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, "Its 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 Vinces 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 oars," 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 testily 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"
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 shes 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 moming, 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 Vinces 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 Bradfield's mouth. With tears streaming, he said, "Thank Cod 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 Sue's 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 sai
d that it seemed reasonable to her. She didn't even mind when Shelly gave him a kissy-face lion 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.
Chapter 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 fiftyeight 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-yearold 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 liked 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.
He had one project left before he'd be satisfied with the house he'd built. He wanted a Madonna, with a pool of water at her feet. He had the spot picked but he couldn't decide what the pool around her should look like. He didn't want it round or oval or kidney-shaped like some goddamn Hollywood swimming pool. It had to look natural, and had to be fed by a little waterfall. He was going to light her with a spotlight so she could be seen at night. He was a devout Catholic and this project was so important to him he was uncertain how to begin.
Despite the strawberry patch and a Madonna and the cat named Snookie, Joe VanNort was not a sentimental man, certainly not as far as people were concerned. Nearly thirty years of policing people was right there in the lopsided cynical grin that passed for a smile.
It was a three-hour drive from the state police barracks in Harrisburg. Sergeant Joe VanNort hoped someday to get a transfer to Dunmore Barracks so he could live in his log house all the time. Instead, the telephone call about a lonely little corpse at the Host Inn took him away from the log house and even away from Betty.
The aftermath of that phone call would age and consume Sergeant Joe VanNort. He often felt that his next hunt would never end, that it would last the rest of his life.
The partner of Joe VanNort was a thirty-two-year-old trooper named John J. Holtz who had joined the Pennsylvania State Police in 1968 and who had been working for VanNort as a criminal investigator out of Troop H in Harrisburg since 1975. Joe VanNort had always said that Jack Holtz had the makings of a top-notch "crime man." Jack Holtz enjoyed working "crime," but many investigations were time consuming and the hours were bad.
A lot of the older troopers said that Jack Holtz reminded them of Joe VanNort when Joe was young. Although he never admitted it, VanNort probably agreed, and maybe that's why he picked Holtz to be his partner and protPSg6.
TTiey had a lot in common, really. Neither was a talker, but Holtz was much quieter and very shy. VanNort got to the point without subtlety when he had something to say. They both liked hunting in the Pennsylvania mountains, although Jack Holtz was happy just to be in the woods, whether he bagged a pheasant or not. He never cared about trophies.
When it came to homicide investigation each had a perfectionist streak that would keep him awake worrying about details. During a stressful investigation the older man chainsmoked Marlboros, lighting ea
ch one with the butt of the last. The younger dipped snuff and called himself a "country boy" because of his admittedly disgusting habit. Holtz used to make other investigators queasy with his gum load of snuff and the paper cup or Coke bottle or tin can he used for a spittoon.
The quality they shared that was most telling as far as their professional life was concerned was evident in their faces: Joe VanNort with that cynical lopsided grin, Jack Holtz with his aviator eyeglasses attached so snugly to his face that the metal rims cut into his cheeks when he smiled. And that wasn't too often, not in public during a homicide investigation. Even more than Joe VanNort, Jack Holtz took his job very seriously, and was obsessively self-controlled. Those glasses weren't about to fall off or even slip down.
Jack Holtz arrived at the Host Inn two hours after the body was discovered. The first thing he noted was that the 1978 Plymouth Horizon was parked in the third row, just a few spaces east of the main entrance. And what with somebody leaving the hatchback open, somebody who was probably the suspicious telephone caller named "Larry Brown," it was apparent that the killer had done everything but light flares to call attention to the body. And that never happened in ordinary homicides.
Before and after the corpse that used to be Susan Reinert was removed to Osteopathic General Hospital in Harrisburg, Holtz took a close look at it. There were abrasions and bruises on both forearms. There was dried blood in the mouth and nose. Hiere were discolored bruises around the right eye. There were abrasions behind both knees, behind the neck, and on the ankle. There were bruises on the buttocks and between the shoulder blades.
Jack Holtz learned from the cops at the scene that the registered owner of the car was Susan G. Reinert of Ardmore, but no one knew if she was this victim. There was no clothing, no purse, no keys.
Dew covered the car uniformly and Holtz could clearly see the swipes across the roof by the driver's door, obviously intended to wipe any fingerprints from that side of the car. Looking closer he saw that everything around the drivers side of the car had been wiped. And instead of just wiping down the rearview mirror, the suspect had removed it. Jack Holtz doubted that they'd get any relevant latent prints.
Echoes in the Darkness (1987) Page 18
