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.