining on what was left on his face . . . “ Hansel had been carrying Frank Schneider, the front-office manager who had been shot on the eleventh floor. Someone had evidently pulled the body into the stairwell and left it there because of the smoke.
Hansel had met a rescue party led by Mac McCrossen. After asking for cover fire, McCrossen and several other firemen pinned behind their trucks had made a dash for the hotel. The sniper had opened up on them when they were out in the street, and only McCrossen and his driver made it inside — the others taking cover wherever they could. No more than seven or eight firemen were waiting in the lobby. “I organized them and told them to strip down their gear,” McCrossen said.
“I wanted them to move light and didn’t want anyone carrying any hose. After I told them I wanted to go up and start fighting the fires, all of them — every man — volunteered. We got six or seven police with shotguns to go up with us. On the eighth floor we knocked down the fires fast. We didn’t stick around long to make sure they were out because someone was shooting inside the hotel, and we were worried about the sniper. We ran door to door, with the cops guarding both ends of the hall and going along with us when we opened the doors. Then we went to the eleventh floor. When we started fighting the fires, we came under heavy fire and had to throw ourselves on the floor. The bullets were smashing through the windows into the hall. They were coming from police outside. About then, smoke from the eighth floor started billowing up, real heavy. The fires down there had started again, so I ordered everyone to pull back. I was sick abandoning those fires like that. I was worried that the fumes and smoke would kill anyone left upstairs.”
Detective Emmett Dupas, also concerned about the smoke, had strapped on an air tank before he climbed up the Gravier stairwell. Dupas and his partner, Rhett Manon — who also wore a tank — had been with John Hansel before they became accidentally separated in the smoke. After they took a few steps into the tenth-floor corridor, the warning bells sounded on their air tanks. The bells went off automatically five minutes before the twenty-minute air supply ran out. And worried that the sniper would hear the loud ringing, Dupas and Magnon broke the alarms by banging the tanks against the wall. Then they threw them away and fled from the smoke.
On their way out they found Walter Collins, the wounded general manager. He was lying on the floor at the end of the corridor.
“Help me, please,” he said. “I’m bleeding to death.”
Magnon and Dupas, and two other men who had come up the steps, placed Collins on a blanket. With a man holding each corner, they carried him downstairs. Ambulance attendants were waiting in the lobby.
After they laid Collins on a stretcher, Dupas and Magnon walked out into the street. They immediately came under fire and took cover behind a car. Dupas emptied his .357-magnum revolver in the direction from which the shots had come. As he fired, knowing that the concealed sniper was far out of range, he remembered what had happened earlier that morning when his wife had driven him to headquarters. She had asked whether he wanted the .44-magnum carbine and the .30-06 Winchester that were in the trunk, along with one thousand rounds of ammunition stored in a knapsack. Dupas remembered how he had hesitated and then decided that he wouldn’t need them. “I didn’t want to lug all that stuff across the street,” he said long afterward. “Besides, it was a Sunday. Nothing ever happened on a Sunday.”