The Pallbearers

Chapter 6

The few times I'd gone back to visit the Huntington House before, I'd had the same reaction. It always looked smaller and grimier than I remembered. My room had been on the second floor of Sharon Cross Hall, a big two-story Spanish house on the east side of the four-acre campus. I didn't know why it was called Sharon Cross Hall. I had never bothered to ask.

When I was a kid, the hall had seemed huge and imposing, looming majestically over my head. Now it just looked like a plain but badly maintained house that needed a new roof and rain gutters.

The athletic field had always been dirt and I'd acquired an impressive collection of skin burns sliding around on it. As I walked the campus after the funeral, I'd been expecting to see the new rubberized turf that Pop had told me about. It wasn't there. The same dirt playground greeted me. It also looked much smaller than I remembered.

Diamond led the five other pallbearers and Alexa on a short tour of the grounds. Nothing had changed but my recollections.

"What happened to the field?" I asked as we stepped out onto the hard dirt baseball diamond. "Pop told me you were putting in rubberized turf."

"Pop always had his dreams," Diamond said sadly. "You know how he was. We couldn't afford stuff like that. There was no money to even run this place. It's been a struggle month to month."

Shortly after we arrived at the reception, I found out from one of the other mourners why Diamond Peterson was put in charge of the funeral. It turned out that she was the current secretary-treasurer of Huntington House. After two years as a foster child here, she'd been taken by a family that eventually adopted her. She graduated from a high school in the Valley and had gone on to community college, where she took sociology. Diamond told us she'd stayed in touch with Pop and wanted to help him, so she'd come back and, for the last six years, had been working on staff. Pop made her the secretary-treasurer two years ago. It was a paid appointed position that, according to the California Department of Social Services, didn't require any special certifications or accounting degrees.

We walked through the milling mourners and finally rounded the corner of the boxy, gym-sized, seventies-era addition known as the rec center. The bungalow that had always served as the office used to sit behind the recreation building, but now all that was left was a charred hulk. The fire looked recent. Ash and debris were everywhere.

"What happened here?" Jack Straw asked as we looked at the small house, now burned to the foundation.

"It accidentally caught fire the same day Pop died. He was so distressed, I guess he must have…" Diamond stopped, then changed her thought, "I guess we don't really know what happened."

I looked over at Alexa. She didn't give me much, and, like me, she had on her cop face. She was thinking what I was thinking. Too many bad things in one time and place. It was starting to look like more than a suicide and accidental fire. It made us both suspicious.

Diamond mustVe picked up the vibe, because she quickly added, "The arson investigators haven't quite finished. We don't know yet if it was deliberately set."

"Really?" It was the first time Sabas Vargas spoke since the tour began. But that one word was packed with skepticism. "I wonder if this is connected to why he called me," he added.

"He called you?" I asked the middle-aged Hispanic man. "You do criminal law, right?"

"Yeah. But he called a couple a days before all this happened. He wanted to have a meeting. He wouldn't tell me what it was about. I assumed he wanted a donation for the home. We set it up for next week."

Why would Pop call a criminal lawyer? I wondered.

"Pop didn't do this," Vicki Lavicki said, refuting his unstated accusation. She was standing with her arms crossed defensively, glaring. "He loved this place. He wouldn't burn it down. That's pure bullshit."

"Nobody said he did," Sabas Vargas said softly. "But come on, the office burns and he kills himself on the same day? Maybe he was so depressed he just snapped."

"What if the office accidentally burning was like the last straw that pushed Pop over the edge?" Vicki challenged, glaring at him. "Ever think of that?"

"He's dead," Diamond said, heaving a sad sigh. "Even if he did set this fire, who are you gonna prosecute? I'm trying to get the arson investigators to do us a favor and just close it. We desperately need the insurance check."

I looked over and noticed Seriana Cotton standing next to Jack Straw. They were wearing flip sides of the same expression. Seriana had a slight frown, Jack a slight smile. Both expressions said, "What the hell is going on here?"

We went into the rec center, where the staff had set up three card tables with refreshments. It was a meager feast. Cheese squares with Triscuits and Dixie cups half full of supermarket wine.

After an hour, Alexa wanted to leave. Because we'd pushed our trip back, she said she had a few more things to do at Parker Center downtown. But I wasn't ready to go just yet, so I told her to take the car. I'd get back to Venice some other way.

Vicki Lavicki was standing nearby and overheard us. "I live in the Marina," she said. "I could drop you, Shane. I go right by there."

"Sounds good," I told her and handed Alexa the keys to my MDX.

"You sure?" Alexa said.

I could tell she really wanted to get me out of there. She could see I was still beating myself up. I smiled at her brightly. Since we were locked in this mild marital deception in front of a witness, there was nothing Alexa could do but agree to leave me there.

"I just need a little more time," I said.

She nodded and, ten minutes later, took my car and left.

I don't know what I was thinking, what I was looking for, but like Sabas Vargas, I didn't believe the story here was as simple as it sounded. Or was I just trying to play catch up, making myself feel useful after it was really too late to help Pop at all?

I found Diamond Peterson by the serving table and asked if I could have a minute. We walked out of the building and sat on one of the wood benches that lined the athletic field.

"You really think Pop set fire to the office bungalow?" I asked.

"No," she said softly. "I can't imagine that. Besides, if Pop did this, if he intentionally set the fire, then we won't get the insurance. He wouldn't do that because he knew we desperately need that money."

"So who did it then?"

"I don't know. Maybe nobody. Maybe it was bad wiring. The arson cops couldn't find an accelerant or even isolate a point of origin. The building was wood. It went up fast."

We looked out at the sad, ramshackle campus of Huntington House Group Home. It was run down, but stumbling on. Tattered, limping, fiscally unhealthy. The evidence of neglect was everywhere. In the poor condition of the rusting vans parked out front, in the deferred maintenance that was visible all around us.

"This place looks terrible," I finally said.

"Yeah." Then Diamond s lip started quivering, and she put her head in her hands and began to cry. I put my hand on her shoulder and then held her as her large body was wracked with sobs. Finally, she struggled to pull herself together. We sat and waited until she was back under control.

"Sorry," she said.

"Don't be."

"I don't know what to do anymore," she admitted. "We have so many problems."

"Tell me."

"I don't know how much you know about how the foster-care system works."

"Almost nothing. When I was here, I was pretty locked up. It was just about me."

She looked at me, tears still on her cheeks. Then she rubbed them angrily away, took a deep breath to settle herself down, and began.

"Okay, well, starting at the beginning, you probably know Walt doesn't own this place anymore. After Elizabeth died it was taken over by a nonprofit corporation that kept him on as the paid executive director. Huntington House is currently owned by an outfit called Creative Solutions. Creative Solutions gets money for each child in residence here, then deposits the funds into our account and acts as a short-term bank for us if we run low. But we have to zero out with them at the end of each fiscal year. Also, the amount a group home gets per child can vary greatly."

"How's that work?"

"There's something called an RCL, which stands for Rate Classification Level. It's given by the California Department of Social Services and it's made up of a lot of stuff. How well-maintained the home is, the ratio of staff to children, how many staff have advanced degrees, rate of foster-home placement or adoption… all kinds of things."

She looked right into my eyes. "The higher the RCL, the more the state pays. It can go from as low as four thousand a child per month to in excess of six."

She struggled again to hold back her tears. "Walt was such a dreamer," she continued. "Like him telling you we were gonna get that Astroturf, or rubberized grass, whatever the hell. That was gonna cost us over two hundred thousand to buy and install. There was no way we could afford that.

"We'd been getting almost six thousand per child, but then we lost Dr. Logan to a better job, and our clinical psychologist quit to have a baby. We were running short of money from the state. I know six thousand a month for each kid sounds like a lot, but there's a lot to maintain. There's plain overhead-staff salaries, insurance, food, schoolbooks, medical… it goes on and on.

"Anyway, we didn't want our RCL lowered, so we stupidly didn't report the drop in staff positions to the CDSS. Two of the staff we lost had doctorates and that figured big in our high RCL rating. At the same time, we lost one or two other people, so our staff-to-child ratio took a big hit as well. We were trying to keep it a secret 'til we worked our way out of it.

"Then, last Christmas, they retroactively lowered our RCL and the state auditor came after us. They demanded a repayment check of almost half a million dollars. We didn't have it. Worse still, with our lowered RCL, we went from six thousand to four thousand per child. This place just couldn't run on that.

"Like I said, Creative Solutions is a nonprofit and didn't want to take the loss. They were thinking about closing the home. Just a few days before Pop died, the California Department of Social Services notified us that because of us not telling them the truth about our staff changes, they'd become suspicious of everything and CDSS was about to do a full audit. Walt knew there were even more problems that a state audit would discover. He just couldn't deal with it."

"And that's why he burned the office before he committed suicide," I said. "To destroy the records?"

"Maybe." She wiped another slow-moving tear away. "I don't know. I don't want to believe he'd burn this place. I also don't want to believe he'd kill himself."

"Me neither."

"But what can we do about it?" she said, shrugging her shoulders in a gesture of defeat.

"Let me mull it over. I'll come up with something."

Good-bye Waikiki.