McCullum, following Brenner, was not sure where Pelser was either, but Constantino was certain that when the shooting started Pelser was “right down under the bench.” Afterward Pelser had told them: “I did not see any of the men but I got the number of the car.” Constantino admitted he had not given any thought to where Pelser was until he had read the latter’s testimony in the newspaper two weeks before. Then he had gone to the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee and volunteered his information. At first he maintained that Pelser was at his workbench three windows down when McCullum had thrown up the sash, but Katzmann finally forced him to admit that he really did not know where Pelser was or whether he might have opened another window.
The appearance of Hans Behrsin, the Slater chauffeur, was unsatisfactory to the prosecution. All he could say was that the two men he had seen sitting on the Rice & Hutchins fence as he drove past in the Marmon “seemed to be pretty well light-complexioned fellows.” He had not noticed their features, and the district attorney did not even bother to ask him to identify the defendants.
It was generally agreed by the newspapermen covering the trial that Lola Andrews was the prosecution’s star witness, since she was the only one who had actually talked with any of the gunmen. She was an unpredictable woman. When Moore and two assistants had gone to Quincy on January 14 with a stenographer to interview her as a prospective defense witness, he found her calm and pleasant. According to the stenographer’s record she told Moore that she could not identify the two men she had seen near the car in front of the Rice & Hutchins factory. When she was shown pictures of Sacco and Vanzetti, she said they were not the men. Although she did not mention it to Moore on January 14, she later claimed that two evenings before, a dark one-eyed man in a sailor’s reefer had appeared at her door, spoken incomprehensibly about the South Braintree crime, and then, when she refused to listen to him, followed her into the hall toilet and assaulted her.
The evening before Lola appeared in court, Jerry McAnarney had gone to see her in Quincy, and she had told him that she could not and would not identify Sacco or Vanzetti as the men she had seen near the automobile in front of Slater & Morrill. Moore had even considered using her as one of his own witnesses and was surprised when she took the stand for the Commonwealth. She wore a stiff-crowned hat with a flat brim that shadowed her face. It was a coarse apprehensive face which, though faded, still managed to preserve a physical appeal.
Again she told her story of walking down Pearl Street to the Slater & Morrill factory, of seeing the pale man and the dark man by the touring car, of asking directions from the dark man on the way back. “He told me—he asked me,” she said, looking at the defendants in the cage, “which factory I wanted, the Slater? I said ‘No, sir, the Rice and Hutchins.’ He said to go in the driveway and told me which door to go in, it would lead me to the factory office.”
Williams then asked her dramatically if she had seen the man since. She replied that she had seen him in the courtroom. It was the climax to which the assistant district attorney had been building. “Do you see him in the courtroom now?” he asked. She paused, raised a bare, fleshy forearm, and pointed to Sacco.
“I think I do. Yes, sir. That man, there.” Sacco jumped to his feet in the cage, his eyes flashing. “I am the man?” he demanded in his thick accent. “Do you mean me? Take a good look!”
Moore in his cross-examination went back at once to the January evening when he had shown her a selection of photographs including one of Sacco holding a derby in his hand. According to the stenographer’s record she had said that the man with the derby was not the one she had talked with in South Braintree. Now, on the stand, she denied that she had said any such thing, claiming on the contrary that she had then identified the man in Moore’s picture as the man who had got up from under the car.
Though Moore could not shake her story he brought out that in February Stewart and Brouillard had taken her to the Dedham jail. There she had looked through a grating at a cell tier on a lower level. For about ten minutes she had watched a dark muscular man pacing up and down, the man—she finally decided—whom she had talked with in front of the factory on the day of the murder. That man, she was told, was Nicola Sacco.
At one o’clock Judge Thayer suspended the session for the week end. Lola Andrews’ cross-examination would continue Monday and into Tuesday. Moore was determined to drive her to the wall. But in his determination he overlooked the one question that should have occurred to any trained legal mind. Lola Andrews had been given detailed directions to Rice & Hutchins by a man who spoke English easily. Sacco’s command of English was so slight that he would not have been capable of such fluent talk. His heavy accent was at times almost incomprehensible. Yet Moore in his two days of hammering at Lola Andrews never once brought up the question of the speech and accent of the man who had directed her.