His voice grew frostier. “I’d have to go through everything to know that.”
I did not have a very good hand but I dealt another card. “I have been told that you do have them.”
“I might,” was all he would answer.
I tried to explain why I wanted to see the bullets. The question had never been settled, I said, as to whether Bullet III might have been substituted for the one found in Berardelli’s body.
The voice cut me off. “You and I seem to be working along the same lines. I’m writing a book on the evidence in the case myself. I’m not going to let you see my private material. Why should I?” The telephone clicked at the other end.
Van Amburgh became singularly more communicative when Bob McLean drove down to see him. He told McLean that he regarded himself merely as a custodian of the exhibits “to be kept inviolate.” His custodianship lasted until the following week end when the Sunday Globe ran McLean’s front-page feature story of his discovery. The Commissioner of Public Safety, J. Henry Goguen, was one of the Globe’s early Sunday readers.
“He hit the roof,” McLean told me afterward. “They say he was shouting in his office, ‘How did they get out of here? Who let Van Amburgh take them? Send two men down to Kingston with a warrant and if he doesn’t give them up, arrest him!’ But Van Amburgh turned them over without a bleat. After all, if you’re getting a state pension you can’t fool around. The stuff was in a big package that looked as if it hadn’t been opened in years.”
I saw the exhibits on their return in the State Police ballistics laboratory, a room with a grille in the front like a cage and a metal door that opens by an electric button. It is a macabre room, the walls hung with the confiscated evidence of old crimes—a Heinz’ variety of pistols, rifles, submachine guns, even a grenade-thrower, dirks, switchblade knives, a Malayan kris, brass knuckles with inch-long prongs, blackjacks, homemade zip guns.
Sacco’s Colt, Vanzetti’s revolver, and the bullets were spread out on Lieutenant Collins’ desk next to a china ashtray in the shape of a revolver.
“The way they handled these exhibits from the beginning makes my hair stand on end,” Collins said. “The way I do is to impound any exhibits, then call in the defense, the prosecution, make whatever tests I have to make in front of them, and ask them if they’re satisfied. I’ve testified now in over sixty murder trials and nobody on either side has ever disputed my findings. But these things”—he swept his hand toward the display on the desk—“I don’t know whether you could prove anything with them now or not. I wouldn’t touch them myself. No matter what tests might show, somebody would be bound to accuse me of cooking the results. There ought to be some expert from outside Massachusetts to run the tests. That’s the way it should be handled.” He picked up one of the bullets. “You think that this Number III might have been switched from the one they cut out of Berardelli?”