That same November night a Dedham police officer, Warren Totty, standing under the arc light in the granite shadow of Memorial Hall, had seen the car speeding across Dedham Square. He had stepped out with his hand raised, but the car swung past him down the hill and under the railroad bridge toward Hyde Park. The license number that Totty managed to copy down turned out to be Murphy’s.
“It is thought,” Hellyer reported, “that this car may have been used by the men last Wednesday.” The connection between the Murphy Buick and the Needham license plates appealed to Stewart, even though both Graves and Harding had said that the car was a Hudson. Hellyer now interviewed Richard Casey, a student at Rhode Island State College, who had seen the car on Main Street before the shooting, and John King, who noticed it afterward near the normal school. Whether or not Chief Stewart had prompted them, both said it was a Buick.
Stewart and Brouillard had managed to trace the car as far as Stoughton. Beyond that point, although they called at all the garages in the vicinity, their leads came to nothing. Chief Shine of Dedham had a notion that an Italian gang in East Dedham might be involved. Stewart visited Dedham, Needham, even some suspects in Newton, and arranged meanwhile for circulars describing the car to be distributed to the local garages and gas stations. He now began to think the car was hidden somewhere between Stoughton and Dedham.
Meanwhile the Pinkerton agents had been spreading out through the Italian districts of Quincy and Boston. On December 30 Assistant Superintendent Henry Murray reported:
Today informant telephoned in; later met him at supper and in the course of conversation stated that he had learned that the Italian mentioned yesterday had said that the men who were implicated in the Bridgewater holdup had occupied temporarily a shack in close proximity to Bridgewater and that the car that had been used was left there along with some overalls or disguise of a similar nature, used by one of the men implicated in the holdup; that these men were Italians, had deserted the car, returned to Quincy by trolley; that they are believed to be residing in the vicinity of Fore River Shipyard and are known as Anarchists.
The “Italian mentioned yesterday” was a floater who spent most of his time hanging around the Boston American Building near Summer Street or in Monahan’s Bar in the North End. It took the Pinkerton agents several days to track him home to 31 Waverly Street, in the massed tenement district of Brighton. The house was a brick three-flatter, and there was a SCARLET FEVER card on the front door. Hellyer, Stewart, and Brouillard went there the afternoon of January 3, 1920. By ringing the three doorbells until they got an answer they learned that the man they wanted had left for Allston earlier in the day. They waited almost five hours on the upper landing until he came back. He turned out to be a flashily dressed Sicilian, Carmine Barasso, who had anglicized his name to C. A. Barr. Quite willing to talk, he invited the three men in to his flat. According to Hellyer’s report:
Barr related a rambling statement about a machine that he had invented with which he could detect who had committed a crime no matter where it was committed. He stated that one Mrs. Vetilia of 2 Lexington Street East Boston, had looked into the machine and saw the holdup happening and saw the man plainly but did not know who they were.
As Stewart drove back to Bridgewater along the empty snow-edged roads of the Blue Hills he added another piece to the puzzle he was fitting together in his mind. If the Pinkerton information was right, the holdup men were anarchists. It was not a difficult conclusion to come to in the winter of 1919-1920. A group of 249 anarchist and Communist aliens that included Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman had just been deported to Russia. That very day, January 3, the headlines of the papers were flaring with the news of Attorney General Palmer’s raids that had taken place all over the country the previous evening. RAIDS TO HEAD OFF REVOLUTION was the heading of the weekly Bridgewater Independent. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE MAKES PUBLIC COMMUNISTS’ PLAN TO OVERTHROW GOVERNMENT. ARRESTS IN FIFTY TOWNS.
But such incidents and antagonisms, the social change and struggle of the postwar period, were sensed only vaguely in Bridgewater. By the time the wave of history reached the inland cape towns it was scarcely a ripple. The same issue of the Independent made Charlotte Randall’s twenty-first birthday party in West Bridgewater the subject of its editorial.
When the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect on January 16 the December holdup no longer seemed worth discussing. The Pinkerton men had gone. The thousand-dollar reward posted by Loring Q. White for the gunmen’s capture was unclaimed. At his headquarters in the back room of the wooden-pilastered town hall, Chief Stewart still thought about the crime, but he could find no more pieces to add to his puzzle.