Echoes in the Darkness

14

Woman? Oh, woman is a consummate rage, but dead, or asleep, she pleases.

Take her. She has two excellent seasons.

— EZRA POUND

On the day in June that Susan Reinerts last insurance policy was being readied for delivery to her home in Ardmore, Bill Bradfield took a drive to Cape May, New Jersey, to book rooms for himself and three companions for the coming weekend. He drove to the shore by way of downtown Philadelphia where he made a stop at the kind of hotel where guests hope that night screams are only coming from overly theatrical hookers.

It was later learned that the Harvard graduate student had been staying in that hotel for a month. Rachel’s room was registered to “Mr. and Mrs. William Bradfield.” One would think that with nearly $30,000 in cash lying around, Bill Bradfield might have booked a better hotel.

But it could have been that the old hotel had its own ghost or a body entombed in a wall, or something else to pique a Gothic taste and compensate for an occasional flea or cockroach. In any case, she accompanied him on the drive to the shore that summer day. Bill Bradfield booked two rooms at the Heirloom Apartments and returned home by way of downtown Philly to deposit Rachel back on the mean streets until further notice.

When Sue Myers was told that she was going to the shore for the weekend she was happy about it, but wondered why he’d gone to the trouble of driving to the shore to book rooms. Ordinarily they just took pot luck when they got there. Naturally, she suspected shenanigans, figuring maybe he’d gone to the shore and maybe he hadn’t. Sue Myers guessed that little Shelly was probably home from college.

It appeared that Susan Reinert was mistaken if she thought Bill Bradfield was going to England that summer. In fact, the only one going to England was Sue Myers who intended to take a course in Shakespeare at Oxford.

Bill Bradfield had his summer all set. He and Chris Pappas were enrolled in the summer program at St. John’s College in Santa Fe. And Rachel was going along as a helpmate.

The first day of class at St. John’s was to be Monday, June 25th. The plan was that Bill Bradfield and Chris would fly down on Friday, June 22nd. Chris Pappas bought himself a plane ticket.

“Why are you going to the shore, Bill?” Chris found himself asking a few days before their scheduled flight to Santa Fe.

“I need the recreation before starting classes at St. John’s,” Bill Bradfield said. “A weekend at the shore might do you some good too.”

“I want to leave for Santa Fe on Friday and get over my jet lag,” Chris argued.

“I need you to come to the shore on Friday,” Bill Bradfield said. “I have a feeling Doctor Smith’s going to finally make his assault on Susan Reinert this weekend. Monday he’ll be sentenced on the weapons and drug charges and this’ll be his last chance. If it happens I want to be able to account for my whereabouts. I need you to help provide my alibi.”

“But Bill,” Chris pleaded, “if you want an alibi why not fly with me to Santa Fe on Friday? We’d be two thousand miles away from here!”

“Well,” Bill Bradfield said, “well, there’s another reason I have to be here. Doctor Smith’s attorney may call me with orders to report to court on Monday to be a character witness at the sentencing.”

That explanation had all the symmetry of melanoma, since seeing Jay Smith get more not less jail time had been their professed goal all along. But by now, Chris Pappas was lost in Bill Bradfields maze. The young Greek just wanted out before a minotaur got him.

“Well, when can you leave?”

“I can fly to Santa Fe on Monday night.”

“You’ll miss the first day of class.”

“We’ll miss it, Chris,” he said. “I need you to be with me this weekend. In case something happens.”

“I guess I can’t let you down,” Chris Pappas said.

Vince Valaitis and Sue Myers and Bill Bradfield decided to celebrate the end of the school year by seeing the movie Hair. After the film, Bill Bradfield asked Vince, “How’d you like to go to the shore next weekend?”

That sounded okay to Vince, but then he thought about the summer job he’d accepted now that Terra Art could no longer afford its treasurer.

He believed he could get the day off so he said, “Fine. Sounds great.”

But a couple of days later, Vince started worrying and figured he’d better not ask his new boss for a day off quite so soon. He went up to Bill Bradfields apartment and found him alone.

Bill Bradfield listened as Vince told him why he wouldn’t be coming on Friday.

When he was all through Bill Bradfield stared at him and those eyes started throwing off arctic blue sparks, and he said, “You have to go. Plans’ve been made.”

That stunned the young teacher. He’d done a whole lot of things for Bill Bradfield and listened to a whole lot of very strange stories, but this was too much. He had to go?

And Vince started stammering and repeating his good reason for not wanting to go, but Bill Bradfield said, “I’m afraid that Jay Smith is going to harm Susan Reinert this weekend. I want to be at the shore and I want my closest friends to be in a position to protect me. You’re going.”

And Vince Valaitis, a twenty-eight-year-old college graduate, like Chris Pappas, a twenty-nine-year-old college graduate, said, “Okay.”

And that was that.

Probably the busiest day in William Bradfields life was June 22, 1979. Early that morning Chris Pappas received telephone instructions to go to the safe deposit box to withdraw enough to buy Bill Bradfield a round-trip plane ticket to New Mexico and also provide him with some walk-around money for a few weeks.

Chris drove to the bank and used his key to open the box. He counted the money and took about $1,100 from the total. He put $500 of it in an envelope and dropped it off with Sue Myers since Bill Bradfield wasn’t at home. But when Chris was on his way to his own house he spotted his friend’s car in Valley Forge Park and flagged him down. They stopped and had a talk.

Bill Bradfield said that he’d been delayed by a meeting with Jay Smith. Chris filled him in on what hed done and was instructed to buy them tickets for the Monday night flight to Albuquerque.

Bill Bradfield said, “We’ll pick you up at home sometime tonight. Be ready.”

And off he drove, as relentless as decay.

Friday afternoon was reserved for Shelly business. Bill Bradfield picked her up at 3:30 P.M. and they drove straight to a motel on Route 30. According to Shelly there was lots of hugging and kissing, but as always, it went no further.

Then he filled her in on what had been happening and what her duties were for the next days. Shelly heard all about Dr. Smith’s chains and weapons and silencers. Bill Bradfield told her how Dr. Smith had fired a gun outside a restaurant in King of Prussia in broad daylight to demonstrate the silencer. And he told her how exhausted he was from his mission of trying to get the goods on Dr. Smith to protect everyone on the hit list.

Then he told her something that nobody had heard before this. He said that even poor old Sue Myers was on the hit list!

He told Shelly that he patrolled Susan Reinert’s neighborhood more than the local cops, and Shelly agreed that he looked totally pooped. The wild tangle of his beard seemed to reflect the anarchy he was trying to set straight.

After all the murder talk was concluded, they got down to the real business. Shelly was informed that she had to go to his bank and do a little transaction. But first he showed her a pile of money and some envelopes, and he counted $4,000 in cash. She was told that she was going to withdraw some more money, a lot of it.

They were in the motel for about three hours before they checked out and drove to West Chester. Bill Bradfield went to the wrong bank because he’d never been to the safe deposit box. Then he grumbled about how he had to do everything, and went to a telephone and called Chris Pappas to get the name of the right bank. And that meant that Chris now knew that Bill Bradfield was doing some more money business, and apparently he didn’t want Chris to know about it.

Finally, at 7:30 P.M they parked outside the Southeast National Bank. Bill Bradfield told Shelly that this bank contained money he’d saved for many years, and that if Dr. Smith really did kill Susan Reinert in the next few days, well, his assets might be frozen because of his name being in her silly old will. He wanted her to go in there and with her access card draw out all the money and bring it to the car.

When she asked why he had so much money in a safe deposit box instead of an interest-bearing account he said it had to do with a tax shelter. And since Shelly was into great books and religious dogma rather than investment banking, she didn’t question it further. She withdrew the money and after she got back to the car they counted it.

Shelly’s next job was to take the money to her home in Wayne and stash it where her parents wouldn’t find it. He told Shelly that due to his being in a state of utter exhaustion he was going to the shore for the weekend with troublesome old Sue Myers to recuperate before summer school. He said that Vince and Chris were coming along, and that he just had to get away somewhere so that in case Dr. Smith did his foul deed he’d be far enough away not to get blamed because of that distressing will.

An so forth.

The last bit of teaching that Bill Bradfield ever tried on Shelly involved a crash course in code and cipher. He gave her a copy of Ezra Pound’s book on Confucious. On pages 12 and 13 he’d numbered each line. The letter beside the number indicated a letter in a cipher and code he’d worked out.

He told her that all future correspondence between them might have to be coded and decoded by Confucius. It might become extremely urgent that Shelly master this system, he said, but he knew she could do it.

But she saw right off that the code was harder than the Hope Diamond. Shelly wanted to kiss pillows, not study cryptography. That afternoon it might have occurred to little Shelly that marriage to Bill Bradfield wouldn’t be all chocolate chips and snuggle hugs.

It seems fairly certain that Elliot Emu passed away at about 5:00 P.M. in the motel on the afternoon of June 22nd. That was the last time Bill Bradfield was jolly enough to whip out Elliot Emu and let him preen and gawk and stretch his limber neck. From that day on, Bill Bradfield would never again be carefree enough for his imaginary ostrich.

Colleagues of William Bradfield and Jay Smith frequently said that the two educators “marched to a different drummer,” or “danced to a different tune.” But Bill Bradfield could only dance a pas de deux; he was never a solo performer. Jay Smith seldom danced in tandem. Jay Smith was a dissonant soloist, dancing his own peculiar lonely jig to his own peculiar off-key melody, maybe played on the kazoo.

After Chris bought the plane tickets he went home and packed and had dinner. He then went to visit his friend Jenny. They were watching television at 8:30 when a car pulled up in front of Jenny’s house. Chris looked out, seeing it was Bill Bradfields blue VW Beetle dropping Shelly. When Shelly came in the house she said that she had to talk to Jenny alone.

After they returned to the living room, Shelly said they had to go out on some business. Chris knew better than to question any of Bill Bradfields other pals about “business” so he said okay and went home and finished watching the show.

None of Bill Bradfields friends saw him for nearly three hours.

The show Chris watched was I, Claudius, a tale of duplicity, greed and murder.

On Friday afternoon, Florence Reinert had the opportunity to speak on the phone with her former daughter-in-law. Susan intended to take the children with her to Allentown the next morning to a Parents Without Partners workshop. Since gasoline was still being rationed she wanted John Reinerts opinion as to whether her Plymouth Horizon could go there and back on a tank of gas.

John Reinert told her it would, as long as they didn’t take any side trips.

Then Susan discussed plans for Michael to be baptized on Wednesday at the Washington Memorial Chapel in Valley Forge. She was a Unitarian, but said that she was happy to please the Reinerts by having the boy christened in the Episcopal faith.

On Monday Susan intended to deliver Michael to his grandparents where he would stay most of the week while Karen visited her father and went to a gymnastics camp. Susan then planned to take both children to a music fair at Valley Forge, and conduct a weekend garage sale with her neighbor the following Saturday.

She was going to be very busy, she said.

That evening Michael was to play in a father-son softball game with the cub scouts. The game was being played at a church about half a mile from Susan Reinert’s home. Ken Reinert arrived at the church with his second wife Lynn just before Susan showed up with Karen and Michael.

Michael was wearing his Philadelphia Phillies baseball shirt with the pinstripes and the big red P on it. Ken didn’t get a chance to talk to Susan or Karen because Susan seemed in a hurry and drove off as soon as Michael jumped out of the car.

The game had lasted only a few innings when unexpected thunder sent everyone scurrying inside the church hall where the regular cub scout meeting was to be held.

Ken and Lynn sat in the back while the pack leaders tried to control thirty noisy kids. Suddenly Ken looked toward the doorway and his former wife was standing there. She was still dressed in a white knit blouse with multicolored stripes and blue jeans.

Ken was supposed to deliver Michael home after the game and wondered if something was wrong, but before he could ask she signaled to Michael who ran to the back of the church hall and they walked out together. Michael did not return.

Ken and his wife Lynn couldn’t figure this one out, so they left for home at about 8:30 P.M. Fifteen minutes later there was a sudden cloudburst and Ken Reinert was standing on his front porch when the phone rang.

It was Michael. He told his father that he was sorry for leaving without an explanation, but that he had to get home to “scrub his floor” because they were going away.

His dad couldn’t figure that one either because Michael had never scrubbed a floor in his life.

He said to his son, “Michael, where’re you going?”

Michael called to his mother and said, “Mom, Dad wants to know where I’m going.”

And Ken heard his ex-wife say, “Well, why don’t you tell him you’re going bowling with PWP.”

It was very strange these days for all the Reinerts. The children had become uncommunicative and evasive when it came to their mother’s business.

* * *

That evening the president of the regional council of Parents Without Partners received a call from Susan Reinert who said, “Something’s come up. Something personal and I don’t want to talk about it. Could you have someone cover for me at the Saturday workshop in Allentown?”

At 9:00 P.M. that Friday night, June 22, 1979, a curious thing happened. An ice-laden cloudburst produced a summer hailstorm over portions of The Main Line communities. There were huge chunks of hail pelting the streets of Ardmore.

Mary Gove, Susan Reinert’s next-door neighbor, had a granddaughter Beth Ann who was sixteen years old. Sometimes Beth Ann would babysit with Karen and Michael when she was visiting her grandmother. Beth Ann and Karen and Michael all ran out to the street and tried to pick up as many hailstones as they could before they melted. Then they decided to count hailstones and see which porch was going to collect the biggest ones before the storm ended.

Susan Reinert came hurrying out of the house to call the children inside at about 9:30 P.M.

Mary Gove was surprised to hear two car doors slam a moment later, and then to hear Susan’s Plymouth Horizon pulling out of the driveway and heading toward Belmont Avenue.

Mary Gove said to her granddaughter, “Oh, I hope she’s not going to drive in the rain!”

But then she looked out again and the cloudburst had stopped. She was relieved.

There was much talk of the eerie battering of The Main Line by the summer hailstorm. It was a very unnatural night, everyone said.

Vince got off from his summer job at 5:30 P.M. that Friday, and came home to shower and pack. He was invited to dinner by Sue Myers and they were joined at eight o’clock by Bill Bradfield’s son Martin and his girlfriend Donna, who had returned from Europe one week earlier.

They had dinner and chatted and waited for Bill Bradfield, and finally Vince invited everyone downstairs to watch a movie on his VCR.

Sue Myers got sleepy before the movie reached the scary part and decided that this was another Bill Bradfield no-show, so she excused herself and went to bed. She wasn’t as mad as she might have been because he’d recently given her five $100 bills for her birthday. She didn’t even want to know where he got it.

At 11:15, Martin and Donna were about to go home when there was a knock at Vince’s door. Donna opened the door for Bill Bradfield.

He was wearing the blue parka with all the big pockets though it was hot and muggy after that unseasonable storm. Donna said, “Hi! How ya doing?”

Bill Bradfield looked past her and didn’t answer. He seemed distracted. He asked, “Where’s Sue?”

“Upstairs taking a nap,” Vince said. “We’d given up on you.”

“Get some gas for the car,” Bill Bradfield said to Vince. “Let’s get it packed. Let’s go.”

When he got upstairs and wakened Sue Myers he seemed even more agitated. He came back down and hardly spoke to his son. He kept telling Vince to hurry up. He actually snapped his fingers at him while Vince poured cans of rationed gasoline into the Volkswagen.

It was after midnight when Sue and Vince and Bill Bradfield drove to Chris’s house to pick him up. When Sue Myers asked where he’d been all evening he said that he’d gone to visit his ex-wife Muriel to say good-bye before leaving for summer school, but that she wasn’t home. He said he’d waited around for a few hours but finally gave up and left her a note.

Chris drove to Cape May and Sue Myers sat next to him. Vince Valaitis and Bill Bradfield were jammed in the back and the trunk was stuffed with their weekend bags. As they approached the Wait Whitman Toll Plaza, Vince peered at his dozing friend in his Whitmanesque whiskers. He looked as old as the poet.

Bill Bradfield was exhausted. His head kept flopping like a giant puppet’s. Suddenly, at the toll plaza he jerked upright and slapped his hand on the front seat and said, “I’m afraid this is it! I’m afraid this is the weekend Doctor Smith could kill Susan Reinert!”

Then Bill Bradfield said, “I tried to protect her! I followed him toward her house! I circled her house fourteen times! I lost him in the hailstorm!”

Vince, ever the supportive friend, said, “You don’t know that, Bill. You don’t know that he’s going to do her any harm.”

But Bill Bradfield said, “It’s in God’s hands.”

Sue Myers would always maintain that she did not hear anything while driving the car that night. Sue Myers was as deaf as an oyster.

They reached Cape May, New Jersey, at 3:30 A.M. and went to a restaurant for a snack. They arrived at the Heirloom Apartments at 5:00 A.M., but something had gone wrong. One of their rooms was occupied and locked. The other was unoccupied but locked. They sat in the corridor and grumbled and dozed until 7:00 A.M. when the proprietor found them.

She told Bill Bradfield that she’d thought he’d wanted to book the rooms for the next weekend. She apologized and quickly arranged for a room for Bill Bradfield and Sue, and another for Chris and Vince.

She was so distressed that she left her keys behind in Chris and Vince’s room. When Chris Pappas found them and brought them to her later that day, she said, “You’ve saved my life!”

“No, you’ve saved ours,” Chris Pappas said.

Vince Valaitis decided to complete his weekly obligation by going to mass on Saturday night instead of Sunday. Bill Bradfield said that he was coming along.

When they got to the church, Bill Bradfield said, “I want to pray for Susan Reinert and you should too.”

When they got back from mass, Vince Valaitis stayed in his room but the others went to see Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?

Bill Bradfield saved the ticket stubs.

They went back to their rooms and read to each other from a book by Woody Allen, but nobody laughed much. They drank ouzo and wine that weekend but no one was in a party mood.

On Sunday morning, Vince had to go to mass again because Bill Bradfield demanded it.

“We’ve got to pray for Susan Reinert!” Bill Bradfield said.

Susan Reinert got a lot of Bill Bradfield prayers that weekend. He even lit a candle.

“This is to keep evil from her,” he said.

The proprietor permitted the guests to make a couple of phone calls in her office on Monday morning, and when Bill Bradfield paid their bill it was with a check that had everyone’s name on it.

He wasn’t satisfied that the check could serve as a receipt; he wanted a written receipt. And he asked the woman to write on the receipt that it was paid in full for three nights, not two.

“Please include Friday on the receipt,” he insisted.

The proprietor thought it must be for tax purposes or an expense account, and obliged.

Vince got scolded once by Bill Bradfield for failing to get a receipt for some hamburgers.

Bill Bradfield informed Chris that he probably wouldn’t have to testify on Monday afternoon after all, so they weren’t going to have to rush back.

Chris wasn’t surprised. These days the former philosophy student expected exactly the opposite of what his faltering logic told him was objective reality.

Before leaving the shore, Bill Bradfield took Chris outside to the VW and said that he had to dispose of some letters that might be “dangerous” to him in case something had happened to Susan Reinert.

“Look at this,” he said to Chris, showing him a pile of letters that he’d crammed into the storage space of the Volkswagen.

Chris read a couple of the letters and Bill Bradfield said, “See how she is? Nothing but sex on her mind,”

But Chris hadn’t seen any sexual references at all, and he said so.

Bill Bradfield snatched the letters out of Chris’s hand and said, “How about this!”

But when Chris read it he didn’t see anything extraordinary except a few “I miss you and love you” lines.

Bill Bradfield got angry and said, “Damn, I can’t find any of her filthy letters. You should see some of the disgusting letters she’s written.”

Then he added, “I better throw these away anyway. People could get the wrong idea about my relationship with that woman.”

So Chris just nodded patiently and watched Bill Bradfield speed through all the letters, and when he’d finished he stacked them in the well behind the backseat with other printed matter.

Later that morning, Vince noticed that the VW looked like a dried-up birdbath. He borrowed a bucket and some soap from the proprietor and volunteered to wash the Beetle. When he was cleaning out the inside of the car he saw a stack of letters and picked them up just as Bill Bradfield was coming outside.

“What do you want me to do with these?” Vince asked.

“Leave them. I’ll take care of them,” Bill Bradfield said.

Still later that morning, Chris walked down the beach to take a look at the corpse of an old ship protruding from the water. Bill Bradfield spent his last hours lying on the sand, flat on his back with his arms outstretched in a crucifixion pose. Vince thought it was the most depressing day of his life.

The drive back was very subdued until they were nearly home. Bill Bradfield said that he wanted to dispose of some “trash” in the back of the Volkswagen. He needed a trash Dumpster.

Chris drove behind an apartment building near his house and got out. He took the bundle of letters from Bill Bradfield and walked to the Dumpster. Like a Bradfield-trained man, he lifted the first layer of trash rather than just throw the letters on top where the wind could blow them into the window of a police station.

After they’d dropped Chris Pappas and were traveling home by way of Valley Forge Park, Bill Bradfield suddenly said he had to make a call to Chris because he’d forgotten to ask if Chris owned some of the books that would be required reading that summer.

He stopped near the chapel where Michael Reinert was to have been baptized and went to a public phone. He made a long telephone call then got back in the car.

Chris Pappas later said that he’d not received a telephone call from Bill Bradfield.

When they got home, Bill Bradfield made yet another call. This time, he told Sue Myers that he was calling Jay Smith’s lawyer.

When he was finished with the call, he hung up and told Sue, “Well, Jay Smith was sentenced to jail! Susan Reinert is out of harm’s way!”

He looked happy. He smiled.

As far as Sue Myers and Vince knew, he was planning to drive the Volkswagen to Santa Fe. Chris had never told them any different. Each of the friends had little secrets to keep from the others.

Vince was glad this weekend was over what with two trips to mass to pray for potential murder victims. He was hoping he hadn’t jeopardized his summer job by taking the day off.

He hadn’t even gotten his toothbrush put away before Bill Bradfield came exploding through the door.

“I just called Doctor Smiths lawyer!” he announced. “They sentenced him to prison!”

And then Bill Bradfield walked over to a chair in Vince’s living room and sat down. And began to cry.

At last he arose and came to Vince and hugged him and thanked his young friend for standing by him during all the difficult months.

Vince would never forget the next words out of Bill Bradfields mouth. With tears streaming, he said, “Thank God he’s in jail! I saved that fucking woman’s life!”

Bill Bradfield then drove straight to Chris Pappas’s house and gave him the good news.

By 6:00 P.M. Vince and Sue had helped Bill Bradfield get all of his things packed into the Volkswagen. Vince carried Sues red IBM Selectric typewriter, which he insisted he’d need in Santa Fe. And Vince was more than happy to say good-bye to his friend. He even packed a thermos of coffee for the first leg of the drive. To keep him awake.

That Monday evening Chris asked Shelly and her friend Jenny to drive him to the airport. Bill Bradfield was delivered by Rachel who had just learned to her very great surprise that he was not traveling by car with her. He was flying with Chris and she was driving the car to Santa Fe alone.

Like all of his pals, Rachel accepted the drastic change without complaint, and said that it seemed reasonable to her. She didn’t even mind when Shelly gave him a kissy-face bon voyage.

When the big bird took off, Bill Bradfield seemed to relax. He bought a round of drinks, and he and Chris toasted each other. Due to their fine work, Jay Smith had been unable to murder anyone.

As Chris put it, “We were very pleased. The bad guy was behind bars.”

The Host Inn near Harrisburg is about a two-hour drive from the home of Susan Reinert in Ardmore. The Three Mile Island nuclear power station is near the hotel, and two men from South Carolina who had business at Three Mile Island happened to be driving into the hotel parking lot at 7:00 P.M. Sunday evening.

The two men spotted an orange Plymouth Horizon in the parking lot with its hatchback partially open. One of the men could see something white inside that he thought was a laundry bag. They entered the hotel but forgot to notify the desk that someone had left the hatchback open.

At 2:00 A.M. Monday morning, a Swatara Township policeman was on routine patrol in the Host Inn parking lot. He too spotted the Plymouth Horizon with the hatchback open. He didn’t get out of his patrol car, but he did make a radio check and found the car to be registered to Susan G. Reinert of Ardmore. He went into the hotel and found that there was no registered guest with that name. He then got a radio call to handle a fatal traffic accident and took off.

At 5:20 A.M., the Dauphin County police and fire radio dispatcher received a call from a man who identified himself as “Larry Brown.” The caller said there was a sick woman in a car at the Host Inn parking lot.

The same Swatara Township cop got the assignment and this time he did open the hatchback of the Plymouth Horizon.

She was so slight that her pale naked body could nearly be contained by the luggage well. The man from Three Mile Island had obviously seen her right hip. Susan Reinert had left the world the way she’d entered, in the fetal position.