by Susan Dunlap
“The two of you, you’ve got the victim, you’ve got the weapon right in front of you. And in less than four hours we’ve got the victim complaining about incompetence.”
“Incompetence?” I said before I could catch myself. I was prepared for Doyle to light into me about the fiasco on Telegraph, but not for Diamond talking about incompetence. It was too soon for him to have heard about Sandoval’s escape. “About what? I took his statement. I interviewed both his house guests. I attempted to interview his neighbor.” I did not bring up her departure. “Raksen took a mold of the eucalyptus branch—”
“And didn’t notice the wound,” Doyle snapped.
“Wound?” I looked at Raksen. We’d both checked Diamond’s leg. There had been no broken skin, no black, blue, or yellow marks. Only the scrapes from the falling eucalyptus branch.
“Wound on the crotch,” the inspector went on.
“He didn’t tell me that,” I said. “And I didn’t check there.” From all I had learned of Leila Sandoval, that did seem the type of wound she might have felt driven to inflict. Damn the woman for escaping me. Damn me for letting her. I could picture her kicking Diamond in the balls, but still couldn’t see how she could have managed to get a eucalyptus to do it.
“Diamond said there was a wound, a depression, that had been dug into the crotch of the tree—”
“The crotch of the tree!”
“That’s where the branch comes into the trunk, Smith.” Doyle’s cheeks quivered; he was as close to laughing as he’d been this year. He fought it back.
“Dug in? There was a depression, but there was no sign of fresh digging, was there, Raksen?” I asked.
Before Raksen could respond, not that he looked likely to, the inspector continued. “Not new, maybe a year old. And in that wound there were bacteria.”
“So that branch was weakened,” I said. “They say eucalyptus branches fall without warning. I guess bacterial wounds are one of the reasons why.”
“And do you know why those bacteria were able to survive, Smith?” Doyle didn’t wait for a reply. “Because water had collected in that wound.”
“Water?”
“In August of a drought year, Smith.”
“The wound was wet,” Raksen muttered.
Despite all my experience with Inspector Doyle, I laughed. “Inspector, what we’ve got here is a soap opera. Sandoval left her husband for Diamond, hard as that is to imagine. Diamond tossed her aside for Bev Zagoya. Sandoval may well be bitter. She did order a hive of bees, most likely to disrupt the presentation at his house tomorrow. But gouging out a hole ten feet above his deck and tossing in bacteria, I find that a bit hard to believe. And now is he asking us to believe she watered that hole every week like a goddamned houseplant?”
Doyle’s face colored. Out of the side of my eye I could see that Raksen was paler. I should have stopped then. I didn’t. “How did Diamond say Sandoval did the watering? Did she shinny up the trunk every Sunday morning when he wasn’t looking? Or did she hang a hose out her window?”
The inspector jammed his teeth together. His face got redder. “You think that’s funny, do you, Smith?”
Maybe it was the result of letting Leila Sandoval outsmart me. Maybe I was just tired. I should have kept my mouth shut, but I didn’t. “It’s ludicrous. I’m sick of us running out to deal with Diamond and Sandoval and their prepubescent squabble.”
“Smith, you’re a public servant. You don’t get to choose which citizens deserve your time. You’re paid to serve them all. You understand that?”
“Inspector, I have served Diamond. We all have. On this he’s had a patrol officer, a homicide detective, and an ID tech. We don’t normally send out ID techs for fallen branches. The man’s not getting his money’s worth, he’s getting the jackpot.”
I expected Doyle’s teeth to plunge well into my jugular. But his only reaction was the deepening red of his face, and the tight set of his jaw. He rapped a finger on the desk. Unbalanced piles of papers jerked in response. “Smith,” he said slowly, “I know about Has-Bitched Diamond. I know about his feud with Leila Sandoval, and I know about the tree controversy. I know the man is a pain in the ass.”
I nodded, amazed at his control. Amazed and wary.
“By rights we should be able to file this complaint under loony.”
I nodded again. Raksen sat back. I didn’t.
“But if you think this is a joke, Smith, you’re missing the ball. Diamond’s a pain all right, but he’s a dangerous pain. He’s already called me once, to say he’s getting slipshod service here.”
“He knows better.”
Undaunted, he continued. “That call, Smith. It came on my private line.”
I was beginning to see the ball now. It was sailing over my head. “Diamond has your private number?” I said. “Who else’s number does he have?”
For the first time, Doyle nodded. “Exactly, Smith. You got that, Raksen?”
Raksen looked paler yet. Clearly, he didn’t get it. In the lab Raksen was the best, but his real love was for microbes. In his view, man’s role was as host.
“How long do you think it’ll be, Raksen,” Doyle asked, as if to a dim child, “before Diamond’s on the horn to the chief, the mayor, the papers?”
“But, Inspector,” Raksen said, “they must know what he’s like, too.”
Before Doyle could position his teeth, I said, “All the better for them.”
But Doyle wasn’t deterred. “Raksen,” he said, staring straight at me, “you must still think news reporting is merely passing on the truth. The truth is that August is a slow news month. Everyone, except Diamond, dammit, is on vacation. It’s too late for floods, too early for hurricanes, too warm to bemoan the plight of the homeless. The city council’s on vacation, the students haven’t returned. Nothing is happening. There is no news, Raksen. Nothing to sell newspapers. You got that? And then, Raksen, Hasbrouck Diamond bursts onto the scene, bitching that his bare flank was attacked by a eucalyptus. It’s a gift from the gods, Raksen. With a clever headline—”
“LIMBS ATTACK LIMB.” It got out before I could stop myself.
“When they find that Diamond is accusing his neighbor of using a tree limb to maim or kill him—”
“BRANCH OFF TO ETERNITY.”
“And when they find out that the crotch of the tree was wet …” He paused.
I could read the dare in his eyes. I couldn’t resist. “‘WET CAVITY FELLS DENTIST.’ We’re talking family papers, Inspector.”
Doyle flashed a smile. It only served to make the glower that followed darker. “You’ve got the game, Smith, so tell Raksen here what happens when they get the report that Diamond is complaining about us.”
“‘COPS FINGER CROTCH WHILE MASSEUSE RUNS LOOSE.’”
Back in my office, I called the dispatcher three times, even though I knew he would have contacted me as soon as he heard from patrol. Leila Sandoval should have ambled back to her Oriental rug and beach chair on the Avenue an hour ago. The longer she was absent, the more uneasy it made me. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t get a warrant for her; as it stood now I didn’t even have grounds to charge her. You can’t charge a woman because her tree branch falls, or because she chooses to purchase a beehive.
I had been flippant with Inspector Doyle, no doubt about that. It was as if I had peeled off the thickened top layer of chocolate pudding and tossed it on the table between us. And now, I was left with just the pudding beneath, the mushy pudding of apprehension.
8
AS I HEADED ACROSS the parking lot to my car, Raksen was starting up his old brown Dodge. He backed up and sat in the lane for a moment staring at me, then pulled up next to me. His face was still as pasty as it had been in Doyle’s office. A film of sweat covered it and coated his wiry hair. He looked like a terrier who’d just been hauled out of the sink by the scruff of the neck. “Two things, Smith,” he said, finger tapping rapidly on the steering wheel. “First—this is really P
ereira’s find, but it’ll be in my report, too—I yanked out a six-inch copper nail.”
“From the base of the eucalypt?” I asked.
His finger stopped, arched back stiffly from the wheel. “One of four. I left the other three.”
“And copper nails kill trees?”
“So people believe. I’ll get the specifics, of course.”
“Four nails,” I said, feeling increasingly uneasy. “Someone is taking no chances. Or is even more obsessive than I’d thought. What’s the second thing?”
Raksen shifted the gearstick into neutral, and began tapping his finger, more tentatively now. “I don’t have test results yet, so this is off the record …” He waited till I nodded. “But Smith, someone has been pulling on your eucalyptus branch. They must have tossed a rope around the branch while the bark was still on it. Could be that the rope is what loosened the bark.”
“What kind of rope?”
“No way to say. The bark is gone. Maybe there’s a fiber I missed. I’m going to go over it again. But I doubt it.”
If Raksen missed it, it didn’t exist. “Thanks,” I said.
I got in my VW, drove slowly out of the lot, and headed across Martin Luther King, Jr. Way, still thinking about Leila Sandoval. If she was hiding out, at least she wouldn’t be at her house, near enough to Diamond’s to cause any more harm. She wouldn’t know that Kris had canceled the bees. Tonight, and as things now looked, tomorrow, she would be sitting smugly in whatever bolt-hole she’d chosen, expecting the bees to do her work. I stopped at the light on University Avenue. A gray-haired woman on a ten-speed slid in in front of me. A man in a sports jacket, another in a suit, and one in an Indian dhoti crossed the street. It was already rush hour; I could be here for a while. I should have thought of that, have taken another route …
An obsessive person would have thought ahead. An obsessive wouldn’t have trusted that the bees would arrive. She would have checked, found they’d been canceled. She’d be furious, and she would … do what?
The light changed. I inched closer to the intersection, wishing now that I had gotten to Kris before he canceled the bees. At least with them, we knew what to expect. Now I had no idea at all.
And there was nothing I could do but worry. What I needed was an hour swimming laps in the pool. Strong pulls, hard kicks. Real hard kicks. If I gave Mr. Kepple a brisk warning not to waste water (at least in sight of his neighbors), I just might make lap-swim hour.
It was a few minutes after five when I pulled up in front of Mr. Kepple’s house, a standard green stucco in a middle-class neighborhood in north Berkeley. Two years ago I had rented the ten-by-forty back porch with its jalousie windows that held out neither rain nor the roar of Mr. Kepple’s electric hedge trimmer, electric mower, blower, and seed sower, with indoor-outdoor carpet that resembled a golf course in monsoon season. I’d moved in because it was there and I was going through a divorce and any place was better than the house that held my ex-husband. Another impulsively grabbed pleasure, or lesser evil.
But it wasn’t my inadequacies I was here to deal with. It was Mr. Kepple’s. And I was certainly in the mood to point out someone else’s faults.
I have interrogated hundreds of suspects. I’ve learned to read a suspect and play him like a fisherman, giving line, reeling in, letting out more and floating the slack on the water, then popping the button on the reel and cranking like mad. I’ve comforted victims too terrified to talk and eased them into giving statements. I’ve faced down guys who’ve spent more years in “Q” than out. But all that skill was useless when it came to talking to Mr. Kepple. When I lived in his converted back porch, my door opened onto the yard where he could be found digging or cutting, planting or yanking out any time of night or day. He had caught me racing out the door to work at seven A.M. (as he was spreading enough manure to become a major player in the state solid-waste disposal game). He’d been delighted to find company when I dragged home after a stakeout at four A.M. (when he was dispersing earthworms into the soil so they could find cover before the early birds indulged). There was no time of day or night when I was safe. He had devoured hours of my time describing his ever changing garden plans, pointing at the brown malodorous ground where the native plant section would be, at prospective Hollyhock Haven, at the site for the dry creek and wooden bridge in the upcoming Japanese garden. He had dragged out series after series of plot sketches he’d made in gardening class. (He’d even displayed several group pictures of his fellow gardening-class students—framed!) Lovingly, he’d shown me flats of baby plants that I knew would be discarded after a week in the ground, by which time he would have been seduced by a grander, or more colorful, or more subtle, more exotic, more natural, more seasonal, more different plan. He had—thank God—scorned plastic flamingos and terra cotta dwarfs. But there had been a tense week when he had realized he could get a good price on five giant Buddhas with differing hand positions. I had pictured the terra cotta statues sinking into the mud outside my door, leaving five bubbles of bad karma.
But even though nothing ever grew, Mr. Kepple had kept the soil ready. He’d added fertilizer weekly. And he never stopped watering.
That last proclivity of his was the problem. He was not responding responsibly to the drought. The neighbors had called the police. Again.
And, following the unwritten rule of professional courtesy, Murakawa had called me. Again.
With all that, I couldn’t help but feel a fondness for the man. (Maybe it was guilt at my own parents being on the other side of the country, too far away to ask for my help.) And although I knew it wasn’t remotely true, he had gotten to me every time he said, “The garden is for you, Jill. I want to see you walk out your door into the prettiest yard in Berkeley.” With each new garden implement he was like a toddler tearing open his gifts on Christmas Eve. The time he got his leaf blower, he couldn’t wait till morning to try it. (Actually, that hadn’t seemed quite so endearing at the time. To me, or to the neighbors.)
The chances of convincing Mr. Kepple to withhold the water of life from his beloved garden were akin to convincing Hasbrouck Diamond to shade his nether parts from the sun.
But if there was ever a time I was prepared to stomp through his wall of intransigence, it was now.
No sound came from inside Mr. Kepple’s pale green house. That didn’t surprise me. I hadn’t expected to find him in there when hours of sun were left. I made my way around the side. The path between his house and the hedge (blessedly, not one of those hedges that could be shaped like a lion or a cupid) was slate today. When I moved in it had been cement, then redwood slab, then wood chip, then a particularly slippery variety of ground cover.
The backyard was as I might have expected. Clusters of tiny green plants I couldn’t name dotted the yard. Over the years they had all looked the same: small, green, flowerless, doomed. Despite the heat and drought, the grass was thick and vibrant green. But Mr. Kepple was nowhere in sight. And there was no roar, buzz, or spray.
“Mr. Kepple!” I called for form’s sake. In the silence here, I didn’t expect an answer. And I got none.
I opened the door to my old digs and got my second surprise. I had assumed that as soon as my last box was gone, Mr. Kepple would fill the porch with the equipment that had jammed his garage. Word was that he had for a while. But now, the ten-by-forty space looked like I still lived there. The chaise lounge was still at one end, the white wicker table and chairs in the middle, the bookcase at the near end by the spot where my sleeping bag had lain for those two years.
The flat was just waiting for me to move back in! I looked back at the ten-by-forty space, at the stained carpet, the one tiny closet, the walk-through kitchen that led to a bathroom so small that the toilet was set at an angle, with the edge of the sink extending over it, and the door had to be left open when I’d showered. My stomach clutched. I couldn’t live here. After two months in The Palace, this place looked like … like a utility porch. On the other hand, if I didn
’t find an apartment this weekend … “Mr. Kepple!”
In the next yard, beyond the hedge, a door opened. Mr. Kepple’s neighbor, a woman a few years older than I—maybe thirty-five—stalked out onto a porch about level with my head. A T-shirt clung clammily to her chest, thin blond hair hung limp and stringy, and on her pale, sweaty face was a scowl. She stared down at my green shirt and gray slacks and my businesslike loop earrings.
“Are you from the water department?” she demanded. She didn’t recognize me. That was a relief. But then, when I lived here I had had little chance to be out in the yard to be seen.
I walked toward her. The overhanging hedge would block her view of all but the top of my head. “No. I’m a friend. I need to talk to Mr. Kepple.”
“Damn right!” she snapped. “Somebody needs to talk to the man. Look at that yard! It’s a swamp! Do you know how many times the man watered yesterday? Six times. In one day! The man’s got no sense!”
The anger I’d been swallowing all day pushed to the surface. Not that I doubted the truth of her complaint. But the plants under the hedge were limp. He hadn’t watered six times today. Still, I could hear the sharp edge to my voice when I said, “I’ll have a talk—”
“We’ve got to save water. I’ve told him. But does he listen?”
I knew the answer to that. I inched closer to the hedge. Standing in the shade, I looked down at the drooping plants. Mr. Kepple was every bit as obsessive as Leila Sandoval or Hasbrouck Diamond. He would never let his plants droop.
“I told him,” the woman told me, her face growing pink, “we all have to conserve. I heat dishwater on the stove so I don’t have to run the water till it gets hot. We empty the rinse water in the garden. We don’t shower anymore; we just soap and rinse off. The kids get a prize each week for shortest time in the shower. We’re killing ourselves saving water. But whatever we save, he wastes.”
What I needed to do was keep my mouth shut, leave a note for Mr. Kepple, and get out of here. Howard would be at the pool, standing at the shallow end, waiting for me, the sunlight glistening off his curly red hair, water dripping down his chest, tracing the line of his pectoral muscles.
