Fall Guy

for your time and effort. You do know that, don't you? I only ask because an awful lot of people don't, and because Detective O'Fallon never discussed this with you.“
    „No, I had no idea.“
    „The executor receives a percent of the value of the estate.“
    „The only other estate I dealt with was my mother's, and my sister and I were the beneficiaries, so that wasn't an issue. I don't feel right about this, that part of Mary Margaret's money will go to me.“
    „Oh, don't worry about that. You'll earn it. And it's what Detective O'Fallon wanted. He was clear about that, Rachel, all my clients are. I always explain what's customary. And why.“
    I was thinking about what she'd just said, about the amount of time this would take. I was thinking about the bills that showed up in my mailbox with great regularity, whether or not I was working. I'd worked for dead people before. That wasn't the problem. But this was the first time a client was dead before hiring me.
    „I'll arrange a bank account with you as the signatory as soon as you get me the account information. We can write the checks here, but we'll need to send them to you for signing. Meanwhile, I'll get to work on the rest of what you need. Please keep in touch.“
    „Thanks, Melanie. I'll try not to bother you unnecessarily.“
    „I get paid, too, Rachel. Getting bothered, as you put it, is part of what I get paid for. Call whenever you need to.“
    Though I believed Melanie, that there'd be a lot of work, more than I could guess, I still wasn't comfortable with the news that I'd be paid. O'-Fallon had had something in mind. Unless I was able to discover what that was, I wouldn't feel I'd earned the money.
    Still, there was the reality of those bills to pay. In fact, there was something else I had to do that morning to keep myself afloat. O'Fallon's rent, I guessed, was governed by Rent Stabilization Laws. Otherwise he would be living in Queens, not Greenwich Village. My fabulous deal had to do with the fact that the Siegals, the couple who owned both the town house across the garden from me and the back cottage that I rented from them, were hardly ever here. They had several other houses and they loved to travel. The deal was that I got the cottage dirt-cheap for making sure their house and their possessions stayed safe in their absence. I usually checked the house at least once a week to make sure no one had broken in and that everything was working the way it should. They'd notify me when they were coming back, and at that time I'd hire a cleaning service and see that everything was ready for them when they arrived. I always took Dashiell with me to check the house. If anything was amiss, he'd know it much sooner than I would. I'd often give him his search command without telling him what I wanted him to find. In those cases, he'd alert for anything that didn't belong where it was, a perfect way to let me know if the house had been invaded. And working on command rather than just being nosy, he'd be sure to search every inch of the house, not just the places that interested him personally.
    One winter, a year and a half earlier, he'd spent a lot of time checking out a pair of shoes he'd found in the pantry. I might have missed them myself. Norma Siegal often slipped off her shoes when she came into the house. Like me, she preferred to walk around barefoot. I'd even seen her on the back deck that way and had a conversation with her in the garden, neither of us wearing shoes.
    After pawing at the shoes and turning them over, Dashiell took off. I could hear him on the stairs, hear him opening doors, then sneezing to clear his nose. Martha was on the top floor in a small spare bedroom, a homeless woman who must have noticed that while lights came on at night, the same lights always came on and went off at the same time. She'd only been there a day, and other than the fact that I'd had to replace the lock to the cellar door, she hadn't done any harm. She'd only been keeping warm and trying to survive, like everyone else. I hadn't called the cops. Instead, I'd got her into a halfway house in Chelsea and hoped their training program and support might help her get back on her feet. It was sort of a work/study program for the homeless I'd read about in the paper, and Martha and I both felt lucky that when I called, they were able to take her.
    I walked Dashiell first, and when we got back we entered the house through the front door, which was on Tenth