Diamond in the Buff (2 page)

“Smith, did the dispatcher tell you who the victim was?”

“No,” I said, wiping a hand across my moist forehead.

Pereira’s smile widened. “The victim,” she said, caressing the word with her voice, “was Hasbrouck Diamond, D.D.S.”

“Diamond? I’ve heard that name. Where?”

“You must never have had this beat—uh,
district
—huh, Smith?” The term “beat” was passé; now beats had become districts.

“No.”

“Then you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Leila Sandoval, either?”

“No. Is she Diamond’s significant other?”

“You might put it that way,” she said portentously. Sweat ran down her forehead into the corners of her eyes and down her cheeks like tears, pale-blue tears. But Connie Pereira didn’t seem to notice.

“Pereira! For Chrissakes, it must be a hundred degrees here. In another thirty seconds we’re both going to be melted all over the sidewalk.”

“Okay, okay. I just wanted to give you the feel of the situation here.”

I wiped my hand across the back of my neck. “If the situation is gummy, I think I have the feel.”

“Well, Smith, Leila Sandoval lives up there.” She indicated the small, heavily cracked, caramel-colored cottage next door. “Diamond and Sandoval had a feud going that would make the Hatfields take note.”

The light dawned. “Has-Bitched Diamond! Dr. Hasbrouck Diamond is Has-Bitched!”

Pereira laughed aloud. “You got it. Let me fill you in on the feud,” Pereira said, moving under the shade of paperbark tree. “It started with the normal stuff, complaints about overturned garbage cans and cars blocking the driveway. Then Has-Bitched reported Leila Sandoval for working at home without a license. She’s a masseuse. She responded by calling us about noise when he had a party. Has-Bitched countered with notifying the zoning commission about her business in her home. She won the hearing but not without weeks of effort. All that hassle seemed to have sapped her. We didn’t hear anything for a couple of months. We’d just about decided Has-Bitched had won, when Sandoval delivered a master stroke.” Pereira grinned. She shifted her weight onto her right foot and said, “Well, now this one I know only by hearsay. It didn’t involve us. The story is that Diamond is crazy about Bev Zagoya. An unrequited passion.”

“Bev Zagoya, the mountaineer! I saw her slide show last night, a rather abruptly ended show.”

“Good, so you know something about mountaineering then. Well, it seems Sandoval managed to convey to Has-Bitched—God knows how, they’re not on speaking terms—that mountaineers are fanatic about perfecting their skills.”

I nodded. Bev Zagoya had made that point about skills several times during her detailed description of the preliminaries.

“Sandoval convinced Has-Bitched that mountaineers are always looking for a place to practice rappelling, that it’s hard to find a good tall rockface where they can attach their ropes at the top and bounce down without running into ten rock climbers on the way up. So to entice the unresponsive Zagoya, Diamond built, at great expense, a rappelling wall off the far end of his deck.”

Despite better intentions, I laughed. “Didn’t he know that mountaineers hate to rappel? I know that from one lecture. Bouncing down a hard surface, bound after bound, the chances of turning an ankle or reinjuring a knee … Zagoya must have thought he was a fool.”

“So the story goes.” Pereira wasn’t rubbing her hands together, but she looked like she wanted to.

“Sandoval must have loved that. Did Diamond counter?”

Pereira nodded. “He got her good. Seems Sandoval was doing some kind of massage where the clients free their repressed emotions by letting out a healthy scream. But here’s the thing about this one, Smith. When Has-Bitched called us to complain, he didn’t say a woman was screaming, he said it sounded like there was a wounded cougar in the house next door.” Pereira paused. “Smith, you are, of course, familiar with the ‘Police Beat’ column in the paper?”

I nodded. “Police Beat” with its wry descriptions of our calls—all public record—alternately amused and infuriated us, as the columnist highlighted the most bizarre or absurd cases.

“Well, Diamond admitted later that he had ‘Police Beat’ in mind when he made the call. But the paper did him one better, it ran the call as their lead,
‘COUGAR’ HOWLS IN HILLS.
According to Sandoval, that story destroyed her business.”

I shook my head. “And did she retaliate?”

“If so, it didn’t involve us. But I can’t believe she didn’t, because a couple months later Diamond hit her with City Ordinance fifty-eight seventeen.” She paused. When I showed no recognition of the number she said, “Smith, the tree ordinance. Diamond’s last complaint was about that eucalyptus. The tree that attacked him!”

Now I did remember. In Berkeley, we take pains to keep the fences of our pasture distant and out of sight. We rarely smack into them. In between those fences, though, we are happy to argue about every weed and pebble. City council meetings last till the wee hours. But many of our municipal wars are over fairness to the underdog.

The tree ordinance, however, was not a battle between haves and have-nots. It was between haves and used-to-haves. Between people who have trees and their neighbors who used to have views. By and large Berkeleyans love trees. On the university campus, gardeners have used giant cranes to transplant sixty-foot Italian stone pines rather than cut them down. Berkeleyans are horrified when lumber companies to the north threaten stands of virgin redwood. But on streets like Panoramic Way, where houses nestle together like toes in a tight shoe and each of those toes sells for half a million dollars, a view of San Francisco Bay, the city skyline, and the Golden Gate Bridge can be a fifty-thousand-dollar eyeful. And a neighbor’s redwood that blocks that view is not the same as the virgin redwood a hundred and fifty miles away.

I glanced from the deck to the five eucalypts, and from them to Sandoval’s shabby house. “Pereira, Sandoval’s not blocking Diamond’s view. Her house is uphill from him.”

“Not his view, Smith.”

“His solar collector?” That was another stipulation of the ordinance—trees that had grown up and blocked a solar collector were liable to trimming, thinning, topping, or removal.

Pereira chuckled. “Only in the most personal sense.” Clearly she could barely contain herself. “Maybe Dr. Diamond has spent too much time looking at the jaundiced white of molars. Or the whiter white of dental crowns. But Has-Bitched does not like to see white on his own epidermis. He never said it in the public hearings, of course, but what he wants that sun for is to lie out in it—in the buff. And when that eucalyptus branch attacked, it scraped the tan right off the left flank.”

Moving closer to Pereira, I lowered my voice, a tactic that she might have considered. “Pereira, the impression I got from the dispatcher was that the branch just fell on him.”

“It seems like it, from the evidence on the branch and the tree where it broke off. You know eucalyptus branches don’t bend and creak and ease their way to the ground like some other trees. They break off and—”

“—fall just like that,” I said, snapping my fingers before she could get hers in position. “Pereira, I don’t call that assault. Assault assumes a perpetrator.”

“Ah, Smith”—Pereira moved her hands in a wide arc as if encircling the whole pasture of possibilities—“but, you see, Has-Bitched does call it assault. Has-Bitched says Leila Sandoval hired a tree trimmer to sabotage the branch so it broke off just when he was sitting beneath it.”

“How did the tree trimmer manage this feat?”

Pereira laughed. “That Has-Bitched doesn’t know. Discovering that, he says, is our problem.”

R
AKSEN, THE
ID
TECH
, hurried toward me, the bag that held his sampling paraphernalia in one hand, camera case slung over shoulder. He was tall, so thin his pants seemed to stay up by good will alone, and had wiry brown hair and dark eyes that were never still. “Attack of the killer eucalyptus, eh?”

“Raksen,” I said, “regardless of what we may think of Diamond and his theory that branches drop by appointment, we have to play this by the book. If he gets it into his head that we’re not honoring his complaint he’ll be bitching to the Review Commission faster than a eucalyptus branch falls.”

“Like that!” he said, snapping his fingers.

I motioned toward the fallen limb. “Go on the assumption that someone managed to sabotage that branch. Check for copper nails, wires, whatever. Cut a cross section. Make a cast. Take photos of the branch end and the spot of the tree it broke from. And let Diamond see that you’re giving it the same treatment as you’d give the gun that shot Kennedy.”

Raksen nodded impatiently. My entreaty had been unnecessary. Raksen was a perfectionist. He never took one photo when three were possible. When he finished dusting for prints, every surface in the room was covered in powder. No spot was so remote that Raksen would admit a “responsible’s” finger could not have been there. He once clinched a case by lifting the guilty UPS man’s prints from the inside of the oven door.

“It’s the eucalypt at the far end of the deck,” I said. “The spot’s a good ten feet above the deck. Get it if you can, but don’t kill yourself doing it.”

Raksen nodded, spun toward the deck and was almost through the hedge before I caught his arm. “And Raksen, ask Diamond for a shot of the injury site. His left flank.”

Raksen nodded, and headed toward the branch.

Pereira went to get Diamond. I paused in the shade of the nearest eucalypt just long enough to cool the sweat on my body. That was a mistake, as impulsively grabbed pleasures so often are. (Howard and I had discussed this very issue as we lay in the California King two mornings ago. But we didn’t come to the conclusion about mistakes for another hour, when we were within seconds of being late for Detectives’ Morning Meeting.)

When I stepped onto Dr. Hasbrouck Diamond’s deck the sun felt all the hotter. There was no breeze. Even the sharp, clean smell from the eucalyptus trees beside the deck had lost its edge.

Raksen stood at the far corner, eyeing the tree in question, the overturned chaise lounge and the thick branch beside it. Had the branch broken the railing and rolled off the deck, it could have fallen forty feet to the ground, careened down the hill, and crashed into the house below or anyone who happened to be in the yard. Diamond’s neighbor might not have engineered the time of the branch’s fall, but if she had weakened the tree, she’d endangered more than Has-Bitched, and this seriocomic feud of theirs was way out of hand.

While Raksen contemplated the angles from which he would photograph, I examined the tree itself. There were no telltale scrapes on the trunk. Like the other four giant eucalypts, it was much too big for the narrow space between the deck and the house next door. A branch or two from each tree extended above the deck. I peered over the deck railing. The ground below dropped off sharply. My throat clutched with panic, a
small
clutch of panic, the residue of a battle with acrophobia. Ignoring that reaction, I stared at the wild shrubs and grass and golden California poppies and poison oak that grew around the bases of the eucalypts. All but the poison oak and the occasional poppy were brown now, victims of the drought year.

But the oddest thing here was the gate in the deck railing, a gate that opened to a forty-foot drop! Swallowing against my tightening throat, I leaned over the railing and looked down. The deck was held up by metal poles anchored in cement bases. Crossbars reinforced them. And beneath me, beneath this odd gate was the rappelling wall Hasbrouck Diamond reputedly had built for his reluctant inamorata. It ran all the way to the ground. And a rope dangled in front of it. A big pasture, indeed, we had here in Berkeley.

Leaving questions about the wall for later, I stood up and looked at Diamond’s house. Double sets of glass doors led into the living room. Between them a picture window reflected the eucalypts. The house was a giant shingled shoebox, running lengthwise out over the steep hillside. It was huge for Panoramic Way, where building even a twelve-by-twelve room required drilling steel support poles deep into bedrock. Geranium-filled window boxes lined the edge of the flat roof above the second floor and at the corners curved Chinese-red planks arched pagodalike. From them hung brightly colored sock-flags painted to resemble carp. Today, in the still air, they looked like dead carp.

The glass door opened. The man Pereira shepherded through was probably in his mid-forties, slightly built, with thin light-brown hair and the worst posture I had ever seen on an ambulatory human being. His head jutted forward like a fat carp dangling from the end of a pole. Or the corner of his roof. He gazed down (the only direction he could without difficulty) and with each step he looked in danger of falling forward and tumbling off the deck. Briefly I wondered if the man had some structural deformity, but I remembered someone insisting that Hasbrouck Diamond’s appalling stance was due to nothing more than sloppy posture. If so, mothers could have displayed Diamond as a warning to their slouching adolescents.

As I watched Diamond stomp toward me, I recalled one afternoon in Howard’s and my office: Jackson, my fellow homicide detective, had been there when Pereira had stalked in from handling the latest Diamond call. “Has-Bitched made his whole complaint staring at his balls,” she’d announced.

“Maybe the dude was doing a double-check,” Jackson said.

“No need!” Pereira had snapped. “Not after he called and had me make a special trip out there because his neighbor’s garbage can spilled on his sidewalk. The guy’s got plenty of balls.”

Looking at Diamond now, it was hard to say just how tall he might have been. Stooped over he was about my height: five-seven. Even in his face he bore a familial resemblance to one of his carp. His eyes strained forward under the lids. His lips seemed poised to smack together. I had a good view of the top of his head: there was a bald spot there, and pale brown hairs hovered around it. He was wearing a white beach jacket belted loosely over his wrinkled tanned stomach and bathing trunks that covered not enough of his spindly tanned legs. What level of aesthetic self-deception, I wondered, could have led
this
man to exhibit his body nude? Now the sight of his bathing trunks and oiled skin reminded me of the heat, the heat I was enduring in work clothes—because of his complaint. The dichotomy in our dress did nothing to endear him to me. And the implicit condescension of his attire didn’t help.