Jerry McAnarney cross-examined Reed at random, asking what he was doing before the car appeared, how often the trains ran, where he now worked, how much dust was on the faces of the men in the car, what sort of hats they were wearing. Then Moore took over and at the last came close to the vital question when he asked if the man had spoken “in a loud bold voice.” Reed admitted that he had and that the quality of the English was “unmistakable and clear.” But Moore did not pursue the matter. As with Faulkner’s and Lola Andrews’ testimony, Moore overlooked the matter of the defendants’ accents. His jibes at Reed’s youth and at his going on his own to the police station aroused John Dever’s sympathy for the witness.
The weather continued oppressive; the motionless air bore down damply on the marble wainscotting. The routine of the court so enveloped the jurymen, the spectators, and even the lawyers and the sheriff’s men, that the outside world became unreal. Though the enlarged map of South Braintree still hung on the wall to the right of the jury box, there seemed no organic connection between the act of violence that had taken place there fifteen months before and this decorous legal game with its inherited rules.
For the newspapers the case lost its novelty, and the accounts of the trial often slipped to an inside page. What blackened the front pages now was the scandal of Mishawum Manor, a roadhouse north of Boston where, at a booze party a few years before, Adolph Zukor and several other film executives had been framed with naked call girls and shaken down for a hundred thousand dollars. The affair had been arranged through the office of District Attorney Nathan Tufts of Middlesex County. Only now was it coming to light, with Tufts, an old Yankee, and District Attorney Joseph Pelletier, an Irishman with a French name, facing disbarment.
It is almost impossible for anyone to sit through a murder trial without taking sides emotionally. With respect to Sacco and Vanzetti the sides had for the most part been taken before the defendants ever appeared in court. In the eyes of the court officers, sheriffs, police, janitors, stenographers, and the rest the two Italians were guilty, otherwise they would not be sitting in the cage. The feeling pervaded Dedham, and Frank Sibley, the dean of the local reporters, covering the trial for the Boston Globe, did not like it.
As the weeks passed there were other things Sibley did not like. He had not liked the squads of state troopers. He could not help but notice the antagonism between Moore and Thayer. Perhaps it was not so obvious to the jury, but as an old crime reporter he had been aware of it at once. Thanks to Moore’s objections, there was a succession of lawyers’ conferences at the bench with the jury sent from the room. Once when the stenographer went up to record what was being said in the buzzing cluster, Sibley heard Thayer snap, “Get the hell out of here! Who called you up here?”
Sibley, who remembered that old Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw would not discuss a current case even with his own family, was shocked by Thayer’s fondness for talking about the case to newspapermen. Several times on his way to lunch at the Dedham Inn Sibley had heard Thayer announce explosively that the defendants’ counsel were damn fools.
A gauntly impressive figure who wore a Windsor tie and a Latin Quarter hat and could be recognized on any Boston street a quarter-mile away, Sibley decided early that Sacco and Vanzetti were not getting a fair trial.
The last three witnesses to identify Sacco were William Tracey, the owner of the Tracey Building, the railroad detective William Heron, and Carlos Goodridge, who had heard the shooting as he was playing pool with Peter Magazu. Of the two men Tracey had noticed standing by the drugstore on the morning of the murders, one, he felt, was Sacco. “While I wouldn’t be positive, I would say to the best of my recollection that was the man,” was the most Katzmann could get out of him. When he was cross-examined he maintained that he felt quite sure he was right, but “would not positively say Sacco was the man.”