Fall Guy Read online

  Dashiell and I walked into the quiet, dimly lit hallway. We stopped for a moment in front of the sealed door, Dashiell moving his head and tasting the air. Then we walked past the staircase and found a second sealed door. At one point, there must have been four separate apartments on this floor, two on each side, otherwise there’d only be one entrance. This time Dashiell put his nose at the bottom of the door where there’s space between the door and the sill, space where deliverymen shove menus into your apartment, supers slide in rent bills or neighbors leave notes. I could hear the whoosh of his breath as he blew out air to cleanse his nose and sucked in the odors from the apartment, his tail straight down, moving rapidly.

  I tried the knob to the garden door and found it locked, tried the same key once again and pushed the glass door open, standing on the threshold of a double-width communal garden. There was the sound of running water and birds singing. I could smell something sweet, and something nasty, a chemical odor I wouldn’t expect to find in a garden. Dashiell sneezed twice, then held his nose high and pulled in the scene. I stepped out.

  She was off to my right, sitting on a little stool in front of her easel, a straw hat covering part of her thin, lined face. At first she didn’t look up. I watched her dip the tip of her brush onto the palette she held in her left hand and leave a flick of color on the painting. She leaned back to appraise the change and nodded her head. Her lips were moving, as if she were talking to herself, but I couldn’t make out the words. Then she turned to where Dashiell and I were standing and she frowned.

  “This private garden,” she said, getting up, the palette and brush still in her hand. “How you get in here? Netty leave door unlocked again? Door unlocked too many time. This no good. Not safe.”

  “I have the keys,” I told her, staying where I was, opening my hand so that she could see them. She looked frightened. “I have Timothy O’Fallon’s keys. I’m the executor of his will.”

  “Talk louder,” she said. “You’re mumbling.”

  “I’m the executor of Detective O’Fallon’s estate,” I repeated.

  “Are you family?” Head back, squinting at me from under her hat.

  I shook my head. “No, I’m…” Not knowing how to finish the sentence.

  “You’re not family.” Pointing at me with the paintbrush.

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. You don’t look like him. So what? You were his friend?” Pleased with her detective work. But before I could confirm or deny, she bowed her head, once again hiding her face. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude.”

  I took a chair and pulled it away from the white table with the green umbrella and sat, thinking that that might put her more at ease.

  “Were you a friend of his?” I asked.

  “His neighbor.” She pointed to the windows behind her with her brush. “He was a very nice man. A good man.” She nodded. “A sad man,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I was painting here on Sunday morning. I heard him crying. His mother had just died. Her funeral was the day before. On Saturday. He was very, very sad. I went back inside to give him privacy. I didn’t want him to see that I heard him crying. He wouldn’t have liked that.”

  I got up, dropping the leash and leaving Dashiell at the table and offered my hand. “Rachel Alexander,” I said. “I’ll be spending some time working here, settling Tim’s estate.”

  “Jin Mei Lin,” she said.

  She carefully put the brush down on the tray that held her paints and put her hand in mine. It was small and dry, and standing there, I towered over her.

  “You’re a good person to do this job,” she said. “It’s too much grief for most people.”

  Then her small dark eyes left me and settled on Dashiell.

  “He doesn’t bite,” I said, feeling silly as I did, but it was the question nearly everyone asked. Despite the clownlike black patch over his right eye and the Charlie Chaplin mustache, both standouts against his white coat, he was, after all, a pit bull. Carrying a lot of baggage was an unfortunate part of his birthright.

  “I see that,” Jin Mei said.

  It was then that I stepped closer and looked at what she was painting. On the vertical board of the easel, she had taped a photo of a German shepherd, her forehead pleated with concern, her eyes dark and intelligent, her ears, instead of pointing toward the clouds, leaning toward each other, as if in conversation. Below, on the canvas, was the beginning of Jin Mei’s portrait of the dog.

  “Your dog’s eyes are wise,” she said, “not mean. She turned to look behind her, at the ruddy Abyssinian on the windowsill, her yellow eyes on Dashiell. “Yin Yin’s a good judge of character. If she’s staying there, this dog is not a problem.”

  “Have you lived here long?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Detective O’Fallon, too. But not Parker.” She wrinkled her nose. “Parker’s one of the worst of all the men he took in. When he was out here”—she turned again and pointed to her window—“I went inside, made a cup of tea and waited for him to leave.”

  “Parker?” I asked.

  I remembered a Parker in Tim’s address book. Parker Bowling.

  Jin Mei nodded. “He’s not here now. The police took him out.”

  “He was arrested?”

  She shook her head. “They took him out here, to the garden. They told him he had to go somewhere else.” She moved her hands as if shooing me away from her. “The detective told him he couldn’t stay here because his name isn’t on the lease.”

  “He was living here, this Parker? With Tim?”

  “Tim always had someone living here, the men he helped. I already told you, he was a good man.”

  “Yes,” I said, “you did,” wondering why Detective Brody hadn’t mentioned this Parker, wondering what it meant that O’Fallon had men live here that he was helping, trying really hard not to jump to conclusions. But this was Greenwich Village. And there were hardly any women’s names in O’Fallon’s address book.

  “How long had Parker lived here?” I asked.

  “Several months,” she said. “No one liked him. He didn’t talk to any of us.” She swirled her hand around, indicating the whole garden. “Too important to talk to us.” She pushed the tip of her nose up with one finger.

  “He didn’t talk to the neighbors?” I asked.

  “Right. He’d come into the garden, sit in a chair, smoke a stinky cigarette, stare straight ahead. He never said, ‘Good morning, Jin Mei. How are you today? How is Yin Yin?’ Very unfriendly.”

  “Were you a little afraid of him, Jin Mei? Was that why you went inside when he came out here, because he was something worse than unfriendly?”

  Jin Mei shrugged and picked up her brush. “I just didn’t like him from day one.”

  “Was there something else, something he did, something other than his unfriendliness?” I asked.

  But that part of our conversation no longer interested her. She dipped just the tip of the brush in white and made a tiny dot in each of the dog’s eyes, bringing them to life. Then she put down her brush and took off her hat, smoothing her hair back from her face with both hands. Her hair was a dark, graphite gray, pulled back and coiled into a knot at the nape of her neck. Without the hat, I got a better look at her paper-thin skin the color of masking tape, the pleating near her small eyes, as dark as currants, the crisscrossing lines above her mouth. She looked to be in her seventies, but she might have been older.

  Jin Mei pointed at Dashiell. “Would you like me to paint him, maybe for a special occasion? I’m very expensive,” she said, “but I’m worth it.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Sitting in the bar at Pastis, Dash next to the table with a bowlful of water, a bowl that matched the decor of the restaurant, I picked at my bacon sandwich as I began to open O’Fallon’s mail. I wasn’t sure of the procedure. I tried to remember what my sister and I did with my mother’s bills, but that was different. We had been named signatories on B
eatrice’s checking account not long after she got sick.

  I pulled an envelope from the bottom of the stack, turned it over and made a note to call O’Fallon’s attorney, hoping that she would take care of paying the bills and dealing with most of the paperwork. I suspected I’d have more than enough to do sorting out O’Fallon’s possessions and dealing with family and neighbors—grumbling neighbors, to judge by Jin Mei.

  I wondered about Parker—who he was, where he was, and how O’Fallon had been helping him. I made a note to talk to the other neighbors. I’d ask Brody about Parker, too, and about the other men O’Fallon had helped. Brody. As if he were about to tell me what he knew.

  I flipped through O’Fallon’s Con Ed bill, a packet of coupons for discounts, the envelope addressed to “Occupant,” his rent bill, due in a little over a week, an L.L. Bean catalog and the letter I’d been making notes on. I turned it over. No return address. A perfect little handwriting, small and neat and ever so careful. There was only one uncharacteristic flourish. The tail on the y on Timothy turned back and underlined his name.

  Opening his mailbox, it had never occurred to me that I shouldn’t be taking his mail. I’d picked up the packet without looking at it, even the coupons and the catalog, and tossed them into the bag where I had the things I needed for Dashiell’s pet-therapy visit. Now holding the square blue envelope, I wondered if I should be the one to open it. I put it down on the table and noticed I’d made a greasy thumbprint on the lower left corner. Too late to go back to Horatio Street and return it to the mailbox. Besides, Brody hadn’t told me not to take the mail. He’d only told me not to use the keys to enter the apartment.

  Curiosity.

  I picked up the envelope, used my knife to slit it open and pulled out the folded sheet of blue stationery. I sniffed it first; no perfume. Then I opened the single fold and read the name. Maggie.

  “I know what happened at Breyer’s Landing,” it said. “I was there. We have to talk.”

  I picked up the envelope and checked the postmark, Saturday, thinking how strange the mail was. You could mail something in Piermont and it would arrive in New York City in a day or two. You could mail something in Greenwich Village to someone three blocks away and it could take a week or longer to arrive.

  I read the note again. Mary Margaret had mailed the note on Saturday, the day of their mother’s funeral. The day before Tim died. The note seemed ominous, threatening. Or was that just my suspicious mind-set? But Tim had never seen it. So it couldn’t have anything to do with anything.

  Except my curiosity.

  “I was there,” she’d written. What could that mean?

  At one, Dashiell and I went for a walk. It was hot but not beastly, and though there was no shade at this hour, there was a bit of a breeze. Whenever we could, we walked under sidewalk bridges to get out of the sun for a minute. Rain or shine, a dog’s got to do what a dog’s got to do, and before a pet-therapy visit, a long walk is a good idea.

  Edna was sitting in her wheelchair near the front door, waiting. “He’s here,” she said, turning back to the others in the room, five really sad-looking people. “Our little friend is here.”

  “Our little friend” was the equivalent of calling women “hon” and guys “pal” when you couldn’t remember their names. It was, I thought, a rather graceful save for an old lady suffering from senile dementia. Knowing what was coming, I made a graceful save of my own. I positioned myself behind Edna’s chair before Dashiell got the chance to put his paws up on the seat, one on each side of her frail, skinny legs, and lean forward to give her a kiss.

  “He loves me,” Edna squealed.

  “He does,” I said from behind her. “Dashiell loves his friend Edna.”

  She nodded. “Comes to see me every day,” she said.

  “Once a week,” I said, thinking I shouldn’t have corrected her, that, at this time, there was no point in doing so.

  “Tuesdays,” Edna said, surprising both of us. “I remembered he was coming today. I saved him some of my lunch.” Edna reached into her pocket and took out a stalk of broccoli. That’s when I noticed the grease stain on her pocket, like the one I’d made on the envelope of Maggie O’Fallon’s letter, wondering if Edna had made grease stains on things when she was younger, too, the way I did. Did I like hanging out with animals because it didn’t matter to them—neat or careless, fat or thin, rich or poor, it was all the same? Then I wondered if I’d end up alone, like Edna, someone visiting me on Tuesdays with a friendly dog, making ten minutes in my endless week bearable.

  I opened my bag and pulled out Dashiell’s boar-bristle brush. A short-coated dog, he didn’t tangle if he wasn’t brushed. And there was no difference in his appearance before and after. But he loved the feel of the brush scratching along his back, and the brushing was part of the ritual with Edna, who’d had a stroke. She’d fished for the broccoli with her right hand. My job was to make sure she did the brushing with her left. Of course Dashiell wasn’t her only therapy, but he was her favorite one. It’s always easier to inspire someone to pet or brush a dog than to do boring, repetitious exercises while someone counted.

  Marlene could still draw, and for her I’d brought a pad and colored pencils. Her favorite ritual was touching Dashiell as she drew him, feeling the lines of his muscular body and the way they related to each other and then translating them to paper. I felt the touching helped her as much as her pride in the finished drawings, which we’d always tack up on the bulletin board in the dayroom.

  Roger wanted a walk. As usual. I checked with the nurse and was told it was okay. He held Dash’s lead and we walked over to Fourteenth Street, where he stopped to say hello to the people eating at a coffee shop with outdoor seating: two men holding hands across the table, a tiny Yorkie on the blond one’s lap; a couple talking German who were nonplussed by Roger’s greeting; a man with copious tattoos reading the paper, his eggs sitting untouched on the plate before him, one small semicircle missing from a triangle of his buttered toast. On the steps of St. Bernard’s Church there was a homeless man talking on a cell phone. He and Roger greeted each other and I thought how odd that was, that someone talking on a cell phone would interrupt his conversation to say hello to a stranger. But when I looked back at him, once again absorbed in his phone call, I noticed that it wasn’t a cell phone at all that he was holding to his ear. It was an empty plastic bottle.

  Going up the block holding Dashiell’s leash, Roger smiled at everyone. Some people got sweeter when they got old, some angry at the dirty trick life played on us, that we start life in diapers, unable to care for ourselves, and sometimes end up the same way. What kind of a reward was this, I wondered, for a life well-lived, for hard work, devotion to family, a contribution to society? But for all I knew, half the people I visited at the home hadn’t lived their lives that way. Half of them may have been self-centered sons of bitches from day one and stayed that way from one set of diapers to the other. Meeting them the way I did, I’d never know. Nor did it matter. Doing pet therapy, what you saw was what you dealt with. Even when snippets of the past were revealed and acknowledged, Dashiell and I worked in the moment, doing whatever was needed at the time we were there.

  I wanted more than that when it came to O’Fallon. I wanted to know him. There would be no future, but I wanted to understand the past, wishing he had spoken up just once—would it have killed him?—in the group where I met him. I wished I had something more to go on other than rumor, gossip, slanted opinions and the detritus of his life; what, and whom, he’d left behind.

  But how much could I get to know, coming in as I had not late in the game but after it was over—the people all gone, the lights out and the stadium deserted? Without the presence of the living, breathing man, how did I now expect to get to know Timothy O’Fallon, to understand why he did what he did and what may have been going through his mind in the hours before his death? Had it been just grief, or was there more to it?

  As I left the Westside Nursi
ng Home, feeling, as I always did, that I’d gotten far more than I’d given, I wondered if Brody had planned on telling me anything else. He seemed to parcel out the information only when he absolutely had to. I wondered if there was some way I could get him to open up, if not about a fellow officer, then about the man who had lived with him, what his relationship to O’Fallon had been and where, if Brody knew, this Parker person was now. But I’d failed to get O’Fallon to speak when I’d had the chance. Why, then, did I imagine I’d be any more successful with Michael Brody?

  CHAPTER 5

  Detective Michael Brody cut the first of two seals on the door closest to the entrance, then turned to face me.

  “There was a man living here with Tim off and on for the past few months. He’s been given your name and number, in connection with getting his possessions out of the apartment.”

  “Living here?” I asked. “With Tim?”

  “Tim had taken him in, to give him a chance at cleaning up, getting his life going again.”

  “Cleaning up? You mean drugs and alcohol?”

  Brody nodded, his face telling me he didn’t exactly approve of Tim’s decision in this case; no way would he, Brody, take a junkie into his home, be on the job twenty-four seven, no break ever.

  “Seems an odd thing to do.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, his knife in his hand, one seal still going from the door to the frame, the air in the hallway still and warm. “But that was Tim’s way.”

  “You mean he’d done that before?”

  “Yes, ma’am. He had.”

  “Did it work?” I asked.

  Brody slit the second seal. “There’s not a terrific track record as far as that goes.”

  “You mean in rehabilitating drug addicts or in O’Fallon’s attempt to rehabilitate addicts, one at a time?”

  He took off his sunglasses and looked at me as if we were just meeting for the first time, as if he’d never laid eyes on me before. Perhaps, in fact, he hadn’t.