Diamond in the Buff (12 page)

For the first time I felt a pang of sympathy for Hasbrouck Diamond, his cherished passion so casually tossed aside. But that pang was brief as I recalled how careless he had been of his neighbor’s involvement with him. As I had about Mr. Kepple and his neighbor, I thought how well suited this threesome here was, and how appalled each one of them would be to hear it. Careful to keep a neutral tone, I said, “You were telling me what happened this morning.”

“I heard the thud. I looked out my window; it was dark. I didn’t see anything.”

“What time was it?”

She shrugged. “Still night. I don’t have one of those clocks that glows in the dark.”

“What did you do?”

She shrugged again. “Went back to sleep.”

“You went back to sleep!”

“Well, hell, this is a noisy place.”

I pressed my arms against my sides to counter the chill. “After you went back to sleep, what?”

“Nothing till I heard the scream. The woman in the house downhill spotted Kris. I woke up, saw the light from her flashlight, saw something—I couldn’t make out that it was Kris then. I ran upstairs and onto the deck. The woman wasn’t screaming anymore. She was just standing there, over Kris, staring. I went down Brouck’s rappelling wall. I looked at Kris. He was dead. I’ve seen enough climbing accidents to know death. Then I called the cops. And that’s it.”

“There must be another way down besides the rappelling rope.” By using it, Zagoya had created good reason for her footprints, fingerprints, clothing fibers to be around the spot where Kris went off the deck.

“I wasn’t looking for
alternate routes.
My friend was dead. There’s a special bond when you climb together. It’s not just between the climbers, it’s the whole team. Your life depends on everyone on that team. Your victory is their victory. What you feel for each other is like friendship boiled down to its essence. I saw Kris down there. I grabbed the rope and went.”

I let a moment pass. The fog had paled to a heather gray. It still clung to the tops of pines and eucalypts. A thin layer spread over the Berkeley flatlands and thickened up at the Bay. San Francisco was beyond, entirely hidden.

“Dr. Diamond thinks Leila Sandoval mistook Kris sleeping on that chaise lounge for him.”

She laughed, at first sarcastically, then hysterically. I let her go on, vaguely wondering about all those deaths she’d seen on mountains. When she had control of herself, she said, “Look, they’re bonkers, both of them, Brouck and Leila. Is Brouck saying Leila pushed Kris over the edge because she thought it was him, because she was pissed off about him having her trees topped two years ago?”

“Are you saying you don’t think she would have?”

“No,” she said slowly. “Not exactly.”

“Not because of the trees?” When she nodded, I went on. “What about this affair between them? How serious was Leila? A great passion?”

She laughed, but it was a controlled sound. “Maybe, maybe not. I barely knew Leila then. She didn’t talk about it then. And afterward she didn’t talk to me at all.”

“So she was angry?”

“Oh, yes. She’s still angry. She didn’t order the bees so I could have honey on my toast. Maybe she was angry about losing Hasbrouck. Maybe he was the great love of her life …”

“Or?” I prompted.

“Or maybe she was pissed that her husband left her and she suddenly found herself with no lover, and worse yet, no income.”

It made a good motive for trying to kill Diamond. “If this is true,” I said, “both you and Dr. Diamond could still be in danger. As long as Leila Sandoval is free. Who might she be staying with? Where?” She started to shake her head. “Think.”

She gazed not toward the Golden Gate, but up at the hills. A hazy yellow halo outlined the tops. Sun shining in Orinda and Moraga on the other side. “She may still have some land in Humboldt County,” she said with an even tone that belied the impression she was clearly trying to give—that this thought had just risen in her mind. “She got ten acres in her divorce settlement. I don’t know whether she still has it.”

“Where in Humboldt County?”

She shrugged.

She knew; I would have put money on it. And she’d tell me if I could give her the chance to do it gracefully. I said, “How did she refer to it when she mentioned it? A few acres near—?”

“Near Garberville.” She smiled.

I smiled. Garberville was the address Kris Mouskavachi had had in his pocket.

L
EONARD HAD CHECKED IN
with Martinez fifteen minutes before. The neighbor who had a view of the deck had told Leonard that she had not noticed any blanket-covered body on the chaise;
she
was not in the habit of looking at Diamond’s deck, and if she had been in the habit and had seen a covered body, she wouldn’t have speculated about who it was, she would only have been relieved that it was neither naked nor creating noise.

I drove back to the station, through the empty early morning streets of Saturday. It was only about six-thirty. Wally’s Donuts, my standard breakfast hangout, was open but I didn’t feel up to being lectured on my eating habits. Instead, I opted for the hope that the desk man at the station would still have a couple of unclaimed jellies, or maybe a chocolate old-fashioned. And after my night in Mr. Kepple’s hospital room, which seemed like weeks ago, and dealing with Kris’s death, I was past the point of differentiating between good and bad coffee. The stuff we had in the machine would be fine.

Perhaps it would have been. But the coffee machine was empty (an indicator that there were guys at the station with greater tolerance or less taste than I). And worse yet, when I checked with Sabec at the front deck, he was out of doughnuts.

Pereira was at the desk she shared with patrol officers from the other shift. I relayed Bev Zagoya’s speculation about Leila Sandoval hiding on her property near Garberville, and gave her the address Kris had had in his pocket. “Tell the sheriff up there we’ll owe him one if he can get us something this morning.”

I made my way to my own office. Later in the day, or on a weekday, Howard would be in there, his chair swiveled back to his own desk, his long legs stretched across the floor, feet braced against my desk. Seeing him here would have eased the grayness of this day. But it was not yet seven
A.M.
Howard was probably still curled up in his extra-long bed, in the forest green bedroom that was the prize awarded to the longest-standing tenant in his house. I sank into my chair, turned toward my desk and began the tedious process of trying to get through to Kathmandu. Getting a free line took half an hour. Not surprisingly the Mouskavachis didn’t have a phone in their home. The phone I reached was in a store. The line crackled. Not surprisingly, the man who answered spoke English with a heavy accent, and it was twenty minutes before I understood that he was sending a boy to fetch one of the Mouskavachis.

While I waited, I used another line to call one of the few people I would dare expect to answer the phone civilly at this hour of the morning, Vikram Patel at the Indian consulate in San Francisco. Berkeley has a growing population from India and Nepal whose foreign affairs India handles, and many Berkeleyans have been to India. The result is that I’d had a number of conversations with the personnel at that consulate. And since Delhi time was almost twelve hours different from ours, Vikram Patel was forced to keep peculiar hours. When I told him of Kris’s death, Patel, the most courteous of men, expressed proper dismay. Then he paused so long I wondered if the line to San Francisco had been infected by static on my other line to Nepal. Finally, he said, “I do not wish to speak unkindly of the bereaved. I myself do not know the family, but I have heard of them. Often. From my associates in Delhi. They have seen them, often.”

“And they have said,” I prompted.

“They have described the mother dogging them like a beggar whining for baksheesh.”

I sighed. “Poor Kris.”

Patel sighed. “I have not met the unfortunate man. But at least he had a few weeks of normal life. I have met the woman who sent him the ticket to come to this country.”

“The woman?” Kris had told me Diamond brought him over. Bev Zagoya had told me that too. Diamond couldn’t have sent Bev to handle the arrangements because she was in the Alps when Kris came. “Mr. Patel, do you recall what the woman looked like?”

“Sorry. No.”

“Rats.”

“But I do have her name. Here it is. Leila Sandoval.”

“Leila Sandoval! Mr. Patel, can you be sure it was she, not someone using her name?”

“Ah yes, she applied for a visa. So, you see, I saw her and her passport. I am trying to recall her face … I cannot.”

I thanked Patel, hung up the phone, and got hold of Martinez. “Do you have someone who can bring Bev Zagoya down here now?”

“Leonard’s just leaving.”

“Thanks.”

The Kathmandu call came through. The static was heavy. It took me five minutes to convey my message to Kris’s mother, and another five to get from her confirmation that her son’s ticket had indeed come from Leila Sandoval. In another three minutes I was satisfied that she probably didn’t know why an American woman had sent Kris a ticket, that she assumed the woman was connected to Bev Zagoya since she remembered that Bev lived in California. In the final minute she explained that she had four younger children to occupy her, and assumed that the city of Berkeley would be paying for Kris’s funeral.

I had just put the phone down when it rang. Leonard had Zagoya in the interview room.

The interview room is at the far end of the station. Scarred pine tables form a square in the middle. Early in the mornings we hold meetings there. Later we keep “responsibles” in the holding cells that look in on it. Now the room was empty but for Zagoya, still in her yellow shirt and red running shorts, sitting on a pine chair, staring at the wall clock, scowling.

Seeing me her scowl deepened. Before she could speak I said, “Not an hour ago, I told you I wanted the truth. I meant the entire truth, not just what tidbits you chose to toss out. Hasbrouck Diamond didn’t bring Kris to this country. That wasn’t Leila Sandoval’s big favor to mountaineering, having
him
bring Kris over. She paid his way herself. Why didn’t you tell me?”

I expected anger, or even sheepishness, but Bev Zagoya looked up at me in surprise. “I didn’t think it mattered.”

“In a murder investigation everything matters.”

She hesitated only momentarily. “It was supposed to be a big secret. Leila swore Kris to secrecy. That amused Kris. Leila herself is no secret keeper, but she would have kept this one. She would have loved to put one over on Brouck.”

“Would have loved?
Are you saying Diamond knew she brought Kris here?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“How did he find out?”

Bev Zagoya looked at me as if I were the village idiot. “Kris told him.”

Kris had begged me not to tell Diamond he even knew Leila Sandoval. I remembered him lowering his voice, looking at me with those pale blue eyes of his. Had he been lying to me? That possibility shouldn’t have surprised me. Still, I found myself surprised … and offended. I had to force myself to take the possibility seriously. Or, of course, maybe the one lying was Bev. “Why would Kris have admitted being in the enemy camp?”

She shook her head, “I wasn’t there. I was in the Alps then. I don’t know what went on.”

I sat heavily on the edge of the table and this time made no effort to restrain my disgust. “Don’t tell me you came back, heard about Leila paying for Kris’s ticket, and you never so much as asked why? No one’s that incurious.”

Lieutenant Davis, the morning watch commander, opened the glass door to his office and headed across the room. Zagoya followed each step with her eyes. When he disappeared onto the stairs she looked back at the wall clock, scowled again, and said, “I don’t know why Leila brought Kris here. Kris didn’t know. But Kris was a kid with an eye for a chance and he took it. Then Brouck realized what a plus Kris could be in promoting my new expedition and—well, you know how Brouck and Leila are—he co-opted Kris.”

“And Leila was so put out that she killed Kris before he could perform?” A trace of sarcasm came through, but only a trace. With what I’d heard of Sandoval I couldn’t rule out that kind of reaction. Zagoya didn’t answer; she stared angrily at the wall clock, as if she begrudged every second that ticked by. I pressed her for leads to Sandoval’s whereabouts. I asked about my only other possibility of a lead, the boy with the tattoo, but Zagoya swore she knew nothing about him.

She sat glaring at the clock, and I was so irritated at her attitude, I was tempted to drag out her stay here. As it was I restrained the urge to comment on her busy schedule or her exemplary ability to concentrate—at least on our clock.

I looked down from our clock to her empty wrist. A watch was not something a mountaineer would do without. When you’re working your way up a mountain face and there are only so many daylight hours left, your life depends on knowing the time. And clearly, she had not done without one. Her tan outlined the place where a watch had been. “Where’s your watch?” I asked, suspecting the answer before she said it.

She jerked her eyes away from the clock. “Kris,” she said, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “I gave it to him.” She forced a smile. “I didn’t want to. But you know how Kris was. He loved it, he wanted it. He’d had so little, it was hard to refuse him. It was sort of a celebration of his coming here.” Standing, she said, “I feel a little awkward about asking this, but when you’re through with the investigation, I would like to have it back. I just bought it in Switzerland. It was an expensive watch.”

I let her go, and walked back into my office. It was still early, but not too early to call the hospital. I dialed and got through to the nurses’ station nearest Mr. Kepple’s room. Mr. Kepple didn’t have a phone. The report on his condition was “resting comfortably.” Nothing more. I asked the nurse to ask Mr. Kepple about the boy with the tattoo. “That boy was in his Trees class, in gardening,” I added. “Ask him what the boy’s name is, and see if he has any idea where I might find him.”