Echoes in the Darkness (1987)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  "I'll hide it out back under your boat," he told Bill Bradfield. "How long do I have to store it?"

  "Just like everything else, Chris," Bill Bradfield told him. "Until we deal with this man. I have to pretend to be his disciple. If he says store it, I store it. If he wants it back, I have to obey."

  And then Chris Pappas asked questions about young Stephanie and her husband Eddie because any talk of dismembered bodies and acid would lead to the grisly speculation that was keeping everyone guessing.

  "He's not that confident about me," Bill Bradfield said. "If he were, if he'd tell me anything I could prove regarding their disappearance, we'd have all we need to have him locked up."

  "We've got to keep trying," Chris said.

  "I can tell you this," Bill Bradfield said. "He's talked about using truth serum on victims. And you know that Stephanie and her husband had access to methadone and other drugs. There's a drug connection somehow, but I can't quite put it together. One minute he talks about taking over the drug operation in Chester County and the next minute hes preaching an antidrug sermon. The mans demented."

  "Do you really believe all of it?" Chris said. "I mean about cutting people up and acid and all that?"

  "He places newspaper on a carpet when he kills his victims. The bloody newspapers wrapped in foil and then the whole things wrapped in plastic trash bags. Then the bodies're taken to a landfill above the Vince Lornbardi service area on the New Jersey Turnpike."

  "Maybe some of its true," Chris said.

  "He uses out-of-town newspapers for the bodies. In case they're ever found."

  And there it was. A Bill Bradfield detail: the alligator shoes, the hairnet, the out-of-town newspapers.

  "I guess it has to be true," Chris Pappas said. "I guess what he tells you has to be true."

  "We can doubt some of the details," Bill Bradfield said. "Because the man uses marijuana. I find that shocking in light of his daughters drug problems."

  While Bill Bradfield was shocked about pot smoking, but not so shocked about chopping and dissolving human beings, Chris Pappas got a brainstorm.

  He said, "Maybe I should conduct a reconnaissance on Doctor Smith's house! After all, you're exhausted. You can't do all this alone."

  Bill Bradfield said, "We might try that, Chris. I'd never let anyone else take such a risk, and certainly not Vince Valaitis. But I think you have what it takes to pull it off. Only don't ever try to follow him. He's very alert for tails."

  "I could just take down license numbers and descriptions of any cars that visit him," Chris offered. "When we do go to the cops we might need all that."

  "I can tell you this: his actual number of mob hits, and I'm relatively sure of it, numbers between twenty and thirty. And he's sent away for banana clips because he's going to rob an

  armored truck eventually. He's got a rifle that he's altering to fire full-on automatic."

  And that led Bill Bradfield to an inquiry as to whether his handyman had made any progress with the armament, so Chris took Bill Bradfield out to the back of the Pappas property where his father raised flowers.

  Bill Bradfield had a .357 Colt magnum, a gun he said he'd had for some time, and wanted Chris to tinker with it and oil it and make it ready in case something big happened. He'd also brought along a .30 caliber rifle and a bag of bullets.

  With the rifle Bill Bradfield brought a story that was so tortuous that at a later time several outsiders dismantled and inspected it, saying it was like a homemade eggbeater held together with Krazy Glue.

  It seemed that the .30 caliber rifle had its barrel cut down and the stock removed. It was a Jay Smith killing instrument, of course. Chris was asked to alter the illegal weapon even more. And the reason was only acceptable to performers in a play within a play within a labyrinth.

  It seemed that the sawed-off rifle might actually belong to Bill Bradfield. Yes. It seemed that he had once owned a similiar .30 caliber rifle and kept it in his parents' farmhouse. He made the mistake of mentioning this to Dr. Smith, and of course, given Jay Smith's demonic powers he very soon turned up with this rifle in this altered condition. Bill Bradfield immediately suspected that Jay Smith had drifted into his parents' home in Chester County and spirited the gun away, disguising it in this fashion to torment Bill Bradfield by revealing just how omniscient and omnipresent he could be.

  And yes indeed, the Bradfield .30 caliber rifle had mysteriously disappeared from his parents' home, so this might be the very gun! But he couldn't tell because it was cut down, and disguised.

  And what did he want Chris to do with the gun? That was easy. As easy as an elephant's pedicure. He wanted Chris to grind the serial numbers off the weapon so that if Jay Smith recalled the weapon from his bogus disciple, Bill Bradfield, and if Bill Bradfield couldn't stop Jay Smith from using the weapon to kill someone, like Susan Reinert for instance, and if the murder weapon should happen to fall into police hands, it could not be traced back to Bill Bradfield who might in fact be the registered owner of the rifle in the first place!

  It was just that simple. If you're more Byzantine than Constantinople.

  And Chris said something like "Makes sense to me!" And started up the old grinding wheel.

  While the handyman was grinding away at the serial number, he inadvertently damaged the barrel of the rifle. Chris later learned that Dr. Smith thought it was a lousy grinding job and that it screwed up the weapon.

  Chris expected Bill Bradfield to be pleased that he'd ruined a Jay Smith death weapon, but Bill Bradfield didn't seem too happy about it.

  Chris Pappas made up for the lousy grinding job by calling Bill Bradfield over to the house a few days later to see what he'd managed to accomplish in the ordnance department.

  The young man had a small .22 caliber handgun of his own, and he'd tinkered and experimented with some pieces of pipe and steel wool and screen and anything else that would act as a baffle. It was like constructing a miniature car muffler.

  This time he could show off a little, even as Bill Bradfield perused the monograph he'd given Chris to work with. When Bill Bradfield read the monograph, his fingers slid over the pages at incredible speed so that Chris, always a painfully slow reader, continued to marvel at the older man's many skills. But Chris showed him some skill of his own that day and addressed all the problems in the pamphlet on silencers that Bill Bradfield had loaned him.

  As Jay Smith had purportedly explained it, the gun mechanism was noisy and had to be coated with a rubberized material. The second noise in a gun shot was caused by the explosion of the powder. The third noise Jay Smith defined was the sound of the traveling projectile. He added that he used .22 caliber short ammo.

  The methodical, reflective, pondering handyman had gotten some specifications at a gun store that listed muzzle velocities, and he'd computed that there's only one bullet that travels below the speed of sound: a .22 caliber short. Therefore, the tiny piece of technical information relayed to him by Bill Bradfield, that the traveling projectile makes a sound, seemed absolute proof to Chris that Bill Bradfield was spending a great deal of time with a firearms expert, a military man like Jay Smith.

  "Bill Bradfield knew nothing about guns or machinery. He couldn't even drive a nail," Chris Pappas later said. "If ever I needed convincing that did it."

  "Vince has gotten freaky on me," Bill Bradfield informed him. "He's taking tranquilizers to sleep. He's no help whatsoever. As far as weapons, I've told him that Doctor Smith's given me his guns and that you're subtly altering them so they won't be able to be fired. He's satisfied with that. He isn't able to cope with much more these days. He's not . . . shall I say man enough to understand that one day I may have no choice, no choice at all."

  "You may have to . . ."

  "That's right." Bill Bradfield nodded grimly. ' 'I may have to kill him."

  Chris started throwing off high voltage over this one, and he asked, "Have you given any thought to logistics? How'll you do it? Do you have a plan?"

&
nbsp; Asking Bill Bradfield if he had a plan was like asking Dwight Eisenhower if he'd given any thought to the June 6th channel crossing. The "plan" involved more props. There was an old car seat on the Pappas property. Bill Bradfield and Chris walked over to it and rehearsed. He told Chris to sit down on the left, as though he were Jay Smith driving.

  "Pretend that I have this little silenced pistol in a plastic bag," he said, lifting Chris's .22 pistol. "Doctor Smith likes to do his talking in the car while we drive around, so that our conversations can't be monitored. Now, I'll wait until the appropriate moment, maybe when he stops at a stop sign, and then I'll pull my pistol from the plastic bag and pow!"

  With that, Bill Bradfield popped a few rounds at a tree, and they were hardly audible. Chris had done a great job with the homemade silencer.

  "I've just shot Doctor Smith in the head!" Bill Bradfield cried, and then became appropriately grave.

  Chris became more grave with the last news of the day. "Your parents' lives may depend on our silence," Bill Bradfield said. "If he finds out how much you know, he'll kill my parents and yours."

  Bill Bradfield put the gun in his pretend bag and practiced a quick draw. Then he put a target on a tree at about the height of Jay Smith's head. He drew and fired. He shot up a lot of ammo. He even tried shooting from the hip. He only stopped when he nearly blew his balls off with a superquick draw.

  Chapter 11

  Ambergris

  It was time for a break in the action. A Bill Bradfield former student who attended St. Johns College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was about to be married there.

  Chris asked Bill Bradfield if he was going to the wedding but Bill Bradfield declined, one of the reasons being his suspicion that the young chap hadn't heeded his advice to stay pure and chaste until marriage.

  But in that Bill Bradfield was as predictable as a Tijuana dog race, he called Chris a few days later to say that he'd changed his mind and toas coming along so that he "could do a favor for Doctor Smith."

  The wedding in Santa Fe was happy and the young couple was handsome and Chris wondered what Jay Smith could want done in New Mexico. He found out the day after the wedding when Bill Bradfield said that they were going to take a little drive from Santa Fe to Taos.

  The Jay Smith "favor" had to do with the fact that cops were starting to pressure Dr. Jay about certain welfare checks that had been cashed around The Main Line, checks issued to his missing son-in-law, Eddie Hunsberger, and bearing Eddie's forged signature. Jay Smith figured he had enough to worry about with his upcoming court trials so he asked his alibi witness, Bill Bradfield, to plant a seed or two in the arid soil of New Mexico.

  Jay Smith supposedly told Bill Bradfield that there was a Spanish-speaking couple in a Taos commune with whom Stephanie and Eddie had stayed for a period of time. Jay Smith wanted to establish the time-frame when Stephanie and Eddie had been with the couple, a time that hopefully would be close to the period in which the stolen Hunsberger checks were being forged and cashed by person(s) unknown. That way, Jay Smith could tell the cops to get off his back because his daughter and son-in-law were alive and well, and maybe they'd stop implying that Jay Smith was the kind of guy who would murder his own daughter

  Off they drove from Santa Fe to Taos, not to visit the Spanish-speaking couple, but to phone the couple to arrange a visit. Chris Pappas didn't ask why they hadn't called the couple from Santa Fe before driving clear to Taos. He didn't have time for such things. He was too busy trying to understand why they were trying to prove that Jay Smith wasn't murderous enough to have killed his daughter when for the past several weeks they'd been glowing white-hot with the certain knowledge that Jay Smith was as deadly as plutonium in your drinking water.

  After they got to Taos, Bill Bradfield made a private call from a pay phone outside a restaurant and informed Chris that the mission was accomplished. No further action was necessary. Back they drove to Santa Fe. Chris assumed by what Bill Bradfield told him that the Spanish-speaking couple had alibied Jay Smith by verifying that the Hunsbergers had been with them during the time in question. But Chris assumed incorrectly.

  When they got back to Pennsylvania Chris received an urgent message from Bill Bradfield that their Taos trip had been another devious plot by Jay Smith to use and humiliate him. Jay Smith had just confessed to Bill Bradfield that he had in fact forged and cashed the Hunsberger checks. And according to Bill Bradfield, Jay Smith hinted that he had killed and disposed of Stephanie and Eddie Hunsberger.

  What Bill Bradfield didn't tell Chris Pappas was that on the very day that they were in Taos, a friend from work of Jay Smith's wife had accepted an urgent collect call at the dry cleaner's on behalf of Stephanie Smith who was back in the hospital for cancer treatment.

  "Hie friend talked to the Taos operator and then to the caller who said, "Hi! This is Eddie Hunsberger. Everything's okay with my wife and me. Please pass on the message to Mrs. Smith."

  She had never talked to Edward Hunsberger before, but was delighted to relay the good news that he was alive and well in Taos, New Mexico.

  * * *

  Chris was called off his surveillance activities. Bill Bradfield decided that for now Jay Smith was probably not a great threat to Susan Reinert because he was too busy slaughtering prostitutes.

  The prostitutes were also known as "remotes," because they were remotely connected with the Jay Smith investigation. Bill Bradfield claimed that the "remotes" had made the mistake of smoking dope with Jay Smith, thus spoiling his defense that the drugs found in the Smith home belonged to Eddie and Stephanie Hunsberger. Dr. Jay was determined that the remotes should never appear as character witnesses against him in his upcoming trial. They had to go.

  Sure enough, the next day in the papers there was a double murder-suicide in King of Prussia (which had been announced on the radio the day before) and Bill Bradfield pointed out to Chris that Jay Smith had done in the poor remotes and made it look like a family affair.

  Chris was shown a legal document by Bill Bradfield who seemed almost as distressed by it as he'd been when he got the news that Jay Smith smoked pot. Susan Reinert had listed him as a beneficiary on a will and had made him the guardian of her children in the event of her death.

  So now, in addition to his moral obligation to provide an alibi for the Sears theft for a guy who'd probably "disappeared" his own daughter and son-in-law, and to protect Jay Smith's secret mistress from being disappeared, Bill Bradfield had his life complicated by this damn will!

  There was only one consolation. "This will is not a final version," he said. Bill Bradfield thought he still had a chance of getting her to drop her mad scheme of "obligating him" in her affairs. He had to persuade her to change the will, so that if she met a terrible fate the police wouldn't think he was connected with her.

  But Bill Bradfield had another worry: he knew of a second guy who wanted to kill Susan Reinert.

  She'd been dating a black man from Carlisle named Alex, Bill Bradfield said. Alex was into kinky sex in a big way: he liked Susan Reinert to tie him up and beat him. And he wanted her to urinate on him, as did some other boyfriends she dated.

  Chris was repulsed by the news of those golden showers, and while he was wondering if Susan Reinert was worth the hazardous duty on her behalf, Bill Bradfield said that the reason she'd confessed this to him was that she was making a last (utile attempt to persuade him to marry her and take her away from the degradation.

  From time to time even the most ardent disciple needs an offer of proof. Chris's need came when Bill Bradfield told him about the "double-screen contact system" he and Jay Smith had devised to eliminate unwanted calls and to protect themselves from each other in the event that one of them was cooperating with authorities. It appeared that the dog distrusted the pony, and vice versa.

  The double-screen phone system was designed so that if the calling party wanted to phone the other he'd let it ring three times, then hang up and call again. He'd let it ring once, then hang up an
d call again and let it ring three times.

  If the other party was at home, he'd then take the phone off the hook so that when the caller tried to call a fourth time he'd get a busy signal and know that it was okay to put phase two into operation.

  Phase two went like this: each man had a list of fifteen pay phones, with a numerical designation beside each number. The phones were all located within twenty minutes from home. They had each selected their own fifteen public phones and then exchanged lists. The caller would wait twenty minutes and start with the first phone number on his list. He'd continue calling until a phone was answered by his partner.

  There was a third phase that might be used in the event of a perceived threat. It went like this: Bill Bradfield might reach Jay Smith on phone number five. But Dr. Jay might decide that he didn't like the looks of a lady in a red bandana loitering nearby, so he'd pick up phone number five and quickly say, "Go to number seven."

  Then Bill Bradfield would wait ten minutes and call number seven on his list.

  Bill Bradfield explained that Jay Smith admitted to having a favorite phone. It was one of the public phones in the Sheraton Hotel in King of Prussia. The phone booths were surrounded by mirrors so that Dr. Jay could sit in the booth and watch for dolls in red bandanas or guys with green carnations, or whatever.

  While they were relaxing with a cold snack from the kitchen Chris made the mistake of asking if there might be a simpler way to accomplish their phone calls, because these two had done everything but square the telephone digits. Bill Bradfield looked at Chris like he'd found a strange pubic hair in his face soap.

  He reluctantly decided to demonstrate to Chris how brilliantly it worked. Bill Bradfield looked as though he was doing one of his methodically devised seating charts at school, as though he enjoyed the control he was exercising over Dr. Jay by sending him scurrying around his neighborhood.