by Susan Dunlap
I almost laughed. They’re usually not that honest, or was it arrogant? “Kris was poised to destroy your career, the career you’ve spent your entire adult life nurturing.”
“Is that what you think? Amateurs!” she snapped, apparently forgetting that my status was way below that.
“That just shows you how little you know about mountaineering.” She unzipped the fanny pack and pulled out her running shoes. She poked a foot into one and began tightening the laces, catching each section with her forefingers and yanking it taut. “Kris couldn’t have done me any harm. What he was spouting was old stuff. Who was going to believe him, a hippie porter?”
“All those reporters outside the house this morning, they figured his death was important enough to come out before dawn. The reason they knew about him is that they had been prepared to be there this afternoon for his announcement.”
“I don’t care what those people think. I’m a climber, not a TV star.” She pulled on the other shoe and slowly began to pull the lace. “Well, okay, so maybe it’s not that black and white. Maybe the story would get a mention on some late-night local newscast. But insiders in the climbing world have heard it before, and they’ve heard my explanation. Look, people die all the time in the Himalaya.”
“That may be how climbers see it.” A gust ruffled the leaves of the live oaks and eucalyptus beside the rock. It chilled my arms and brought out goose bumps on Bev’s. But she didn’t seem to notice. “Financial backers,” I insisted, “are not likely to be so sanguine about death.”
“Backers,” she snapped. “I’ve already got backers. I’ve got equipment, medical supplies, my airfare covered. And, the promise of ten percent of the film money; I can get a loan off that. Brouck’s got a check for my share waiting for me right now. The rest of the backers will get on board. All they care about is the hook. They’d put their money behind the first California expedition on Everest led by a woman if the climbing party were Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
“Not if all the dwarfs were likely to die.”
She smacked the pack down on the rock. “Backers don’t care about that. If they get their shots of me standing on the top in their parka, they won’t give a damn about anything else. They’re not writing a book, they’re looking for a photo opportunity for their gear. Like those posters in the living room. They’re going to sell them in stores at campuses all over the country. The kids who buy them aren’t going to ask what went on before the photographer pushed the button, or after.”
A gust of wind flapped Bev’s T-shirt. She didn’t shiver, its effect on her was all mental. I could almost see her gears moving as she pulled herself back into control. To me, she said, “To tell you the truth, Kris was a pain in the ass. He was going to create a wrinkle in the cloth of the preparations for this expedition, but he was not going to rip the cloth apart. Mountaineering just isn’t like that. You’re an outsider, like Brouck; you think that what climbing’s about is a great adventure story, with lots of danger, and maybe a tragedy, but with basically a happy ending. That’s not it. Mountaineering is a very individual thing. And what it’s all about is getting to the top. That’s all.”
“And the hose on the roof, in position to keep the crotches of Leila Sandoval’s eucalyptus trees wet? What was that all about?”
Her eyes opened wide. “Why would you think I—”
“Because Leila’s house is on the other side of the tree. Even if she held a hose out the window and squirted the water up week after week without anyone ever noticing, she couldn’t have hit the crotch of that branch. It’s on the far side from her house. But with the hose on the roof, it would be nothing for you.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“How soon did you realize there was no way to keep Kris from exposing you? When you first saw him at Diamond’s house? No that wouldn’t be it, would it? Then you still had hope. Otherwise you wouldn’t have given him your watch. Or was that watch a gift?”
“Blackmail,” she muttered.
“And all those clothes?”
She stared at me. “I didn’t buy him clothes. Christ, he was better dressed than I am.”
“He had a couple of thousand dollars worth of new things,” I insisted.
Bev pressed her whitened fingertips into the rock. “Maybe he did, but he didn’t get them from me. I couldn’t afford a couple of thousand dollars of anything. And if I had the money, I wouldn’t submit to that kind of blackmail. If I did it would be an admission of guilt.”
“Easy to say now.”
“What do you take me for? I’ve bargained with the best of them. And the worst. I’d been on a climb with Kris Mouskavachi. I knew what he was.”
“You knew nothing short of death would stop him.”
Bev dragged her fingers slowly, angrily across the rock. They left trails of chalk. Furiously she said, “Don’t you think if I’d pushed Kris off the deck, I would have taken my watch off his wrist first?”
“If you could.”
“Look, alive Kris was going to be a pain in the ass, I’ll admit it, a big one. But I could have handled that. He was smart, and charming, but he didn’t know the ropes like I did. He wasn’t an insider. Maybe he would have ruined this expedition, but there would have been others. I’m twenty-eight-years old. I could climb for another fifteen years.” She released the rock and stared down at her chalky, callused fingers. Suddenly that lowering brow of hers seemed not so much an indication of anger as grief. “You’re not a climber. You don’t know the way things are between the real climbers, the insiders. Whoever killed Kris Mouskavachi killed this expedition. No matter who killed him, his death is going to be connected to me. A death on a mountain is ordinary stuff, but a murder is not. The story of Kris flying off a deck in Berkeley is going to get a lot of attention, for a long time. It’ll be a notorious legend in the climbing world. And it will destroy me.”
She gazed down at her hands, like someone in a trance. The fingers looked stiff, gnarled, white, arthritic, like they might after years of forced inactivity.
She shook her head sharply, turned to me and said, “Kris Mouskavachi being murdered is the worst thing that could have happened to me. Now nothing matters.” She spun around, grabbed one of the abandoned ropes, and before I could move she bounced over the edge, pushed off, bounced three more times to the bottom and raced out through the underbrush.
21
I STARED DOWN THE face of the rock after her. My stomach jumped. It took me a split second to call up and discard every excuse I could muster to avoid going down that forty-foot drop. I had been to a few climbing lectures and read a couple of books. I understood the theory of rappelling down a wall. And the dangers. My throat tightened, my heart thudded. Suddenly my hands were so sweaty I felt sure I’d never hold onto the rope. But there was no escape. I couldn’t give in to this fear, not and go on being a cop. Not and go on being.
I grabbed the rope, ran it over my shoulder, down across my back, and back toward my navel, and lowered myself over the edge. I didn’t bounce like Bev had, I walked down, sliding the rope between my hands. The skin on my palms burned. On my back the rope dragged my shirt up and scraped the bared flesh. The world narrowed to the dull rockface and the thick sound of my breath. I never looked down. And when my foot hit dirt, I almost fell back from surprise.
I followed the path Bev had made. When I reached the fire trail she was almost out of sight. I jogged along the path, slowly catching my breath and getting into a sort of rhythm. I didn’t need to catch her (a good thing). I just needed to keep her in sight. To my right the slope dropped off sharply. Gusts of wind rattled the live oak leaves and the eucalypts.
I thought about Leila Sandoval and the pleasure she would have gotten if Kris had made his announcement. And what Bev had said, that the backers who would provide the supplies for the actual expedition didn’t care what happened to the climbers on a mountain, that they only wanted the still photos of their gear on top. And about Bev’s destroyed caree
r. The truth had been a long time coming, but now I felt sure I had it. I thought about how far ahead Bev Zagoya was getting, how strong her legs were, how strong her arms were.
By the time I reached Hasbrouck Diamond’s deck it was all clear in my mind. But by then Bev Zagoya was gone. Only Hasbrouck Diamond was there, standing peering at his feet. “If you’re looking for Bev,” he said, “she left.”
I was panting too hard to speak.
“She needed my check, from the film people. She grabbed it and took off, without so much as a …” He was staring at me with an expression of such bewilderment and fear that I almost felt sorry for him.
I remembered the chaise lounge as it had been early this morning, in the brush below. And yesterday as it stood on the deck no more than ten feet from where we were now. I couldn’t picture Bev Zagoya’s chalky white fingers oiling the runners. I shook my head. “Not her,” I gasped. “It’s you I’m looking for. You killed Kris. You have … the right … to remain silent. You …”
For a moment Diamond didn’t react. Then he spun and ran for the far end of the deck where Kris had gone over. He flung open the gate and grabbed the rappel rope that hung there. Gasping, I ran after him. He poised a foot at the edge of the deck and braced to pivot out. I caught the railing with one hand and with the other grabbed his arm and swung him back toward me. He pulled away. Bracing my feet I let go of the railing, took hold of his shoulder, and slammed him onto the deck.
I’d made myself rappel down a wall once today. I was damned if I was going to do it twice.
22
SATURDAY NIGHT, MY LAST night at The Palace. I had intended to spend it with Howard, lounging in the hot tub, gazing out through the nonfog picture window at the string of lights on the Bay Bridge as they twinkled smudgily through the real fog outside. I’d planned to drink the bottle of champagne we’d saved, snuggle down in the hot water, and listen to the deep, shivery breaths of the foghorns.
Instead, I devoted the evening to Hasbrouck Diamond. When I took his first statement, about the eucalyptus branch, I was amazed at just how willing he was to go over, in loving detail, a complaint he’d already made several times. Now, again, I was astounded at not only how long and freely he talked, but the narrow slice of life he saw. Hasbrouck Diamond was definitely a horse in blinders. He was, as I had suspected, pierced to the marrow by Kris’s betrayal. His hurt took up all the light the blinders allowed in; there was no room left to see that Kris had been focusing on issues of his own and that he, Diamond, his feud, his need for acceptance, his prospective film, were merely peripheral. As peripheral as was his own understanding that he had murdered Kris. For Hasbrouck Diamond the murder was merely an appendage to his hurt.
I spent the rest of the evening with Leila Sandoval, taking her statement (nothing new there) and listening to her bemoan the unfairness of life, an unfairness for which she, of course, had no responsibility. I left her in another cell awaiting transport to Santa Rosa.
Between those interviews, Vikram Patel called to tell me that the elder Mouskavachis and their four children would be arriving at the San Francisco airport the next afternoon. He had added, in a gleeful tone I hadn’t previously heard from him, that his consulate, at the encouragement of the Nepalese government, would not be renewing their visas.
Sunday morning, which I had planned to spend in a whirlwind of apartment hunting, Howard and I devoted to alternately sleeping and otherwise taking advantage of the luxurious California King. I couldn’t bring myself to wake up enough to admit this was my last day here.
When I did finally swing my legs over the side onto the plush gold carpet, it was two in the afternoon. Howard, who seemed remarkably tolerant of my pre-departure grief, brought me a cup of espresso. (He had become an expert at operating the machine. I had become a pro at letting him.) I could still have gotten dressed and looked at apartments. Instead I said, “I’m going to miss it here,” and followed him for a last lovely soak in the tub.
The fog had lifted. The picture window across from the tub, of course, was clear, and below, San Francisco Bay was bespeckled with white sails. “Like dandruff on a blue-haired lady,” Howard commented as he lowered his long tan body into the warm water. Clearly he had endured as much of my upscale melancholy as any decent Berkeleyan could stand.
I slithered down into the water, trailing my hand along his arm. Then I leaned back against the edge of the tub and let the hot water lap halfway up my neck and thought again, I am going to miss this place.
I pictured Mr. Kepple’s waiting porch, with its indoor-outdoor swamp and cacophony of botanical gizmos and irate neighbors. I was really going to miss this place.
On Howard, of course, the water reached only to his armpits. He reached one of those long arms over the edge and hoisted up a Carta Blanca beer. Taking a swallow he said, “Pereira and I had a bet on your murderer. I picked Bev Zagoya. Tell me how come I can be wrong.”
“Do you mean that in the cosmic sense? Or just with this issue?” I reached for my espresso but it was too far away.
He handed me the cup, spraying water across my face in the process. I was going to miss seeing his lovely, wide, lightly muscled shoulders with the steam rising around them.
Keeping hold of his hand, I said, “Bev was right. Alive, Kris couldn’t destroy her. But he could destroy this one expedition. Hasbrouck Diamond had everything committed to that. With Kris’s announcement he’d have lost his place as honored supporter, his money, probably his house, and certainly what credibility he had in the film world. He’d have been left with nothing but gums.”
Howard shifted his leg over next to mine. “Diamond’ll get lots of them in ‘Q.’” He laughed. “Bev Zagoya may not have killed Kris, but I wouldn’t put money on that option having been far from her mind when she saw him wander into her lecture Thursday night. No wonder she ended it so fast.”
Meandering down from his knees, droplets of steamy water outlined his thigh muscles. I rested a hand on his knee. “It’s funny, Howard, if it hadn’t been for the feud, Leila would never have brought Kris over here. And if not for the feud, she wouldn’t have allowed him to stay with Hasbrouck Diamond. And Diamond, Sandoval, and Zagoya might have realized that Kris was playing them all—except, of course, they were all too involved in playing each other to be able to compare notes.”
Howard took another swallow of beer, put down the bottle, and sank lower into the water. It lapped around his neck. Another two inches of thigh emerged. “But, Jill, what about the killer eucalyptus? Did Diamond’s nemesis, Sandoval, magically drop it on him?”
I sighed. “I want to go on record as being right about that branch. You cannot make them drop on cue. Even with the worst tree trimmer in Berkeley. Even with copper nails in the base and bacteria in the damp crotches. And in any case, it wasn’t Leila who damaged the tree, not that she might not have, had she thought of it.”
“Or Zagoya?”
“She was gone too much, in the Alps or wherever, to water anything regularly.”
“Diamond, huh? Willing to lose his head, literally, to save his spot in the sun?”
“He was never in danger. The thing was, Howard, his chair was not right under the branch. If it had been, the branch would have fallen on him. Branches that size fall straight down. This one didn’t hit him, because he wasn’t sitting under it, he was just far enough to one side to escape with a scratch. At the time he hatched the plan for the branch to fall, he didn’t care when it came down. He was just hoping that the implicit danger would be enough to force Leila to take out the trees.”
“But he was liable.”
“So he’d have had to pay to haul them out. He’d still have had his victory.”
“Regained face, eh?”
“Right. It was he with his hose on the roof who kept the crotch wet enough to cause the branch to fall. And he got a rope around it in the dark of night and pulled to weaken it. All he needed to do was check that Leila wasn’t home. No one else would notice. He w
as the only one who could have done that.”
“Then he sat back in the sun and waited? Every creak from the tree when the wind blew must have been a thrill. And they say the sedentary life isn’t exciting.” Howard laughed and shifted over so his arm was against mine.
Despite the heat of the tub a shiver ran through me. I realized I’d better talk fast. “That was his plan. But when he realized that Kris was going to destroy him, he hurried that plan along so we would be focusing on Leila by the time Kris died.”
“Rather than himself.”
“And his plans for Bev’s expedition.”
“It’s nice that he’s confessed.”
I wriggled under his arm. “We would have got him anyway. Would you like to guess what kind of suntan lotion he used? Patchouli oil.”
“Raksen will be unbearable.”
“He wants to send a copy of the report to ‘Police Beat.’ He wants it headlined FOILED BY OIL.”
Howard laughed, then pushed himself up and reached for one of the thick towels on the pegs nearby. “We could go upstairs and build a fire. With the fog it’s cool enough.”
Howard was going to miss The Palace, too, even though he would never admit that this was the Triple Crown of dwellings, as compared to his own Glue Factory Handicap.
I sat in the warm water watching the drops scurry down his back, over his firm butt, down his long sleek thighs. “I’m going to miss this place,” I said. “I think I wasn’t meant to rent an apartment; I was meant to housesit in palaces. To watch tall, sleek, red-headed men rise like Excalibur from the steamy depths of hot tubs. To live above my element.”
Laughing, Howard reached over and pulled me up. Then his blue eyes narrowed into seriousness. “Jill,” he began slowly, “I know you aren’t wild about my house. You don’t see the hidden beauty, the possibilities—”
“The fuses that blow whenever you use two appliances at once.”