Tony glanced at Hilary, then back at the sheriff. “When you hear what we’ve got to tell you, I think you’ll be able to believe Officer Larsson.”
“However,” Hilary said, “you still won’t be able to make sense out of it. We’re in deeper than you are, and we still don’t know what’s going on.”
She told Laurenski about Bruno Frye being in her house Tuesday morning, five days after his death.
***
In his office in St. Helena, Joshua Rhinehart sat at his desk with a glass of Jack Daniel’s Black Label and looked through the file that Ronald Preston had given him in San Francisco. It contained, among other things, clear photocopies of the monthly statements that had been blown up from microfilm records, plus similar copies of the front and back of every check Frye had written. Because Frye had kept the account a secret, tucked away in a city bank where he did no other business, Joshua was convinced that an examination of those records would yield clues to the solution of the dead ringer’s identity.
During the first three-and-a-half years that the account had been active, Bruno had written two checks each month, never more than that, never fewer. And the checks were always to the same people–Rita Yancy and Latham Hawthorne–names which meant nothing to Joshua.
For reasons not specified, Mrs. Yancy had received five hundred dollars a month. The only thing Joshua could deduce from the photocopies of those checks was that Rita Yancy must live in Hollister, California, for she deposited every one of them in a Hollister bank.
No two of the checks to Latham Hawthorne were for the same amount; they ranged from a couple of hundred dollars to five or six thousand. Apparently, Hawthorne lived in San Francisco, for all of his deposits were made at the same branch of the Wells Fargo Bank in that city. Hawthorne’s checks were all endorsed with a rubber stamp that read:
FOR DEPOSIT ONLY
TO THE ACCOUNT OF:
Latham Hawthorne
ANTIQUARIAN BOOKSELLER
&
OCCULTIST
Joshua stared at that last word for a while. Occultist. It was obviously derived from the word “occult” and was intended by Hawthorne to describe his profession, or at least half of it, rare book dealing being the other half. Joshua thought he knew what the word meant, but he was not certain.
Two walls of his office were lined with law books and reference works. He had three dictionaries, and he looked up “occultist” in all of them. The first two did not contain the word, but the third gave him a definition that was pretty much what he had expected. An occultist was someone who believed in the rituals and supernatural powers of various “occult sciences”–including, but not limited to, astrology, palmistry, black magic, white magic, demonolatry, and Satanism. According to the dictionary, an occultist could also be someone who sold the paraphernalia required to engage in any of those odd pursuits–books, costumes, cards, magical instruments, sacred relics, rare herbs, pig-tallow candles, and the like.
In the five years between Katherine’s death and his own demise, Bruno Frye had paid more than one hundred and thirty thousand dollars to Latham Hawthorne. There was nothing on any of the checks to indicate what he had received in return for all that money.
Joshua refilled his glass with whiskey and returned to his desk.
The file on Frye’s secret bank accounts showed that he had written two checks a month for the first three-and-a-half years, but then three checks a month for the past year and a half. One to Rita Yancy, one to Latham Hawthorne, as before. And now a third check to Dr. Nicholas W. Rudge. All of the checks to the doctor had been deposited in a San Francisco branch of the Bank of America, so Joshua assumed the physician lived in that city.
He placed a call to San Francisco Directory Assistance, then another to Directory Assistance in the 408 area code, which included the town of Hollister. In less than five minutes, he had telephone numbers for Hawthorne, Rudge, and Rita Yancy.
He called the Yancy woman first.
She answered on the second ring. “Hello?”