Fall Guy

small wooden box my mother had kept on top of her dresser which held the costume jewelry she let me play with when I was a child, a pair of candlesticks, in case of a blackout, some books of poetry, a silver bracelet with a heart dangling from it, a gift to her from my father the year before he'd died, and photographs, lots and lots of photographs.
    What would I do with O'Fallon's possessions with no family or friends to want them? What do you do with pictures of generations of O'Fallons, with army dog tags, assuming he'd been in the army, with the lamp he kept near his bed, his favorite books, his music? Would I know what his intentions were, since it was now my job to carry them out? The most obvious things would be spelled out in the will, how and where he'd chosen to be buried, who would be the recipient of his money and his valuables. But beyond that, what would I find, how much would I come to understand, deconstructing the life of a person I barely knew? And after I tossed the milk and butter, the mayonnaise and the mustard from his refrigerator, packed up his clothes and took them to Housing Works, donated his books to the library, then what? When nothing was left of the things he'd owned and the life he'd lived, who would remember Detective Timothy William O'Fallon? Would that be my job, too?
    „You don't have to do this,“ Brody had told me. „The law doesn't require—“
    I'd raised a hand to stop him. He seemed to be doing more than letting me off the hook. He seemed anxious for me to turn it down, to turn it over, perhaps, to his colleagues at the precinct. But I'd made up my mind at the top of those stairs. I don't know if it was stubborn resolve or curiosity. Whatever it was, I was not to be moved.
    I went inside and opened the envelope, slipping out O'Fallon's wallet first. It was years old and worn. I held it in my hand before opening it, feeling the softness of the leather and the weight in my hand, as he would have felt it in his pocket. There was no money in it. I dumped the contents of the envelope onto my coffee table, spread it out and picked up the property clerk's invoice, a list of what had been removed from the deceased's apartment along with the body. Item number one: one-dollar bills U.S. currency; quantity, one; cash value, one dollar. Item number two: five-dollar bills U.S. currency; quantity, one; cash value, five dollars. And so on. It turned out that according to the property clerk's invoice, there'd been fifty-six dollars in O'Fallon's wallet. The wallet was listed as number seven. There'd been sixteen items vouchered for safekeeping. The money would be released to me upon written request. Everything else seemed to be in the envelope—his credit cards, no longer in the wallet but in a separate small manila envelope, all neatly slashed from the bottom left corner to near the upper right one. I flipped through them—Amex, Visa, Discover, a Chase bankcard. No shield in the envelope. Nor was it on the list. No mention of a gun, or handcuffs, either, or anything else that would revert to the Department. I left the list where I could see it, going back to the wallet. The credit cards had all been removed but the photos had not. They were old and faded, the colors no longer true, the haircuts and clothes from decades earlier. Five young boys, one young girl. In some of the snapshots they were together. In others, they were in smaller groupings, or alone. O'Fallon's driver's license was in the envelope with the credit cards. I took that and held it next to the photos, looking at them for a long time.
    On his driver's license, renewed a month earlier, the forty-four-year-old O'Fallon's face was unanimated, the way it was in the group where I'd met him. Stony. If he was one of those kids in the pictures he carried with him, he'd not only aged, he'd changed. But didn't we all do that?
    There was a picture of me, at two, propped on the mantel of my fireplace, taken when my family had moved to the apartment where I grew up. I had the same unruly brown hair, the same fair skin, but the eyes had changed. When I became a dog trainer, years before, I often stood between a dog and death, his last stop before a one-way trip to the pound. I almost always succeeded in saving the dog's life. But now that I am a PI, in almost every case, by the time I am hired it's too late for heroes. Someone is already dead and all I can achieve is the cold comfort of justice. It holds me fast, this work,