Free Diamond in the Buff by Susan Dunlap Page A

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