Bill Pronzini - Camouflage

Tamara had most of her priority client work caught up by two thirty. Which left reports and bookkeeping, neither of which she felt like tackling just yet. Instead she started in on the deep backgrounder for Jake. Child abuse was about as low a crime as there was; anything she could do to help put a stop to what was happening to Bryn’s son was a mandate.

Francine Whalen. Jake had been fairly thorough in what he’d pulled up on the woman so far, but the Net was a vast storehouse of information, some of it distorted and useless, and what you had to do was get down into the nooks and crannies far below the surface and then start a careful sifting. Same principle as rummaging around in attics and sub-basements and dusty old buildings where the long-stored, valuable stuff was hidden away.

Didn’t have much luck at first. The twenty-nine years of Whalen’s life to date seemed pretty clean, without any apparent psychological or other problems. Except for the five-months-and-out marriage to the investment banker, Kevin Dinowski, but that could’ve been simple incompatability; whatever the reason for the quick split, there was no indication of it in the public record. Still, everybody had some dark spots in their lives, no matter how small or how well buried. Get a hint of what they were and you could usually pull them out into the open.

Tamara picked up the Whalen hint when she started probing into the lives of her two sisters. Gwen Whalen, the unmarried one living in Berkeley, had tried to commit suicide when she was sixteen and had spent three months in a psychiatric facility. Wasn’t her only stay in a twitch bin-six months in another at age twenty. No public record on cause or treatment in either case, and hacking into private hospital files was a risky proposition; get caught and there went your career down the rabbit hole. The last of Gwen’s two incarcerations was six years ago; she seemed to have pulled her life together since then. The past several years she’d worked as a caregiver in a Berkeley elderly-care facility called the Sunshine Rest Home and, from all indications, appeared to be leading a normal life. What passed for one these days, anyhow.

Tracy Holland, the second, married sister living down in Ojai, had one stand-out blemish on her record: arrested four years ago for battery on her six-year-old daughter, the charge brought by her mother-in-law. Charge was dropped the next day, either because the mother-in-law changed her mind or because Tracy’s husband had stepped in on her behalf. Social Services had looked into the matter, but they must not have found anything to justify taking further action. The Hollands were still married, still had custody of the child.

Broad hints, both of these. When kids were abused, they often developed one kind of psychological problem or another as they got older, and some of them turned into abusers themselves when they became parents. So if all three Whalen girls had been childhood victims of abusive parents, that might be the answer to why a childless woman like Francine would start beating up on the first kid to come into her charge.

One problem with that idea: the girls’ parents weren’t the likeliest of suspects. The father, George Whalen, had died in a freak industrial accident when Francine, the oldest of the girls, was five and the youngest, Gwen, just two. Pretty young for abuse to start… unless he’d been one of these real sickos who get off on sexually and physically molesting their kids when they’re barely out of infancy. Could also have been the mother, after the father was dead, taking out her frustrations on her daughters-that kind of thing happened often enough-but Arlene Whalen had been in declining health for years with a blood disease that finally took her out when Francine was thirteen. Neither George nor Arlene had any kind of police record, and there were no red flags in their personal or professional lives.

After Arlene’s death, the girls had been raised by her mother in Grandma’s home in Concord. Another possibility there. The grandmother, Joan Cartwright, had been in her mid-sixties, widowed and living alone for eight years, when she took the kids in. Figure her quiet life had to’ve been disrupted by the presence of three young girls and the hassles of coping with them. Possible she’d taken out her frustrations by using them as punching bags.

Tamara did some probing into Joan Cartwright’s life. Nothing there to support the theory. So then she went back and dug deeper into Francine Whalen’s, as deep as she was able to without a lead in a new direction, but all she got out of that was an empty hole.

Well, the sisters-abuse angle was something, at least, for Jake to follow up on. She got him on his cell, caught him free, and laid out what she’d learned and the possibilities it indicated. Nothing more she could do for him now.

Time to bite the bullet, get to work on the backlog of reports and bookeeping. But the phone, which had been silent most of the day, kept ringing to interrupt her. Three calls in the space of half an hour, the first two expected and routine: Bill checking in, then Alex checking in. It was the third call and the reason for it that surprised and rocked her.

“This is David Virden. What the hell’s the matter with you people?” Angry, real angry. “One simple little job and you go and screw it up, make me look like a fool. How could you make such a stupid mistake?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Finding my ex-wife, what do you think I’m talking about. Christ, no wonder that woman wouldn’t take the goddamn envelope.”

“What woman?”

“The dog-boarding McManus,” Virden said. “Her initials might be the same, she might look a little like Roxie, but she’s not my ex-wife. I never saw that woman before in my life.”

JAKE RUNYON

He was in the East Bay, done with interviewing a second witness in the hit-and-run case whose name had been provided by the first one he’d tracked down, when Tamara called. He’d intended to talk to Francine Whalen’s ex-husband before the sister in Berkeley, but since he was in the general vicinity, and given what Tamara had uncovered, Gwen Whalen was a better choice. If there was a history of abuse in the Whalen girls’ childhood, it might explain Francine’s behavior toward Bobby. Convincing anyone to admit to that kind of thing, particularly a woman who’d spent time in mental hospitals, was liable to be difficult. Depended on how close Gwen was to her sister, their joint history. The fact that she worked as a caregiver likely meant she had compassion, a sense of mercy. Work on that angle if he could.

Tamara had provided phone numbers. He called the Sunshine Rest Home first; Gwen Whalen’s shift had ended at four, he was told. The facility was in northeast Berkeley, at the edge of the hills near the Albany line, and her apartment was several miles away, on the southwest side of the university. It took Runyon forty minutes to drive there from Union City.

Four-unit apartment building, old and drab, on a street of similar dwellings. Probably a mixture of off-campus housing for U.C. students and relatively inexpensive rentals for moderate-income members of the workforce like Gwen Whalen. Her apartment was number two, first floor rear. She lived alone, apparently; G. Whalen was the only name on the mailbox.

No answer any of the three times he rang the bell. But now that he was here, he was reluctant to leave. Give it a while. Could be she’d stopped to run an errand or two on her way home.

He’d had to park two blocks away, and lucky to get a space that close; Berkeley’s residential streets were always jammed, particularly the ones close to major arteries like this neighborhood was to Ashby. No point in going back to the car to wait, so he walked it off. Ten blocks one way, ten blocks back to ring Gwen Whalen’s bell again. He did this three times, killing most of another hour, before he finally got a response.