Langlois, glanced incredulously down at the slumped Berardelli and
the two strangers. “Someone’s been shot!” he shouted and ran for
the wall telephone in the corridor. Barbara Liscomb peered from the
window to see the paymaster and his guard on the ground, and just
below her a dark, short, hatless man with a pistol in his hand. As
she looked, he lifted his head and stared directly at her, a face
that she could never afterward get out of her mind. He pointed his
pistol, but before the bullet crashed through the pane over her head
she had fainted. Langlois, dashing back, looked out again to see the
dark car rolling toward the crossing. The glass had been removed from
the back window and a rifle or shotgun barrel was sticking through
the opening.
In the Slater & Morrill lower factory Minnie Kennedy and Louise Hayes
had gone upstairs to the ladies’ room. When they heard the shots they
dashed to the window just in time to catch a glimpse of the vanishing
car.
From the kitchen of the frame house in back of the excavation Annie
Nichols, so startled that she could hardly breathe, had watched
the shooting, seen Berardelli and Parmenter fall, and the laborers
scatter and dodge toward her fence. Then the touring car appeared and
a man tossed the cashboxes into it. In his house next door Maurice
Colbert, a carman for the railroad, had just gone into the kitchen
to take off his coat when he heard the shots and saw the Italians
running. He started for the front door only to find that his wife,
sensing trouble, had locked it and removed the key. All he could
see from the window was the auto and the two men with boxes running
toward it.
As the car approached the railroad crossing, it came so close to
Bostock that he could have reached out and touched it. Levangie,
washing the windows of his shack, had heard the shots without heeding
them until he saw a man come out from behind the brick pile and
commence shooting. At that very moment the warning bell began to ring
for the Brockton train, and he left his cloth and bucket to crank
down the gates. Just as he brought the bars horizontal the touring
car came to a halt in front of him, a man leaning out with a pistol
that he jerked up sharply, shouting “Up! Up!” The train was still
beyond the Hood Rubber Works, the engine just rounding the bend.
Again the man jerked the pistol, then pointed it. Levangie raised the
barrier. The touring car jolted across the ties, passing within a few
feet of Roy Gould on his way to the factories with his razor-blade
paste. A bareheaded gunman fired at Gould almost point-blank, the
bullet piercing a lapel of his overcoat. Gould fixed the man’s look
in his mind: the blown wavy hair, the blue suit, and oddly enough the
watchchain that he was wearing across his waistcoat.
Mary Splaine and Frances Devlin from their Hampton House office,
Mark Carrigan from the cutting room above, watched the topheavy
car with its flapping curtains as it crossed from the tracks to
the cobbler’s shop on the corner. The gunman in the front seat was
firing at random. Workers scurried out the side entrance of Rice &
Hutchins. Someone was chasing up the street from the factory calling
“Stop them! Stop them!” A railroad gang working beside a sandpile
stood gaping, their shovels still in their hands, Angelo Ricci, the
foreman, trying to keep them back.
On the corner of Railroad Avenue in front of the cobbler’s shop the
car almost brushed Frank Burke, an itinerant glassblower down for the
day from Brockton. The gunman in the front seat aimed directly at
him and pulled the trigger, but the hammer merely clicked. “Get out
of the way, you son of a bitch!” he bellowed at Burke, the curtains
blurring his face.
Louis DeBeradinis in his cobbler’s shop was giving an order to a
salesman, Merle Averill, when he heard the tattoo of shots. “What the
hell’s that?” Averill asked him, dropping his order book and running
to the door. DeBeradinis followed. Together they saw the touring car
sputter past the shop. The gunman leaned out and fired almost in
DeBeradinis’ face. Again the weapon misfired.
At the poolroom at 66 Pearl Street, beyond the stable, Carlos
Goodridge, a Victrola salesman, had been having a quick game with
Peter Magazu, the proprietor, who also owned the shoe store next
door, when he heard the first shots. He walked to the window, saw
nothing, came back, and was chalking his cue when he heard more shots
and people shouting. This time, stepping out to the edge of the
sidewalk, he saw the dark touring car only twenty feet away and a
swarthy man leaning out of it pointing a revolver at him. He ducked
back inside and slammed the poolroom door, then peered out through
the glass as the car spun by. The gunman had lowered his hand now,
but he still held the revolver. Goodridge, his stomach tightened in a
knot, watched the car swerve past the bakery, a gun barrel protruding
from the gap of the rear window.
It gathered speed, running more smoothly, rolling past the stores and
the frame two- and three-family houses and the barber shop with its
spiraling striped pole. At 54 Pearl Street Nicola Damato, the barber,
watched it pass, as did a shoe worker, Olaf Olsen, who had just come
out of Torrey’s Drugstore. Both of them saw the gunman leaning out.
Olsen noticed how he kept his left hand over his mouth as he held the
pistol in his right. As the car swung left onto Washington at the top
of Pearl Street, the tires spewing up the gravel, one of the men in
the rear seat threw out several handfuls of tacks.
Elmer Chase, loading a truck in front of the Co-operative Society a
hundred yards down Washington Street, heard the squeal of brakes and
the grinding of gears. He looked up at the oncoming car, expecting a
smashup. It slowed slightly as it passed him, and he had a glimpse of
a sickly-looking driver and a stocky dark man with blowing hair bent
over next to him.
* * * * *
Scarcely a minute had elapsed from the first shot until the getaway
car vanished, but with its disappearance the actuality faded and the
myth took over. All in all there were more than fifty witnesses of
the holdup in its various stages, yet each impression now began to
work in the yeast of individual preconceptions. The car was black, it
was green, it was shiny, it was mud-streaked. There were two cars.
The men who did the shooting were dark, were pale, had blue suits,
had brown suits, had gray suits, wore felt hats, wore caps, were
bareheaded. Only one had a gun, both had guns. The third man had been
behind the brick pile with a shotgun all the time. Anywhere between
eight and thirty shots had been fired. On some points there was a
rough agreement: The car was a touring car, there were five men in
it, the driver was a fair, sallow man, and the two men who had begun
the shooting were short and clean-shaven.
The three gunmen had scarcely climbed into their car before Jim
McGlone crawled from the excavation to where Parmenter lay sprawled
on a stone. “I got him by the shoulder,” McGlone related two days
later at the inquest, “and asked him where he was hurt and he didn’t
answer, and I lowered his head to the ground. I went to the double
team and got a horse blanket to put under Parmenter’s head and my
brother came along and we lifted Parmenter up and they spread the
horse blanket out and we put Parmenter in, and my brother and two
other fellows took hold of a corner of the blanket and we carried him
into the house.”
As soon as the car had passed the water tower Jimmy Bostock ran back
to Berardelli. The detective lay on his side, his lips open, and with
every breath blood foamed from his mouth. Bostock propped the guard’s
head up slightly and wiped his face with a handkerchief.
Berardelli gave a shudder, the bright bubbling at his mouth stopped,
and Bostock knew that the man was dead. In the gravel Bostock noted
four spent shell cases. He picked them up and put them in his pocket.
All the factory entrances were now clogged with gesticulating
figures. Those who remained inside lined the open windows. From
the shops and tenements and the Hampton House beyond, people were
streaming across the tracks to where the two men were lying. Around
Berardelli they gathered ten deep. Fred Loring, who had run out with
the others from the lower factory, saw a dark cloth cap lying a foot
or so from the guard’s body. He picked it up and tucked it into
his pocket. McGlone kept pushing the crowd back from the groaning
Parmenter. Then he and his brother and Bostock carried the paymaster
into the Colbert house, just behind the excavation. Crowds swarmed
into Pearl Street: men in shirtsleeves, women in work aprons, small
boys underfoot pushing their way through the others. The roadway was
soon blocked from the factories to the railroad crossing. The voices
of the men and women mingled, a collective murmur of incredulity
that a thing such as they might have read about in newspaper
headlines could actually have happened in South Braintree.
Shelley Neal arrived with his special police badge pinned on his coat
and his Colt in his pocket just as they were carrying Parmenter into
the Colbert house. The paymaster looked almost gone. As soon as Neal
saw him in the blanket his one thought was to get back to the office
and call the man’s wife. It took him five minutes, bucking the crowd,
to reach the Hampton House and once there he found all the telephone
lines busy. After trying several times to get central, he hurried
down the steps to his harnessed wagon and headed for the telephone
exchange.
Police Chief Jeremiah Gallivan, driving up in his Ford, passed the
careening wagon, Neal with his feet braced against the dashboard
and slashing at his galloping horse. By the time Gallivan covered
the mile and a half from his home to Rice & Hutchins, Parmenter had
been taken inside and Berardelli was dead. The chief shouldered his
way through the crowd until he stood looking down at the familiar
body with the unfamiliar glazed eyes. The mill workers pressed about
him, their voices clamorous as they pointed out where the shots had
been fired and the route of the car. Fire Chief Fred Tenney, already
on the spot, told him it was a touring car with a green body. Its
motor was acting up, Tenney said. He thought there might still be a
chance to catch the gunman. Gallivan was willing to try. Together
they started off in the red department runabout, forcing their way up
Pearl Street, Tenney sounding the brass bell mounted on the radiator.
After a left turn onto Washington Street they had to stop to brush
away the scattered tacks, but after that they were in the clear. At
the Plain Street railroad crossing Gallivan shouted at Joe Buckley,
the gate-tender, that there had been a killing. Had he seen a car
pass? Buckley had not. Gallivan and Tenney continued straight south
toward Holbrook, two miles away.
At Holbrook Square they found a soldier who had seen just such a
green touring car ten minutes before on the way to Abington. They
swung east on the Abington road, Gallivan gun in hand, Tenney
clanging his bell as he held the accelerator to the floor. The flat
wooden town came on them with a rush, but beyond, in the network of
roads between Whitman and Cox’s Corner, they lost the trail. Back and
forth through the barren landscape they circled, along dirt ways that
looped back on themselves or ended in the litter of some squatter’s
chicken yard. The dust rose behind them and the afternoon shadows
lengthened as the red runabout pushed on—until after almost two hours
of driving they gave up.
Gallivan’s revolver was back in its holster and the fire chief’s bell
silent when they again reached the Plain Street crossing. Buckley
waved for them to stop. “I forgot to tell you about a car that came
down here and went up that way,” he told them, pointing north. “It
went out of my mind. The brakes screeched so much I thought it was
going into the river.”
“Well,” said Gallivan, “it’s too late now.”
* * * * *
Instead of continuing over the tracks at Plain Street the car—with
the screech that Buckley noted—had made a hairpin turn and headed
back toward South Braintree on the almost parallel Franklin Street.
But at the hill corner by the white-spired South Congregational
Church it had swung west on Pond Street, following the curve of
Sunset Lake on the right, and past the cemetery and the Torrey
Elementary School on the left. After following Pond Street west for
a mile, slapping and jolting, side curtains billowing and the motor
roaring, the car turned south on Granite Street toward Randolph.
Mrs. Alta Baker saw it near the Randolph line, moving at fifty miles
an hour. At twelve minutes after three it passed Walter Desmond, a
tobacco salesman, on his way from Randolph to South Braintree. Then
at the junction with the Randolph highway it swung right along the
broken surface of Oak Street, cut through the scrubby outskirts of
the Randolph Woods for a mile and a half, and took the left fork near
an old cemetery into Orchard Street. On this obscure lane it passed
Albert Farmer and his wife Adeline with their horse and wagon that
they had just taken from the barn where the two roads joined. The
Farmers noticed the swirl of dust as the car moved toward them and
they watched it make the abrupt turn south into Orchard Street.
The driver must have soon realized he was off course, for ten minutes
later George Chisholm, a road laborer working on Main Street, a
stone’s throw from Oak, saw the car beating up north with flaring
curtains, hurtling by him so fast he thought the tires were coming
off. It turned right into Oak Street and continued a quarter of
a mile east, bearing down Orchard until it again arrived at the
junction. The driver stopped, hesitated, then swung the car into the
yard of the Hewins house on the corner just across from the Farmers.
Mabel Hewins was standing on her porch when the swarthy man in the
front seat leaned out and asked her the way to Providence. She told
him to follow Oak Street to Chestnut across North Main and keep
going. He grunted, reversed the car jerkily, and started back the way
he had come. She could see both men in the front seat clearly, but
not the others.
Not quite two miles farther, a mile beyond Tower Hill where Chestnut
Street merges with the Stoughton Post Road, John Lloyd and Wilson
Dorr, working in a sandpit, saw the car jouncing south along the
road that was “all hills and hollows and ruts.” Dorr noticed that
the glass was missing from the back window. On the sharp gradient
of Tucker Hill leading into Stoughton it overtook Francis Clark and
Elmer Pool in their bakery wagon, veered out, and continued on the
left-hand side of the road and over the crest. Clark, too, noticed
the oblong gap in the back of the cloth top and told Pool to copy the
license plate. All Pool could spot was 49.
The car disappeared south in the isolation of the old turnpike and
was not glimpsed again until it reached the outskirts of Brockton
at a quarter to four. A high school girl, Julia Kelliher, saw it
coming down very fast over the hill from Brockton Heights, churning
the dust behind it, the curtains fluttering in the wind. As it went
over a bump she saw something tossed up in the back seat behind the
curtains. There were two men in front. After the car passed she tried
to take down the license number. She could made out an 83 at the end
and a 9 and a 7, and these she wrote in the sand beside the road.
At 4:15 Austin Reed, the railroad-crossing tender at Matfield, a
small settlement on the outskirts of West Bridgewater, eight and a
half miles southeast of Brockton Heights and twenty-two miles from
South Braintree, stepped out of his shanty at the approach of the
train from Westdale. As he stood in the middle of the road with the
yellow Stop sign in his hand, he saw a touring car racing down the
hill from West Bridgewater. He walked toward it holding up his sign.
The driver did not seem to want to stop, but finally he pulled up
about forty feet away. A man sitting next to the driver leaned out
and shouted, “What the hell are you holding us up for?” Then the
train passed between them. After it had rumbled by, the car started
up over the crossing and the man in the front seat pointed his finger
at Reed as if it were a pistol and bellowed again: “What the hell did
you hold us up for?” He was only four feet away.
The rattling car took the right fork on Matfield Street, then, as if
it had made a circle, returned three minutes later on the left fork
of Belmont Street and recrossed the track. Reed saw it edge over the
hill and watched the cloud of dust that slowly settled behind it.
That was the last seen that day of the touring car.
* * * * *
Parmenter lay propped up on the sofa in the front room of the Colbert
house. Scarcely conscious, he managed to whisper that one gunman was
dark, short, and stocky and the other short and thin.
When the Weymouth medical examiner, Dr. John Chisholm Frazer, arrived
at four o’clock there were several other doctors already in the room
with Parmenter. Frazer stopped by Berardelli’s body—it had been
carried into the Colbert kitchen—only long enough to note that he was
dead and that blood was oozing from his back and arms. Shortly after
the medical examiner’s arrival, the ambulance from the Quincy City
Hospital came for Parmenter. As the paymaster was carried down the
steps the onlookers surged in toward the stretcher. They surged in
again twenty minutes later when Berardelli’s body was taken away in a
wicker basket.
After the hearse had disappeared the crowd began to thin. Most of the
workers headed home, leaving behind a diminishing core of the young
and idle. The long shadow of the afternoon moved along the factory
fronts and the sun turned the Slater & Morrill windows orange. A
group—mostly boys in corduroy knickers—still stood around the stains
in the gravel where Berardelli had fallen.
Later, as the sun edged toward the Blue Hills and the light began to
fade, the crowd increased again. Workers and their wives strolled
down Pearl Street after supper for a second look, voluble witnesses
repeated the details, and as the news spread to the neighboring
towns the curious and the morbid began to arrive from the compass
points—Randolph, Quincy, Holbrook, Weymouth.
Dr. Nathaniel Hunting operated on Parmenter shortly after his arrival
in the hospital. A bullet that had apparently glanced off his ribs,
causing an elongated but superficial wound, was shaken out of his
jacket. The second bullet, the one that had struck him after he
turned, had cut horizontally through his abdomen, perforating the
_vena cava_, the body’s largest vein. Hunting was able to remove
it easily from a mass of blue flesh just below the surface of the
abdomen. He marked the bullet with a cross on the base. After the
operation Parmenter recovered consciousness for a few minutes and
managed to tell Assistant District Attorney George Adams, who had
been waiting at his bedside, that he did not recognize the men who
shot him. Then he drifted off again. He died at five in the morning,
some fourteen hours after he was shot.
Dr. George Burgess Magrath, the medical examiner of Suffolk County,
made the autopsy on Berardelli, assisted by the Norfolk County
examiner, Dr. Frederick Jones. He found four visible wounds: the
first in the left back upper arm, the second near the left armpit,
the third lower down on the left side, and the fourth at the right
shoulder. According to Dr. Magrath, Berardelli might have recovered
from the first three wounds, but not from the fourth. The bullet
there had pierced the right lung, severed the great artery issuing
from the heart, and continued down through the intestines until it
lodged in the hipbone.
All four bullets had remained in the body. As Dr. Magrath recovered
them he took a surgical needle and scored each in turn on the base
with a Roman numeral. The mortal bullet he marked with three vertical
scratches.
The shell cases that Jimmy Bostock had picked out of the gravel he
handed to Thomas Fraher, the Slater & Morrill superintendent. These
consisted of two Peters shells, one Remington, and one Winchester—the
last identifiable by a W stamped on its base. Fraher in turn gave
them to Captain William Proctor, the head of the State Police, who
had driven down from Boston as soon as he heard of the shootings.
Several hours later Fred Loring gave the cap he had picked up to
Fraher, who kept it overnight and then passed it on to Chief Gallivan.
Over that week end South Braintree bubbled with gossip. State Police
and Pinkerton detectives, occasionally at crosspurposes, combed the
town, interviewing and filling out their reports. Chief Gallivan
spent Sunday with a state policeman searching the Braintree woods for
abandoned cashboxes. He found nothing. That was his last discouraged
gesture in the case.
A rumor floated round that Berardelli had recognized the man who
shot him, that he had known in advance something was up, and that
was why he had been killed. There was a lot of such talk in the
Hampton House. Mary Splaine and Jimmy Bostock told a young Pinkerton
operative, Henry Hellyer, they thought a man named Darling who
worked in the order department might have been the front man for the
bandits. Darling had a bad reputation. Two of his friends had been
arrested some years back for stealing shoes from the factory, and
only a few weeks ago the police had found some stolen shoes at his
house. Mary Splaine supposed that Darling had probably hatched the
scheme and tipped off his accomplices as to the time the payroll went
out. But when Hellyer asked Fraher about this, the superintendent
told him that Darling was completely trustworthy and that Mary
Splaine was too irresponsible for anyone to take her seriously.
On Saturday, when the inquest was held before Judge Albert Avery
in the Quincy District Court, several witnesses said they had seen
two cars during the holdup, a large touring car and a small sedan.
Levangie, the gate-tender, described the driver of the touring car as
having a “dark complexion, dark brown mustache, soft hat, and brown
coat.” Everyone else described him as a pale, fair-haired man with a
smooth yellowish face.
Detectives brought down a selection of rogues’-gallery pictures from
Boston. Bostock, Wade, and several others who riffled through the
assortment picked out a New York bank robber, Anthony Palmisano,
as one of the South Braintree bandits. On April 23 a group that
included Bostock, Wade, Albert Frantello, and Mary Splaine was taken
to Captain Proctor’s office in the State House and shown a number
of photographs, including Palmisano’s. Mary Splaine positively
identified his picture as that of the man she had seen leaning out
of the car with the revolver. Frantello and Bostock said it was an
excellent likeness.
Unfortunately for their promising identification, it was soon learned
that Palmisano—also known as Tony the Wop and Baby Tony—had been
arrested in Buffalo in January and was still in jail there.
CHAPTER FOUR
BRIDGEWATER AND WEST BRIDGEWATER
The attempted robbery of the L. Q. White Shoe Company payroll in
Bridgewater, on Wednesday, December 24, 1919, resulted neither in
loss of money nor life. At twenty minutes to eight on that freezing
overcast morning Alfred Cox, the company paymaster, was taking
the week’s payroll of $33,113.31 in his delivery truck from the
Bridgewater Trust Company to the factory at the foot of the hill
by the railroad station. The truck, a Ford with a tarpaulin top
and solid rubber tires, was driven by Earl Graves, with Constable
Benjamin Bowles beside him. Cox sat just behind Graves, on a large
galvanized-iron box containing the money.