He set down his coffee cup. “I don’t suppose what I’ve been telling you helps you much. These are just my feelings. Those others, where we delivered the eels that morning, they didn’t want to testify either. They were all good Catholics and Vanzetti was an anarchist. But they’d bought the eels, they’d seen Vanzetti, and my father talked to them. They had respect for him, not fear but respect, so they went.”
As we talked the lights of the suburban street began to wink out, and I could see it was time for me to go. “You’ll probably think of things you forgot to ask me,” he said at the door. “Just telephone me or come down, if there’s anything more you want to know. Any time.”
Driving home, I thought over what Brini had told me. What had a respectable school principal to gain by lying? If he had had anything to hide, forty years after the event, he could simply have refused to see me. Yet if Brini was telling the truth, Vanzetti was innocent of the Bridgewater holdup. And if he was innocent of the first crime, it seemed to me he was most probably innocent of the second. But Brini knew. If he had told me the truth, Vanzetti was an innocent man.
“I think you can sense whether a person is telling the truth or not,” I told a sergeant at the State Police headquarters a few days later. “You can judge a man by the sort of person he is, by the general impression he gives as much as by what he says. You can size him up, don’t you think?” The sergeant did not reply directly, but his laugh had a jeering ring.
For weeks I had been trying to get an interview with Michael Dray, Katzmann’s old law partner, but always, without quite turning me down, he had eluded me. Katzmann had been dead six years, but Dray still kept the firm’s name. After the trial Katzmann had never made any public comment on his great case. Nor since his death had his partner been less reticent.
Finally, unexpectedly, Dray offered to see me. I drove through Dedham again, past the rain-wet courthouse with its glistening columns, down the empty High Street and across the empty square, and then through the mean industrial section of East Dedham, following the loops of the Neponset River to Hyde Park. It was a strange feeling to be on that journey, as if I might at last be heading toward the center of the maze.
Katzmann & Dray—there was the name on the downstairs directory of the modernized office building on River Street. Upstairs it was not quite so modern. I followed the dark, creaking corridor until I faced the name painted on an open door, then walked into a narrow brown room with nothing in it but a table, a lamp, and a gilt-framed photograph of Katzmann. I recognized him at once from the afternoon at Dedham: the square domineering head with the close-cropped hair.
Dray came suddenly out of a back room, a short, pudgy man in his sixties, with thin mouse-gray hair and blue eyes. “Just go in there,” he said pointing to another room, “and I’ll be right with you.”
On the oak door were the faded letters F. G. KATZMANN, Room 12. Stepping inside, I found myself alone. An oak desk faced me. On its plate-glass top I noticed the issue of American Heritage containing my Sacco-Vanzetti article with the Ben Shahn illustrations—to my embarrassment, for my description of Katzmann in it was not flattering.