Shane and Carmen: The Novelization Ch. 04

Mr. Wilkinson was cooperative and sympathetic, and was only mildly surprised when Consuelo asked what all this was going to cost. He prepared a pro forma invoice for her, and was mildly surprised again when Consuelo reached into her shoulder purse and counted out stacks of crisp hundred-dollar bills. Consuelo gave Mr. Wilkinson the address of the Sutton Hills Hospice, where she said her father's body was waiting, with all the properly signed paperwork and a copy of the death certificate.

Shane waited in her pickup truck in the funeral home parking lot until the hearse returned from the funeral she'd attended an hour ago. When the driver got out of the hearse Shane approached him. He was about 35, clean-shaven, of middle height and weight, nothing special. Shane introduced herself as Consuelo Lopez, and asked the man if he wanted to meet her for a drink at the Steak and Brew down the street. He looked at her suspiciously, trying to figure out what the deal was. Consuelo reached into her pocket and removed a folded hundred-dollar bill, which she put into the hearse driver's suit jacket breast pocket.

"Five-thirty be okay?" he asked.

"I'll see you then," Consuelo said, getting into her pickup and driving away.

Shane sat at the bar nursing a club soda when the hearse driver arrived.

"Hey, Consuelo, I'm, ah, let's try Bob. I'm Bob, okay? You buying?"

Shane nodded and signaled to the bartender.

"What'll it be?"

"Jack and a beer back," Bob said. "And another for the lady." When the bartender walked away, Bob asked, "So what's up?"

"Are you going to be on duty Sunday?" Consuelo asked.

"I don't know. I guess. Why?"

"There are going to be two funerals on Sunday. One is going to be out at Forest Lawn, a real big fancy affair, lots of people there. The other one is just a body in a casket going to a crematorium somewhere. I don't even know where it is, but maybe you do. By a strange coincidence, both bodies are going to be inside identical caskets, the plain black ones, the biodegradable wood ones."

"A popular model," Bob said.

"Whatever," Consuelo said, taking a sip of her club soda. "Bob, I need to have those two caskets switched. I don't care how it gets done, so long as no one finds out about it. If the two hearse drivers can just switch addresses, that's fine. If they mis-load the wrong casket in the right hearse, that'll work, too. The one going to Forest Lawn will be in a long procession, police escort, the works. The body going to the crematorium will go alone. I was wondering if maybe you had some idea how such a horrible mistake might happen. It's worth a fair amount of money to me to find out."

"Well, you've got a problem right off the bat," Bob said. "Both Forest Lawn and the crematorium are both going to check out all the paperwork. They are going to make sure they get the right bodies."

"Actually, that's already been taken care of," Consuelo said. "The crematorium is expecting to receive a Mr. Platt. The receiving department at Forest Lawn is expecting to receive a Mr. Lopez. It is only your funeral home that believes it is the other way around. My goal is to make sure Mr. Platt gets to the crematorium and Mr. Lopez gets to Forest Lawn, without the funeral home or any of the families and mourners realizing there's been a switch. When the bodies get where they are going, all the paperwork will be correct. The only way there will be a paperwork problem is if the bodies don't get switched."

Bob sipped from his Jack Daniels. "I think I know a way to do that," he said after a minute. "I'd drive one hearse, and a friend of mine would drive the other. And there's one person inside the funeral home who would have to know. He'd be the one doing the switching of the caskets. They have to be switched before the burial service, because of the procession; that one will be going directly out with all the pallbearers, and so on."

"I don't care about the details, so long as it works," Consuelo said. "I have an envelope in my pocket with three thousand dollars in it. I don't care how it gets disbursed. Would that be sufficient, do you think? If it's any consolation, I can also assure you that this is a good thing, for both of the families and loved ones of the deceased. We're actually doing a good deed here."

Consuelo saw Bob considering, figuring out how to divvy up the shares, probably two grand for him and five hundred for each of the other two people.

"That should cover it nicely," he said. Consuelo nodded, took a final sip of club soda, laid the envelope of cash on the bar with a twenty-dollar bill to cover the drinks, and left the Steak and Brew.

***

McFadden got them two limousines, one for Shane, Carol and Barbara Cranshaw, and a second one he'd share with Mattie Shepherd and the Platinskys' out-of-town New York lawyers and their hired-gun L.A. suit. Shane started to protest that she didn't need a limo, that she could go in her pickup, but McFadden caught a negative head shake from Carol Beringer, and told Shane it really would be best if she rode in the limo, because they didn't want a pickup truck at the head of the procession. Vicki Saperstein would find her own way; she was going to be what she called "on duty" as the unofficial and self-appointed chief of the entire funeral. She'd make a brief appearance at the funeral home at 1 p.m. when the funeral began, then she'd hustle out to Forest Lawn to make sure everything was ready. She had drafted two assistant event planners from her office. There was liaison with the LAPD on the route of the funeral procession and the closing of intersections all the way over to Forest Lawn. There was the cemetery itself, with arrangements for parking. Twenty-seven members of the SoCal Pops Philharmonic insisted on being part of the interment ceremony, and so their orchestra stands had to be set up. It was decided there would be no sound system used; if people at the back of the crowd couldn't hear, they couldn't hear. It wasn't a concert, and they were only going to play Amazing Grace and Peter, Paul and Mary's Light One Candle. Pavarotti was in town and had known Harvey slightly, when he'd performed at the Hollywood Bowl with the Pops. But he had a commitment and couldn't get out of it, and had canceled at the last minute. He just had time to drop in at the funeral home and give his condolences to the family, but then he had to go right away.

Saperstein also had charge of the post-interment reception, which was going to be held out at the Hollywood Bowl, in a very large tent they'd rented. She called it an Irish Jewish Wake. There would be music, food, liquor, lots of speeches and eulogies from Harvey's colleagues and friends. The Platinskys were invited, as was proper, but of course they all declined, as was also proper, in keeping with Harvey's father's stern religious rules against it. If Harvey's friends wanted a secular remembrance afterward, that was their business and he was powerless to prevent it, not that he would have done so. So Saperstein and her event planners had their hands full with caterers, Hollywood Bowl staff, a thousand details. Fortunately, they were really good at it. This was Hollywood; people knew how to throw a memorial.

The decision to get a limo turned out to be omniscient, because Shane was a mess that Sunday morning. She'd slept all alone in Harvey's house Saturday night, the first time the house had been so empty, and she missed him terribly. Carol came over Sunday morning with lox and bagels, and made coffee, and was sitting at the table reading the paper when Shane finally emerged from her room, red-eyed. It broke Carol's heart to see Shane so miserable, and she rose to enclose Shane in a long hug. Barbara came by at 11 and used a spare bedroom to get ready; it was going to be a long day. The limo would pick them up at noon; the funeral began at 1 p.m., the interment at Forest Lawn at 3, the reception/wake at the Hollywood Bowl at 5, and that was open-ended.

When they arrived at the funeral home they found Alice Pieszecki waiting in the lobby. "Shane!" she called out, coming to join them. "Can I sit with you guys?"

"Uh, yeah, sure," Shane said.

The funeral home people put the Platinsky clan on the right half of the room in the first three rows, which had "Reserved" signs discretely posted on the aisle seats. An usher came forward and said very quietly, "Miss McCutcheon, this way, please." He then led Shane and her party down the aisle to the very first row on the left, which also had a small "Reserved" sign posted on it. He indicated the first few seats on the center aisle for Shane.

"Take the second seat, Shane," Carol whispered from behind her. Carol sat down in the first seat, and Barbara Cranshaw in the third. Next came Alice, and finally Bernie McFadden. They'd talked it over privately, and had decided the best thing to do was sandwich Shane between Carol and Barbara, because they believed Shane wasn't going to handle the service very well, and they didn't want her on the aisle. They wanted to be able to comfort her, as necessary.

"I don't understand ... " Shane began, but for once she followed orders. "Why are we in the first row?"

"It's okay, honey," Carol whispered. "Harvey's family is on the other side. But of all the people in the world, you were the one closest to Harvey in the last eight months of his life. You were like his daughter. Maybe not legally, but emotionally, morally and spiritually, you're Harvey's closest next-of-kin. So this is where you sit. Nobody out here knows the Platinskys, or cares about them. But a lot of them know about you. For most people here today, you are Harvey's primary next-of-kin. You are the one who people are going to come to, to offer condolences."

Shane sniffled, and began to tear up. She still didn't understand. And a minute or two later things began to happen. An older couple came down the aisle and introduced themselves to the Platinskys. They talked briefly, and then the couple came over to the left side.

"Shane?" the man said. "I'm Philip Hauser, I'm president of the SoCal Pops. This is my wife, Hilary. We're truly very, very sorry for your loss. We were very fond of Harvey, and I don't have to tell you what a mainstay he was to the philharmonic. He was one of our most respected and beloved members, and we'll all miss him terribly."

Shane nodded, and sniffled into a tissue. Hauser leaned forward and brought Shane into a hug, then let her go. "I really look forward to chatting with you at the reception," Hauser said. "Harvey's told us so much about you."

They retreated, leaving Shane teary and mystified. "What did he mean, Harvey told them about me?" she asked Carol and Barbara.

"Just that, dear," Barbara said. "Harvey did talk about you to his friends. Lots of people knew he'd taken someone in. And he was very proud of you, so he talked about you. It's very natural; it's what proud parents do."

"But he wasn't my parent," Shane said.

Barbara smiled. "That's open to some interpretation. Just don't let comments like that bother you. You're going to hear many comments like that today, and everyone who says something like that means well."

And sure enough in the next fifteen minutes before the service started, a dozen people in ones and twos came up to Shane and her friends and introduced themselves, and then offered condolences. As patrons of the philharmonic, Barbara and Carol knew almost all of them by first name, and shook hands and exchanged the occasional hug. Everyone of them made a point of talking to Shane, and treating her as the central mourner and unofficial kinsman of the deceased. They were all very nice, and all very gentle with her. Slowly it began to dawn on Shane that she wasn't a casual bystander at Harvey's funeral; in the minds of nearly everyone in Los Angeles, she was the primary relationship of the deceased. She was, effectively, Harvey's daughter. Everyone already knew it but Shane.

The service started five minutes late, and most of it baffled Shane. Great portions of it were in Hebrew, and though Shane had no interest in their content, it was still baffling to not know what was going on. At one point Carol prodded Shane to stand and read the transliteration of a Hebrew prayer in pronounceable English syllables, starting with Yis'ga'dal v'yis'kadash sh'may ra'bbo, b'olmo dee'vro chir'usay v'yamlich malchu'say, and more, the strange sounds on the piece of paper they'd handed out to each person.

"This prayer is called the Kaddish," Carol whispered. "It's the most important prayer of mourning." Carol knew the words and recited the prayer from memory. Shane couldn't bring herself to do or say anything. She and God were not on good terms on the best of days, and now that God had cruelly wiped out Harvey in a split second on the 101, there was no way Shane was saying any damn prayer under these circumstances.

When the prayer ended the rabbi conducting the service said, "He who makes peace in his high holy places, may he bring peace upon us, and upon all Israel; and say Amen." And most people in the room said amen, only the way they said it sounded more like owe-main, not what Shane used to hear in Austin a decade ago.

And then finally it was over, the walk up the aisle to the foyer, and then greeting more people she didn't know, strangers who came up and hugged her, some of them in tears or close to it. Then a lot of waiting, and then the walk to the limos for the caravan procession out to Forest Lawn, Shane not thinking much about the casket and who was inside it. She saw Bob the driver standing beside the hearse, and saw him get in it when the casket arrived and was loaded in. She didn't know if he'd seen her across the parking lot, and it didn't matter if he had.

The grave site on the side of the hill at Forest Lawn was beautiful, with a great view of the Hollywood Hills. There were many more people at Forest Lawn than came to the funeral home, and Vicki Saperstein later said she thought about 800 people had come out to say goodbye to Harvey. There were a small number of chairs for the family and immediate friends such as Shane and her group, but most of the attendees stood. The weather had threatened in the morning, but by mid-afternoon it was typical Southern California weather, smoggy. The rabbi did his thing; the assembled members of the philharmonic did theirs. The casket was lowered into the ground, and mourners were invited to pass by and in accordance with Jewish law and custom to deposit a shovel full of dirt into the grave. They were all instructed that they must not hand the shovel to the next person in line; rather, they must set the shovel down upon the ground, and the next person must pick it up again. This way, it could not be said that mourners transferred their grief to other people. Observant Jews also bent over nearby to pluck a few blades of grass from the ground, symbolizing the growth and rebirth of life of earth. Then they tossed the grass away behind them.

When it came Shane's turn, she picked up the shovel from the ground, took a small bit of earth on it from the pile prepared for this purpose, and dropped it onto the casket of Hector Manuel Lopez.

***

Shane had told the hairdressing school that she needed to take Monday off after the funeral. She spent a restless night, weeping sometimes, and grieving for Harvey. In the morning she made herself coffee, and ate half a bagel. She dressed in old, loose jeans and a baggy sweatshirt with cut-off sleeves, and left the house. As she walked to the driveway and her pickup truck, she saw a car come up the drive, and recognized it as Alice Pieszecki's old beater.

"Hey, Shane! Where ya going?" Alice called out as Shane walked up to Alice's car window.

"Uh, I have an errand I gotta go do," Shane said. "What are you doing here? Is your article about Harvey done?"

"No, not quite. I gotta turn it in tomorrow. But I had one more question I needed to ask you about. And hey, I'm not doing anything else, so can I come along on your errand?"

Shane suddenly realized that she was now basically alone in the world; or at least, she had no friends her own age. She had Carol, of course, but Carol was sixty and her shrink, so she hardly counted. And Shane realized that she liked Alice. Where Shane was inarticulate and often nearly speechless, Alice was a talker. She was high-energy, and quirky, and funny, and pleasant to be around. She was friendly. There was no special sexual attraction to each other, and Shane's gaydar was quiet. Alice seemed to be about five or six years older than Shane, but that didn't matter to anyone. Alice was just this woman acquaintance who'd been a customer at the hairdressing salon, and Shane had washed her hair a couple of times. They'd talked music and celebrity gossip, and that was about it. And the simplest truth of all was, Shane had no other friends, and right now having one seemed like a pretty nice thing to have. She'd never had a big sister, and maybe Alice would fill the bill.

"Sure," Shane said. "Let's take my truck."

"Cool!" Alice said. "Where we going?"

"You'll see," Shane said.

As they headed down Topanga Canyon Shane asked, "So what was it you wanted to ask me about?"

"Oh, right! Well, there was this really weird thing happened. Last evening when I got home I discovered my cell phone was missing, so naturally I was in a panic, right? I can't live without my cell phone. I figured I must have dropped it somewhere, so I yell at my boyfriend, Gregg -- he's in this garage band we have? -- that we have to go find my fucking cell phone. So we start at the funeral home, and they don't have it. So then we go out to Forest Lawn, and it's like, 7:30, and we drive over to the grave site, and I see a handful of people out by Harvey's grave. And Gregg and me, we walk over there, and there's this Hispanic family gathered around Harvey's grave. And they've got a priest there, a Catholic priest, you know? And they're having a ceremony at Harvey's grave. And I see these two Forest Lawn staff people nearby, waiting. And I go ask them about the cell phone, and the one guy, he calls the office, and yes, somebody found a cell phone lying in the grass and turned it in, and I can go to the office and claim it. And then I ask him what's going on at the grave site, and this guy, he says, they're having a funeral. And I say that's impossible, they had a funeral there earlier today. And he says he doesn't know about that, all he knows is they're burying some guy named Señor Lopez. What do you think of that?"

Shane knew almost from the beginning where Alice's story was going to wind up, and it was right here. "Shane, what the fuck is going on?"

Shane sighed. "Must have been the wrong grave," she said.

"No, it was the right one," Alice said. "It was right where Harvey's grave was, and the grave had already been filled in. They were having this little Catholic prayer service in Spanish. There was only about six people, and this priest. And they were standing around Harvey's grave and the priest was reciting this funeral service. Shane, my last name is Pieszecki, I'm Polish and ex-Catholic as the day is long. I know a Catholic funeral service, with all the Latin, when I hear it."

"Beats the hell out of me, Alice," Shane said.

"Shane," Alice said, "I wasn't born yesterday, okay? So you don't want to tell me, don't tell me. But please don't lie to me."

Shane drove for a while, and thought. The noise level in her head was rising, but wasn't overwhelming.

"Did you finish your magazine article?"

"No. Like I said, I'm supposed to turn it in tomorrow. It's mainly biographical, all about Harvey's life. Only a sentence or two about the funeral, and the big turn-out at Forest Lawn."