Whispers (48 page)

“Surely he didn't always make his deposits at your window.”

“Not always,” she admitted. “But a lot of the time, he did. And I swear it was him who made those withdrawals last Thursday. If you know him at all, Mr. Rhinehart, you know that I wouldn't even have had to see Mr. Frye to know it was him. I would have recognized him blindfolded because of that strange voice of his.”

“A voice can be imitated,” Preston said, making his first contribution to the conversation.

“Not this one,” Mrs. Willis said.

“It might be imitated,” Joshua said, “but not easily.”

“And those eyes,” Mrs. Willis said. “They were almost as strange as his voice.”

Intrigued by that remark, Joshua leaned toward her and said, “What about his eyes?”

“They were cold,” she said. “And not just because of the blue-gray color. Very cold, hard eyes. And most of the time he didn't seem to be able to look straight at you. His eyes kept sliding away, as if he was afraid you'd see his thoughts or something. But then, that every great once in a while when he
did
look straight at you, those eyes gave you the feeling you were looking at . . . well . . . at somebody who wasn't altogether right in the head.”

Ever the diplomatic banker, Preston quickly said, “Mrs. Willis, I'm sure that Mr. Rhinehart wants you to stick to the objective facts of the case. If you interject your personal opinions, that will only cloud the issue and make his job more difficult.”

Mrs. Willis shook her head. “All I know is, the man who was here last Thursday had those same eyes.”

Joshua was slightly shaken by that observation, for he, too, often thought that Bruno's eyes revealed a soul in torment. There had been a frightened, haunted look in that man's eyes—but also the hard, cold, murderous iciness that Cynthia Willis had noted.

For another thirty minutes, Joshua questioned her about a number of subjects, including: the man who had withdrawn Frye's money, the usual procedures she followed when dispensing large amounts of cash, the procedures she had followed last Thursday, the nature of the ID that the imposter had presented, her home life, her husband, her children, her employment record, her current financial condition, and half a dozen other things. He was tough with her, even gruff when he felt that would help his cause. Unhappy at the prospect of spending extra weeks on the Frye estate because of this new development, anxious to find a quick solution to the mystery, he was searching for a reason to accuse her of complicity in the looting of the Frye accounts, but in the end he found nothing. Indeed, by the time he was finished quizzing her, he had come to like her a great deal and to trust her as well. He even went so far as to apologize to her for his sometimes sharp and quarrelsome manner, and such an apology was extremely rare for him.

After Mrs. Willis returned to her teller's cage, Ronald Preston brought Jane Symmons into the room. She was the woman who had accompanied the Frye look-alike into the vault, to the safe-deposit box. She was a twenty-seven-year-old redhead with green eyes, a pug nose, and a querulous disposition. Her whiny voice and peevish responses brought out the worst in Joshua; but the more curmudgeonly he became, the more querulous she grew. He did not find Jane Symmons to be as articulate as Cynthia Willis, and he did not like her as he did the black woman, and he did not apologize to her; but he was certain that she was as truthful as Mrs. Willis, at least about the matter at hand.

When Jane Symmons left the room, Preston said, “Well, what do you think?”

“It's not likely that either of them was part of any swindle,” Joshua said.

Preston was relieved, but tried not to show it. “That's our assessment, too.”

“But this man who's posing as Frye must bear an incredible likeness to him.”

“Miss Symmons is a most astute young woman,” Preston said. “If she said he looked exactly like Frye, the resemblance must, indeed, be remarkable.”

“Miss Symmons is a hopeless twit,” Joshua said grumpily. “If she were the only witness, I would be lost.”

Preston blinked in surprise.

“However,” Joshua continued, “your Mrs. Willis is keenly observant. And damned smart. And self-confident without being smug. If I were you, I'd make more of her than just a teller.”

Preston cleared his throat. “Well . . . uh, what now?”

“I want to see the contents of that safe-deposit box.”

“I don't suppose you have Mr. Frye's key?”

“No. He hasn't yet returned from the dead to give it to me.”

“I thought perhaps it had turned up among his things since I talked to you yesterday.”

“No. If the imposter used the key, I suppose he still has it.”

“How did he get it in the first place?” Preston wondered. “If it was given to him by Mr. Frye, then that casts a different light on things. That would alter the bank's position. If Mr. Frye conspired with a look-alike to remove funds—”

“Mr. Frye could not have conspired. He was dead. Now shall we see what's in the box?”

“Without both keys, it'll have to be broken open.”

“Please have that done,” Joshua said.

Thirty-five minutes later, Joshua and Preston stood in the bank's secondary vault as the building engineer pulled the ruined lock out of the safe-deposit box and, a moment after that, slid the entire box out of the vault wall. He handed it to Ronald Preston, and Preston presented it to Joshua.

“Ordinarily,” Preston said somewhat stiffly, “you would be escorted to one of our private cubicles, so that you could look through the contents without being observed. However, because there's a strong possibility you'll claim that some valuables were illegally removed, and because the bank might face a law suit on those charges, I must insist that you open the box in my presence.”

“You haven't any legal right to insist on any such thing,” Joshua said sourly. “But I have no intention of hitting your bank with a phony law suit, so I'll satisfy your curiosity right now.”

Joshua lifted the lid of the safe-deposit box. A white envelope lay inside, nothing else, and he plucked it out. He handed the empty metal box to Preston and tore open the envelope. There was a single sheet of white paper bearing a dated, signed, typewritten note.

It was the strangest thing Joshua had ever read. It appeared to have been written by a man in a fever delirium.

 

Below the body of the letter, in ink, there was a fine forgery of Bruno Frye's signature. It had to be a forgery, of course. Frye was dead already when these lines were written.

The skin tingled on the back of Joshua's neck, and for some reason he thought of Friday night: walking out of Avril Tannerton's funeral home, stepping into the pitch-black night, being certain that something dangerous was nearby, sensing an evil presence in the darkness, a thing crouching and waiting.

“What is it?” Preston asked.

Joshua handed over the paper.

Preston read it and was amazed. “What in the world?”

“It must have been put in the box by the imposter who cleaned out the accounts,” Joshua said.

“But why would he do such a thing?”

“Perhaps it's a hoax,” Joshua said. “Whoever he is, he evidently enjoys a good ghost story. He knew we'd find out that he'd looted the checking and savings, so he decided to have some fun with us.”

“But it's so . . . strange,” Preston said. “I mean, you might expect a self-congratulatory note, something that would rub our faces in it. But this? It doesn't seem like the work of a practical joker. Although it's weird and doesn't always make sense, it seems so . . .
earnest
.”

“If you think it's not merely a hoax, then what do you think?” Joshua asked. “Are you telling me Bruno Frye wrote this letter and put it in the safe-deposit box
after
he died?”

“Well . . . no. Of course not.”

“Then what?”

The banker looked down at the letter in his hands. “Then I would say that this imposter, this man who looks so remarkably like Mr. Frye and talks like Mr. Frye, this man who carries a driver's license in Mr. Frye's name, this man who knew that Mr. Frye had accounts in First Pacific United—this man isn't just pretending to be Mr. Frye. He actually thinks he
is
Mr. Frye.” He looked up at Joshua. “I don't believe that an ordinary thief with a prankster's turn of mind would compose a letter like this. There's genuine madness in it.”

Joshua nodded. “I'm afraid I have to agree with you. But where did this doppelganger come from? Who is he? How long has he been around? Was Bruno aware that this man existed? Why would the look-alike share Bruno's obsessive fear and hatred of Katherine Frye? How could both men suffer from the same delusion—the belief that she had come back from the dead? There are a thousand questions. It truly boggles the mind.”

“It certainly does,” Preston said. “And I don't have any answers for you. But I do have one suggestion. This Hilary Thomas should be told that she may be in grave danger.”

 

After Frank Howard's funeral, which was conducted with full police honors, Tony and Hilary caught the 11:55 flight from Los Angeles. On the way north, Hilary worked at being bubbly and amusing, for she could see that the funeral had depressed Tony and had brought back horrible memories of the Monday morning shootout. At first, he slumped in his seat, brooding, barely responding to her. But after a while, he seemed to become aware of her determination to cheer him up, and, perhaps because he didn't want her to feel that her effort was unappreciated, he found his lost smile and began to come out of his depression. They landed on time at San Francisco International Airport, but the two o'clock shuttle flight to Napa was now rescheduled for three o'clock because of minor mechanical difficulties.

With time to kill, they ate lunch in an airport restaurant that offered a view of the busy runways. The surprisingly good coffee was the only thing to recommend the place; the sandwiches were rubbery, and the french fries were soggy.

As the time approached for their departure for Napa, Hilary began to dread going. Minute by minute, she grew more apprehensive.

Tony noticed the change in her. “What's wrong?”

“I don't know exactly. I just feel like . . . well, maybe this is wrong. Maybe we're just rushing straight into the lion's den.”

“Frye is down there in Los Angeles. He doesn't have any way of knowing that you're going to St. Helena,” Tony said.

“Doesn't he?”

“Are you still convinced that it's supernatural, a matter of ghosts and ghouls and whatnot?”

“I'm not ruling out anything.”

“We'll find a logical explanation in the end.”

“Whether we do or not, I've got this feeling . . . this premonition.”

“A premonition of what?”

“Of worse things to come,” she said.

 

After a hurried but excellent lunch in the First Pacific United Bank's private executive dining room, Joshua Rhinehart and Ronald Preston met with federal and state banking officials in Preston's office. The bureaucrats were boring and poorly prepared and obviously ineffectual; but Joshua tolerated them, answered their questions, filled out their forms, for it was his duty to use the federal insurance system to recover the stolen funds for the Frye estate.

As the bureaucrats were leaving, Warren Sackett, an FBI agent, arrived. Because the money had been stolen from a federally-chartered financial institution, the crime was within the Bureau's jurisdiction.

Sackett—a tall, intense man with chiseled features—sat at the conference table with Joshua and Preston, and he elicited twice as much information as the covey of bureaucrats had done, in only half the time that those paper-pushers had required. He informed Joshua that a very detailed background check on him would be part of the investigation, but Joshua already knew that and had no reason to fear it. Sackett agreed that Hilary Thomas might be in danger, and he took the responsibility for informing the Los Angeles police of the extraordinary situation that had arisen, so that both the LAPD and the Los Angeles office of the FBI would be prepared to look after her.