“Pretend that I have this little silenced pistol in a plastic bag,” he said, lifting Chris’s.22 pistol. “Doctor Smith likes to do his talking in the car while we drive around, so that our conversations can’t be monitored. Now, I’ll wait until the appropriate moment, maybe when he stops at a stop sign, and then I’ll pull my pistol from the plastic bag and pow!”
With that, Bill Bradfield popped a few rounds at a tree, and they were hardly audible. Chris had done a great job with the homemade silencer.
“I’ve just shot Doctor Smith in the head!” Bill Bradfield cried, and then became appropriately grave.
Chris became more grave with the last news of the day. “Your parents’ lives may depend on our silence,” Bill Bradfield said. “If he finds out how much you know, he’ll kill my parents and yours.”
Bill Bradfield put the gun in his pretend bag and practiced a quick draw. Then he put a target on a tree at about the height of Jay Smith’s head. He drew and fired. He shot up a lot of ammo. He even tried shooting from the hip. He only stopped when he nearly blew his balls off with a superquick draw.
11
It was time for a break in the action. A Bill Bradfield former student who attended St. Johns College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was about to be married there.
Chris asked Bill Bradfield if he was going to the wedding but Bill Bradfield declined, one of the reasons being his suspicion that the young chap hadn’t heeded his advice to stay pure and chaste until marriage.
But in that Bill Bradfield was as predictable as a Tijuana dog race, he called Chris a few days later to say that he’d changed his mind and was coming along so that he “could do a favor for Doctor Smith.”
The wedding in Santa Fe was happy and the young couple was handsome and Chris wondered what Jay Smith could want done in New Mexico. He found out the day after the wedding when Bill Bradfield said that they were going to take a little drive from Santa Fe to Taos.
The Jay Smith “favor” had to do with the fact that cops were starting to pressure Dr. Jay about certain welfare checks that had been cashed around The Main Line, checks issued to his missing son-in-law, Eddie Hunsberger, and bearing Eddie’s forged signature. Jay Smith figured he had enough to worry about with his upcoming court trials so he asked his alibi witness, Bill Bradfield, to plant a seed or two in the arid soil of New Mexico.
Jay Smith supposedly told Bill Bradfield that there was a Spanish-speaking couple in a Taos commune with whom Stephanie and Eddie had stayed for a period of time. Jay Smith wanted to establish the time-frame when Stephanie and Eddie had been with the couple, a time that hopefully would be close to the period in which the stolen Hunsberger checks were being forged and cashed by person(s) unknown. That way, Jay Smith could tell the cops to get off his back because his daughter and son-in-law were alive and well, and maybe they’d stop implying that Jay Smith was the kind of guy who would murder his own daughter.
Off they drove from Santa Fe to Taos, not to visit the Spanish-speaking couple, but to phone the couple to arrange a visit. Chris Pappas didn’t ask why they hadn’t called the couple from Santa Fe before driving clear to Taos. He didn’t have time for such things. He was too busy trying to understand why they were trying to prove that Jay Smith wasn’t murderous enough to have killed his daughter when for the past several weeks they’d been glowing white-hot with the certain knowledge that Jay Smith was as deadly as plutonium in your drinking water.
After they got to Taos, Bill Bradfield made a private call from a pay phone outside a restaurant and informed Chris that the mission was accomplished. No further action was necessary. Back they drove to Santa Fe. Chris assumed by what Bill Bradfield told him that the Spanish-speaking couple had alibied Jay Smith by verifying that the Hunsbergers had been with them during the time in question. But Chris assumed incorrectly.
When they got back to Pennsylvania Chris received an urgent message from Bill Bradfield that their Taos trip had been another devious plot by Jay Smith to use and humiliate him. Jay Smith had just confessed to Bill Bradfield that he had in fact forged and cashed the Hunsberger checks. And according to Bill Bradfield, Jay Smith hinted that he had killed and disposed of Stephanie and Eddie Hunsberger.
What Bill Bradfield didn’t tell Chris Pappas was that on the very day that they were in Taos, a friend from work of Jay Smith’s wife had accepted an urgent collect call at the dry cleaners on behalf of Stephanie Smith who was back in the hospital for cancer treatment.
The friend talked to the Taos operator and then to the caller who said, “Hi! This is Eddie Hunsberger. Everything’s okay with my wife and me. Please pass on the message to Mrs. Smith.”
She had never talked to Edward Hunsberger before, but was delighted to relay the good news that he was alive and well in Taos, New Mexico.
* * *
Chris was called off his surveillance activities. Bill Bradfield decided that for now Jay Smith was probably not a great threat to Susan Reinert because he was too busy slaughtering prostitutes.
The prostitutes were also known as “remotes,” because they were remotely connected with the Jay Smith investigation. Bill Bradfield claimed that the “remotes” had made the mistake of smoking dope with Jay Smith, thus spoiling his defense that the drugs found in the Smith home belonged to Eddie and Stephanie Hunsberger. Dr. Jay was determined that the remotes should never appear as character witnesses against him in his upcoming trial. They had to go.
Sure enough, the next day in the papers there was a double murder-suicide in King of Prussia (which had been announced on the radio the day before) and Bill Bradfield pointed out to Chris that Jay Smith had done in the poor remotes and made it look like a family affair.
Chris was shown a legal document by Bill Bradfield who seemed almost as distressed by it as he’d been when he got the news that Jay Smith smoked pot. Susan Reinert had listed him as a beneficiary on a will and had made him the guardian of her children in the event of her death.
So now, in addition to his moral obligation to provide an alibi for the Sears theft for a guy who’d probably “disappeared” his own daughter and son-in-law, and to protect Jay Smith’s secret mistress from being disappeared, Bill Bradfield had his life complicated by this damn will!
There was only one consolation. “This will is not a final version,” he said. Bill Bradfield thought he still had a chance of getting her to drop her mad scheme of “obligating him” in her affairs. He had to persuade her to change the will, so that if she met a terrible fate the police wouldn’t think he was connected with her.
But Bill Bradfield had another worry: he knew of a second guy who wanted to kill Susan Reinert.
She’d been dating a black man from Carlisle named Alex, Bill Bradfield said. Alex was into kinky sex in a big way: he liked Susan Reinert to tie him up and beat him. And he wanted her to urinate on him, as did some other boyfriends she dated.
Chris was repulsed by the news of those golden showers, and while he was wondering if Susan Reinert was worth the hazardous duty on her behalf, Bill Bradfield said that the reason she’d confessed this to him was that she was making a last futile attempt to persuade him to marry her and take her away from the degradation.