All the factory entrances were now clogged with gesticulating figures. Those who remained inside lined the open windows. From the shops and tenements and the Hampton House beyond, people were streaming across the tracks to where the two men were lying. Around Berardelli they gathered ten deep. Fred Loring, who had run out with the others from the lower factory, saw a dark cloth cap lying a foot or so from the guard’s body. He picked it up and tucked it into his pocket. McGlone kept pushing the crowd back from the groaning Parmenter. Then he and his brother and Bostock carried the paymaster into the Colbert house, just behind the excavation. Crowds swarmed into Pearl Street: men in shirtsleeves, women in work aprons, small boys underfoot pushing their way through the others. The roadway was soon blocked from the factories to the railroad crossing. The voices of the men and women mingled, a collective murmur of incredulity that a thing such as they might have read about in newspaper headlines could actually have happened in South Braintree.
Shelley Neal arrived with his special police badge pinned on his coat and his Colt in his pocket just as they were carrying Parmenter into the Colbert house. The paymaster looked almost gone. As soon as Neal saw him in the blanket his one thought was to get back to the office and call the man’s wife. It took him five minutes, bucking the crowd, to reach the Hampton House and once there he found all the telephone lines busy. After trying several times to get central, he hurried down the steps to his harnessed wagon and headed for the telephone exchange.
Police Chief Jeremiah Gallivan, driving up in his Ford, passed the careening wagon, Neal with his feet braced against the dashboard and slashing at his galloping horse. By the time Gallivan covered the mile and a half from his home to Rice & Hutchins, Parmenter had been taken inside and Berardelli was dead. The chief shouldered his way through the crowd until he stood looking down at the familiar body with the unfamiliar glazed eyes. The mill workers pressed about him, their voices clamorous as they pointed out where the shots had been fired and the route of the car. Fire Chief Fred Tenney, already on the spot, told him it was a touring car with a green body. Its motor was acting up, Tenney said. He thought there might still be a chance to catch the gunman. Gallivan was willing to try. Together they started off in the red department runabout, forcing their way up Pearl Street, Tenney sounding the brass bell mounted on the radiator. After a left turn onto Washington Street they had to stop to brush away the scattered tacks, but after that they were in the clear. At the Plain Street railroad crossing Gallivan shouted at Joe Buckley, the gate-tender, that there had been a killing. Had he seen a car pass? Buckley had not. Gallivan and Tenney continued straight south toward Holbrook, two miles away.
At Holbrook Square they found a soldier who had seen just such a green touring car ten minutes before on the way to Abington. They swung east on the Abington road, Gallivan gun in hand, Tenney clanging his bell as he held the accelerator to the floor. The flat wooden town came on them with a rush, but beyond, in the network of roads between Whitman and Cox’s Corner, they lost the trail. Back and forth through the barren landscape they circled, along dirt ways that looped back on themselves or ended in the litter of some squatter’s chicken yard. The dust rose behind them and the afternoon shadows lengthened as the red runabout pushed on—until after almost two hours of driving they gave up.
Gallivan’s revolver was back in its holster and the fire chief’s bell silent when they again reached the Plain Street crossing. Buckley waved for them to stop. “I forgot to tell you about a car that came down here and went up that way,” he told them, pointing north. “It went out of my mind. The brakes screeched so much I thought it was going into the river.”
“Well,” said Gallivan, “it’s too late now.”
Instead of continuing over the tracks at Plain Street the car—with the screech that Buckley noted—had made a hairpin turn and headed back toward South Braintree on the almost parallel Franklin Street. But at the hill corner by the white-spired South Congregational Church it had swung west on Pond Street, following the curve of Sunset Lake on the right, and past the cemetery and the Torrey Elementary School on the left. After following Pond Street west for a mile, slapping and jolting, side curtains billowing and the motor roaring, the car turned south on Granite Street toward Randolph.
Mrs. Alta Baker saw it near the Randolph line, moving at fifty miles an hour. At twelve minutes after three it passed Walter Desmond, a tobacco salesman, on his way from Randolph to South Braintree. Then at the junction with the Randolph highway it swung right along the broken surface of Oak Street, cut through the scrubby outskirts of the Randolph Woods for a mile and a half, and took the left fork near an old cemetery into Orchard Street. On this obscure lane it passed Albert Farmer and his wife Adeline with their horse and wagon that they had just taken from the barn where the two roads joined. The Farmers noticed the swirl of dust as the car moved toward them and they watched it make the abrupt turn south into Orchard Street.
The driver must have soon realized he was off course, for ten minutes later George Chisholm, a road laborer working on Main Street, a stone’s throw from Oak, saw the car beating up north with flaring curtains, hurtling by him so fast he thought the tires were coming off. It turned right into Oak Street and continued a quarter of a mile east, bearing down Orchard until it again arrived at the junction. The driver stopped, hesitated, then swung the car into the yard of the Hewins house on the corner just across from the Farmers. Mabel Hewins was standing on her porch when the swarthy man in the front seat leaned out and asked her the way to Providence. She told him to follow Oak Street to Chestnut across North Main and keep going. He grunted, reversed the car jerkily, and started back the way he had come. She could see both men in the front seat clearly, but not the others.