Not quite two miles farther, a mile beyond Tower Hill where Chestnut Street merges with the Stoughton Post Road, John Lloyd and Wilson Dorr, working in a sandpit, saw the car jouncing south along the road that was “all hills and hollows and ruts.” Dorr noticed that the glass was missing from the back window. On the sharp gradient of Tucker Hill leading into Stoughton it overtook Francis Clark and Elmer Pool in their bakery wagon, veered out, and continued on the left-hand side of the road and over the crest. Clark, too, noticed the oblong gap in the back of the cloth top and told Pool to copy the license plate. All Pool could spot was 49.
The car disappeared south in the isolation of the old turnpike and was not glimpsed again until it reached the outskirts of Brockton at a quarter to four. A high school girl, Julia Kelliher, saw it coming down very fast over the hill from Brockton Heights, churning the dust behind it, the curtains fluttering in the wind. As it went over a bump she saw something tossed up in the back seat behind the curtains. There were two men in front. After the car passed she tried to take down the license number. She could made out an 83 at the end and a 9 and a 7, and these she wrote in the sand beside the road.
At 4:15 Austin Reed, the railroad-crossing tender at Matfield, a small settlement on the outskirts of West Bridgewater, eight and a half miles southeast of Brockton Heights and twenty-two miles from South Braintree, stepped out of his shanty at the approach of the train from Westdale. As he stood in the middle of the road with the yellow Stop sign in his hand, he saw a touring car racing down the hill from West Bridgewater. He walked toward it holding up his sign. The driver did not seem to want to stop, but finally he pulled up about forty feet away. A man sitting next to the driver leaned out and shouted, “What the hell are you holding us up for?” Then the train passed between them. After it had rumbled by, the car started up over the crossing and the man in the front seat pointed his finger at Reed as if it were a pistol and bellowed again: “What the hell did you hold us up for?” He was only four feet away.
The rattling car took the right fork on Matfield Street, then, as if it had made a circle, returned three minutes later on the left fork of Belmont Street and recrossed the track. Reed saw it edge over the hill and watched the cloud of dust that slowly settled behind it. That was the last seen that day of the touring car.
Parmenter lay propped up on the sofa in the front room of the Colbert house. Scarcely conscious, he managed to whisper that one gunman was dark, short, and stocky and the other short and thin.
When the Weymouth medical examiner, Dr. John Chisholm Frazer, arrived at four o’clock there were several other doctors already in the room with Parmenter. Frazer stopped by Berardelli’s body—it had been carried into the Colbert kitchen—only long enough to note that he was dead and that blood was oozing from his back and arms. Shortly after the medical examiner’s arrival, the ambulance from the Quincy City Hospital came for Parmenter. As the paymaster was carried down the steps the onlookers surged in toward the stretcher. They surged in again twenty minutes later when Berardelli’s body was taken away in a wicker basket.
After the hearse had disappeared the crowd began to thin. Most of the workers headed home, leaving behind a diminishing core of the young and idle. The long shadow of the afternoon moved along the factory fronts and the sun turned the Slater & Morrill windows orange. A group—mostly boys in corduroy knickers—still stood around the stains in the gravel where Berardelli had fallen.
Later, as the sun edged toward the Blue Hills and the light began to fade, the crowd increased again. Workers and their wives strolled down Pearl Street after supper for a second look, voluble witnesses repeated the details, and as the news spread to the neighboring towns the curious and the morbid began to arrive from the compass points—Randolph, Quincy, Holbrook, Weymouth.
Dr. Nathaniel Hunting operated on Parmenter shortly after his arrival in the hospital. A bullet that had apparently glanced off his ribs, causing an elongated but superficial wound, was shaken out of his jacket. The second bullet, the one that had struck him after he turned, had cut horizontally through his abdomen, perforating the vena cava, the body’s largest vein. Hunting was able to remove it easily from a mass of blue flesh just below the surface of the abdomen. He marked the bullet with a cross on the base. After the operation Parmenter recovered consciousness for a few minutes and managed to tell Assistant District Attorney George Adams, who had been waiting at his bedside, that he did not recognize the men who shot him. Then he drifted off again. He died at five in the morning, some fourteen hours after he was shot.