Fall Guy (3 page)

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.

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north on Greenwich Street, toward Horatio, I thought of something else that struck me as ridiculous, or at least outdated, the way the cops kept everything so close to the vest.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 Brody 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.

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.”