“Got what?” Vince asked, afraid to know.
“My key. He had a key belonging to me. Let’s get out of here!”
Vince didn’t see Bill Bradfield all that much. He kept trying to lead a dull ordinary schoolteacher’s life.
Vince was in his apartment one night taping a horror movie when Bill Bradfield barged in. It was almost midnight. He had something in the trunk of his car to show Vince, and Vince hoped it wasn’t a body belonging to Jay Smith.
“What’s that?” Vince Valaitis asked when Bill Bradfield opened the trunk.
“It’s a gun.”
“It looks like an oil can,” Vince said, peering closer in the darkness. “It is an oil can. It’s not a gun.”
The driveway beside the apartment house in Phoenixville was next to the woods that marked a wildlife preserve. Bill Bradfield walked toward a row of trees and pointed his oil can. Vince heard it pop five times.
“I once saw Doctor Smith fire one into the ground in broad daylight. Right outside a restaurant.”
“Is that a silencer?”
“I may have to use it on Doctor Smith.” Bill Bradfield nodded.
“Put that away!” Vince cried. “Put that away!”
But Bill Bradfield grinned and whirled and sped away on some other madcap adventure and Vince returned to movie horror.
Vince Valaitis was finally upset enough to talk it over with his father. The blue-collar mechanic from South Philly listened to the story about all the nutty school teachers and shook his head and said, “Son, it all sounds crazy!”
And Vince was relieved. Just as Sue Myers had felt relieved when her lawyer said it sounded preposterous. He slept a little better that night. It was too crazy to think about. Jay Smith was just tormenting a decent man like Bill Bradfield for the perverse pleasure of it. Vince prayed that his friend would abandon this folly.
Most people have a general understanding that a sociopath’s personality disorder means that he has little or no conscience, no capacity for guilt. Some call it an underdeveloped superego. And some people understand that a sociopath would rather manipulate and control than go to heaven. Actually, to many sociopaths, manipulation and control is heaven.
A lesser-known symptom of sociopathy involves an obsession to always raise the stakes. A sociopath needs greater and greater risks.
Bill Bradfield may have had a demonstrable reason for spreading Jay Smith terror among certain of his friends. But among others the bizarre gossip provided nothing but more risk to the teller. Or perhaps it provided titillation. The larger a daredevils audience the greater his personal reward.
Or perhaps it was simply assumed that if enough people hear a rumor it becomes true.
Another English teacher was told by Bill Bradfield about being a reluctant alibi witness for Jay Smith with the usual explanation given. He was also told, during a secret conversation in the English office at Upper Merion, that Bill Bradfield might be mentioned in a will or insurance policy belonging to Susan Reinert. And that Bill Bradfield had learned that Susan Reinert was seeing a “kinky” person who used human feces in his disgusting sexual rituals.
By playing around with people like that, Susan Reinert might get herself killed, he said. But she wouldn’t listen to anyone’s advice, Bill Bradfield told the astonished teacher.
In May, 1979, Susan Reinert went to an attorney and had him draft a new will. In the event of her death, her brother Pat Gallagher would no longer be her executor, and her children would no longer be her beneficiaries. The sole beneficiary, executor and trustee of her estate would be her “future husband,” William S. Bradfield, Jr.
It was getting hard to talk to Sue Myers these days. Vince would drop in from time to time when he was bored or tired from correcting papers. Once he tried to bring up The Subject.
“Where’s Bill?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think he’s with Doctor Smith?”
“I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know anything.”
“Did Bill tell you that he and Chris went to a commune in New Mexico and found someone who actually saw the Hunsbergers?”
“No.”
“Don’t you and Bill talk anymore?”
“Hardly.”
“Do you ever see Rachel?”
“I never see her. I don’t know if he does.”
“I hear she’s going to Harvard.”
“That’s real nice. Especially on Memorial Day. I’ll bet she has lots of family graves to decorate. In Salem, Massachusetts.”
And that’s how the conversations would go. Sue Myers knew too much and she was too tired. Her bones were tired. Even her hair was tired. Bill Bradfield made her feel older than coal.
What could she do? When she fell in love with the guy sixteen years earlier, she’d been a twenty-three-year-old college graduate, who, the statistics claimed, had a fifty-fifty chance of getting married and having children. Now what?
Toward the end of April, Bill Bradfield asked Chris Pappas to come over to the apartment and help with a little spring cleaning. So Chris put on an old shirt and jeans and looked forward to some good wholesome sweat. But something in the back of his mind told him that a Bill Bradfield housekeeping chore might not be like anyone else’s.
They weren’t up in the attic for more than five minutes before he learned he was right.
Bill Bradfield said it casually as he was dragging a box of books out of the attic. “I’ve got some things in the trunk of my car, Chris.”
“What things?”
“Cash. Thousands.”
“Of dollars?”
“Yeah. And some acid.”
“Acid?”
“A very large bottle of hydrochloric acid. Doctor Smith gave it to me and told me to hide it. He uses it to dissolve the fingertips of his victims. And their facial features.”
“Their facial features?”
“And their teeth, of course. Teeth can be identified.”
It wasn’t an extraordinary conversation. Not in the spring of 1979. Not among Bill Bradfields friends.
Chris wanted it slowly, so he could reflect. “Okay, Bill, Doctor Smith gave you acid and told you to hide it for him?”
“Precisely.”
“And he gave you thousands of dollars?”
“No. The money’s mine.”
“Where did you get thousands of dollars?”
Then Bill Bradfield asked, “Can you keep a secret?”
But Chris wasn’t into irony, not at the time, so he just said, “Of course I can.”
Bill Bradfield said, “I wouldn’t want Sue to know. This is money that has nothing to do with her or the store. I’ve been saving for years. I sold property sometime back and this is what I’ve ended up with.”
“Why’s it in the trunk of the car, Bill?”
“I withdrew it from the Elverson City Bank, and I tell you I’m lucky I did it. Do you know they’d only let me withdraw five thousand at a time? That’s how nervous the banks are. That’s how uncertain the whole economy is. A bank’s the worst place in the world to keep your money. I’ve been saving to buy a new boat.”
“But Bill, the banks pay interest on your money!”
“I think they’re all going under. I want this money accessible. I’m thinking of putting it in a safety deposit box.”
Chris had to sit down and start working on it by the numbers.
“Bill, if you’ve got a lot of money in the trunk with a bottle of acid, that isn’t wise. Is it?”
“Doctor Smith stole the acid from Upper Merion, by the way.”
“So if you have this acid and this money, don’t you think you better get that money out before an accident destroys it?”
“Good thinking,” Bill Bradfield said. “Let’s go get it.”