“The other prisoners, how did they feel about him?”
“They all felt the same way,” Joe said in his faded far-off voice. “Most of the guards thought he was innocent too. The night they was executed we made a hell of a row. It used to be the lights went dim at an execution for a couple seconds, but this time they wasn’t using Edison current and nothing happened, but we all knew when it was midnight just the same.”
His mind groped back to that August night thirty-three years before and he was silent for several seconds before he continued. “I remember Vanzetti come to me once, he was crying. He says, ‘You know I’m innocent. Tell them if you had anything to do with Bridgewater.’ I told him I would if I had—but I hadn’t nothing to do with it. Even my sisters and my cousins come in before the execution and asked me and I says ‘I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it.’ Sometimes I used to think, maybe that fellow Weeks had something to do with both the robberies. He was smart, he was. But Vanzetti never had nothing to do with them. He wasn’t that kind.”
DiCecca swung toward me in his swivel chair as if to call an end to the interview.
“Joe says he’s willing to take a lie-detector test along with Mede to see who’s telling the truth.”
“Or I’ll take it all by myself,” Joe broke in. “You’ll never get the Big Chief to take no test like that. He might try to con some money out of you, but he’d never take the test.”
“That’s the size of it,” said DiCecca. “Whether we believe Joe or not doesn’t matter until we give him a lie-detector test.”
“I’ll take it any time,” Joe said. We stood up. Joe and I left DiCecca there, walking out together through the echoing anteroom and down the stairs. The pinched and hostile face I had first encountered had now become relaxed, softened, the face of a human being.
“I was a dumb kid, no education,” said Joe reflectively. “I took that rap for thirty-three years because I didn’t know no better.” It was the second time he had used the word rap. I stopped on the stairs where the arc lamp shone through the doorway. “You’re telling me, then, that you didn’t kill that policeman?”
His voice was low, quite passionless. “Him or anyone else. I never did. Maybe you won’t believe that neither, but I never did. It was my gun all right, but if I’d of said at the trial who pulled the trigger I’d of got a bullet through my head. The one who done it got killed in a gunfight four years later. Back in thirty-one I come up before the parole board and his widow come and told them he done it, but they wouldn’t listen to her, just asked her why she didn’t tell it before. And she says, ‘I got to live too.’”