Fall Guy

wastebasket and held them in my hand. The little pot of keys hadn't been hidden. Anyone coming in here might have seen it. Parker certainly knew those keys were here. He could, in fact, have entered any of the other people's apartments and stolen from them, too.
    As could any of the drifters he called his friends.
    What else did they know, the men Parker hung out with, the men I had played poker with? If they hung out with Parker, they might have heard, at one time or another, big and little details about Tim's life, his schedule, his habits. They surely knew his work schedule because it was when he was at work that Parker would let them in, feed them Tim's food, offer them free access to the contents of his liquor cabinet.
    They'd know about Parker's Aunt Elizabeth. Perhaps they'd been in her apartment, too.
    Had they met her? Was there any way one of them could have called her and arranged a meeting? I tried to imagine this, one of Parker's friends calling Elizabeth and saying he was hurt. She was sick of him, fed up with him. But he was still family. She wouldn't have gone somewhere if he was broke. Broke? That was his middle name. But if he were hurt? Hurt was a different story. Hurt might have gotten her to the waterfront, to one more chance to bail out her nephew. Only it wasn't her nephew who was there waiting for her. It was someone else. A bushy-haired stranger. Freddy Baker. Was that when the purse was nabbed? Had good old reliable Freddy taken her money? Had he taken her keys, thinking they'd be worth having, all the easier to implicate Parker in yet another crime, should that become necessary? Had he left the jewelry she'd forgotten to put back on after the show, something to indicate whose purse it was? Was that how it had happened?
    And did Parker's buddies know about Tim's family as well, pictures of them all around the room until yesterday? Did Parker ask who those kids were? And once he knew, did he tell his friends, „This is Dennis, Tim's brother. He's a Lexus dealer but his brother drives a piece of crap Toyota. This one's Maggie, his kid sister, the one who got stuck nursing his sick mother.
    And if O'Fallon had been miserable enough to leak the truth one night, or if Parker had found the articles I'd found and, shrewd observer of human nature that he was, had put two and two together and figured out exactly what his benefactor was atoning for and why he'd gotten the leeway he did from a cop, of all people, if this had happened, might Parker have also said, „This little one here, this one's Joey, the one Tim pushed off the cliff“? Did anyone ask what the hell he was doing telling Parker how to live his life when all Parker had done was rob a few people who had more than they needed and would never miss it anyway and Tim had killed someone? Did anyone see the irony of that?
    I dumped the keys back into the wastebasket and started to clean out the cabinets below the bookshelves, stacking the things for Housing Works on one side, the things I planned to take home on the other, a couple of books on crime detection and Tim's notebooks. I thought Brody might want them, but I planned on reading them first.
    I'd only emptied one of the cabinets when I began to think about the poker game again and the motley crew that met at Irwin's every week. What did they talk about?
    Because if Tim hadn't killed himself and if whoever did kill him was doing a hell of a job of framing Parker, that would mean that that person not only knew enough about Tim to know his habits, but that he knew Parker well enough, too.
    I checked the time. Brody had said they'd be at least two hours. I decided to be rude instead of calling first. I motioned to Dashiell, clipped on his leash at the door and we headed upstairs.
    „Doll,“ he said. „To what do I owe the pleasure?“
    „Nothing special,“ I told him. „I have to wait around for Tim's sister to show. I thought it might be more fun to wait around with you, if that's okay. It's kind of creepy down there, what with what happened last week.“ I shrugged. He stepped back. I stepped in.
    There were cards on the poker table, a game of solitaire set out. I pulled out a chair and sat. Irwin stood near the door for a moment, then closed it and took the seat next to me, the one with the pillow on it. I noticed that he didn't look at me when he was struggling to do something I could take for granted. But once he was seated, he was all eyes.
    „You think about Tim much?“ I