Fall Guy

not. Maybe he'd left a roast in the oven, I thought, chiding myself silently for being irreverent.
    Brody stayed where he was, near the doorway, while I walked around, getting a feel for the place. I sat at the desk for a while, looking through the folders, all the paperwork I'd have to deal with as soon as the apartment was unsealed. I picked out a recent bank statement, his checkbook, a pile of bills that needed to be paid, and found an envelope to put them in. Then I noticed a briefcase leaning against the desk. I put the envelope in that and put the briefcase near the front door.
    I looked at O'Fallon's books—lots of technical manuals on crime-scene investigation, fingerprints, a book on interrogation, one on forensic pathology. There was a shelf of true-crime books as well—Ann Rule, Jack Olsen, James Ellroy, Philip Gourevitch, and three about the O.J. Simpson case. There were books on learning Spanish, a bartender's guide, some old photo albums. I pulled one of the albums from the shelf and slipped it into the briefcase, looking at the pictures on his walls as I walked around, all those same kids whose photos were in his wallet. A family man. A serious cop.
    Then I went to the kitchen to empty the refrigerator of all the perishables. No need to wait and make the cleanup any more difficult than it was going to be. Dashiell was in the kitchen, standing and staring at me, his brow lined. I felt the same way. What the hell were we doing here in this stranger's house?
    Brody had moved to the kitchen with me, perhaps as a silent way to remind me he was waiting, to hurry me along. There was no sign of violence in the kitchen either. I wondered if O'-Fallon had used a small-caliber gun, if the bullet that did the damage had never exited his body and gone into a cabinet or the wall. You could easily clean the floor in here. Maybe that was it. Maybe that's why Dashiell had come into the kitchen as soon as the door of the apartment was opened.
    I took a bowl from the cabinet and filled it from a Brita pitcher standing on the sink, putting it down for Dashiell, but he never touched it. I opened the cabinet under the sink and pulled out a couple of D'Agostino bags for the garbage. Then I took everything that would spoil, if it hadn't already, out of the refrigerator and put it all in the bags, tying the handles on top twice to make sure things stayed put. Last, I took the watering can off the sill so that I could take care of the plants. There were beer bottles on the sill, too, and empties all over the counter and on the table—beer cans, liquor bottles, wine bottles. The sink had dishes in it and not just one night's dinner dishes. Pots and pans and plates and glasses were piled almost to the tap. I imagined that washing those would fall to me now. Unless I merely pitched them out, too. I remembered that when Lili and I were doing my mother's apartment, the longer we worked, the more readily we threw things away, anxious to be done with it, to breathe the air outside, eat pizza, make love, anxious not to be thinking about death.
    I headed for the bathroom to fill the can in the bathtub. That's when Brody moved. Fast.
    „Rachel, wait!“ His hand on my arm. I turned to face him. „Don't go in there.“ Grim, he was. I turned again, to look at the closed bathroom door, then back to look into Michael Brody's brooding eyes.
    „He was cleaning his gun in the bathroom?“
    Brody took the watering can from my hand. „We can get water in the garden,“ he said. „There's a hose.“
    I was going to tell him we could use the Brita pitcher to water the plants. What difference did it make now? Instead, I said, „Why don't we just take the plants out.“
    I put the can back where it had been. Brody picked up an angel-wing begonia from the kitchen sill, its cheerful pink flowers at odds with the reason we were here. He put it on the round table near the second door and went back for another plant. Without speaking, we gathered the rest of the small plants. Then Brody opened the door, unlocked the garden door, propping each open with a plant. I began taking the small plants out while Brody went back to the living room for the big ones.
    As I stood holding a coleus and a wandering Jew that for some reason were sitting on the counter instead of hanging from the two hooks in the ceiling over the sink, looking for a good place to put them down, I thought I might suggest the neighbors adopt them sometime before the cool weather