“We’ve got to keep trying,” Chris said.
“I can tell you this,” Bill Bradfield said. “He’s talked about using truth serum on victims. And you know that Stephanie and her husband had access to methadone and other drugs. There’s a drug connection somehow, but I can’t quite put it together. One minute he talks about taking over the drug operation in Chester County and the next minute he’s preaching an antidrug sermon. The man’s demented.”
“Do you really believe all of it?” Chris said. “I mean about cutting people up and acid and all that?”
“He places newspaper on a carpet when he kills his victims. The bloody newspaper’s wrapped in foil and then the whole thing’s wrapped in plastic trash bags. Then the bodies’re taken to a landfill above the Vince Lombardi service area on the New Jersey Turnpike.”
“Maybe some of it’s true,” Chris said.
“He uses out-of-town newspapers for the bodies. In case they’re ever found.”
And there it was. A Bill Bradfield detaiclass="underline" the alligator shoes, the hairnet, the out-of-town newspapers.
“I guess it has to be true,” Chris Pappas said. “I guess what he tells you has to be true.”
“We can doubt some of the details,” Bill Bradfield said. “Because the man uses marijuana. I find that shocking in light of his daughter’s drug problems.”
While Bill Bradfield was shocked about pot smoking, but not so shocked about chopping and dissolving human beings, Chris Pappas got a brainstorm.
He said, “Maybe I should conduct a reconnaissance on Doctor Smiths house! After all, you’re exhausted. You can’t do all this alone.”
Bill Bradfield said, “We might try that, Chris. I’d never let anyone else take such a risk, and certainly not Vince Valaitis. But I think you have what it takes to pull it off. Only don’t ever try to follow him. He’s very alert for tails.”
“I could just take down license numbers and descriptions of any cars that visit him,” Chris offered. “When we do go to the cops we might need all that.”
“I can tell you this: his actual number of mob hits, and I’m relatively sure of it, numbers between twenty and thirty. And he’s sent away for banana clips because he’s going to rob an armored truck eventually. He’s got a rifle that he’s altering to fire full-on automatic.”
And that led Bill Bradfield to an inquiry as to whether his handyman had made any progress with the armament, so Chris took Bill Bradfield out to the back of the Pappas property where his father raised flowers.
Bill Bradfield had a.357 Colt magnum, a gun he said he’d had for some time, and wanted Chris to tinker with it and oil it and make it ready in case something big happened. He’d also brought along a.30 caliber rifle and a bag of bullets.
With the rifle Bill Bradfield brought a story that was so tortuous that at a later time several outsiders dismantled and inspected it, saying it was like a homemade eggbeater held together with Krazy Glue.
It seemed that the.30 caliber rifle had its barrel cut down and the stock removed. It was a Jay Smith killing instrument, of course. Chris was asked to alter the illegal weapon even more. And the reason was only acceptable to performers in a play within a play within a labyrinth.
It seemed that the sawed-off rifle might actually belong to Bill Bradfield. Yes. It seemed that he had once owned a similiar.30 caliber rifle and kept it in his parents’ farmhouse. He made the mistake of mentioning this to Dr. Smith, and of course, given Jay Smiths demonic powers he very soon turned up with this rifle in this altered condition. Bill Bradfield immediately suspected that Jay Smith had drifted into his parents’ home in Chester County and spirited the gun away, disguising it in this fashion to torment Bill Bradfield by revealing just how omniscient and omnipresent he could be.
And yes indeed, the Bradfield.30 caliber rifle had mysteriously disappeared from his parents’ home, so this might be the very gun! But he couldn’t tell because it was cut down, and disguised.
And what did he want Chris to do with the gun? That was easy. As easy as an elephant’s pedicure. He wanted Chris to grind the serial numbers off the weapon so that if Jay Smith recalled the weapon from his bogus disciple, Bill Bradfield, and if Bill Bradfield couldn’t stop Jay Smith from using the weapon to kill someone, like Susan Reinert for instance, and if the murder weapon should happen to fall into police hands, it could not be traced back to Bill Bradfield who might in fact be the registered owner of the rifle in the first place!
It was just that simple. If you’re more Byzantine than Constantinople.
And Chris said something like “Makes sense to me!” And started up the old grinding wheel.
While the handyman was grinding away at the serial number, he inadvertently damaged the barrel of the rifle. Chris later learned that Dr. Smith thought it was a lousy grinding job and that it screwed up the weapon.
Chris expected Bill Bradfield to be pleased that he’d ruined a Jay Smith death weapon, but Bill Bradfield didn’t seem too happy about it.
Chris Pappas made up for the lousy grinding job by calling Bill Bradfield over to the house a few days later to see what he’d managed to accomplish in the ordnance department.
The young man had a small.22 caliber handgun of his own, and he’d tinkered and experimented with some pieces of pipe and steel wool and screen and anything else that would act as a baffle. It was like constructing a miniature car muffler.
This time he could show off a little, even as Bill Bradfield perused the monograph he’d given Chris to work with. When Bill Bradfield read the monograph, his fingers slid over the pages at incredible speed so that Chris, always a painfully slow reader, continued to marvel at the older man’s many skills. But Chris showed him some skill of his own that day and addressed all the problems in the pamphlet on silencers that Bill Bradfield had loaned him.
As Jay Smith had purportedly explained it, the gun mechanism was noisy and had to be coated with a rubberized material. The second noise in a gun shot was caused by the explosion of the powder. The third noise Jay Smith defined was the sound of the traveling projectile. He added that he used 22 caliber short ammo.
The methodical, reflective, pondering handyman had gotten some specifications at a gun store that listed muzzle velocities, and he’d computed that there’s only one bullet that travels below the speed of sound: a.22 caliber short. Therefore, the tiny piece of technical information relayed to him by Bill Bradfield, that the traveling projectile makes a sound, seemed absolute proof to Chris that Bill Bradfield was spending a great deal of time with a firearms expert, a military man like Jay Smith.
“Bill Bradfield knew nothing about guns or machinery. He couldn’t even drive a nail,” Chris Pappas later said. “If ever I needed convincing that did it.”
“Vince has gotten freaky on me,” Bill Bradfield informed him. “He’s taking tranquilizers to sleep. He’s no help whatsoever. As far as weapons, I’ve told him that Doctor Smiths given me his guns and that you’re subtly altering them so they won’t be able to be fired. He’s satisfied with that. He isn’t able to cope with much more these days. He’s not … shall I say man enough to understand that one day I may have no choice, no choice at all.”
“You may have to …”
“That’s right.” Bill Bradfield nodded grimly. “I may have to kill him.”
Chris started throwing off high voltage over this one, and he asked, “Have you given any thought to logistics? How’ll you do it? Do you have a plan?”
Asking Bill Bradfield if he had a plan was like asking Dwight Eisenhower if he’d given any thought to the June 6th channel crossing. The “plan” involved more props. There was an old car seat on the Pappas property. Bill Bradfield and Chris walked over to it and rehearsed. He told Chris to sit down on the left, as though he were Jay Smith driving.