the Pallbearers (2010) (2 page)

"If that's your office again, I'm gonna load up and clean out that entire floor of gold-braid pussies you work with," I said, only half in jest.

The phone kept blasting us with electronic urgency. It was quickly ruining the moment. Alexa rolled off the bed and snatched it up.

"Yes?" Then she paused. "Who is this?" She hesitated. "Just a minute."

She turned toward me, covering the receiver with her palm. "You know somebody named Diamond Peterson?"

"No, but if she's related to Diamond Cutter, tell her she's killing her little brother."

"Stop bragging about your wood and take this." Alexa grinned, handing me the phone.

I sat on the side of the bed and put the receiver to my ear.

"Yes? This is Detective Scully."

"You're a police detective?" a female voice said with a slight ghetto accent. She sounded surprised.

"Who is this again?"

"Diamond Peterson. I'm calling from Huntington House Group Home." The mention of the group home shot darkness through me. Memories of that part of my life were negative and confusing. I now only visit them occasionally in dreams.

"How can I help you, Ms. Peterson?" I asked cautiously.

"It's about Walter Dix. Since you're in the police, I assume you've heard."

"Heard what? Is Pop okay?"

"Not hardly." She hesitated, then let out a breath that sounded like a sigh and plunged ahead. "Pop's dead."

A wave of feelings cascaded through me. When they settled, the emotion on top was guilt. I had left Walt and the group home in my rearview mirror decades ago. I had been studiously ignoring the man who had injected the only bit of positive energy into my life growing up--the man to whom I probably owed a large portion of my eventual survival. Pop provided a thread of hope that had been all that was left when I hit rock bottom eight years ago.

Even during my lowest days, because of Pop, I clung to the belief that there was still some good in the world despite the fact that by the time I reached my mid-thirties, I'd managed to find almost none.

It was hard to know the complete mixture of events that had finally led to my salvation. The easy ones to spot were Alexa, and my now-grown son, Chooch, who was attending USG on a football ride. But Pop was also there in a big way. He had somehow convinced me that it was possible to survive a horrible start where I was left unattended in a hospital waiting room, a nameless baby with no parents, who was then shuffled off to a county infant orphanage. Child Protective Services had finally placed me at Huntington House at the age of six, but by then I was already starting to rot from the inside.

It marked the beginning of a life of loneliness, which was only occasionally interrupted by a parade of strangers. Once or twice a year I was forced to put on my best clothes and stand like a slave waiting to be purchased. "This is Shane, he's seven years old. This is Shane, he's nine. This is Shane, he's twelve."

All the rejection, all the rage--Pop had seen me through it with his crinkly smile, the weird seventies surfer lingo, the sunrise surf patrols. "Shane, there's a place for you. You have to be patient." All these years later, it turned out he was right.

But once I'd survived it, I'd turned my back on him. I'd moved on. It was too painful to go back there and revisit that part of my life, so I hadn't. I'd left Pop behind as surely as if I'd thrown him from a moving car.

The memory made me feel small as I stood in our bedroom scattered with Alexa s colorful clothing. I'd been getting ready to run off to paradise but had just been pulled back with one sentence from a woman I didn't know.

"Dead?" I finally managed to say.

"Suicide. He went into his backyard yesterday and blew his head off with a shotgun."

Diamond Peterson was talking softly, trying to mute the devastating news with gentle tonality. It wasn't working. I knew from years of police work in homicide that there is no good way to deliver this kind of information.

My stomach did a turn. I felt my spirits plunge.

"I've been meaning to stop by and see him," I said. It was, of course, completely off the point and pretty much a huge lie.

"He left a note in his desk," she said. "It was written a week before he died. He wanted you to be one of his pallbearers."

Chapter
3

Diamond Peterson told me that the funeral was going to be at the old Surfers' Church located on Cliffside Drive, overlooking the public beach at Point Dume. It was scheduled for the day after tomorrow, when we were planning to be in Hawaii.

I hung up and turned to face Alexa, who could read my devastation. She knew bad news was coming.

"Problems?"

"Yeah." I stood there, trying to get the right words.

"Come on, buddy. Just lay it on me," Alexa said. "Something go wrong with one of your current cases?"

"You remember Walter Dix?"

She frowned slightly, found the memory, and nodded. "From the group home?"

"He's dead."

Her expression changed, saddened by sympathy. Tm so sorry, Shane. I know how important he was to you growing up."

"Suicide," I said, trying to fit that idea into a mosaic of things I knew about Pop. Some guys are suicide types--brooders, drinkers, mood flippers, tight winds. Pop was none of those. He was the perennial optimist, a hang-loose guy who loved to laugh.

Even though he ran a foster-care home packed with depressing social casualties, he saw the world as a place of constant opportunity. There was always a party wave out there. He knew it was coming and would be large enough for all of us to ride. He believed in miracles.

He didn't seem to me like someone who would commit suicide. But then, how did I really know? I'd ditched him like a bad date. I hadn't been back there to see him in years. And the few times I did go, I'd been awkwardly subdued. We'd been on the same page when I was a kid, but we struggled to communicate as adults. I'd told myself the reason for this was that all we had in common were bad memories of my childhood, which neither of us wanted to revisit.

This excuse suddenly seemed like an artful dodge to avoid a painful self-evaluation. I suspected the real reason I didn't go was because Walt was a witness to a different Shane Scully, a mean angry bully who I no longer liked. I'd been staying away because he knew about parts of me that I was trying to either eliminate or forget.

If I thought about it, I didn't really know Walter Dix as he was today at all. I knew who he said he was, but sometimes there's a big gap between that and the real thing. Maybe under those crinkly smile lines and the surfer disguise, something darker was hiding. I couldn't trust my recollections as a child and hadn't invested enough interest as a man to have a valid opinion.

"When's the funeral?" Alexa asked, getting to the meat of it before I had a chance to bring up that problem.

"Day after tomorrow."

"You need to go," she said, instantly knocking three days off a vacation we'd carefully planned and had been desperately looking forward to.

"Yeah," I said.

She took a step forward and held my hand. "It s okay, honey. Ten days in paradise is still nothing to complain about. It'll give me time to refine my wardrobe selections."

"He left a note. He wants me to be a pallbearer."

She stood there thinking, remembering the few things I'd told her over the years. "But you . . ."

"Yeah. Shallow, selfish bastard that I am, I've barely talked to him in twenty-five years."

"Come on, Shane, stop it."

My thoughts suddenly started shooting all over the place. The Huntington House home; the early morning surf trips to the beach; toys Pop had bought for us with his own money; coaching our baseball and soccer teams; a sad memory of him sitting next to Theresa Rodriguez's bed one night, holding one of her horribly scarred hands while she cried.

"Where's the funeral?" Alexa said, trying to jog me out of what she could see was a developing funk.

"Surfers' Church in Point Dume. Never been there. She said it was on a cliff overlooking the steeps."

"Steeps?"

"Surfer talk--what Walt called waves. He also called them glass walls, cylinders, the green room. . . . Everything was surf lingo with him." My voice was dulled by emotion.

"How 'bout I fix us a drink? This mess in here can wait. I've got plenty of time to pack now."

She put on a robe, fixed me a light scotch, and got one for herself. We went back outside and sat on the patio. I could still feel remnants of my body heat coming off the iron chair from before. My world had totally shifted before the metal even had time to cool. Thing
s w
ere different. A little piece of my past had been torn out and had just floated away. Some things lost can never be retrieved. I had lost my chance to say thank you, and now all that was left to do was carry Pops coffin and say good-bye.

Again, Alexa read me. "He understood, Shane."

I turned and looked at her.

"How could he?"

"It wasn't all about you. Some of it was about him."

Of course, she was right about that. But he'd been there for me when it counted and if he was so desperate he'd committed suicide, why had I not been around to know that and repay the favor? I'd been in the military when his wife, Elizabeth, had died. Stationed far away. No help. I sent him cards at Christmas, paid one or two visits. Not enough. But the reason was simple. I just didn't want to go back there. I couldn't. So I rarely had.

Alexa and I sat in silence until the sun went down. I said very little because I was deep inside my own head. I saw her shiver slightly in a descending ocean mist.

"You go on in. I'll be there in a few minutes."

She got up, kissed the top of my head, and went into the house.

I began letting the thoughts I'd pushed aside for all those years flood back.

I remembered old feelings. The anger, the hatred, the need to strike out and hurt someone. I thought about living in a group home full of angry, similarly rejected children. None of us trusted or liked the others.

There had only been Pop to lean on.

Chapter
4

The church looked like it belonged in Mexico. It was white stucco, small, and almost exactly square. It had an old-fashioned steeple with three bells. Ropes attached to the clappers hung down the front face of the building so the bells could be rung by people standing on the ground. A primitive system.

There were about forty surfboards leaning against the outside walls, a silent tribute to Walt from a bunch of long-haired, toes-on-the
-
nose mourners. Hibiscus and jasmine grew wild in a field overlooking the ocean and choked the little stone path that led up from the dirt parking lot.

The view was spectacular, sitting right on top of Point Dume, just off Cliffside Drive, overlooking the ocean almost a thousand feet below. The three-foot incoming swells were diminished by the height where we stood and from up here looked like tiny ripples headin
g t
oward shore. The setting was quaint and beautiful. A perfect place to say good-bye.

I pulled in next to one of several Huntington House vans. There were already about thirty or forty cars, all shapes and sizes parked in the lot--some clunkers, a few pricey models, and a scattering of rusting surf wagons.

Alexa and I got out. I was wearing a black suit and sunglasses. My face felt hot in the afternoon sun. I moved slowly as we walked toward the church and a very dark, African-American woman who appeared to be about twenty-five. She was big-boned--large, but not fat--and wore a black dress with padded shoulders. She had a friendly, if unremarkable, face. As I approached, she put out her hand and flashed a bright smile.

'Tm Diamond," she said. "Hope you're either Shane or Jack."

"I'm Shane." We shook hands. "This is my wife, Alexa."

"Nice to meet you. If that's the right thing to say under such terrible circumstances."

It was always like that at funerals. Even common pleasantries seemed out of place.

"We're having a preservice pallbearers' meeting in the rectory building over there beside the church. There's only one who hasn't showed yet. Hope he doesn't duck out."

"Who's missing?" I asked, thinking maybe it was someone from my days there.

"Jack Straw. He's coming from Long Beach. Do you know him?" I shook my head. "I don't know him either, but like all of us, he once lived at Huntington House and was on Walt's list. He said over the phone that his boss wouldn't let him off 'til noon." She frowned at her watch. "He should have been here by now."

"I'll just go on into the rectory and introduce myself," I said.

"Good. I'll be there as soon as this guy Straw shows."

Just then a shiny, red-and-black, custom Softail Harley came roaring up the hill, pipes blaring. I could tell from the deep growling sound that the engine was a big V-twin. Astride the brightly painted bike, arms outstretched to clutch shoulderwide ape hangers, was a young guy with no helmet, long black hair, dirty jeans, and leathers. Not what I'd choose to wear to a funeral, but Huntington House wasn't exactly an Eastern finishing school, so you had to be ready for anything.