Whispers (47 page)

Joshua had been to the house yesterday, had taken a brisk five-minute tour to be certain everything was as it should be, and he had not noticed anything awry.

Why had Bruno kept secret bank accounts in San Francisco?

Was there a dead ringer, a double?

Who? And why?

Evidently, overseeing the complete and final settlement of the Frye estate was not going to be as short and easy a job as he had thought.

 

At six o'clock Tuesday evening, as Tony swung the Jeep into the street that ran past his apartment building, Hilary felt more awake than she had all day. She had entered that peculiar second-wind state of grainy-eyed alertness that came after being awake for a day and a half. Suddenly, the body and the mind seemed to decide to make the best of this forced consciousness; and, by some chemical trick, the flesh and the spirit were renewed. She stopped yawning. Her vision, which had been blurry at the edges, grew clear again. The grinding weariness receded. But she knew it would be only a short-lived reprieval from exhaustion. In an hour or two, this surprising high would end in an abrupt and inevitable crash, not unlike the sudden descent from an amphetamine energy peak, and then she would be too drained even to stay on her feet.

She and Tony had successfully dealt with all of their business that needed tending to—the insurance adjuster, the house cleaning service, the police reports, and all the rest. The only thing that hadn't gone smoothly was the stop at the Wyant Stevens Gallery in Beverly Hills. Neither Wyant nor his assistant, Betty, was there, and the plump young woman in charge was reluctant to take possession of Tony's paintings. She didn't want the responsibility, but Hilary finally convinced her that she would not be sued if one of the canvases was marked or torn accidentally. Hilary had written a note to Wyant, explaining the artist's background, and then she and Tony had gone to the offices of Topelis & Associates to ask Wally to make excuses to Warner Brothers. Now the slate was clean. Tomorrow, after Frank Howard's funeral, they would catch the 11:55 PSA flight that would take them to San Francisco in time to board a connecting commuter air shuttle to Napa.

And then a rented car to St. Helena.

And then they would be on Bruno Frye's home ground.

And then—what?

Tony parked the Jeep and switched off the engine.

Hilary said, “I forgot to ask if you managed to find a hotel room.”

“Wally's secretary made reservations for me while you and Wally were huddling in his office.”

“At the airport.”

“Yes.”

“Not twin beds, I hope.”

“One kingsize.”

“Good,” she said. “I want you to hold me while I drift off to sleep.”

He leaned over and kissed her.

They took twenty minutes to pack a pair of suitcases for him and to carry their four bags down to the Jeep. During that time, Hilary was on edge, fully expecting Frye to leap out of a shadow or step around a corner, grinning.

He didn't.

They drove to the airport by a roundabout route that was full of twists and turns. Hilary watched the cars behind them.

They were not followed.

They reached the hotel at 7:30. With a touch of old-fashioned chivalry that amused Hilary, Tony signed them in as husband and wife.

Their room was on the eighth floor. It was a restful place, done in shades of green and blue.

When the bellhop left, they stood by the bed, just holding each other for a minute, silently sharing their weariness and what strength they had left.

Neither of them felt capable of going out to dinner. Tony ordered from room service, and the operator said service would take about half an hour.

Hilary and Tony showered together. They soaped and rinsed each other with pleasure, but the pleasure wasn't really sexual. They were too tired for passion. The shared bath was merely relaxing, tender, sweet.

They ate club sandwiches and french fries.

They drank half a bottle of Gamay rosé by Robert Mondavi.

They talked only a little while.

They draped a bath towel over a lamp and left the lamp on for a nightlight because, for only the second time in her life, Hilary was afraid to sleep in the dark.

They slept.

Eight hours later, at 5:30 in the morning, she woke from a bad dream in which Earl and Emma had come back to life, just like Bruno Frye. All three of them pursued her down a dark corridor that grew narrower and narrower and narrower. . . .

She couldn't get back to sleep. She lay in the vague amber glow of the makeshift nightlight and watched Tony sleep.

At 6:30 he woke, turned toward her, blinked, touched her face, her breasts, and they made love. For a short while, she forgot about Bruno Frye, but later, as they dressed for Frank's funeral, the fear came back in a rush.

“Do you really think we should go to St. Helena?”

“We have to go,” Tony said.

“But what's going to happen to us there?”

“Nothing,” he said. “We'll be all right.”

“I'm not so sure,” she said.

“We'll find out what's going on.”

“That's just it,” she said uneasily. “I have the feeling we'd be better off not knowing.”

 

Katherine was gone.

The bitch was gone.

The bitch was hiding.

Bruno had awakened in the blue Dodge van at 6:30 Tuesday evening, thrown from sleep by the nightmare he could never quite remember, threatened by wordless whispers. Something was crawling all over him, on his arms, on his face, in his hair, even underneath his clothes, trying to get inside his body, trying to scuttle inside through his ears and mouth and nostrils, something unspeakably filthy and evil. He screamed and clawed frantically at himself until he finally realized where he was; then the awful whispers slowly faded, and the imaginary crawling thing crept away. For a few minutes, he curled up on his side, in a tight fetal position, and he wept with relief.

An hour later, after eating at McDonald's, he had gone to Westwood.

He drove by her place half a dozen times, then parked up the street from it, in a pool of shadows between streetlamps. He watched her house all night.

She was gone.

He had the linen bags full of garlic and the sharp wooden stakes and the crucifix and the vial of holy water. He had the two very sharp knives and a small woodman's hatchet with which he could chop off her head. He had the courage and the will and the determination.

But she was gone.

When he first began to realize that she had skipped out and might not be back for days or weeks, he was furious. He cursed her, and he wept with frustration.

Then he gradually regained control of himself. He told himself that all was not lost. He would find her.

He had found her countless times before.

chapter six

Wednesday morning, Joshua Rhinehart made the short flight to San Francisco in his own Cessna Turbo Skylane RG. It was a honey of a plane with a cruising speed of 173 knots and a range of over one thousand miles.

He had begun taking flying lessons three years ago, shortly after Cora died. For most of his life, he had dreamed about being a pilot, but he had never found time to learn until he was fifty-eight years old. When Cora was taken from him so unexpectedly, he saw that he was a fool, a fool who thought that death was a misfortune that only befell other people. He had spent his life as if he possessed an infinite store of it, as if he could spend and spend, live and live, forever. He thought he would have all the time in the world to take those dreamed-about trips to Europe and the Orient, all the time in the world to relax and travel and have fun; therefore, he always put off the cruises and vacations, postponed them until the law practice was built, and then until the mortgages on their large real estate holdings were all paid, and then until the grape-growing business was firmly established, and then. . . . And then Cora suddenly ran out of time. He missed her terribly, and he still filled up with remorse when he thought of all the things that had been delayed too long. He and Cora had been happy with each other; in many ways, they had enjoyed an extremely good life together, an excellent life by most standards. They'd never wanted for anything—not food or shelter or a fair share of luxuries. There'd always been enough money. But never enough time. He could not help dwelling on what might have been. He could not bring Cora back, but at least he was determined to grab all of the joy he could get his hands on in his remaining years. Because he had never been a gregarious man, and because he felt that nine out of ten people were woefully ignorant and/or malicious, most of his pleasures were solitary pursuits; but, in spite of his preference for solitude, nearly all of those pleasures were less satisfying than they would have been if he'd been able to share them with Cora. Flying was one of the few exceptions to that rule. In his Cessna, high above the earth, he felt as if he'd been freed from all restraints, not just from the bonds of gravity, but from the chains of regret and remorse as well.

Refreshed and renewed by the flight, Joshua landed in San Francisco shortly after nine o'clock. Less than an hour later, he was at the First Pacific United Bank, shaking hands with Mr. Ronald Preston, with whom he had spoken on the phone Tuesday afternoon.

Preston was a vice-president of the bank, and his office was sumptuous. There was a lot of real leather upholstery and well-polished teak. It was a padded, plush, fat office.

Preston, on the other hand, was tall and thin; he looked brittle, breakable. He was darkly tanned and sported a neatly trimmed mustache. He talked too fast, and his hands flung off one quick gesture after another, like a short-circuiting machine casting off sparks. He was nervous.

He was also efficient. He had prepared a detailed file on Bruno Frye's accounts, with pages for each of the five years that Frye had done business with First Pacific United. The file contained a list of savings account deposits and withdrawals, another list of the dates on which Frye had visited his safe-deposit box, clear photocopies of the monthly checking account statements blown up from microfilm records, and similar copies of every check ever written on that account.

“At first glance,” Preston said, “it might appear that I haven't given you copies of all the checks Mr. Frye wrote. But let me assure you that I have. There simply weren't many of them. A lot of money moved in and out of that account, but for the first three and a half years, Mr. Frye wrote only two checks a month. For the last year and a half, it's been three checks every month, and always to the same payees.”

Joshua didn't bother to open the folder. “I'll look at these things later. Right now, I want to question the teller who paid out on the checking and savings accounts.”

A round conference table stood in one corner of the room. Six comfortably padded captain's chairs were arranged around it. That was the place Joshua chose for the interrogations.

Cynthia Willis, the teller, was a self-assured and rather attractive black woman in her late thirties. She was wearing a blue skirt and a crisp white blouse. Her hair was neatly styled, her fingernails well-shaped and brightly polished. She carried herself with pride and grace, and she sat with her back very straight when Joshua directed her into the chair opposite him.

Preston stood by his desk, silently fretting.

Joshua opened the envelope he had brought with him and took from it fifteen snapshots of people who lived or had once lived in St. Helena. He spread them out on the table and said, “Miss Willis—”

“Mrs. Willis,” she corrected him.

“I'm sorry. Mrs. Willis, I want you to look at each one of those photographs, and then you tell me which is Bruno Frye. But only after you've looked at them all.”

She went through the batch of photos in a minute and picked two of them. “Both of these are him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive,” she said. “That wasn't much of a test. The other thirteen don't look like him at all.”

She had done an excellent job, much better than he had expected. Many of the photographs were fuzzy, and some were taken in poor light. Joshua purposefully used bad pictures to make the identification more difficult than it otherwise might have been, but Mrs. Willis did not hesitate. And although she said the other thirteen didn't look like Frye, a few of them actually did, a little. Joshua had chosen a few people who resembled Frye, at least when the camera was slightly out of focus, but that ruse had not fooled Cynthia Willis; and neither had the trick of including two photographs of Frye, two headshots, each much different from the other.

Tapping the two snapshots with her index finger, Mrs. Willis said, “This was the man who came into the bank last Thursday afternoon.”

“On Thursday morning,” Joshua said, “he was killed in Los Angeles.”

“I don't believe it,” she said firmly. “There must be some mistake about that.”

“I saw his body,” Joshua told her. “We buried him up in St. Helena last Sunday.”

She shook her head. “Then you must have buried someone else. You must have buried the wrong man.”

“I've known Bruno Frye since he was five years old,” Joshua said. “I couldn't be mistaken.”

“And I know who I saw,” Mrs. Willis said politely but stubbornly.

She did not glance at Preston. She had too much pride to tailor her answers to his measurements. She knew she was a good worker, and she had no fear of the boss. Sitting up even straighter than she had been sitting, she said, “Mr. Preston is entitled to his opinion. But, after all, he didn't see the man. I did. It was Mr. Frye. He's been coming in the bank two or three times a month for the past five years. He always makes at least a two-thousand-dollar deposit in checking, sometimes as much as three thousand, and always in cash. Cash. That's unusual. It makes him very memorable. That and the way he looks, all of those muscles and—”