When Christine remembered the four people who were after her, it didn't seem so hard to be Linda Welles of Minneapolis. She felt as though she and her baby were in a different world from San Diego, and perfectly safe. Even so, she kept the revolver Jane had given her in her purse. When she drove anywhere in her car, the purse was there beside her on the passenger seat where she could reach it. When she was at home like this, the purse was never more than a few feet away. She had promised herself that she would never let herself be captured by Richard's friends.
When she and Richard had been together, she had given him more than enough chances, but he had never taken her seriously. And Richard had hurt her. The first time he had hit her she considered leaving, but she had not been sure he'd meant it. There had been too much ambiguity. They had been in their house in San Diego. It was really just Richard's house, but she had been living with him for at least six months by then, and so she thought of it as their house. They had just come home from work to get ready for dinner with some clients, so she was in the shower. She came out of the bathroom with a big bath towel around her, and when she passed Richard, he was standing in front of the full-length mirror on the door of the closet, buttoning a shirt.
His arm shot out like a whip and wrapped around her waist. He spun her around as he pulled her close, and the towel came off. She tried to get away, and they wrestled around a little. She struggled and she ended up on the bed bent across his lap. He gave her a light slap across the bottom. She shrieked, but not too loudly because there were neighbors, and she was laughing, too. She squirmed and wriggled, pretending to try to escape, but really just doing it because she knew it would excite him. The truth was that she liked the fact that he was strong and aggressive, and that he was paying this kind of attention to her. She knew he found it erotic, and she found his arousal erotic.
Then he hit her again, another slap. It was harder this time, and it stung. She could feel her eyes watering, not quite producing tears yet, just a reaction to the pain. "Richard! Don't. It really hurt that time! Stop!" But he hit her again and again, and the playful spanking wasn't fun anymore. It was painful. She tightened the muscles of her buttocks and put her hands behind her to fend off the slaps. "Stop!" She was crying, but he didn't seem to notice. After a few more blows she became silent and stiff like a dead person, and he finally stopped. She ran into the bathroom, locked the door, then put on the clothes she had taken off before the shower, still weeping.
He knocked on the door, he called to her, he even made a halfhearted attempt to push the door open with his shoulder, but she knew he wasn't going to break it down. She could hear him move off, and a few minutes later he came back, knocked quietly, and said it was time to leave. She called out that she wasn't going anywhere with him. She stood behind the bathroom door holding her cell phone, ready to dial 911 if he came inside. He didn't. She heard him walk off down the hall, and then thought she heard the front door slam.
She waited a half hour before she was sure he was gone. She cautiously left the bathroom and then hurried out to her car. She drove to an inexpensive motel off Interstate 8. He called her cell phone a couple of times before she decided to answer.
He said, "I thought you were just kidding. You were laughing."
But by then she'd had time to stand in front of the mirror and see the red marks starting to darken into blue and purple bruises, and the pain was not going away. She waited another day to make him sweat and give the bruises time to ripen and darken, and then drove to the company building, went into his office, locked the door, and showed him.
He seemed sincerely shocked, and he apologized. She went back to the motel and spent the next three days thinking about what to do. There were many reasons to go back, and one reason not to, and that was fading with the bruises. She wanted to be sure he really deserved another chance, that he'd misunderstood what she had wanted, and not meant to do her harm. Christine wanted to believe that her own motives were simple and pure, too—that if she went back it would be because she loved him, and not because if she left him she would lose her job and her only place to live. There was also the nagging, uncomfortable question of whether she had misled him by giggling and being playful at first. In the end she decided she could not be sure about anything. She decided to start over again with Richard as though nothing had happened, and wait to see if anything important had.
The next time he hit her was during an argument. She would have hesitated to even call it a fight. They were at a party and she was tired and wanted to go home. He wanted to stay, and he wanted her to stay with him. It was after two A.M., and they were at a house all the way up in Capistrano. He had been drinking, and it was a long drive home. She asked him not to have another drink. She whispered discreetly, her face close to his ear and her arms around him so nobody else knew what she was saying. He didn't argue with her, but he took another drink. She sat down beside him and waited.
When it was three, he was ready to go. As they walked out toward the car, she held out her hand. "Can I have the key, please? I'll drive." He clutched her shoulders and shook her, then held her face close to his. "Listen," he rasped. "Don't you ever tell me what to do again." He slapped her face, pulled her around the car, and shoved her into the passenger seat, then got in and drove.
Before they even reached home, he apologized. He said it was the alcohol that was to blame, and swore he would never drink and drive again. It was four days before she would speak to him. She stayed home from work and wore sleeveless tops so he would have to look at the thumbprints on her upper arms.
The next time, she began to complain to him about the way he left his clothes on the floor of the bedroom and expected her to pick them up. Suddenly he gripped her hair and gave her face three or four slaps. Each time he was angry at her, the violence got a bit more sudden and harsh, and each time, he would apologize longer and more extravagantly. But then, after a week or two, he would speak to her with boredom and contempt in his voice, as though her forgiving him made her stupid and weak.
After that she tried to avoid doing anything that might provoke him. She managed to find ways to live with him without getting hurt, and her success made her believe he was improving.
But by then, the other things had begun to bother her. As she came to understand the business, she admitted to herself that he wasn't always honest. There were discrepancies between what he told customers they were signing and what she knew was on the paper because he'd told her to put it there. The extra, unexpected construction costs he charged to customers were inflated tremendously. Still later she noticed that he was lying about the costs of things in his own company's books. She could tell he was doing it so nobody would notice he was moving money out of the business.
Richard rented out some apartments in big complexes, and listed them on the Beale Company books as vacant or under remodeling, and then collected the rents under the name Richard Beale Rentals. There were even times when she saw him take cash home in a briefcase and lock it in the safe built into the floor of his closet.