Diamond in the Buff

by Susan Dunlap

  “Did Kepple ever listen?” she yelled, shaking her head. “The man’s impossible.”

  I looked back at the wilted plants. How long had it taken them to sag like this? An hour? Four hours? All day? Mr. Kepple the obsessive … I remembered Howard at the pool Tuesday, flicking a drop of water off my arm, letting his hand rest there.

  Howard had said, “We could skip lap swim tonight. We swam yesterday.” “There’s a bottle of Zinfandel in the fridge,” I’d said. The same verbal foreplay we could be having in a few minutes. I could almost feel his fingers quivering against my skin, or was it the other way around? I stared down at the wilting plants. Despite the heat a shiver ran down my back. Picturing the pool and Howard pushing off, gliding underwater, without me, I sighed. To the neighbor, I said, “Has Mr. Kepple been watering today?”

  She pounded her fist on her porch railing. “Selfish old bastard! Doesn’t care about anyone but himself!”

  Be calm, I told myself. But I was already stepping out from the protection of the hedge. “Mr. Kepple doesn’t have anyone but himself. His wife is dead. All he has is his yard. Maybe you’d like to practice showing compassion during all those minutes you, and your husband, and your children save by not showering. Maybe you could earn a prize, too.”

  She stared, open-mouthed. Before she could regroup, I said, “Now tell me, when was the last time you saw him out here watering?”

  “Last night, but—”

  “Last night? Today’s the hottest day of the year. Where has he been today?”

  “Not here, thank God …” But some of the anger had drained from her voice. “I don’t know where he is.”

  I ran around to the front and pounded on the door. No sound came from inside. There was no green glow from the television (Mr. Kepple’s idea of burglar-proofing). I ran downstairs and peered into the garage. His pickup truck was inside.

  I grabbed the front door key from under the rock by the stairs and ran back up the stairs. Unlocking the door I walked in, calling his name.

  He wasn’t there. I picked up his phone and dialed the dispatcher at the station and asked him to check his records. If Mr. Kepple had had an accident in Berkeley, if an ambulance had been called in an emergency, it would be on the dispatcher’s log.

  I sat waiting, looking around the living room. The sofa was a brown tweed, frayed, the carpet green, worn. Everything needed dusting. In front of the television a Naugahyde recliner stood, its footrest still up. There were three rips in the plastic, two taped over with gray tape. A beer can lay on the floor next to it. Although I had never been in the room long enough to survey it like this, none of what I saw surprised me. Until I looked at the mantel. It was crowded with photos. In the center was a gold framed wedding picture of the Kepples that must have been forty years old. In it was a young Mr. Kepple, his hair too brown, his cheeks too pink in the photographic tint.

  He looked not nervous or stiff, but downright cocky. And Mrs. Kepple, who had died before I moved in, had a shy but knowing smile. Through the unnatural tint of the picture, she looked not pretty exactly, but warm, friendly, and yet … What exactly did that picture purvey? Wry. She looked wry. It was not the first characteristic I would have expected of a wife of Mr. Kepple. There were seven photos, taken, I guessed, every fifth anniversary. The Kepples smiled at each other in every one, the cockiness of his grin fading with each interval, her knowing smile softening to one of compassion. In the last one, maybe seven years old now, the two expressions had been nearly the same.

  But it wasn’t the expression itself that surprised me. What surprised me was the look of understanding, one I had never seen on Mr. Kepple’s face.

  What was taking the dispatcher so long?

  I glanced at the wall behind the recliner, at group photos from Mr. Kepple’s classes. WEEDS said the sign in front of the dozen or so students in the top one. PESTS was in the middle. And at the bottom TREES. I looked closer at TREES. Mr. Kepple was at the far right of the eight students. At the left, standing a bit away from the other seven was the blond boy with the tattoo of the cypress on his back and shoulders, the boy who had been talking to Leila Sandoval and Herman Ott this afternoon.

  “Smith?” the dispatcher said. “The call came early this morning, a nine eleven call to Alta Bates Hospital.”

  9

  MR. KEPPLE HAD FALLEN and broken his leg. That was the good news. The bad news was that they didn’t know why. Tomorrow they would run tests. It might have been a stroke.

  I walked slowly down the beige hospital hall to his room. I hadn’t pictured what he’d look like, but when I stepped into Mr. Kepple’s room he looked worse than I was prepared for. Mr. Kepple, who I was used to seeing bent over a wheelbarrow or hoisting a burlap-bound sapling, lay in the bed, gray, small, and rubbery looking. His eyes weren’t quite closed. Carefully, I put a hand on his arm and whispered, “Mr. Kepple?”

  He didn’t move.

  I hesitated to say his name louder, in case he really was asleep. I pulled up a chair next to his bed and watched him breathe. And tried not to imagine what life would be for him if he couldn’t move one side of his body, if he could never bend down and plant a six-pack of violets, or yank out a rhododendron.

  Suddenly Hasbrouck Diamond and Leila Sandoval seemed less than childish squabblers. They were fools to toss away precious hours or whole days or weeks fuming at each other. Hasbrouck Diamond was an idiot to sit stubbornly under a branch that could fall and maim him. And Leila Sandoval, what variety of villain was she to take even the chance of killing Bev Zagoya to nourish her petty revenge? And Herman Ott? Had he been party to Sandoval’s disappearance or had she merely made use of him? Herman Ott’s own unavailability could mean any of a number of things. And the boy with the cypress tattoo, who had been talking first to Leila and then to Ott, just where did he fit in? Was he a courier carrying her desperate plea to a responsive Ott? Or just a kid who happened by and spoke to two acquaintances? And who was he, anyway? How consistent with my day that I had before me the one person who knew the boy’s real name, and he couldn’t speak to me.

  I looked down at Mr. Kepple and felt a wave of guilt about that last thought. But, I reminded myself, Mr. Kepple of all people would understand self-absorption.

  The bed next to him was empty. The room was dark now, lit only by a dim fixture over the bed, one of those dull lights that seem to suck the illumination into it rather than spreading it out. Two feet from the bed, I couldn’t have seen to read. But reading didn’t occur to me. The room had taken on a reality of its own, pulling me into the rhythm of Mr. Kepple’s breathing. The regularity of the sound was lulling and I found myself sinking back in the chair, wedging my feet against the bedside table. Every so often, his breath would catch, he’d give a high wheeze, and I would jerk forward, pierced by fear of what his diagnosis might be, fear intensified by the sight of his pale, pale face. Then the shortness of his breaths reminded me of the terror that might lie beneath his eyelids. Or maybe nothing lay there.

  I should have gone on home. It was foolish to stay. But I couldn’t bare to have him wake up in a strange place with no one around. I kept thinking of those pictures on his mantel, and of Mrs. Kepple who wasn’t here for him. I wondered if he had sat in a hospital like this watching her breathe, and cease to breathe.

  I wondered if there would be a time, thirty, forty years from now, when I would sit in a chair like this and watch Howard cease to breathe. Or, considering his line of work, a time sooner. I couldn’t bring myself to picture Howard’s face gray like Mr. Kepple’s or his eyes empty. I knew I couldn’t allow myself to think of it at all. There are times for gallows humor in police work; it protects us. There are times when the unspoken law of police etiquette forbids it: we don’t laugh about death when the dead are kids or old people, or other cops. Then all our fury goes into getting the bastards who did it. But in a way the two reactions are the same thing. Both protect us; both allow us to keep going and do the job we’re paid for. And yet every
time we hone this skill we push the realization of death deeper down farther from consideration, and the unfaced fear gains strength in the darkness.

  I stood up and went in search of a phone to call Howard. But when I dialed, I got no answer at my place and the machine at his. I called the dispatcher—no word from patrol—then dialed information and got Sandoval’s number and dialed her. No answer. Then, for form’s sake, I tried Ott. I could picture him perching next to the phone, yellow bathrobe over yellow nightshirt (I’d woken him up often enough over the years to know his nocturnal garb) and a smug look on his sallow face as he listened to me talk to his machine.

  I walked back to Mr. Kepple’s room and sat for half an hour, a draft moving across my shoulders, medicinal odors I couldn’t name tainting the air. Uncomfortable as the chair was I dozed.

  Mr. Kepple woke up around two A.M. He looked right at me.

  “Mr. Kepple,” I said.

  “Flo?” he asked.

  Flo? Mrs. Kepple? “No, it’s me, Jill. Jill Smith?”

  “Oh.” His eyes misted. It was a full minute before he said, “Not Flo.” Then his eyes closed again.

  I swallowed, wondering if she lived each night in his dreams, or if I was making that up.

  Mr. Kepple woke twice more. The second time I told him who I was and he repeated my name, but I couldn’t tell whether he knew what that word meant. I didn’t know whether my sitting in the chair all night had made the slightest difference to him, if he even realized I was there or remembered it once his eyes closed.

  At four fifteen, a nurse woke me up.

  “Are you Detective Smith?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  She handed me a piece of paper. “Call this number.”

  Back cramped, neck tight, one hand numb from falling asleep on that side, I stood up.

  Mr. Kepple groaned. His eyes opened. He stared straight ahead, eyes fixed with the look of terror I had hoped he’d be spared. “Hospital?” he asked.

  “It’s okay, Mr. Kepple.”

  “What am I doing here?”

  I rang to get the nurse back. “You had a fall. You broke your leg. You’ll be okay now.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Four twenty.”

  “Twenty after four!” His grayish face looked even paler. “After four! I needed to get the sprinkler on at three. Before they come home from work.”

  I didn’t have to say who “they” were. I caught myself before I could say it was four in the morning. “Don’t worry, Mr. Kepple, I checked the plants, they’re fine.”

  “Sprinkler … dahlia … salpiglossis.”

  I gave his hand a squeezed and smiled. “The plants will be fine, Mr. Kepple.”

  He nodded. His skin looked as if it had loosened. It reacted to the movement of his chin an instant late. “Jill?”

  “Yes?” I bent closer.

  “You’ll take care of them, won’t you? You can turn the sprinkler on when you go out to work.”

  He’d forgotten I didn’t live there anymore. “Yes,” I said, knowing there was no other answer, “of course I’ll take care of the garden.”

  “You’re a nice girl, Jill.” He sighed. His face relaxed. In a moment he was asleep again. He hadn’t asked about his own condition.

  Shaking my head, I hurried out to the phone and dialed the number on the paper: the dispatcher.

  “Berkeley Police Department.”

  “Five twenty-seven,” I said.

  “Ah, Smith.” He paused a moment, to check his log, I knew. But I wouldn’t have had to wait for him to give me the particulars. The dispatcher’s tone is always the first clue. I recognized that mixture of adrenaline, regret, and curiosity. I knew it would be a 187 (homicide) before he told me. But I didn’t guess that the address would be Dr. Hasbrouck Diamond’s.

  It took me less than twenty minutes to drive to the base of Panoramic Way.

  Overnight the fog had blown in, thick, gray, cold. Pulser lights from patrol cars and the spinner atop the ambulance flashed off the retaining wall across the street, off the fog-wet NO PARKING ANY TIME sign, off the pavement, off the finish of the other cars. There was light in every window in every house. Thick morning fog fuzzed the yellow light in the windows, and the street looked like an Advent calendar on Christmas Day. Lights on second floors went out; lights downstairs came on. The patrol cars blocked driveways (the street was too narrow to double-park in). The squeals from the radios filtered into the fog. Farther up the street I spotted Raksen’s van. A couple of civilian cars I recognized as belonging to newspeople stuck out at odd angles at the switchback. I pulled in front of another driveway and hurried down to Diamond’s house, shivering in the shirt that had been too heavy yesterday.

  A surprisingly large crowd peered over the hedge and pressed at the yellow plastic “rope” the scene supervisor had put up. About half of them looked like reporters; two had cameras.

  “Detective Smith,” one of them called.

  “I just got here,” I said, stepping over the barricade and making my way onto the deck.

  The lights from Hasbrouck Diamond’s living room came through the big glass doors. In the post-dawn fog they had the same depressing after-the-party look as dirty glasses and overflowing ashtrays abandoned on tables and chair arms. Inside, I could see the poster-size photos of huge icy mountains, of Nepali villages at the foot of them, of Bev Zagoya at the peak of one, planting a flag. I saw geometric quilts in red and blue and black prints, and a cloth wall hanging depicting Tibetan demons that hadn’t been there yesterday. The room was set up for Bev Zagoya’s presentation. Vaguely I wondered who would call all the invitees and cancel.

  I looked at the spot where Hasbrouck Diamond had been sitting when the eucalyptus branch fell. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find his corpse right there. But nothing was there, neither Hasbrouck Diamond, nor his chair.

  I walked toward the end of the deck where Hasbrouck Diamond’s rappelling wall went forty feet down. The gate was open.

  Martinez, the crime scene supervisor, put up a hand. “Watch it!”

  “Watch what?”

  Martinez pointed to the deck floor.

  I had to bend closer to see what he was protecting. Hunkered down I could make out the two long skid marks. They led off the edge of the deck.

  “Down there,” Martinez said as I stood up. “The chaise lounge went over the end. He went headfirst. Landed on his head. Snapped his neck.”

  I moved around him to the edge of the deck. There’s an odd silence that comes at that moment when you know you’re going to see the body, a body that used to be a person you knew. It’s as if a bubble surrounds you, blocking the patrol car squeals, the murmuring of the crowd, the slap of shoe leather against the redwood decking, and what you hear is your own breathing, and the eucalyptus leaves rustling in the cold, fog-laden wind.

  Careful to avoid the skid marks, I looked down into the brush and poison oak, and the light that surrounded the body.

  I hadn’t actually formed the thought, but I had assumed the victim would be Hasbrouck Diamond. I was prepared for that. I hadn’t liked Diamond, and that would have made it a little easier.

  But I had liked Kris Mouskavachi. And I didn’t want him to be dead. And Kris Mouskavachi was certainly dead.

  10

  THE ONLY WAY TO get to the spot where Kris lay, other than the route he himself had taken, was to go back through the deck arch, down the sidewalk, around the switchback to the yard below Diamond’s, up the path, over the yellow plastic “rope,” and twenty feet up the steep, rocky brush-and poison-oak-covered incline.

  I took a breath as I neared the body, but it didn’t help. After the last ceremony when new officers were sworn, I had taken a couple of the women aside and said, “Berkeley’s a small town. There are going to be times when you roll out and find the corpse of a friend’s mother, or child, or the friend himself. You’re going to feel like shit. But no matter how bad you feel, how justified that is, remember th
is: Women cops don’t cry. A guy cries, people think that’s a sign he’s human, but if a tear rolls down a woman officer’s cheek, she loses credibility forever.”

  I stared into fog-dark underbrush and listened to one of the patrol guys up on the deck, talking to Martinez, talking about the DOA, about Kris. “Helluva way to get up in the morning, huh?”

  “Yeah.” It was Martinez. “Regular Cannonball Run.”

  “Berkeley Airlines Supersaver!” They both laughed. I would have laughed had I not known Kris. But even having known him, the gallows humor was working. I felt that therapeutic distance forming. And I looked down not quite so much at the boy who’d made me an iced cappuccino, but more at “the deceased.”

  The chaise lounge had landed right side up, the end wedged against a tree. Kris’s head had hit a slab of rock and the force of the flight had flipped his body over, so now he lay with his legs, pelvis, and lower ribs across the chaise, the back of his head still on the rock. It didn’t take any esoteric knowledge to see that his neck had snapped. His nose—not his chin, but his nose—was pressed into his breastbone.

  Surely, I thought, he couldn’t have lived long after the impact, probably only seconds. But he’d bled a lot. Head wounds do. Brown, dried blood coated his hair and the rock, like wax that has dripped from a fast-burning candle. I wondered how Raksen would deal with that when he moved the body. Would the blood pull at Kris’s hair?

  I turned away and swallowed hard, and came within a breath of losing my credibility.

  Kris’s right hand clutched the metal arm of the lounge. That watch of his with the map of Switzerland was still running. The gallows thought crossed my mind: an advertisement for Swiss watches. “You may crash to your death, but your Swiss watch will keep ticking.”

  I took Raksen’s flashlight, bent down, and looked more closely at that watch. The case was gold, as was the map of Switzerland and the lettering of the German name beneath it, one I’d never heard of. It was an expensive-looking watch for a boy like Kris to have. To Raksen, I said, “I’ll need this watch when you’re done.”