We trudged back to the house. Joe was silent. He finally announced that he might resign from the force. Mary told him to cut the bullshit and help plan dinner. This helped some, but I was quick to notice that he did not pitch into the kitchen activities with his usual gusto. Instead he trudged around like a robot, slicing and peeling here, tasting, there, trimming here, all with a look of black depression on his big dark face.
I called Tom Costello to confirm our appointment for early the next morning, since the original appointment had been scrubbed because of our wrecked house. During the course of our conversation I happened to mention Joe, and Tom replied that he'd like to see Joe again soon. I remembered then that the two men liked each other. I told Tom in all frankness that he'd be pretty sore tomorrow after my work on him, and suggested that perhaps a little jaunt with us would take his mind off the discomfort. He agreed, and it was set up.
"I told ya, Doc, I don't want to go," Joe said a few minutes later. I'm dropping this thing and so are you. Frankly, I hope the whole thing blows over. All I want to do is to get Carmen DeLucca. Dead or alive. Preferably dead."
We sat on the high stools near the butcher block and talked and smelled the onion soup and halibut cooking. Joe got a wee bit brighter over the deep sadness. He still said he wasn't going.
"After today I don'; wanna hear about those two greaseballs anymore. Not now. Not ever."
"We're going down to Braintree tomorrow at ten. Be at my office, Joe. Be there."
"Not on your life."
He was.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I had Tom in the chair, tilted far back, for an hour and a half. He was getting purple in the face. If it had been a set of lowers I was putting in, he would have remained sitting upright, but the uppers require the patient to be almost horizontal so I can look right into the upper gums and sockets from the tooth's point of view. The saliva ejector squeaked and hissed and kept his mouth dry.
I had prepped Tom's eyeteeth, or canines, by grinding them into pegs over which the ends of the six-unit bridge would fit. I spent the better part of an hour checking and rechecking the fit, using De Mark and articulating paper to locate humps and high spots I wanted to remove. I checked his bite and removed the interferences with a greenstone and the polishing wheel. When the occlusion, or bite, was perfect, I was ready for Susan to mix the cement. Susan mixed it perfectly in one minute. It was a brand-new wonder cement that creates a chemical as well as physical bond between the bridge and the teeth. Called glass ionomer, the cement contains ions of fluoride which slow-release into the teeth constantly and prevent decay. Great stuff!
I applied the cement, inserted the bridge firmly and finally, and it was done. The entire upper permanent bridge lit in flawlesslybetter than any glove. There would be no wiggle or waggle. No fuss, no muss. Tom could eat anything _and his permanent front dentures would not come out or slip. He would not have to put them to sleep in a glass every night. He would not have to buy Polygrip, Dentu-Creme, or any of that elderly stuff.
I liked doing this kind of work because it demanded a lot of skill and patience. And when I was finished my patients were always very happy with the result.
"You do good work, Doc," said Tom, admiring himself in the mirror. "And I can talk now too. You can't imagine how sick I was of sounding like a dress designer. The only thing is, my mouth feels all tingly and fuzzy."
"Well enjoy it while you can, old sport," I said as I cleaned up and hung up the white smock. "Because when the local wears off there'll be some discomfort for a while. Now here's Joe in the parking lot. Let's go."
Out on 128 Joe told Tom about recent developments in the case, including a brief and bloody bio of one Carmen DeLucca. Tom said he was sick of hearing about the Mob the way the Germans must be sick of hearing about Hitler. But like me, he couldn't believe for a second that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. However, the more we explained to him, the more silent he became.
At the South Shore Plaza shopping mall we got coffee and studied a map of Braintree. Pearl Street, where the old Slater and Morrill factory stood, was about a mile away. We drove over there, and found nothing.
Joe drove while Tom and I consulted the street map and one of my library books which had a detailed map of the robbery scene. As we passed up and down the section of Pearl Street indicated, we saw not even the slightest indication that it was anything special. No historical marker, no privately erected sign, not even a memorial water bubbler for the two watchmen killed. Nothing.
"I'll be damned," mused Joe as he nursed the cruiser along in a crawl. The guy behind us leaned on his horn and Finally passed us right in the middle of an intersection. As he flew past he glared at Joe and shouted, then roared on and ran the next red light.
"Where the hell are the cops when you need 'em?" said Joe, staring out of his unmarked car.
"Pull over here," said Tom, pointing. "This is right smack dab where it happened."
We got out and walked around. Nothing was left of the Slater and Morrill factory. In its place was a rubble-strewn field of weeds. About a hundred yards down the road and pretty far back I saw the remains of the Rice and Hutchins factory: a rickety red-brick smokestack just like the one Andy Santurnio had been found in. I pointed it out to Joe.
"Surely that's more than coincidence, Joe."
"Don't be too sure. There are lots of old smokestacks left behind when they pull down factories. It's because they're too tall to wreck; they can't get the wrecking ball up high enough, even on the biggest derricks. The only really safe way to take them down is to build a scaffolding around them and do it piece by piece, which is too expensive. Only way to do it cheap is to dynamite 'em, which they should do, because they're a hazard. They fall over and it's like a bomb."
We strolled along the fields, using my book as a reference to key spots. The railroad track was right where it had been in the 1920s, minus the depot shack where the money was delivered in the morning. On the day of the robbery, the payroll had been kept there until mid-afternoon, when the two guards, Parmenter and Berardelli, came and took it away in two locked boxes. But they never
made it to the factory. We walked through the scene, trying to reconstruct it, and half-closing my eyes, I could almost take myself back to April 15, 1920.
The men in the depot shack received the money as scheduled when the train pulled through that morning. They paid little attention to the men lounging nearby, watching the train. Later, on the witness stand, they recalled that these early-morning visitors were obviously casing the job, making sure the money had indeed arrived. Things were quiet until just before three o'clock…
I squint my eyes and look across the road to the nibble field, but now it's a red-brick factory with a belching smokestack and people in skimmer hats in the yard. Some of the workingmen wear cloth caps. Two men emerge from the building and walk purposefully along the road, which is Pearl Street, then across it toward the shack. They go in. A few minutes later they come back out, each carrying a metal bank box. They are armed but guns aren't drawn. They usually make the transfer by car or wagon, with a shotgun guard, but today for some strange reason they walk.
Back across the street, then up along the road past Rice and Hutchins, they approach the grounds of Slater and Morrill. As they near the big red-brick factory, two men who have been leaning idly against the wall step out and walk toward the street, intercepting the two guards with the metal boxes. As they get within a few feet of the guards, guns appear in their hands. There are a few shouted orders. Quickly and without warning one of the bandits shoots, and the chief guard, Frederick Parmenter, falls mortally wounded, clutching at his middle. Alessandro Berardelli, his assistant, panics. He drops his box and begins to run back across Pearl Street, where he is cut down by pistol fire. Then one of the gunmen raises up his pistol and fires a lone shot into the air.