Whispers (41 page)

Those things might protect him from Katherine, but he knew they would not ward off the nightmare. It would come to him now as it always did when he slept, as it had all his life, and he would wake with a scream caught in the back of his throat. As always, he would not be able to recall what the dream had been about. But upon waking, he would hear the whispers, the loud but unintelligible whispers, and he would feel something moving on his body, all over his body, on his face, trying to get into his mouth and nose, some horrible thing; and during the minute or two that it would take for those sensations to fade away, he would ardently wish that he were dead.

He dreaded sleep, but he needed it.

He closed his eyes.

***

As usual, the lunchtime din in the main dining room at Casey's Bar was very nearly deafening.

But in the other part of the restaurant, behind the oval bar, there were several sheltered booths, each of which was enclosed on three sides like a big confessional, and in these the distant dining room roar of conversation was tolerable; it acted as a background screen to insure even greater privacy than was afforded by the cozy booths themselves.

Halfway through lunch, Hilary looked up from her food and said, "I've got it."

Tony put down his sandwich. "Got what?"

"Frye must have a brother."

"A brother?"

"It explains everything."

"You think you killed Frye last Thursday--and then his brother came after you last night?"

"Such a likeness could only be found in brothers."

"And the voice?"

"They could have inherited the same voice."

"Maybe a low-pitched voice could be inherited," Tony said. "But that special gravelly quality you described? Could that be inherited, too?"

"Why not?"

"Last night you said the only way a person could get such a voice was to suffer a serious throat injury or be born with a deformed larynx."

"So I was wrong," she said. "Or maybe both brothers were born with the same deformity."

"A million-to-one shot."

"But not impossible."

Tony sipped his beer, then said, "Maybe brothers could share the same body type, the same facial features, the same color eyes, the same voice. But could they also share precisely the same set of psychotic delusions?"

She took a taste of her own beer while she thought about that. Then: "Severe mental illness is a product of environment."

"That's what they used to think. They're not entirely sure of that any more."

"Well, for the sake of my theory, suppose that psychotic behavior is a product of environment. Brothers would have been raised in the same house by the same parents--in exactly the same environment. Isn't it conceivable that they could develop identical psychoses?"

He scratched his chin. "Maybe. I remember...."

"What?"

"I took a university course in abnormal psychology as part of a study program in advanced criminology," Tony said. "They were trying to teach us how to recognize and deal with various kinds of psychopaths. The idea was a good one. If a policeman can identify the specific type of mental illness when he first encounters an irrational person, and if he has at least a little understanding of how that type of psychopath thinks and reacts, then he's got a much better chance of handling him quickly and safely. We saw a lot of films of mental patients. One of them was an incredible study of a mother and daughter who were both paranoid schizophrenics. They suffered from the same delusions."

"So there!" Hilary said excitedly.

"But it was an extremely rare case."

"So is this."

"I'm not sure, but maybe it was the only one of its type they'd ever found."

"But it is possible."

"Worth thinking about, I guess."

"A brother...."

They picked up their sandwiches and began to eat again, each of them staring thoughtfully at his food.

Suddenly, Tony said, "Damn! I just remembered something that shoots a big hole in the brother theory."

"What?"

"I assume you read the newspaper accounts last Friday and Saturday."

"Not all of them," she said. "It's sort of ... I don't know ... sort of embarrassing to read about yourself as victim. I got through one article; that was enough."

"And you don't remember what was in that article?"

She frowned, trying to figure out what he was talking about, and then she knew. "Oh, yeah. Frye didn't have a brother."

"Not a brother or a sister. Not anyone. He was the sole heir to the vineyards when his mother died, the last member of the Frye family, the end of his line."

Hilary didn't want to abandon the brother idea. That explanation was the only one that made sense of the recent bizarre events. But she couldn't think of a way to hold on to the theory.

They finished their food in silence.

At last Tony said, "We can't keep you hidden from him forever. And we can't just sit around and wait for him to find you."

"I don't like the idea of being bait in a trap."

"Anyway, the answer isn't here in L.A."

She nodded. "I was thinking the same thing."

"We've got to go to St. Helena."

"And talk with Sheriff Laurenski."

"Laurenski and anyone else who knew Frye."

"We might need several days," she said.

"Like I told you. I've got a lot of vacation time and sick leave built up. A few weeks of it. And for the first time in my life, I'm not particularly anxious to get back to work."

"Okay," she said. "When do we leave?"

"The sooner the better."

"Not today," she said. "We're both too damned tired. We need sleep. Besides, I want to drop your paintings off with Wyant Stevens. I've got to make arrangements for an insurance adjuster to put a price on the damage at my place, and I want to tell my house cleaning service to straighten up the wreckage while I'm gone. And if I'm not going to talk to the people at Warner Brothers about The Hour of the Wolf this week, then I've at least got to make excuses--or tell Wally Topelis what excuses he should make for me."

"I've got to fill out a final report on the shooting," Tony said. "I was supposed to do that this morning. And they'll want me for the inquest, of course. There's always an inquest when a policeman is killed--or when he kills someone else. But they shouldn't have scheduled the inquest any sooner than next week. If they did, I can probably get them to postpone it."

"So when do we leave for St. Helena?"

"Tomorrow," he said. "Frank's funeral is at nine o'clock. I want to go to that. So let's see if there's a flight leaving around noon."

"Sounds good to me."

"We've got a lot to do. We'd better get moving."

"One other thing," Hilary said. "I don't think we should stay at your place tonight."

He reached across the table and took her hand. "I'm sure he can't get to you there. If he tries. you've got me, and I've got my service revolver. He may be built like Mr. Universe, but a gun is a good equalizer."

She shook her head. "No. Maybe it would be all right. But I wouldn't be able to sleep there, Tony. I'd be awake all night, listening for sounds at the door and windows."

"Where do you want to stay?"

"After we've run our errands this afternoon, let's pack for the trip, leave your apartment, make sure we're not followed, and check in to a room at a hotel near the airport."

He squeezed her hand. "Okay. If that'll make you feel better."

"It will."

"I guess it's better to be safe than sorry."

***

In St. Helena, at 4:10 Tuesday afternoon, Joshua Rhinehart put down his office phone and leaned back in his chair, pleased with himself. He had accomplished quite a lot in the past two days. Now he swiveled around to look out the window at the far mountains and the nearer vineyards.

He had spent nearly all of Monday on the telephone, dealing with Bruno Frye's bankers, stockbrokers, and financial advisers. There had been many lengthy discussions about how the assets ought to be managed until the estate was finally liquidated, and there had been more than a little debate about the most profitable ways to dispose of those assets when the time came for that. It had been a long, dull patch of work, for there had been a large number of savings accounts of various kinds, in several banks, plus bond investments, a rich portfolio of common stocks, real estate holdings, and much more.

Joshua spent Tuesday morning and the better part of the afternoon arranging, by telephone, for some of the most highly-respected art appraisers in California to journey to St. Helena for the purpose of cataloging and evaluating the varied and extensive collections that the Frye family had accumulated over six or seven decades. Leo, the patriarch, Katherine's father, now dead for forty years, had begun simply, with a fascination for elaborately hand-carved wooden spigots of the sort often used on beer and wine barrels in some European countries. Most of them were in the form of heads, the gaping or gasping or laughing or weeping or howling or snarling heads of demons, angels, clowns, wolves, elves, fairies, witches, gnomes, and other creatures. At the time of his death, Leo owned more than two thousand of those spigots. Katherine had shared her father's interest in collecting while he was alive, and after his death she had made collecting the central focus of her life. Her interest in acquiring beautiful things became a passion, and the passion eventually became a mania. (Joshua remembered how her eyes had gleamed and how she had chattered breathlessly each time that she had shown him a new purchase; he knew there had been something unhealthy about her desperate rush to fill every room and closet and drawer with lovely things, but then the rich always had been permitted their eccentricities and manias, so long as they caused no harm to anyone else.) She bought enameled boxes, turn-of-the-century landscape paintings, Lalique crystal, stained glass lamps and windows, antique cameo lockets, and many other items, not so much because they were excellent investments (which they were) but because she wanted them, needed them as a junkie always needed another fix. She stuffed her enormous house with these displays, spent countless hours just cleaning, polishing, and caring for everything. Bruno contained that tradition of almost frantic acquisition, and now both houses--the one Leo built in 1918, and the one Bruno had built five years ago--were crammed full of treasures. On Tuesday, Joshua called art galleries and prestige auction houses in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and all of them were eager to send their appraisers, for there were many fat commissions to be earned from the disposition of the Frye collections. Two men from San Franisco and two from Los Angeles were arriving Saturday morning; and, certain that they would require several days to catalogue the Frye holdings, Joshua made reservations for them at a local inn.

By 4:10 Tuesday afternoon, he was beginning to feel that he was on top of the situation; and for the first time since he was informed of Bruno's death, he was getting a fix on how long it would take him to fulfill his obligations as executor. Initially, he had worried that the estate would be so complicated that he would be tangled up in it for years, or at least for several months. But now that he had reviewed the will (which he had drawn up five years ago), and now that he had discovered where Bruno's capable financial advisers had led the man, he was confident that the entire matter could be resolved in a few weeks. His job was made easier by three factors that were seldom present in multimillion-dollar estate settlements: First, there were no living relatives to contest the will or make other problems; second, the entire after-tax net was left to a single charity clearly named in the will; third, for a man of such wealth, Bruno Frye had kept his investments simple, presenting his executor with a reasonably neat balance sheet of easily understood debits and credits. Three weeks would see the end of it. Four at most.

Since the death of his wife, Cora, three years ago, Joshua was acutely conscious of the brevity of life, and he jealously guarded this time. He didn't want to waste one precious day, and he felt that every minute he spent bogged down in the Frye estate was definitely a minute wasted. Of course, he would receive an enormous fee for his legal services, but he already had all the money he would ever need. He owned substantial real estate in the valley, including several hundred acres of prime grape-producing land which was managed for him and which supplied grapes to two big wineries that could never get enough of them. He had thought, briefly, of asking the court to relieve him of his duties; one of Frye's banks would have taken on the job with great pleasure. He also considered turning the work over to Ken Gavins and Roy Genelli, the two sharp young attorneys who he had taken on as partners seven years ago. But his strong sense of loyalty had kept him from taking the easy way out. Because Katherine Frye had given him his start in the Napa Valley thirty-five years ago, he felt he owed her the time it would take to personally preside over the orderly and dignified dissolution of the Frye family empire.

Three weeks.

Then he could spend more time on the things he enjoyed: reading good books, swimming, flying the new airplane that he'd bought, learning to cook new dishes, and indulging in an occasional weekend in Reno. Ken and Roy handled most of the law firm's business these days, and they did a damned good job of it. Joshua hadn't plunged into full retirement yet, but he sat on the edge of it a lot, dangling his legs in a big pool of leisure time that he wished he had found and used when Cora was still alive.

At 4:20, content with his progress on the Frye estate and soothed by the magnificent view of the autumn valley beyond his window, he got up from his chair and went out to the reception area. Karen Farr was pounding the hell out of an IBM Selectric II, which would have responded equally well to a feather touch. She was a slip of a girl, pale and blue-eyed and soft-voiced, but she attacked every chore with tremendous energy and strength.

"I am about to treat myself to an early whiskey," Joshua told her. "When people call and ask for me, please tell them I am in a disgraceful drunken condition and cannot come to the phone."