by Susan Dunlap
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.”
3
RAKSEN, 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 he
ad: 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.
I said, “I’m Detective Smith, Homicide–Felony Assault. Why don’t you start from the beginning, Dr. Diamond?”
Most victims balk at repeating their stories over and over again, but Diamond nodded enthusiastically, an action that made his head look all the more like a hooked carp. “That’s the branch, right there, Detective. No question it could have killed me. You can see that, right?” He shifted his gaze from the branch to Raksen bending over the end, camera in hand. “She’s crazy. I kept telling you people—she’s crazy.”
It took me a moment to realize Diamond was not anthropomorphizing the eucalypt. I said, “She?”
“My neighbor, Leila Sandoval,” he sputtered, thrusting an accusing finger at the cottage beyond the deck rail. He held the pose for effect. But the impression he gave standing there, head down, arm raised to the side, was of a diver about to slip off the end of the board.
I glanced at Pereira, another of those ill-conceived indulgences. She was pressing her lips together to keep from unsuitable behavior. This was not going to be an easy interview for her.
Diamond lowered his arm and raised his gaze. Glaring directly at me, he said, “Detective, the woman’s been off the beam for years. She’s a lunatic. Ought to be put away.”
“Do I understand that you are accusing your neighbor of breaking off a thick eucalyptus branch ten feet above the spot where you were sitting and dropping it on you?”
“You won’t think it’s ridiculous when you meet her.”
“Now, Dr. Diamond,” I said, making an effort to mask any sarcasm, “how do you think she might have managed this attack without alerting you?”
My effort failed; Diamond’s flat face reddened. “Officer, I expect service from my police force. This woman has been plaguing me for years and the police have done nothing about it. It’s not for lack of my trying, I’ll tell you that.”
Behind, Diamond Pereira nodded emphatically.
I opened my pad, pushed in the button on the ballpoint pen, and waited.
“Look at those branches,” he shouted, “they’re thick as tree trunks themselves. And hanging out like that, it’s no wonder they drop off. She needs to get all those branches trimmed. Any idiot can see that. But do you think she’d do it? Not her.”
“So, is it negligence you’re talking about?” I asked, lowering my voice in reaction to his.
But that tactic made no impression. Diamond shouted, “Not negligence. Assault!”
“Dr. Diamond, assault and battery assume intent—”
“Of course she intended to hit me. That’s why she left the branches like that. She knew there was nothing I could do about them.”
I glanced up at the overhanging branches. “I’m sure you know that when a neighbor’s tree crosses the property line—”
“They’re not over my property line,” he muttered, his voice suddenly softer than mine.
“What did you say, Dr. Diamond?”
He dropped his gaze. “Guy who put in my deck,” he muttered at his groin, “he built it six feet too wide.”
“He built your deck six feet over your neighbor’s property?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice even.
Pereira clamped a hand over her mouth. Raksen was lying at the far corner of the deck peering up through his lens, presumably to get the fallen branch and the tree in one shot.
Grabbing back the offensive, Diamond said, “Don’t think that lunatic of a woman didn’t make hay from that. I was out of town while the carpenter was working. But she was here. If she was as piqued as she made out, she could have stopped him when the first board crossed the line. But not her. She waited till the whole thing was done. Done and stained and waterproofed. Seventeen thousand dollars later. Then she waltzed in here, all smug, and told me I’d have to pull it down. Then the deck would have been no bigger than a sidewalk. It would have been useless. She knew that. And she made hay.”
“What specific kind of hay, Dr. Diamond?”
“Twenty thousand dollars. Sheer blackmail,” he said to his belt.
“Do you mean she gave you an easement in return for the twenty thousand?”
He nodded, and muttered something to his chest. The only word I could make out was “branches.” But that was enough.
“You agreed that the eucalyptus branches can overhang your deck because they are on her property, is that right?”
Flushing to the top of his tonsure, Diamond grunted.
Behind him, Pereira swallowed hard. Her face was nearing the color of his. With considerable effort I restrained a smile of my own as I realized that this was Sandoval’s missing thrust in the feud, the one after Diamond’s howling cougar. Sandoval had certainly parried in style. No wonder he’d been spurred on to invoke the tree ordinance. “Still—”
“Officer, I lie sunbathing there at the corner of my deck, in my chaise every Thursday afternoon, every sunny weekend. She knows that. Ask Bev Zagoya. She’s living here.” He looked directly at me, beaming with pride.
“Bev Zagoya, the mountaineer?” I asked, amazed to find she was living here. Had the scorned rappelling wall done the trick after all? Did Hasbrouck Diamond embody an attraction not visible to the naked eye? From what I had seen, Diamond seemed like the last person a woman like Bev Zagoya would choose to live with. “Is she here now?”
“She’s taking a break, working on holds up at Indian Rock. She’s pitching the Everest expedition tomorrow; we’ve been working like crazy getting the background data, compiling the figures, hassling the caterers. Tomorrow afternoon the living room will be jammed with money men. Half of Hollywood will be here to get in on the ground floor of the first all-California expedition to Everest led by a woman. That is if that lunatic doesn’t sabotage it.”
I restrained a sigh. “Do you have some proof she’s attempting sabotage?”
“She’d love to sabotage me.”
I took that for a no. But I did wonder if Bev Zagoya shared her host’s apprehension and if that, perhaps, was the real cause of her peculiar behavior last night. Shifting my attention back to the issue at hand, I said, “Dr. Diamond, did she or anyone else see the branch fall on you?”
“Kris Mouskavachi, one of Bev’s associates. He is here.” He turned, cranking his head up to stare at the tree. “That branch was right over my chair. The lunatic knew that,” he insisted angrily. “All she had to do was weaken it. When those eucalyptus branches go, they go like that.” His fingers brushed past each other. In the history of eucalyptus, had anyone ever described the fall of a branch without attempting to snap his fingers? “Nothing can stop them.”
“Dr. Diamond,” I said slowly, “since you had these suspicions about your neighbor, didn’t it occur to you to sit somewhere else?”
Diamond turned purple. “Move!” he demanded. “Why should I move? It’s my deck! That’s the one spot where her damned trees don’t shade it. I had ’em topped, but look at them!” He shot an arm in their direction. All five eucalypts rose to a point just even with Leila Sandoval’s roof, where their tops had been lopped off. New growth poked out from the branches, but that did little to ameliorate the effect of the sawed-off trunks, and, in fact, gave the great trees an unnaturally foreshortened look, rather like Hasbrouck Diamond himself.
“Not two years later and they’re already shading out eighty percent of the deck. I’ll be damned if that bitch’ll make me move out of the sun!”
“Would she be likely to know how you feel?” I asked for form
’s sake.
“You bet. She knows and she loves it. She’s just waiting till the trees shade the whole thing, which’ll probably be in another month. Damn trees. Drought doesn’t bother them. They grow in heat. They grow in frost. They don’t need fertilizer. The damned things are weeds, Detective,” he said, dropping his arm and gaze, “sometimes I see her up there looking out the window, just watching those branches grow and block out my sun. I can see her smiling to herself. She’s got me by the short hairs.”
A clear and present danger for the nude sunbather. I took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and asked, “What exactly gives her this, uh, hold on you?”
“The tree ordinance, Detective. Surely you’re familiar with the ordinances of our city.”
“But Dr. Diamond, you made the complaint about the trees!”
“The damned ordinance is full of holes,” he growled. “Twelve point forty-five point oh-four-three gee states that once you’ve gotten a judgment on a tree you can’t get another one for five years. So she’s got me for the next three years. Her trees can turn my house into an ice palace and there’s not a damned thing I can do.”
I jammed my teeth together to keep from laughing. Pereira wasn’t so successful. A gurgle escaped her. She made tracks for the far end of the deck. Diamond continued to scowl at his feet.
I swallowed and said, “Dr. Diamond, this is a serious charge you are making. And I have to question Ms. Sandoval’s motivation. From what you say, she already had you.”
Diamond squeezed his hands into fists. “I keep telling you, the woman’s a lunatic. She didn’t need a reason. She saw that branch hanging over me and she just couldn’t resist it. She’s probably up there right now laughing her head off,”