The first letter is a short introduction to what I want to tell you. There is much, much more. I hope that you will give me a chance to give you my views before you slam the cell door on me and throw the key away. You still have not heard of my SECRET LIFE, as one Harrisburg paper put it. But now I want to ask your help.
Please send me any newspaper clippings you have or any ideas you have concerning the following matters: my wife’s property. It should all be in the hands of the court. (My wife’s will and my will are the same, viz., what we have goes to our two daughters.) Susan Reinerts murder. Especially newspaper items that indicate my involvement. The Satan cult slander: items that include my name are especially important. Drug use or sex orgy articles. Any that name me as a participant.
Embarrassed, I end this letter as a mendicant. No matter what the amount, I ask you to please send me a postal money order or bank money order. Personal checks and cash are verboten. If you do not wish to think of it as alms for IRS purposes, think of it as an IOU that I will redeem from you in the future. Regardless, no hard feelings; I know you just got back from a huelga.
Ciao.
Jay
P.S. I am sure there is no Satan cult in Upper Merion even though I am just as sure that Satan is active there as everywhere.
The chains, and much that surfaced in Stephanie’s diary, along with Bill Bradfields use of women, got the FBI wondering about something new: could there be a homosexual bond between Jay Smith and William Bradfield?
Vince Valaitis told them that Bill Bradfield had warned that the FBI might try to find out about his long-ago lodger, Tom. The feds tried to track Tom out on the west coast, but agents in Los Angeles who located his apartment were never able to speak with him directly. Nor could the FBI ever verify that Bill Bradfield had gone to Cuba with or without Tom to kill for Castro.
At about the same time that the Terra Art store was going under, and Bill Bradfield was trying to unload the stock and dissolve the corporation, Sue Myers learned a little something about the elusive Tom. When the publicity hit, Tom sent a letter to Bill Bradfield along with a book of Ezra Pounds poetry.
Bill Bradfield was deeply touched by the gesture from an old friend and read the letter to Sue, but not all of it. She noticed an ellipsis in his reading.
When he turned his back she dashed straight for his files and read it for herself. Tom told Bill Bradfield about his new life as a married man, and how content he was. In the context of the letter it was clear that Tom was married to another guy.
And then Tom told Bill Bradfield that despite his conjugal bliss he would always remember Bill Bradfield as the only man he ever truly loved.
Sue Myers had one thought when she finished that letter. She later said, “I wondered if he’d been any more faithful to Tom than he had to the rest of us.”
Ken Reinerts favorite FBI agent, Matt Mullin, was the quintessential FBI prep. He looked as though he could be Big Brother Biff to any of the coeds at Bryn Mawr. He looked like a cousin of The Main Lines most famous daughter, Grace Kelly.
His old man might have pumped gas at Sloan’s Super Service, but to Joe VanNort he was Eights-with-coxswain. The agents clothes had something to do with it. Matt Mullin always wore the FBI prep uniform: three-button suit, button-down Oxford shirt, paisley tie okay but only if you’re feeling revolutionary, cuffed pants at least two inches over the wingtip brogues, and those well run over at the heels because you’re a lawman, after all.
Matt Mullin’s strawberry-blond hair had never seen stickum or spray, and he was forever pushing it off his forehead, boyishly. He looked like he’d spent his entire life blushing, or his systolic pressure matched Rod Carew’s batting average. His accent even sounded like a Kennedy’s. Okay, so he’d gone to college at La Salle in Philly, he was still more Ivy League than F. Scott Fitzgerald. When you saw guys that looked like Matt Mullin, you didn’t bother trying to spot the bulge under the coat. They had to be FBI.
The FBI’s sex research had outdone Masters and Johnson. They’d interviewed several women who the gossips claimed had been intimate with Bill Bradfield. One of them, described unkindly as “another plain-Jane schoolteacher,” agreed to meet Matt Mullin to reveal some information of an intimate nature.
He asked the lady in question to meet him at a precise location in the Sears parking lot at St. Davids, and informed the state cops that he wanted a backup unit. After all, the talk was going to be of a sexual nature, and he didn’t want the woman to accuse him of anything.
The cops were amused by this to start with, and Jack Holtz and another trooper agreed to provide the backup for Matt Mullin so there could be no accusations of rape in either direction. Before they left for the parking lot, Matt Mullin started telling Jack Holtz how not to be seen, and where to park, and how to behave, implying that the staties didn’t know how to conduct a surveillance. That did it.
In the late afternoon, Jack Holtz and his partner were running all over the Sears store trying to find fake noses and glasses. They arrived at the meeting place fifteen minutes early and roared in fifty miles an hour, sliding up bumper to bumper with the FBI unit. Both state cops then picked up newspaper pages with eye holes cut out and pretended to read.
Matt Mullin told them okay, you’ve made your point, and now could we please get down to business, but the cops weren’t through yet. They wanted to see Matt Mullins scarlet kisser go into terminal blush.
They went to an observation point and composed a report while the agent interviewed the schoolteacher. The next morning at the regular task force briefing the special agent in charge read a state police report detailing Matt Mullins surveillance.
1703 hours. White female parked car east of SA Mullins car. Female exited vehicle and entered FBI car.
1730. Windows began to fog. 1740. Car rocked violently.
1750. White Kleenex thrown from car window. Large German Shepherd seen roaming parking lot. Door opened drivers side. German Shepherd entered FBI car.
1815 hours. Kleenex obtained by reporting officers. Sent to lab for analysis. Refer lab report.
The information revealed to Matt Mullin by the former lover of Bill Bradfield was noteworthy. Just before Rachel arrived in May at the downtown hotel, Bill Bradfield had persuaded this schoolteacher to meet him at the same hotel for a quickie. He told the teacher that he often thought of their past romance and because he’d been celibate for so long he now needed her “to bring him back to manhood.”
This, when he was already juggling Sue Myers, Susan Reinert, Shelly and Rachel. So okay, the agent wanted to know, is this guy a superstud or what? And to his surprise she told him.
Bill Bradfield was a creamy cuddler and a super snuggler, but not worth a nickel when it came right down to the real stuff, ostrich or no ostrich.
It verified what several of the feds were already beginning to suspect: the charismatic womanizing Renaissance man of Upper Merion was, alas, a bum lay.
Bill Bradfield, Chris Pappas and Sue Myers weren’t talking at all, but toward the end of the year Jack Holtz and Chick Sabinson took a trip to Boston to talk with Rachel. That conversation was about as relevant as the Harvard football program. As to the murder weekend she said she’d been alone looking at architecture in Philly, and that she’d never heard of Jay Smith before the murder. She’d desert Bill Bradfield, they figured, when they started pronouncing their r’s in Boston.