Lola and old Julia went down the gravel walk along the side of the brick building, up the stairs, and through the double folding doors. They could see the Employment Office sign there plainly enough.
Whenever William Tracey drove to the square on an errand, as he did two or three times a day, he liked to drive by his building, the wooden three-decker he had built in 1907 at the corner of Hancock and Pearl. Torrey’s Drugstore occupied the ground floor. That Thursday morning as he parked on Pearl to pick up his wife’s groceries at Dyer & Sullivan’s, just across from the drugstore, he noticed two strangers standing with their backs to Torrey’s window where the big glass vase of red water hung from its chains. The men were swarthy, about medium height, one just a little taller than the other. If it had been twelve o’clock the streets would have been full of factory hands and he probably would not have noticed them, but it was still half an hour before the noon whistle and the square was empty. He could not help but notice them.
After Tracey reached home with the groceries he found he had forgotten bread, so he drove back again, past his building and left to Schrout’s Bakery on Pearl Street. The strange men were still leaning against the window as he went in. When he came out they were gone.
Not quite an hour later William Heron, a railroad detective, noticed the same two men in the station. They were sitting on a bench by the gents’ toilet smoking cigarettes and talking in some foreign language. Dagos, he thought they were. He had come down on the 12:27 from Boston, and he was scarcely off the train before he spotted a fresh kid who had climbed on top of the Union News stand and was trying to tip it over. Eleven or twelve years old he was, one of that gang that hung around the station afternoons. Heron grabbed him by the collar and ran him into the operator’s room. The Dagos didn’t even look up as he went by.
McNamara was the kid’s name. The operator said his old man was all right, worked for the railroad, so Heron told the kid what he’d do to him if he ever caught him hanging round the station again, and let him go. He was not in the operator’s room more than five minutes, but when he stepped out again the Dagos had left. Somehow they stuck in his mind, and he wondered where they had gone to.
By trade Ralph DeForest was a shoemaker, though he had been unemployed for two months now. When he had nothing else to do, and that was most of the time, he wandered around South Braintree Square or sometimes dropped in at Magazu’s poolroom on Pearl Street. At 2:20 he was talking with Officer Shea on the corner next to Torrey’s when he spotted two men in front of the jewelry store. In the last two months he had seen everyone in town, but he had never seen those two before. Shea left to go up to the town hall and DeForest walked down by the fruit store past the jeweler’s. The two men looked him over as if they wanted to make something of it. Dark men they were, tough babies. He wasn’t going to let them think he was scared of them, though. Deliberately he turned round and walked past them again. They stared at him, and he stared at them, and finally he said: “I don’t think I owe you fellows anything.”
Without answering him they started off down Pearl Street, one about five feet ahead of the other. DeForest decided he would follow them. At the crossing they turned left toward the station. Just in front of the station a pinch-faced man in a brown coat was tinkering with the engine of a black touring car. The other two paused on the platform and DeForest brushed right by them and through the station into the toilet. When he came out the car and men had disappeared.
At ten minutes to three Jenny Novelli, a nurse, was on her way down Pearl Street to call on her friend Mrs. Knipps, who lived on Colbert Avenue, a dead-end dirt road just beyond Rice & Hutchins on the left. As she passed Schrout’s Bakery she noticed a large curtained touring car abreast of her and going in the same direction scarcely faster than she was walking. The car kept level with her until she reached the cobbler’s shop on the corner. At first she thought the man next to the driver was a friend of hers, William Mooney, but at second glance she realized she was mistaken. The pale driver she scarcely noticed.
For sixteen years Lewis Wade had been working in the sole-leather room at Slater & Morrill. Then, late in 1919, the boss had put him in charge of the shed and gasoline pump in front of the lower factory. Any time the company cars needed gas he went out to take care of them. Every afternoon at the same time Hans Behrsin, Mr. Slater’s chauffeur, would come round to fill up Slater’s Marmon sedan, and Wade was always ready for him with the shed door open and the pump unlocked.
On this April 15 just before three o’clock, Behrsin dropped by as usual and said he was on his way to the garage and that he would be back in ten minutes. A couple of minutes after three, as Wade was hitching the hose onto the pump, he happened to see a touring car below the factory in front of the little wooden house that belonged to the carpenter at Rice & Hutchins. A man was bending over the hood of the car fixing something.