Tony wearily wiped his face with one hand. “The other’s not something that can easily be put into words. It’s just a hunch. But the story sounds … too smooth.”
“You mean fabricated?” Joshua asked.
“I don’t know,” Tony said. “I don’t really know what I mean. But when you’ve been a policeman as long as I have, you develop a nose for these things.”
“And something smells?” Hilary asked.
“I think so.”
“What?” Joshua asked.
“Nothing particular. Like I said, the story just sounds too smooth, too pat.” Tony drank the last of his wine and then said, “Could Bruno actually be Katherine’s child?”
Joshua stared at him, dumbfounded. When he could speak, he said, “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“You’re asking me if it’s possible that she made up the whole thing about Mary Gunther and merely went away to San Francisco to have her own illegitimate baby?”
“That’s what I’m asking,” Tony said.
“No,” Joshua said. “She wasn’t pregnant.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well,” Joshua said, “I didn’t personally take her urine sample and perform a rabbit test with it. I wasn’t even living in the valley in 1940. I didn’t get here until ’45, after the war. But I’ve heard her story repeated, sometimes in part and sometimes in its entirety, by people who were here in ’40. Now you’ll say that they were probably just repeating what she had told them. But if she was pregnant, she couldn’t have hidden the fact. Not in a town as small as St. Helena. Everyone would have known.”
“There’s a small percentage of women who don’t swell up a great deal when they’re carrying a child,” Hilary said. “You could look at them and never know.”
“You’re forgetting that she had no interest in men,” Joshua said. “She didn’t date anyone. How could she possibly have gotten pregnant?”
“Perhaps she didn’t date any locals,” Tony said. “But at harvest time, toward the end of summer, aren’t there a lot of migrant workers in the vineyards? And aren’t a lot of them young, handsome, virile men?”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Joshua said. “You’re reaching way out in left field again. You’re trying to tell me that Katherine, whose lack of interest in men was widely remarked upon, suddenly fell for a field hand.”
“It’s been known to happen.”
“But then you’re also trying to tell me that this unlikely pair of lovers carried out at least a brief affair in a virtual fish bowl without being caught or even causing gossip. And then you’re trying to tell me that she was a unique woman, one in a thousand, a woman who didn’t look pregnant when she was. No.” Joshua shook his white-maned head. “It’s too much for me. Too many coincidences. You think Katherine’s story sounds too neat, too smooth, but next to your wild suppositions, her tale has the gritty sound of reality.”
“You’re right,” Hilary said. “So another promising theory bites the dust.” She finished her wine.
Tony scratched his chin and sighed. “Yeah. I guess I’m too damned tired to make a whole lot of sense. But I still don’t think Katherine’s story makes perfect sense, either. There’s something more to it. Something she was hiding. Something strange.”
***
In Sally’s kitchen, standing on broken dishes, Bruno Frye opened the telephone book and looked up the number of Topelis & Associates. Their offices were in Beverly Hills. He dialed and got an answering service, which was what he had expected.
“I’ve got an emergency here,” he told the answering service operator, “and I thought maybe you could help me.”
“Emergency?” she asked.
“Yes. You see, my sister is one of Mr. Topelis’s clients. There’s been a death in the family, and I’ve got to get hold of her right away.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said.
“The thing of it is, my sister’s apparently off on a short holiday, and I don’t know where she’s gone.”
“I see.”
“It’s urgent that I get in touch with her.”
“Well, ordinarily, I’d pass your message right on to Mr. Topelis. But he’s out tonight, and he didn’t leave a number where he could be reached.”
“I wouldn’t want to bother him anyway,” Bruno said. “I thought, with all the calls you take for him, maybe you might know where my sister is. I mean, maybe she called in and left word for Mr. Topelis, something that would indicate where she was.”