The Fall Guy

by James Lasdun

“Yummie!” Lily called out. “I love cobbler!”

  “Me too,” Charlie said.

  “Yes, but . . . it’s late, and Matthew shouldn’t—”

  “It’s no problem,” Matthew interrupted her, opening the gate. “I like going into town.”

  He left before Chloe could make any more objections. His desire to drive by the A-frame was as sharp, suddenly, as it had ever been.

  This time a Chevy pickup was parked in the driveway, with a metal trailer attached to it.

  Forcing himself to keep driving, Matthew glimpsed a man on a riding lawn mower in the backyard, sending out plumes of grass.

  He parked by the bridge and climbed straight down to the creek. The daylight seemed to be throbbing around him. At the top of the bank opposite the A-frame he found himself staring straight into the eyes of the man on the lawn mower. He raised a hand as if in casual greeting, and the man waved back as he rotated his machine back toward the house. A second man, wearing goggles, was weed-whacking around some shrubs at the corner of the kitchen. He was stepping slowly backward, moving in the direction of the kitchen door. With an effort, Matthew made himself leave. It was possible that you couldn’t actually see into the kitchen through the door unless you stuck your face right up to the glass, but he didn’t want to be around to find out.

  It was coming, he thought. If not now, then soon. Fear was pushing up through the numbed feeling he’d had for the past two days. It was as though what had occurred was only beginning to become real in his own mind, now that the prospect of other people discovering it was looming closer.

  He drank copiously at dinner that night, sensing he was going to have trouble sleeping. By the time he’d finished the dishes he could barely keep his eyes open. In bed, he fell asleep instantly. But an hour later he came lurching awake, his heart pounding. Had it happened yet? An awful certainty that it had, gripped him. He got up and took his netbook down to the pool, to search online for news. Still nothing. He stood up, intending to go back to bed, but instead found himself sidling around the house and into the truck. If anyone heard him, he thought, he could say he’d been unable to sleep and had gone to listen to the drumming. Town was deserted. From the county road he turned onto Veery Road. The thin dark triangle of the A-frame reached up like a finger saying, Sshhh. The gardeners’ truck and trailer were gone. Only the LeBaron stood in the driveway, its lonely persistence charged with odd pathos now, like that of some helplessly loyal pet. I ought to be relieved, Matthew thought. But if anything the stillness of the place—as though he’d somehow sealed it in time—made him more restless than ever. Parking in the pull-off beyond the bridge, he felt as if there were two of him; a self and a second self, ghostlier and yet seemingly more in control of him than the first, as it replicated every movement he made: two of him climbing down to the stream, picking their way with identical motions from rock to rock among the white combs of falling water and the black pools; two of him climbing the wooden steps up the bank below the A-frame, and stepping silently across the lawn to the windowed back door, aware of the dark forms of the pear trees on either side of him, the little Buddha cross-legged under the maple.

  Covering the door handle with his shirtsleeve, he turned it and stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

  The AC had been on, but there was a bad smell already: human waste and the odor of spoiling meat. In the darkness he made out Grollier’s naked body, slumped against the wall like a heap of pillows with dark stains. As he stepped forward, moonlight coming in from the skylight caught the slits of white in the half-open eyes and he flinched back. All right, he thought, steadying himself. Alright. This was why he’d come, wasn’t it? To see what he’d done; confirm that he hadn’t in fact been dreaming or imagining his long evening at the A-frame. Well, here was his proof: the bearded head slumped on the enormous torso, one arm on the floor, the other bent at the elbow with the hand turned back awkwardly as if caught in the act of batting off a fly, legs kicked out across the passage; the whole body, blood-splotched from the neck down, emanating a sort of confused reproach, like some felled colossus who believed he’d been promised immortality.

  He stared on. You! the man had shouted, incredulous as he recognized Matthew in the flickering darkness. You!—glancing back into the living room and up toward the loft as if suddenly understanding everything, and then lunging forward with his empty hands outspread in front of him. That much Matthew remembered vividly. What happened next was less clear in his mind, and in fact never acquired a stable outline. The fireworks lights strafing the kitchen in bright flashes that made the intermittent darkness all the more impenetrable no doubt added to the uncertain nature of the episode. Sometimes he saw himself blindly grabbing the kitchen knife only as Wade came charging toward him. Sometimes he’d taken it deliberately out of the knife block the moment he’d reached the back door, and had been highly conscious of having it in his possession all along. Sometimes it really did seem to have materialized in his grip by magic. As for the stabbing itself, it appeared to have occurred in some purely interstitial realm, outside consciousness and intractable to memory. One moment Wade was charging at him like an enraged ape; the next he was thrashing on the floor with a five-inch Sabatier blade in his throat, blood fountaining out from the severed artery in a copious gush while Matthew staggered back to the wall and stood flattened against it, aware only of a roaring in his ears and the fact that his body was vibrating uncontrollably, as if he were in the process of being sucked into a tornado.

  eleven

  At around five the following afternoon, he went out from the kitchen, where he’d been making focaccia dough, and walked over to the pool. Chloe was lying on a sunbed, wearing earbuds and laughing at something on her phone. She liked listening to comedy podcasts and on those occasions there would be the minor delight of seeing her break into helpless laughter without visible cause.

  It was a beautiful afternoon, the light so clear he could see small insects at the far end of the pool, glinting in the air above the water.

  “Coming for a swim?” Chloe asked, tapping her phone. She was wearing one of her thin cotton shirts over her swimsuit. Her hair was loosely gathered in a leather clasp, falling in dark strands.

  “Thinking of it,” Matthew said. “I was actually wondering if it was warm enough.”

  “I know. It’s getting cooler. I think the monarchs may have started leaving.” She gestured over to the butterfly garden, where a few desultory specimens were still wandering through the air.

  “Where do they go?”

  “Mexico.”

  “Lucky them!”

  She smiled.

  “Want to hear something hilarious?”

  She held out one of her earbuds, leaving the other in her ear.

  “Sure.”

  He went over and perched on the end of her sunbed.

  “Come closer,” she said. “It won’t reach.”

  He slid closer to her and put in the earbud. Chloe said a name that didn’t mean anything to him.

  “He’s an actor but he also does stand-up. This . . . this person I know who goes to a lot of comedy clubs put me on to him.”

  She tapped the phone and the comedian’s voice came into Matthew’s ear. He laughed along with Chloe, but he wasn’t listening. To be sitting there, joined to her through the looping white scribble of the earbuds, close enough to feel the warmth of her body, was a novel experience, strangely intimate, and he found himself wanting to take note of every detail of it: her arm in its weightless shirt brushing against him as she laughed; the sunlight on her fine small teeth; her perfume, which was like the scent of something grown in paradise; above all the private atmosphere of happiness she dwelled in, that at this proximity was something you could almost touch and taste and see. The intense love he felt for her seemed to dilate and sparkle inside him. He sat motionless, drinking in the unexpected blissfulness of the moment.

  It was Charlie who brought it to an end, appearing at the gate in his swimming
trunks. He was looking at his iPad.

  “Hey, Chlo, didn’t we meet Wade Grollier? The director?”

  Chloe took out her earbud.

  “What?”

  Charlie walked in through the gate, still looking at his screen.

  “Didn’t we meet Wade Grollier?”

  Very coolly Chloe said:

  “Who?”

  “Wade D. Grollier. Movie guy.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think we met him at some fund-raiser. Big guy with a beard.”

  She shrugged.

  “Maybe. Why?”

  “He was renting a house up here this summer.”

  Matthew braced himself.

  “Oh,” Chloe said with perfect nonchalance.

  “Yeah. He was just killed.”

  No sound came from Chloe for a second or two.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “He was found dead in his rental house.”

  “What?”

  “Stabbed. They found him today.”

  “What . . . where?”

  Charlie looked down at his screen. “Veery Road—that’s the one that goes by the creek, isn’t it?”

  Chloe didn’t answer. She had stood up, putting on her sunglasses, and was walking over to Charlie.

  “I’m pretty sure we did meet him,” Charlie said as she looked at the screen over his shoulder. “At that thing in Aspen, where they had the hot-air balloons . . .”

  Chloe had turned pale and Matthew could see that her hands were clenched tight.

  “Don’t you remember? Must have been two, three years ago.”

  “Maybe. What else does it say?”

  Charlie flicked the screen.

  “That’s all. It’s just a statement from the sheriff’s department. Found stabbed earlier today . . . Treating it as murder . . . That’s his picture.”

  “Oh, god.”

  “Unbelievable, right?”

  Chloe moistened her lips, but said nothing.

  She detached herself from Charlie and walked to the gate, cradling her elbows. Matthew could feel, almost on his own nerves, the horror surging through her.

  “Where are you off to?” Charlie called after her.

  “Lily.”

  She moved quickly toward the house. After she’d gone, Charlie gave a quiet laugh:

  “Psycho on the loose, she’s thinking.”

  Matthew gave a vague nod. He’d known his reactions were going to have to be very carefully calibrated once the discovery was made, but he could tell already that this was going to be more complicated than he’d imagined. Aside from the need to hide any awareness of how Chloe would surely be feeling under her own, equally necessary, masquerade, it was also going to be crucial not to seem out of step with the casual attitude that Charlie, who had no reason to feel personally affected, would naturally assume.

  Charlie continued:

  “I doubt that’s what it is, though. Probably just some meth-head burglar who wasn’t expecting to find anyone home.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah, or one of those Rainbow people.”

  He plunged into the pool and began swimming laps. Matthew went inside. The TV was on in the upstairs bedroom. He could hear its muffled noise through the kitchen ceiling, under the squeak of Lily’s clarinet from along the corridor. There was a radio in the kitchen, but he couldn’t find any news on it. He fetched his netbook from the living room and found a couple of breaking news stories that had the same information Charlie had read from his iPad.

  Charlie came in from his swim and joined Chloe upstairs. An hour later the two of them came down for dinner.

  “Like I told you, Matt,” Charlie said, “burglary gone wrong. They had the sheriff on the local news. So we’re off the hook for anything creepier. Right, Chlo?”

  “Right.” Chloe poured herself a drink.

  “What did they say?” Matthew asked, trying to strike a tone of neutral interest.

  “Basically just that. Someone broke in thinking he was out, got surprised and stuck a knife in him. The owner of the house found the body this morning but it happened a while ago.”

  “They can’t tell exactly?”

  “I guess that takes some time to determine. Anyhow, according to the owner he was due to fly out to Malaysia the day before yesterday, so—”

  “Indonesia,” Chloe corrected him.

  “No, I think she said Malaysia.”

  She seemed about to insist, but swallowed down her drink instead.

  “I’m guessing it happened the night of the fireworks,” Charlie said. “Everyone in town goes, so it’s an obvious time for a break-in.”

  “Right.”

  “It’ll put a damper on the summer rental market, that’s for sure.”

  Chloe went over to the drinks cabinet. Matthew heard the bottle clinking against her glass but managed to stop himself from looking.

  “Sorry, that was a callous thing to say,” Charlie said. “I guess I’m spooked by the fact that we met the guy. Chloe does remember, by the way, Matt.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  Matthew looked at Chloe. She nodded.

  “What was he like?”

  Her eyes met his, and he made himself hold their glance. Her poise impressed him. Aside from the shaky hands and the fact that she was drinking at three times her usual rate there was little outward indication of what she must have been feeling. Certainly Charlie didn’t seem to have any inkling of it.

  “Oh, you know . . . It was at one of those events where you chat to hundreds of people. He seemed nice enough . . .”

  “Was he . . . did he have a family?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “He lived with some actress in SoHo,” Charlie said. “She’s off filming in the desert. Apparently he was up here to rewrite the script of his new movie.”

  “What actress?” Matthew asked, trying to second-guess what a guiltless version of himself would be saying.

  “I forget. Who was it, Chloe?”

  “I have no idea,” Chloe said with a brusqueness that made Matthew nervous. He was well aware that his safety depended as much on Chloe’s ability to put on a convincing performance as it did on his own.

  “But listen,” she said. “Let’s not talk about this right now, shall we? Lily doesn’t know and I don’t want to scare her.”

  “Agreed,” Charlie answered.

  The topic wasn’t mentioned at dinner, and Chloe went off upstairs immediately after. Matthew cleared up while Charlie and Lily embarked on a game of Scrabble in the living room. When he was finished he looked online for more news. There were tributes from fans and colleagues, but nothing new about the investigation. He went to bed without any serious expectation of being able to sleep, which turned out to be the case, though he drifted off for a couple of hours just as day was breaking and the birds were beginning to sing.

  Breakfasting alone, he found a report on the murder in the New York Times online, along with a short obituary. Neither contained anything he didn’t already know. Later that morning Charlie came home from tennis with the Aurelia Gazette and the East Deerfield Citizen.

  “He’s all over the Citizen,” he said, sprawling down on the sofa.

  “Who is?” Chloe asked. She’d been upstairs most of the morning, but had gone outside a little while ago, and had just come back in with some wildflowers, which she was arranging in a vase. She was wearing more eye makeup than usual, Matthew noticed. Other than that, it was hard to tell whether there was any objective basis for the aura of precarious frailty he detected around her, or if he was only noticing it because of what he knew. Lily was up in her room, her voice rising uninhibitedly over the tinny accompaniment of a karaoke machine.

  “Wade D. Grollier,” Charlie answered his wife. “Want to hear what they say?”

  Chloe cleared her throat before answering.

  “Sure.”

  “Not interrupting you, Matt?”

  Matthew had found a Sudo
ku book in the bathroom and spent the last couple of hours doing puzzles. Plunging his mind into the realm of pure numbers seemed to give him some relief from his own thoughts, which had begun circling around the variables of what might or might not happen now that the body had been found, and how best to react to each eventuality. This ceaseless but largely pointless activity was what had kept him awake for most of the previous night.

  “Of course not,” he said.

  “I’ll give you the highlights. Let’s see. Police unable to pinpoint exact time of death but believe it occurred sometime during the Aurelia Volunteers Day fireworks. So I was right about that . . . Director survived by a sister, who issued a statement calling him one of the kindest, funniest, most creative blah blah blah . . . Staying in Aurelia to work on a screenplay . . . Not married but living in New York with girlfriend, actress Rachel Turpin. Right, of course. Spokesperson for Turpin said the actress, who is currently on location in Arizona, was devastated and blah blah . . . Officers from the sheriff’s department canvassing neighbors on Veery Road and throughout Aurelia for possible leads . . . Case being handled by detectives from Homicide and Burglary Divisions . . . Murder weapon believed to be a kitchen knife missing from the house . . . Any information from members of the public blah blah blah . . .”

  He tossed the paper aside.

  “East Deerfield Burglary Division. Now, there’s a phrase to strike fear into the most hardened criminal’s heart! Maybe the guy’ll just turn himself in out of sheer terror.” He laughed. It was a quirk of Charlie’s to be contemptuous, on principle, toward the police and uniformed officials in general.

  “Why are they so sure it was a burglary?” Chloe asked.

  “As opposed to what? An assassination? Some rival director jealous of his awards?”

  Chloe shrugged.

  “I mean, was anything actually stolen?”

  “Well . . . presumably.”

  After a moment, Chloe said:

  “Does it say what?”

  Charlie picked up the paper and scanned the piece again.

  “No. But—would it, necessarily?”

  “I guess not.”

  She adjusted some flowers in her vase, and picked up a photography book. Matthew glanced over, trying to guess what was going through her head. It occurred to him that she might have been thinking about Grollier’s disposable Tracfone; hoping it had been stolen, perhaps, so that the police wouldn’t find her number on it. It was too bad he couldn’t tell her he had it safely in his own possession.