Fall Guy

by Carol Lea Benjamin

  “This is so kind of you,” I told her. “I didn’t want you to trouble yourself like this.”

  “It’s no bother at all,” she said. “I haven’t had time for company in a while. It’s lovely to have someone here for lunch.” As if I were a neighbor or old school chum dropping by for a chat. As if I weren’t here to talk to her about her dead brother.

  During lunch, she talked about the gentrification of Piermont, all the new construction, the rising prices of the houses, even the small ones, like hers, along the creek. The old Victorian houses facing the Hudson River, once considered white elephants, were never on the market more than a week, she told me, and sometimes strangers would ring the bell, even along the creek, but most definitely along the river, and ask if this house or that might be going on the market anytime soon.

  “Are you planning to sell?” I asked.

  “Where would I go?”

  I finished the last of my omelet, wiping the plate with a piece of toast, thanking her again for the delicious lunch. When I got up to put my plate in the sink, she flapped her hand at me.

  “Just leave it, Rachel. We can have our iced tea out on the back patio. The dog might enjoy that better than sitting in the living room.”

  Dashiell and I followed her out. I wasn’t sure she’d believed he was house-trained. Some people who’ve never lived with a dog have trouble believing a dog can be unobtrusive and appropriate, even in a living room. But it was cool outside under the shade of an awning, and in no time Dashiell was down at the water’s edge, turning back to catch my eye in the hope I’d throw a stick for him to retrieve.

  I put O’Fallon’s briefcase across my lap, taking out the folder I’d brought along to convince the guy at the lot that it would be okay for me to take the car. But before I asked Maggie if she’d consider taking the car on Saturday, I thought of an even better plan.

  “I was wondering if I could leave Tim’s car here? The payment at the lot is due tomorrow. It seems an awful waste of money. I don’t know if you can use the car, or if you’d want to sell it?”

  Actually, according to the will, the car was now mine. But the last thing I wanted to contend with was Tim’s old wreck of a car that might not even pass inspection without expensive repair work. I’d have to take the time and trouble to sell it, paying to park it at the lot until I did.

  “Of course, if that helps. You can leave it.”

  “Perhaps Dennis might be able to help you sell it.”

  “Oh, I don’t think Dennis would be wanting that at his Lexus dealership. The only kind of used car he’d sell would be a pre-owned Lexus.”

  I shrugged. “I have all the papers here.” I tapped the folder. “I’ll just need to know what you get for it if you sell it, for the final income tax form.”

  “You don’t even get away with that when you’re dead,” she said. “You’d think…”

  “The lawyer will take care of that,” I told her. “She seems very efficient and most helpful.” She must be dealing with all of this for her mother, too. Just the thought of handling two estates at once was overwhelming. I wonder if that had occurred to Tim, too. I wondered if that was why he hadn’t named Maggie his executor, if it were that simple, nothing more than that he didn’t want her to have to do this twice.

  “How will you get back to the city?” she asked. “I don’t think…” She was looking at Dashiell now, lying down on the slope of cool earth near the water’s edge.

  “I can take a car service back,” I said, thinking that if I hadn’t been so preoccupied, I would have thought of this earlier, left Dashiell at home and taken the bus back to the city, a subway after that. But even if I ended up with a car service, it would be much cheaper than a month’s worth of parking at the lot.

  “I doubt they’ll take you with a wet dog.”

  Dashiell was wading in the creek. In no time, he’d find a reason to go swimming. I hadn’t, after all, told him he couldn’t.

  “I see your point,” I said. “Well, I guess I could keep the car another couple of days. I could pay the day rate at the lot. It won’t be so bad.”

  “How about if I drive you over the bridge? You can grab a cab there. Would that be okay?”

  “That would be great, if you don’t mind.”

  “No problem. It’s on the way to work anyway.”

  “Terrific.” I put my hand back into the briefcase. “Even though you’re coming Saturday, I brought some pictures from Tim’s apartment. I thought you’d want them. I didn’t see any reason to wait.”

  Maggie looked, but didn’t say anything.

  “They’re old ones,” I said. “The only recent one was of your mother.” I didn’t have that one with me, the one Tim had left on the desk before taking his gun into the bathroom, before pulling the trigger on what should have been the rest of his life. “I was hoping we could look at some of the ones in the album and that you might tell me which one is Tim.”

  “Of course.”

  “I brought a couple of other things from the apartment as well. I’m sure there’s more there you’ll want.”

  She nodded.

  “I was thinking of sending the clothes and the kitchen things to Housing Works. The kitchen things are pretty inexpensive, not nearly as nice as the ones you have.” I decided not to mention the scarf and the sweater. Maybe that was a dumb idea to begin with, picking out things for a person you didn’t know. “Is there anything special that you can think of that you want me to put aside, because I’ll be working there again tonight, and all day tomorrow?”

  “I’m not, I don’t…”

  “It’s awkward, doing this. I’m sorry if…”

  “Don’t apologize. It’s all got to be done. Let’s look at the pictures now, and I’ll show you which one’s Timothy.”

  I took out the album I’d brought along and placed it on the redwood table in front of us, moving my glass of iced tea off to the side, flipping the album open to the middle.

  “That’s Tim”—her finger pointing to one of the grinning redheaded boys. “This one’s Dennis.”

  “The Lexus salesman.”

  “Yes. And here’s our Joey.”

  “Joseph Patrick.”

  “Yes. Bless his soul. And this one’s me, of course.”

  “The only girl.”

  She looked up, her mouth open, as if she were about to speak, perhaps to tell me what that meant. But I already knew. It meant being the one stuck at home, taking care of your mother.

  “Have you always lived at home?” I asked.

  “I have,” she said. “And this is Liam. He was my first cousin. And this one’s Francis. I had a terrible crush on him when I was eleven. Oh, I thought the sun rose and set on Francis Connor, I was that smitten.”

  “Tim had some newspaper articles among his things,” I said. “One about Joseph. One about your father.”

  “Dennis once said we were like the Kennedys, only without the money or the fame.”

  “I—”

  “Do you believe in curses?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.”

  “Oh, you’d think about it a lot if you were in this family.”

  I looked back at the pictures of the smiling kids, then back at Mary Margaret.

  “No one knows why it happened to them either,” she said.

  “To the Kennedys?”

  “Yes, and it goes on and on. Like ours. It didn’t stop with Jack or Robert or that terrible incident with Teddy. There was that rape trial, and the Skakel nightmare. On through the generations. I don’t expect our troubles are over either.”

  “You mean the accidents in your family?”

  “My father used to say, ‘We’re not here for fun. We’re here for sorrow.’” She was looking straight ahead, watching Dashiell racing back and forth at the river’s edge. “‘That’s our lot here on earth,’ he said before his accident. ‘Our reward comes later.’”

  “Sounds as if you were raised to be a very
responsible person.”

  “I was, not like the kids coming up today, so self-involved—just me, me, me. Even the young nurses, fresh out of school. It’s a service profession. Some of them, they’re in it for the social life. They’re in it to find a doctor to marry. You do what’s right,” she said. “That’s what I grew up with, what we all grew up with.”

  “Were you and Tim close?” I felt as if I was treading on thin ice, expecting Maggie to break down and cry at any moment. But her eyes were dry. She was in control.

  “Oh, I worshiped Timothy. We all did.” Smiling now.

  “He was the oldest, wasn’t he?” To keep it going.

  “Yes, the firstborn. We all looked up to him. We all wanted to be just like him, to do everything he could do.”

  She hadn’t answered me at all, so I asked again. “So you were close? As grown-ups, too?”

  Her back straight, her head high, she sat perfectly still, the sibling who’d stayed at home and nursed her mother, working full-time, keeping the house immaculate, taking care of the old lady as she slipped from one world to the next.

  “So you saw each other often?” I asked.

  “I loved him,” she said without looking at me. “We were family. Family’s everything. But he was so busy with work.”

  “And you were working long hours at the hospital and taking care of your mother.”

  Do you see Dennis much? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t. I thought I’d said too much already. I thought about the letter, the short note that had arrived after Tim had died. I didn’t mention that either.

  I gave Maggie the keys to the car, leaving the folder on the table. While she changed for work, I went to check the car, to see if there was anything in it I needed to take. There was the usual stuff in the glove compartment: empty and half-empty packs of cigarettes, the repair manual, a flashlight, a greasy rag, a package of Kleenex, an unopened roll of red Lifesavers and a plastic cup. The trunk was empty except for the spare, which looked brand-new, and the tool kit, the jack, flares, a few wrenches. I checked the floor in the back and came away with dirty hands, sand, cigarette butts, empty soda cans. I checked under the passenger seat and found more tissues, Scott this time, the box crushed on one side as if someone had stepped on it. And then I sat in the driver’s seat and reached under it as far as I could, pulling out the notebook. It was one of those the kids used to buy every fall for school, like the ones I’d found at Tim’s apartment. Only this one was current. I took it inside, put it into the briefcase, then went into the downstairs bathroom to wash my hands.

  I thought I’d sit outside with Dashiell until Maggie was ready, but then I remembered something from my first job as an undercover agent, when I worked for the Petrie Brothers before going out on my own. I was placed at a hospital on Staten Island, ostensibly working as a nurse’s aide. In fact, I was there because of theft. Whenever I tried to take notes, the head nurse would open the bathroom door, see my white shoes and the pink uniform that was two sizes too big hanging down to my ankles. Then she’d yell at me to get back to work. In order to make notes so that I could write my daily report, I would stand on the toilet, then crouch down, using a little nib of a pencil and a folded three-by-five card to jot down names and things I saw. Then I’d slip the folded card and the pencil into a cigarette pack and go back to work. So I went back out to the car and looked inside the cigarette packs I’d seen in the glove compartment, but there was nothing there. I looked at the matchbooks, too, and this time I did find something. On the inside flap of one of them, written in pencil. It said, “Alexander.” And then my phone number. I slipped the matchbook into my pocket and went back to wait with Dashiell.

  Maggie, in a white tunic, white pants and white thick-soled shoes, came out with two towels. She gave me one to use on Dashiell. She spread the other one on the backseat of Tim’s old car, tucking it in carefully to protect the stained, torn upholstery seat. She opened the back windows, too, perhaps to dilute the smell of wet dog, which made me feel rude and foolish.

  Crossing the George Washington Bridge, Maggie said I should use my judgment about the things in Tim’s apartment. She said she was sure I’d know what to hold on to and what to let go, but if there was a doubt about any particular item, she’d help me when she got there. She asked if ten was too early. I told her it wasn’t. Then she asked me what the cross streets were, letting me know that if she had been there at all, it hadn’t been for a very long time.

  As the cab drove down the Westside Highway, I looked out over the water, the afternoon light making ripples of bright silver where it moved, leaving it a deep blue-gray in places where there was the illusion of stillness. Though I had only been gone for a few hours and hadn’t been all that far away, something in me fluttered, someplace there was joy at being back in the city.

  That’s when I remembered that Parker was due to show up at Tim’s apartment in the morning, Parker whose aunt had gone missing during the run of a play. The napkin he’d written his aunt’s number on was on Tim’s desk. I’d simply make up another story and postpone his visit. I needed more time to look things over by myself before he got the chance to spirit away anything I might find telling. And I needed time to figure out a way to keep Maggie O’Fallon from seeing what I had seen in the bathroom. The last thing on earth she needed was to upgrade her brother’s death to suicide. I told the driver I’d changed my mind, to take me to Horatio Street instead of home.

  CHAPTER 14

  As soon as I got inside O’Fallon’s apartment, I dropped the briefcase on top of the desk and picked up the napkin, holding it under the light so that I could read the numbers Parker had written there. I dialed, still working on my story as I listened to the phone ringing at the other end. A machine picked up saying that Carolyn and Mark were sorry they couldn’t come to the phone but that my call was important to them, so would I please leave a message after the beep. I didn’t.

  The apartment was stuffy, so I opened the kitchen window and one of the front ones, letting a breeze blow through. Parker had given me a wrong number. Had he done it on purpose, so that I couldn’t call him to cancel? He’d waited long enough to get his things. Whatever it was he wanted to retrieve, he wanted it badly. Not his clothes, though. I was as sure as I could be that if Parker needed something to wear, he was willing and capable of shoplifting it. And probably had. Was it the shrine? I opened the closet with his things, going through the clothes this time, my hand in every pocket, collecting whatever I found and dropping it into a plastic food-storage bag. Then I pulled over a kitchen chair and studied the shrine, picking up a tiny skull, a smooth rock, a small feather, and not picking up what appeared to be nail clippings, hair, desiccated feces, hoping I was wrong about the last item but not willing to do anything to find out.

  There were boxes on the floor of the closet, comic books in one. Those could be worth money. I wondered if they were Tim’s, but I didn’t see Tim as someone who’d collect Batman and Spider-Man. Still, you never know.

  There were running shoes in one box, a pair of new boots in another. And in the corner, as if it had been tossed there, perhaps when Parker had heard someone at the door, a beaded purse, small and elegant. I picked it up and put it on Tim’s desk, wondering if perhaps the purse had belonged to Tim’s mother, thinking I’d ask Maggie when I saw her. I put the plastic bag on the desk, too, figuring I’d dump it and go through the things I found, though none of it looked particularly telling at first glance.

  There was a soft rap at the kitchen door. When I opened it, there was Jin Mei with a cup of tea.

  “I noticed the window was open. I thought you might like a cup of tea.”

  I took the cup, celedon green with a brushstroke drawing of bamboo on it, and asked her in. She shook her head.

  “I’m working, too,” she said, “catching the afternoon light for my painting. Saturday, the same time as now, four o’clock, all the neighbors want to meet in the garden, to remember Tim. We’d like you to come.”

&nb
sp; “Of course.”

  She nodded. “I knew you would.”

  “Is anyone inviting Tim’s family?”

  “That will be your job.”

  “His sister will be here anyway on Saturday. I’ll call his brother and ask him to come, too.”

  “Good.”

  “What about Parker?” I asked. “Will he be here?”

  “Irwin said he’d call him. Irwin said it would be bad karma not to invite Parker.”

  “Bad karma for whom?”

  “That’s what I wondered.” Jin Mei smiled and nodded.

  “Is Irwin calling Parker? Does he have his number?” Thinking I could run upstairs, get it from him, cancel tomorrow’s visit, tell him Saturday, after the memorial, would be a more sensible time. Or Sunday, after Maggie had taken the things she wanted, after I had packed up the rest for Housing Works.

  Jin Mei shrugged. “If he doesn’t call him, it’s fine by me.”

  “Thank you for the tea, Jin Mei.”

  “Don’t work too late. You need to sit still and be quiet tonight. You have too much on your mind. I can see that.”

  “True.”

  “You need to empty your mind, sit in the garden, look up at the stars, feel your”—she circled one hand—“to the universe.”

  “Connection?”

  “Yes. You need to do this.”

  “I promise,” I told her. “I will.”

  When I’d closed and locked the door, I remembered that there was a cell phone number for Parker in Tim’s address book that was with the papers I’d dumped out of the briefcase. I went to the desk, sat in Tim’s chair, put the teacup down on the napkin from the White Horse with the wrong phone number on it and opened the address book. I picked up the phone and dialed, hoping Parker had it turned off and that I could leave a message and not have to talk to him. But when the phone rang, I heard it in Tim’s living room, the sound somewhat muffled but clearly coming from someplace in the room. I put the handset of Tim’s phone down on the desk and looked around, but I couldn’t see a cell phone anywhere and I wasn’t sure exactly where the sound was coming from.