When we was all paid, old Mr. Jensen stood up and said that he was going off to Salinas for the next few days on business, and that Mr. Carbante was to be in charge and if we wanted anything we should see him. After that he went out and got into his big Lincoln and drove off down the road.
I went back to the bunks then, but most of the other pickers, they was going off into San Sinandro to drink in the bars. A couple of them asked me if I wanted to come along, but I said I wasn’t much for the drinking.
I lay down on my bunk and started to read this movie magazine one of the college boys had. I sure like to read them movie magazines, all about the Hollywood people and the houses they have and the fine clothes and everything. Someday I’m going to have me all them things, too.
Well, I lay there and pretty soon it got dark outside. But it was awful hot in there and I got up and went out to get some air. It sure hadn’t cooled down much.
I walked down by the other bunks and come around the south end of the second one, and I heard all this commotion inside. There was a window right there and I stopped by that and looked inside to see what it was all about.
There was this bunch of pickers in there, about six of them, and they was all pretty well oiled up. They had a couple of empty wine jugs lying around on the floor, and they was passing this other one around from one to another.
And who should be right there in the middle of all of them but Haysoos. He was sitting on one of the bunks, his eyes all glassed over. He got the jug and took a long one out of there, and passed it on to the next one. He wasn’t whooping it up or nothing, like the rest of them was, but just sitting there on that bunk, kind of staring at the floor.
Well, while I watched, the rest of them started out the door and one had the wine jug. They called back to Haysoos, but he just sat there and didn’t answer them at all. Then Haysoos was alone, and I heard the rest of them going off down the road singing some kind of Mex song.
Old Haysoos found another jug somewhere and had one you would hardly believe from it. He wiped off his mouth with the back of his hand and then stood up and wobbled around some. I could see his lips moving like he was talking to himself, but I couldn’t hear none of it.
I got tired of watching him and went back to my bunk and lay down again, and it wasn’t so hot anymore. Pretty soon I went to sleep.
I woke up right away when I heard the sirens.
I jumped off my bunk and run outside, and there was a lot of the other pickers there, too, just come back from San Sinandro. They was all running up toward the big white house.
I commenced to running up there with them, and I thought how it must be that the big white house had caught fire somehow and what a terrible thing that would be. But when I got up there, I saw that it wasn’t fire engines that had made the sirens, but police cars. There was three of them there, and a big ambulance, and they all had these red lights going round and round on their tops. There was a couple of policemen, too, holding the pickers back and telling them not to come any closer.
I wedged in there, and the pickers that had been there for a while was talking pretty fast.
“...right there in the bedroom.”
“She had it coming.”
“They both did.”
“Yeah, but not that way.”
“Who found them?”
“Somebody heard the screams.”
“But they didn’t get him?”
“Not yet.”
“He must have gone through the fields.”
“They’ve got the roads blocked.”
“We’ll get up a posse...”
I said to one of the college boys who had been talking, “What is it? What happened?”
“You don’t know?”
I said, “I was sleeping. What is it?”
Just then the front door of the big white house opened and two fellows dressed in white and two policemen come out and they was carrying two stretchers. They had to pass by where I was to get to the ambulance, and I looked at the two sheet-covered stretchers and what was on them.
I just couldn’t believe it at first, but the college boys was talking again, telling about it, and I knew it had to be true. I turned away, sick as anybody ever was.
The one college boy put his hand on my shoulder. “Come on,” he said, “we’re going after him—”
But I pulled away and run back to the bunks. I had to get away from there. I couldn’t stay there no more.
You know what that crazy Haysoos had done?
He’d killed Mrs. Jensen and Mr. Carbante, that’s what. He’d gone up to the big white house with that sharp, sharp lettuce knife of his and cut off both their heads.
I don’t understand it, and I’m just so sick. A fine lady like Mrs. Jensen and a nice man like Mr. Carbante. Two of the swellest people you ever wanted to meet and know, and that crazy Haysoos had killed them both.
I just don’t understand what could have made him do a terrible, terrible thing like that.
Proof of Guilt
I’ve been a city cop for thirty-two years now, and during that time I’ve heard of and been involved in some of the weirdest, most audacious crimes imaginable — on and off public record. But as far as I’m concerned, the murder of an attorney named Adam Chillingham is the damnedest case in my experience, if not in the entire annals of crime.
You think I’m exaggerating? Well, listen to the way it was.
My partner Jack Sherrard and I were in the Detective Squad Room one morning last summer when this call came in from a man named Charles Hearn. He said he was Adam Chillingham’s law clerk, and that his employer had just been shot to death; he also said he had the killer trapped in the lawyer’s private office.
It seemed like a fairly routine case at that point. Sherrard and I drove out to the Dawes Building, a skyscraper in a new business development on the city’s south side, and rode the elevator up to Chillingham’s suite of offices on the sixteenth floor. Hearn and a woman named Clarisse Tower, who told us she had been the dead man’s secretary, were waiting in the anteroom with two uniformed patrolmen who had arrived minutes earlier.
According to Hearn, a man named George Dillon had made a ten-thirty appointment with Chillingham, had kept it punctually, and had been escorted by the attorney into the private office at that exact time. At ten-forty Hearn thought he heard a muffled explosion from inside the office, but he couldn’t be sure because the walls were partially soundproofed.
Hearn got up from his desk in the anteroom and knocked on the door and there was no response; then he tried the knob and found that the door was locked from the inside. Miss Tower confirmed all this, although she said she hadn’t heard any sound; her desk was farther away from the office door than was Hearn’s.
A couple of minutes later the door had opened and George Dillon had looked out and calmly said that Chillingham had been murdered. He had not tried to leave the office after the announcement; instead, he’d seated himself in a chair near the desk and lighted a cigarette. Hearn satisfied himself that his employer was dead, made a hasty exit, but had the presence of mind to lock the door from the outside by the simple expediency of transferring the key from the inside to the outside — thus sealing Dillon in the office with the body. After which Hearn put in his call to Headquarters.
So Sherrard and I drew our guns, unlocked the door, and burst into the private office. This George Dillon was sitting in the chair across the desk, very casual, both his hands up in plain sight. He gave us a relieved look and said he was glad the police had arrived so quickly.
I went over and looked at the body, which was sprawled on the floor behind the desk; a pair of French windows were open in the wall just beyond, letting in a warm summer breeze. Chillingham had been shot once in the right side of the neck, with what appeared by the size of the wound to have been a small-caliber bullet; there was no exit wound, and there were no powder burns.