“I’ve been told that John Curran doesn’t represent you,” Joe VanNort said to Chris Pappas. “How about you looking over the questions?”
“John Curran represents him now,” Bill Bradfield said. “And I’m afraid we have to go back to our work. You can mail your questions to our attorney and he’ll forward them to us.”
Jack Holtz decided to take a shot. “That’d be very time consuming,” he said to Bill Bradfield. “We’re trying to locate two missing children and we need your help.”
“I’d like to help,” Bill Bradfield told him, “but my first concern is with my studies.”
It was a long flight home. Joe VanNort was no longer so concerned about Ken Reinert or anybody else. He wanted Bill Bradfield and his little gang.
Bill Bradfield had a few duties for Shelly that summer which the teenager performed with varying degrees of proficiency. The duties involved banking, ordnance and cryptology.
Shelly was instucted to take $300 out of her $28,000 secret treasure and put it into the safety deposit box. Bill Bradfield had been stewing over the notion that the cops might somehow find the box, and he thought that an empty safety deposit box might not look kosher.
Then Chris got on the phone and asked Shelly and her girlfriend to go to his house and dismantle the gun with the silencer and dump the pieces in the Schuylkill River.
But then Bill Bradfield threw her a knuckleball. He told the teenager that he feared his mail might get intercepted by the police who would be trying to link him to Dr. Smith. So he would have to write to her in the code they’d discussed.
And Shelly, who’d tried so hard to master Ezra Pound, and Greek, and his Bible studies, and had even become a Catholic for him, said sure she could. But that code was tougher than the Pittsburgh Steelers. Little Shelly failed him.
Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz were both suspicious, cautious, deliberate crime men. Jack Holtz’s caution extended into all phases of his life. He did very little on impulse and didn’t like surprises. Perhaps his personality was the wrong kind to mesh with his former wife’s. She had a flair for art and always talked of a need for self-expression.
The first time Charlotte left him, he did all of his “hurting and healing,” as he put it. But then “Chaz,” as he called her, came home. A little later she left for good, seemingly on impulse.
He claimed that when she left the second time it didn’t hurt, especially since she didn’t try to take Jason away from him. He and his son lived in a little house he’d bought on a twenty-eight-year loan. He’d put a workout room and a weight machine in the basement and decorated the place with lots of ducks and outdoors pictures.
He dated occasionally, but always felt that his job and his son kept him too busy for chasing around. He was thirty-two years old and Jason was nearly eleven so he figured with his mother helping they could go it the rest of the way without a woman in the house.
He could cook Chinese and had decent recipes for shish kebab and chicken cordon bleu, but Jason would rather have a steak than the fancy stuff so Jack Holtz got pretty good on the grill.
Jack Holtz had thick black hair, and behind his aviator glasses were large, heavily lashed dark eyes, the kind they used to call “bedroom eyes.” As a result of an incorrect bite alignment his lower jaw looked unusually small and called attention away from the large neck below it and the big chest below that-the neck and chest of a guy who’d pushed some iron around. You had to be around him a bit before you noticed that he was fairly tall and well put together.
That hair of his was the kind you see on the Bryl-Creem ads, full and dense and black. Before he was finished with this case it’d be the kind you see on the Grecian Formula ads: steel-gray, all of it.
He was something of a loner and didn’t hang around with other cops, but the relationship between Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz worked for them. Jack Holtz was the kind of investigator who wanted to be as good as he could be, but wasn’t sure he could be better than that. He worried about not having been to college. He thought he didn’t express himself well, especially in court, when in fact he was an excellent witness. He was content to play second banana.
Joe VanNort on the other hand pointed out that the Bill Bradfield gang had a whole bushel of college degrees and not one of them could tell a cat turd from a Candy Kiss. He wasn’t intimidated by sheepskins and mortarboards. He was a confident top banana.
The comb found in the trunk of Susan Reinert’s car got worked during July. Information arrived in bits and pieces. A call to the War College in Carlisle identified the acronym, 79th USARCOM. A call from a cop in the King of Prussia area gave them a lead on a former principal named Dr. Jay C. Smith who’d taught at the same school where Susan Reinert had worked. Another call to the 79th Army Reserve Command brought the news that Jay C. Smith had been a colonel in the command prior to his retirement. Then they learned that Jay Smith had gone to prison on Monday, June 25th, from a Harrisburg courtroom.
When the comb and the Jay Smith connection was explained to Joe VanNort, he wasn’t impressed.
“It’s too obvious,” he said. “This Jay C. Smith is in a whole pack of trouble and a comb from his army outfit ends up under the body. Too obvious. Sounds like something our pal Bradfield might dream up to throw suspicion on his old nut-case principal.”
Joe VanNort stuck with that notion for several months.
While Bill Bradfield and Chris were winding up their summer studies Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz made another trip to St. John’s. Only this time they made a prearranged visit to a New Mexico judge and had a court order when they arrived, an order requiring Bill Bradfield and Chris Pappas to submit to fingerprinting so that their prints could be compared to unidentified lifts taken in the Reinert home and car.
Bill Bradfield didn’t like any of it, paricularly the ride to the state police headquarters where he was mugged and printed like a thug. And he really didn’t like being driven in a separate car from Chris Pappas. And Chris didn’t like being photographed, because the mug shot had nothing to do with fingerprint comparison.
When Bill Bradfield next called home he told Vince Valaitis that Joe VanNort was an extremely “unintelligent” man, and that as far as VanNort’s partner was concerned, he’d like to have thrown Holtz into the school fountain.
He was incensed with Holtz because when he was trying to explain to the cretinous cop about the Great Books Program at St. John’s, and how demanding it was, and how he resented being subjected to police harassment, Jack Holtz had said, “The Bible’s a great book. I don’t read it myself, but I know it says in there, thou shalt not kill.”
Bill Bradfield asked only one question the whole time he was with the cops during their second visit to Santa Fe.
He asked, “How long do the state police stay on a murder case?”
When the cops had made their second appointment at St. John’s a college staff member informed Chris Pappas they were coming, and Chris told his mentor who ordered him to get the IBM typewriter out of Bill Bradfields room and into his own.
After the cops went home, Bill Bradfield visited the Olsens after class and brought a small metal strongbox with him.
“I’ve got some papers in here,” he told Jeff Olsen. “They’re not really important, but the police might find them and manipulate them to try to manufacture some evidence. Could you hold this box for me?”
“Sure,” Jeff Olsen said. “I’ll lock it in the trunk of my car.”
“And I’d like you to keep a typewriter for me,” Bill Bradfield said. “It was used to write some letters to Susan Reinert. They were nothing of course, but you know the cops.”
“Just leave it in this apartment,” Jeff Olsen said. “Put it right there on the dining room table.”
Naturally, Chris got the assignment of lugging the heavy typewriter to the Olsen apartment. These days he was all muscle and faith.