Fall Guy

say what the call was about. I thought, with this kind of news, the least she deserved was a live voice at the other end of the phone.
    I tried Dennis O'Fallon next. I got a message for him too, this one letting me know that I'd reached a Lexus dealership that didn't open until eleven. I looked at the crossed-out number for Dennis and Iris O'Fallon and decided to wait and call Dennis at eleven.
    I had nearly the whole day before I was due to meet Michael Brody on Horatio Street and only one appointment before then, a pet-therapy visit with Dashiell at two at the Westside Nursing Home on West Thirteenth Street. I opened the small envelope and dumped the keys into my hand, feeling how hard and cold they were. There were only three keys—outer door, door to the apartment, mailbox key. I'd been warned not to go into the apartment without Brody. But I hadn't been asked not to walk by, and my dog needed a walk anyway.
    I tried Mary Margaret one more time before leaving the house, just in case she'd been in the shower when the phone rang or down in the basement putting up the wash. I didn't leave a message this time, hoping she wouldn't see the number show up again on Caller ID. I didn't want to alarm her, I thought to myself, then realized how ridiculous that was.
    Walking north on Greenwich Street, toward Horatio, I thought of something else that struck me as ridiculous, or at least outdated, the way the cops kept everything so close to the vest. I thought about O'Fallon at the group, not saying a word about what was bothering him, about what drove him to come week after week and sit among us. Sit he did, but silently, cops only talking to other cops about what they saw, not sharing their feelings with anyone. Did just being there help O'Fallon? I wondered.
    And when was their habit of silence going to change? Clearly, the system was failing, or there wouldn't be so many cops having tragic accidents, as Brody had put it. It was failing the public as well. Despite the determined effort to protect us, no one was feeling safe anymore. Not anyone. I stopped and turned around to look downtown, as I often did now, to see what was no longer there.
    We had breathed in the fine particles of debris, tasted it on our tongues, washed it from our eyes, combed it from our hair. We'd walked on the ashes of the dead—even here in Greenwich Village, a mile and a half north of Ground Zero. And we'd seen the Towers crumble and fall hundreds and hundreds of times—at the moment it happened, then on television, perhaps forever in our sleep.
    So why were the police still protecting us from the truth, everything out there now, on television, on the Internet, on the nightly news? The news cameras zoom in on the bloody stains on the sidewalk after a murder, honing in on exactly what used to be avoided. The New York Times prints lists of body parts, as yet unidentified, found at the World Trade Center disaster site and now in the hands of the medical examiner: a left foot, a ring finger, a head, for God's sake.
    True, the cops still saw things the public didn't. And they saw them on a day-to-day basis, a steady diet of the worst mankind has to offer. But didn't their protection of us, their code of silence make the job even more stressful for them than it already was?
    Mary Margaret had just lost her mother. Now I had to tell her she'd also lost her brother. Would she believe the death was accidental? Was there any possibility it was?
    All of a sudden I was glad neither of Tim's siblings had been available to answer the phone. It would make more sense to speak to Mary Margaret or Dennis O'Fallon after I'd seen O'Fallon's residence, after I had a better idea if it was just my cynicism that made me disbelieve the story Brody had offered up, cynicism and the knowledge that police suicide is one of the more hideous side effects of the job. In protecting us, the public, from what they see, not exactly appropriate dinnerparty conversation when you think about it, they become all the more vulnerable to depression, despair and suicide.
    Was that why O'Fallon had come to the post-traumatic-stress group? Not because he'd lost someone in the attack. Not even because of the way the attack changed all our lives. But because of the stress he'd accumulated as part of his job, the steady diet of witnessing horror and keeping it a secret?
    Tim had lived on the south side of Horatio Street in one of two identical brick houses. I checked the numbers. Coming from