We missed the right turn at Oak Street and drove almost to Randolph before we realized our mistake. One thing was already clear to us: The getaway driver and his crew must have been familiar with the back roads. I had a hard enough time keeping on course even with my map. And from the map it was plain how well they had known how to avoid every center of population. The reason they had gone astray on Orchard Street was apparent enough when we arrived there, for we made the same mistaken left turn ourselves.
Down Chestnut Street and along the old turnpike the way still runs straight and empty, the old pastoral landscape emerging as the ranch houses recede. We found the lane into the Manley Woods where the Buick had turned off, a scarcely visible dirt path branching to the right between an empty shingled cabin and a derelict cemetery. Two hundred yards from the highway we came to a field of stumps surrounded by speckled alders, the earth bulldozed away at one corner as if preparations were being made for another clutch of ranch houses, but still empty and deserted enough to hide a car there all day long without anyone being the wiser. It looked, in its accessible isolation, much the most logical place on the escape route to shift cars.
Ehrmann’s version seemed scarcely plausible—that Mike Morelli had driven back from New Bedford that same night in a car with the telltale missing rear window, a car for which by this time all the local police had been alerted, just to leave it in the Manley Woods when there were thirty-four miles of barren country lying between. As we looked at the opening of the lane, it seemed to us it would have been impossible to find it in the dark on the way north. McLean and I agreed that the car must have been abandoned in the Manley Woods on the way down and that the time lag had taken place there.
Why the escape car had returned after going over the Matfield crossing became clear to us only when we had gone over the route ourselves. Obviously the car had headed that way to avoid the five-cornered traffic center of West Bridgewater, half a mile to the south. But then, once beyond the railroad crossing, the driver had found himself on the road to thickly populated East Bridgewater, and had circled back.
Morris Ernst had said at the State House hearing in 1959 that Joe Morelli told him he had thrown the empty cashboxes into Canapa Pond and had even pointed out the spot. But when I had written to ask Ernst about the location, he replied that he had no idea where Canapa Pond was. As we traced our way from South Braintree I could find no appropriate body of water, large or small. Sunset Lake would have been too near, and anyhow I knew its original name had been Little Pond.
After the Matfield crossing, the last point where the getaway car was seen, we were on our own. We drove toward Providence, through Bridgewater and over Route 44 by way of Taunton. Just before Providence we stopped at Seekonk for whatever trace might remain of the bullet-scarred Bluebird Inn. We found that unappreciated landmark had long since been tom down. There were only the barest traces of its foundations in an empty corner lot overgrown with ragweed and tansy. Next to the corner was a white bungalow with children swarming on the front steps and a zinc mailbox lettered B. Monterios.
The air seemed to get heavier as we approached Providence, or perhaps it was just the sad wooden decay of those submerged streets below the anachronistic graciousness of Brown University’s island-hill.
I had pictured Ben Bagdikian as the dean of Providence reporters, a Rhode Island Frank Sibley, perhaps wearing old-fashioned spectacles on a ribbon, but when we met him in the city room of the Journal he turned out to be a small gray-haired man in his forties, with the long nose and dark animated eyes of his Armenian inheritance. He had come to the Journal from Stoneham, Massachusetts, after World War II. Before he began writing his pieces on them, he had never heard of the Morellis. I asked him if he knew anything about Canapa Pond and told him of the uncommunicative Morris Ernst.
“That sounds like Ernst,” Bagdikian said, at the same time making a note on a scratch pad. “I worked with him on the Morelli angle, and I never could get anything really definite out of him. As for Canapa, he mentioned it in a book and I asked him about it, too, and got about the same answer you did. There isn’t any Canapa Pond. What I think Joe said was Canada Pond—and Ernst may just have changed a letter to throw us off the track. Canada Pond’s only a couple of miles north of here, half in Providence, half in Pawtucket. You can see it from the new Woonsocket highway. It’s in an Italian district, not very far from Joe’s old house. As I remember there aren’t many houses right near it; lot of bushes and things, just the place to throw old boxes. As a matter of fact they tossed a couple of gangsters in there a few years back. But whether Joe threw any boxes in there or not, Canada would probably be the first name that would come into his mind.”
I asked Bagdikian if he had any idea what had become of Joe’s autobiography.