Diamond in the Buff (11 page)

I sat a moment looking across the thick carpet, then said, “Let me see Kris’s room.”

Diamond pushed himself up, a slow awkward movement more suited to his posture than his age or his interests. He shuffled across the carpet and up the stairs to the second floor. The staircase bisected the house and, I noted, continued on up to the roof. To the west of it was one large room—Diamond’s, he indicated—with windows from which on a fogless day he might have seen the Golden Gate Bridge and the Farallon Islands beyond. The east half was divided unevenly into two rooms, and the bedroom he indicated as Kris’s was nearly twice the size of the other. Like everything else it was white, with a white quilted double bed, and white lacquered desk, chair, and dresser. Two Himalayan posters decorated one wall, and an antique-looking Tibetan Thangka, a vividly colored cloth depiction of the Tibetan deities, hung across from it. On a shelf was a large statue of the Hindu god Siva, dancing in a ring of fire. I checked the desk, dresser, and closet. The clothes there were basic: a spare pair of jeans and two shirts, a couple of changes of underwear. The adjoining bathroom held minimal supplies. It could have been a hotel room. A carefully decorated hotel room.

“There’s nothing personal here,” I said.

Diamond leaned against the doorjamb. It was a moment before he said, “He was on a budget.”

And in that moment I could see the stab that my words had been. Nothing
personal.
Nothing in return for Hasbrouck Diamond’s hospitality. He didn’t move or make a sound, but all his anger and drive melted and he
became
no more than his slumped posture.

I looked again at the Thangka and the bronze Siva. The same friend who had told me about the pasture saying had shown me some of her Indian art. Unless I missed my guess, what Diamond had here was expensive. “Did you decorate the room for him?”

He nodded.

This expensively decorated room was the last type of place that would have appealed to a teenager, much less Kris Mouskavachi, the future CEO. Left to Kris this room would have sported posters of San Francisco with the Transamerica pyramid in the foreground and “Feinstein for Governor,” a computer, a TV, a VCR, a Walkman, a CD player, Lee Iacocca’s biography on the night table, and in the closet lots and lots of stylish clothes. But if he’d had to accept the room as is, my take on Kris was that living in here would have appealed to him a whole lot more than sleeping on the deck.

The windows in Kris’s room faced away from the deck, an arrangement that would have given Diamond more privacy down there.

Or up here.

I looked around the room again. Was the emptiness in here merely an indication of Kris’s lack of commitment to Hasbrouck Diamond, or was it a much more pointed rejection? Charming, eager-to-be-liked Kris would have been an easy boy to misjudge. “Dr. Diamond,” I said, “what exactly was the relationship between you and Kris?”

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.

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 bonding 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.”