Stephen Cannell - The Pallbearers

"Why?"

"I'm trying to understand why Walt picked me. I had barely spoken to him in years and yet, out of hundreds of kids who lived in that place, I'm one of six."

"I've got a take on that."

"Lets hear it, cause I'm completely lost."

"Five of the six of you share one major and very uncommon trait." She looked at me. "This is just instinct, so treat it for what it is."

I nodded.

"You're kamikazes. Nonconformists who aren't worried about actions that might cause a bad result. You're also all uncompromising and stubborn." "That's it?"

"Give me a psychologist and two weeks, I'll flesh it out for you. This is after only a few hours, not really trying." She smiled. "Of course, the biker is easy. Straw wouldn't follow a stripper upstairs after a lap dance. Complete renegade."

"Agreed."

"The Army corporal, Seriana Cotton, never smiled, and those eyes were always evaluating, always adding and subtracting. Her eyes are just like yours sometimes. She's armor plated. She'll take orders, but not blindly. She'd rather follow her own counsel. That's you, buddy."

"And Vargas?"

"The lawyer?" I nodded. "Rarely talks, never shows you what he's thinking. But when he does speak, he's willing to say the unpopular stuff. Vicki La whatever her name is…"

"Lavicki."

"She looks like a summer pastry in her little print dress and sensible shoes, but that's one very tough brass cupcake. She'll cut you no quarter. She will go down swinging, Shane Scully style.

"Diamond Peterson is the only one who doesn't fit. She's a den mother. But she worked with Pop, so she probably got there on a pass."

"You're saying, except for Diamond, they're all like me?"

"Not exactly. But they share your trait of suspicious nonconformity. You're all walk alones who don't mind breaking the pottery."

I thought about that for a long time.

"Comments?" she said, looking over at me.

"I guess I can see it," I said. "So why did he pick us?"

"I don't know. Maybe he wanted you to do just what you're doing. Study this and wonder. Maybe, for some reason, he didn't want a bunch of organization drones carrying his coffin."

We sat there for a while longer. Then she said, "You want me to make you something for dinner? I got the makings in there for a great casserole."

"I looked in the fridge. Cheese and noodles isn't a great casserole."

She slapped my arm playfully. "Stop complaining. We were going to Hawaii so I didn't go to the market. At least it's not peanut butter and jelly." Then she got up and went inside.

I wondered if that was it. Pop knew us better than most. He'd been there when the raw material was being molded. He knew how hard our centers were. We'd all known him well and none of us thought he'd committed suicide because it wasn't in his DNA. Pop just wouldn't shotgun his head off alone in his backyard. He was a party-wave guy. As Theresa had said, he wouldn't take a sand ride.

Did he pick me because I was such a stubborn uncompromising son of a bitch that I would never let go of this even if everything and everybody told me to? Was that the endearing quality that had earned me a place at his coffin rail?

Had he chosen four of the other five for the same reason?

It seemed pretty far-fetched. Pretty mystical. Anything with more than a ten percent bugga-bugga factor usually had me laughing, but I wasn't laughing tonight. Tonight I wondered if Walt was stuck in some heaven rip, backwalling beyond the break, watching and waiting for the six of us to do something.

I wondered if we were supposed to somehow avenge his death so he could ride that big rhino out of limbo and finally make it back to shore.

The medical examiner's office is on North Mission Road, not far from Parker Center. It's located on the top two floors of an ugly rectangular building that always reminds me of a large cement shoe box.

I pulled into the lot at seven the next morning and looked for Ray Tsu's brown Toyota. I'd already called ahead and found out that Ray's ME section had done the police autopsy on Walter Dix.

Ray is one of three chief coroners working under the L. A. medical examiner. He currently supervises the midnight to eight shift, which is the busy one because most murders occur after midnight. After his shift ends, Ray usually goes to breakfast. That's why I was down here so early.

I spotted his car on the east side of the lot in a marked row of spaces reserved for the ME's staff, so I parked in visitors and went inside.

Mission Road is not one of my favorite places, but a lot of my favorite police work gets done here. Its the morbid pall that overhangs a building devoted solely to death that always pulls me down.

I called upstairs from reception and offered to buy Ray breakfast if he'd bring a photocopy of the Dix file with him. No crime had supposedly been committed, so I didn't think he would have a problem sharing the death report. Ray did, however, ask me why.

"Walter Dix ran the group home where I was raised as a foster kid," I told him over the lobby phone. "We buried him yesterday and a lot of the people who also grew up there didn't believe he would kill himself. I told them I'd look at the file. Get some kind of closure for us or something," trying to low key it.

"Where will we be dining?" Ray said in his soft, almost effeminate voice.

"How about the Breakfast Bagel?" I suggested because it was close and cheap.

"How about the Pacific Dining Car?"

"Jesus, Ray. You seen the prices on the menu there?"

"You want a cheap date, call Hairy Mary in forensics." He paused, then asked, "You want this file or not?"

"God, you're such a whore."

"Be right down."

Ray was a rare piece of meat, a rail-thin Chinese American with fine black hair, which he wore long and parted in the middle, tucked behind each ear. A hairstyle that always reminded me of tie-back drapes. He spoke in such a soft voice that he'd been nicknamed Fey Ray by the homicide detectives who dealt with him.

But Ray knew his stuff. He'd started out as a crime-scene criminalist, then went to medical school. He now supervised a staff of ten medical examiners and dieners. But Ray wasn't content to be an office jock. He was a devoted cutter who, despite his management position, still did a good bit of table work.

We snagged a booth at the back of the original Pacific Dining Car on 6th Street, which is a great L. A. landmark restaurant, close enough to the downtown financial center to be a stockbroker hangout. The interior is done in red leather with green upholstered walls and brass fixtures. A polished oak bar dominates the Grill Room, where we were seated.

Ray Tsu didn't weigh much more than a hundred pounds, but he ordered a big enough breakfast for two or three NFL linemen.

"You planning on brown-bagging that to nibble on throughout the week?" I groused.

"I'll get it all down, just watch."

After our food came we got around to Walt's autopsy.

"It was a standard do-it-yourself shooting," Ray said between bites of steak, hash browns, and eggs. He slid the file across the table to me. "Of course, unless we have video or pictures of the actual capping, we can only call it a probable. But there was nothing that indicated any unusual circumstances."

I opened the file and thumbed through the ME's pictures of Pop. He was laid out on an autopsy table under harsh lights with half of his head missing. I'd seen plenty of similar shots over the years, but these knotted my stomach and shot a bolt of emotional guilt through me.

"You did this one yourself?" I asked, putting the photos aside and looking at ten pages of small print and Latin medical phrases.

"No. We usually give our newbies the slam dunks, which include most of the obvious suicides like this one."