A Death in Belmont - Sebastian Junger

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first thing Blomerth did was erect a wood frame over the work site and cover it with heavy plastic tarpaulins. That way they could keep the cement warm with diesel heaters so that it would cure properly. Al dropped by every day to fill the heaters with diesel, and once the foundation was finished, all three men showed up to start framing out the walls and roof. Blomerth and Wiggins were the expert builders, and Al was the laborer of the crew, the heavy lifter. “He wasn’t much taller than I am, but he was absolutely the strongest man I ever saw,” my mother remembers. “I mean, he wasn’t muscle bound, he was just strong. I don’t think he was wildly intelligent but he was clever. No, ‘clever’ isn’t the right word. He knew his way around.”

      The work on the studio stopped over the holidays, though Al came out every day to fuel the heaters. One bitter night he stopped by as usual, but this time he brought his four-year-old son, Michael, and his eight-year-old daughter, Judy. Al finished with the heaters and then came in to introduce his children to my father, who was sick in bed with the flu. My father was born in Germany and had an accent, and Al said that if he spoke to Judy in German, she would understand because her mother was German as well. My father said a few words to her, and then Al wished him well and took his children back out of the house and drove away. My father still didn’t know about the incident in the cellar, and it occurred to him that Al’s last name, which was DeSalvo, meant “safe” in Italian, and that it was a fitting last name for someone who seemed so solid and dependable.

      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 free 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

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