Fall Guy

on the top step. He leaned against my side, his cheek against mine, as content to be in my company as I was to be in his. It must have been nearly two before I locked the door and followed Dashiell up to bed.
    Even then, sleep wouldn't come. Just a few days earlier, I hadn't recognized Timothy O'Fallon's name. Now I was unable to get it—or him— out of my thoughts even when all I longed for was to go to sleep.

CHAPTER 19
    I got to O'Fallon's apartment at eight, two hours before Maggie was due to arrive. I decided to tackle the kitchen first. I wanted to get rid of that mound of dirty dishes before she came. I put on rubber gloves, ran the water as hot as it would get, and then stood there looking at the mess Parker and his buddies had left. Then I shut off the water, drained the sink and began to double-bag the musty ashtrays, the cheap unmatched glasses, the plates and platters and pots and pans that nobody would want, carrying them to the trash cans out front, two bags at a time. I saved two glasses and two cups, in case Maggie and I wanted water or tea, and a large bowl that I filled with water for Dashiell. I began to go through the kitchen cabinets next. I didn't think either Maggie or Dennis would want an open box of Ritz crackers, almonds from the year one, half a six-pack of diet ginger ale, Cheerios, enough Campbell's tomato soup for a small army, an open box of linguini.
    The shelves were grimy. If the place were a condo or a co-op, I would have called Maria Sanchez to come and clean everything before it went on the market. But it was a rental, and cleaning up before re-renting would be the responsibility of the landlord. I merely closed the empty cabinets and scoured the empty sink.
    There was more to do in the kitchen but I wanted to make sure the bathroom was taken care of before Maggie came. The bathroom, I thought, trumped everything.
    I found some towels and a bath mat at the very top of Tim's closet. I took those down and filled the empty rack with hand towels. Then I closed the shower curtain, hoping it would stay that way. And thinking it might discourage Maggie from moving it, I hung two large bath towels over the shower-curtain bar, as if they'd been put there to dry. I put the mat in front of the sink, then opened the medicine cabinet and dumped everything into a garbage bag. The less time Maggie spent in the bathroom, the better.
    I still had forty minutes left. I'd left the couch pillows upturned. I put them back the way they should be, smacked the couch in a few places to give it better shape, tightened the cover on the daybed, opened the shutters to give the room more light and then started on the desk. I'd left a lot of papers there, things I wasn't finished with. I stacked those neatly and slipped them into the briefcase, wiping the dust off the desk with a paper towel. Now all that was left was a cup that held pens and pencils, a small bronze statue of a horse, the small purse I'd found in the comer of Parker's closet and the photo of Kathleen O'Fallon, the one the police had found on Tim's desk at the time they found him dead in the bathtub.
    I wasn't sure what to do with the photo. I surely didn't want to tell Maggie the circumstances under which it had been found. But it was a lovely portrait and I thought she might want it. So, as a compromise, I propped it up against the books on one of the shelves adjacent to the desk.
    When I looked back at the desk, there was one more thing to put away, that small purse. So I stood it on the shelf, right next to the photo. But when I looked back at it, I realized I'd made a little shrine of my own. So I took the purse and dropped it into the bottom desk drawer, out of sight.
    For a moment, I thought about emptying out my mother's apartment. My sister Lili and I would take turns dredging up some of the awful things our mother had said to us when we were growing up, laughing at the memory of them, as if they hadn't cut to the core at the time. And then we'd realize, as if for the first time, how final this departure was and we'd begin to cry. Sometimes it was an object that got to us, like the shoe box we found with pictures of us as kids. „She loved us,“ Lili had said, as if that were a complete surprise to her.
    I sat in Tim's chair, looking at his mother's implacable face. Maggie looked very much like her, someplace to the west of placid. Perhaps „unfeeling“ was the right word, though it seemed cruel. But if she had closed herself