Echoes in the Darkness

by Joseph Wambaugh

  And Ken heard his ex-wife say, “Well, why don’t you tell him you’re going bowling with PWP.”

  It was very strange these days for all the Reinerts. The children had become uncommunicative and evasive when it came to their mother’s business.

  * * *

  That evening the president of the regional council of Parents Without Partners received a call from Susan Reinert who said, “Something’s come up. Something personal and I don’t want to talk about it. Could you have someone cover for me at the Saturday workshop in Allentown?”

  At 9:00 P.M. that Friday night, June 22, 1979, a curious thing happened. An ice-laden cloudburst produced a summer hailstorm over portions of The Main Line communities. There were huge chunks of hail pelting the streets of Ardmore.

  Mary Gove, Susan Reinert’s next-door neighbor, had a granddaughter Beth Ann who was sixteen years old. Sometimes Beth Ann would babysit with Karen and Michael when she was visiting her grandmother. Beth Ann and Karen and Michael all ran out to the street and tried to pick up as many hailstones as they could before they melted. Then they decided to count hailstones and see which porch was going to collect the biggest ones before the storm ended.

  Susan Reinert came hurrying out of the house to call the children inside at about 9:30 P.M.

  Mary Gove was surprised to hear two car doors slam a moment later, and then to hear Susan’s Plymouth Horizon pulling out of the driveway and heading toward Belmont Avenue.

  Mary Gove said to her granddaughter, “Oh, I hope she’s not going to drive in the rain!”

  But then she looked out again and the cloudburst had stopped. She was relieved.

  There was much talk of the eerie battering of The Main Line by the summer hailstorm. It was a very unnatural night, everyone said.

  Vince got off from his summer job at 5:30 P.M. that Friday, and came home to shower and pack. He was invited to dinner by Sue Myers and they were joined at eight o’clock by Bill Bradfield’s son Martin and his girlfriend Donna, who had returned from Europe one week earlier.

  They had dinner and chatted and waited for Bill Bradfield, and finally Vince invited everyone downstairs to watch a movie on his VCR.

  Sue Myers got sleepy before the movie reached the scary part and decided that this was another Bill Bradfield no-show, so she excused herself and went to bed. She wasn’t as mad as she might have been because he’d recently given her five $100 bills for her birthday. She didn’t even want to know where he got it.

  At 11:15, Martin and Donna were about to go home when there was a knock at Vince’s door. Donna opened the door for Bill Bradfield.

  He was wearing the blue parka with all the big pockets though it was hot and muggy after that unseasonable storm. Donna said, “Hi! How ya doing?”

  Bill Bradfield looked past her and didn’t answer. He seemed distracted. He asked, “Where’s Sue?”

  “Upstairs taking a nap,” Vince said. “We’d given up on you.”

  “Get some gas for the car,” Bill Bradfield said to Vince. “Let’s get it packed. Let’s go.”

  When he got upstairs and wakened Sue Myers he seemed even more agitated. He came back down and hardly spoke to his son. He kept telling Vince to hurry up. He actually snapped his fingers at him while Vince poured cans of rationed gasoline into the Volkswagen.

  It was after midnight when Sue and Vince and Bill Bradfield drove to Chris’s house to pick him up. When Sue Myers asked where he’d been all evening he said that he’d gone to visit his ex-wife Muriel to say good-bye before leaving for summer school, but that she wasn’t home. He said he’d waited around for a few hours but finally gave up and left her a note.

  Chris drove to Cape May and Sue Myers sat next to him. Vince Valaitis and Bill Bradfield were jammed in the back and the trunk was stuffed with their weekend bags. As they approached the Wait Whitman Toll Plaza, Vince peered at his dozing friend in his Whitmanesque whiskers. He looked as old as the poet.

  Bill Bradfield was exhausted. His head kept flopping like a giant puppet’s. Suddenly, at the toll plaza he jerked upright and slapped his hand on the front seat and said, “I’m afraid this is it! I’m afraid this is the weekend Doctor Smith could kill Susan Reinert!”

  Then Bill Bradfield said, “I tried to protect her! I followed him toward her house! I circled her house fourteen times! I lost him in the hailstorm!”

  Vince, ever the supportive friend, said, “You don’t know that, Bill. You don’t know that he’s going to do her any harm.”

  But Bill Bradfield said, “It’s in God’s hands.”

  Sue Myers would always maintain that she did not hear anything while driving the car that night. Sue Myers was as deaf as an oyster.

  They reached Cape May, New Jersey, at 3:30 A.M. and went to a restaurant for a snack. They arrived at the Heirloom Apartments at 5:00 A.M., but something had gone wrong. One of their rooms was occupied and locked. The other was unoccupied but locked. They sat in the corridor and grumbled and dozed until 7:00 A.M. when the proprietor found them.

  She told Bill Bradfield that she’d thought he’d wanted to book the rooms for the next weekend. She apologized and quickly arranged for a room for Bill Bradfield and Sue, and another for Chris and Vince.

  She was so distressed that she left her keys behind in Chris and Vince’s room. When Chris Pappas found them and brought them to her later that day, she said, “You’ve saved my life!”

  “No, you’ve saved ours,” Chris Pappas said.

  Vince Valaitis decided to complete his weekly obligation by going to mass on Saturday night instead of Sunday. Bill Bradfield said that he was coming along.

  When they got to the church, Bill Bradfield said, “I want to pray for Susan Reinert and you should too.”

  When they got back from mass, Vince Valaitis stayed in his room but the others went to see Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?

  Bill Bradfield saved the ticket stubs.

  They went back to their rooms and read to each other from a book by Woody Allen, but nobody laughed much. They drank ouzo and wine that weekend but no one was in a party mood.

  On Sunday morning, Vince had to go to mass again because Bill Bradfield demanded it.

  “We’ve got to pray for Susan Reinert!” Bill Bradfield said.

  Susan Reinert got a lot of Bill Bradfield prayers that weekend. He even lit a candle.

  “This is to keep evil from her,” he said.

  The proprietor permitted the guests to make a couple of phone calls in her office on Monday morning, and when Bill Bradfield paid their bill it was with a check that had everyone’s name on it.

  He wasn’t satisfied that the check could serve as a receipt; he wanted a written receipt. And he asked the woman to write on the receipt that it was paid in full for three nights, not two.

  “Please include Friday on the receipt,” he insisted.

  The proprietor thought it must be for tax purposes or an expense account, and obliged.

  Vince got scolded once by Bill Bradfield for failing to get a receipt for some hamburgers.

  Bill Bradfield informed Chris that he probably wouldn’t have to testify on Monday afternoon after all, so they weren’t going to have to rush back.

  Chris wasn’t surprised. These days the former philosophy student expected exactly the opposite of what his faltering logic told him was objective reality.

  Before leaving the shore, Bill Bradfield took Chris outside to the VW and said that he had to dispose of some letters that might be “dangerous” to him in case something had happened to Susan Reinert.

  “Look at this,” he said to Chris, showing him a pile of letters that he’d crammed into the storage space of the Volkswagen.

  Chris read a couple of the letters and Bill Bradfield said, “See how she is? Nothing but sex on her mind,”

  But Chris hadn’t seen any sexual references at all, and he said so.

  Bill Bradfield snatched the letters out of Chris’s hand and said, “How about this!”

&nbs
p; But when Chris read it he didn’t see anything extraordinary except a few “I miss you and love you” lines.

  Bill Bradfield got angry and said, “Damn, I can’t find any of her filthy letters. You should see some of the disgusting letters she’s written.”

  Then he added, “I better throw these away anyway. People could get the wrong idea about my relationship with that woman.”

  So Chris just nodded patiently and watched Bill Bradfield speed through all the letters, and when he’d finished he stacked them in the well behind the backseat with other printed matter.

  Later that morning, Vince noticed that the VW looked like a dried-up birdbath. He borrowed a bucket and some soap from the proprietor and volunteered to wash the Beetle. When he was cleaning out the inside of the car he saw a stack of letters and picked them up just as Bill Bradfield was coming outside.

  “What do you want me to do with these?” Vince asked.

  “Leave them. I’ll take care of them,” Bill Bradfield said.

  Still later that morning, Chris walked down the beach to take a look at the corpse of an old ship protruding from the water. Bill Bradfield spent his last hours lying on the sand, flat on his back with his arms outstretched in a crucifixion pose. Vince thought it was the most depressing day of his life.

  The drive back was very subdued until they were nearly home. Bill Bradfield said that he wanted to dispose of some “trash” in the back of the Volkswagen. He needed a trash Dumpster.

  Chris drove behind an apartment building near his house and got out. He took the bundle of letters from Bill Bradfield and walked to the Dumpster. Like a Bradfield-trained man, he lifted the first layer of trash rather than just throw the letters on top where the wind could blow them into the window of a police station.

  After they’d dropped Chris Pappas and were traveling home by way of Valley Forge Park, Bill Bradfield suddenly said he had to make a call to Chris because he’d forgotten to ask if Chris owned some of the books that would be required reading that summer.

  He stopped near the chapel where Michael Reinert was to have been baptized and went to a public phone. He made a long telephone call then got back in the car.

  Chris Pappas later said that he’d not received a telephone call from Bill Bradfield.

  When they got home, Bill Bradfield made yet another call. This time, he told Sue Myers that he was calling Jay Smith’s lawyer.

  When he was finished with the call, he hung up and told Sue, “Well, Jay Smith was sentenced to jail! Susan Reinert is out of harm’s way!”

  He looked happy. He smiled.

  As far as Sue Myers and Vince knew, he was planning to drive the Volkswagen to Santa Fe. Chris had never told them any different. Each of the friends had little secrets to keep from the others.

  Vince was glad this weekend was over what with two trips to mass to pray for potential murder victims. He was hoping he hadn’t jeopardized his summer job by taking the day off.

  He hadn’t even gotten his toothbrush put away before Bill Bradfield came exploding through the door.

  “I just called Doctor Smiths lawyer!” he announced. “They sentenced him to prison!”

  And then Bill Bradfield walked over to a chair in Vince’s living room and sat down. And began to cry.

  At last he arose and came to Vince and hugged him and thanked his young friend for standing by him during all the difficult months.

  Vince would never forget the next words out of Bill Bradfields mouth. With tears streaming, he said, “Thank God he’s in jail! I saved that fucking woman’s life!”

  Bill Bradfield then drove straight to Chris Pappas’s house and gave him the good news.

  By 6:00 P.M. Vince and Sue had helped Bill Bradfield get all of his things packed into the Volkswagen. Vince carried Sues red IBM Selectric typewriter, which he insisted he’d need in Santa Fe. And Vince was more than happy to say good-bye to his friend. He even packed a thermos of coffee for the first leg of the drive. To keep him awake.

  That Monday evening Chris asked Shelly and her friend Jenny to drive him to the airport. Bill Bradfield was delivered by Rachel who had just learned to her very great surprise that he was not traveling by car with her. He was flying with Chris and she was driving the car to Santa Fe alone.

  Like all of his pals, Rachel accepted the drastic change without complaint, and said that it seemed reasonable to her. She didn’t even mind when Shelly gave him a kissy-face bon voyage.

  When the big bird took off, Bill Bradfield seemed to relax. He bought a round of drinks, and he and Chris toasted each other. Due to their fine work, Jay Smith had been unable to murder anyone.

  As Chris put it, “We were very pleased. The bad guy was behind bars.”

  The Host Inn near Harrisburg is about a two-hour drive from the home of Susan Reinert in Ardmore. The Three Mile Island nuclear power station is near the hotel, and two men from South Carolina who had business at Three Mile Island happened to be driving into the hotel parking lot at 7:00 P.M. Sunday evening.

  The two men spotted an orange Plymouth Horizon in the parking lot with its hatchback partially open. One of the men could see something white inside that he thought was a laundry bag. They entered the hotel but forgot to notify the desk that someone had left the hatchback open.

  At 2:00 A.M. Monday morning, a Swatara Township policeman was on routine patrol in the Host Inn parking lot. He too spotted the Plymouth Horizon with the hatchback open. He didn’t get out of his patrol car, but he did make a radio check and found the car to be registered to Susan G. Reinert of Ardmore. He went into the hotel and found that there was no registered guest with that name. He then got a radio call to handle a fatal traffic accident and took off.

  At 5:20 A.M., the Dauphin County police and fire radio dispatcher received a call from a man who identified himself as “Larry Brown.” The caller said there was a sick woman in a car at the Host Inn parking lot.

  The same Swatara Township cop got the assignment and this time he did open the hatchback of the Plymouth Horizon.

  She was so slight that her pale naked body could nearly be contained by the luggage well. The man from Three Mile Island had obviously seen her right hip. Susan Reinert had left the world the way she’d entered, in the fetal position.

  15

  Starship

  “Look at them little bastards,” he said with a grin that was always lopsided.

  Joe VanNort referred to a litter of strawberries huddling against the shale at his weekend retreat near Scranton. He was proud of his new strawberries, and proud of all he’d accomplished in two years. Almost single-handed, he’d cleared a road and built a log house in his twenty-nine acres of wilderness.

  His labor was truly amazing in that many years earlier he’d broken his back during an African safari. A Land Rover had overturned leaving him writhing in the bush for four days. He’d refused surgery and body casts and traction and demanded to be sent home after promising incredulous doctors that he’d heal the “natural way.” And he did. His only concession to the fractured vertebrae was sitting in straight-backed chairs whenever possible.

  The interior walls of the log house were covered with skins and heads from that safari: lion, gazelle, and a mammoth Cape buffalo that had charged him. The ebony horns measured fifty-eight and a half inches from tip to tip, close to the world record at the time. His only regret was that he’d never gotten his leopard, and when he looked in the mirror at his fifty-five-year-old gray-white head he knew it was too late.

  One thing that could really aggravate Joe VanNort when he was weekending in the mountains was the sound of whining engines down in the valley-the swarm of mud bikers. The summer brought them like the gypsy moths that ate his trees.

  A biker engine made his spiky black eyebrows arch and he’d need his twentieth Marlboro of the day, or his sixtieth if it was late afternoon. Mud bikers in summer, snowmobiles in winter, horsemen all the time. Goddamn neighbors. Goddamn people.

  “Them sons a bitches!” he l
iked to yell at all the worlds trespassers.

  “Which ones, Joe?” his wife would retort from inside the log house.

  Betty VanNort was an administrative assistant to the director of the Pennsylvania State Police. She’d been with the “staties” for twenty years, and felt like a cop herself. Joe VanNort, a lifelong bachelor, had proposed to her four years earlier after a courtship that had lasted a decade. She was a domestic dynamo who could clean and cook while chatting with any state trooper who came from the police barracks in Harrisburg to haul logs or clear land or just to see what had been accomplished on the mountain by those two compulsive workers.

  Betty always said that Joe shouldn’t let people get to him because folks were naturally curious about the middle-aged weekenders on top of the mountain in the log house. Her voice was deep and foggy and disappeared into a rasp when she laughed at Joe.

  “Wait’ll the lookie-loos come next Christmas,” Joe VanNort told her. “I’ll throw the assholes in jail, is what!”

  He was complaining about the rubberneckers who came all winter long to look at the Santa Claus and reindeer and lighted owls he’d attached to the pitched roof of his log house. To keep people out he’d chained the rut-pocked, spine-jarring path leading down to the country lane in the lowlands. And he’d also dropped a few trees across the path that led up to his neighbor in the north.

  One “trespasser” almost wrecked the furniture. Joe VanNort and a chipmunk practically demolished the interior, one trying to escape with his life, the other trying to let him do it. In the end Joe accidentally coldcocked the chipmunk and couldn’t revive it.

  That wouldn’t happen anymore because of a remarkable cat. It had been a wounded mangy bag of bones that he’d found limping three-legged in the snow. The amazing thing about the cat was that it loved bread.

  Joe VanNort would step out behind his cabin and say, “Here, Snooker. Come Snookie, baby,” and throw bread or cookies or a doughnut to the half-wild creature and it would crouch and pounce and devour that meal like a state trooper at a truck stop.