The only witness of the actual shooting to make any such identification was the young Jewish shoe-cutter Louis Pelser, who had been working on the first floor of Rice & Hutchins. After hearing shots outside, he said, he had opened the middle window and looked out at a bareheaded man with a gun, only seven feet away, shooting at Berardelli. “I seen this fellow shoot this fellow,” he told the court. “It was the last shot. He put four bullets in him.” The gunman had “wavy-hair—pushed back ... dark complexion,” and was wearing dark green pants and an army shirt. He had then seen the gunman climb into the car. Pelser pointed to Sacco as the man. Katzmann twice asked him, over Moore’s objections, if he had any question in his mind but that Sacco was the man. Pelser hesitated. In the heat of the day, in his blue serge suit, he was an abject sight. John Dever thought he “looked and acted like a man who was doing something he didn’t want or like to do.” Looking at Sacco, pressed by the district attorney, Pelser reluctantly came out with it: “I wouldn’t say he is the man, but he is the dead image of the man I seen.” He added that he had thrown open the factory window and watched there from the time the gunman shot Berardelli until the car disappeared up Pearl Street. The day that Pelser testified, June 10, was the hottest of the year. Outside the sun was molten and inside the air had become so humid that the walls and marble floor were beaded. Judge Thayer allowed the jurors to take off their coats, and finally ordered the sheriff to bring them fans. Moore, beginning his cross-examination, was like a cat with a not overly nimble mouse. Pelser sweated so that the drops fell. Some months earlier, when interviewed by Robert Reid, a white-bearded Boston constable who had become a defense investigator, Pelser had denied seeing any of the shooting. “They were shooting while I was at the window,” he had told Reid, “and I got under the bench, and that is all I seen of them.” Now he claimed that he had lied to Reid because he did not want to be called as a witness. Moore, driving him into a corner, made him admit that he had, after all, ducked under the bench. He also admitted that he had avoided going to the Brockton station with the other witnesses by telling the police he had not seen enough to identify anyone. However, Moore could not shake Pelser’s insistence that he had seen the gunman and the getaway car—and it was a fact that Pelser was the only person in South Braintree who had written down the car’s license number.