“If they convict me?”
“Yeah.”
“They’ll probably send me to the electric chair.”
“No shit!” Martray said. “Look what it does to me!”
“It’s a problem,” Jay Smith said, sympathetically.
“It’s a loose end,” Martray said. “Just like you said before, get rid of loose ends.”
“I think if they were to arrest me for Reinert, the best thing for you to do is to go kill Bradfield and make him disappear,” Jay Smith said, casually.
“He would disappear. That’s it. You made the comment. That’s it.”
“But see …”
“You don’t have to say any more,” said Martray.
But Jay Smith had more to say. “Get him back in your car. Kill him and take his body up into some woods, up in Fayetteville or someplace, but nobody, see, nobody should know where his body is but you. When you deal with a body, only you should know. You should never let anyone else know. Do you see the advantage to that?”
“Yeah.”
And then, just when it looked as though Martray had Dr. Jay on the verge of an all-out admission, the former principal said, “There’s nothing that Bradfield could do to hurt me other than lie, and that’s it.”
Then the talk turned to more mundane matters such as escaping from jail with electric hacksaws.
In July, Jay Smith wanted Ray Martray to drive up to Dallas to pay him a visit. Martray contacted the task force in Harrisburg and agreed to wear a body wire. They videotaped Martray and Jay Smith standing in the prison visiting area. It was nearly 100 degrees outside. Inside the panel truck where the electronics technician and Jack Holtz were hiding it was a lot hotter. They shot the visiting area with a telephoto lens from outside the fence.
It wasn’t a great performance by their man. He was overacting from the moment he stepped back inside the walls of Dallas prison. One of the first moves Martray made after the handshakes were over was to playfully give Dr. Jay a little bump with his hip after he’d said something that wasn’t particularly funny in the first place.
Cute, Jack Holtz thought. Showing off because he’s wearing a body wire.
Then he made Holtz even madder by hopping around Jay Smith like some kind of oversized puppy, nervously talking over the top of everything Jay Smith was saying. He was too hyper to let Jay Smith complete a single phrase that afternoon.
Jay Smith just stood there and put his hand up in front of his mouth in case a guard in a tower could read lips with binoculars. And he pretty well said the same things that they’d been hearing on the telephone tapes. The cops were really sick of the bullshit.
The temperature in the van soared up over 140 degrees and the camera lens started sweating and they lost their video for a while.
On that video, Jay Smith looked for all the world like what he’d been trained to be, a schoolteacher. He gave out lots of advice and acted as though he were humoring his boy by talking about some robberies he was going to pull with Martray to make them both rich. And he figured he wouldn’t have too much longer to do, what with a good shot at a favorable appeal. He just chatted as little kids scampered around the area while their mommies visited daddies and boyfriends.
Jay Smith was absolutely avuncular through most of it, but since no Jay Smith meeting would be complete without a little sex talk he told Martray about a mutual friend who was starting to disappoint him a whole lot. He’d started using drugs. And as Uncle Jay put it, “He likes to suck black cocks when he’s high.”
The cops figured they’d sweated off a combined total of twenty-five pounds while Raymond Martray chewed more scenery than Olivier in Richard III.
Three months later, Martray got a chance to redeem himself with yet another videotaping. It was a lot cooler for the cops inside the panel truck. Jay Smith was wearing a long-sleeved shirt this time, carrying glasses and a couple of pencils in his shirt pocket. You’d swear he was the pious chaplain making his rounds.
This time Martray’s performance, even though he’d been coached by Jack Holtz, went more over the top. He was just too anxious.
Martray blurted out that he was going to “take care” of Bill Bradfield, and it was clear that Jay Smith was very wary of this kind of talk.
Jay Smith said, “But I had nothing to do with the murder, Ray.”
Then Raymond Martray danced around and promised that he’d never let Jay down. He referred to him as a criminal genius, but Jay Smith kept repeating that he had nothing to do with the Reinert murder, and all the while Martray still never let him finish a sentence.
The cops figured they’d better sprinkle Valium on Martray’s waffles before they tried this again. He was so breathless Jay Smith might have to give him CPR.
After about a hundred “like you said’s” and “like you told me’s” that Jay Smith didn’t seem to be buying, the older man apparently decided to quiet his disciple down with, what else? A little sex talk. Jay Smith gave Raymond Martray graphic advice on how to please a lady with cunnilingus.
As relevant film making, these two shows ranked with a Sylvester Stallone movie. The mini-task force was not thrilled.
Bill Bradfield, still out on bail while appealing his conviction, had lost his job with the school district and been forced to withdraw his claim against the estate of Susan Reinert.
Bill Bradfield now knew that he would not be following the trail of Achilles and Hector and the thousand black ships. He would not be playing the lyre on the bridge of a ketch with some young disciple peeping up his tunic. He’d have to content himself with sailing boats in his mother’s bathbub.
But he was hoping to continue to breathe the free air of Chester County.
During a small dinner party at a lawyers’ club in Philadelphia just after his conviction, Bill Bradfield said, “The key to my dilemma is to be found in Ezra Pound, two cantos in particular. It’s that I’ve loved my friends imperfectly.”
When he was offered the wine list he refused to choose, saying, “I have no palate for wine.”
One was reminded that it was Ezra Pound who wrote: “There’s no wine like the blood’s crimson!”
23
They decided in the fall of 1981 to try for a murder indictment against William Bradfield. From October of that year until March of the next, Jack Holtz and Rick Guida had to contend with the aggravation of running back and forth on the turnpike between Harrisburg and Philly to interview witnesses for grand jury testimony.
The grand jury term ran for five months, but each months session lasted only a few days. Because their case was so complicated they never had enough time, and actually had to present their evidence piecemeal and hope they could finish by March.
In November Bill Bradfields day arrived. He had to begin serving a four-month jail sentence for the theft of Susan Reinerts money. He was sent to Delaware County Prison but knew he had a good chance of getting out on bail pending his appeal. Cops have long suspected that the law dictionaries of America have omitted the F’s, as in “final,” “finish,” etc.
Jack Holtz made an uncannily accurate prediction, He told Rick Guida that Bill Bradfield would find himself a friend in prison, and he described the friend. He said it would be a big, street-smart black guy, and that Bill Bradfield would have to talk about the case sooner or later because he always had to tell his troubles to somebody.
Jay Smith had been in prison quite a while before he made any friends at all, but Bill Bradfield was no soloist. He needed friends worse than Mary, Queen of Scots. He started looking around.