Diamond in the Buff (16 page)

I wandered up Solano, licking my Double Double cone, feeling guilty about not getting ice cream for Mr. Kepple, feeling annoyed that I felt guilty—annoyed that in the middle of a murder case I felt obligated to visit my former landlord, and guilty about being annoyed. The ice cream ran down the side of the cone. With one great swath of tongue I caught it. It dripped out of the bottom. Onto my slacks.

It was one-thirty when I walked into Mr. Kepple’s room. I shivered, remembering my fear that he had had a stroke. He didn’t look like he had any residual damage. Thirty-six hours ago he had been the color of mashed potatoes. Now he was sitting up in bed, pushing a mound of them around his plate with his fork, while using the other hand to flick the remote control as the television picture jumped from station to station. An I.V. tube still threaded into his arm; his leg, under the sheet, was in a cast. Still, he could have had a stroke, a small stroke. Something had caused him to fall in a yard that he knew better than most people know their living rooms.

Looking at him now, I noted that his round face was surprisingly ruddy for a hospitalized patient, and his gray hair was combed instead of poking out in clumps as it did when he was digging or mowing or just standing in the yard running dirt-encrusted fingers through it.

“Jill,” he said, finger still pressing the remote control. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

“It’s okay, Mr. Kepple.”

“They say they’re running tests to find out why I fell. I don’t have time for tests. I have—”

I put a hand on his arm. “It’s okay. I watered the garden.”

“I have to … Oh. Did you get the zinnias? What about the cosmos, they shrivel in this kind of heat. Is it as hot as it was yesterday? I can’t find the danged weather report on the TV.”

“The plants are okay. It’s not hot today. Look outside at the fog. Tell me how it is you fell.”

“But they still need watering.”

“Howard’s watering. At this very moment he’s in your yard with a hose. About your fall—”

“Howard? The big one with all that red hair? He doesn’t know plants.”

“Mr. Kepple, Howard’s doing you a favor!” I almost added, “Any moron can hold a hose.” But I caught myself and thus saved fifteen minutes of didacticism on the varying rates of moisture absorption of our local flora.

“The cineraria, are they—”

“Mr. Kepple, it’s been less than two days since you were out there,” I said before it became obvious that I had no idea which plants the cineraria were. “Now tell me about falling.”

I watched him as he considered my question. I knew that expression; he was gauging whether to go on pressing me for more botanical reassurance. And I was assessing him. Were his eyes moving normally? Was he hesitating too long? What were the signs of a small stroke anyway? And what was the prognosis? Would he be a candidate for a bigger one? Would he have to avoid bending over, having the blood rushing to his head?
Not
lift fifty-pound garden sacks? And did it mean that someone would have to keep an eye on him? “Mr. Kepple, how did you feel just before you fell? Lightheaded? Dizzy? Did everything go black?”

He gave me such a puzzled look that I wondered if he was following the conversation. “It was just a fall. I didn’t see it and I fell.”

Night blindness? A sudden blackout? What did that indicate. “Didn’t see what?”

“The wheelbarrow,” he said, as if that were
the
item God had created to propel the human body earthward.

“You didn’t see it?” I asked, alarmed. “Were you wearing your glasses?”

He nodded.

“When was the last time you had the prescription checked?”

“I don’t know, Jill, a couple years ago.”

In Kepple-ese, for a nonbotanical task a couple of years could mean a decade. “But, Jill, it was dark.”

“Even so,” I said, thinking of those antique lenses. “You have lights in the yard.”

“Out.”

“You took them out!”

“No, no. They’re still there. In fact—now, you tell me what you think of this—I was considering replacing them with pole lanterns. I could get colored glass, different colors, some red, some yellow, blue, light blue—”

“About the lights you have now, Mr. Kepple, why weren’t they on?”

“Didn’t turn them on,” he muttered.

“Mr. Kepple, it took you two months to get those lights in the way you wanted them, and now you’re not even using them?” Why did this surprise me? “Have you thought of calling an electrician?”

“They work. Didn’t turn them on,” he said, his voice softer than before.

“Why not?”

“Because there was no moon.”

I was leaning forward to make out his words. “You’re telling me that you spent weeks of time and God knows how much money to put lights in the yard, and then on a night when there is no moon, when it is pitch black in your backyard, you don’t turn those lights on?”

“Wanted it dark.”

“Oh.” Now light was beginning to dawn. “Why?”

“So they wouldn’t see.” It was nearly a whisper.

“So
the neighbors
wouldn’t see. See what?”

“Pps.”

“What?”

“Pppppsss.”

I had my ear nearly next to his mouth and still I had a hard time making out the word.
“Pipes.
Garden pipes? Irrigation pipes?”

Mr. Kepple took the TV remote in both hands and made a show of changing the channel. To a soap opera. He straightened his shoulders and said, “Well, Jill, I think the heat has gotten to some of my neighbors. You know they used to be nice people, good neighbors. Oh, some of them don’t do much with their yards, but to each his own, that’s what I say. I don’t hold that against them. Bert Pendergast, now he tries, but that magnolia of his, it hasn’t had a blossom in years. Doesn’t fertilize, doesn’t put anything into the soil. Nothing in, nothing out, that’s what I told him.”

“And I’m sure he appreciated it,” I said, forgetting that sarcasm was lost on Mr. Kepple. “I’ve been at your house. I know the neighbors are complaining about you using too much water.”

“I wanted to put a stop to that, Jill.”

I laughed. “And so you went and got underground irrigation pipe, carried it to the backyard in the pitch black to avoid the neighbors spotting it, and fell over your own wheelbarrow and broke your leg. Right?”

Mr. Kepple grunted.

“Well, you’d better tell your doctors about this before they spend all your money on brain scans and blood tests. And you’d better—”

He dropped the remote control and took my hand. “Jill, you’ve got a real interesting case now, right?” he said, demonstrating world-class lack of subtlety.

That silenced me for a moment. “How did you know about that?”

“Read it in the paper,” he said, as if reading about current events was an essential part of his routine. I knew better. For Mr. Kepple, newsprint was something on which to wipe his trowel. I sighed. If Mr. Kepple had noticed a report on the case, that meant the article was prominent, probably page one. And it meant the next installment of the story would be all the more appealing when the grieving Mouskavachis planted themselves in the police station lobby. Every newspaper in the Bay Area would dispatch reporters and photographers. TV camera crews would be vying for space. Politicians would demand action, self-appointed advocates would call press conferences. Committees would form to make sure that no city monies expended on the Mouskavachis were being siphoned from more deserving people, places, or things. Every member of the city council would take a position, on both the question of the family and the handling of the case,
my
handling of the case. It’d be press conferences morning and evening and a horde of phone demands in between. Once the Mouskavachis arrived, I’d be lucky to have any time at all to search for Kris’s killer.

Since the topic of Mr. Kepple’s fellow classmate was where I was headed anyway, I said, “I suppose you know about Hasbrouck Diamond and Leila Sandoval and her eucalyptus tree.”

“Oh, yeah. I was taking a class in trees at the time of the arbitration hearing. We spent a whole class discussing how we would trim the eucalypt, if we had to. Of course, no one would have wanted to. Trees that size—it was a
camaldulensis;
they can grow to a hundred and twenty feet in the right conditions—they’re hard to trim right to save the shape and keep the relative balance of the branches. And you know, Jill, the danger with eucalyptus branches is—”

“They fall just like that,” I said, snapping my fingers.

He did a double take, then smiled and patted my hand, as if to say I had done better than he would have expected.

“So no one in your class would have tackled the job?” I asked. “Was that because the job required more training than you had?”

The look of approval faded from his face. “No, Jill. Leila Sandoval’s tree was topped. Any moron, any moron without principles, that is, can run a chain saw through a tree. Stoned as he was most of the time, careless as he was even when he was straight, even he could do that.”

“Do you mean Cypress?”

“He’s the one Leila Sandoval chose to top the tree, Jill. I’d have thought you’d know that.”

“Cypress—where is he now?”

“Up north, I heard. But I don’t know. I wasn’t friendly with him, Jill. He had nothing to offer. He wasn’t really interested in gardening. It wasn’t just me, Jill, no one wanted to work with him. You could never count on him to do his part. If he was supposed to buy the fertilizer, he forgot. If it was his job to mulch he did it too late, or not at all. The guy was a flake, Jill. Even by Berkeley standards he was a flake.”

“He was thrown out of the school, right?”

“And none too soon. He was a hophead, Jill.”

There was a term I hadn’t heard for years. “Was he dealing?”

“Dealing? I don’t know. I didn’t get involved in things like that. He wouldn’t have asked about that in class. In classes—I had a couple with him—he just wanted to know about growing plants. We all knew what plants he meant. Jill, everybody laughed about him.”

“Leila Sandoval must have been able to find out what he was like.”

“She called the school for names and recommendations. I know for a fact that no one would have recommended him. He never passed a class.”

“And would she have been able to discover his interest in growing marijuana?”

Mr. Kepple’s eye opened wide. “Ah, Jill, I see what you’re asking. You want to know if she was looking for someone to grow her marijuana, right? It’s her land he’s got up there near Garberville, right? He’s just a tenant farmer, right?” He was all but bouncing up and down on the bed, bouncing his casted leg.

I had assumed that Leila Sandoval had hired a gardener to top her trees and then discovered that he was interested in growing marijuana. It could have been the other way around. Very possibly, Leila Sandoval got word of Cypress’s proclivities and that was why she chose him to top her trees and end her poverty.

As he had done to me not five minutes before, I reached over and patted Mr. Kepple’s hand in approval.

T
HE DEPARTMENTAL MEETING ROOM
is underneath the jail. At Detectives’ Morning Meeting, we all sit around the square formed by the tables in the middle of the room. Then there’s no one looking through the windows from the watch commander’s office or from the four holding cells that hug the walls. But after Morning Meeting the character of the room changes, as if the room itself took off its jacket and loosened its tie. Sworn officers tap on the watch commander’s window, before being motioned in to make reports or give explanations. Patrol officers rush to and from the communications center upstairs, clutching the goldenrod cards on which the calls in are recorded. Officers drag the old wooden chairs together and rest paper cups of vile machine coffee on the table as they swap information.

Sometimes we interview witnesses at the table as I had done this morning with Bev Zagoya. It’s an effective technique. A lot of official tan passes by. And holstered guns. And beepers. Through the door the witnesses can see rows of metal file cabinets; they hear officers talking about running names through
PIN,
through
CORPUS,
running latents through the new computer in Oakland. It reminds them what their odds are.

I could have brought Leila Sandoval out there. She was sitting in one of the holding cells, a small, old-fashioned school-roomish affair with one wooden chair and the one window overlooking all the activity in the meeting room. But keeping suspects in the holding cells has its own benefits. From inside there the suspects can see the fingers of Big Brother in Blue (or, in our case, tan) but can’t hear anything except the dire warnings of their own imaginations.

Leila Sandoval watched it all, as she shifted on the hard chair and shivered in that same T-shirt she had worn on Telegraph Avenue, the one with the sketch of the foot. Despite her sudden and unexpected departure from Garberville, her Kewpie doll makeup was in place—the turquoise eye shadow and the black mascara, the bright pink lipstick and the circles of rouge on her cheeks. Twenty years ago her delicate silky skin must have been like porcelain. Now, even the bright colors couldn’t seduce the eye away from the myriad of tiny lines that veiled her face. Her once blond hair was streaked with gray. She looked like a Kewpie doll that had been left in the attic all those years—old, dusty, forgotten.

Had it not been for her muscular shoulders and the scabrous-foot T-shirt, I would have pictured her doing nothing so down to earth as massage: I would have pictured her doing nothing at all, a living carnival prize.

I sat down at the square table where she could see me, and fingered through a folder. The most intimidating-looking papers in it were the standard forms, but Sandoval wouldn’t know that. Had she been reading over my shoulder, she would have seen an innocuous-looking note; that was what should have worried her. In it Raksen had said, “Oil on the chaise runners scented with patchouli.” Patchouli oil was a favorite in massage.

I let my gaze wash over her as she sat in the holding cell—another technique to soften up a suspect, or get one on edge. Sandoval looked edgy all right, as would any woman in her right mind after she had been picked up sunning herself in the middle of ten acres of marijuana. Did she look as nervous as a murder suspect should, I asked myself, as if there were a reliable scale of blush or twitching quotient. Hallstead, the Humboldt County sheriff, hadn’t mentioned Kris Mouskavachi’s death to her. It was too soon for word of it to have made the news in Humboldt County. But a neighbor from Berkeley could have called her. If so, she would ask about the murder first thing. If she didn’t, I’d wait to see what she revealed. And I’d nail her.