Fall Guy Read online

  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.

  The notes were cryptic, but even now, all this time later, they were enough to remind me of what was important.

  Larry’s sister had worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and he’d had a fight with her on September 7. They hadn’t made up. Brian’s brother had been a firefighter. His dad, too. He’d said he should have been one, that he should have died, the way they did, when the Towers collapsed. And Timothy O’Fallon hadn’t told us why he’d come, why he seemed so tired, why his eyes looked so sad. Next to his name there was only one comment, “NR,” for no response.

  CHAPTER 3

  As soon as I woke up, I called Mary Margaret O’Fallon to give her the sad news. I got an answering machine and left a message, just my name and number and a request that she call me back. I didn’t say what the call was about. I thought, with this kind of news, the least she deserved was a live voice at the other end of the phone.

  I tried Dennis O’Fallon next. I got a message for him too, this one letting me know that I’d reached a Lexus dealership that didn’t open until eleven. I looked at the crossed-out number for Dennis and Iris O’Fallon and decided to wait and call Dennis at eleven.

  I had nearly the whole day before I was due to meet Michael Brody on Horatio Street and only one appointment before then, a pet-therapy visit with Dashiell at two at the Westside Nursing Home on West Thirteenth Street. I opened the small envelope and dumped the keys into my hand, feeling how hard and cold they were. There were only three keys—outer door, door to the apartment, mailbox key. I’d been warned not to go into the apartment without Brody. But I hadn’t been asked not to walk by, and my dog needed a walk anyway.

  I tried Mary Margaret one more time before leaving the house, just in case she’d been in the shower when the phone rang or down in the basement putting up the wash. I didn’t leave a message this time, hoping she wouldn’t see the number show up again on Caller ID. I didn’t want to alarm her, I thought to myself, then realized how ridiculous that was.

  Walking north on Greenwich Street, toward Horatio, I thought of something else that struck me as ridiculous, or at least outdated, the way the cops kept everything so close to the vest. I thought about O’Fallon at the group, not saying a word about what was bothering him, about what drove him to come week after week and sit among us. Sit he did, but silently, cops only talking to other cops about what they saw, not sharing their feelings with anyone. Did just being there help O’Fallon? I wondered.

  And when was their habit of silence going to change? Clearly, the system was failing, or there wouldn’t be so many cops having tragic accidents, as Brody had put it. It was failing the public as well. Despite the determined effort to protect us, no one was feeling safe anymore. Not anyone. I stopped and turned around to look downtown, as I often did now, to see what was no longer there.

  We had breathed in the fine particles of debris, tasted it on our tongues, washed it from our eyes, combed it from our hair. We’d walked on the ashes of the dead—even here in Greenwich Village, a mile and a half north of Ground Zero. And we’d seen the Towers crumble and fall hundreds and hundreds of times—at the moment it happened, then on television, perhaps forever in our sleep.

  So why were the police still protecting us from the truth, everything out there now, on television, on the Internet, on the nightly news? The news cameras zoom in on the bloody stains on the sidewalk after a murder, honing in on exactly what used to be avoided. The New York Times prints lists of body parts, as yet unidentified, found at the World Trade Center disaster site and now in the hands of the medical examiner: a left foot, a ring finger, a head, for God’s sake.

  True, the cops still saw things the public didn’t. And they saw them on a day-to-day basis, a steady diet of the worst mankind has to offer. But didn’t their protection of us, their code of silence make the job even more stressful for them than it already was?

  Mary Margaret had just lost her mother. Now I had to tell her she’d also lost her brother. Would she believe the death was accidental? Was there any possibility it was?

  All of a sudden I was glad neither of Tim’s siblings had been available to answer the phone. It would make more sense to speak to Mary Margaret or Dennis O’Fallon after I’d seen O’Fallon’s residence, after I had a better idea if it was just my cynicism that made me disbelieve the story Brod
y had offered up, cynicism and the knowledge that police suicide is one of the more hideous side effects of the job. In protecting us, the public, from what they see, not exactly appropriate dinner-party conversation when you think about it, they become all the more vulnerable to depression, despair and suicide.

  Was that why O’Fallon had come to the post-traumatic-stress group? Not because he’d lost someone in the attack. Not even because of the way the attack changed all our lives. But because of the stress he’d accumulated as part of his job, the steady diet of witnessing horror and keeping it a secret?

  Tim had lived on the south side of Horatio Street in one of two identical brick houses. I checked the numbers. Coming from Greenwich Street, Tim’s building was the closer of the two. I went up the three concrete steps to the outer door, tried the knob and found it locked, pretty much the way it is in New York City unless there’s a doorman to filter visitors. The bells were outside, to the left of the door. The mailboxes were inside, in the tiny vestibule. The mailman could get in using the front-door key that was kept in a special lockbox, the lockboxes themselves all supplied by the post office, all using the same key. I took out Tim’s keys and opened the first door, checking the names on the mailboxes. Brody, after all, had not told me not to do that. I opened Tim’s mailbox and took out his mail. I hadn’t been told not to do that either.

  Tim lived on the first floor. I looked through the inner glass door and saw doors on either side of the hall, the one to my right with a rectangular seal on it. The hallway was wider in the center, to accommodate the staircase to the basement below and to the upper floors. Beyond that, at the far end of the narrow hallway, there was another door, this one made of small glass panes and without tape on it. I could see, beyond the glass, a table with a large green umbrella over it and some plants. I hesitated for a moment, then tried the inner door and found that the same key opened it as well.