“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.