Sue Myers invited Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz to sit and said, “Vince, that phone isn’t working very well, why don’t you use the one in the bedroom?”
And Vince nodded and tried to mumble a hello to the cops and sidled into the bedroom because he was so terrified he was losing feeling in his limbs.
He talked to Bill Bradfield a bit longer while Sue Myers told the cops the lie she’d been ordered to tell by Bill Bradfield, namely that they’d left for Cape May at four o’clock Friday afternoon.
When Bill Bradfield said good-bye and Godspeed and hung up, Vince began to discover that lying to the cops was like ski jumping. You can’t get hurt as long as you stay in the air. And as one would guess, Vince was out of practice. The last time he’d tried lying to an authority figure was in the fourth grade and a nun rapped him with a ruler for it.
Now he was trembling before Joe VanNort whose ruler would probably turn out to be a leather strap, and Vince was expecting a thump or two across the nose as soon as he told his first whopper.
“We left here at four P.M. on Friday,” Vince croaked, and they reacted like he’d just said toxic waste was good for New Jersey tomatoes.
“How well did you know Susan Reinert?” Joe VanNort asked, and that gave Vince a chance to start winging it.
He said how they were absolutely wrong to think that any of them would do anything to hurt Susan Reinert. Why, she was a woman who could easily get herself killed. She was sex crazy. She made a pass at him at a party one time, he said. She probably went out and made a pass at some bluebeard, Vince assured them.
There was only one problem with Vince’s Method acting. He couldn’t stare anybody in the eyes. He just couldn’t stop looking up.
The cops couldn’t have known that Vince was looking for The Man Upstairs. But Vince’s Man Upstairs didn’t resemble the Michelangelo ceiling. In Vince’s case, the Big Guy wore a two-toned leotard. Vince wanted nothing less than the starship Enterprise to come swooping down on Phoenixville and take him out of this earthly nightmare.
When Vince ushered the cops out of the apartment that night, his good-bye face said it all. Vincent Valaitis, two minutes from hyperventilation, was silently screaming: “Beam me up! Beam me up! Beam me uuuuuuuuuuuup!”
16
Chris Pappas was probably never closer to reviving the stomach ulcer he’d had at the age of ten. The summer session at St. Johns in Santa Fe was an endurance test. It took every bit of self-discipline and self-delusion to pretend that the glory that was Greece had any relevance.
They were getting clippings from the Philly newspapers. And Chris was no longer electric. His wiring was as tangled as Lebanese politics. It was bad enough when he thought Jay Smith had gone and done it, but somehow it was even worse when Bill Bradfield made an announcement.
“Chris,” he said, “I don’t think Doctor Smith killed Susan Reinert. It’s not his style. I think he was set up by the mob to make it look like he did it.”
Chris used the word “fuzzy” to describe what he felt when trying to follow Bill Bradfield’s logic. After hearing that Jay Smith hadn’t done it, he was fuzzier than Burlington Mills. Even as he was trying to articulate a logical response, Bill Bradfield had another notion for him.
“Of course,” Bill Bradfield conceded, “it could have just been Alex, the kinky black guy from Carlisle. I told her a hundred times to stay away from that guy!”
“The mob,” Chris Pappas mumbled. “Alex.”
“If the police should ever talk to us, we’ve got to downplay our involvement with Doctor Smith,” he warned. “For example, let’s say that the police find out that you filed the serial numbers off Doctor Smith’s rifle, that wouldn’t look very good for you, would it?”
Chris had only a couple of questions. The first was “Am I in trouble?”
“Trouble? Well, there’s potential trouble for us, but not if we’re careful,” Bill Bradfield said.
“When we first heard about Susan Reinert’s death, you said, ‘Doctor Smith finally went and did it.’ Isn’t that what you said?”
“Ah, yes. But that was before I talked to his attorney on the phone. Didn’t I tell you? Doctor Smith had an alibi?”
Chris felt as if somebody just wrapped his brain in ten yards of angora. He felt fuzzier than the whole peach crop of the goddamn state of Georgia.
The living arrangements at St. John’s College in Santa Fe were simple but comfortable. They had dormitory accommodations and were all settled by the time Rachel arrived with the Volkswagen Beetle. The ice maiden was pretty well thawed after driving alone across the desert. She and Bill Bradfield went off in private to get intelligence reports on Susan Reinert and do whatever they did together. Chris was never sure what that was.
Bill Bradfield and Rachel had two adjoining dorm rooms with two desks in one room and two beds pushed together in the other. In the room with the desks was Sue Myers’s red IBM typewriter, which Rachel had brought in the Volkswagen. The typewriter had suddenly gotten very important. Chris Pappas was told for the first time that Bill Bradfield had “lent the machine” to Susan Reinert.
Bill Bradfield informed him that he was afraid that Susan Reinert had used the typewriter to type “certain legal papers.” The legal papers had to do with her “financial situation.”
That particular statement stuck like a turkey bone in the esophagus. Chris couldn’t forget it.
“I was snakebit from the start,” Joe VanNort said, referring to his hot new case involving a dead schoolteacher and two missing children.
The first reptile bite was indirectly caused by Three Mile Island. Due to the meltdown scare at the nuclear power station, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of the U.S. government had placed a hold on all broadcast tapes in the possession of the Dauphin County emergency radio system. Somebody apparently thought there was something to be learned from listening to the panicked citizens who phoned in messages which were recorded as a matter of policy.
The trooper who was sent to pick up the tape containing the voice of “Larry Brown” who had reported the “sick woman” in the Host Inn parking lot was told that he’d need a court order.
He wasn’t an old-school homicide investigator like Joe VanNort who would’ve walked over the guy and snatched the tape. So he went through the delay of getting a court order while Joe VanNort lined up a voiceprint expert in New Jersey.
But because of the NRC edict, there was a shortage of tape. And someone had inadvertently reused the one in question. They’d taped over and obliterated Larry Brown forever.
The second screw-up was the homicide equivalent of a nuclear meltdown.
“They what?” Joe VanNort yelled into the telephone Wednesday afternoon.
It was true. They’d lost the body for good.
The autopsy had been done on Monday, and VanNort was not satisfied. He was trying to arrange for a more experienced forensic pathologist to come in to do a lot more work.
They’d told the funeral home on Tuesday that they did not want the body cremated. Susan Reinert’s brother had requested cremation, thinking the cops were finished. Somebody didn’t get the word. On Wednesday Susan Reinert’s body was burned to dust.
So they’d lost their voiceprint. And they’d lost their corpse. Joe VanNort called it snakebite, but the snake was a python and the evidence was being swallowed whole. Before he went home that night, he finished his eightieth Marlboro of the day and asked if anybody had stolen Susan Reinert’s car yet.