Diamond in the Buff Read Free Page B

pasture, indeed, we had here in Berkeley.
    Leaving questions about the wall for later, I stood up and looked at Diamond’s house. Double sets of glass doors led into the living room. Between them a picture window reflected the eucalypts. The house was a giant shingled shoebox, running lengthwise out over the steep hillside. It was huge for Panoramic Way, where building even a twelve-by-twelve room required drilling steel support poles deep into bedrock. Geranium-filled window boxes lined the edge of the flat roof above the second floor and at the corners curved Chinese-red planks arched pagodalike. From them hung brightly colored sock-flags painted to resemble carp. Today, in the still air, they looked like dead carp.
    The glass door opened. The man Pereira shepherded through was probably in his mid-forties, slightly built, with thin light-brown hair and the worst posture I had ever seen on an ambulatory human being. His head jutted forward like a fat carp dangling from the end of a pole. Or the corner of his roof. He gazed down (the only direction he could without difficulty) and with each step he looked in danger of falling forward and tumbling off the deck. Briefly I wondered if the man had some structural deformity, but I remembered someone insisting that Hasbrouck Diamond’s appalling stance was due to nothing more than sloppy posture. If so, mothers could have displayed Diamond as a warning to their slouching adolescents.
    As I watched Diamond stomp toward me, I recalled one afternoon in Howard’s and my office: Jackson, my fellow homicide detective, had been there when Pereira had stalked in from handling the latest Diamond call. “Has-Bitched made his whole complaint staring at his balls,” she’d announced.
    “Maybe the dude was doing a double-check,” Jackson said.
    “No need!” Pereira had snapped. “Not after he called and had me make a special trip out there because his neighbor’s garbage can spilled on his sidewalk. The guy’s got plenty of balls.”
    Looking at Diamond now, it was hard to say just how tall he might have been. Stooped over he was about my height: five-seven. Even in his face he bore a familial resemblance to one of his carp. His eyes strained forward under the lids. His lips seemed poised to smack together. I had a good view of the top of his head: there was a bald spot there, and pale brown hairs hovered around it. He was wearing a white beach jacket belted loosely over his wrinkled tanned stomach and bathing trunks that covered not enough of his spindly tanned legs. What level of aesthetic self-deception, I wondered, could have led this man to exhibit his body nude? Now the sight of his bathing trunks and oiled skin reminded me of the heat, the heat I was enduring in work clothes—because of his complaint. The dichotomy in our dress did nothing to endear him to me. And the implicit condescension of his attire didn’t help.
    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