“There’s a church just across the street,” Dray said. “The priest, Father Fraher, had a brother who was in here after the trial. He told Fred, ‘You want to know where Berardelli got his gun? He got it from me, that’s where he got it.’ There was a crack or nick or some sort of mark on the handle, and this Fraher said, ‘If the one you found on Vanzetti has that mark on it, it’s the same gun.’ He hadn’t even seen the gun then, mind you, but when we showed it to him, there was the mark, just like he said. “Ah,” he said at last, sadness in his voice, “I wish I could explain to you in words what Fred really was. You couldn’t really understand him, seeing him just that once. Perhaps you were fed up with being on a jury. Fred wasn’t tricky. He was honest all the way through. I remember some man came in here once and wanted Fred to defend him in a robbery case, offered him five thousand dollars. That was a lot more money then than it is today. When he came to pay Fred, he brought the money in a box, all in bills, done up in little piles. As soon as Fred saw it, he wouldn’t touch the case. That money looked too much like payroll money. But an assistant district attorney over in Suffolk County didn’t mind taking it. No, you couldn’t get Fred to do anything that had even a suspicion of being wrong. He was that kind of man.” I left Dray in the anteroom. We shook hands beside Katzmann’s picture. “I’m glad you came,” he said finally. Out I went into the slashing rain, to my car parked by the dark bulk of the Catholic church where Father Fraher or his successor was probably still hearing confessions. If only Dray could have whipped open one of his filing cabinets and taken out the ultimate document that would have satisfied everyone from Aldino Felicani in his sheet-metal office to the corporation lawyer on Federal Street. I would have settled for a villain, but I had found only decent-enough people in irreconcilable positions, and still at the core of the labyrinth two men who had died a third of a century earlier in the electric chair. CHAPTER THREE APRIL 15, 1920 Thursday mornings Shelley Neal, the South Braintree agent for the American Express Company, met the 9:18 local from Boston to pick up the payrolls of the Slater & Morrill and Walker & Kneeland shoe factories. Until January 1920, the payrolls had been sent down on Wednesdays, but recently there had been so many holdups around Boston that the head office had altered its delivery schedules.