“Sam,” Carella said gently, “Mr. Lasser is dead,”
Whitson blinked. “What you mean?” he asked.
“He’s dead. Someone killed him. Now, Sam, you’d better pay close attention to what we ask you, and you’d better tell the truth when you answer, because now that you know someone’s been killed, you also know you can get in a lot of trouble. Okay?”
“I didn’t kill him,” Whitson said.
“No one said you did. We just want to know what you were doing out in the alley in only your shirt in this kind of weather.”
“My job is chopping the wood,” Whitson said.
“What wood?”
“The firewood.”
“Sam, the furnace in this building burns coal.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why do you chop firewood?”
“Some of the tenants, they got fireplaces in they apartments. Mr. Lasser brings logs to work with him in his truck, and I splits them up for him, and he gives me fifty cents an hour. Then he sells the firewood to the tenants.”
“Do you work for him every day, Sam?”
“No, sir. I come to work every Wednesday and Friday. But this year, Wednesday is New Year’s Day, and Mr. Lasser he say I shouldn’t come in, so I didn’t come in Wednesday this week. I come in today instead. Friday.”
“Do you always come in at this time?”
“Yes, sir. Three o’clock in the afternoon. Yes, sir, that’s the time I usually comes in.”
“Why so late?”
“Well, I got jobs in other buildings around.”
“Doing what?”
“Helping out the supers.”
“How’d you happen to get this job with Mr. Lasser?” Carella asked.
“I got it for him,” a voice just inside the open foyer door said, and they all turned to find themselves looking at a thin Negro woman with a scowl on her face and fire in her eyes. She was wearing a flowered housedress and a pair of men’s house slippers, but she walked past the patrolman with great dignity and took up a position beside Whitson, her back ramrod-stiff, her head high. Standing beside the huge Whitson, she seemed even more thin and fragile than she really was. But Carella, watching her, suddenly noticed the similarity of her features and Whitson’s, and realized the woman was Whitson’s mother. As if to corroborate his guess, she immediately said, “What have you been doing to my boy?”
“Are you his mother, ma’am?” Hawes asked.
“I am,” she said. She had a clipped manner of speaking, and she held her head cocked to one side as though drawing a bead on the speaker and ready to let him have it right between the eyes if he said anything contrary to her way of thinking. She kept her lips pursed as she watched, her arms folded across her narrow breast, her body balanced exactly the way her son had balanced his earlier, as though expecting a lynch party at the front door almost any time now.
“We were asking him some questions,” Carella said.
“My son didn’t kill Mr. Lasser,” she said, looking Carella directly in the eye.
“No one said he did, Mrs. Whitson,” Carella answered, looking her back in the eye.
“Then what are you questioning him about?”
“Mrs. Whitson, about half an hour ago, at exactly two twentyseven to be exact, actually more than half an hour ago, we received a telephone call from a Mrs. Ryan in this building, who told us her son had seen the building superintendent dead in the basement with an ax sticking out of his skull. We got over here as soon as we could, and located the body down there near one of the coal bins, and then talked to some of the tenants and the boy who’d found the body, and that was when one of our patrolmen found your son wandering around outside in his shirtsleeves.”
“What of it?” Mrs. Whitson snapped.
“Pretty cold to be walking around in his shirtsleeves,” Carella said.
“Cold for who?”
“For anyone.”
“For someone chopping wood?” Mrs. Whitson asked.
“He wasn’t chopping wood, ma’am.”
“He was about to,” Mrs. Whitson said.
“How do you know that?”
“He gets paid for chopping wood, and that’s why he comes here,” Mrs. Whitson said.
“Do you work in this building, too?” Carella asked.
“Yes. I do the floors and windows.”
“And you got this job for your son?”
“Yes. I knew Mr. Lasser needed someone to split those big logs he brings in from the country, and I suggested my son. He’s a good worker.”
“Do you always work outside in your shirtsleeves, Sam?” Carella asked.
“He always does,” Mrs. Whitson answered.
“I asked him,” Carella said.
“Tell him, son.”
“I always does,” Whitson said.
“Were you wearing a coat when you came to work today?” Hawes asked.
“No, sir. I was wearing my Eisenhower jacket.”
“You were in the Army?”
“He fought in the Korean War,” Mrs. Whitson said. “He was wounded twice, and he lost all the toes on his left foot from frostbite.”
“Yes, sir, I was in the Army,” Whitson said softly.
“Where’s your jacket now?”
“I put it on the garbage cans out back.”
“When did you do that?”
“When I headed for the toolshed. You see, Mr. Lasser dumps the logs right out back there in the alley near the shed, and that’s where I chops them up. So what I usually does, I comes right down the alley and I puts my jacket on the garbage cans, and then I goes to the shed to get the ax and begin work. Only today I couldn’t begin work because this policeman he stop me.”
“Then you don’t know whether or not the ax is still in that shed, do you?”
“No, sir.”
“How many axes are in that shed, usually?”
“Just the one, sir.”
Carella turned to the nearest patrolman. “Murray, you want to check out back? See if there’s a jacket on those garbage cans, like he says, and also look in the shed for an ax.”
“You’re not gonna find no ax out there,” Mrs. Whitson said.
“How do you know?”
“Because it’s right down there in the basement, ain’t it? Sticking in Mr. Lasser’s head?”
2
They did not, as Mrs. Whitson had prophesied, find an ax in the toolshed out back, the only ax anywhere in the vicinity being the one that had been left protruding from the dead Mr. Lasser’s cranium. They did, however, find Whitson’s Eisenhower jacket draped over one of the garbage cans where he had allegedly left it before heading for the toolshed. And they did find a dozen or so rather large logs dumped in the alleyway several feet from the toolshed—all of which seemed to corroborate Whitson’s story. They advised Whitson to go home but not to leave the city as they might want to contact him again at a later time, the later time they had in mind being the time the police laboratory reported on the ax handle attached to the ax blade attached to Mr. Lasser’s head. They were hopeful, you see, that the lab would find some fingerprints on the weapon, thereby enabling them to solve the case before the crime was several hours old.
Some days, though, you can’t make a nickel.
The lab found an awful lot of smeared blood on the wooden ax handle, and a few gray hairs caught on some of the wood splinters, and also some pulp that had spattered out of Lasser’s open skull when the metal blade wedged its way into bone and brain, but, alas, they found no fingerprints. Moreover, although there were some bloody palm prints and thumbprints on the gray basement wall, the laboratory technicians discovered that these prints had been left by Mr. Lasser himself, either as he backed away from his assailant or else as he groped along the wall for support when collapsing to the floor after, most likely, the blow that had severed his jugular. It was the medical examiner’s opinion that Mr. Lasser had been lying on the basement floor already dead for several minutes when the ax was finally sunk and left in his skull, a conjecture that seemed corroborated by the severed jugular and the unusually large amount of blood all over the basement floor, the trickle of which had first attracted young Mickey Ryan to the body. Utilizing a simple logical progression, and beginning with the inescapable position of the ax, embedded as it was in the skull of Mr. Lasser, it necessarily followed that this was the ultimate blow and that it had been preceded by numerous other blows. Neither the lab nor the medical examiner’s office could suggest when the jugular had been severed, but they agreed on the number of ax slashes—they each counted twenty-seven, including the dangling fingers on the left hand—and assumed the slashing of the jugular had been the cause of death, the previous slashes being serious enough to have caused considerable loss of blood over an extended period of time, but none of them being serious enough in themselves to have caused immediate death. It was the blow across the throat then, a blow that must have been delivered with a sweeping sidearm motion, like the swinging of a baseball bat, that had killed George Lasser. The final ax stroke was something of a coup de grâce, the downward swing of the blade into the skull of the man already dead at the assassin’s feet, and then, the final touch, the leaving of the ax in his skull as though the skull were the stump of a tree and the sinking of metal into pulp signaled the end of the working day.