There was something queer about him, about his being there, Neal felt as he trudged up to the second floor. “Some funny-looking people round here today,” he told the girl at the desk. Margaret Mahoney, the paymistress, was at her desk by the water cooler. Neal had known Margaret Mahoney for years. The payroll bag was heavy for her so he walked across the office and put it in the safe himself. She gave him the receipt for it, and he and Stevens started downstairs. From the top of the landing Neal could see the pale man still standing in the doorway but when he was about halfway down the man took his hands out of his pockets, walked over to the touring car, opened the rear door, and got in. Neal kept his hand on his Colt. By the time he reached the doorway the car had started up and swung round the corner of Holbrook Avenue. The mud-streaked car had already disappeared. * * * * * South Braintree Square was empty at half-past ten when Harry Dolbeare, a piano tuner, finished a cup of coffee at Torrey’s Drugstore on the corner and started up Washington Street to Cuff’s Music Store. Cuff had called him the day before to see about the felts on a secondhand upright, and Dolbeare told him he would have a look at it. As he reached Gregor’s Restaurant he noticed a black touring car turning left from Holbrook Avenue to Washington Street. He could see two men in front and, although the rear side curtains were up, three more men in the back seat. One of the men in back was leaning forward talking to the driver. Dolbeare had never seen any of them before, or the car either. They looked to him like foreigners, maybe some of that Dago bunch from the Fore River shipyards. Tough tickets, the lot of them, he thought to himself after the car had passed him. At 11:15 Lola Hassam, a hard-faced woman in her forties, got off the train from Quincy with Julia Campbell, the old woman who rented one of her two rooms in the Alhambra Block there. Lola now called herself Lola Andrews, her name before her divorce, although some people said she had never been married. At various times she had been a waitress, a cleaning woman, and a practical nurse. Men often used to come to her room in the Alhambra. Since things were slack in Quincy, she and Julia had decided to come to South Braintree and look for work in one of the shoe factories. They crossed the tracks by the gate-tender’s shack at the end of Railroad Avenue, walked down Pearl Street past the double pipe fence in front of Rice & Hutchins, and continued another twenty-five yards to the lower Slater & Morrill factory. Julia Campbell was developing cataracts, and she took the younger woman’s arm going downhill.