A rumor floated round that Berardelli had recognized the man who shot him, that he had known in advance something was up, and that was why he had been killed. There was a lot of such talk in the Hampton House. Mary Splaine and Jimmy Bostock told a young Pinkerton operative, Henry Hellyer, they thought a man named Darling who worked in the order department might have been the front man for the bandits. Darling had a bad reputation. Two of his friends had been arrested some years back for stealing shoes from the factory, and only a few weeks ago the police had found some stolen shoes at his house. Mary Splaine supposed that Darling had probably hatched the scheme and tipped off his accomplices as to the time the payroll went out. But when Hellyer asked Fraher about this, the superintendent told him that Darling was completely trustworthy and that Mary Splaine was too irresponsible for anyone to take her seriously. On Saturday, when the inquest was held before Judge Albert Avery in the Quincy District Court, several witnesses said they had seen two cars during the holdup, a large touring car and a small sedan. Levangie, the gate-tender, described the driver of the touring car as having a “dark complexion, dark brown mustache, soft hat, and brown coat.” Everyone else described him as a pale, fair-haired man with a smooth yellowish face. Detectives brought down a selection of rogues’-gallery pictures from Boston. Bostock, Wade, and several others who riffled through the assortment picked out a New York bank robber, Anthony Palmisano, as one of the South Braintree bandits. On April 23 a group that included Bostock, Wade, Albert Frantello, and Mary Splaine was taken to Captain Proctor’s office in the State House and shown a number of photographs, including Palmisano’s. Mary Splaine positively identified his picture as that of the man she had seen leaning out of the car with the revolver. Frantello and Bostock said it was an excellent likeness. Unfortunately for their promising identification, it was soon learned that Palmisano—also known as Tony the Wop and Baby Tony—had been arrested in Buffalo in January and was still in jail there. CHAPTER FOUR BRIDGEWATER AND WEST BRIDGEWATER The attempted robbery of the L. Q. White Shoe Company payroll in Bridgewater, on Wednesday, December 24, 1919, resulted neither in loss of money nor life. At twenty minutes to eight on that freezing overcast morning Alfred Cox, the company paymaster, was taking the week’s payroll of $33,113.31 in his delivery truck from the Bridgewater Trust Company to the factory at the foot of the hill by the railroad station. The truck, a Ford with a tarpaulin top and solid rubber tires, was driven by Earl Graves, with Constable Benjamin Bowles beside him. Cox sat just behind Graves, on a large galvanized-iron box containing the money.