“A lawyer? Wait a minute, now. I can’t afford to get involved with lawyers. My position here at the bank, my finances… a lawsuit would ruin me… no. No, I don’t think I’d better get involved.”
“Think about the boy, Mr. Dinowski-”
“No, I’m sorry. No. I’d like to help, but it’s not my problem; she’s not my problem anymore. I shouldn’t have said anything to you in the first place.” He drummed blunt, nervous fingers on the desktop. “You’re not going to repeat it to this lawyer, are you? Without my permission?”
“Not without permission, no.”
“Well, good, I appreciate that. I wouldn’t want it to get back to Francine. As crazy as she is, there’s no telling what she might do. You understand, don’t you? I hope you find some other way to stop her from marrying the lawyer, hurting the boy anymore, I really do-”
Runyon was on his feet by then and moving toward the door. He left without giving Kevin Dinowski another glance or another word.
Francine Whalen’s ex-roommate, Charlene Kepler, still lived in the same apartment on Broderick Street in Laurel Heights. Runyon drove out California Street from downtown, but he didn’t go directly to the Broderick address. It was not quite five o’clock, and Charlene Kepler wasn’t likely to be home yet; she worked for an insurance company in the Transamerica building.
He turned into the Laurel Heights shopping center. You could find a Chinese restaurant in just about any mall in the city, and this one was no exception. He’d eaten Chinese food five or six times a week after Colleen was gone; it had been her favorite and he’d used it as a way to maintain a connection to her and the life they’d shared together. He hadn’t felt the need as often since meeting Bryn, but it was what he was in the mood for tonight. Chinese restaurants were usually quiet and orderly, good places to think as well as eat.
Over tea and a plate of kung pao chicken and fried rice, he went over his talk with Kevin Dinowski. As much as Dinowski seemed to hate Francine, he might’ve exaggerated the extent of her behavior, but that scar on his arm, assuming he’d gotten it the way he claimed he had, said otherwise. Further confirmation that Francine was violence prone and unstable. Capable of greater acts of violence than hurling a pot of boiling water, inflicting bruises, and breaking a little boy’s arm. Capable of killing someone, child or adult, if one of her sudden rages got amped up high enough and she completely lost control.
Runyon had already decided not to repeat what Dinowski had told him to Bryn. Without the self-centered banker’s cooperation, it would only increase her fear and anxiety.
Dinowski, out. Francine’s two sisters, out. Maybe Charlene Kepler had a horror story of her own to tell and was willing to pass it on to Robert Darby. But even if she did, there was no guarantee it would do any good. Without a second or third person’s account to back it up, Darby might claim she had an ax to grind and dismiss it as fabrication. A man in love or lust, a man who had yet to be subjected to Francine’s violent outbursts, was a man in denial.
Runyon had lost his appetite, not that he’d had much to begin with. He left half the meal unfinished, went back out into the foggy night.
Charlene Kepler was home and willing enough to talk to him. Runyon interviewed her in an untidy living room while her current roommate banged pots, pans, and dishes in the kitchen. Kepler was a plump thirtyish redhead, the chattery, scatterbrained type who had an annoying habit of starting every other sentence with “well” and sprinkling others with “you know.”
“Well, I don’t know what I can tell you about Francine,” she said. “We were roomies for only about five months and that was, what, six or seven years ago. I haven’t seen her since she moved out to get married.”
“So you weren’t close friends?”
“Well, no, we weren’t. We shared expenses and that’s about it.”
“How did you happen to get together?”
“Well, we were both working at the same place, Mitchell and Associates-that’s a law firm in Cow Hollow. I was in the secretarial pool and she was one of the, you know, the paralegals. Well, she’d been living with this guy and they broke up because he got another job back east someplace and she needed a place to live. And I needed a roommate because the girl I was living with moved out to get married. My roomies are always moving out to get married, I don’t know what it is-I wish I had that luck with my relationships. Well, anyway, that’s how we got together.”
“The guy Francine was living with-do you remember his name?”
“Well, no, not exactly. David, Darren, something like that.”
“Last name?”
“I don’t think she ever mentioned it.”
“Did she say what kind of work he did, where his new job was?”
“Well… no, I don’t think so. She didn’t talk about him much. I mean, well, you know how it is when you break up with somebody; you don’t want to even think about the person.”
“How did you and Francine get along?”
“Oh, well, okay, I guess. We didn’t spend very much time together. She had her life and I had mine.”
“Ever have any problems with her?”
“Problems? You mean did we argue or fight about stuff?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there were a few times. She liked everything neat and tidy and I’m not a neat and tidy person. I mean I try not to be a slob, but I just don’t care about picking up after myself, you know? Life’s too short to worry about the little things.”
“Did she ever become violent?”
Kepler blinked at him as if he’d asked her a question in a foreign language she didn’t understand.
Runyon said, “I’ve been told that Francine has a violent temper, a tendency to lose control when she’s angry. Did she ever attack you, try to hurt you?”
“Well…” The plump face colored slightly. Kepler’s voice was rueful when she said, “Well, there was one time, right before she moved out. She got all dressed up to go out on a date with the guy she married, Kevin I think his name was, and the outfit she had on… well, the colors, you know, they just didn’t go with her blond hair. I shouldn’t’ve said anything, but I did and she got real mad, I mean real mad, and started yelling four-letter words at me. I tried to tell her I was sorry, but she wouldn’t listen, just started after me like, you know, like she wanted to break my neck or something. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door. She pounded on it a few times and I guess after that she calmed down and went out. Well, I was so shook up I stayed in the bathroom for a good half hour, until I was sure she was gone.”
“What happened when you saw her again?”
“Well, she acted like nothing had happened. I told her she’d scared me pretty bad and she said, ‘Well, don’t ever criticize my clothes again,’ and I said I wouldn’t and that was the end of it.”
“And that was the only incident?” Runyon asked.
“The only one. Francine was real sweet most of the time, you know?”
Charlene Kepler, out.
Now he had nothing to tell Bryn.
10
BRYN DARBY
She stood looking at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, fingering the vial of Xanax and wondering how many of the little white pills it would take to put her out of her misery.
A dozen or so would probably do it. This was a new prescription, the vial almost full-more than enough. Wash them down with a couple of glasses of wine, throw in four or five Vicodin to make sure, and when she started feeling the effects lie down in bed with the lights on to wait for the dark. Easy, painless. Just go to sleep and no more hurt or fear or black depression, no more looking at what she was looking at right now.
The face in the mirror was like one of those split theatrical masks, only hers wasn’t half tragedy and half comedy; it was half living and half dead. That was how she thought of the left side, not as paralyzed or frozen, the euphemisms used by the doctors and everybody else, but as dead. Part of her already dead. Pale waxy flesh, the corner of the mouth puckered so that she couldn’t open it all the way, couldn’t eat or drink in a normal fashion, dribbled and drooled like a baby. Puckered lines around the eye, too, and the optic nerve damaged so that she had cloudy vision out of it. The muscles and nerves already atrophying, no way to stop it, no chance of recovery. Most of the time she had no feeling on that side, but sometimes, and now was one of them, there was a faint burning sensation as if she were standing too close to a stove or heater. Her doctor claimed that this was psychosomatic, a phantom sensation, because of the extent of the nerve damage. Dead tissue has no feeling. Death has no feeling. Except that it did. The dead side of her face burned.