written on that account.
'At first glance,' Preston said, 'it might appear that I haven't given you copies of all the checks Mr. Frye wrote. But let me assure you that I have. There simply weren't many of them. A lot of money moved in and out of that account, but for the first three-and-a-half years, Mr. Frye wrote only two checks a month. For the last year and a half, it's been three checks every month, and always to the same payees.'
Joshua didn't bother to open the folder. 'I'll look at these things later. Right now, I want to question the teller who paid out on the checking and savings accounts.'
A round conference table stood in one corner of the room. Six comfortably padded captain's chairs were arranged around it. That was the place Joshua chose for the interrogations.
Cynthia Willis, the teller, was a self-assured and rather attractive black woman in her late thirties. She was wearing a blue skirt and a crisp white blouse. Her hair was neatly styled, her fingernails well-shaped and brightly polished. She carried herself with pride and grace, and she sat with her back very straight when Joshua directed her into the chair opposite him.
Preston stood by his desk, silently fretting.
Joshua opened the envelope he had brought with him and took from it fifteen snapshots of people who lived or had once lived in St. Helena. He spread them out on the table and said, 'Miss Willis--'
'Mrs. Willis,' she corrected him.
'I'm sorry. Mrs. Willis, I want you to look at each one of those photographs, and then you tell me which is Bruno Frye. But only after you've looked at them all.'
She went through the batch of photos in a minute and picked two of them. 'Both of these are him.'
'Are you sure?'
'Positive,' she said. 'That wasn't much of a test. The other thirteen don't look like him at all.'
She had done an excellent job, much better than he had expected. Many of the photographs were fuzzy, and some were taken in poor light. Joshua purposefully used bad pictures to make the identification more difficult than it otherwise might have been, but Mrs. Willis did not hesitate. And although she said the other thirteen didn't look like Frye, a few of them actually did, a little. Joshua had chosen a few people who resembled Frye, at least when the camera was slightly out of focus, but that ruse had not fooled Cynthia Willis; and neither had the trick of including two photographs of Frye, two headshots, each much different from the other.
Tapping the two snapshots with her index finger, Mrs. Willis said, 'This was the man who came into the bank last Thursday afternoon.'
'On Thursday morning,' Joshua said, 'he was killed in Los Angeles.'
'I don't believe it,' she said firmly. 'There must be some mistake about that.'
'I saw his body,' Joshua told her. 'We buried him up in St. Helena last Sunday.'
She shook her head. 'Then you must have buried someone else. You must have buried the wrong man.'
'I've known Bruno Frye since he was five years old,' Joshua said. 'I couldn't be mistaken.'
'And I know who I saw,' Mrs. Willis said politely but stubbornly.
She did not glance at Preston. She had too much pride to tailor her answers to his measurements. She knew she was a good worker, and she had no fear of the boss. Sitting up even straighter than she had been sitting, she said, 'Mr. Preston is entitled to his opinion. But, after all, he didn't see the man. I did. It was Mr. Frye. He's been coming in the bank two or three times a month for the past five years. He always makes at least a two-thousand- dollar deposit in checking, sometimes as much as three thousand, and always in cash. Cash. That's unusual. It makes him very memorable. That and the way he looks, all of those muscles and--'
'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
