Echoes in the Darkness (14 page)

His diary entry confirmed to her that maybe for once he was telling the truth, and that even if he'd been sleeping with

Susan Reinert in the past, he was now simply trying to elude her clutches. The entry read: "I'd like to kill Susan Reinert." If Sue Myers feared that Bill Bradfield might be seeing Susan Reinert on Thanksgiving weekend, she needn't have. At a later time she learned that he'd traveled to Boston over that holiday. And, as it turned out, she had someone else to worry about. Bill Bradfield was visiting Rachel who had left Annapolis and moved on to Harvard for graduate study.

After the Thanksgiving weekend had ended and Jay Smith had not knocked off Susan Reinert or anyone else, Bill Bradfield took credit for keeping Jay Smith "under control." The word "control" surfaced frequently in conversations with Bill Bradfield.

Sue Myers began seeing a sex therapist in Bryn Mawr to learn if she could ever hope to experience sexual desire again-assuming that she survived whatever was to happen, his mental breakdown or hers.

She wondered if there could be sex after William Bradfield.

During December, Susan Reinert contacted the USAA insurance company and tried very hard to secure a life insurance policy for half a million dollars, naming a "friend" as beneficiary. The name of the friend was William S. Bradfield,

Jr.

The insurance company denied her application on the grounds that such a large policy would overinsure her life.

During the same week Susan Reinert wrote a letter to the man that Bill Bradfield claimed was trying to murder her for walking out on a clandestine affair. It was a straightforward business letter:

Dear Dr. Smith:

I am applying for an exchange teaching position in England under the Fulbright-Hays program for 1979-80 and could use a letter of reference from you.

I hope you are doing all right, especially considering your present circumstances. If I can be of any aid, please let me know.

Jay Smith responded immediately:

Susan,

I have some familiarity with the Fulbright programs and would be happy to fill out a reference for you. While teaching at Rider College in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, last year, I was on a review committee re Fulbrights.

Send whatever data you have and I will write a reference geared toward the requirements.

Hope you and your children are in good health.

Jay Smith

And that was all. It was a letter from one colleague to another. He didn't even call her Tweetie Bird.

Bill Bradfield held a critical meeting with Vince Valaitis at school. It was so intense it was subdued. Bill Bradfield's soft husky voice could hardly be heard at times.

"I need to tell you something. I need advice," he said. "I'm listening."

Bill Bradfield took a date book from his pocket and thumbed through the pages. "I'm troubled," he said. "I don't know what to do. You see, I was with Doctor Smith at the shore on Saturday, August twenty-seventh, of last year." "I don't see what ..."

"That's when the Sears store in St. Davids got robbed. So Doctor Smith's been truthful all along. It was a case of mistaken identity. So it was probably the lookalike, whoever he is, who did the other one too!"

And Vince started pondering because in the newspaper they said that the police found all kinds of evidence like security guards' uniforms and badges and I.D. cards and guns.

"But maybe he did do the other robbery. After all there was other evidence."

"I'm only concerned with the St. Davids case," Bill Bradfield said. "Whatever else he did or didn't do isn't my business. All I know is he didn't do that one."

"What about the stuff the police found in the house? What about all that?"

"It's very possible he's telling the truth that Edward and Stephanie Hunsberger are not only responsible for all the contraband, but the robberies too. Tliey may've had a partner who resembled Doctor Smith."

It didn't take a lawyer to conclude that if Jay Smith could show he didn't do the first one, he'd have a very good chance of beating the second case, and if the evidence in the basement could be suppressed due to search and seizure laws, Jay Smith might get his life back to abnormal, free once more to save children from homosexuality and prove to the American Kennel Club that it owed a debt to America's women.

Vince Valaitis got confused thinking about it. All he could say was "I don't know, Bill. I've never encountered anything like this."

"Of course not," Bill Bradfield said. "Nor have I. But damn it, I have an obligation as a citizen to come forward when I can save an innocent man who's being harassed by the police. They're twisting the evidence and forcing witnesses to identify the wrong man!"

"Jay C. Smith is . . ."

"Innocent of this. Whatever else he is. He's innocent of this crime, Vince. And I fear it's my duty to help him no matter what I feel about the man personally."

Chris Pappas hardly knew Susan Reinert other than to say hello when he was substituting for regular teachers at Upper Merion. Of course, there had been those telephone calls from her last summer when she'd called Bill Bradfield at St. John's. And he'd guessed that Bill Bradfield had gone to Baltimore to see Susan after one of those telephone calls, but Chris accepted Bill Bradfields explanation that she was simply a pitiful friend and that he wanted out of his advisory role.

In that he hardly knew her, Chris wasn't as shocked as Vince Valaitis to hear from Bill Bradfield that she was the secret lover of Jay Smith, and that Jay Smith was very angry that she'd jilted him and wanted revenge.

It was a lot more shocking to hear that Jay Smith was a "screened hit man" for the Mafia-which meant that he was screened off from knowing who the contractor really was and vice versa. Bill Bradfield told Chris that ads were taken in the classified section to let a killer know all he needed to know, and that was how Jay Smith did business. Jay Smith had told Bill Bradfield about a vendetta against several of the people involved in his legal problems, and against school officials as well.

Now Chris Pappas was warned that he must not go to the police or Bill Bradfield was a dead man. And besides there wasn't a shred of evidence.

While Chris spent a few days digesting the news that Jay Smith was a Mafia hit man and wondered why his friend had ever offered to be Jay Smiths character witness, Bill Bradfield came to him with an even more bewildering secret. He'd had a dream and worked out a date in 1977 and now he wasn't just a potential character witness, he was an alibi witness. Jay Smith had been with him in Ocean City on the very day that the Sears store was victimized.

It was put to the introspective, insecure, worrisome, thoughtful young fellow almost like a philosophical proposition. What would he do if he knew that a truly wicked man was innocent in a specific instance of a wicked crime even though he was by his own admission guilty of scores of more wicked crimes? Did Bill Bradfield have a duty to the rule of law, or would society be served better by letting Jay Smith get wrongly convicted?

Chris worked on it for a while, but it was clear to him that Bill Bradfield had the distasteful duty of stepping forward and protecting the integrity of the system. He had no choice but to be an alibi witness for Jay Smith.

Bill Bradfield reluctantly agreed.

English teacher Fred Wattenmaker thought a lot of his colle&gue Susan Reinert. He once described her as "sensitive, sincere and caring." He thought she was a wonderful mother.

He got to know her children when she chaperoned some students on a Puerto Rican field trip supervised by Fed Wattenmaker. He told people that Karen and Michael were the type of children he would want if he ever had his own. During the past spring, Susan and her children had visited Fred Wattenmaker at his vacation home in Ocean City. A few weeks later, Bill Bradfield and Sue Myers also accepted an invitation and stayed for a few days. It was the only time that Bill Bradfield had been there except for a day in August, 1977, when Fred Wattenmaker found a note on his door saying, "Tell McKinley I won the bet. I was here but you weren't."

Fred Wattenmaker forgot all about that incident until the fall of 1978, after the entire school was overwhelmed by the arrest of Jay Smith and the scandal surrounding his secret life.

Fred Wattenmaker was surprised when Bill Bradfield approached him at school and said, "Believe me, Fred, I've questioned Doctor Smith for hours and hours and there's no way he did any of the things he's been accused of doing."

And Fred Wattenmaker didn't think too much about that odd little aside except that Bill Bradfield approached him again a month later and said, "I've covered everything with Jay Smith and he's innocent. I'm sure of it except that we can't cover the theft at the Sears store in St. Davids."

Fred Wattenmaker thought it was awfully decent of old Bill Bradfield to be trying to help his former principal, but he did seem to be getting rather obsessive about it.

And then in November, Bill Bradfield talked about it yet another time. He asked Fred Wattenmaker to step outside his classroom and he said, "You won't believe this, but I know where Doctor Smith was when he was supposed to have robbed Sears!"

"That's fantastic!" said Fred Wattenmaker. "And where was he?"

"We were visiting you in Ocean City!" Bill Bradfield announced. "Remember the note? Well, Doctor Smith was with me. It was the Saturday before Labor Day."

Fred Wattenmaker said, "But I was there with a house full of people over Labor Day weekend. You must've come a week earlier."

"I forget the date, but anyway, it coincides with the Sears theft."

"I'll look for the note," Fred offered. "That might help."

"That's not important," Bill Bradfield said. There was no date on the note. Its not important."

By the Christmas holidays another former student was privy to the worst-kept secret in Bill Bradfields life: that Susan Reinert was the mistress of Jay Smith who was threatening to kill her because "she knows too much." This time he informed a former pupil of his who was presently a student at St. John's College on the New Mexico campus.

The young man was home for the holidays when Bill Bradfield told him. It was pretty much as it had been told to Vince Valaitis, Chris Pappas and Sue Myers, but there were variations.

This time Bill Bradfield said that Susan Reinert, if she wasn't killed by Jay Smith, would no doubt be done away with by somebody she picked up because "she frequents dangerous bars and dates black men."

"Sometimes," he told his former pupil, "she seems to have a death wish."

And Bill Bradfield added that though he was nothing more than a friend who'd tried to help with financial and emotional problems, she had, alas, gone bonkers over him and included him in her will naming him guardian of her children in the event of her death.

Bill Bradfield also mentioned that Susan Reinert had, in her pathetic attempts to ensnare him, made him beneficiary on some insurance policies.

The young man reacted as everyone else had upon hearing all the business about Jay Smith murdering Susan Reinert. He said that the police must be notified, and Bill Bradfield responded as he always had by saying, no, that wouldn't help at this time.

But Bill Bradfield assured the young man that he would do something. He said he might take Susan to England in the summer to "diffuse" the situation.

It all sounded as loony to the young guy as it did to everyone else, so, like everyone else, he decided not to tell Susan Reinert that a loose cannon out there named Jay C. Smith was threatening her life. Anyway, Bill Bradfield's secret seemed to have all the exclusivity of the Democratic National Convention.

There was some strange business involving typewriters that added to the overall confusion of Sue Myers. In their apartment was a red IBM Selectric that Bill Bradfield had bought for her birthday back in 1975, during much happier times. The typewriter had cost $350 and when they went to pick it up in downtown Philly he made her close her eyes while he brought it to the car. That was back in a time when Elliot Emu was still alive. Now, old Elliot was nearly as dead as her libido.

In any case, the IBM was a perfectly good typewriter and they didn't need another. So she didn't know what to make of a machine that she found in their attic. It was there along with a tape recorder that she'd never seen before, and when she examined the typewriter she almost cried.

There was a foreign student at Upper Merion, a handicapped boy who had very little speech or motor control. He was twenty-one years old, but Sue always thought of him as a little child.

To say "Hi, Miss Myers" took him thirty seconds of enormous effort. Sue admired the lad enormously.

The school district supplied the student with a special typewriter mounted on a typing stand that he could manage. The machine typed extra-large letters of one size. When the lads parents thought he needed more individual attention he was transferred across the hall to the class of Bill Bradfield, along with his machine.

The boy had a great sense of humor and there wasn't a kid at Upper Merion who was ever less than kind to him. He did everything he was told to do and did it about as well as he could, which was about first-grade level. The teachers gave him straight A's and because of his straight As he would always be at the academic awards banquets and would always receive a standing ovation.