Echoes in the Darkness (28 page)

Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz were both suspicious, cautious, deliberate crime men. Jack Holtz's caution extended into all phases of his life. He did very little on impulse and didn't like surprises. Perhaps his personality was the wrong kind to mesh with his former wife's. She had a flair for art and always talked of a need for self-expression.

The first time Charlotte left him, he did all of his "hurting and healing," as he put it. But then "Chaz," as he called her, came home. A little later she left for good, seemingly on impulse.

He claimed that when she left the second time it didn't hurt, especially since she didn't try to take Jason away from him. He and his son lived in a little house he'd bought on a twentyeight-year loan. He'd put a workout room and a weight machine in the basement and decorated the place with lots of ducks and outdoors pictures.

He dated occasionally, but always felt that his job and his son kept him too busy for chasing around. He was thirty-two years old and Jason was nearly eleven so he figured with his mother helping they could go it the rest of the way without a woman in the house.

He could cook Chinese and had decent recipes for shish kebab and chicken cordon bleu, but Jason would rather have a steak than the fancy stuff so Jack Holtz got pretty good on the grill.

Jack Holtz had thick black hair, and behind his aviator glasses were large, heavily lashed dark eyes, the kind they used to call "bedroom eyes." As a result of an incorrect bite alignment his lower jaw looked unusually small and called attention away from the large neck below it and the big chest below that-the neck and chest of a guy who'd pushed some iron around. You had to be around him a bit before you noticed that he was fairly tall and well put together.

That hair of his was the kind you see on the Bryl-Creem ads, full and dense and black. Before he was finished with this case it'd be the kind you see on the Grecian Formula ads: steelgray, all of it.

He was something of a loner and didn't hang around with other cops, but the relationship between Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz worked for them. Jack Holtz was the kind of investigator who wanted to be as good as he could be, but wasn't sure he could be better than that. He worried about not having been to college. He thought he didn't express himself well, especially in court, when in fact he was an excellent witness. He was content to play second banana.

Joe VanNort on the other hand pointed out that the Bill Bradfield gang had a whole bushel of college degrees and not one of them could tell a cat turd from a Candy Kiss. He wasn't intimidated by sheepskins and mortarboards. He was a confident top banana.

The comb found in the trunk of Susan Reinerts car got worked during July. Information arrived in bits and pieces. A call to the War College in Carlisle identified the acronym, 79th USARCOM. A call from a cop in the King of Prussia area gave them a lead on a former principal named Dr. Jay C. Smith who'd taught at the same school where Susan Reinert had worked. Another call to the 79th Army Reserve Command brought the news that Jay C. Smith had been a colonel in the command prior to his retirement. Then they learned that Jay Smith had gone to prison on Monday, June 25th, from a Harrisburg courtroom.

When the comb and the Jay Smith connection was explained to Joe VanNort, he wasn't impressed.

"Its too obvious," he said. "This Jay C. Smith is in a whole pack of trouble and a comb from his army outfit ends up under the body. Too obvious. Sounds like something our pal Bradfield might dream up to throw suspicion on his old nut-case principal."

Joe VanNort stuck with that notion for several months.

While Bill Bradfield and Chris were winding up their summer studies Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz made another trip to St. John's. Only this time they made a prearranged visit to a New Mexico judge and had a court order when they arrived, an order requiring Bill Bradfield and Chris Pappas to submit to fingerprinting so that their prints could be compared to unidentified lifts taken in the Reinert home and car.

Bill Bradfield didn't like any of it, paricularly the ride to the state police headquarters where he was mugged and printed like a thug. And he really didn't like being driven in a separate car from Chris Pappas. And Chris didn't like being photographed, because the mug shot had nothing to do with fingerprint comparison.

When Bill Bradfield next called home he told Vince Valaitis that Joe VanNort was an extremely "unintelligent" man, and that as far as VanNort's partner was concerned, he'd like to have thrown Holtz into the school fountain.

He was incensed with Holtz because when he was trying to explain to the cretinous cop about the Great Books Program at

St. John's, and how demanding it was, and how he resented being subjected to police harassment, Jack Holtz had said, "The Bible's a great book. I don't read it myself, but I know it says in there, thou shalt not kill."

Bill Bradfield asked only one question the whole time he was with the cops during their second visit to Santa Fe.

He asked, "How long do the state police stay on a murder case?"

When the cops had made their second appointment at St. John's a college staff member informed Chris Pappas they were coming, and Chris told his mentor who ordered him to get the IBM typewriter out of Bill Bradfields room and into his own.

After the cops went home, Bill Bradfield visited the Olsens after class and brought a small metal strongbox with him.

"I've got some papers in here," he told Jeff Olsen. "They're not really important, but the police might find them and manipulate them to try to manufacture some evidence. Could you hold this box for me?"

"Sure," Jeff Olsen said. "I'll lock it in the trunk of my car."

"And I'd like you to keep a typewriter for me," Bill Bradfield said. "It was used to write some letters to Susan Reinert. They were nothing of course, but you know the cops."

"Just leave it in this apartment," Jeff Olsen said. "Put it right there on the dining room table."

Naturally, Chris got the assignment of lugging the heavy typewriter to the Olsen apartment. These days he was all muscle and faith.

Later, Bill Bradfield, accompanied by Rachel, came again to the apartment of Jeff Olsen, with another important request. He wanted to use the fireplace. Bill Bradfield was carrying a wastebasket filled with documents of one sort or another.

"These're just school papers and things belonging to Susan Reinert," Bill Bradfield explained. "I don't know why I save everything. It's mostly stuff from her students."

Young Olsen told him to fire away and Bill Bradfield fed the papers into the fireplace and burned them and stirred up the ashes.

Then he said, "Jeffrey, if the police should come here or contact you at any time, you don't have to cooperate with them, they'll try to trick you. But don't tell them that I warned you of that because then they'll twist what you say and try to make me look as though I'm obstructing their investigation. "

And the student nodded and said, "Gotcha."

"I simply trusted Bill Bradfield completely. I believed he was not guilty," Jeff Olsen reported at a later time.

"I need a favor," Bill Bradfield said to Chris as they were preparing for departure from Santa Fe. "Could you switch typing elements for me? You have a machine just like it, and I'm sure the typing balls are interchangeable."

But now for the first time Chris was thinking about saving his own skin. He was starting to get some very funny feelings about the whole business.

He said, "Bill, why don't you just throw the typing ball away if it bothers you?"

The answer was pure Bradfield. "I'm afraid to," he said. "You never know when you might need something and if you throw it away its gone for good. I'd feel so much better if you kept it. You know how to remove them, don't you?"

"After we get home I'll see what I can do," Chris Pappas said.

But the handyman realized it didn't take a Wernher von Braun to replace typing balls. Chris had started worrying a whole lot when Bill Bradfield first said that he'd loaned the typewriter to Susan Reinert. And it goosed Chris a bit when he heard about a $25,000 "money receipt."

He'd read a news report that Susan Reinert had been unable to remove her $25,000 in large increments, and had to withdraw it in smaller increments. He started thinking about Bill Bradfield claiming that his life savings of $28,000 had to be removed in increments of $5,000.

Chris Pappas felt like a cripple who didn't want to walk, but some hairy gorilla in a white smock kept dumping his wheelchair and forcing those baby steps.

He was beginning to put Bill Bradfield's stories under a bright light for a little third degree. And the answers were not in English, Latin or Greek. Bill Bradfield just might have had a little something to do with misappropriating the $25,000 investment of Susan Reinert.

As to Bill Bradfield having something to do with the murder of Susan Reinert and the disappearance of her children, Chris Pappas wasn't ready to deal with that one yet. He was protected by deductive reasoning. To Chris Pappas it was a simple syllogism. If Bill Bradfield revered Thomas Aquinas, then he could never be a truly bad man. At worst he could be a flawed good man. A flawed good man might be tempted to misappropriate a sum of money that he intended to repay, but only a truly evil man could do the other thing.

It can be theorized that Chris Pappas suffered a bit of added torment over the whole business of the "flawed good man" and the "misappropriation" of money. It is not precisely clear whether he actually informed Bill Bradfield that he was taking $1,300 out of the safety deposit box to buy his brothers tradein car.

Flawed good men. The concentric circles around William Bradfield were full of them, and Chris Pappas was beginning to indulge some uncomfortable ideas. He absolutely refused to give Bill Bradfield his own typing ball. The typeface style on Bill Bradfields typewriter was Gothic, of course.

The commandant of the Pennsylvania state troopers, a recent appointee of Governor Thornburgh, was a former special agent of the FBI from the Pittsburgh office. The governor had served western Pennsylvania for several years as a U.S. attorney so they knew each other pretty well.

Ken Reinert had been calling his congressman and the U.S. attorney trying to persuade somebody to bring the FBI into the case. He didn't have faith in Joe VanNort and his state troopers. So whether it was pressure from the congressman or from Senator Schweiker or Governor Thornburgh, the FBI agreed to enter the Reinert case on the pretext that the children were possibly kidnap victims being held in some other state for a future ransom demand. Farfetched, but it satisfied federal requirements for the time being.

Joe VanNort treated the news that the feds were coming as if the Reds were coming. He had a little talk with his team of five cops telling them what to expect.

"Okay, we gotta cooperate with them," he said. "But they ain't never goin' in the Reinert house unless there's a trooper with them. Got that? And if anybody tries to push you around, you come to me and tell me right nowl Remember, they know nothin' about homicide. They're glory boys. They come in and give press conferences, and like that. They got no real field experience. They got no real court experience. No real police experience. They're not cops. They're a bunch of lawyers and bookkeepers. No, they're a bunch a . . . schoolteachers, is what they are!"

It was the worst thing Joe VanNort could think of to describe a special agent of the FBI.

Civilians have seldom understood the real danger inherent in police work. It has never been particularly hazardous to the body, not since Sir Robert Peel first organized his corps of bobbies. This line of work has always been a threat to the spirit.

That summer it was dramatized. It was a night like other nights since the investigation had started: frustrating, fruitless, maddening. And now they were awaiting the arrival of eighteen special agents to form a joint task force.

There they sat long after they should have gone home: Joe VanNort, Jack Holtz and a few other troopers. No one remembers who started it, but it was a night when the spirit of a cop could burst loose and show itself without the badge and veneer of cynicism. That scarred-up cop spirit can turn as panicky as a colt in a barn fire.

One of the troopers had a bad thought, just a little jock-itch of a thought, but within five minutes it was like a raging syphilis epidemic.

The trooper said, "Do you know something? Our photos of the corpse aren't all that recognizable. I mean, she was beat up pretty bad. I mean, a person who knew her could look at our photos and think it was Susan Rienert. But what if it was somebody else?"

Everybody laughed.

But then Jack Holtz said, "You know, that mortician who cremated her said he was a little mixed up by what her brother told him to do. What if Pat Gallagher told him to burn the body, and after it was done tried to convince the mortician that he misunderstood the instructions?"

"You mean what if Pat Gallagher is in on it with ..."

"Bill Bradfield!"

"And Ken Reinert is . . ."

"Also in on it! He identified the wrong corpse on purpose!"

"And Susan Reinert is . . ."

"In England with her kids waiting for her boyfriend to inherit seven hundred and thirty G's!"

"And the body we have is . . ."