Fall Guy (2 page)

Walking back down the stairs from the detectives' squad room, I had something I didn't have an hour and ten minutes earlier. I had a job I didn't want and the document to go along with it. I had turned down Brody's offer to “see me home,” a quaint way to put it, I thought, but I had been unable to turn down O'Fallon's postmortem request that I see to his estate, perhaps because he was no longer around to make an alternate choice. I knew that most wills had a second choice, in case the first person named could not, or would not, do the job. O'Fallon's will didn't. There was only me.

Carrying a manila envelope containing the Last Will and Testament of Timothy O'Fallon, his wallet, address book and a set of keys to his apartment, I walked Dashiell through the lonely streets of Greenwich Village. While I thought my own thoughts, silently, he read the evening news found on trees, mailboxes, hydrants, radial tires and garbage bags left at the curb to be collected in the morning, and filed his own report in each
place. The hum of air conditioners was our music, an occasional dog walker our only company.

When we got back to West Tenth Street, I looked up at the grimy windows of the precinct. Though the lights were still on, the place looked deserted. I unlocked the wrought-iron gate that kept the back cottage where I lived safe from the rest of the world—or so I liked to think—walking down the tunnel into the dark garden, then sitting on the steps that led to the door of the small brick cottage where I'd been living for five years.

Brody said he could meet me at O'Fallon's apartment the following afternoon at four for a quick look. Then he'd have to reseal it until it was officially released. I'd helped settle my mother's affairs after she'd died, but that was different. In that case, my sister and I had wanted all the things that had sentimental value, my sister more than me. She was more of a saver, a collector. And she had a bigger house, and children who might one day want to have some of their grandparents' possessions. I mostly wanted odd things, some of little worth. I'd taken the small wooden box my mother had kept on top of her dresser which held the costume jewelry she let me play with when I was a child, a pair of candlesticks, in case of a blackout, some books of poetry, a silver bracelet with a heart dangling from it, a gift to her from my father the year before he'd died, and photographs, lots and lots of photographs.

What would I do with O'Fallon's possessions with no family or friends to want them? What do you do with pictures of generations of O'Fallons, with army dog tags, assuming he'd been in the
army, with the lamp he kept near his bed, his favorite books, his music? Would I know what his intentions were, since it was now my job to carry them out? The most obvious things would be spelled out in the will, how and where he'd chosen to be buried, who would be the recipient of his money and his valuables. But beyond that, what would I find, how much would I come to understand, deconstructing the life of a person I barely knew? And after I tossed the milk and butter, the mayonnaise and the mustard from his refrigerator, packed up his clothes and took them to Housing Works, donated his books to the library, then what? When nothing was left of the things he'd owned and the life he'd lived, who would remember Detective Timothy William O'Fallon? Would that be my job, too?

“You don't have to do this,” Brody had told me. “The law doesn't require—”

I'd raised a hand to stop him. He seemed to be doing more than letting me off the hook. He seemed anxious for me to turn it down, to turn it over, perhaps, to his colleagues at the precinct. But I'd made up my mind at the top of those stairs. I don't know if it was stubborn resolve or curiosity. Whatever it was, I was not to be moved.

I went inside and opened the envelope, slipping out O'Fallon's wallet first. It was years old and worn. I held it in my hand before opening it, feeling the softness of the leather and the weight in my hand, as he would have felt it in his pocket. There was no money in it. I dumped the contents of the envelope onto my coffee table, spread it out and picked up the property clerk's invoice, a list
of what had been removed from the deceased's apartment along with the body. Item number one: one-dollar bills U.S. currency; quantity, one; cash value, one dollar. Item number two: five-dollar bills U.S. currency; quantity, one; cash value, five dollars. And so on. It turned out that according to the property clerk's invoice, there'd been fifty-six dollars in O'Fallon's wallet. The wallet was listed as number seven. There'd been sixteen items vouchered for safekeeping. The money would be released to me upon written request. Everything else seemed to be in the envelope—his credit cards, no longer in the wallet but in a separate small manila envelope, all neatly slashed from the bottom left corner to near the upper right one. I flipped through them—Amex, Visa, Discover, a Chase bankcard. No shield in the envelope. Nor was it on the list. No mention of a gun, or handcuffs, either, or anything else that would revert to the Department. I left the list where I could see it, going back to the wallet. The credit cards had all been removed but the photos had not. They were old and faded, the colors no longer true, the haircuts and clothes from decades earlier. Five young boys, one young girl. In some of the snapshots they were together. In others, they were in smaller groupings, or alone. O'Fallon's driver's license was in the envelope with the credit cards. I took that and held it next to the photos, looking at them for a long time.

On his driver's license, renewed a month earlier, the forty-four-year-old O'Fallon's face was unanimated, the way it was in the group where I'd met him. Stony. If he was one of those kids in
the pictures he carried with him, he'd not only aged, he'd changed. But didn't we all do that?

There was a picture of me, at two, propped on the mantel of my fireplace, taken when my family had moved to the apartment where I grew up. I had the same unruly brown hair, the same fair skin, but the eyes had changed. When I became a dog trainer, years before, I often stood between a dog and death, his last stop before a one-way trip to the pound. I almost always succeeded in saving the dog's life. But now that I am a PI, in almost every case, by the time I am hired it's too late for heroes. Someone is already dead and all I can achieve is the cold comfort of justice. It holds me fast, this work, sometimes I'm not sure why, but there's a price. If anyone looks carefully, the cost is visible, the way it had been with Timothy O'Fallon—the evidence of the weight he carried in his eyes, too.

I looked at the pictures again—teenaged kids, hair all slicked down, dressed up and looking uncomfortable but grinning at the camera anyway. In one of the shots, one of the older boys had put two fingers behind the head of one of the younger ones, making horns, goofing around. They were happy kids, full of life. Three of the boys and the little girl had round faces, fair hair, light eyes, pale skin. They probably had freckles, too, but the pictures were too faded to tell. The other two boys had military-looking short hair, dark, and dark eyes.

I thought one of those redheads might be O'Fallon, picking up the driver's license again to see if I could tell which one. But in that picture, the
picture of the forty-four-year-old man, the cop, the hair was faded, the round face had begun to soften, the eyes looked dead sad, or just plain dead. His eyes were nothing like the merry eyes of any of those kids, kids without the weight of responsibility driving them into the ground, kids who didn't know what cops see, things, even now, the rest of us can't imagine. No wonder O'Fallon grew up to look so grim.

O'Fallon's apartment keys were in a little envelope. I could feel them without opening it. There was an address book, too, small and worn, like the wallet. I figured a lot of names would be crossed out, people who had moved or married or divorced or died. Why should his address book be different from anyone else's?

I read the will next, expecting to find it dull reading, the same legalese as any other will I'd ever read, reiterating the laws, instructions that any debts be paid, indicating a burial place, a few pages of dry and boring language with no surprises anywhere. But that was far from the case. I checked the time, then picked up the phone and dialed the precinct.

“Now I really don't get why my name is on this will,” I told Brody when he picked up his phone. “O'Fallon has family. He left his estate to his sister. Why didn't he name her the executor of his will?”

For a moment he didn't say anything. Then: “He must have had his reasons.”

“He must have,” I said, picking up the address book, holding it in my other hand. “Did you notice that this will is brand-new? It's dated two days before he died.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Why wouldn't he notice? Noticing things was what he did for a living. I took a deep breath, a suggestion in an article I'd read on anger management. It didn't work. I was feeling duped, stuck with one of life's most unpleasant jobs when it should have fallen to a blood relative. Which, obviously, he had. I felt as if I was shouting now in my own head, if that's even possible.

“Did you ever meet his sister?” I asked. “Did he talk about her? Did she…?” Too loud, too fast, too everything.

“Tim had just lost his mother. Perhaps that's why he redid his will. For an unmarried man, it wouldn't be unusual to leave his estate to his mother. And then, when she'd passed on, to change the will and leave the estate to his sister. And, no, I never met her and I don't recall Tim ever mentioning her. Did you want the Department to do the notification? Is that why you called?”

I took another deep breath, absorbing the news. A stressful job, a code of silence, a recent death in the family, an accidental suicide. Giving Brody the benefit of the doubt. For now.

“No, no, I'll take care of it,” I said, thinking about what he'd said earlier when he'd notified me. But I hadn't lost a loved one. I'd lost an acquaintance I barely remembered. That wouldn't be the case for the call I had to make. “As I understand it,” I said, “it's part of my job.”

“Is there anything…?”

“No, Detective. I'll see you tomorrow then, on Horatio Street.”

“Ms. Alexander?”

“Yes?”

“You have the keys. I just want to remind you that the apartment—”

“It's sealed. I understand.” Impatient. Still feeling I'd been had.

Was that what pushed him over the line, I wondered, the loss of his mother on top of the stress of the job? But why leave everything to his sister? What about those other red-haired kids from a couple of decades ago, and the two with dark hair? Didn't he want them to know he loved them, too? Wasn't that part of what leaving a will was all about in the first place, especially when the estate would probably be modest?

I opened the address book next and looked up Mary Margaret O'Fallon's phone number. It was an 845 exchange. The address was in Piermont, one of those charming little towns along the Hudson River, in Rockland County, only minutes away from where my own sister lived. He'd left her his money, but he'd never mentioned her. Maybe he and Brody weren't all that close. Though, from the look on Brody's face, that didn't seem to be the case.

I picked up one of the pictures of the little girl, all by herself in this one, smiling shyly at the camera with her head cocked to one side, clearly a kid who had just been told to smile, not one caught in the act of doing so. Most of the pictures of me as a kid looked very much the same way, my father telling me to smile, the smile in the picture overly large and patently false. But parents preferred that to a frown. What did it say about them if you
weren't happy all the time? Still, you could almost see how badly I wanted to get away from the camera. Mary Margaret, too.

Mary Margaret O'Fallon, it said. Did that mean she'd never married? Perhaps that was why she'd been left all the money. There were two other O'Fallons on the page, a Kathleen O'Fallon, at the same address, and Dennis. He'd been listed in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, that address and phone number, and the name Iris, lightly crossed out, so that you could still read what was there. Underneath, there was an address and phone number in Paramus, a small
w
after it. Dennis's work number.

I looked through the rest of the book, paging through from A to Z. There weren't many names. He didn't seem to have had many friends. I noticed, though, that there were several names with addresses in a row, all on Horatio Street where he lived. Helene and David Castle, and penciled in next to their names, Emma. Then Rob Rosen, and penciled in next to his name, Kevin. And Jin Mei Lin, and next to her name, Yin Yin. Were they all pets, all the ones whose names had been penciled in?

There was the name of a lawyer, the same one who had done the will. There were two doctors listed, one dentist. There were phone numbers for three different liquor stores and one for a Chinese takeout. And there were a handful of other names, men's names, throughout the book: Freddie Ainsley, Dale Benson, Parker Bowling, Chuck Evans, Tommy Finletter, Lanny Smith and Spike Zaslow. They all seemed to have one thing in
common. There were no addresses or phone numbers listed, though one of them, Parker Bowling, had a cell phone number alongside his name. There were even some first names without last names in the book, Guy and Sonny and Craig. So what did that mean—that O'Fallon had been gay? Did any of the names, I wondered, belong to the young men in the pictures, and if they didn't, why not, and where were those kids today?

I did one more thing before going to bed. I went up to my office and pulled out the file on the pet-assisted-therapy group where I'd met Timothy O'Fallon. There were very few comments next to each name, just a word or two that might help me help them the following week. I'd put my keys in John's pocket, for example, when it was clear he needed a little push, a push he got literally from Dashiell when I asked him to find what I'd hidden. And after that session I'd written “3,” to indicate that it was the third of our six meetings when John spoke, and “Mother,” to let me know who it was that John had lost, as if I would forget. I'd also written, “More?” I had the feeling that John had only given us part of the story, that he was holding something back. But there was nothing further, not in the group and not in my notes.