As I walked upstairs and into DiCecca’s long anteroom I had my first glimpse of Joe. Squatting on a leather couch before a television set, he was watching the Ed Sullivan show. He was a slight, stooped man with an elongated, almost bald head, cheeks creased against high cheekbones, and eyes that seemed incongruously blue in his wasted face. When we shook hands I could feel his misshapen fingers. He told me DiCecca was out but would be right back. We sat there half an hour in silence. For once I was grateful for the sight of Ed Sullivan’s jacked-up shoulders and melon face.
Finally we heard drum-tap footsteps on the stairs. DiCecca brushed in, apologized, and we moved to the inner office, he to his desk, I to the seat I had taken before, and Joe to sit by the window, partly in the shadows.
“Now, Joe,” DiCecca began quietly, “I just want you to tell us what you told me here the other night—about Bridgewater, Silva, Jimmy Mede—just as it comes to you.”
“Mede is a rat,” Sammarco said without anger, his face set like a barrier between himself and the outside world.
“Wait,” DiCecca said. “We’ll get to that. Now as I read through that article of Silva’s—remember, I knew nothing about the case—it seemed pretty convincing. According to that, Silva and you and Doggy Bruno and Guinea Oates drove down to Bridgewater to try to steal the L. Q. White payroll. You’d cased the joint two years before with Jimmy Mede.”
Sammarco shook his head, laughed silently, and then spoke again. “It’s a pack of lies, every bit of it. Silva got some fellow to write that piece after he got out of jail, and he got paid plenty for it. I know, because he told me.” He looked at me quizzically, as if he were wondering whether I believed him. “Not a word of truth in it, not a word.”
“Wait a minute!” DiCecca interrupted him. “Let me just ask you these questions in order. Before you went to jail, did you know Jimmy Mede, Frank Silva, Guinea Oates, and Doggy Bruno?”
“Sure I knew them. I was just a kid then and we was all brought up in East Boston together. I knew them since I was that high. We used to hang around Nick’s Restaurant just across the street from Jimmy Mede’s shoeshine parlor. Frank Silva met this guy Luban in jail or somewheres and cooked up all this story. Why, Silva was too yellow to pull a real holdup. He’d roll some drunk sailor down on Atlantic Avenue, he’d steal when it was safe, but nothing dangerous, not him. Bruno wasn’t yellow. He was in dope, robberies, everything, and he got his own living. He never would of worked with Silva or anyone like that. And Guinea Oates, he was younger than the rest of us and never got in no kind of trouble.”
Again DiCecca interrupted him. “Did you ever ride in a car with Silva and Mede to plan a holdup?”
“Yes, I did. In 1917 Silva and Mede and me and a guy named Gargalino and someone else went to Braintree. We was going to get a payroll from the factory there when the paymaster come out with it.”