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.
10
The associates of William Bradfield had certain traits in common: they were either especially impressionable, riddled with self-doubts, fearful of the future, or all three. Intimate experience with the opposite sex had been very limited or nonexistent in their lives. None had spent a significant period of life outside a classroom. Sue Myers, Vince Valaitis, Chris Pappas, Shelly, and Susan Reinert were decent trusting people. They were also more vulnerable than bloodroot.
The only one who was in some way different was Rachel, now off at Harvard pursuing a graduate degree, and learning how to look even more like Charlotte Brontë. Her love letters to Bill Bradfield, always mailed to Upper Merion Senior High School, are penned in the tiny precise formal script taught in British boarding schools, though she hailed from the American West.
Dear William:
I thought about you all day yesterday amp; (so far) all day today. Knowing you wouldn’t, but hoping to have you call up. Vaguely nervous with your people so close. I imagine what a confrontation would hold. All nonsense, of course, but inner dialogues haunting me all day. Have been in foul mood upon foul mood. You said something about my new-found interest in political matters. It isn’t. That is, the interest has always been there. The feeling of responsibility. But my notions of what seems sane don’t coincide with anyone’s-well, maybe yours, and that’s why I talk to you about things and the frustrations of never being able to get the kind of information I want. I keep wanting to have you here to say-“That’s why!”
Perhaps you weren’t even here this weekend? That would be strange. You’ve been locked up in my head these days. I miss you horribly. CSEPAHC? Center for the Study of Ezra Pound and His Contemporaries. (see clipping) Stung. Paralyzed. What can be said which will do justice to such a thing??? It’s beyond me. At Yale, yet. They should be ashamed.