pushed it under the seat. Then Neal climbed up beside the driver.
The driver flicked the reins and the horse started forward. Stevens,
who had climbed over the tailboard, remained standing. Just as the
wagon began to move, the locomotive backed up suddenly with a clank
of couplings. Its piston rods reversed, a jet of steam shot from the
cylinders, and the train started off in the direction of Weymouth,
Hingham, and the South Shore.
The shadow of the wagon moved diagonally across Railroad Avenue
toward the Hampton House, a mansard-roofed structure, four stories
high, that had been built in the seventies for a trunk factory.
It now housed the Slater & Morrill offices as well as the cutting
rooms of the upper factory—Slater & Morrill’s lower factory was some
distance away on Pearl Street. On the ground floor of the Hampton
House, to the left of the center entrance, was the express company’s
office. The gilt sign over its door, unchanged from an earlier day,
read _New York & Boston Despatch Express Co._
Its clapboarding flaked and blistered, the gray building lay full
in the slanting sunlight that burnished its windows. A narrow grass
border divided the avenue from an indented strip of pavement in front
of the porticoed Slater & Morrill entrance. Six or seven cars were
parked along the outside of the border. Neal recognized them. It was
still possible to know all the cars in town at sight. “A lot of autos
here this morning,” he remarked to the driver. There was one auto
parked by the granite curb near the central entrance that Neal had
never seen before: a touring car, dark and shiny as if it had just
been polished. The top was up, the rear side curtains were fastened
in place, and the motor was running. Neal’s driver had to turn out
sharply to avoid scraping its fender. A man slumped down in the
driver’s seat did not turn or look at them. He wore a felt hat, and
his shoulders were hunched so that all Neal could see was the back of
his neck, and his right hand on the steering wheel. Then, standing in
the doorway under the portico, Neal noticed a second man, thin and
fair-haired, with a pale sunken face. He had on a brown coat like an
old army overcoat and he wore a gray hat pulled over his forehead.
Neal did not like his looks.
The driver backed the wagon into the space in front of the express
office, and Neal and Stevens carried the box inside. After the
outside chill the office was warmly pleasant, smelling of floor oil
and cigars. Neal took the key from the envelope and opened the box.
Inside were the payrolls for the two companies, each in a brown
canvas bag stamped National Shawmut Bank. He took out the Slater
& Morrill bag and put the box containing the Walker and Kneeland
money in the safe. Then he closed the safe door, pressed down the
nickel-plated handle, and spun the dial.
With the bag tucked under his arm Neal motioned to Stevens and they
started out the door toward the building’s center entrance. Neal now
noticed another strange car. This one was parked across the avenue,
facing south. He could not tell what kind it was. It was streaked
with mud. He heard its driver call out “All right!” to the man in the
first car. The pale man was still standing under the portico leaning
against the door post. His hands were thrust into his overcoat
pockets, and he held his head low, but as Neal and Stevens passed he
stared up at them, moving his eyes without lifting his head. Neal
felt for the reassurance of the Colt in his pocket. The man did not
move. He had blue bulging eyes, the whites muddied, and his skin was
yellowish, sickly, as if he were tubercular.
There was something queer about him, about his being there, Neal felt
as he trudged up to the second floor. “Some funny-looking people
round here today,” he told the girl at the desk. Margaret Mahoney,
the paymistress, was at her desk by the water cooler. Neal had known
Margaret Mahoney for years. The payroll bag was heavy for her so he
walked across the office and put it in the safe himself. She gave him
the receipt for it, and he and Stevens started downstairs.
From the top of the landing Neal could see the pale man still
standing in the doorway but when he was about halfway down the man
took his hands out of his pockets, walked over to the touring car,
opened the rear door, and got in. Neal kept his hand on his Colt.
By the time he reached the doorway the car had started up and swung
round the corner of Holbrook Avenue. The mud-streaked car had already
disappeared.
* * * * *
South Braintree Square was empty at half-past ten when Harry
Dolbeare, a piano tuner, finished a cup of coffee at Torrey’s
Drugstore on the corner and started up Washington Street to Cuff’s
Music Store. Cuff had called him the day before to see about the
felts on a secondhand upright, and Dolbeare told him he would have
a look at it. As he reached Gregor’s Restaurant he noticed a black
touring car turning left from Holbrook Avenue to Washington Street.
He could see two men in front and, although the rear side curtains
were up, three more men in the back seat. One of the men in back was
leaning forward talking to the driver. Dolbeare had never seen any of
them before, or the car either. They looked to him like foreigners,
maybe some of that Dago bunch from the Fore River shipyards. Tough
tickets, the lot of them, he thought to himself after the car had
passed him.
At 11:15 Lola Hassam, a hard-faced woman in her forties, got off the
train from Quincy with Julia Campbell, the old woman who rented one
of her two rooms in the Alhambra Block there. Lola now called herself
Lola Andrews, her name before her divorce, although some people said
she had never been married. At various times she had been a waitress,
a cleaning woman, and a practical nurse. Men often used to come to
her room in the Alhambra. Since things were slack in Quincy, she and
Julia had decided to come to South Braintree and look for work in one
of the shoe factories.
They crossed the tracks by the gate-tender’s shack at the end of
Railroad Avenue, walked down Pearl Street past the double pipe fence
in front of Rice & Hutchins, and continued another twenty-five yards
to the lower Slater & Morrill factory. Julia Campbell was developing
cataracts, and she took the younger woman’s arm going downhill.
About thirty feet from the factory they passed a black touring
car parked at the side of the road. A dark stocky man with high
cheekbones was bending over the raised hood adjusting the motor.
Lola Andrews saw another man sitting in the back of the car, a pale,
sick-looking sort of fellow in a khaki overcoat.
The men paid no attention to them and the women walked up the steps
of Slater & Morrill. Once inside they could not locate the employment
office. As they stood there undecided, a middle-aged man in a
business suit came down the corridor and asked them what they wanted.
“We want work, mister,” Lola Andrews said. The man said that three
months ago he could have given them both jobs. Now they were not
taking on any new help. She was not to be put off so easily,
insisting she had heard in Quincy that the factory needed people. He
told her she had heard wrong. “Isn’t this Rice and Hutchins?” she
asked him finally.
No, he told her, Rice & Hutchins was up the road.
When the women again passed the touring car, the pale man in the
overcoat was standing behind it and the dark man had crawled
underneath and was working on the motor from below, his head and
shoulders just visible through the spokes of the front wheel. Lola
had almost to step over his feet to get by. He had a screwdriver in
his hand, and just as she was opposite him he glanced up at her.
“Pardon me,” she said, “could you tell me how to get to the factory
office?”
He crawled out from under the car, stood up, and asked her what
factory she wanted. When she told him Rice & Hutchins, he pointed
out the brick building and told her to take the driveway to the left;
that was the office up there.
Lola and old Julia went down the gravel walk along the side of the
brick building, up the stairs, and through the double folding doors.
They could see the Employment Office sign there plainly enough.
Whenever William Tracey drove to the square on an errand, as he did
two or three times a day, he liked to drive by his building, the
wooden three-decker he had built in 1907 at the corner of Hancock and
Pearl. Torrey’s Drugstore occupied the ground floor. That Thursday
morning as he parked on Pearl to pick up his wife’s groceries at
Dyer & Sullivan’s, just across from the drugstore, he noticed two
strangers standing with their backs to Torrey’s window where the big
glass vase of red water hung from its chains. The men were swarthy,
about medium height, one just a little taller than the other. If it
had been twelve o’clock the streets would have been full of factory
hands and he probably would not have noticed them, but it was still
half an hour before the noon whistle and the square was empty. He
could not help but notice them.
After Tracey reached home with the groceries he found he had
forgotten bread, so he drove back again, past his building and left
to Schrout’s Bakery on Pearl Street. The strange men were still
leaning against the window as he went in. When he came out they were
gone.
Not quite an hour later William Heron, a railroad detective, noticed
the same two men in the station. They were sitting on a bench by
the gents’ toilet smoking cigarettes and talking in some foreign
language. Dagos, he thought they were. He had come down on the 12:27
from Boston, and he was scarcely off the train before he spotted a
fresh kid who had climbed on top of the Union News stand and was
trying to tip it over. Eleven or twelve years old he was, one of that
gang that hung around the station afternoons. Heron grabbed him by
the collar and ran him into the operator’s room. The Dagos didn’t
even look up as he went by.
McNamara was the kid’s name. The operator said his old man was all
right, worked for the railroad, so Heron told the kid what he’d do to
him if he ever caught him hanging round the station again, and let
him go. He was not in the operator’s room more than five minutes, but
when he stepped out again the Dagos had left. Somehow they stuck in
his mind, and he wondered where they had gone to.
By trade Ralph DeForest was a shoemaker, though he had been
unemployed for two months now. When he had nothing else to do, and
that was most of the time, he wandered around South Braintree Square
or sometimes dropped in at Magazu’s poolroom on Pearl Street. At 2:20
he was talking with Officer Shea on the corner next to Torrey’s when
he spotted two men in front of the jewelry store. In the last two
months he had seen everyone in town, but he had never seen those two
before. Shea left to go up to the town hall and DeForest walked down
by the fruit store past the jeweler’s. The two men looked him over
as if they wanted to make something of it. Dark men they were, tough
babies. He wasn’t going to let them think he was scared of them,
though. Deliberately he turned round and walked past them again. They
stared at him, and he stared at them, and finally he said: “I don’t
think I owe you fellows anything.”
Without answering him they started off down Pearl Street, one about
five feet ahead of the other. DeForest decided he would follow them.
At the crossing they turned left toward the station. Just in front of
the station a pinch-faced man in a brown coat was tinkering with the
engine of a black touring car. The other two paused on the platform
and DeForest brushed right by them and through the station into the
toilet. When he came out the car and men had disappeared.
At ten minutes to three Jenny Novelli, a nurse, was on her way down
Pearl Street to call on her friend Mrs. Knipps, who lived on Colbert
Avenue, a dead-end dirt road just beyond Rice & Hutchins on the left.
As she passed Schrout’s Bakery she noticed a large curtained touring
car abreast of her and going in the same direction scarcely faster
than she was walking. The car kept level with her until she reached
the cobbler’s shop on the corner. At first she thought the man next
to the driver was a friend of hers, William Mooney, but at second
glance she realized she was mistaken. The pale driver she scarcely
noticed.
For sixteen years Lewis Wade had been working in the sole-leather
room at Slater & Morrill. Then, late in 1919, the boss had put him in
charge of the shed and gasoline pump in front of the lower factory.
Any time the company cars needed gas he went out to take care of
them. Every afternoon at the same time Hans Behrsin, Mr. Slater’s
chauffeur, would come round to fill up Slater’s Marmon sedan, and
Wade was always ready for him with the shed door open and the pump
unlocked.
On this April 15 just before three o’clock, Behrsin dropped by as
usual and said he was on his way to the garage and that he would be
back in ten minutes. A couple of minutes after three, as Wade was
hitching the hose onto the pump, he happened to see a touring car
below the factory in front of the little wooden house that belonged
to the carpenter at Rice & Hutchins. A man was bending over the hood
of the car fixing something.
Behrsin pulled up alongside the shed with the gray Marmon and
Wade put in about eight gallons of gas. While he was cranking he
kept watching the black car until before he knew it the tank had
overflowed. Behrsin and he wiped up the overflow, then Behrsin drove
off up Pearl Street toward the station.
As he passed Rice & Hutchins he saw two men sitting on the pipe fence
near the end of the building, their feet on the lower bar. He knew
they were strangers, but that was all he noticed about them.
From the time Shelley Neal brought in the payroll money, Margaret
Mahoney had been dividing it to make up the envelopes for the lower
factory. There were almost five hundred separate envelopes to be
filled, and dividing the $15,776.51 took her right up to three
o’clock, with only about ten minutes off for lunch. After she had
sealed the envelopes she packed them in two wooden cases that went
inside steel cashboxes with Yale locks. Hardly had she got the locks
fastened before Mr. Parmenter and his guard Berardelli, the one
everyone called the detective, stood there waiting for them.
Frederick Parmenter was in his middle forties, a full-faced man with
a short mustache. The solidness of his body, his slightly sagging
features and thinning brown hair made him seem older. Margaret
Mahoney and the other girls in the office looked forward to his
weekly visits. He liked to joke and pretend to make dates with them,
though it was only in fun, for he had been married for years and
did not play around. He was always very careful of his dress. That
day he wore a white shirt with black and pink stripes and a new
brown felt hat. Before he left he kidded a bit with the bookkeepers,
Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine. He said he would take his pay now
while there was still some money, and Margaret Gabney, the assistant
bookkeeper, told him he had better, for there might not be any
tomorrow. Then he took one of the cashboxes by the handle, and the
detective took the other. The detective was just another Italian who
never said anything.
Margaret Mahoney remembered afterward how Parmenter stood for a
moment in the doorway and then how the stairs creaked as he and the
detective walked down. It was a few minutes past three.
Outside the main entrance of the Hampton House, Parmenter, with
Berardelli behind him, met Albert Frantello from the lower factory.
Frantello said he was on his way to the office to get some cardboard
tags. The paymaster and his guard walked on out of the shadow of the
Hampton House.
Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine watched them for some minutes from
their window on the second floor. Parmenter, without an overcoat,
kept to the outside of the gravel walk and the detective, his
overcoat buttoned up, walked a little way behind him. Just before
they reached the crossing Parmenter shifted the cashbox from his left
to his right hand. Fifteen feet beyond him the gate-tender was out
washing a window of his shack.
From the cutting room on the third floor, Mark Carrigan, also looking
out a window, kept his eye on the paymaster and the detective with
their boxes as they passed the cobbler’s shop on the corner and went
on toward the railroad-crossing sign. Just beyond the crossing, they
stopped to talk with a man coming uphill from the other direction.
Then they went on down, behind the high board fence by the water
tower.
The first-floor windows of the lower Slater & Morrill factory were
open, and Minnie Kennedy and Louise Hayes at their workbench noticed
a touring car parked by the side of the street only about ten feet
from them. A slight fair-haired man in a blue suit was fussing with
the motor, lifting one side of the hood and then the other. Finally
he stood by the front mudguard and lit a cigarette. A sickly young
man he seemed, but not bad-looking. While he was standing there with
a screwdriver in his hand, Thomas Treacy drove up with a wagonload
of coal for Slater & Morrill, noticed the man’s light hair, and
remembered that he had seen the same car with another man in front of
the railroad station early that morning.
After a while the two girls watched the fair-haired man get into the
car, drive down Pearl Street toward the swamp, turn round, and start
back again.
Roy Gould had invented an oil-and-pumice paste for sharpening safety
razor blades. All you needed to do was smear a little on the edge
of a blade, run the blade a couple of times around the inside rim
of a glass tumbler, and it was as good as new. He used to go to the
different South Shore factories on paydays and sell his paste at the
gates as the men came out. On April 15 he arrived at South Braintree
on the 2:59 train. There was a young fellow standing on the platform
and Gould asked him if he knew where and how they paid off at the
shoe factories. The other pointed to two men walking down the street
to the railroad crossing. “There goes the paymaster now,” he told
him. “Just follow him.”
Gould started off toward the gateman’s shack. He could see the
paymaster stop briefly at the crossing to talk with someone, then
disappear behind the board fence the other side of the tracks.
Jimmy Bostock, the bandy-legged machine repairman, hurrying up Pearl
Street from the lower factory to get the 3:15 trolley to Brockton,
was near the water tower when he saw Parmenter and Berardelli coming
down the street. He crossed over to meet them.
“Bostock,” Parmenter said as he came up, “there’s a pulley off one of
the motors up at Number One.”
“I can’t look at it, not today,” Bostock told him. “I got to get this
quarter-past-three trolley to Brockton to do a job there.”
“Well,” said Parmenter amiably, “they just told me to tell you if I
saw you. That’s all.” While they were talking, Behrsin drove by in
the Marmon sedan, honking and waving as he passed. Bostock said he
would have to leg it to catch his trolley. “Don’t let me keep you,”
Parmenter told him. He and his guard continued down the gravel walk.
Parmenter shifted the cashbox from his right to his left hand. The
afternoon sun was warm on his back. To his right was the garage with
the tin roof, and beyond it the tower of Rice & Hutchins. The lilac
bush on the little dirt triangle in front of the factory was just
coming into bud. A flock of pigeons circled over the tower, then
headed back to their loft in Cain’s livery stable. Across the street,
beyond a pile of bricks, some Italians were digging the cellar for
a new restaurant. A loaded truck had just started up out of the
excavation. Jim McGlone’s dump cart was pulled up to the curb beside
a couple of little carts into which the Italians were shoveling dirt.
Parmenter passed the telephone pole with the red fire-alarm box on
it. Two strangers were standing by the fence in front of Rice &
Hutchins, dark squat men, their hands in their pockets. One wore a
cap, the other a felt hat. He kept on past them, one step, two steps,
three....
As his guard, still following, reached the telephone pole, the
strangers whipped their hands from their pockets, and the man in
the cap lunged forward, pinning Berardelli by the shoulder with his
left hand while his right brought up a pistol. Berardelli tried to
grapple with him, but before he could get a grip the man fired into
him three times. Parmenter turned like a cat to find the same man
now facing him, pistol in hand, and Berardelli just behind, his
knees buckling. Then the gun muzzle flashed and a bullet struck him
in the chest. He flinched, took a few steps sideways, and the man
fired again. This time the bullet struck him in the back, and as he
staggered across the street his legs began to go limp. Berardelli lay
in the gutter, his arms twitching, the second cashbox just beyond the
reach of his right hand. The man in the felt hat snatched up the box,
then darted out toward the box Parmenter had dropped.
The man in the cap, who had followed Parmenter halfway across the
street, now signaled with his pistol and fired again. As he did so
the dark touring car that had been parked below Slater & Morrill
seventy-five yards away started jerkily uphill with a grinding of
gears.
The staccato sound of the shots echoed from the factory walls.
From the loft of the livery stable the pigeons swirled up into the
sunshine, then wheeled over the Hampton House. At the end of the
wooden fence, almost at the crossing, Jimmy Bostock turned to see
Berardelli doubling up and the gunman firing. Parmenter was walking
jerkily across the street, and Bostock did not realize the paymaster
had been hit until he began to sag. Seeing him fall, Bostock took a
few steps toward him, but as he did so the man in the cap froze him
by the fence with two shots.
The touring car churned along the street, sputtering and skipping,
the driver furiously working the spark lever on the steering wheel.
Berardelli had managed to get to his hands and knees. Before the
car stopped a man, crouched on the running board, sprang off near
the brick pile. He had an automatic in his hand. Stepping to the
swaying Berardelli, he fired point-blank. Berardelli collapsed in the
gravel. The first two bandits had piled into the back seat with the
cashboxes. After firing several shots at the upper factory windows,
the third bandit climbed in the back seat after them. As the car
whined toward the crossing he crawled over into the front seat,
leaning out, pistol in hand.
Wade was just snapping the lock on the gas pump when he heard the
noise and looked up the street, thinking the Italians had started
a fight. He saw Parmenter drop behind the cart and then watched a
wavy-haired man shoot at Berardelli.
Along the front of each floor of Rice & Hutchins were nine rows of
frosted-glass windows. Even if the sash of the middle cutting-room
window on the first floor had not been jammed several inches above
the sill, the cutters at their benches might still have heard the
shots above the noise of the machinery. The jammed window made
this certain. At the sound William Brenner leaned forward from his
cutting board to peer through the slit, as did Louis Pelser on his
right. As they looked down they saw Berardelli writhing in the
gutter almost directly below them and a man with a pistol standing
over him. Afterward they found it difficult to remember just what
or how much they had seen in that one glimpse. As Pelser later
testified, “We seen a glance of the whole thing.” From behind them
Peter McCullum sprang on top of the bench, kicking the cutting boards
aside and throwing the window up to the sash. What he saw was a dark
man pushing a box in a car with his right hand. The sunshine was
flickering on a whitish pistol in his left hand.
“Duck!” McCullum yelled, “There’s shooting going on!” Another shot
echoed, and there was a tinkle of broken glass. McCullum, Brenner,
Pelser, and the rest of the cutters threw themselves on the floor
under the benches. A few seconds later a cutter at the other end of
the room shouted that the automobile was crossing the tracks. They
crawled out from under the benches, and Pelser pushed down to the
end of the room where someone had opened the last window. He managed
to see only the rear of the car jolting over the tracks but he could
still make out the license plate. Going back to his cutting board he
wrote down the number: 49783.