A heat wave seared the city. Through two weeks the Lowell Committee interviewed its witnesses. Thompson again and in vain asked for public hearings. The committee agreed, however, that with the exception of Judge Thayer, Chief Justice Hall, the district attorney, and the jurors, all of whom would be examined privately, counsel for both sides might suggest witnesses and be present to question them.
Most of the witnesses the committee examined had already been interviewed by the governor. Sometimes, as Rosina had, they merely stepped from the governor’s office to the council chamber.
Day after day the three old men in coats and stiff collars sat at their wedge-shaped mahogany desks while the witnesses filed damply by and Thompson and Assistant District Attorney Ranney struck sparks from each other. Lowell dominated the sessions, with Stratton silent and Grant fretting at his subordination. In the city four people died of the heat. The grass on the Common where the derelicts sprawled in alcoholic stupor—impervious to Prohibition—had turned to cocoa matting. Through the open windows of the council chamber came the summer hum of the city, broken faintly by the yelps of urchins in the Frog Pond. Within that Federalist room dominated by the spaniel-featured autocrat it was hard to realize that the matter of debate was two men’s lives.
Katzmann, after testifying privately, voluntarily submitted to being cross-examined by Thompson. Thompson accused the district attorney of having arranged the Plymouth trial first so that Vanzetti would appear in Dedham as a convicted felon. Katzmann said it was merely the chance that there happened to be a June term in Plymouth and none in Dedham. In the matter of Captain Proctor he would not positively deny that the captain thought Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, but doubted he ever said so.
Katzmann was followed—at Lowell’s request—by Professor Guadagni and Bosco, the editor of La Notizia. Lowell particularly wanted to ask them about their Dedham testimony that they, along with Dentamore, had met Sacco in Giordani’s Café on the day of the crime and had remembered the date afterward because a banquet had been given at the Franciscan Priory for the editor of the Transcript that same day. In reading over the trial record Lowell had noticed that although Dentamore had said he had just come from the banquet, Guadagni said it was to be held in the evening. Struck by the discrepancy, Lowell had gone through the files of the Transcript and discovered that a group of Italians had given a dinner for Editor Williams at Frascati’s on May 13, eight days after Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested. Thinking that there might possibly have been two banquets, Lowell telegraphed Williams, who happened to be in Washington. Williams replied that there had been only one.
With this information concealed like a time bomb, Lowell faced Guadagni while Bosco waited outside. Guadagni now appeared uncertain whether the banquet had been held before or after the talk in Giordani’s Café. When Lowell showed him the account of the banquet in the Transcript, he concluded that it must have taken place the night before and added ruefully, “I was so sure of that day.” Then Lowell set off his bomb, pointing out that the paper was dated May 14. The banquet had taken place May 13! How, then, could Guadagni have discussed it a month before? Lowell felt he had the proof in his hand that the story was a fraud, concocted by Guadagni, Bosco, and Dentamore to create an alibi for a fellow anarchist.
Thompson was shattered in his dismay. Guadagni’s lie seemed too flagrant, too utterly exposed. “If it was deliberate I do not think you would see me around here very much longer,” he told Lowell. “If I did not think these men were innocent I should not be fooling away my time. And I would not resort to any means to justify an end, just because I was convinced these men were innocent, any more than if I thought they were guilty.”
“Of course not, Mr. Thompson,” the other assured him urbanely. Guadagni stood there, beaten down, admitting now that the banquet had had nothing to do with his meeting Sacco, that he had accepted the idea from Dentamore, that it was a mistake.
Bosco was of sterner fiber. When he appeared, not only did he insist to the aroused and hostile committee that there had been a banquet for Commandante Williams on April 15 but that he had printed an account of it on the sixteenth in La Notizia. Lowell stared at him with contempt. “It is perfectly obvious that is not so,” he remarked coldly. Thompson could scarcely control himself as he turned on the still-defiant Italian:
“You can trust Mr. Lowell for that. He has investigated it. He knows there was no banquet on the fifteenth.”