“Well, when can you leave?”
“I can fly to Santa Fe on Monday night.”
“You’ll miss the first day of class.”
“We’ll miss it, Chris,” he said. “I need you to be with me this weekend. In case something happens.”
“I guess I can’t let you down,” Chris Pappas said.
Vince Valaitis and Sue Myers and Bill Bradfield decided to celebrate the end of the school year by seeing the movie Hair. After the film, Bill Bradfield asked Vince, “How’d you like to go to the shore next weekend?”
That sounded okay to Vince, but then he thought about the summer job he’d accepted now that Terra Art could no longer afford its treasurer.
He believed he could get the day off so he said, “Fine. Sounds great.”
But a couple of days later, Vince started worrying and figured he’d better not ask his new boss for a day off quite so soon. He went up to Bill Bradfields apartment and found him alone.
Bill Bradfield listened as Vince told him why he wouldn’t be coming on Friday.
When he was all through Bill Bradfield stared at him and those eyes started throwing off arctic blue sparks, and he said, “You have to go. Plans’ve been made.”
That stunned the young teacher. He’d done a whole lot of things for Bill Bradfield and listened to a whole lot of very strange stories, but this was too much. He had to go?
And Vince started stammering and repeating his good reason for not wanting to go, but Bill Bradfield said, “I’m afraid that Jay Smith is going to harm Susan Reinert this weekend. I want to be at the shore and I want my closest friends to be in a position to protect me. You’re going.”
And Vince Valaitis, a twenty-eight-year-old college graduate, like Chris Pappas, a twenty-nine-year-old college graduate, said, “Okay.”
And that was that.
Probably the busiest day in William Bradfields life was June 22, 1979. Early that morning Chris Pappas received telephone instructions to go to the safe deposit box to withdraw enough to buy Bill Bradfield a round-trip plane ticket to New Mexico and also provide him with some walk-around money for a few weeks.
Chris drove to the bank and used his key to open the box. He counted the money and took about $1,100 from the total. He put $500 of it in an envelope and dropped it off with Sue Myers since Bill Bradfield wasn’t at home. But when Chris was on his way to his own house he spotted his friend’s car in Valley Forge Park and flagged him down. They stopped and had a talk.
Bill Bradfield said that he’d been delayed by a meeting with Jay Smith. Chris filled him in on what hed done and was instructed to buy them tickets for the Monday night flight to Albuquerque.
Bill Bradfield said, “We’ll pick you up at home sometime tonight. Be ready.”
And off he drove, as relentless as decay.
Friday afternoon was reserved for Shelly business. Bill Bradfield picked her up at 3:30 P.M. and they drove straight to a motel on Route 30. According to Shelly there was lots of hugging and kissing, but as always, it went no further.
Then he filled her in on what had been happening and what her duties were for the next days. Shelly heard all about Dr. Smith’s chains and weapons and silencers. Bill Bradfield told her how Dr. Smith had fired a gun outside a restaurant in King of Prussia in broad daylight to demonstrate the silencer. And he told her how exhausted he was from his mission of trying to get the goods on Dr. Smith to protect everyone on the hit list.
Then he told her something that nobody had heard before this. He said that even poor old Sue Myers was on the hit list!
He told Shelly that he patrolled Susan Reinert’s neighborhood more than the local cops, and Shelly agreed that he looked totally pooped. The wild tangle of his beard seemed to reflect the anarchy he was trying to set straight.
After all the murder talk was concluded, they got down to the real business. Shelly was informed that she had to go to his bank and do a little transaction. But first he showed her a pile of money and some envelopes, and he counted $4,000 in cash. She was told that she was going to withdraw some more money, a lot of it.
They were in the motel for about three hours before they checked out and drove to West Chester. Bill Bradfield went to the wrong bank because he’d never been to the safe deposit box. Then he grumbled about how he had to do everything, and went to a telephone and called Chris Pappas to get the name of the right bank. And that meant that Chris now knew that Bill Bradfield was doing some more money business, and apparently he didn’t want Chris to know about it.
Finally, at 7:30 P.M they parked outside the Southeast National Bank. Bill Bradfield told Shelly that this bank contained money he’d saved for many years, and that if Dr. Smith really did kill Susan Reinert in the next few days, well, his assets might be frozen because of his name being in her silly old will. He wanted her to go in there and with her access card draw out all the money and bring it to the car.
When she asked why he had so much money in a safe deposit box instead of an interest-bearing account he said it had to do with a tax shelter. And since Shelly was into great books and religious dogma rather than investment banking, she didn’t question it further. She withdrew the money and after she got back to the car they counted it.
Shelly’s next job was to take the money to her home in Wayne and stash it where her parents wouldn’t find it. He told Shelly that due to his being in a state of utter exhaustion he was going to the shore for the weekend with troublesome old Sue Myers to recuperate before summer school. He said that Vince and Chris were coming along, and that he just had to get away somewhere so that in case Dr. Smith did his foul deed he’d be far enough away not to get blamed because of that distressing will.
An so forth.
The last bit of teaching that Bill Bradfield ever tried on Shelly involved a crash course in code and cipher. He gave her a copy of Ezra Pound’s book on Confucious. On pages 12 and 13 he’d numbered each line. The letter beside the number indicated a letter in a cipher and code he’d worked out.
He told her that all future correspondence between them might have to be coded and decoded by Confucius. It might become extremely urgent that Shelly master this system, he said, but he knew she could do it.
But she saw right off that the code was harder than the Hope Diamond. Shelly wanted to kiss pillows, not study cryptography. That afternoon it might have occurred to little Shelly that marriage to Bill Bradfield wouldn’t be all chocolate chips and snuggle hugs.
It seems fairly certain that Elliot Emu passed away at about 5:00 P.M. in the motel on the afternoon of June 22nd. That was the last time Bill Bradfield was jolly enough to whip out Elliot Emu and let him preen and gawk and stretch his limber neck. From that day on, Bill Bradfield would never again be carefree enough for his imaginary ostrich.
Colleagues of William Bradfield and Jay Smith frequently said that the two educators “marched to a different drummer,” or “danced to a different tune.” But Bill Bradfield could only dance a pas de deux; he was never a solo performer. Jay Smith seldom danced in tandem. Jay Smith was a dissonant soloist, dancing his own peculiar lonely jig to his own peculiar off-key melody, maybe played on the kazoo.
After Chris bought the plane tickets he went home and packed and had dinner. He then went to visit his friend Jenny. They were watching television at 8:30 when a car pulled up in front of Jenny’s house. Chris looked out, seeing it was Bill Bradfields blue VW Beetle dropping Shelly. When Shelly came in the house she said that she had to talk to Jenny alone.