Later, Bill Bradfield, accompanied by Rachel, came again to the apartment of Jeff Olsen, with another important request. He wanted to use the fireplace. Bill Bradfield was carrying a wastebasket filled with documents of one sort or another.
“These’re just school papers and things belonging to Susan Reinert,” Bill Bradfield explained. “I don’t know why I save everything. It’s mostly stuff from her students.”
Young Olsen told him to fire away and Bill Bradfield fed the papers into the fireplace and burned them and stirred up the ashes.
Then he said, “Jeffrey, if the police should come here or contact you at any time, you don’t have to cooperate with them. They’ll try to trick you. But don’t tell them that I warned you of that because then they’ll twist what you say and try to make me look as though I’m obstructing their investigation.”
And the student nodded and said, “Gotcha.”
“I simply trusted Bill Bradfield completely. I believed he was not guilty,” Jeff Olsen reported at a later time.
“I need a favor,” Bill Bradfield said to Chris as they were preparing for departure from Santa Fe. “Could you switch typing elements for me? You have a machine just like it, and I’m sure the typing balls are interchangeable.”
But now for the first time Chris was thinking about saving his own skin. He was starting to get some very funny feelings about the whole business.
He said, “Bill, why don’t you just throw the typing ball away if it bothers you?”
The answer was pure Bradfield. “I’m afraid to,” he said. “You never know when you might need something and if you throw it away it’s gone for good. I’d feel so much better if you kept it. You know how to remove them, don’t you?”
“After we get home I’ll see what I can do,” Chris Pappas said.
But the handyman realized it didn’t take a Wernher von Braun to replace typing balls. Chris had started worrying a whole lot when Bill Bradfield first said that he’d loaned the typewriter to Susan Reinert. And it goosed Chris a bit when he heard about a $25,000 “money receipt.”
He’d read a news report that Susan Reinert had been unable to remove her $25,000 in large increments, and had to withdraw it in smaller increments. He started thinking about Bill Bradfield claiming that his life savings of $28,000 had to be removed in increments of $5,000.
Chris Pappas felt like a cripple who didn’t want to walk, but some hairy gorilla in a white smock kept dumping his wheelchair and forcing those baby steps.
He was beginning to put Bill Bradfields stories under a bright light for a little third degree. And the answers were not in English, Latin or Greek. Bill Bradfield just might have had a little something to do with misappropriating the $25,000 investment of Susan Reinert.
As to Bill Bradfield having something to do with the murder of Susan Reinert and the disappearance of her children, Chris Pappas wasn’t ready to deal with that one yet. He was protected by deductive reasoning. To Chris Pappas it was a simple syllogism. If Bill Bradfield revered Thomas Aquinas, then he could never be a truly bad man. At worst he could be a flawed good man. A flawed good man might be tempted to misappropriate a sum of money that he intended to repay, but only a truly evil man could do the other thing.
It can be theorized that Chris Pappas suffered a bit of added torment over the whole business of the “flawed good man” and the “misappropriation” of money. It is not precisely clear whether he actually informed Bill Bradfield that he was taking $1,300 out of the safety deposit box to buy his brothers trade-in car.
Flawed good men. The concentric circles around William Bradfield were full of them, and Chris Pappas was beginning to indulge some uncomfortable ideas. He absolutely refused to give Bill Bradfield his own typing ball. The typeface style on Bill Bradfields typewriter was Gothic, of course.
The commandant of the Pennsylvania state troopers, a recent appointee of Governor Thornburgh, was a former special agent of the FBI from the Pittsburgh office. The governor had served western Pennsylvania for several years as a U.S. attorney so they knew each other pretty well.
Ken Reinert had been calling his congressman and the U.S. attorney trying to persuade somebody to bring the FBI into the case. He didn’t have faith in Joe VanNort and his state troopers. So whether it was pressure from the congressman or from Senator Schweiker or Governor Thornburgh, the FBI agreed to enter the Reinert case on the pretext that the children were possibly kidnap victims being held in some other state for a future ransom demand. Farfetched, but it satisfied federal requirements for the time being.
Joe VanNort treated the news that the feds were coming as if the Reds were coming. He had a little talk with his team of five cops telling them what to expect.
“Okay, we gotta cooperate with them,” he said. “But they ain’t never goin’ in the Reinert house unless there’s a trooper with them. Got that? And if anybody tries to push you around, you come to me and tell me right now! Remember, they know nothin’ about homicide. They’re glory boys. They come in and give press conferences, and like that. They got no real field experience. They got no real court experience. No real police experience. They’re not cops. They’re a bunch of lawyers and bookkeepers. No, they’re a bunch a … schoolteachers, is what they are!”
It was the worst thing Joe VanNort could think of to describe a special agent of the FBI.
Civilians have seldom understood the real danger inherent in police work. It has never been particularly hazardous to the body, not since Sir Robert Peel first organized his corps of bobbies. This line of work has always been a threat to the spirit.
That summer it was dramatized. It was a night like other nights since the investigation had started: frustrating, fruitless, maddening. And now they were awaiting the arrival of eighteen special agents to form a joint task force.
There they sat long after they should have gone home: Joe VanNort, Jack Holtz and a few other troopers. No one remembers who started it, but it was a night when the spirit of a cop could burst loose and show itself without the badge and veneer of cynicism. That scarred-up cop spirit can turn as panicky as a colt in a barn fire.
One of the troopers had a bad thought, just a little jock-itch of a thought, but within five minutes it was like a raging syphilis epidemic.
The trooper said, “Do you know something? Our photos of the corpse aren’t all that recognizable. I mean, she was beat up pretty bad. I mean, a person who knew her could look at our photos and think it was Susan Rienert. But what if it was somebody else?”
Everybody laughed.
But then Jack Holtz said, “You know, that mortician who cremated her said he was a little mixed up by what her brother told him to do. What if Pat Gallagher told him to burn the body, and after it was done tried to convince the mortician that he misunderstood the instructions?”
“You mean what if Pat Gallagher is in on it with …”
“Bill Bradfield!”
“And Ken Reinert is …”
“Also in on it! He identified the wrong corpse on purpose!”
“And Susan Reinert is …”
“In England with her kids waiting for her boyfriend to inherit seven hundred and thirty G’s!”
“And the body we have is …”
“Maybe some poor hooker that could pass for Susan Reinert in morgue photos!”
“And then Bradfield …”
“Gives Gallagher and Ken Reinert their quiet money and goes off to England and meets his new family and they buy a boat and go sailing off to …”
“The Greek islands or the Aegean Sea or some canal in Venice where Ezra Pound mighta flushed his freaking toilet one time!”