by Susan Dunlap
Without looking up, he said, “Kris was my guest, my responsibility. I cared about the boy. Although he’d only been with me six weeks, it was kind of like having a son. I showed him Berkeley, I took him to my spot on Orchard Lane. I told him”—Diamond swallowed—“how it’s like a three-minute vacation in Florence there. But he didn’t understand. He didn’t even know what Florence was like; he’d never been anywhere but Kathmandu and Delhi. Having Kris here was nice … comfortable … having him here. I like company. Bev was in the Alps when he arrived, so, you see, I had a chance to really know him, just like a son.”
“Any sexual attraction?”
His eyes snapped open. “Hardly. Detective, I was responsible for the boy. And I, Detective, am not attracted to boys.”
“What about Bev Zagoya? You were attracted to her.”
His face softened. I recalled that look of pride he’d had the first time he mentioned her. “I am,” he said, “very fond of Bev. Fond and very, very proud. You’d have to ask her if that feeling is mutual.”
I nodded, noting the odd terms he had used, ones that would certainly not be mutual. “And Leila Sandoval? You were involved with her, weren’t you?”
“That lunatic! Detective, haven’t I made myself clear about her? I—”
“The truth, Dr. Diamond.”
“I don’t expect to be—”
“Enough!” I said, glaring down at him. “A boy’s been murdered. You say that attack was meant for you. Maybe so. Now I don’t have time for lies. I want to know exactly what went on between you and Sandoval, and how it relates to everything that’s happened since.”
For a moment he didn’t move. Outside the branch of a live oak brushed against the window pane. Red lights from one of the pulsers flashed and then were gone. Diamond sank down on the corner of Kris’s unused white bed. His head hung. He muttered, “She lived next door. It was just convenience. I thought for a while there was something in her, some drive, some flash of specialness, some small speck of what Bev is made of. But there wasn’t. But it was convenient. I had my Thursdays off.
She was here. Her husband was at work. It was an amusement for a while. Just temporary. Just a convenience.”
“But not for her?” I prodded, sitting beside him where I could get a better view of his face.
Diamond shrugged.
“She and her husband separated, didn’t they?”
His jaw tightened. “That wasn’t my fault. I didn’t encourage that. Whatever great flourish of emotion that lunatic woman chose to indulge, I did not demand.” He looked directly at me. “Detective, Lucas Sandoval was a sensible man. He was an engineer. He saw his chance to escape the lunatic, got himself transferred, and pressed for divorce. If you ask me he’d probably been looking for a way out for years. And considering what’s happened to me, and now to Kris, Lucas Sandoval was damned smart.”
Diamond slumped farther forward, the picture of depression. And self-protection. It’s hard to talk to a man’s back or side, or the top of his head. Suddenly, the sight of him, his incredible protective self-absorption, made me furious. And despite my feelings about Leila Sandoval I sympathized with her. Then Hasbrouck Diamond surprised me.
“Kris was my guest,” he said. “My responsibility. I will call his parents and give them the news.”
I hesitated momentarily, hating to remove the onus of that task from him. “That’s not—”
“No. It is.” His hands squeezed back into fists. Despite his tan, his face had taken on a jaundiced look. “Besides,” he muttered, “I am a periodontist. I have a lot of experience in making bad news palatable.” A weak smile flashed on his face. He blushed, swallowed, let his head hang back to its normal position, and said, “Sorry, a little dental humor there. Hardly the time for it.”
“Dr. Diamond, that’s a generous offer. But notification of survivors in a murder case is a police function.
“When I call the Mouskavachis I will tell them that you intended to let them know.” Looking at Diamond I wondered if his rare display of consideration was generated by a sorrow over Kris’s death, a horror at the thought that Kris had died in his place, or just the hollow terror of thinking that it could have been himself on the way to the morgue. Or all three. Or perhaps there was something he didn’t want the Mouskavachis telling me.
12
I LET DIAMOND GO. He trudged into his own pristine room, looking like a troll who’d made a wrong turn and wandered into the Hall of the Elf Kings.
I went downstairs to the deck, motioned Martinez over, and told him to have Leonard go back to the neighbors who had a view of that chaise and find out who they would have expected to find on it. Acosta he sent up to the roof garden to relieve Heling, who had taken Zagoya’s statement and was now babysitting the climber. When Heling came down I went over the statement with her. Zagoya’s story matched Diamond’s: They both said they had been working on their presentation. Kris had been out. They finished about ten. She went to bed about eleven.
Then I climbed the two flights to the roof. The roof garden was a redwood-floored rectangle with a redwood railing, redwood chairs and tables, and flower boxes filled with red geraniums. It would have made a much better sundeck than the deck below. Here Hasbrouck Diamond could have sat unshaded by eucalyptus, unendangered by threats from branches. This morning, like most mornings, it was still thick in fog. But if Bev Zagoya missed the sun, she gave no indication. Hose in hand, she was bending over one of the geranium-filled planters that lined the edges of the roof. Geraniums are not flowers you see much anymore, outside of posters of Switzerland (a thought which I would be careful not to pass on to Mr. Kepple). These made an odd mixture with the red Chinese turrets at the corners, and the fish socks that hung limply from them. Dissonant but not ineffective.
“Dissonant” summed up the impression I got looking at Bev Zagoya. In red silky running shorts and a bright yellow tank top, she seemed oblivious to the chill of the fog. I would not have credited her tense face and haphazard movements to sorrow, or anger, or even the shock of Kris Mouskavachi’s death. To what? It occurred to me that this was the same impression I had had of her at Indian Rock yesterday, the sense that it was her nature to be hiding something. “How are you holding up?” I asked.
She jerked around. Those bushy dark eyebrows lifted in surprise. Then she shook her head. “I thought I would handle this better than I am. It’s not like I haven’t seen people die, you know. No climber of my class has escaped; we’ve all seen a friend take one wrong step. One minute he’s in front of you, pulling out his ice ax, the next moment he’s gone. You step wrong on a mountain top and it can be half a mile straight down before you stop. You’re dead before you realize what’s happened.” She shrugged. “Or at least that’s what we tell each other. Maybe your screams for help are choked in a throat paralyzed by terror and you can’t do anything but watch yourself plunge down picking up speed with each hundred feet till you crash into the rocks thousands of feet below. We won’t know till it’s too late, will we?” She shrugged again, stiffly this time. “Death is part of mountaineering. It’s essential to it. The ultimate danger. If there wasn’t the threat of death, there’d be no point in climbing.”
I sat on a redwood bench and motioned her across from me, not wanting to break the spell of her introspection. Her soliloquy on death was definitely not part of her public performances, like the one I’d seen two days ago. This was not talk of the ultimate thrill of standing on ice-covered rock on which no human had set foot. Or the wordless bonding between team members who must ultimately depend on each other. Or even the physiological high that comes from great exertion at high elevation, a runner’s high doubled and redoubled.
“How do you deal with that?” I asked.
She leaned forward, tan, sleekly muscled arms resting on thighs that showed sinews even in rest. “You know, it’s the underside that makes the game worthwhile. If the mountains weren’t dangerous they would have been climbed centuries ago. There’d be no bo
nding of team members, no need for it. It’s the danger that weeds out the weak. It’s what makes us climbers an elite corps. Nowadays, how many people get the chance to risk everything, betting their own planning, skill, bodies, and snap judgments against the biggest mountains in the world? And knowing there is no chance of rescue? When a friend dies on a mountain it sends a chill so icy through your body that you can’t do anything but stand and shiver. You know it could have been you, that the odds are some day it will be you. Then you stop shivering and go on, because the next mountain is that much more valuable.”
“What about a death like this, dying not on a mountain but on a chaise lounge in town?”
In the pale light I could see the skin on her face tightening. “Death is death. You can’t go around assigning values to kinds of deaths, ten points for those who fall off the top of Everest, nine from the top of K-2, one for a guy squashed by an Oakland Scavenger truck on Shattuck Avenue. Life’s a chance. Sometimes you win; eventually you don’t. But you can’t wallow around thinking about that, right? Cops get shot. It could be you, right?”
It wasn’t the same, but there was no value in going into that. I said, “I need to go over a few points in the statement you gave Officer Heling.” I asked her about the events of the previous night. “You went to bed at eleven? Downstairs?”
“That’s where my room is. That’s where I sleep. Alone. Did Brouck try to tell you something different?”
“No,” I said. “Has he misled people?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he hasn’t. But if someone assumed I was more than a guest, I wouldn’t count on Brouck setting them straight,” she added with a visible shiver.
“What happened after you got down there?”
“Nothing. I didn’t hear anything. My room is beneath the first floor.”
“Yours permanently?”
“Yes. Mine. Brouck hates it. There’s no view but the tree trunks and the hillside brush. He’d use it for storage if I weren’t in it. I need a place to keep my stuff when I’m here. Climbing is a poor-man’s game. You have to hustle to get backers, to get clothing manufacturers to give you parkas in return for being the ‘official parkas of the first mixed-sex Himalayan expedition led by a woman,’ to get airlines to contribute free flights, to get ice ax manufacturers—”
“I get the picture.”
Her shaggy brows lowered a millimeter. Clearly, Bev Zagoya was used to talking down to people, or perhaps just to other women. As clearly, she was not used to being stopped in midsentence. “The point I’m making, Detective, is that I don’t have the money to pay rent on a house all year when I’m gone over half of it. This year alone I’ve been in the Alps twice, on a lecture tour in New England, and given a couple of climbing seminars in Yosemite.”
“And Dr. Diamond lets you live here solely because he’s fond of you.”
“What does he get in return, if not my love? He gets something a lot more satisfying: my reflected glory. Look, I’m no fool. Being a climber is like being poet laureate. In order to write an epic you have to dish out the occasional shit about the queen’s birthday. Occasionally I dish myself out at Brouck’s dinners with Brouck’s friends, and with the hotshot film hopefuls who’ve spent so much time in L.A. that if they saw a real mountain, they’d be looking around for the freeway tunnel.”
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.
13
LEONARD 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.