Diamond in the Buff (19 page)

They both laughed. It was Hallstead who said, “And get up all wrinkled?”

“So,” Howard asked, “why was he out there?”

“And why were his clothes over here? So he could keep pretending to Diamond that he was just an earnest kid from Nepal here to help his friend Bev. When I saw him Friday at Diamond’s he was wearing the same rugby shirt and jeans he was wearing yesterday. They weren’t fresh Friday. So maybe for Diamond’s viewing he wore only a couple of shirts, only what he could justify having and still maintain his image.”

“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” Hallstead pronounced. “Matthew six, twenty-one,” he added. “I aim to bring some authority to this investigation.”

Howard shook his head and glanced back at the closet. “So, with all this, Leila Sandoval knew just what a good actor Kris was. And how much he liked luxury.”

“She hasn’t had her head between someone’s toes all these years. And she’s no slouch when it comes to putting on a show herself,” I said. “She was on to Kris. She knew he was an opportunist; she just didn’t realize how far he’d go. Still, once she gave him the clothes, she would have realized that Kris had made what use of her he could. Because she didn’t have much, he’d already sucked her dry. Why should he remain loyal to her when he could align himself with Diamond?”

“And with Bev Zagoya?” Howard said. “And with the money men who sponsored her new expedition?”

I leaned back against the wall, staring out the small vine-covered window. “Then that would mean Kris planned to support Bev in today’s presentation. That fits with Kris canceling the bees. And that would mean there would be nothing unusual happening, nothing newsworthy, nothing to bring out all those reporters who rushed over there when they heard about Kris’s death.”

“So, conversely,” Howard said, “if there was something newsworthy, it would have been something a lot more serious than the bees. Something like Kris planning to undermine Bev and come out with some sort of revelation about the deaths on the previous climbs.”

I nodded. “Umm. Then the question is, why would he have done that? Leila would be delighted, of course. It would be her ultimate revenge on Diamond. It would explain the clothes here, and why Leila was anxious for me not to see them and find out there was one final change of loyalties she hadn’t told me about. But what would be in it for Kris?”

Hallstead was sitting shaking his head.

But Howard pushed off the wall and said, “What would Kris want? Tell me about him.”

“His goal was to be CEO of some Pacific Rim international business.”

“So maybe he was going to ingratiate himself with the business people who would
not
be wasting money on Bev’s next expedition.”

“And,” I said, “Kris loved attention. Well, he’d get plenty of that. Whatever news coverage this affair got, it would have pictured Kris unmasking an incompetent, Kris saving lives and money.”

“Not a bad way to start out in business school.”

A flash of red and yellow passed the window. “Howard,” I said excitedly, “Leila worked in public relations. She knows who to call, what to say, how to get news coverage. That, Howard, is what was still left for Kris to suck out of Leila. And— Omigod, that’s Bev Zagoya.”

“Where?”

“On Panoramic. Running.
Up
Panoramic.” I raced out the door, down the hill, unlocked the patrol car door, and started the engine. The patrol car has a big engine; it’s useless on a road like this. There’s no way to go above twenty on the straightaway, or ten on the cutbacks. Once I rounded the corner I could see Zagoya in the distance, taking the next curve to the right and moving out of sight. I stepped on the gas and spotted her again. She was wearing that yellow T-shirt and red shorts, and a purple fanny pack bounced on her pelvis. As I neared her I could see the bulge of the oblong contents in the pack. I blew the horn.

She turned, spotted the car, looked at me with an expression of shock and anger she might have shown Kris Mouskavachi when she first came upon him on Diamond’s deck, and ran faster.

I stepped on the gas. She rounded the corner. I had to slow to five mph to get by a Mercedes parked on the curve. And when I came to the short straightaway Bev Zagoya was nowhere in sight.

I didn’t spot her till I came to the fire trail that ended at Panoramic. Then I saw her a hundred yards or so in the distance. She was running easily on the dirt track. A lot more easily than I would. More easily than she would have if there hadn’t been a pole blocking auto access to the trail.

She was almost out of sight when she glanced around. She was smiling. She thought she was safe from me.

She was wrong.

T
HE GOOD NEWS WAS
that as I watched Bev Zagoya disappear at the top of the hill and around the corner onto the fire trail, I was ninety-five percent sure where she was going—particularly when I noted her purple fanny pack. Why would she be wearing a pack? What could she need enough to carry the extra weight during a run? Not a sweatshirt; the pack was too small. Money she’d carry in a shoe purse; tissues she’d tuck in her belt. The thing she’d carry would be those sticky, rubber rock-climbing shoes. Climbing shoes fit like foot bindings. They’re not shoes to walk in, much less run in. There was only one climbing place the trail led to: Grizzly Peak Rock, a forty-foot-high face hidden high in the Berkeley Hills.

The bad news was that Grizzly Peak Rock was two miles away, and actually in Oakland rather than Berkeley. I would have to spend more time calling the dispatcher and having him notify Oakland.

But the best news was that there was a way for me to get there without running along the fire trail after Bev Zagoya and demonstrating that I was in nowhere near as good shape as she. I could drive down Panoramic, behind campus, up Centennial Road, and back this way on Grizzly Peak Road, and be plunked coolly atop the rock waiting when she trotted up panting and sweaty.
If
I could get there in less than the ten minutes or so she would need. Any later and she’d spot me before I could get in position to take her by surprise. I yanked the wheel all the way to the right, turned around, and headed down Panoramic.

Howard was just coming out of Leila Sandoval’s house when I came abreast it. “Bev Zagoya’s heading for Grizzly Peak Rock. I’ll be waiting for her at the top.”

“You need back-up?” he said, shifting his stance in readiness to move around the car and climb in.

“Be at the far end of the fire trail. Zagoya won’t make it to the rock for fifteen minutes. If she keeps going—there’s no reason why she should—it would be twenty minutes before she’d get to the trail’s end. You’ve got time to drop Hallstead near the station.”

He nodded.

I stepped on the gas, driving down Panoramic as fast as I dared between the parked cars, squealing the tires on the sharp cutbacks. I put on the pulsers as I turned the corner off Panoramic and into the campus fraternity area. Bev had a run of about a mile and a half. My drive would be at least twice that, and through one of the most crowded areas in town. As I neared the corner, four students sauntered into the crosswalk, all talking, hands waving in emphasis. For all the notice they took of traffic, they might have been sitting around a table in a cafe; they didn’t even react to the pulser lights. I flicked on the siren. They leapt back as one, and scowled. I hung a right.

I turned off the siren long enough to call the dispatcher. He’d notify Oakland and the Day Watch commander. Then I turned it back on to get through the campus roads. My fingers tightened on the steering wheel. The wail of the siren blotted out everything else; it turned the car into a capsule. Just me and the car and the chase. I loved it. I raced along the sharply curving road, up the hillside, between the redwoods and eucalypts that crowded the road. On the curves, I pressed harder on the gas and leaned into the turns. The tires squealed. The staccato bursts from the radio goaded me on, like the whip of a jockey’s crop.

I made it to the parking lot by the rockface in eight minutes. There were no other cars. It was late in the day for rock climbing.

The rockface stands just in front of the hillside beneath the parking area, the way a thumbnail is in front of an upturned thumb. The parking area is on top. Most climbers start there, walk over the tip of the thumb, and climb down the nail. But looking up from the fire trail, there is no suggestion that a road, much less a parking turnout, is there at all.

The afternoon wind iced the sweat on my face and back. I raced across the dirt lot and clambered down the hillside (from the tip of the thumb down behind the nail) and peered over the edge of the rock. I couldn’t see all the way to the underbrush below the rock. But Bev Zagoya was not on the face. No one was. Only a couple of abandoned ropes hung down it from hooks that had been pounded into the top of the rock. I looked down the fire trail to my left. No sign of Bev. Could I have been wrong about her heading here? Could that bulge in her pack have been a water bottle, or a couple of oranges? Could she be sprawled on the wooden bench back along the fire trail, gazing out over the tops of the pines and eucalypts, past the carillon tower on campus, watching the fog flow in from the ocean?

Staring down at the underbrush, it occurred to me that every single person I’d heard mention climbing this rock face had come at it from the top. Was the ground down below too uncertain to try? Was the—I laughed silently. I was viewing that problem from the wrong end. The underbrush wasn’t the issue. No one worried whether it was too thick or the ground beneath it too treacherous. It wasn’t that the underbrush was the minus, it was that the parking lot at the top was the plus.

I glanced back to the left, and sighed. In the distance were the yellow shirt and red shorts. I moved back behind the shield of the rock to wait. The dirt had a dank smell. The rock was cold and slippery from the fog; it was hard to believe that just yesterday it had been ninety degrees here. After one night of fog it was like the sun had never shone at all. I remembered Bev this morning, in her shorts and sleeveless top, oblivious to the cold as she stood on the roof hosing down the window boxes.

Moving forward inch by inch, I peered cautiously over the edge of the rock face. My stomach lurched. It was forty feet, straight down. I closed my eyes and swallowed hard, then forced myself to look again. Bev Zagoya was at the bottom of the rock changing shoes.

I waited, thinking how much easier this would be if I didn’t need answers to key questions. But I did, and I needed to pose them here, on her turf, where a woman who had conquered the Himalaya would feel in control. Where she wouldn’t be calling for a lawyer before she spoke.

When I glanced down again, she was on the face maybe ten feet up. Although to me the face looked as smooth as the wall of a three-story building, she was finding handholds and toeholds and moving up with the speed of someone climbing stairs.

I moved back, trying to hear the sound of Bev’s rubber-coated shoes, or the scrape of short fingernails in the fingerjams. I thought of Bev Zagoya and that hose on the roof, and the wet crotches in Leila Sandoval’s eucalypts. And of the Swiss watch. I thought of Bev Zagoya living in a borrowed room because she couldn’t afford her own place. I thought of the years she had devoted to learning to climb, improving her technique, her endurance, running in the heat and the cold and the rain. The years it had taken her to be among the best. And the years she had not spent studying economics, or business administration, or dentistry, or anything that could provide her with a living.

Her dark hair was visible over the rim. I waited one more moment, until she hoisted herself onto the top of the rock, then I pulled myself up beside her and said, “If you couldn’t climb anymore, what would you do?”

Her shocked expression could have been the result of seeing me pop up here. For someone else it would have been. But for Bev a rockface would be as natural a place to come across anyone as a bus stop. Like it had been yesterday on Indian Rock, her face was tight with anger, but now there was fear there, too.

“Your whole adult life has been built around climbing. How would you live without it?”

She inched back farther in on the rock. “I could get a job. I have connections.”

“I don’t mean just financially, I mean what would your life be like as a
former
climber, a woman who
used
to be a mountaineer?”

Despite the cold air, sweat was running down her forehead, and beaded above the hairs on her eyebrows.

“To know it’s over,” I insisted. “That you’ll never stand on another mountaintop again. To have your life be ordinary?” To rip through the curtain of Berkeley syndrome and find the wall behind it more blank and gray and endless than you’d allowed yourself to fear? To not only see the pasture fence but be tethered to it?

“I’ll worry about that when the time comes.”

I nodded. “That doesn’t sound like the organized person who plans her expeditions with a computer.”

Her eyebrows lowered, the beads of sweat began to run down over the hairs. “Some things you have to think about now, some there’s no point in worrying about.”

“Like when you’ve already negotiated for the food on an expedition and started out, and then you realize there may not be enough, and you may end up taking a shorter more dangerous route because you haven’t got enough food to go the safe way?”

She glared. “Who are you to tell me how to run an expedition?”

I shifted my legs so I could face her. “Oh, no, Bev, this isn’t my conclusion, this is Kris’s. This is what Kris Mouskavachi would have been saying to those potential investors and all those reporters today, isn’t it? He would have been standing in the middle of Hasbrouck Diamond’s living room right now telling the filmmakers and the money men that you didn’t buy enough food for your last expedition, that you were too arrogant to admit your mistake, and that three people died.”

Angrily, she yanked off a climbing shoe, and stared at it. She sat as still, as granitelike as Grizzly Peak Rock. I had expected her to deny the charge, but her silence told me she was jettisoning that defense and deciding what she had left in good enough condition to use. Before she could call up her second line of defense, I said, “You told me Kris was your friend. But he came here to expose you.”