He paused and I could hear the squeak of his swivel chair. “Maxwell Anderson wrote a play about the case just after the executions. He had dinner with me afterward and I told him he was barking up the wrong tree. I explained why, and I think I convinced him. Then he wrote _Winterset_, and in that he saw the case quite differently. To my mind the greatest wrong, the greatest injustice in the whole trial, was done to Webster Thayer. He was an upstanding man, and they took years off his life. The trial grew to be an obsession with him later, but it’s small wonder the way he was threatened. He once told me that every day at noon he telephoned home to see if his house was all right, and every day he felt sick inside thinking it might be blown up. You remember they finally did dynamite it. “One of the jurors, Dever, became a lawyer afterward and he wrote an account of his experiences during the trial. Simon and Schuster would have published it. They found it all very interesting, if he’d only put in a happy ending: tell how he changed his original opinion and decided they were innocent. But Dever wouldn’t do it, so he never did find a publisher. That’s the situation I’ve been up against. That’s what you’ll face if you’re honest. It’ll take you five years, and you’ll come up against a stone wall.” He stood up abruptly and stalked to a table on which were two piles of manuscript, each over a foot high. “Here’s my answer,” he said, patting them. “This is my book on the case, the definitive answer. But do you think any publisher will touch it? Of course not. Can’t you imagine what the _Times_ and the _Herald Trib_ and the _Saturday Review_ would say to anything like this?” The chapters of the book were bound separately. He let me leaf through the one on the ballistics testimony while he moved over to a row of filing cabinets labeled S-V. “Look,” he said, rolling open the drawers one after another. “That’s the raw material. It would take you years to get all that together, years. Much of it’s not even in the record. There’s the report from the Attorney General’s office, for example—never been released. I can’t even tell you how I got it. “You aren’t a lawyer, your mind isn’t trained to evaluate,” he said, leading me out to the elevator. “If you’ll take my advice, kindly meant, just give up the whole business.” When I stepped from the air-conditioned building onto sun-baked Federal Street the city growled. The sky beyond Post Office Square looked rancid. I remembered the World War II British Army expression for accumulated paperwork: _bumf_. Those tight-packed filing cabinets with their formidable accumulation of details were bumf. The transcript of the record itself ran to over six thousand pages, and on top of this was enough additional bumf to bury me.