Diamond in the Buff (3 page)

I said, “I’m Detective Smith, Homicide–Felony Assault. Why don’t you start from the beginning, Dr. Diamond?”

Most victims balk at repeating their stories over and over again, but Diamond nodded enthusiastically, an action that made his head look all the more like a hooked carp. “That’s the branch, right there, Detective. No question it could have killed me. You can see that, right?” He shifted his gaze from the branch to Raksen bending over the end, camera in hand. “She’s crazy. I kept telling you people—she’s crazy.”

It took me a moment to realize Diamond was not anthropomorphizing the eucalypt. I said, “She?”

“My neighbor, Leila Sandoval,” he sputtered, thrusting an accusing finger at the cottage beyond the deck rail. He held the pose for effect. But the impression he gave standing there, head down, arm raised to the side, was of a diver about to slip off the end of the board.

I glanced at Pereira, another of those ill-conceived indulgences. She was pressing her lips together to keep from unsuitable behavior. This was not going to be an easy interview for her.

Diamond lowered his arm and raised his gaze. Glaring directly at me, he said, “Detective, the woman’s been off the beam for years. She’s a lunatic. Ought to be put away.”

“Do I understand that you are accusing your neighbor of breaking off a thick eucalyptus branch ten feet above the spot where you were sitting and dropping it on you?”

“You won’t think it’s ridiculous when you meet her.”

“Now, Dr. Diamond,” I said, making an effort to mask any sarcasm, “how do you think she might have managed this attack without alerting you?”

My effort failed; Diamond’s flat face reddened. “Officer, I expect service from my police force. This woman has been plaguing me for years and the police have done nothing about it. It’s not for lack of my trying, I’ll tell you that.”

Behind, Diamond Pereira nodded emphatically.

I opened my pad, pushed in the button on the ballpoint pen, and waited.

“Look at those branches,” he shouted, “they’re thick as tree trunks themselves. And hanging out like that, it’s no wonder they drop off. She needs to get all those branches trimmed. Any idiot can see that. But do you think she’d do it? Not her.”

“So, is it negligence you’re talking about?” I asked, lowering my voice in reaction to his.

But that tactic made no impression. Diamond shouted, “Not negligence. Assault!”

“Dr. Diamond, assault and battery assume intent—”

“Of course she intended to hit me. That’s why she left the branches like that. She knew there was nothing I could do about them.”

I glanced up at the overhanging branches. “I’m sure you know that when a neighbor’s tree crosses the property line—”

“They’re not over my property line,” he muttered, his voice suddenly softer than mine.

“What did you say, Dr. Diamond?”

He dropped his gaze. “Guy who put in my deck,” he muttered at his groin, “he built it six feet too wide.”

“He built your deck six feet over your neighbor’s property?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice even.

Pereira clamped a hand over her mouth. Raksen was lying at the far corner of the deck peering up through his lens, presumably to get the fallen branch and the tree in one shot.

Grabbing back the offensive, Diamond said, “Don’t think that lunatic of a woman didn’t make hay from that. I was out of town while the carpenter was working. But she was here. If she was as piqued as she made out, she could have stopped him when the first board crossed the line. But not her. She waited till the whole thing was done. Done and stained and waterproofed. Seventeen thousand dollars later. Then she waltzed in here, all smug, and told me I’d have to pull it down. Then the deck would have been no bigger than a sidewalk. It would have been useless. She knew that. And she made hay.”

“What specific kind of hay, Dr. Diamond?”

“Twenty thousand dollars. Sheer blackmail,” he said to his belt.

“Do you mean she gave you an easement in return for the twenty thousand?”

He nodded, and muttered something to his chest. The only word I could make out was “branches.” But that was enough.

“You agreed that the eucalyptus branches can overhang your deck because they are on her property, is that right?”

Flushing to the top of his tonsure, Diamond grunted.

Behind him, Pereira swallowed hard. Her face was nearing the color of his. With considerable effort I restrained a smile of my own as I realized that this was Sandoval’s missing thrust in the feud, the one after Diamond’s howling cougar. Sandoval had certainly parried in style. No wonder he’d been spurred on to invoke the tree ordinance. “Still—”

“Officer, I lie sunbathing there at the corner of my deck, in my chaise every Thursday afternoon, every sunny weekend. She knows that. Ask Bev Zagoya. She’s living here.” He looked directly at me, beaming with pride.

“Bev Zagoya, the mountaineer?” I asked, amazed to find she was living here. Had the scorned rappelling wall done the trick after all? Did Hasbrouck Diamond embody an attraction not visible to the naked eye? From what I had seen, Diamond seemed like the last person a woman like Bev Zagoya would choose to live with. “Is she here now?”

“She’s taking a break, working on holds up at Indian Rock. She’s pitching the Everest expedition tomorrow; we’ve been working like crazy getting the background data, compiling the figures, hassling the caterers. Tomorrow afternoon the living room will be jammed with money men. Half of Hollywood will be here to get in on the ground floor of the first all-California expedition to Everest led by a woman. That is if that lunatic doesn’t sabotage it.”

I restrained a sigh. “Do you have some proof she’s attempting sabotage?”

“She’d love to sabotage me.”

I took that for a no. But I did wonder if Bev Zagoya shared her host’s apprehension and if that, perhaps, was the real cause of her peculiar behavior last night. Shifting my attention back to the issue at hand, I said, “Dr. Diamond, did she or anyone else see the branch fall on you?”

“Kris Mouskavachi, one of Bev’s associates. He
is
here.” He turned, cranking his head up to stare at the tree. “That branch was right over my chair. The lunatic knew that,” he insisted angrily. “All she had to do was weaken it. When those eucalyptus branches go, they go like that.” His fingers brushed past each other. In the history of eucalyptus, had anyone
ever
described the fall of a branch without attempting to snap his fingers? “Nothing can stop them.”

“Dr. Diamond,” I said slowly, “since you had these suspicions about your neighbor, didn’t it occur to you to sit somewhere else?”

Diamond turned purple. “Move!” he demanded. “Why should I move? It’s my deck! That’s the one spot where her damned trees don’t shade it. I had ’em topped, but look at them!” He shot an arm in their direction. All five eucalypts rose to a point just even with Leila Sandoval’s roof, where their tops had been lopped off. New growth poked out from the branches, but that did little to ameliorate the effect of the sawed-off trunks, and, in fact, gave the great trees an unnaturally foreshortened look, rather like Hasbrouck Diamond himself.

“Not two years later and they’re already shading out eighty percent of the deck. I’ll be damned if that bitch’ll make me move out of the sun!”

“Would she be likely to know how you feel?” I asked for form’s sake.

“You bet. She knows and she loves it. She’s just waiting till the trees shade the whole thing, which’ll probably be in another month. Damn trees. Drought doesn’t bother them. They grow in heat. They grow in frost. They don’t need fertilizer. The damned things are weeds, Detective,” he said, dropping his arm and gaze, “sometimes I see her up there looking out the window, just watching those branches grow and block out my sun. I can see her smiling to herself. She’s got me by the short hairs.”

A clear and present danger for the nude sunbather. I took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and asked, “What exactly gives her this, uh, hold on you?”

“The tree ordinance, Detective. Surely you’re familiar with the ordinances of our city.”

“But Dr. Diamond,
you
made the complaint about the trees!”

“The damned ordinance is full of holes,” he growled. “Twelve point forty-five point oh-four-three gee states that once you’ve gotten a judgment on a tree you can’t get another one for five years. So she’s got me for the next three years. Her trees can turn my house into an ice palace and there’s not a damned thing I can do.”

I jammed my teeth together to keep from laughing. Pereira wasn’t so successful. A gurgle escaped her. She made tracks for the far end of the deck. Diamond continued to scowl at his feet.

I swallowed and said, “Dr. Diamond, this is a serious charge you are making. And I have to question Ms. Sandoval’s motivation. From what you say, she already had you.”

Diamond squeezed his hands into fists. “I keep telling you, the woman’s a lunatic. She didn’t need a reason. She saw that branch hanging over me and she just couldn’t resist it. She’s probably up there right now laughing her head off,”

“Because the branch fell?”

“Because,” he said in obvious exasperation, “she knows I can’t sue.”

I couldn’t help it; I laughed.

“Detective, I obeyed the law!” He glared at me. “I went through the whole process, the way the ordinance instructs. She fought me every step. Of course we couldn’t settle the question of those damned trees between the two of us. That woman couldn’t agree to walk across the street. So we go to a mediator. Took me six months to find a mediator she’d agree to. Both parties have to agree on the mediator; that’s what the ordinance says. This mediator handled the public employees’ strike the year before, you remember that. He dealt with the county bureaucracy; he handled ten thousand public employees; but he couldn’t put up with Leila Sandoval! He said it was the worst case he’d ever tried. I believe him. The woman’s a lunatic!”

Sweat dripped down his shiny face. Wiping a hand across his forehead, he continued. “So we went to binding arbitration. The lunatic agreed to include all five eucalypts in the dispute. The arbitrator’s report on the trees said to top ’em. Then, Detective,
she
chose the tree trimmer—that’s the law, the tree owner chooses the trimmer, the complainant okays the decision
and
pays for the work. So she chose her trimmer, and probably told him to charge an arm and a leg since
I
had to pay.
And
she must have had him weaken this branch.”

I wiped a hand across my own sweaty forehead. “Dr. Diamond, what does all this have to do with her not being able to resist attacking you with a eucalyptus branch and your not being able to sue?”

Diamond leaned over the railing, his face suddenly pale as a deck passenger’s at the height of a hurricane. “I had to indemnify her for the cutting. The ordinance says, ‘The Complaining Party shall indemnify and hold harmless the Tree Owner with respect to any damages or liability incurred by said owner, arising out of the performance of any work at the behest of the Complaining Party.’ So, Detective, if
her
tree falls on me,
I’m
the one who’s liable.”

H
ASBROUCK DIAMOND HAD NOT
dealt with the question of
how
his neighbor could have engineered the eucalyptus branch to fall at the precise moment he was sitting under it. To him that was a peripheral issue, and after several attempts, all of which led him to new descriptions of his neighbor’s villainous character and dearth of sanity, I gave up. I checked out the wound on his left thigh. It was a fairly deep scrape, but hardly of the type that keeps morticians in business. Diamond already had a written report from his doctor. I sent him to get it and his other houseguest, Bev Zagoya’s associate.

The man Diamond sent out looked to be about twenty. Despite the heat he wore a long-sleeved rugby shirt and acid-washed jeans. His sun-bleached hair hung an inch below his ears as if he had compromised between the short stylish look, and the long old-Berkeley look. His skin was olive-y enough to have acquired the kind of tan I had spent months working for in the days before the sun had turned into a killer. And his eyes were the pale blue of morning, eyes that foster the illusion of being windows to the soul; they neither moved nervously as Raksen’s did, nor did they bulge like Diamond’s. What they seemed to be doing was lying back in their wide-apart sockets waiting for another clue to the situation. It took me a moment to realize that he was the blond who’d come into the back of the lecture hall last night at the time Bev Zagoya started rushing her talk.

“Brouck said you wanted to see me,” he said. “I’m Kris Mouskavachi. Kris with a K.” Hesitantly he extended a hand. On his wrist was a gold watch with a map of Switzerland on its face. The watch was too small for him. It looked more like a woman’s watch.

I shook his hand. It was moist. The boy was perspiring, as would be anyone dressed as inappropriately as he.

“Is Kris short for Kristopher? I’ll need your full name and address.”

Now those eyes narrowed momentarily. “Krishna,” he muttered. “Krishna Das Mouskavachi. My address here?”

“And your permanent address.”

“I don’t have a permanent address. My parents are in Kathmandu.”

“Trekking?” Probably ten percent of Berkeley had been to India at one time or another. Maybe a third of those had included Kathmandu, Nepal, in their journeys, some to begin treks through the Himalaya, some to smoke dope unhindered by the exigencies of reality. “Trekking?” I repeated.

Now the boy laughed. All the wariness vanished, and half of his twenty or so years seemed to evaporate. He pulled up the lime-colored chair and plunked himself on the arm. “Trekking! Going to the post office is an expedition for them. And then half the time they forget why they went. They spend days getting ready to go to market, or one of them wanders down five times in an afternoon because their whims change. Trekking!” He laughed again, but there was no bitterness. “You know some of the holy men up there and in Tibet talk about finding pockets in time.”

I nodded. I’d heard that before, from the same friend who’d told me about the Buddhist pasture story. A pocket in time was an idea with a lot of appeal. If I had one, I could slide into it, find an apartment, and slide out without losing a minute on this case.