Fall Guy

especially when the estate would probably be modest?
    I opened the address book next and looked up Mary Margaret O'Fallon's phone number. It was an 845 exchange. The address was in Piermont, one of those charming little towns along the Hudson River, in Rockland County, only minutes away from where my own sister lived. He'd left her his money, but he'd never mentioned her. Maybe he and Brody weren't all that close. Though, from the look on Brody's face, that didn't seem to be the case.
    I picked up one of the pictures of the little girl, all by herself in this one, smiling shyly at the camera with her head cocked to one side, clearly a kid who had just been told to smile, not one caught in the act of doing so. Most of the pictures of me as a kid looked very much the same way, my father telling me to smile, the smile in the picture overly large and patently false. But parents preferred that to a frown. What did it say about them if you weren't happy all the time? Still, you could almost see how badly I wanted to get away from the camera. Mary Margaret, too.
    Mary Margaret O'Fallon, it said. Did that mean she'd never married? Perhaps that was why she'd been left all the money. There were two other O'Fallons on the page, a Kathleen O'Fallon, at the same address, and Dennis. He'd been listed in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, that address and phone number, and the name Iris, lightly crossed out, so that you could still read what was there. Underneath, there was an address and phone number in Paramus, a small w after it. Dennis's work number.
    I looked through the rest of the book, paging through from A to Z. There weren't many names. He didn't seem to have had many friends. I noticed, though, that there were several names with addresses in a row, all on Horatio Street where he lived. Helene and David Castle, and penciled in next to their names, Emma. Then Rob Rosen, and penciled in next to his name, Kevin. And Jin Mei Lin, and next to her name, Yin Yin. Were they all pets, all the ones whose names had been penciled in?
    There was the name of a lawyer, the same one who had done the will. There were two doctors listed, one dentist. There were phone numbers for three different liquor stores and one for a Chinese takeout. And there were a handful of other names, men's names, throughout the book: Freddie Ainsley, Dale Benson, Parker Bowling, Chuck Evans, Tommy Finletter, Lanny Smith and Spike Zaslow. They all seemed to have one thing in common. There were no addresses or phone numbers listed, though one of them, Parker Bowling, had a cell phone number alongside his name. There were even some first names without last names in the book, Guy and Sonny and Craig. So what did that mean—that O'Fallon had been gay? Did any of the names, I wondered, belong to the young men in the pictures, and if they didn't, why not, and where were those kids today?
    I did one more thing before going to bed. I went up to my office and pulled out the file on the pet-assisted-therapy group where I'd met Timothy O'Fallon. There were very few comments next to each name, just a word or two that might help me help them the following week. I'd put my keys in John's pocket, for example, when it was clear he needed a little push, a push he got literally from Dashiell when I asked him to find what I'd hidden. And after that session I'd written „3,“ to indicate that it was the third of our six meetings when John spoke, and „Mother,“ to let me know who it was that John had lost, as if I would forget. I'd also written, „More?“ I had the feeling that John had only given us part of the story, that he was holding something back. But there was nothing further, not in the group and not in my notes.
    The notes were cryptic, but even now, all this time later, they were enough to remind me of what was important.
    Larry's sister had worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and he'd had a fight with her on September 7. They hadn't made up. Brian's brother had been a firefighter. His dad, too. He'd said he should have been one, that he should have died, the way they did, when the Towers collapsed. And Timothy O'Fallon hadn't told us why he'd come, why he seemed so tired, why his eyes looked so sad. Next to his name there was only one comment, „NR,“ for no response.

CHAPTER 3
    As soon as I woke up, I called Mary Margaret O'Fallon to give her the sad news. I got an answering machine and left a message, just my name and number and a request that she call me back. I didn't