She turned to Lieutenant Clemenza. “Is this really necessary?” she asked exasperatedly.
Clemenza said, “Frank, can you hurry this along?”
“Look, I’ve got a point I’m trying to make,” Lieutenant Howard said. “I’m building up to it the best way I know how. Besides, she’s the one slowing it down.”
He turned to her, and again she had the creepy feeling she was on trial in another century and that Howard was some religious inquisitionist. If Clemenza would permit it, Howard would simply take hold of her and shake until she gave the answers he wanted, whether or not they were the truth.
“Miss Thomas,” he said, “if you’ll just answer all of my questions, I’ll be finished in a few minutes. Now, will you describe Bruno Frye?”
Disgustedly, she said, “Six-four, two hundred and forty pounds, muscular, blond, blue-gray eyes, about forty years old, no scars, no deformities, no tattoos, a deep gravelly voice.”
Frank Howard was smiling. It was not a friendly smile. “Your description of the assailant and Bruno Frye are exactly the same. Not a single discrepancy. Not one. And of course, you’ve told us that they were, in fact, one and the same man.”
His line of questioning seemed ridiculous, but there was surely a purpose to it. He wasn’t stupid. She sensed that already she had stepped into the trap, even though she could not see it.
“Do you want to change your mind?” Howard asked. “Do you want to say that perhaps there’s a small chance it was someone else, someone who only resembled Frye?”
“I’m not an idiot,” Hilary said. “It was him.”
“There wasn’t even maybe some slight difference between your assailant and Frye? Some little thing?” he persisted.
“No.”
“Not even the shape of his nose or the line of his jaw?” Howard asked.
“Not even that.”
“You’re certain that Frye and your assailant shared precisely the same hairline, exactly the same cheekbones, the same chin?”
“Yes.”
“Are you positive beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was Bruno Frye who was here tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Would you swear to that in court?”
“Yes, yes, yes!” she said, tired of his badgering.
“Well, then. Well, well. I’m afraid if you testified to that effect, you’d wind up in jail yourself. Perjury’s a crime.”
“What? What do you mean?”
He grinned at her. His grin was even more unfriendly than his smile. “Miss Thomas, what I mean is–you’re a liar.”
Hilary was so stunned by the bluntness of the accusation, by the boldness of it, so disconcerted by the ugly snarl in his voice, that she could not immediately think of a response. She didn’t even know what he meant.
“A liar, Miss Thomas. Plain and simple.”
Lieutenant Clemenza got out of the brown armchair and said, “Frank, are we handling this right?”
“Oh, yeah,” Howard said. “We’re handling it exactly right. While she was out there talking to the reporters and posing so prettily for the photographers, I got a call from headquarters. They heard back from the Napa County Sheriff.”
“Already?”
“Oh, yeah. His name’s Peter Laurenski. Sheriff Laurenski looked into things for us up there at Frye’s vineyard, just like we asked him to, and you know what he found? He found that Mr. Bruno Frye didn’t come to Los Angeles. Bruno Frye never left home. Bruno Frye is up there in Napa County right now, right this minute, in his own house, harmless as a fly.”
“Impossible!” Hilary said, pushing up from the sofa.
Howard shook his head. “Give up, Miss Thomas. Frye told Sheriff Laurenski that he intended to come to L.A. today for a week-long stay. Just a short vacation. But he didn’t manage to clear off his desk in time, so he cancelled out and stayed home to get caught up on his work.”
“The sheriff’s wrong!” she said. “He couldn’t have talked to Bruno Frye.”
“Are you calling the sheriff a liar?” Lieutenant Howard asked.
“He … he must have talked to someone who was covering for Frye,” Hilary said, knowing how hopelessly implausible that sounded.
“No,” Howard said. “Sheriff Laurenski talked to Frye himself.”
“Did he see him? Did he actually see Frye?” she demanded. “Or did he only talk to someone on the phone, someone claiming to be Frye?”