the Pallbearers (2010) (12 page)

"You guys ready to order?" Alexa asked, smiling at the guy talk while passing menus around.

Alexa and I had the classic Mai Tai, Chooch had a Coke, and we all ordered the teriyaki-steak special. While we waited for the meals, we talked some more about school and spring ball.

"I was doing great 'til this hamstring," Chooch said. "Coach says you don't lose your position on the depth chart through injury, but my not being on the field can't help. I gotta totally concentrate on getting rehabbed."

It went on like that for a while, until our dinners came. Then Chooch abruptly changed the subject.

"Mom tells me Walter Dix was real important to you. Thats why you guys canceled Hawaii."

"Yeah," I said. "He was."

"Then how come you never talked about him?"

I sat for a moment and tried to deal with that.

"It was a mistake not to," I said. "I should have." Alexa reached out and took my hand. "Pop Dix ran the foster home where I lived from the time
I
was six until I graduated high school. He was the only person back then who cared whether I did my homework or got into fights. Cared if I was hurting or afraid. Walter stood between me and disaster. But when he needed me, I was nowhere around. I failed him, and in doing so I failed myself." The last part came out almost as a whisper.

"If I said something like that, you know what you'd say to me, Dad?"

"No."

"You'd say, 'Suck it up, Chooch. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. It's not the way to solve your problem.'"

"Is that what I'd say?"

"Yeah. It wasn't your fault."

"I can't get past my betrayal," I said. "I'm trying, but it's eating me up."

"Y'know, Dad, you can never pay people back for the favors they do. The best you can usually do is pass those favors 011."

I looked down at my plate, then stirred niv tropical drink, wondering how the hell to get out of this conversation.

"When we first met, you didn't know that you were my dad," Chooch continued. "But you reached out to me anyway. Got me out of that gang. You cared about me when nobody else did. There was only you between me and disaster, the same way Mr. Dix was there for you. When you saved me, you passed his favor on."

"It isn't quite that simple," I said.

"It is," Chooch replied. "It's exactly that simple."

Alexa squeezed my hand, and when I looked over, she nodded.

Later that night, after Chooch went back to USC and we got home, Alexa and I were again in the backyard. A low fog had dropped over the coast, and we were sitting in a thick white cloud, unable to even see halfway across the small canal that runs past our house. She held my hand as a distant foghorn blared mournfully miles away out in the ocean.

I thought about what Chooch had told me, how you can rarely pay people back for the good deeds they do. Circumstances almost never align so perfectly that they allow for that to happen. So you drag your debts around instead, feeling bad because you haven't been able to square things. As Chooch had said, the closest you usually come to a payback is some sort of transference. Becoming a cop was part of that for me.

But now that Walt was gone the debt had been prematurely canceled. His death had just turned into a homicide and that gave me a fresh chance. At least I could now go out there and solve his murder.

Alexa was studying me carefully as I sat beside her. "I think you'r
e w
ay too emotional about this," she said, echoing Detective Coles concern. "You better snap out of your funk or I'm not gonna let Cal assign this case to you."

"I should have been there. I should have seen what Walt was going through," I said softly.

"But you weren't and you didn't. You'll never do right by Walt now if you've got your chin on your chest. You've got to work this like any other murder. Unemotionally and with objectivity. You do it any other way you're gonna screw up."

"Yeah, you're right. I'll pull it together."

She looked over at me, skeptically. "I was thinking, since I'm on vacation for two weeks anyway and don't have anything to do, maybe I could give you a hand."

"Don't trust me to do this by myself?"

"You want my help, I'm in," she said. "I won't butt in on what Sally does, but I can handle stuff in the background. Then we can go over it and strategize together at night."

"You always were my best backup," I told her. I reached over and we slapped palms. "Partners," we said in unison.

"Since I'm gonna have a little role in this, you want to tell me what we're doing--what our first step is?"

"In the morning I'm gonna take a look at a guy named Rick O'Shea." Then I told her who he was and why he'd caught my interest.

"Sounds like a good thread to start pulling," she said. "What do you want me to do?"

"Put some pressure on the ME's office. This redo autopsy is a loser for them. They already know they're gonna end up looking bad. Don't let them delay it or push it off."

"Done," she said.

"I'm pissed off, Alexa. I'm really angry. How could I have let this happen?"

"Now you're cooking. Anger's good. Now go out and bring us back a collar." The night was turning cool so Alexa decided to go inside.

I sat there a little longer and slowly my anger turned to resolve. Suddenly I felt Walt's unseen presence hovering next to me. It was like the old days, when we'd been in the morning lineup, floating beyond the break, just outside the impact zone.

Without looking, we could always tell when a big one was coming. The energy of the wave building from the ocean floor touched a spot deep inside us, curling our toes with expectation.

I had that same feeling now. A huge swell of energy and expectation was beneath me. I could almost hear Walt shouting encouragement like he did when I was a boy, yelling at me to start cranking and tap the source.

In the old days we'd sometimes take off on the same wave, ride shoulder to shoulder, dropping in together behind the curl. Both of us lighting it up, fully covered, blasting out of the tube, rail to rail, riding the wall of glass all the way into the shore, shouting our excitement into the sky where only God could hear.

Chapter
21

At seven thirty the next morning I was getting reach' to leave the house when the phone rang. Alexa was in the shower, so I picked it up.

"Scully?" a deep voice said.

"Yeah?"

"Sabas."

"How ya doing?"

"
I
need to meet with you."

"That's gonna be tough to arrange this morning,"
I
said. "I'm running late. We can set it up for this afternoon or maybe tomorrow if you want."

"I'm parked outside your house. Let's do it now."

"Now's not convenient."

"I don't care."

This wasn't getting us anywhere.

"You better talk to me, Scully. You don't, I promise you're gonna regret it."

"I'll be right out."

I thought, Who does this guy think he is?

I grabbed my briefcase and jacket and walked out the door. A lowered five-windowed '53 Chevy pickup, painted bright yellow with a fifties-style flame job on the nose, was parked in the drive right across my rear bumper, blocking my egress.

Vargas was standing by the truck bed, dressed in jeans and a polo shirt. He had a BlackBerry in his hand.

"I don't have much time, so let's make this quick," I said.

"Scully, I did a little checking on you last night. Some friends of mine who work at the Public Defenders office say you have a very unorthodox style. You don't obey the rules."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You run stop signs, create legal messes."

"All that tells me is I musta put a bunch of good cases on your dirtbag friends in the PD's office."

"It's more than that."

"I don't need career counseling right now. Get to it. What's this about?"

We faced off over the bed of the Chevy.

"Where you going this morning?" he demanded.

"None of your business."

"If it's about Walt Dix, then I'm making it my business."

I stood there, trying to decide how to unload this guy. Then I pointed to his truck.

"You want to move that, or do I have to call for a police tow?"

"I know from my friends downtown that you're used to running things on your own, but with Walt's murder, that's going to change. I'm going to be taking the lead."

"It's an open homicide, Mr. Vargas. You hamper my active investigation, you're gonna eat a nice fat obstruction statute."

"Bullshit."

T
ry me.

"I'm not like the others," Vargas said. "The laws my beat too. I know how the game works. It's gonna take the coroner two, maybe three days to alter his cause-of-death finding. Until that happens, this is still officially just a suicide. That means you got shit. You got no case for me to hamper. I can do whatever I want."

He was right, of course, but I didn't give him the satisfaction of saying that. I was looking for a plan of action that didn't include letting some Fast L
. A
. gang lawyer get in the way on my murder case.

"For the next two days, I'm gonna check into this on my own," Vargas said. "There's nothing you can do to stop me."

"That would be a mistake. We could screw the case up, not coordinate on a witness, create future havoc for the DA."

"That's why I came over," he said. "I cleared my court calendar. I'm willing to cooperate with you. I'll meet you halfway. I have some unique street contacts that could be very helpful in a pinch."

"Sabas, I know you're a tough guy. I see the old scars on your knuckles. What'd that used to say, DEATH?"

He looked down at both his hands as I went on.

"I checked you out too. I got a call from my office at eight this morning. You used to run with the Latin Kings as a kid. Word I get is you've got a thick sealed file in juvie."

"Si, lo sabes," he replied softly. The words rolled off his tongue. It was obvious that Spanish was his native language. "You're right." He held up both hands. "I had DEATH on my right, MATAR on my left. I could kill you in two languages."

"I don't want your help," I told him. "If I see you anywhere around this case, I'll find some charge that works and lay it on you. Now move your truck or you'll have to pick it up in police impound."

He hesitated for a moment before moving to the drivers-side door. Then he stepped up on the running board and faced me over the roof of the cab.

"I talked to Diamond. She said you never came around, that you barely ever talked to Walt the last couple of years."

"See ya."

"Sounds to me like you're probably dealing with a heavy load of guilt right now because after all Pop did, you dissed him. Why was that? You been running away from your past and now you feel bad because you still owe him big and he's gone. That why you don't want to share this case with the rest of us?"

He'd come pretty damn close.

"Hey, I get it, Detective. Remember when I told you that Pop called me a few days before he died? That he wanted to set up a meeting?"

I looked at him and waited.

"He wanted to see me right away, but I blew him off. I was in court on a murder trial. Too busy. I told him I'd see him in a week. If I'd met with him right away like he wanted, then maybe he'd still be alive. Like you, I fucked up and didn't help him when he needed it. I'm not sleeping over it. Shit s been killin' me."

I only took a moment to think about it before I said, "Park your truck on the lawn over there, we'll take my car. I'll tell you what we're doing on the way."

Vargas moved his Chevy truck. Then he grabbed a worn leather briefcase from the front seat and climbed into the Acura beside me.

I put the MDX in gear and pulled out heading toward the 101 freeway and Rick O'Shea s house in Calabasas.

Chapter
22

As we drove, I told Vargas that
I
didn't really have anything solid except for a strong feeling that Rick O'Shea was a strange choice to be running the nonprofit that owned Huntington House.

As I talked, Vargas had his BlackBerry out and was typing the information onto an e-page.

"I'll run him when
I
get back to the office," he said. "I've got some good sources."

"I already ran him. Nothing major. But trust me, the guy's slime."

Sabas nodded.

The address on Lupine Lane turned out to be a very large, new, Spanish hacienda-style house on about two acres with a front fountain and cobblestone drive located in an expensive new development. It looked like a hell of a lot of house for a guy who ran a charitable nonprofit corporation. The maroon Escalade I'd seen in the parking lot at Huntington House was parked out front.