Diamond in the Buff (8 page)

“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.

“Did Kepple ever listen?” she yelled, shaking her head. “The man’s impossible.”

I looked back at the wilted plants. How long had it taken them to sag like this? An hour? Four hours? All day? Mr. Kepple the obsessive … I remembered Howard at the pool Tuesday, flicking a drop of water off my arm, letting his hand rest there.

Howard had said, “We could skip lap swim tonight. We swam yesterday.” “There’s a bottle of Zinfandel in the fridge,” I’d said. The same verbal foreplay we could be having in a few minutes. I could almost feel his fingers quivering against my skin, or was it the other way around? I stared down at the wilting plants. Despite the heat a shiver ran down my back. Picturing the pool and Howard pushing off, gliding underwater, without me, I sighed. To the neighbor, I said, “Has Mr. Kepple been watering today?”

She pounded her fist on her porch railing. “Selfish old bastard! Doesn’t care about anyone but himself!”

Be calm, I told myself. But I was already stepping out from the protection of the hedge. “Mr. Kepple doesn’t
have
anyone but himself. His wife is dead. All he has is his yard. Maybe you’d like to practice showing compassion during all those minutes you, and your husband, and your children save by not showering. Maybe you could earn a prize, too.”

She stared, open-mouthed. Before she could regroup, I said, “Now tell me, when was the last time you saw him out here watering?”

“Last night, but—”

“Last night? Today’s the hottest day of the year. Where has he been today?”

“Not here, thank God …” But some of the anger had drained from her voice. “I don’t know where he is.”

I ran around to the front and pounded on the door. No sound came from inside. There was no green glow from the television (Mr. Kepple’s idea of burglar-proofing). I ran downstairs and peered into the garage. His pickup truck was inside.

I grabbed the front door key from under the rock by the stairs and ran back up the stairs. Unlocking the door I walked in, calling his name.

He wasn’t there. I picked up his phone and dialed the dispatcher at the station and asked him to check his records. If Mr. Kepple had had an accident in Berkeley, if an ambulance had been called in an emergency, it would be on the dispatcher’s log.

I sat waiting, looking around the living room. The sofa was a brown tweed, frayed, the carpet green, worn. Everything needed dusting. In front of the television a Naugahyde recliner stood, its footrest still up. There were three rips in the plastic, two taped over with gray tape. A beer can lay on the floor next to it. Although I had never been in the room long enough to survey it like this, none of what I saw surprised me. Until I looked at the mantel. It was crowded with photos. In the center was a gold framed wedding picture of the Kepples that must have been forty years old. In it was a young Mr. Kepple, his hair too brown, his cheeks too pink in the photographic tint.

He looked not nervous or stiff, but downright cocky. And Mrs. Kepple, who had died before I moved in, had a shy but knowing smile. Through the unnatural tint of the picture, she looked not pretty exactly, but warm, friendly, and yet … What exactly did that picture purvey? Wry. She looked wry. It was not the first characteristic I would have expected of a wife of Mr. Kepple. There were seven photos, taken, I guessed, every fifth anniversary. The Kepples smiled at each other in every one, the cockiness of his grin fading with each interval, her knowing smile softening to one of compassion. In the last one, maybe seven years old now, the two expressions had been nearly the same.

But it wasn’t the expression itself that surprised me. What surprised me was the look of understanding, one I had never seen on Mr. Kepple’s face.

What was taking the dispatcher so long?

I glanced at the wall behind the recliner, at group photos from Mr. Kepple’s classes.
WEEDS
said the sign in front of the dozen or so students in the top one.
PESTS
was in the middle. And at the bottom
TREES.
I looked closer at
TREES.
Mr. Kepple was at the far right of the eight students. At the left, standing a bit away from the other seven was the blond boy with the tattoo of the cypress on his back and shoulders, the boy who had been talking to Leila Sandoval and Herman Ott this afternoon.