Diamond in the Buff (13 page)

She put me on hold. It took almost as long as calling Kathmandu for her to return. “Sorry to keep you waiting. It took me a while to get an answer to your question.”

I could believe that.

“I’m afraid Mr. Kepple doesn’t know where to find your friend. He says that Cypress—that’s his name, you know, like the tree—”

Like the tattoo.

“—he never finished the class. Mr. Kepple seemed to think he was thrown out of the school.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Can you ask him?”

“Doctor came in while I was there. He’s with him now. I couldn’t interrupt.”

“Thanks.”

I called Howard. I woke him up. It was still not quite eight in the morning. “I need a favor.”

“Some people say ‘Good Morning.’”

“I’m a police detective. That is good morning.”

“I missed you last night.”

Despite the fact that there was no one else in my tiny office, I lowered my voice. “Me, too.” Then I told him about Mr. Kepple and his hospitalization, and his observation about Cypress.

Howard laughed. I could picture him propped on an elbow in the middle of his double bed, the tuft of red hairs on his bare chest matted from the night, the door to the balcony that overlooked the back yard open despite the cold fog outside. It was a nice room. Dark green walls, white molding, with big windows letting in the sunlight that filtered through the live oak tree in the back yard. No wonder Howard loved his house. No wonder he was hurt that I didn’t. Maybe I should … I reminded myself of its other attributes: the sounds of jazz, rock, television, barking dogs, a baying beagle who paced along the upstairs gallery as if each room were inhabited by rabbits, and the screams of lovers and ex-lovers in one or more of the other five bedrooms coming through the walls at any hour of night.

“And so, Detective,” Howard said, “you figure that there aren’t too many reasons why a guy gets thrown out of a government-sponsored gardening class, right? And you want to trade off my associations in Vice and Substance Abuse and have me check my sources and see if Cypress was dealing.”

“That and a local address for him.”

“Okay. But this’ll cost you.”

I smiled. “How much?”

“Come by and see.” Some place in the house the beagle bayed.

I could feel the tension in his silence, the tension that was always there now when he coupled a lascivious proposition with an invitation to his house. In my mind, the one detracted from the other. But I wasn’t sure Howard was clear on that. And this was hardly the time to comment on the infuriating whines, whistles, and screechings in that house he loved so, as opposed to the seductive appeal of his sleekly muscled chest with its light mat of sun-goldened hairs, or his cute little butt. Quickly, I said, “This is the oddest homicide I’ve ever had,” falling into our sure-fire way of handling awkwardness. “There’s the squabble. Now I find that Leila Sandoval paid for Kris Mouskavachi to come to this country. Why? This is a woman who exited a divorce with no money. And then she spends a thousand dollars to fly a strange kid over here.”

“How did she even know he existed?” Howard asked. There was no hesitancy in his voice. It was one of his charming qualities this ability to throw himself wholeheartedly into the problem under discussion.

“So she brings him here, Howard, and then he defects to Diamond.”

“Nice kid.”

“But, Howard, Kris was still hedging his bet. Diamond offered to loan him money for college, he gave him his nicest guest room, and how did Kris react? Kris put not one personal item in that room. He didn’t even sleep there. He slept on the deck.”

Took his money and scorned his house. Kris knew how to hit Diamond where it hurt, huh?”

I swallowed. “Yeah,” I said, but the word was barely audible. I wasn’t sure Howard had heard it at all, much less understood that I had caught the personal implications.

The beagle bayed. For once I was thankful. I said, “I’ll talk to you later.”

I could hear Howard’s quick intake of breath. “Where you off to now?”

“To get another man out of bed.”

M
AYBE
H
OWARD WOULD FIND
Cypress. Maybe Cypress would lead me to Leila Sandoval. But I couldn’t wait. It was time for my one trump card: Herman Ott.

I headed for Ott’s office. Patrol hadn’t reported a sighting, but I was familiar enough with Ott to know he could have gotten back unseen into the two rooms that housed his office and himself.

Amazingly, it was not quite eight
A.M.
My reward for starting the day at 4:37.

Two hours from now, Telegraph Avenue would be bustling with students making their way to more civilized ten
A.M.
classes, or even more civilized cafes, with shop owners unlocking doors and street sellers unfolding card tables and display cases. But now the sidewalk held only two undergraduates running in tandem, clutching notebooks, and a street person who had been an Avenue regular longer than I’d been on the force. He was easing himself up from the vestibule of the pizza shop next to Herman Ott’s building. The fog clouded the shop windows and blurred the signs; there was a black-and-white quality to the street.

I could have driven another thirty yards down Telegraph Avenue and parked in a red zone. Instead I left the patrol car double-parked in front of Herman Ott’s building. I was tempted to turn the pulser lights on, but I didn’t want to overdo it.

I made my way up the staircase and turned left into the hallway that formed a square around it. As I passed the other “offices” the rhythm picked up and I caught bursts of high-pitched television voices and frenetic music from Saturday morning cartoons, and giggles of the children watching them.

Ott’s two-room office and home was at the end of the hall. As always, the office door was closed. The other room, I knew from my numerous visits here, contained a cot, hot plate, a chair with springs springing, and a homogeneous pile of clothes, sheets, and half-read newspapers that made walking across the floor akin to traversing the pasture at the end of mud season. The door was nailed shut. But Ott was in there, I was ninety percent sure of that. With his clientele Ott wasn’t likely to leave his office untended long enough for word to get around. Ott was not a morning person. By nature he was not even a day person. With the same fervor with which a bodybuilder nurtures muscles and a year-round tan, Ott maintained his sallow complexion. Right now, he’d be lying under a heap of yellow blankets on the cot. He was in there all right. But if I knocked on the door, he’d never answer.

I stepped softly down the hall to the nailed-closed door, bent down, poked open the mail slot, and stuck my ear next to it. No snores. He probably even had his nose under the yellow blankets. Probably all of him that was visible was a few greasy strands of blond hair. I rattled that door handle as loud as I could, and listened. A groan.

Behind me, across the hall, a door squeaked open. A young woman peered out. I smiled. She shrugged. She might well want to warn Ott, but it was too late for that.

I pushed Ott’s mail slot in and let it bang back. In and bang. In and bang. Then I rattled the handle again. I smacked both hands against the door and ran loudly down the hall in my best imitation of the mischievous children that Ott had grumbled about. It wasn’t an Academy Award performance, but then Ott wasn’t exactly awake, either.

I was rewarded with a grunt.

It took three more runs through the whole routine before I could hear Ott cursing and clambering up and heading for the door in the office. He flung it open, and before he could get both feet out into the hall I was inside.

He glared at me. “What the hell— You! Hey, you have a warrant or something?”

I held up my hand. “Skip it, Ott.” I settled on the edge of his desk. “I don’t have time for amenities. We have a common goal here.”

“No, we don’t, Smith. My only goal is to get you out of here and get back to bed. Unless you’d like to join me there.”

I stared at Ott. Mustard-colored sweatpants spanned his round belly and flapped around his skinny legs. A lemon-and-ochre-swirl turtleneck came down not quite far enough to camouflage a burst of pale fuzz in the neighborhood of where his waist might have been. His thin blond hair lay plastered to his head except for one greasy clump that poked out above his left ear, and his eyes were so caked with sleep it looked like the sandman had dumped his whole load and taken the rest of the night off. “Ott,” I said, “the sight of you in the morning would be enough to make a lesser woman turn to sheep.”

“Out!”

“The Sandoval case—it’s murder now.”

Ott had been about to repeat his order. Instead, he twisted his fists around his eyes. I knew he was using the time to try to figure who might have been killed, and what his own reaction should be. I gave him a full sixty seconds; I needed him awake.

“Who?” he asked.

“Kris Mouskavachi.”

A small shiver rippled down Ott’s flesh. It was a big reaction for Herman Ott, who prided himself on never reacting, never getting personally involved, and above all, never giving anything away. That shiver revealed more than half an hour of questioning would have drawn out. A fairer person might have told him that Hasbrouck Diamond might have been the intended victim. I didn’t; I went with the advantage of that shiver. “Leila Sandoval is in the middle of this. And she’s still not home.”

“So find her, Smith. You’re a hotshot detective.”

“Ott, I don’t have time to run through our usual song and dance. I’ve got a call in to Humboldt County. It’s only a matter of time before we bring Cypress in, and Cypress ties you into Sandoval and that performance on the street yesterday. Do I make myself clear?” I didn’t know whether Ott had been a party to Sandoval’s escape, or if she’d used him. For the moment it made no difference; Ott would be more likely to deal with the consequences of the former than admit the latter.

Ott leaned back against the door. He muttered, “You got nothing, Smith.” Then he waited. I knew that look: puffy eyelids half closed over deep-set hazel eyes. It meant: Make me an offer.

But I wasn’t about to deal, not on this one. “Ott, let me put it in the terms of those volleyball games you like to watch so much. The woman spiked me. She spiked me, but
you
gave her the lay-up to do it.”

Ott relaxed back against the edge of the door. It wavered from side to side.

I stepped forward, grabbed the door above Ott’s head, and slammed it shut. As Ott jerked forward and hobbled for his balance on the balls of his surprisingly long narrow feet, I said, “Sandoval’s got land in Humboldt County. Maybe she’s there. Maybe she’s hiding out with someone in Berkeley. I don’t care. You see that she is here by noon.”

Ott just stared. “Or?”

“Look out your window.”

With a shrug of his spongy sloping shoulders, he sidled to the window. The panes hadn’t started as opaque glass, but years of external neglect by the building manager and internal neglect by Ott himself had turned them a mold-speckled gray. Ott had to raise the window to peer out down the alley to the small slice of street he could view.

“You see the black-and-white parked down there? The pulser light’s off now. At twelve-oh-one it’ll be on. At twelve-oh-two-there’ll be a patrol officer outside your door, calling to you. If you go out our guys will be waving to you.”

Ott slammed the window and turned toward me. “Smith, you need me to define harassment?”

“We’re not talking harassment. Just friendly attention, just so your associates know that we on the force are pleased to see you.”

Ott’s sallow face turned orange. If there was one thing Herman Ott valued it was his reputation of never cooperating with the police unless there was no way of avoiding it, and never admitting anything about a client. It was his pride, and it probably explained why a guy as out of shape as he was had survived as long as he had, and had gotten paid enough to live, even in the fashion to which he was naturally accustomed. “I don’t know where she is.”

“Find her.”

He rocked slowly back and forth on those long feet, thinking. It was a move of his I hadn’t seen before, one I couldn’t interpret.

“Find her, Ott.”

He stopped moving and stared down at his feet. “Look, Smith, I’m going to give you the truth. I liked Kris; he was a good kid in his way.”

I waited to hear the rest of his assessment of Kris. I couldn’t believe Herman Ott had missed the “to the highest bidder” quality in the boy.

But if he caught it, he didn’t mention it. Still eyeing his pedal digits he said, “The truth is, Smith, that I don’t know where Leila Sandoval is. And I have no idea how to find her.”

“Ott!” I exclaimed. “I’m, well,
insulted
that you would expect me to buy that. Come on!”

He threw up his hands. His yellow sleeves nearly covered them.

“Your client and you don’t know where to find her?”

“She’s not my client.”

“She has been, though, hasn’t she?” Ott was not one to bestow unpaid favors on acquaintances, like coming to their defense and letting them escape the police. But once a person had become his client, once he’d taken her under his professional wing, he seemed to feel an ongoing responsibility. This was not to say he would take cases for nothing; he wouldn’t. “Smith, I said I was giving you the truth. I don’t know where she is.”

I sat back on the edge of his big wooden desk, considering my options. Why would Sandoval have hired a private detective? How long ago? Would that reason have anything to do with this case? That was information I definitely would not get out of Ott. Still, what
was
the woman involved in? I was tempted to tell him that I already knew about her bringing Kris over from Nepal. But something stopped me. Instead, I said, “Be that as it may, Ott, you do understand it is in her best interest to turn herself in. It is in my best interest. And it is definitely in your best interest to get her here by noon.”

Ott stood motionless, still staring down at his calloused feet. “I’ll give you a gift.”

Words I’d never before heard from Herman Ott. I waited.