I was thinking and acting as if I were on the job, a habit that had become a way of life for me, something I had in common with Timothy O’Fallon, never mind that it was something he never knew about. He hadn’t told me he was a detective and I hadn’t told him I was a private investigator. In fact, when someone else in the group had asked me what I did besides pet therapy, I’d lied, the same lie I’d told Brody, the same one that was on the business card I’d just given him. “Research,” it said. Perhaps that was more of a half-truth than a lie. No one had asked what it meant and I hadn’t volunteered anything further.
Carrying O’Fallon’s briefcase and lost in thought, I followed behind my dog, not paying any attention to where we were going. We ended up all the way down at Houston Street before I noticed, turned around and headed home.
CHAPTER 6
The answering machine was blinking. I hit play.
The first message began with someone coughing. “Be quiet. I’m on the phone here. Rachel, this is Parker, um, Parker Bowling. I need to get my things from Tim’s apartment. I guess you’re not home. I’ll call you later.” I could hear some noise in the background, as if he were calling from a restaurant or a bar.
“Ms. Alexander, this is Maggie O’Fallon returning your call.” There was a long pause, just short of disconnecting the answering machine. “You sounded…it sounds as if this is something important, but you didn’t say what it was about.” Then she hung up.
“Rachel, it’s me again. I’ll try you later.” This time he must have been outside. I could hear the sound of traffic, a dog barking, a snippet of a passing conversation. “Not tomorrow,” someone said. I heard Parker strike a match. And then he hung up.
“This message is for Rachel Alexander. This is Dennis O’Fallon calling from Paramus Lexus. You didn’t say what you were calling about, whether it was business or personal.” He sighed. An impatient man. Then he repeated his name again and left the work number and an extension, saying both twice.
There was a call from someone who wanted to handle my investments, someone who had a method for clearing up my credit card debt who was surprised I hadn’t responded to his last three calls, and from someone who said I had been selected to have a free weekend in Florida. I hadn’t won any dance lessons or the lottery. But Parker Bowling had called twice more. And he was starting to sound annoyed.
I dialed Maggie O’Fallon and got her machine again. This time I told her I was home and that I’d be staying home. Just in case she called while I was walking Dashiell, I left my cell phone number as well. I couldn’t return Dennis’s call. He hadn’t left his home number.
Parker Bowling hadn’t left a home number either. No matter. I wasn’t in any rush to talk to him.
I decided to work downstairs, where it was cooler. The brick cottage I rented was small, but had three floors. There were two small bedrooms upstairs, one of which I used for an office, and the bathroom was there, near the top of the stairs. The living room and tiny kitchen were on the ground floor, and there was a large room downstairs that I rarely used. I had a dining room table there but never seemed to invite enough people to dinner to use it. Sometimes I thought I had better skills with dogs than with people. Sometimes I wasn’t sure which kind of company I preferred.
I thought about cooking something, but I wasn’t in the mood, so I ordered a pizza and took the briefcase to the round table just outside my kitchen. I took out O’Fallon’s checkbook first, starting at the latest check in the register and going backward. He’d not only recorded his checks and deposits, but his ATM withdrawals as well. Unlike the way I kept my checkbook, with more than one item on a line—a check and a deposit or a check and an ATM withdrawal—he gave each item a line of its own.
The checks were fairly ordinary—his rent, his electric bill, his phone bill. There were regular checks to a Marie Sanchez, fifty dollars every two weeks. I guessed that she was his cleaning lady. She’d gotten a check the Thursday before. I’d have to make sure to call her sometime before she showed up again.
There were checks to several liquor stores, a recent check to a florist, one to a doctor, or dentist, a small amount meaning it was a co-pay. There was a check for twenty-five dollars to Rob Rosen. Tim had written “garden” after Rob’s name. The deposits were evenly spaced, one a month, always the same amount of money. It was the ATM withdrawals that interested me. There had been seven in the last month, totaling $820. On the line adjacent to five of the eight withdrawals, there was a notation: “For Parker.” Three hundred and seventy-five dollars in cash had gone to Parker in June.
Tim had an IRA at the bank where he had his checking account. There was $41,654 dollars in the account, not an awful lot to show for twenty-one years of service, but there must have been a retirement account connected to the job as well. I wondered if he’d thought of retiring. So many police suicides seem to occur around that time and he’d put in his twenty years-plus.
The bell at the gate rang. I grabbed some money and Dash and I headed through the garden to fetch our pizza. The delivery kid handed me a card from the pizzeria. Ten of them, he told me, and I’d get a free pie, regular, nothing extra on it. I was sure I’d qualified for several already.
When we got back inside, I put three slices on a plate to cool for Dashiell and pushed O’Fallon’s papers aside to keep them clean. Dash watched me eat, a bit disappointed. Maybe even resentful. He usually ate a souped-up diet of raw meat and grated raw vegetables, except when I ate pizza. But he never seemed to remember that each time he had to wait for his slices to cool.
After I had finished two slices, I walked out into the garden, putting Dashiell’s plate down on the ground. No sense having to clean up the living room floor when he’d be just as happy eating out-of-doors.
There was a slight breeze. I could smell the lavender growing near the path, the basil from the herb garden. I sat on the steps and thought about what I had to do, hoping again that I could get the attorney to do most of the paperwork. I’d call her first thing in the morning. I wondered if Maggie would want to come into the city and help me sort things. According to the will, only the money and certain named valuables were going to her. The rest of O’Fallon’s possessions had been left to the executor, me, to dispose of as I saw fit. I thought this was done when there was no family to pick and choose what they wanted to keep. Perhaps O’Fallon knew better. Perhaps he knew, or thought, that Maggie wouldn’t want most of his things. Still, it seemed strange for me to be doing this when he had at least two living blood relatives.
I went inside to look at the photo album, those same kids again, the pictures faded, some even a pale brown, the images on their way to disappearing altogether. I was only on the third page when the phone rang.
“Is this Rachel Alexander?” she asked.
“Yes. Is it Maggie?”
“Yes, it is. I only have a moment. I’m on my break. But your voice sounded urgent and I was wondering what it is you called about. I hope I haven’t made a mistake. I hope this isn’t one of those calls to ask me to switch to A T and T.”
“No, it isn’t. I wish it were.”
“Oh,” she said. “Then what?”
I took a breath. “It’s about your brother,” I said.
“Dennis?”
“No, it’s about Tim. There’s been an accident, Maggie. I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you this. Tim is dead.”
I heard her inhale sharply.
“He was cleaning his service revolver,” I said. “On Sunday morning. I’m sorry this has taken so long, but I didn’t hear about it right away.”
“He’s dead? He shot himself? Mother of God. This is all my fault.”
“No, no,” I said. “It was an accident.”
Mary Margaret was silent.
I wished I could comfort her, but there was nothing comforting to say. I could have told her that her brother went quickly, that he didn’t suffer long, or said that at least there was no wife left behind, no young children orphaned, things
people say in situations like this. But to what avail? She’d lost her mother last week and her brother this week. There wasn’t anything I could say that would erode even the smallest bit of her grief. I’m sorry for your loss, I thought. That’s what people said, because what else was there to say?
“Maggie,” I said. Then: “I’m so sorry.”
I could hear what sounded like a bell ringing, again and again.
“Who are you?” she asked. “Are you with the Department?”
“No, I’m—”
“Then why are you the one calling me?”
“That’s the weird thing,” I said. I’d walked outside with the phone and was sitting on the steps outside the cottage. There was a three-quarter moon and the sky was cloudless, a kind of inky blue with more stars than you usually see in the city. “I barely knew your brother, but he named me as executor of his estate. It came as—”
“He named you? What does that mean?”
“That his will designated me as—”
“But you just said you barely knew Tim? I don’t understand.”
“He must have had his reasons,” I told her, repeating what Brody had said to me. I told her how I’d met Tim and what he’d said that last day. I probably should have told her about the tears, but now didn’t seem the time. “That’s all I know,” I told her. “I’m as puzzled as you are. I guess he never mentioned—”
“No, never. I have to go,” she said. “I’m at the hospital.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said again.
“It’s not that. It’s my job. I’m a nurse.”
“Can we talk again, Maggie? I’d like—”
But the line went dead, leaving me with the feeling that I’d botched an important task. I put my head down to my knees, feeling awful. And then, I can’t even say why, I went inside, picked up Brody’s card and called his cell phone.
“It’s Rachel,” I said. “I just spoke to Maggie O’Fallon.”
I felt a tear rolling down my cheek, glad this was a phone call and not a face-to-face meeting.
“That’ll do it every time,” he said. “It went badly?”
“It was terrible.”
“It always is. No matter how they react, it’s always terrible.”
“She says it’s her fault.”
“That’s a common reaction, Rachel. We all like to think we’re more powerful than we are. If only we had done this or hadn’t done that, things would have turned out differently. It’s human nature.”
“Then…”
“You did the best you could. You know what they say about the messenger?”
“Yes, I do. But she was mad at herself.”
“Not at you?”
“She was mad at me, too. Very mad.”
“Give her a bit of time. Try her again in a day or two.”
“Okay,” I said. “I will. Detective?”
“Yes?”
“How do you…?”
“Long story. I’ll buy you a drink one night and tell you all about it.”
“I’m sorry if I bothered you.”
“You didn’t bother me at all. I’ll call you tomorrow, when I hear about the release.”
As soon as I put the phone down, it rang again. But I didn’t pick it up. Instead, I took the stairs two at a time to the office and listened to the machine pick up, Dashiell barking, my outgoing message and then Parker Bowling, sounding impaired and frustrated.
“She’s still not there,” he said. “What now?”
Another voice, farther away from the phone, said, “Who am I, fucking Martha Stewart, I got the answer to everything?”
“Bitch,” Parker said.
I wasn’t sure which one of us he meant. Then I heard the disconnect.
I went back downstairs and poured a glass of wine, sitting at the table where I’d left O’Fallon’s album. There were adults in some of the pictures and those same kids again, and again, and again, in different combinations. Family, I thought. So Tim had a brother, too. Dennis. But he hadn’t been mentioned in the will. What was that all about?
I paged through the rest of the album, thinking I’d see those kids growing up, thinking I’d be able to figure out which one grew up to be Tim. But they all stayed frozen in time. In the beginning of the album, the kids were ten or eleven through fifteen or sixteen. At the end, the same. Same kids, same ages, same goofy smiles, funny haircuts, high energy, high jinks and, every once in a while, a grown-up in the picture or a more formal shot, the kids dressed up and looking as if they hated it. Nothing written in the album. It didn’t say “Tim’s fifteenth birthday” or “Aunt Colleen’s wedding.” No dates, either, no “Summer Vacation, 1979,” nothing like that. And no one was holding up a newspaper, the way hostages do so that you know they are alive on a certain date. I could only guess from the fading and my assumption that Tim was one of those boys, that Maggie was the little girl, that the contents of the album were around twenty-five years old, give or take a year or two in either direction.
After looking at the end and seeing that no one had aged, I paged through rather quickly, but near the end of the album, I found a lumpy page. It wasn’t a real photo album, the photographs held on by those little black corners my father had used in ours. This was a loose-leaf book with plastic sleeves and a sheet of black paper in the middle of the photos. The lumpy page had two black sheets so that whatever was between them didn’t show through from either side. I slipped in two fingers and pulled it out, a newspaper article. It had oxidized to a yellowish-brown color and the paper was very dry. I unfolded it very carefully, noting that it had been folded and unfolded many times. The creases were torn right through in several places. The name of the newspaper wasn’t there, but the date was. The article had been published twenty-nine years ago. I began to read.
FATAL ACCIDENT AT BREYER’S LANDING
A local Piermont boy, Joseph Patrick O’Fallon, 12, died yesterday in a dive into the swimming hole at Breyer’s Landing. His brothers, Timothy and Dennis, were with him, as well as two cousins, Liam and Francis Connor. The boys, aged 12 to 15, said that although they warned Joseph not to jump from the highest point, he did. When he didn’t come back to the surface, the two oldest boys, Timothy and Liam, went in after him but were unable to find him. Francis Connor, 12, ran home to tell his mother, who called the paramedics. The body was recovered later that day.
“The neighborhood boys had been told repeatedly not to use the swimming hole at Breyer’s Landing because it is unsafe and there is no supervision,” Detective Anthony Rizzo of the Orangeburg Police Department said, “but it was sort of a rite of passage for the local kids, jumping off that rocky ledge into the ice-cold water. I did it myself when I was growing up.”
Joseph’s father, Detective Colm O’Fallon of the New York City Police Department, said he’d warned the boys too, but to no avail. “If there’s a challenge,” he said, “boys are going to try to meet it. My wife and I hope that this tragedy might make other boys think twice.”
I took Maggie O’Fallon’s note out of her brother’s briefcase.
“I know what happened at Breyer’s Landing. I was there.”
If she’d been there, why wouldn’t he have known that? Why was she telling him that now, all these years later? And why hadn’t the article mentioned her name along with those of her brothers and cousins?
I read the article again to make sure. Then I checked inside each plastic sleeve to see if there was anything else, but there wasn’t. I started at the beginning and paged through the album more slowly this time. The boys, three O’Fallons and two Connors, and one little girl, eternally young, nothing recorded after all those charming, goofy, normal kid smiles were wiped off their faces by a tragic accident.
O’Fallon’s father had been a New York City detective, too. Grief traveling the marrow of the bones, generation after generation.
I pulled out O’Fallon’s driver’s license and looked at his face again and then I began to think about Michael Brody, ab
out what cops saw, about how they never told.
I went upstairs to the office and picked up the file from the post-traumatic-stress group where I’d met O’Fallon. I checked my watch. It was nearly ten. I picked up the phone and dialed the first number.
CHAPTER 7
When I woke up, I called O’Fallon’s attorney, Melanie Houseman. She said she’d get started on the paperwork, the letter of testamentary that would give me the power to function legally on O’Fallon’s behalf, and the death certificate. She asked me to collect and messenger her the bank statements, the lease and any other legal documents I might find.
“I’m sorry to hear this,” she said. “He seemed like an awfully nice man.”
“I didn’t really know him,” I told her.
“Is that so?”
“I thought it was odd, his choosing me this way, without even asking. I wonder, did he say anything to you about it, when he gave you my name? Did he happen to say why he’d chosen me to do this for him?”
“He told me his mother had died. She had been the designated executor of the previous will. So naturally he had to make a change. I told him it didn’t have to be done in such a hurry and he said that was true, he understood that, but if I didn’t mind, he’d appreciate making the changes and signing the new will all in one visit. I figured he was busy and he wanted to get it done, get it off his mind. A lot of the officers are like that, they want something and they want it done immediately. Like lawyers. Now that everything’s computerized, I was able to do that for him.”
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