Vieux Carre, Old Square, New Orleans, June 3, 1847
The door of the Gator’s Den, a free blacks’ gaming parlor, opened, and the yellow rays of gaslight spilled out into the dark night. The mutter of men at craps and cards drifted out the opening and reached Lezin Morissot, who was in the deep shadows of the carriageway of the deserted house a block away.
A large black man stepped from the Gator’s Den and stood on the brick sidewalk. Someone shoved the door closed behind him and night fell again upon Dauphine Street.
Morissot watched the man take a deep breath of the slow, damp wind coming off the Mississippi River, and glance both ways along the street. Even in the frail light, the hulking form of Verret was recognizable. He turned to the right and leisurely strode off.
Morissot moved back a step into the deeper darkness of the carriageway and leaned against the brick wall. He calmly planned his strategy for killing. Now and then he peered out at Verret, faintly silhouetted in the night. The man came steadily on.
Morissot had stealthily followed Verret from early evening and into the night, until the man had finally ceased rambling about the Vieux Carre and settled down to play cards in the Gator’s Den. Morissot had entered the gambling place himself and played cards for an hour at a table near Verret. Over his cards, he had studied the man. It was nearly morning now, and the man would be heading but one place, home and bed.
Reaching into the pocket of his jacket, Morissot removed a garrote. He uncoiled the steel wire and took the wooden handles, one attached to each end, into his hands. When Verret felt the wire around his neck, there would be no escape. Morissot the assassin liked the silent, deadly weapon.
He glanced up at the dark sky. A thick overcast, hanging close to the earth, crept off to the south. It was a good night for Verret to disappear.
For a moment, Morissot wondered about Verret. He knew him only as one of the many black crew bosses on the docks. Why did someone want him dead? But then Morissot let the question slide away. He was being paid a handsome sum to see that the man vanished. That was the simple beginning and end of it. Still, at some primal level he felt that the man’s death would in some unknown manner mean danger to him.
Morissot’s senses began to sharpen, to expand, as they always did when he took a killing weapon into his hands and prepared to strike his victim. His keen eyes checked the fronts and the wrought-iron balconies of the two-story houses lining the street and set flush against the sidewalk. He smelled the house slop, garbage, and human excrement in the drainage ditch in the center of the dirt street. A bat dived out o f the blackness and darted in close to inspect him. He heard the whisper of its leathery wings stroking the air as it veered upward and away. Verret’s footfalls sounded on the sidewalk.
Two Spanish sailors with three sheets in the wind came staggering out of a cross street that led from the nearby red-light district with its brothels and saloons. They began to sing in loud, off-key obscenities, their voices echoing along the canyon of Dauphine Street. They lurched together and, supporting each other, crossed Dauphine and disappeared down a side street in the direction of the docks. The drunken voices faded away.
Verret had halted and turned to stare at the sailors.
Now he faced about and continued on toward Morissot. He seemed more alert.
Morissot cast one last look both directions. The street lay abandoned in the late hour of the night. But the day was only minutes below the horizon, and soon a throng of people would pour out of the houses. The killing must be accomplished quickly.
The assassin spread the handles of the garrote to widen the wire bop. He stepped to the edge of the carriageway darkness near the street and pressed tightly against the brick wall.
The burly form of Verret passed in the night. He was humming a low tune to himself.
Morissot sprang from his hiding place and in behind the man. He raised the garrote and brought it down swiftly over the man’s head. Jerked it savagely tight. With a mighty heave, Morissot yanked Verret into the carriageway.
Verret’s hands flew up to tear away the choking band around his neck. His fingers dug at the wire embedded in his flesh. Abruptly he stopped the futile effort. He whirled to catch his attacker.
Morissot, his muscles bulging as he tightened the garrote ever tighter, spun with Verret, staying clear of the larger man’s hands.
Verret tried again and again to break free, lunging left, right, plunging ahead to suddenly pivot, desperately grabbing for the man at his back. Morissot moved with him, always just out of reach. The two men spun in a silent macabre dance of death in the murk-filled carriageway.
Few men were Verret’s equal in strength. But the garrote had cut deeply into the tendons and veins of his neck. Stars began to explode in his brain. He had but one last chance to live. He hurled himself toward the ground. There he could roll and catch his assailant.
Morissot, with the knowledge gained from many killings, did not try to stop the fall of the big man. He stepped away from Verret and pulled to the side, changing the man’s downward momentum into a swing to the side. Verret’s head crashed into the brick wall of the carriageway with a thud.
Morissot rode the man down to the ground. His knees landed with crushing force in the center of the strangling man’s back. In the darkness, Morissot held the garrote tightly, and he sawed it hard from side to side to cut off the last bit of air to the lungs and stop the final drop of blood flowing through the large jugular vein.
For a full three minutes, Morissot held the choking garrote. Then he released the handles and unwound the wire from Verret’s neck. He stowed the weapon away in a pocket and rolled the man to his back. Stooping, he caught an arm and with ease hoisted the big body to his shoulder.
Silently Morissot passed along the short carriageway to the enclosed courtyard at the rear of the vacant house. He called softly out ahead through the darkness to his horse. The beast must not become alarmed at the smell of death and the corpse across his shoulder and make a racket.
The overcast of the sky parted and bright moonlight speared down, bathing the courtyard in bright light. Morissot froze and stood motionless, the corpse of Verret dangling. If someone should step out onto the balcony of the house across the street, Morissot would be completely visible.
The speeding clouds healed the momentary tear in the overcast. The sky and moon vanished and night poured black and dense into the courtyard.
Morissot went on. Verret’s limp body was placed in the rear of the light wagon that was hitched to the horse. Morissot spread a blanket over the still form and then laid his fisherman’s poles, lines, and net on top of everything.
He stepped up into the wagon and spoke to the horse. The animal tossed its head once with a jangle of bridle metal and went out the carriageway, pulling the vehicle into the street.
Morissot began to whistle in a soft tone, the tune Verret had been humming just before he died.
* * *
The wagon with its grisly load reached the border of the Vieux Carre. As Morissot guided the horse across the broad thoroughfare of Canal Street, three black stevedores heading for the wharves on the Mississippi River came into sight. Morissot recognized them in the rising dawn.
“ ’Mornin’, Lezin. Going fishing mighty early, ain’t you?” called one of the men.
“Can’t even see to bait a hook yet,” added a second man.
“I’ve found the fish favor a man who’s there just at daybreak,” Lezin said. He did not slow. The three were a nosy, talkative lot.
“How about givin’ us a ride to the river?” asked the first man.
“Walkin’s good for you,” Lezin replied shortly. He lifted the reins and slapped them down on the horse’s back.
“Lezin Morissot, you’re a nigger with a mean streak in you,” the first man called.
Lezin ignored the fellow. The men knew him as a river fisherman. They must never learn more than that.
He entered Baronne Street of the Garden District. The homes of the rich white Americans lay on his left. In ten minutes he had skirted around those big fine houses and come to an area of cultivated fields separated by bayous full of stale black water. Another ten minutes and he halted the wagon in a grove of giant cypress and sycamore trees on the bank of the Mississippi.
Morissot jumped down from the wagon and uncovered Verret’s corpse. Unceremoniously he caught the man’s jacket at the collar and dragged him out of the vehicle and to the edge of the water.
* * *
Tim Wollfolk awakened to the rumble of the deep Mississippi River flowing past close beside him. He tossed aside his blanket and climbed erect.
He was three days riding south of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The evening before, he had made camp on the top of the river levee. The embankment, some fifty feet wide, fell away steeply to the river. While on the opposite side, it sloped down at a gentle angle to the old floodplain and the main road. A dense woods, still dark with lingering night shadows, lay beyond the road.
Thick gray clouds hung close overhead. To the north rain hung like curtains along the full length of the horizon, and was moving directly down the broad river valley. Tim smelled the threatening rain. The storm would be upon him in an hour.
He glanced down river. There, somewhere within four or five miles lay the one-hundred-and-thirty-year-old city of New Orleans with its one hundred thousand inhabitants. Tim’s pulse increased. Soon he would enter that great port city. He would locate the lawyer, Gilbert Rosiere, and claim his inheritance.
Two weeks earlier, Tim had received a letter from the New Orleans lawyer informing him that his uncle, Albert Wollfolk, had died and that Tim was the main beneficiary of his will. Rosiere indicated that properties of value were involved.
Tim’s mother had died when he was but a boy. His father had died in an explosion of the boilers of a steamboat five years past. That had left his Uncle Albert as Tim’s last living relative. He felt a bitter sorrow for not having known his uncle before his death. Now Tim stood alone as the last of the lineage of Wollfolks.
Tim had quit his job as accountant in the Lynch and Lynch Steamboat Company at Cincinnati, Ohio, and purchased a ticket on the steamboat Rainbow. In five days the boat had reached Baton Rouge. Wanting to see the land and plantations at a close range, Tim had left the riverboat. He bought a saddle horse and rode south, marveling at the huge cotton and cane plantations with the elegant mansions. As he drew nearer New Orleans, the land had become swampy and the broad cultivated fields fell away behind. The road often wound through dark bayou country and long stretches of forest.
The horse snorted a sharp blast of air and stomped the ground. It stood tense, ears thrust forward and staring across the road at the woods. Tim looked in the same direction to see what bothered the animal. He saw nothing threatening in the woods, only the indistinct boles of the trees and the leaf-filled branches swaying to the wind.
Probably the horse had caught the scent of a prowling panther or maybe an alligator. Tim had heard the animals were present and sometimes took livestock. An alligator rarely killed a human.
He turned and walked down the slope of the levee to the river’s edge. For the past few days the Mississippi had been rising slowly from springtime storms. The water had continued to climb during the darkness of the night and now hurried past in a tide of brown, muddy water nearly three-quarters of a mile wide. Patches of floating foam and brush rushed by. A large tree torn loose from its hold on some distant upstream piece of land wallowed and rolled as it was shoved along by the current. A flock of ducks glided in to inspect the river, then climbed up and away from the rolling waves kicked up by the jostling, swirling currents. They flew off searching for quiet water. A rattlesnake driven from its den and caught by the river swam by in a sensuous, undulating twist of its long body.
Tim was used to the flooding Ohio; still he was amazed at the titanic flow of the Mississippi pouring past.
He knelt to wash his hands in the cold water. After a quick bite to eat, he would ride into New Orleans.
“Hey, fellow, turn around,” a loud voice shouted from the top of the levee.
Tim twisted to look behind in the direction of the call. He jerked, startled, for three men with pistols in their hands stood staring down at him. The pistols pointed straight at him.
“Stand up,” shouted the same voice, coming from a tall skinny man, “and get your hands above your head where I can see them.”
“What do you want?” questioned Tim, rising slowly to his feet.
“Now, how about that?” the first man said. “He wants to know what we want.” He grinned without mirth.
“We want your money, fool,” said a second man.
“Then maybe we’ll have you take a long swim in the river,” the third man said.
The three men laughed as if the threatened robbery was some huge joke.
Tim’s heart thudded within his ribs. “I only have fifty dollars,” he said. “It’s there in my belongings near the blanket.”
“Clovis, see if he tells the truth,” directed the skinny man.
Clovis quickly stooped and rummaged through Tim’s possessions. “His pocketbook is here,” he said. He counted the coins and paper money. “Fifty-two dollars and some change.”
The skinny leader of the robbers jabbed his pistol in Tim’s direction. “Damn little money. Turn your pockets wrong side out. Hurry it up.”
Tim dug into his pocket and turned them outward. “I only have this knife and some lucifers.” He held them up for the men to see.
“He might have his loot in a money belt, or he may be carryin’ it in his boot,” Clovis said.
“Go down there and check,” ordered the leader.
Clovis scrambled down the steep face of the levee. He warily approached the well-muscled young man. “Now, don’t try anything,” he warned. “Throw that knife away.”
Tim dropped the knife and matches to the ground. His fear grew. These men would not simply walk off and leave him alive. It was obvious they were practiced robbers. They would know dead victims would tell no tales to the law.
Clovis, holding his pistol cocked and pointed at Tim’s head, reached out to feel for hidden money.
It’s now or never, thought Tim. His hand flashed down and caught Clovis’ outstretched arm in a viselike grip. He spun the robber around and at the same time dodged to the side to get from in front of the man’s pistol.
The gun fired with a brain-jarring explosion. Tim rocked to the mighty concussion. The burning gunpowder scorched the side of his face. The acid smoke stung his eyes.
But he was not hit by the bullet. He jerked the man again to keep him off balance and caught him by the gun hand. Bodily he lifted Clovis and swung him to a position so that his body, though smaller than Tim’s, would be a partial shield between him and the two remaining robbers on top of the levee.
A horrible blow struck Tim in the left shoulder. He staggered back under the punch of the bullet. He caught himself in knee-deep water. His feet slipped on the steeply down-shelving bottom of the river, and he almost fell. The swift current pulled at his legs.
“I thought you’d try something,” yelled the bandit leader. “But you made a mistake. I can shoot your eyes out at this range.”
The angry voice added strength to Tim’s arms. Trapped as he was against the river, he knew there was little chance to survive. But damn them all to hell, he wasn’t dead yet. He wrenched the pistol from Clovis’ hand and swung it to point up the slope at his enemies.
The bandit leader fired again as Tim’s side showed for an instant from behind Clovis. The bullet went true to his point of aim.
Tim felt the bullet skittering across his ribs, ripping muscle loose from bone, and tearing free from his back. His breath left him with a swish.
Clovis felt Tim’s grip loosen. He broke away.
Tim was hurled backward by the slam of the hurtling chunk of lead. His feet found no bottom in the deep water.
Tim sank at once, the cold water of the river enclosing him like ice. Down, down he went, the swift current catching him, tumbling and rolling him, adding confusion to his pain-filled brain.
At some great depth, Tim’s shoulder bumped the bottom of the river. Knowing for an instant which direction was up, he tried to stroke to the surface. But his left arm refused to respond to the frantic commands of his mind, and his clothing and boots were like lead holding him down. He tumbled helplessly along the gravelly bottom of the river.