Fall Guy

himself, was immaculate. Was it be-cause this was a fellow officer that the police had hired a cleaning service? Because that was not the usual procedure. Still, whatever the reason, I was grateful.
    The toilet was across from the door, on the west wall of the bathroom. The sink and small vanity were to the left of the toilet. And across the south wall was the tub, the shower curtain, a translucent blue, pulled closed, everything just so. The white tile floor was spotless, including the grout. Had there been a bath mat, there was none now. Nor were there any towels.
    I bent and touched the floor. No telltale grit, traces of soap, grease, no anything but cool, clean tile. I wondered if they'd bleached the grout to get it so white. I stood, took a breath and pulled the curtain aside, exposing the bathtub and the tiled wall. There was a small, high window overlooking the garden to the left, and on the right side, where there should have been several shattered tiles, there was another surprise. Not only had the service done an astonishing job of cleaning the wall, someone had apparently replaced the damaged tiles as well. But as meticulous and skilled as they had been, I could easily see where the grout was new. Had I not seen the repair, I might have thought Detective O'Fallon had been cleaning a small-caliber gun and that therefore the bullet that did the fatal damage had never exited his body. I might have been convinced that, despite the odds, and despite his experience with firearms, Detective O'Fallon had had an unfortunate accident. Perhaps that had been the point of the careful cleanup. But, in fact, that's not what I thought, because the tiles that had been replaced were nowhere near where they would have been had the detective been sitting on the edge of the bathtub, as reported, cleaning his gun. In fact, the damaged area was exactly where it would have been had a man of six feet one inch tall, the height recorded on O'Fallon's driver's license, held the barrel of a revolver to his right temple and squeezed the trigger.
    Jin Mei had said she'd heard him crying. Had he been in the bathroom then, cradling his gun in his hands? Had he been crying in the shower to muffle the sound, afraid, even at the last minute, of seeming weak? Standing at the edge of the tub, looking at the tile wall, the sound of Dashiell's sniffing echoing in the small space, I felt the scenario changing before my eyes. He'd bought grief on the job for twenty-one years, then, for who knew how long, he took it into his private life, taking users off the street and trying to get them to turn their lives around. And he'd failed this time. He'd failed with Parker. How many other times had he failed? What made him keep trying?
    His mother had been buried the day before, but grief was already running deep in the O'Fallon family—brother, cousin, father. All when he was not yet a man.
    Had the burden gotten to be more than he could bear?
    I thought of O'Fallon in the group where we met, stoic and silent. He had come, but he couldn't put his burden down. Now this. Had he killed himself in the shower to minimize the cleanup, to make it easier for whoever would find him, a stand-up guy right down the line?
    I pulled the shower curtain closed and took a step back, nearly tripping over Dashiell. Suicide. That surely explained why Brody seemed anxious for me to relinquish my obligation; let the cops take care of this, let it be recorded as an accident. But unless Detective O'Fallon was cleaning a water gun, no way would he have been standing in the shower when his gun accidentally discharged. And suicide would explain the brand-new will and the envelope with my initials on it. But it didn't explain what it was he wanted me to do. As far as that went, I still didn't know any more now than I did at first.
    Suddenly I needed to be busy, to be soothed by work. I decided to do what I could before Maggie came—clean the kitchen, empty the closets, check the cabinets under the bookshelves. I was sure Maggie wouldn't want Tim's clothes, and the kitchen things looked ordinary and inexpensive. I could make things easier if I could figure out what belonged to Parker and pack those things for him, maybe avoid his coming here altogether.
    There were two big closets that opened into the living room, dividing it from the back of the apartment. I thought I could start there, do something mindless while I let the new information gel. I opened the one on the right