Echoes in the Darkness (19 page)

Vince thought he was joking. "Five hundred dollars? Where'd you get five hundred dollars?"

"Not from the store, of course," Bill Bradfield said. "From my personal fortune, which has diminished considerably. Still, I'd like you to have it."

"You're too generous, Bill," Vince Valaitis said. Too generous with all your friends. Thanks, but I won't be needing any more than my salary, for as long as it lasts."

"Well, keep it in mind."

"You're too generous."

Bill Bradfield didn't disagree.

Vince had paid a lot of money in his life to get scared, that was one way to look at it. Nowadays, Bill Bradfield provided more fright than a dozen horror films, but Vince didn't like it a bit.

One night, Bill Bradfield, who seldom drank and had never been known to use any land of drug, came puffing into Vince's apartment. He was overwrought and exhausted. He looked more crazed than the Ancient Mariner.

He sat down and said, "I don't know how much longer I can go on. Jay Smith just put a gun to my head! I dared to doubt one of his stories about killing for hire, and he whipped out a roll of reinforcing tape and before I could move he'd taped my wrists and put a gun to my head!"

"Oh my, oh my, oh my," Vince Valaitis said. "Oh my."

"I'm afraid I'm losing my health," Bill Bradfield said. "I need your help, Vince. I need it tonight."

"Sure, Bill. Anything," Vince said.

"I need you to come with me to Jay Smith's house."

"Oh my."

An hour later, still unable to believe he was wide awake on a

cold spring night in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., and not in some galazy far away, Vince Valaitis found himself driving his Camaro to a house on Valley Forge Road. A house with a basement apartment where unspeakable things occurred. A house that maybe looked like Anthony Perkins's horrible house right next to the Bates Motel where he . . .

"Pull over and park!" Bill Bradfield told him suddenly.

Vince parked and cut his engine.

"Take the bulb out of the dome light!" Bill Bradfield ordered, and Vince's hands were so sweaty he could hardly manage.

"Now continue driving. We're almost there!" Bill Bradfield whispered, while Vince tried not to hyperventilate.

The house on Valley Forge Road was quiet. There was a light burning, perhaps two lights. Vince parked and cut his headlights. Bill Bradfield got out quietly and left the door open.

It was a secluded street with an orchard across the road. There obviously wasn't much traffic here at any time. The garage that led to the mysterious basement apartment could not be seen from the street.

Vince could see Bill Bradfield blowing steam in the moonlight as he crept up the driveway toward the back of the house in a tangle of shadows.

A blood-freezing scream would not have surprised the young teacher, but after a moment Bill Bradfield came skulking back to the Camaro, jumped in, and said, "I've got it!"

"Got what?" Vince asked, afraid to know.

"My key. He had a key belonging to me. Let's get out of here!"

Vince didn't see Bill Bradfield all that much. He kept trying to lead a dull ordinary schoolteacher's life.

Vince was in his apartment one night taping a horror movie when Bill Bradfield barged in. It was almost midnight. He had something in the trunk of his car to show Vince, and Vince hoped it wasn't a body belonging to Jay Smith.

"What's that?" Vince Valaitis asked when Bill Bradfield opened the trunk.

"It's a gun."

"It looks like an oil can," Vince said, peering closer in the darkness. "It is an oil can. It's not a gun."

The driveway beside the apartment house in Phoenixville was next to the woods that marked a wildlife preserve. Bill Bradfield walked toward a row of trees and pointed his oil can. Vince heard it pop five times.

"I once saw Doctor Smith fire one into the ground in broad daylight. Right outside a restaurant."

"Is that a silencer?"

"I may have to use it on Doctor Smith." Bill Bradfield nodded.

"Put that away!" Vince cried. "Put that away!"

But Bill Bradfield grinned and whirled and sped away on some other madcap adventu e and Vince returned to movie horror.

Vince Valaitis was finally upset enough to talk it over with his father. The blue-collar mechanic from South Philly listened to the story about all the nutty school teachers and shook his head and said, "Son, it all sounds crazy!"

And Vince was relieved. Just as Sue Myers had felt relieved when her lawyer said it sounded preposterous. He slept a little better that night. It was too crazy to think about. Jay Smith was just tormenting a decent man like Bill Bradfield for the perverse pleasure of it. Vince prayed that his friend would abandon this folly.

Most people have a general understanding that a sociopaths personality disorder means that he has little or no conscience, no capacity for guilt. Some call it an underdeveloped superego. And some people understand that a sociopath would rather manipulate and control than go to heaven. Actually, to many sociopaths, manipulation and control is heaven.

A lesser-known symptom of sociopathy involves an obsession to always raise the stakes. A sociopath needs greater and greater risks.

Bill Bradfield may have had a demonstrable reason for spreading Jay Smith terror among certain of his friends. But among others the bizarre gossip provided nothing but more risk to the teller. Or perhaps it provided titillation. Hie larger a daredevils audience the greater his personal reward.

Or perhaps it was simply assumed that if enough people hear a rumor it becomes true.

Another English teacher was told by Bill Bradfield about being a reluctant alibi witness for Jay Smith with the usual explanation given. He was also told, during a secret conversation in the English office at Upper Merion, that Bill Bradfield might be mentioned in a will or insurance policy belonging to Susan Reinert. And that Bill Bradfield had learned that Susan Reinert was seeing a "kinky" person who used human feces in his disgusting sexual rituals.

By playing around with people like that, Susan Reinert might get herself killed, he said. But she wouldn't listen to anyone's advice, Bill Bradfield told the astonished teacher.

In May, 1979, Susan Reinert went to an attorney and had him draft a new will. In the event of her death, her brother Pat Gallagher would no longer be her executor, and her children would no longer be her beneficiaries. The sole beneficiary, executor and trustee of her estate would be her "future husband," William S. Bradfield, Jr.

It was getting hard to talk to Sue Myers these days. Vince would drop in from time to time when he was bored or tired from correcting papers. Once he tried to bring up The Subject.

"Where's Bill?"

"I don't know."

"Do you think he's with Doctor Smith?"

"I don't want to know. I don't want to know anything."

"Did Bill tell you that he and Chris went to a commune in New Mexico and found someone who actually saw the Hunsbergers?"

"No."

"Don't you and Bill talk anymore?"

^Hardly."

"Do you ever see Rachel?"

"I never see her. I don't know if he does."

"I hear she's going to Harvard."

"That's real nice. Especially on Memorial Day. I'll bet she has lots of family graves to decorate. In Salem, Massachusetts."

And that's how the conversations would go. Sue Myers knew too much and she was too tired. Her bones were tired. Even her hair was tired. Bill Bradfield made her feel older than coal.

What could she do? When she fell in love with the guy sixteen years earlier, she'd been a twenty-three-year-old college graduate, who, the statistics claimed, had a fifty-fifty chance of getting married and having children. Now what?

Toward the end of April, Bill Bradfield asked Chris Pappas to come over to the apartment and help with a little spring cleaning. So Chris put on an old shirt and jeans and looked forward to some good wholesome sweat. But something in the back of his mind told him that a Bill Bradfield housekeeping chore might not be like anyone else's.

They weren't up in the attic for more than five minutes before he learned he was right.

Bill Bradfield said it casually as he was dragging a box of books out of the attic. "I've got some things in the trunk of my car, Chris."

"What things?"

"Cash. Thousands."

"Of dollars?"

"Yeah. And some acid."

"Acid?"

"A very large bottle of hydrochloric acid. Doctor Smith gave it to me and told me to hide it. He uses it to dissolve the fingertips of his victims. And their facial features."

"Their facial features?"

"And their teeth, of course. Teeth can be identified."

It wasn't an extraordinary conversation. Not in the spring of 1979. Not among Bill Bradfields friends.

Chris wanted it slowly, so he could reflect. "Okay, Bill, Doctor Smith gave you acid and told you to hide it for him?"

"Precisely."

"And he gave you thousands of dollars?"

"No. The moneys mine."

"Where did you get thousands of dollars?"

Then Bill Bradfield asked, "Can you keep a secret?"

But Chris wasn't into irony, not at the time, so he just said, "Of course I can."

Bill Bradfield said, "I wouldn't want Sue to know. This is money that has nothing to do with her or the store. I've been saving for years. I sold property sometime back and this is what I've ended up with."

"Why's it in the trunk of the car, Bill?"

"I withdrew it from the Elverson City Bank, and I tell you I'm lucky I did it. Do you know they'd only let me withdraw five thousand at a time? That's how nervous the banks are.

That's how uncertain the whole economy is. A banks the worst place in the world to keep your money. I've been saving to buy a new boat."

"But Bill, the banks pay interest on your money!"

"I think they're all going under. I want this money accessible. I'm thinking of putting it in a safety deposit box."

Chris had to sit down and start working on it by the numbers.

"Bill, if you've got a lot of money in the trunk with a bottle of acid, that isn't wise. Is it?"

"Doctor Smith stole the acid from Upper Merion, by the

way."

"So if you have this acid and this money, don't you think you better get that money out before an accident destroys it?"

"Good thinking," Bill Bradfield said. "Lets go get it."

The bottle of acid was in the trunk all right, and so was the money. There were several envelopes full of money. Some of them were in a gym bag. Some of them were concealed in piles of clothes and in the toolbox. They gathered up the envelopes and took them into the apartment.

Chris noted that the bills were fifties and hundreds. The numbers were consecutive and the money looked as though it had been packaged in batches of $1,000.

Chris counted the money and it totaled $28,500. Bill Bradfield stuffed it in three envelopes and said he was going to hide it in the top drawer of a black filing cabinet in the apartment.

"Bill," Chris said, "the United States insures bank savings, you know. I mean if a bank should fail."

"Unwise," Bill Bradfield said. "Unwise at this time."

Chris didn't have time to argue. There was yet another job, and this one took some talking, even for Chris, even at this juncture of the secret mission. They had to obliterate fingerprints.

"Why would we need to wipe our fingerprints off the money, Bill?" Chris asked, after being given a handkerchief.

"Very simple, Chris," Bill Bradfield replied.

Chris got gooseflesh whenever Bill Bradfield said, "Very simple."

"It all goes back to Jay Smith. If he should kill Susan Reinert, you know how terrible it would be for me. I'm this fool who's tried to help her and what do I get for it? I get my name on her will as some sort of insurance beneficiary. Well, when the authorities come talking to me and find my money, they're going to be looking for a scapegoat. As you know, Susan Reinert inherited an estate from her mother. And if she inherited an estate I assume she got some money. So, the police will see my name as her beneficiary and start searching my things and probably take fingerprints or something on any money they find. So really, the reason we're wiping down all this money is to protect you. I wouldn't want your fingerprints on my money."

Chris was fuzzier than a boll weevil so he decided to shut up. And there they sat all afternoon on a day that was perfect for spring cleaning but even better for money wiping. The student and teacher, mentor and disciple, the director and his grip, getting all the props ready for opening night. They chatted and wiped each bill carefully.

Of course the handyman was given the task of taking the acid to a safe place on the Pappas property and storing it until Jay Smith should make a demand for its return. He said he'd store it under the small boat belonging to Bill Bradfield. The boat he was making shipshape for the skipper.