That was the only time that Al was ever in the house, although occasionally my mother would go out to the studio and have lunch with him when he was there on his own. Al never gave her the sort of look he had in the cellar that day—a “bold male look,” as my mother described it to my father years later—but there was still something about him that made my mother uneasy. She gave private art lessons at home, and every week a teenager named Marie came by in the afternoon to learn to draw. One afternoon Marie arrived before my mother, and she let herself in to the newly finished studio to wait. It was a warm day, and she was dressed in a madras shift, and Al must have noticed her through the plate-glass windows because the next thing she knew, he was standing next to her. You must be the model, he said.
Marie was sixteen years old and easily embarrassed. Oh no, I’m just the student, she said. Al put his arm around her waist and pulled her close. But your waist is so small, you’ve got to be the model, he insisted. Marie struggled between feeling flattered that an older man was paying attention to her and terrified that it was a form of attention she couldn’t stop. Right at the point when she began worrying what was going to happen next, my mother walked in. There’s Ellen! she said and broke from Al’s weird hug. She ran over to my mother and told her what had happened, and my mother got her settled at her easel and then went outside and told Al that she didn’t like what she had heard.
Aw, she’s just a kid, she’s so cute, Al said. I just wanted to hug her.
My mother told him that she didn’t want anything like that to ever happen again. It was the last time she left Marie alone in the house with Al.
The studio was finished in mid-March, the day after Bessie Goldberg was murdered. There are photographs, however, of the studio with an open metal toolbox on the roof and an oak tree fully leafed out in the background. That means that some sort of work went on into May, though my mother’s memory is that Al was not involved. My mother’s memory is that the day after Bessie Goldberg was killed, Russ Blomerth took the photograph of his crew and my mother and me in the finished studio, and then Al left the job for good. The studio had a flagstone entry and a lovely winter garden that took in sunlight from the southwest through floor-to-ceiling French doors. It had a tile floor and big triangular windows in the eaves and a domed Plexiglas skylight that brightened the room even in midwinter. Along the south wall my mother set up her big wooden easel, and along the east wall she had a worktable with a glass top on which she could mix her colors. Marie continued to come in the afternoons for lessons, and I have dim memories of her struggling with charcoal and paper while my mother simultaneously kept an eye on me and on her and got dinner going in the kitchen.
SEVEN
BELMONT WAS CARVED in 1859 from lands formerly belonging to neighboring towns in an area of upland meadow and forest that once belonged to the Pequuset Indians. Early Belmont was a rugged little outpost laced with old Indian footpaths that connected the fields and boggy meadows where colonists grazed their cattle. Fish weirs were built on the Charles River, gravel operations were started in the numerous deposits of glacial till, and, in winter, ice was cut from the kettle ponds that had been left behind when the glaciers retreated from Massachusetts Bay thirteen thousand years ago. Belmont owed its existence as a modern town to a railroad that was built westward from Cambridge in the 1840s. Decades earlier a young Boston merchant named Frederick Tudor had started cutting ice out of a large glacier-formed pond called Fresh Pond and selling it to Bostonians. In order to sell ice all year round, Tudor started packing his ice in sawdust, and that worked so well that he was soon shipping Fresh Pond ice to the West Indies. The costs of moving so much ice by horse and cart to the Boston waterfront were prohibitive, so Tudor built a railroad that was eventually extended to what was then known as Wellington Hill Station.
A village formed around the railway station, roads were built to the village, and newcomers built homes along the roads. Within a decade the community that had formed around Wellington Hill started clamoring for recognition. It was finally incorporated in 1859 and named after Bellmont, an English-style estate built by the town’s top taxpayer, John Cushing. With cool summer breezes on the hill, light industry on the flats, and a railroad line running straight into Boston, it became one of the first bedroom communities in the country. Wellington Hill was renamed Belmont Hill, and its rocky sheep pastures became some of the most sought-after real estate in the Boston area. It was on the outermost flanks of Belmont Hill, within earshot of Route 2, that Israel Goldberg bought a modest colonial-style house in 1951.
Belmont has always been known for its careful conservatism, and the early town planners reinforced that idea as strongly as possible with the civic buildings that grew up around what was now called Belmont Center. The town hall is a massive 1880s brick-and-slate-roof structure with numerous towers, chimneys, and cupolas. The railroad station behind it was built with fieldstone walls thick enough to take cannonballs. The police station, built in the 1930s, is a no-nonsense Georgian revival–style with end chimneys, granite trim, and a pedimented entry that created—in the words of one town publication—a “dignified building as the center of law enforcement in Belmont.”
It was into that dignified building that Roy Smith was led in handcuffs on the afternoon of March 12, 1963.
“WHAT IS YOUR name?”
“Roy Smith.”
“Where do you live, Roy?”
“One seventy-five Northampton Street, Boston.”
“Did you come out to Belmont yesterday?”
“I did.”
“Did you go to the Massachusetts Unemployment Service yesterday looking for work?”
“Yes, before I came out here.”
“Before you came out here?”
“Yes. That’s where I got work.”
“And where did they send you?”
“Fourteen Scott Street. I think it’s Scott. Yes, 14 Scott Street, I believe.”
“Whom did you talk with at the bureau who gave you this job to come out here?”
“Mrs. Martin.”
“And she sent you out here to this address?”
“Yes, she sent me out here. I don’t know whether it’s out ‘here.’ I don’t know where I’m at now.”
Roy Smith was in a chair in a back room of the Belmont police station. A stenographer named Berta Shear was recording every word that was said. Gathered around Smith were Chief Paul Robinson, two additional Belmont police officers, a detective from the state police barracks, and a lieutenant detective from the police barracks named John Cahalane. Cahalane was the highest-ranking officer in the room and was sent by the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office because of the grave implications of the case. Eventually the DA himself, John Droney, showed up. Bessie Goldberg’s murder was not just another killing; it was the ninth in a series of brutal sex slayings, and the authorities were still not sure that Bessie Goldberg was the only woman Smith had killed.
The interrogation started off with Chief Robinson and Lieutenant Maguire of the Belmont police asking Smith to tell them, step by step, what he had done the morning before. Smith said he took the bus to Belmont, asked directions at a local gas station and arrived at the Goldberg house just before noon. He said that Bessie Goldberg made him a bologna sandwich for lunch and then showed him what to clean after he’d finished eating. He said he cleaned the couch and the floors and the windows. He said he cleaned what he thought was the library—“it had a lot of books in it”—and the living room and the dining room. He said that he was paid six dollars and thirty cents—a dollar fifty an hour for four hours, plus thirty cents’ bus fare—and that he left around a quarter to four. He said he knew the time because he happened to see a wall clock when he went into the pharmacy to buy his cigarettes.
This must have struck the investigators as odd. Not only did Smith have the time wrong by almost an hour—the pharmacy clerk, among other people, placed the time at just after three—but if he was bending the truth in order to
cover his guilt, he was bending it in the wrong direction; Smith was placing himself at the murder scene for the maximum amount of time possible. Israel Goldberg had said that he called his wife around two-thirty and then arrived home just before four. If you were Roy Smith and you were guilty, you would say that you left just after the phone call and that in the intervening hour and twenty minutes, someone else must have sneaked into the house and killed Bessie Goldberg. But in Smith’s version there was only a ten-minute window for someone else to have committed the crime.
If the police were puzzled by this tactic—or lack thereof—they didn’t show it, they just continued prodding him. Smith said that after buying cigarettes at the pharmacy, he got on what he thought was the bus back to Cambridge, but it was going in the wrong direction. Instead of getting off he rode to the end of the line, smoked a cigarette with the driver during the five-minute layover, and then rode back to Harvard Square. He said that he left a card with his landlady’s phone number on Bessie Goldberg’s kitchen counter in case she wanted more work, and that he worked for a lot of different people and that they were all pleased with his work and wanted him to come back to clean for them, and that he had a wallet full of phone numbers to prove it.
“I ain’t hurt nobody, nothing like that,” he added.
“You what?” Chief Robinson said.
“I haven’t hurt nobody, I’m not like that, I take nothing from nobody.”
“Why do you say you’ve never hurt anybody?”
“I haven’t, I haven’t. I mean this guy here—“
“Will you repeat that, Roy?”
Before Smith could answer, Lieutenant Cahalane of the state police stepped in. “Do you want a drink of water, Roy?”
“Yes, please,” Roy answered. “When this guy come down here at this girl’s house he had a pistol all in my face, you know what I mean.”
“Why didn’t you go back to your house in Boston?”
“Why didn’t I go?”
“Yes.”
“Because I was drunk and I was still drinking and I was drinking when the police come by there, I sure was. And besides, I mean, I stay by my self anyway…. I got my own place, four rooms, you know, I go there when I get ready.”
“Roy, what happened there?” Cahalane finally asked. “Now give us the whole story.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Give us the whole story of what happened in that living room.”
“I told you, I told you.”
“You’re holding something back.”
“Mister, I’ve been working my whole life, you understand. I never put my hand on nobody…. I ain’t did nothing but drinking, so—”
“You weren’t drunk when you landed in Belmont yesterday morning, were you, at twelve o’clock noon?”
“Of course not, I got drinking last night.”
“You know what you did out on Scott Road yesterday?”
“You all got the wrong man.”
“Why did you do it?”
“You got the wrong man, you can’t pin all that stuff on me, I ain’t did nothing. I ain’t did nothing to that woman yesterday in Belmont and no other Belmont and no other place. Look, I love myself, do you understand? I love myself. I ain’t going to stick my neck out—you kidding?”
Smith’s only demonstrable departure from the complete truth came soon afterward, when he was asked about the name “Bell” on his mailbox. Smith claimed that it was the previous tenant, who was still getting his mail there; in fact it referred to Carol Bell, who had been his girlfriend and was the mother of his son, whom he called “Scooter.” Carol Bell had left him five days earlier without any forwarding address. Carol Bell had sent Smith to prison for six months for nonpayment of child support. Carol Bell, in other words, was not a chapter of Smith’s life that he would want the police to know about. Smith did, however, mention that there was another tenant in the building, a woman named Blackstone.
“You are a male, aren’t you, Roy?” Cahalane asked.
“What?”
“Are you a male—sex?”
“I’m a male.”
“You don’t use sanitary napkins, do you?”
Smith addressed the other officers: “I don’t know what he’s talking about now.”
“Do you wear women’s clothes?”
“No.”
“Who do the women’s clothes belong to?”
“Blackstone. What about her clothes?”
Smith was refusing to admit to the murder, but neither could the police catch him in a significant lie. Much of a police interrogation consists of asking otherwise meaningless details about a suspect’s day that he can’t possibly keep track of. Once the police have opened up even a small contradiction in the testimony, they have a way into the web of lies that inevitably surrounds any denial of guilt. In the eyes of the police Smith was so obviously guilty that his refusal to make everyone’s life easier by confessing seemed to exasperate them. They were playing their parts, in a sense, but Smith was not playing his. Again it was Lieutenant Cahalane who attempted to break through the denials.
“Straighten me out, will you? I’m all mixed up.”
“Go ahead,” said Smith. Cahalane proceeded to introduce himself and everyone else in the room, including the stenographer. He then led Smith once again through every detail of his morning. He asked what time Smith woke up, what he ate for breakfast, where he got off the bus. With slow, grinding thoroughness he asked exactly what work Smith performed in the Goldberg house, which rooms he worked in, and how long everything took. He asked what door he entered through, what door he left through, and whom he saw on the short walk to the bus station. At one point Cahalane asked if he saw three children walking along the sidewalk on Pleasant Street—Dougie Dreyer and his friends coming home from school—and Smith said that he did. The children all placed Smith leaving the crime scene, and Smith would have known that, but he still declined to fall into the trap of lying. Cahalane was getting nowhere.
“Do you ever black out?” Cahalane finally asked.
“I never blacked out in my life.”
“Do you ever find yourself getting into some sort of predicament that you don’t remember getting into?”
“No.”
“You know at all times everything you’re doing?”
“Sure, yes—I mean I’m normal, if that’s what you mean.”
“You have never been in any mental hospital?”
“No.”
“Have you ever fainted in the street?”
“Never.”
Cahalane was trying to lure Smith into a legal trap. If he killed Bessie Goldberg but didn’t remember doing it, then it could not possibly be premeditated. The definition of first-degree murder is the killing of another human being “with malice aforethought,” and a blackout would effectively remove intentionality from the crime, reducing the charge to manslaughter. Had Smith taken the bait and acknowledged that perhaps he had killed her without realizing it, he almost certainly would have been destroyed at trial, but that was not Cahalane’s problem.
“This was a pretty nice lady?”
“She was nice.”
“She treated you nice?”
“Real nice.”
“Did you proposition her?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you ask her to be over-friendly?”
“Never.”
“Listen, Roy, no one is trying to put you in the middle, we’re just trying to find out what happened.”
“Look, this is serious; I’m giving it to you straight,” said Smith. “If you’ll excuse me for saying this here, there’s too many women out there for me to be making a proposition for somebody. Do you think I want my neck broken?”
“You didn’t ask her to be extra friendly?”
“No, I’d swear on a stack of Bibles as high as a building, I swear.”
“Did you make a grab at her when she refused you?”
“I never made no passes at her.”
&
nbsp; “Roy, that’s not very reasonable, I’m telling you.”
“I didn’t make no passes. That lady never made no passes at me. She was nice. She fixed me dinner [lunch] and got me a cup of tea. I sat down and ate that and got right back up like I do in everyone’s house. I got right back up and started working.”
“Roy, something happened in that house, and it is quite natural that we should feel you are responsible.”
“Why me?”
“Because you were the only one who was there. Don’t you understand? If there is nobody else there but you and the woman and something happens to the woman, naturally we got to think you did it. Now listen, Roy, nobody is trying to put you in the middle. If there is something bothering you and you made a grab for her, all you have to do is say so.”
“I didn’t.”
“It’s no big mystery, it happens every day.”
“I’m telling you, you can take a knife and take my insides out—you can take me to a hospital and let them do anything to me.”
“I’m not going to do anything—all I want to know is what happened.”
“How do I know? I went there, and I worked for that woman. She’s not the only woman I worked for.”
“I believe—they tell me—you’re a good worker.”
“Jesus Christ, take me to a hospital, let them do anything to me.”
“Listen Roy—at the time this happened to the woman—”
“Yes?”