“Some bigger than others. I’ll never make one like Francine again.”
“Another man is about to. She’s engaged to be married.”
“Well, I feel sorry for the poor guy, whoever he is. Is that why you’re here? Checking up on her for her future husband?”
“Something like that. He has a little boy, nine years old, from a previous marriage.”
“Francine as a wife is bad enough, but as a mother? I pity that kid.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s crazy, that’s why. Ceritifiable.”
“How is she crazy?”
Dinowski looked away, not answering. A muscle fluttered along his jaw. The shape of his mouth was lipless, pinched.
Runyon said, gambling, “Violent tendencies?”
“Tendencies? She’s psychotic when something sets her off, and it doesn’t take much to set her off.” Dinowski shot the left sleeve of his suit coat, unbuttoned his shirt cuff, and drew that up. The skin along his forearm bore a long puckered scar. “See this? She threw a pot of boiling water at me one night. Just because of a mild criticism of what she was cooking. If I hadn’t ducked away in time, it’d be my face that’s scarred. That was the last straw. The next day I filed for divorce.”
“There were other incidents, then?”
“Oh yes. None as bad as the boiling water, but bad enough. Just fly into a rage for no good reason. One time in bed she… never mind the details. It was the only time I ever hit her, slapped her, and she scratched the hell out of me in return. Lord, I wish I’d never laid eyes on her. Those were the worst five months of my life.”
“Would you be willing to repeat what you’ve just told me, Mr. Dinowski?”
“Repeat it? To whom?”
“Her fiance, the father of the little boy I told you about.”
“To stop Francine from marrying him, is that it?”
Runyon said, “There’s a chance she may have been taking out her aggressions on the boy.”
“Christ. Hurting him, you mean?”
“He has a fractured arm and multiple bruises.”
“A nine-year-old kid? Well, I’m not really surprised. I told you she was crazy, totally out of control.”
“Can I count on your cooperation, then?”
“Cooperation?” Dinowski hesitated. Wary thoughts had come into his head; Runyon could tell by his body language and the sudden altered state of his expression. “I don’t know. If I step into this, spoil her plans, she’s liable to come after me again. I wouldn’t put anything past her.”
“You’d be saving the boy a lot more grief.”
“Or causing him more. She could take it out on him, too, you know. This man she’s marrying… who is he? Somebody important? Somebody with money, I’ll bet. Francine loves money.”
“He’s a family law attorney.”
“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.”
