After a while the two girls watched the fair-haired man get into the car, drive down Pearl Street toward the swamp, turn round, and start back again. Roy Gould had invented an oil-and-pumice paste for sharpening safety razor blades. All you needed to do was smear a little on the edge of a blade, run the blade a couple of times around the inside rim of a glass tumbler, and it was as good as new. He used to go to the different South Shore factories on paydays and sell his paste at the gates as the men came out. On April 15 he arrived at South Braintree on the 2:59 train. There was a young fellow standing on the platform and Gould asked him if he knew where and how they paid off at the shoe factories. The other pointed to two men walking down the street to the railroad crossing. “There goes the paymaster now,” he told him. “Just follow him.” Gould started off toward the gateman’s shack. He could see the paymaster stop briefly at the crossing to talk with someone, then disappear behind the board fence the other side of the tracks. Jimmy Bostock, the bandy-legged machine repairman, hurrying up Pearl Street from the lower factory to get the 3:15 trolley to Brockton, was near the water tower when he saw Parmenter and Berardelli coming down the street. He crossed over to meet them. “Bostock,” Parmenter said as he came up, “there’s a pulley off one of the motors up at Number One.” “I can’t look at it, not today,” Bostock told him. “I got to get this quarter-past-three trolley to Brockton to do a job there.” “Well,” said Parmenter amiably, “they just told me to tell you if I saw you. That’s all.” While they were talking, Behrsin drove by in the Marmon sedan, honking and waving as he passed. Bostock said he would have to leg it to catch his trolley. “Don’t let me keep you,” Parmenter told him. He and his guard continued down the gravel walk. Parmenter shifted the cashbox from his right to his left hand. The afternoon sun was warm on his back. To his right was the garage with the tin roof, and beyond it the tower of Rice & Hutchins. The lilac bush on the little dirt triangle in front of the factory was just coming into bud. A flock of pigeons circled over the tower, then headed back to their loft in Cain’s livery stable. Across the street, beyond a pile of bricks, some Italians were digging the cellar for a new restaurant. A loaded truck had just started up out of the excavation. Jim McGlone’s dump cart was pulled up to the curb beside a couple of little carts into which the Italians were shoveling dirt. Parmenter passed the telephone pole with the red fire-alarm box on it. Two strangers were standing by the fence in front of Rice & Hutchins, dark squat men, their hands in their pockets. One wore a cap, the other a felt hat. He kept on past them, one step, two steps, three....