by Susan Dunlap
“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.
18
THE DEPARTMENTAL MEETING ROOM is underneath the jail. At Detectives’ Morning Meeting, we all sit around the square formed by the tables in the middle o
f 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.
I strode into the holding cell, yanked a chair in behind me, and shut the door.
“You are in a lot of trouble,” I said.
Her face quivered. From cold, or fear? About Kris, or something else?
“Possession of one ounce of a controlled substance is a felony.”
“I didn’t—”
“You were growing ten acres of it up there in Humboldt.”
“Not me. I live in Berkeley.” Was that relief on her face? Relief about the Berkeley excuse, or at me asking about drugs rather than murder?
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter where you live; you own the land on which cannabis is being grown.”
“I rent it out.”
“Your name is on the deed.”
“Yes, but I don’t live there. I have a renter. I don’t go up there. On the lease it says I can’t come onto the property without notifying him first.”
I let out a laugh. “Leila, a stipulation like that is an announcement that you know exactly what’s going on in those fields.”
The skin around her mouth tightened. “My tenant, he insisted on that; I didn’t. I have no idea what goes on up there.”
I leaned back, slowly shaking my head. Few attitudes irritated me as much as this righteous air of irresponsibility. Particularly when the speaker was lying. But Sandoval was giving me such a first-rate show of “not me” that the act blurred what it was she was covering up.
I said, “The issue of the land is between you and the Humboldt County sheriff. And, of course, the CAMP authorities.” I fingered the file. “Too bad it’s up there.”
The look of panic on her face told me I didn’t have to explain the difference in attitude up there. Her fear of CAMP was the real thing. She took a deep breath, as if to bring herself under control, looked straight at me, and said, “What are you offering?”
I almost laughed again. So much for the helpless featherhead. “There’s a big range in how they can handle you. A woman who does massage on Telegraph Avenue is not going to be a sympathetic figure in the Eureka courthouse. You know that.”
She nodded, all business now.
“But a woman who has supported the police effort here, she’ll have a much better chance of being believed when she testifies about her tenant and his use of her land. A woman who has cooperated in a murder investigation …”
She stiffened. The reaction seemed too slight for the first discovery of a murder. But reactions vary.
I chose a tack and said, “You don’t seem surprised that there’s been a murder.” If she’d killed Kris, she’d had since the middle of last night to get accustomed to the idea of him dead. And she’d had the three hours or so since Hallstead picked her up to plan her reactions to these questions. And, it was clear to me already, Leila Sandoval was an accomplished actress.
“I’m stunned. I’ve known about Kris for a while, but I’m still stunned.”
“How’d you find out?”
“A friend called.”
“From Berkeley?” That would be a message unit call, one that would be on the friend’s phone bill.
She shook her head. “No. A friend up north. Someone called him.”
I smiled sardonically, “A series of calls which can’t be checked.” Before she could comment, I said, “Tell me about Kris Mouskavachi. You brought him over here. Why?”
She sat there, tapping those marmotlike teeth together. “The thing about Kris,” she said, thoughtfully, “was that he was on Bev’s last expedition. Bev’s been worried about this new expedition. And it isn’t easy for her living with Has-Bitched. I thought having Kris here would make it easier for her.”
I nodded, slowly, at the same rate she had been tapping her teeth. “That’s a nice story. Now what is the truth?”
Those wrinkles on her face looked deeper, darker, and lots tighter. She sighed, and said, “Okay. I guess it was naive to expect you to believe I was just interested in making things easier at Has-Bitched’s. You probably think I was out to get him. I can understand that. And God knows, I would get him if I could think of a way. But this is different.” She leaned forward and looked straight at me, with what I figured was her Earnest Look. “Do you know about Bev’s last expedition? Three people died.”
I nodded.
“Well, Kris was on that. Kris was convinced that they wouldn’t have died if the leader had been competent. I know Bev, and that lack of planning, and the arrogance that made her think that no matter what happened, she could pull things out. When she leads this new expedition, she’ll be just as arrogant and just as scattered. The only difference is that there will be more people involved, mo
re people who may die.”
“The word on her last expedition is common knowledge.”
“No, that’s not quite true,” she said, reaching a hand toward me as if to touch my arm. Her face was more relaxed now, but there was an urgency to her posture. “Only a little is knowledge. Most of what’s known is rumor. You’re talking about something that happened halfway around the world, on the side of a mountain, where the climbers are not only cut off from the outside world, but frequently from each other. Accidents are common. Facts vary depending on who you’re talking to. So most of what’s circulating in the climbing community is conjecture. And Bev’s a pro at dealing with that. She may be scattered, but she’s also a performer, a salesman. And that arrogance of hers gives her an air of competence.” Leila reached out a hand again, again drawing it back at the last moment. “I’ve seen Bev give lectures and do fund raising. She talks about using computers to determine the number of porters it will take to carry the supplies to base camp, and the number from there to advance base, and from there to Camp One on the mountain, and having the computer factor in the increased amount of grain needed if the weather is ten degrees colder. It sounds like NASA is doing the planning. Businessmen can barely keep themselves from throwing checks at her. Other climbers begin to think the rumors must have been wrong. Bev’s the best at this. If no one contradicts her, she’ll get her backing, she’ll get other climbers—not the best ones, the ones who know better; she’ll get the less experienced, the ones with good enough credentials to appeal to the sponsors, the one who won’t have a chance if things get desperate up on the mountain. If no one contradicts her, these people will die.” Now she did put an “earnest” hand on my arm. “Bev,” she said, “is a pro at conning people.”
Coming from Leila Sandoval that was quite an endorsement. I was tempted to ask, “A pro at conning Hasbrouck Diamond? Luring him away from you?” But I didn’t want her focusing on that, not yet. Instead, I sat watching her. She pulled her hand back. It was shaking. If Leila Sandoval was lying about Bev, it was a great act. I said, “So you brought Kris Mouskavachi here to contradict Bev? At her reception today?”