Dray strode in briskly, sat down at the desk, and stared at me several seconds before speaking. “I could have seen you at any time within the last two months,” he said finally, “but I couldn’t make up my mind whether to or not. This is what decided me.” He tapped the magazine. “You write here that though you thought they were innocent, just by reading the evidence alone you’d have found them guilty. When I read that I decided you at least were honest. But for that I’d not have seen you.
“You know that Fred, as long as he lived, refused to discuss this case publicly with anyone. Of course he mentioned it to me. I don’t suppose a day went by that he didn’t think of it in one way or another. I saw him come in sometimes with tears in his eyes and say, Why do they say these things about me? Why do they keep on attacking me?’ Don’t think he wasn’t hurt.
“Now he’s gone, thinking it over, I’m willing to tell you a few things I know to set the record straight, because so much has been said against him. Fred was almost like a father to me. I was twenty-four when I came here just after the trial, and I studied what law I know right here in this office. Fred never had a son of his own, just his two daughters, and I think he came to look on me sort of as a son. All I know is this: My son’s at law school now, and if I can teach him as much decency and as much law as Fred Katzmann did me, I’ll think I’m a lucky man. You think I admire Fred. I do.”
He opened the American Heritage. “Here you speak of Katzmann as being, in spite of his name, a Mayflower descendant. He wasn’t. His father was a German, his mother Scotch and came from Roxbury. They were poor. His mother used to work. Fred had nothing. I think when he went to Harvard an aunt helped him out a little, but he used to tend furnaces to work his way through. Sometimes he earned a bit singing. He had a fine voice. Even when he was starting up his practice he still used to sing sometimes at churches and funerals.
“We got pretty close over the years. I don’t think in the end there was anything he kept back from me. I knew about his family, his social life, his practice. I knew how he felt about the Sacco-Vanzetti case. In that he never changed. He didn’t just think they were guilty, he knew they were guilty. He wouldn’t have avoided the case, for he never did put off dirty jobs onto other people, but sometimes he’d say to me, ‘Mike, if I had my life to live over, I’d never want to go through that again.’ He always felt it shortened his wife’s life, the whole business. For years they had to have guards round his house. He said whenever he woke up nights he’d hear them tramping round.
“A lot of things I set myself out to tell you,” Dray went on, “but they slip through my mind right now. Just this, though. I’ve built up a good practice in Hyde Park. I’ve done all right here. But I always have the feeling somehow that it was Fred’s practice, that anything I’ve amounted to has been through him. I want to defend his memory, and that’s why I’m talking to you.
“I’ll tell you another thing. When Jerry McAnarney was on the Sacco-Vanzetti defense, he thought his clients were innocent. I never heard any of the Defense Committee boys criticize Jerry. He went to the governor’s committee afterward and he still thought they were innocent. But he and Fred stayed the same good friends all through the years. They were partners together on that Willett-Sears case. Maybe you remember, that case lasted fourteen months—the longest jury case in the history of Massachusetts. I suppose if anyone asked Fred to name his ten best friends, Jerry McAnarney would have been among them. And if Jerry named his best five, Fred would have been on the list. I remember, too, just a short while before Jerry died he said one day right in this office: ‘No matter what they said about you, Fred, you were all right.’”
So we talked—or rather, I listened—as the lawyer talked through the afternoon. Katzmann had avoided the Dedham courtroom the day Thayer passed sentence, but Dray had gone there deliberately, and had heard Vanzetti’s speech to the court and watched him point his finger at the judge. For Dray, Vanzetti had seemed a sinister figure at that moment with his glaring eyes, his heavy bobbing mustache, and his passionate foreign voice.
Inevitably, we got to the subject of the guns.
“There’s a church just across the street,” Dray said. “The priest, Father Fraher, had a brother who was in here after the trial. He told Fred, ‘You want to know where Berardelli got his gun? He got it from me, that’s where he got it.’ There was a crack or nick or some sort of mark on the handle, and this Fraher said, ‘If the one you found on Vanzetti has that mark on it, it’s the same gun.’ He hadn’t even seen the gun then, mind you, but when we showed it to him, there was the mark, just like he said.