The bottle of acid was in the trunk all right, and so was the money. There were several envelopes full of money. Some of them were in a gym bag. Some of them were concealed in piles of clothes and in the toolbox. They gathered up the envelopes and took them into the apartment.
Chris noted that the bills were fifties and hundreds. The numbers were consecutive and the money looked as though it had been packaged in batches of $1,000.
Chris counted the money and it totaled $28,500. Bill Bradfield stuffed it in three envelopes and said he was going to hide it in the top drawer of a black filing cabinet in the apartment.
“Bill,” Chris said, “the United States insures bank savings, you know. I mean if a bank should fail.”
“Unwise,” Bill Bradfield said. “Unwise at this time.”
Chris didn’t have time to argue. There was yet another job, and this one took some talking, even for Chris, even at this juncture of the secret mission. They had to obliterate fingerprints.
“Why would we need to wipe our fingerprints off the money, Bill?” Chris asked, after being given a handkerchief.
“Very simple, Chris,” Bill Bradfield replied.
Chris got gooseflesh whenever Bill Bradfield said, “Very simple.”
“It all goes back to Jay Smith. If he should kill Susan Reinert, you know how terrible it would be for me. I’m this fool who’s tried to help her and what do I get for it? I get my name on her will as some sort of insurance beneficiary. Well, when the authorities come talking to me and find my money, they’re going to be looking for a scapegoat. As you know, Susan Reinert inherited an estate from her mother. And if she inherited an estate I assume she got some money. So, the police will see my name as her beneficiary and start searching my things and probably take fingerprints or something on any money they find. So really, the reason we’re wiping down all this money is to protect you. I wouldn’t want your fingerprints on my money.”
Chris was fuzzier than a boll weevil so he decided to shut up. And there they sat all afternoon on a day that was perfect for spring cleaning but even better for money wiping. The student and teacher, mentor and disciple, the director and his grip, getting all the props ready for opening night. They chatted and wiped each bill carefully.
Of course the handyman was given the task of taking the acid to a safe place on the Pappas property and storing it until Jay Smith should make a demand for its return. He said he’d store it under the small boat belonging to Bill Bradfield. The boat he was making shipshape for the skipper.
Another English teacher might notice that it was like the scene in Moby Dick where Ishmael and Queequeg are kneading the ambergris, and it’s all so intoxicating: the smell of ambergris and the silkiness of it as it slides between the fingers. And once in awhile the whalers accidentally squeeze each others hands and that served to strengthen the male bonding.
So they wiped and wiped and wiped the day away, smelling the long green as it slid through their fingers. It was not an unpleasant way to spend a spring afternoon.
Sue Myers couldn’t avoid talking with Vince Valaitis about the frantic coming and going of Bill Bradfield. But when Vince started babbling about something new in the life of Jay Smith, Sue Myers would give him a blank stare, and her darting brown eyes would get as placid as mud and she’d just tune him out. Simple as that. Sue Myers had honed her ability to turn deaf as a snail. But she could still sneak and peek with the very best of them.
Her lawyer had told her to advise William Bradfield what he could do with the cohabitation agreement, and he said that the whole business sounded nuts. But Sue had started keeping a lookout for anything that might be lying around the house, because there were surprises written on that cohabitation agreement. One, of course, was the reference under “assets of William S. Bradfield, Jr.” that consisted of very large insurance policies in his favor with the name of the insured person unlisted. The other was an asset of $20,000 that he supposedly had in the bank.
Now, Sue Myers didn’t know anything about a pile of money in some bank. In fact, she’d been forced to raid a savings account that he knew nothing about in order to pump some life into the art store. She’d depleted the secret account and figured that they now stood to lose $80,000. On one memorable day the store took in 84 cents worth of business. Sue Myers was starting to foresee a future as an indebted old maid, saving grocery coupons.
She also started wondering why he was suddenly locking the filing cabinet. At first she thought he might be keeping Jay Smith paraphernalia in there: tape, or rope, or chain, or other nonsense that in his mid-life fantasy had become instruments of torture and death. Now she wasn’t so sure about anything.
As usual, she waited until he was sleeping and then she lifted his key ring and opened the cabinet drawer. And lo, he had some hideout money! A lot of hideout money. In fact, he had a two-inch stack of crisp U.S. currency. On top was a picture of Benjamin Franklin.
Two weeks later she repeated the exercise and this time she found a will. She later claimed that she’d only read the first page and seen that the beneficiary was William S. Bradfield, Jr. But the beneficiary’s name was on the third page of the will, so no matter what she said, Sue Myers had taken a closer look at the will than she would ever admit. Without a doubt, she knew that there was some very funny business going on between Bill Bradfield and the woman she hated, Susan Reinert.
Sue Myers always said she didn’t want to know too much about his business, but the fact is, she already did know quite a bit more than she wanted to know.
Bill Bradfield may have sensed that the will or the envelope full of money in the file drawer had been disturbed. In any case, Chris Pappas got a call to report for duty. Bill Bradfield told Chris that he’d decided that the money should no longer be kept in a file cabinet in his apartment, but should be tucked away in a safety deposit box.
Bill Bradfield said, “If something does happen, and if the police start making inquiries at local banks, I hope they don’t discover my name on a safety deposit box.”
And Chris found himself staring into those brooding, poets eyes, and the pondering bard was twisting his whiskers and trying to figure a way to handle all this when Chris said, “I’ll go and rent a safety deposit box in my name, Bill.”
What an idea! Bill Bradfield told him.
Did Chris Pappas get a chance to walk into a bank and rent a safety deposit box like anybody else? Not a chance. Bill Bradfield wanted little Shelly to have access to the box.
That afternoon Chris Pappas went to the Southeast National Bank in West Chester and signed a contract for a safety deposit box. He signed the signature card and took additional cards for Bill Bradfield and Shelly.
A friend of Shelly’s had been planning to visit her in California so Chris asked her to deliver the signature card. And, naturally, Shelly blabbed all about the weird goings-on between Jay Smith and Susan Reinert to her pal.
Chris Pappas borrowed $1,300 of the money to buy his brothers 1973 Datsun, which was about to be traded in on a new car.
So by now there were several teachers and former students and parents and at least one lawyer and maybe Norman the janitor who’d heard that Susan Reinert might be in jeopardy.
One might think that somebody would just accidentally slip and say something like “Morning, Susan. Nice to see Jay Smith didn’t cut your throat over the weekend.”
Yet the fact is that nobody at any time so much as hinted to Susan Reinert or to any of her close friends that Bill Bradfield had been saying for months that Jay Smith or “Alex” wanted her dead.