After his rehearsal, Chief Stewart hurried back to headquarters. LeBaron was already there, behind the desk. “That Dago,” he said. “There wasn’t nothing wrong with his wife. Just a stall.” As Stewart walked home from the town hall, under the elms of the deserted common, he kept mulling over LeBaron’s remark. He suddenly recalled what Barr-Barasso had said in December about some anarchists living in a shack near Bridgewater. On April 15 these anarchists had been—where? It was in this evening moment, in Chief Stewart’s responding mind, that the Sacco-Vanzetti case had its origin.
On the afternoon of April 17, Charles Fuller, the business manager of the Brockton Enterprise, locked his office, walked over to the Fair Grounds where he kept his horse, and started out with his friend Max Wind on their usual Saturday ride. They left the Fair Grounds at half past two, riding out the back gate toward West Bridgewater. Once over the railroad track on Manley Street, not far from the Poor Farm, they headed down a bridle path through the thick secondary growth of maple and scrub oak and alder known as the Manley Woods. Fuller rode ahead. About six hundred feet in from the road, he came face to face with a Buick touring car. So close were the bushes that he and Wind had to dismount and lead their horses past it. The car had apparently been there overnight, for the windshield and hood and fenders were streaked with dew. Fuller glanced in as he went by and saw a few coins on the front seat and a coat in the back. A moment later when he looked back to see if Wind could get by, he noticed that the glass was missing from the rear window.
Before remounting the two men stopped to look at the smeared dark-blue car. It had no license plates, but otherwise it seemed to resemble the holdup car they had read about the day before. Just ahead of the car they made out the thin tracks of a smaller car, perhaps a Ford, leading to Manley Street. They rode back the way they had come, stopped at the first house, and called the Brockton police. Within fifteen minutes City Marshal Ryan arrived with Officer William Hill.
Together the four men examined the car inside and out. Besides the coins and the old brown overcoat, they found a phial that was thought afterward to have contained dope, and on the floor the glass from the rear window. Since Fuller was more familiar with a Buick than the others he drove it out through the snagging bushes. Reaching Manley Street, he turned the car over to Hill, who drove it to the police garage in Brockton. The next morning the police, examining the car a second time, found a bullet hole in the rear door.
Stewart and Brouillard were notified, and they inspected the car Sunday evening. The Buick’s spare tire was missing, and the maker’s number near the gas tank had been chiseled off. The engine number, however, was still intact: 560,490. It was the number of the Murphy car stolen in Needham on November 23. The Registry of Motor Vehicles had reported that the license plate, 49783, had been stolen from a Ford belonging to Warren H. Ellis of 602 Webster Street, Needham. Just after ten o’clock on the night of January 6 Ellis had put his car in his garage. Next morning the plates were gone.
Stewart learned about the Ellis plates on Monday. In December he had connected the missing Needham Buick with the Bridgewater holdup. Now it turned out to be the car used in South Braintree. And both the Bridgewater and the South Braintree license plates had been stolen in Needham within an interval of about two weeks. The two crimes now seemed to him to be the work of the same gang—another piece added to his puzzle. It was curious too—a kind of corroboration of his theory of the other night—that the car should have been found less than two miles from Puffer’s Place. Coacci again!
Unfortunately, Coacci was at this point somewhere on the Atlantic. Nevertheless Stewart felt there might still be some evidence to be found in the South Elm Street house. He telephoned Brouillard and they arranged to go over to Puffer’s Place on Tuesday.
That same Monday Joseph Ventola turned up at Puffer’s with a truck to move Ersilia, her children, and her belongings to a house in South Braintree. Not long after he had gone Simon Johnson and his brother Samuel arrived from their Elm Square Garage with a tow truck to haul away Boda’s broken-down Overland. Boda helped them push the car out of the shed at the side of the house. After they had hitched it up, Boda, who had known the Johnsons ever since he had moved to Cochesett, rode the mile to Elm Square with them in the truck. The Italian wore his velour hat and was carrying his leather bag. The Johnsons let him off at the car stop and he boarded the Brockton trolley.
Tuesday afternoon Stewart picked up Brouillard and they drove to Puffer’s Place. In the fading light, the ramshackle gabled house with the gnarled apple tree in front of it and the leafless grapevine in the rear looked as if it might have been cut out of cardboard. Broken windows in the shed had been tacked over with burlap.