Echoes in the Darkness

9

There was always a lot of talk about the “magnetic” personality of William Bradfield, or the “magnetic field” around the man. Well, in the fall of 1978 those magnetic filings-his chums and protégés and secret lovers-weren’t all lining up according to positive and negative influences.

Susan Reinert was doing something that no woman had ever done to Bill Bradfield. She was giving ultimatums. It could have been that she felt more independent now that she had a modest inheritance. It could have been that, as she reported to her therapist, she’d finally had “more than enough.”

According to Roslyn Weinberger, when Susan gave Bill Bradfield an ultimatum he got very angry. Then he calmed down and pointed out that if he walked out on Sue Myers it might prove fatal.

“She’s hysterical, unstable, and God only knows what she might do,” he argued.

But this time Susan Reinert wasn’t buying. She said, “Sorry, that won’t work. Not anymore.”

And she told the psychologist that now she was able to withstand the litany of excuses, rationalizations and arguments that in the past had always confused her and resulted in an agreement to be patient and let one of his schemes cook a bit longer.

This time she said, “No way. Good-bye, then.”

And she meant it. And he knew it.

He humbly suggested that if he could have just a little more time he might “ease Vince Valaitis into a relationship with Sue Myers,” thereby allowing for less trauma when he left home.

She managed a little derisive laughter over this one since it would be about as probable as “easing” Jay Smith into holy orders. And at last it appeared that Bill Bradfield was going to cave in. He told her that he was indeed moving out of Sue’s apartment and into his parents’ home as a show of good faith. He outlined some major plans, and for the remainder of the school year, he said, he would simply have to extricate himself from his financial arrangements with Sue Myers and make ready for a new life.

Susan Reinert told Roslyn Weinberger and Pat Schnure the hot news that could not be announced until Sue Myers was completely out of the picture: she was marrying Bill Bradfield in the coming summer of 1979.

Susan Reinert’s old friend Sharon Lee got married in December and Susan Reinert went to the wedding. The wedding was at Sharon’s parents’ house near the shore. The weather wasn’t very cold and the morning after her wedding Sharon and Susan took a stroll along the beach. Susan Reinert told her friend that she and Bill Bradfield were being married in the coming summer, and that they intended to take her children to England with them.

The secret had to be kept from the children, Susan said, because she didn’t want them in a position of having to lie to their father. She feared that her ex-husband Ken might suspect they were going to live in Europe and try to stop her from taking the kids. Susan Reinert had picked up some very secret ways.

Sue Myers suddenly found herself in need of an attorney. In one of his more bizarre moments Bill Bradfield told her that he was going to present her with a “cohabitation agreement” that she must sign and that she should “trust” him. And now Sue tried to decipher the scheme behind the scheme.

Having lived with Bill Bradfield for five years and having been his lover for fifteen, she immediately started thinking about the famous palimony case in California involving actor Lee Marvin. The theory behind the cohabitation agreement was that if two people parted by mutual consent, with a full disclosure of each partner’s assets, the agreement couldn’t be overturned at a later time should one party have a change of heart and want a bigger share.

Why did Bill Bradfield and she suddenly need this in their life? she asked.

Well, it seemed that he feared that Susan Reinert had gone and named him as beneficiary on a small insurance policy, and if Jay Smith were actually to kill her, Bill Bradfield might become the subject of enormous scandal because of that silly insurance policy.

“I want to protect you from scandal,” he told Sue Myers.

“And how will signing an agreement protect me?” she wanted to know.

Because, he said, he might be drawn into a sticky civil lawsuit involving the Reinert heirs, and Sue Myers as his live-in companion might be subject to a piece of the liability as though she were his wife. This way, she’d escape the whole mess, attorney fees and all.

“And would you stand to inherit insurance money?” Sue Myers asked Bill Bradfield. “If something happened to Susan Reinert?”

“Out of the question,” he said. “I’ve simply got to convince that neurotic that gestures like this are futile. She’ll go to any lengths to draw me into her snare. I simply despise the woman.”

And that, Sue Myers believed utterly. She was convinced that he truly despised Susan Reinert. And she would never change that opinion. So Sue Myers made herself an appointment with an attorney and never told Bill Bradfield about it. The lawyer told her that the whole thing sounded absurd and that she should not be talked into signing such an agreement under any circumstances.

When she talked to an outsider about such things, they all did seem insane. She wondered if she needed a psychiatrist rather than a lawyer.

Bill Bradfield also told her to get out of town for Thanksgiving because Jay Smith often “killed on holidays,” and he might be unable to control the former principal. Sue Myers started to object, but thought it less stressful to humor him. Sue Myers was beginning to feel that she was watching this on television. She couldn’t walk away without seeing how it would end.

In one of her many search-and-explore missions, Sue found what she called his “jogging diary.” Bill Bradfield, the world’s foremost keeper of notes, enjoyed jotting down his ideas and brainstorms when he returned from his morning jog. He probably thought that at least these were safe from prying eyes. But she was able to get a fast peek at the jogging diary one morning when he was in the shower.

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 Bradfields 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. They 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 Bradfield’s 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 colleague 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. It’s not important.”

By the Christmas holidays another former student was privy to the worst-kept secret in Bill Bradfield’s 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 Bradfields 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 lad’s 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.

A terrible thing had happened after the last spring term. The typewriter had been stolen from school. There was no mistaking the machine Sue found in the attic, and she speculated that the tape recorder also belonged to Upper Merion.

She was as furious as she could get, and confronted Bill Bradfield who at first seemed a bit vague. But then he said that he’d bought the typewriter from Jay Smith for $75, and was going to give it to her as a Christmas present to type little merchandise signs for the art store. He said that he didn’t know the machines were stolen.

Sue Myers said the typewriter had been bought by the school for the handicapped boy and that Bill Bradfield knew it and this was too much and he must be absolutely insane to be buying stolen machines from Jay Smith. And then Sue Myers demanded that Bill Bradfield take the typewriter back to the school.

“They’ll think I stole it,” he said.

“Sneak it back in the school,” she said, and then she started crying.

From that day on, she was absolutely certain that Bill Bradfield was meeting with Jay Smith. The typewriter proved it. Soon the machines disappeared from the attic, and Bill Bradfield swore he’d returned them, but the special stand for the typewriter was later found by Vince Valaitis in the basement.

Sue didn’t know why in the name of heaven Bill wanted another typewriter in the first place. She thought a whole lot about mental illness in those days.

Bill Bradfield suddenly wanted to get out of town during the Christmas holidays, the precise time at which he felt Jay Smith went around massacring half the population.

To Sue Myers it made about as much sense as everything else he said. She didn’t question it much. She was just glad to be away from school and the art store and the cold damp weather. She looked forward to heading south. She might even get a suntan.

Vince Valaitis, who was also asked to go along on the trip to Florida, thought that his friend had just about reached his limit because of what was happening with Jay Smith. He was pleased to tag along.

They rented a camper from another teacher and hit the road. But if Sue Myers thought she was going to spend a Christmas vacation without hearing about Jay Smith she was dead wrong.

They weren’t five miles out of Philadelphia before Bill Bradfield said, “If Doctor Smith’s true to form and kills on holidays, there’s nothing I can do about it if I’m in another state, right?”

“You’ve done all you can do,” Vince Valaitis reassured him, while Sue Myers might as well have been stone deaf.

And that was about the best way to deal with it. At the mention of Jay Smith or Susan Reinert, she would let the hum of the engine obliterate human speech. In self-defense she’d make herself immune to voices.

Vince Valaitis was still partly ascribing the talk of murder to a symptom of Jay Smiths mental disorder. He continued to reassure Bill Bradfield that Jay Smith loved to shock people, and that Bill should try to forget about it, at least during the holidays.

But Bill Bradfield started telling some things that Vince hadn’t heard. For example, he said that Jay Smith claimed to have “hit” more than a few people.

And when Vince asked how many, Bill Bradfield without blinking those brooding blue eyes said, “Two hundred and fifty.”

That did it. Vince Valaitis hoped there’d be lots of room in the funny place for Jay Smith and Bill Bradfield. Maybe they could go to St. Elizabeth’s together and share Ezra Pounds old padded cell.

Whether or not Jay Smith had killed his own daughter and son-in-law, it seemed obvious to Vince that the only guy with two hundred personal hits was Count Dracula.

The more outrageous claims that Jay Smith made (always according to Bill Bradfield) the more Vince was discouraged from telling Susan Reinert or police authorities for fear of looking silly.

The itinerary included Charleston, Atlanta, Orlando, St. Augustine. They got as far as Charleston when the specter of Jay Smith once again hopped aboard the camper. They had gone to a store to buy a sleeping bag when Vince called Bill Bradfields attention to the gun display, and that brought up maybe having to shoot Jay Smith, and the next thing Sue knew Bill Bradfield decided he had to buy a handgun.

Sue got furious at Vince and at Bill Bradfield and at Jay Smith and at Susan Reinert and at Bill Bradfields parents for buying him that toy truck, because as far as she was concerned all this was mostly an attempt to get the new piano his sister got and the attention that went with it instead of that lousy stinking goddamn toy truck!

In a St. Augustine hardware store he made another try at buying a.22 handgun, but he was told he had to be a Florida resident and got turned down. Pretty soon Vince was informed that a gun might not do much good anyway if it came to a showdown with the prince of darkness. Due to his years of army training, Jay Smith could kill with any ordinary household utensil, according to Bill Bradfield.

Despite himself, Vince started to believe again. He envisioned nightmare chases by a potato peeler and a curling iron.

Vince Valaitis went to mass in Orlando and Bill Bradfield accompanied him. When they got to St. Augustine, Vince went to mass again. Bill Bradfield went to a Quaker meeting and to the Catholic mass. Sue said that that made him a Quack-lik.

While in a Catholic church with Vince, Bill Bradfield lit a candle and said, “I pray that no evil will befall Susan Reinert.”

That sort of talk terrified Vince Valaitis, because when you started bringing the Church into this business it had to be true or else sacrilegious. And the fear of God was by far the dominant fear in his life.

Vince and Bill Bradfield had occasion to stay up one night talking. Just when Vince thought he’d heard every possible bit of Jay Smith gossip, Bill Bradfield, with his secret-sharer voice, said, “Vince, Jay Smith told me something else. I can’t vouch for its authenticity. I can only repeat what the man said. Jay Smith knows how Jimmy Hoffa was killed. He was chopped into pieces and dissolved in acid.”

And Vince saw in his mind’s eye several big bottles of nitric acid that Jay Smith had stolen from Upper Merion. And if you took parts of Jay Smiths lunatic talk and joined it to demonstrable events in his weird life, and if you thought about his daughter Stephanie and Eddie Hunsberger …

“Jay Smith knows how to make human beings absolutely disappear,” Bill Bradfield said, his last words on the subject during that holiday trip.

Vince’s nightmares now included ghastly parcels dropped into school Dumpsters to offend and bedevil poor old Norman the janitor.

After they got home, Bill Bradfield managed to see little Shelly during the end of the holidays when she was back from college in California. Shelly was by now pushing nineteen and she told Chris Pappas that Bill Bradfield had promised she only had to wait until graduation when they would be married in a “cathedral in France.” He was going to be financially secure by then and they were going to buy an oceangoing sailboat. The rest of it was open-ended.

According to Shelly’s later statements, she and her intended sometimes went to motels in King of Prussia, but the girl always denied that there was sexual intercourse during the few hours they would spend there. Snuggling and hugging and kissing were implied in Shelly’s statements.

When this devout girl, a Catholic convert through the efforts of Bill Bradfield, later denied sex with Bill Bradfield few witnesses believed her. But the more that became known of Bill Bradfields romantic techniques, the more it was thought to be true. The motel trysts may have been a job for Elliot Emu.

Once when Sue Myers was working at the store, he took Shelly to their apartment. Shelly told her girlfriend that during this visit Bill Bradfield had said, “Someday all this will all be yours.”

As might be expected, Bill Bradfield also told Shelly that Jay Smith was on the loose and threatening to kill Susan Reinert. This time he said that the reason was because Jay Smith had an idea that she was somehow going to interfere with the alibi testimony that Bill Bradfield felt obliged to offer in Jay Smiths upcoming trial. He told Shelly that Jay Smith had admitted that he’d killed a couple of people in King of Prussia, probably prostitutes. But Bill Bradfield still had the moral obligation to testify.

He told Shelly how frightened he was for Susan Reinert, but that he didn’t dare go to the police because Jay Smith’s contacts were everywhere in the police service. Bill Bradfield had to resort to protecting Susan Reinert on his own. He said that he circled the streets around Susan’s home late at night and often rang her on the phone only to hang up in relief when she answered. He prayed for her.

Of course Shelly promised not to breathe a word, and before she returned to college in February they went to motels a couple more times and played with the invisible ostrich or whatever they did.