“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For another thirty minutes, Joshua questioned her about a number of subjects, including: the man who had withdrawn Frye’s money, the usual procedures she followed when dispensing large amounts of cash, the procedures she had followed last Thursday, the nature of the ID that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.”