Before they left for the restaurant, Laurenski told the night receptionist where he would be and asked her to let him know immediately if word came in that the Los Angeles police had arrested the second Bruno Frye.
“It’s not going to be that easy,” Hilary said.
“I suspect she’s right,” Tony said. “Bruno has concealed an incredible secret for forty years. He may be crazy, but he’s also clever. The LAPD isn’t going to lay hands on him that fast. They’ll have to play a lot of cat-and-mouse before they finally nail him.”
***
When night had begun to fall, Bruno had closed the attic shutters again.
Now there were candles on each nightstand. There were two candles on the dresser. The flickering yellow flames made shadows dance on the walls and ceiling.
Bruno knew that he should already be out looking for Hilary-Katherine, but he could not find the energy to get up and go. He kept putting it off.
He was hungry. He suddenly realized that he hadn’t eaten since yesterday. His stomach was growling.
For a while, he sat on the bed, beside the staring corpse, and he tried to decide where he should go to get some food. A few of the cans in the pantry hadn’t swelled up, hadn’t burst, but he was sure that everything on those shelves was spoiled and poisonous. For almost an hour, he struggled with the problem, trying to think of where he could go to get something to eat and still be safe from Katherine’s spies. They were everywhere. The bitch and her spies. Everywhere. His state of mind was still best described as confused, and even though he was hungry, he had difficulty keeping his thoughts focused on food. But at last, he remembered there was food in the vineyard house. The milk would have spoiled during the past week, and the bread would have gotten hard. But his own pantry was full of canned goods, and the refrigerator was stocked with cheese and fruit, and there was ice cream in the freezer. The thought of ice cream made him smile like a small boy.
Driven by the vision of ice cream, hoping that a good supper would give him the energy he needed to begin looking for Hilary-Katherine, he left the attic and made his way down through the house with the aid of a candle. Outside, he snuffed out the flame and tucked the candle into a jacket pocket. He descended the crumbling switchback stairs on the face of the cliff and strode off through the dark vineyards.
Ten minutes later, in his own house, he struck a match and relit the candle because he was afraid that he would attract unwanted attention if he switched on the lights. He got a spoon from a drawer by the kitchen sink, took a one-gallon, cardboard tub of chocolate ripple from the freezer, and sat at the table for more than a quarter of an hour, smiling, eating big spoonfuls of ice cream right out of the carton, until at last he was too full to swallow even one more bite.
He dropped the spoon in the half-emptied carton, put the ice cream back in the freezer, and realized that he ought to pack up canned goods to take back to the clifftop house. He might not be able to find and kill Hilary-Katherine for days, and during that time he didn’t want to have to sneak back here for every meal. Sooner or later, the bitch would think to have some of her spies put a watch on this place, and then he would be caught. But she’d never look for him in the cliff house, not in a million years, so that was where he ought to have his food supply.
He went into the master bedroom and got a large suitcase from the closet, took that into the kitchen, and filled it with cans of peaches, pears, mandarin orange slices, jars of peanut butter and jars of olives, and two kinds of jelly–each jar wrapped in paper towels to cushion it and keep it from breaking–and tins of little Vienna sausages. When he finished packing, the big suitcase was extremely heavy, but he had the muscles to handle it.