The Fall Guy

by James Lasdun

  Charlie looked at his watch.

  “I should get going. Big meeting this afternoon.”

  He went up to take a shower. Before long Chloe put aside her book and casually reached for the newspaper. Grollier’s face filled most of the front page, broad and smiling. Matthew watched out of the corner of his eye as she looked at the picture, her own face expressionless. After a while she stood up and, without a word, went out through the glass doors. Halfway across the lawn she stumbled on something, almost tripping over, though she moved on as though she hadn’t noticed. Passing Charlie’s meditation garden, she wandered into the woods at the edge of the property, disappearing behind the gray trunks. She was gone for the rest of the morning.

  • • •

  Lily had been invited to a birthday party that afternoon, for a girl she’d met at camp. To Matthew’s surprise, Chloe invited him along for the ride.

  “They sound interesting, the parents. You should come.”

  “Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to gate-crash . . .”

  “No. It’s just one of those things where they invite the adults to stick around if they want to. I’d drop Lily off but it’s all the way over in Klostville. Come, Matt!”

  They set off in the Lexus. Chloe hummed quietly as she drove. She seemed dazed, absent, and Matthew wondered if she’d taken a tranquilizer. Lily sat in the back, listening to music on her headphones. Veery Road was cordoned off, the words SHERIFF’S LINE DO NOT CROSS running in black letters along the yellow tape. News vans and police vehicles were parked on the county road verge. Chloe glanced down toward the A-frame as they passed. She didn’t say anything but it wasn’t hard to imagine what she was feeling. An urge to make some comforting gesture gripped Matthew. He almost felt he could touch her shoulder in silent sympathy without danger, as if there were some point of contact between them that existed outside the practical exigencies of the situation. He restrained himself, however, aware of the danger of giving even the remotest hint of what he knew.

  Glancing in the mirror, Chloe said quietly:

  “Did you ever see any of his movies?”

  For form’s sake Matthew thought he should ask whose.

  “Wade Grollier’s. That was Veery Road back there. Where he was killed.”

  “Ah, right. No, I don’t think I have. Have you?”

  “I’ve seen every one of them.”

  He looked for a tone of ordinary surprise.

  “What are they like?”

  “I think you’d enjoy them. They’re very funny and warm and . . . human. Even though they’re full of robots and talking animals!”

  He gave a polite laugh. Was this why she’d invited him along? To talk about Grollier? If so, he felt he should do what he could to rise to the occasion.

  “You said he was nice, that one time you met him . . .”

  She was silent a long moment, and it seemed to him he could feel her struggling with an intense desire to talk, perhaps even to blab out the whole story of her affair.

  “We barely spoke,” she said, clearing her throat. “But he must have made an impression on me. I went out and got hold of all his films.”

  “I’d like to see them. Maybe we could watch one tonight . . .”

  “Maybe.”

  She rummaged in her purse, bringing out a pair of sunglasses that hid half her face. Matthew turned away, doing his best to conceal any awareness of her emotion. In the mirror, he saw Lily take a pair of checker-framed shades from her backpack and put them on, gazing up at her mother’s reflection. Chloe stared at her a moment before smiling. Again there was that slight impression of strain in her relationship with the girl. She started humming again; a light, tuneless sound that seemed designed to keep the world at arm’s length. By uncertain processes of thought Matthew found himself remembering Charlie’s comment about his first wife’s reluctance to have a child—how he’d been afraid it meant she wanted to go on “fooling around with other guys”—and with a little jolt he realized he might have just stumbled on something interesting. Chloe had become pregnant with Lily almost immediately after she and Charlie were married. Charlie had told Matthew the news over the phone, and Matthew had congratulated Chloe the next time he saw her in Cobble Hill. She’d thanked him, but he’d been struck by a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the prospect of impending motherhood. “It’s not exactly what I had planned for this moment in my life,” she’d said. “But I guess that’s the way it goes.” He’d assumed the pregnancy must have been an accident, and that she’d simply decided to make the best of it. (His later discovery that she was a practicing Catholic had seemed to confirm this.) But now, as he considered it in the light of Charlie’s comment about Nikki, it seemed to him things might have been more complicated. Had Charlie somehow pressured his new wife into having a child before she was ready? Got her pregnant so as to lock her into the marriage tightly enough to ward off his own jealousies? Not that he’d have forced anything: his benign image of himself wouldn’t have allowed that. But he was a good manipulator, Charlie; very proficient at getting what he wanted without seeming to twist your arm. You could say it was a specialty of his, in fact, Matthew thought. If nothing else, he was quite capable of being deliberately careless in bed. And of course he’d have been able to pretend to argue for terminating the pregnancy (Matthew could hear him doing it; all scrupulous devil’s advocacy against himself), knowing full well that Chloe wouldn’t consider it . . .

  Was that it? he wondered, turning back to her. Was that what had pushed her into Grollier’s arms, or at least enabled her to act on her attraction to him? There was nothing vengeful or calculating about her—he was certain of that—but the delicate mechanism of her psyche was such that even if she’d had no idea of having been manipulated, let alone of punishing Charlie for it, the sheer drastic fact of it, lodged in the living tissue of her marriage, was bound to have summoned into existence some equally drastic countermeasure somewhere along the line. In which case poor old Charlie had had it coming . . .

  A few miles beyond Klostville, the GPS took them up a steep mountain road and onto a driveway that skirted a grassy meadow. At the end was a wooden house with a stone terrace where several adults and young girls were gathered. Solar panels gleamed on the roof, and an open-sided shed of rough timbers filled with neatly stacked logs stood to one side. There was a fenced chicken coop, and a paddock with a donkey in it and some small goats. A pleasant farmyard smell scented the air, sweetish and mealy.

  A tall man in his thirties greeted them on the terrace, introducing himself as Philippe. He spoke with a French accent but his wife, Caitlin, who came over a moment later, seemed thoroughly American: gangly and blonde, with a generous laugh.

  “So great to meet you,” she said, shaking their hands and looking from one to the other. “Natalie is very smitten with your daughter.”

  She seemed to assume that Matthew was Lily’s father, and Chloe made no attempt to correct her. They were introduced to the other adults.

  “Do you guys live around here?” a bearded man in a T-shirt asked.

  “Aurelia,” Chloe answered. She’d taken off her sunglasses and seemed to be making a determined effort to appear relaxed and cheerful.

  “Aurelia!” another guest exclaimed. “Isn’t that where that movie director was just killed?”

  “That’s right,” Matthew said, answering for Chloe.

  The guest, a woman with long silver hair, shook her head:

  “Awful! Do the police have any idea who it was?”

  “Not as far as we know.”

  “Truly awful,” the woman repeated.

  Caitlin brought out dips and carrot sticks from the kitchen, while Philippe led the girls off on a treasure hunt, piling them into a wagon attached to a small tractor. The dozen-odd adults chatted on the terrace, sampling the dips and drinking craft beers from the cooler. They were a mixture of locals and weekenders. The silver-haired woman was a sculptor. The bearded man worked as a fishing and wilderness guide. The
re was a chiropractor and a couple who ran a shoe store. It seemed to Matthew that they were all under the impression he was Chloe’s partner, and he found himself slipping mentally into the role; sitting close to her, opening her beer, letting his arm brush carelessly against hers. He was oddly relaxed. The individual who had spent the last few weeks in a state of neurotic, spiraling obsession seemed utterly unconnected to him. He felt affable, even charming. It was as if, playing the part of Chloe’s lover, he was able to draw on qualities he couldn’t access as himself, most notably the sort of easy-going, half-serious curiosity that had always seemed to him the elusive key to getting along with strangers. He found himself in conversation with Caitlin about the enormous flagstones on her terrace. She described how she and Philippe had transported them from a disused quarry on the ridge above their house, using the old quarrymen’s technique of building an ice road in winter and sliding the pieces down. Genuinely interested, he questioned her about the house, the animals, their lives here in general. They’d moved from the city three years ago, she told him, where they’d bought and sold houses that had gone into foreclosure. Philippe, a graduate of Wharton as well as some eminent-sounding French institute, still did some real estate, but their aim was to live entirely off the land. “Homesteading,” Caitlin called it, though from the plans she described—building cellars into the hillside for goat cheese, and raising pigs for charcuterie in mobile foraging pens through the woods behind the house—it sounded more ambitious than that. She herself had grown up in Manhattan, but her grandparents on both sides were Wisconsin farmers, and as she described her and Philippe’s new life, she seemed to radiate a more than purely personal happiness, as though some large and significant destiny were being fulfilled.

  After a while she excused herself and went back inside the house. The silver-haired woman and some of the other guests were still talking about Grollier’s murder, trading theories about what had happened. Matthew turned toward them, listening in. One of the shoe store couple had heard that Grollier’s body was found naked, and was surmising some kind of sexual assignation gone wrong. The chiropractor seemed to know for a fact that the police were planning a raid on the Rainbow encampment to search for the stolen property. The wilderness guide echoed what Charlie had said: “I’ll bet it was just some drug-addled drifter who’s probably halfway across the country by now . . .”

  He tuned out. The air was cool, but the sun itself was pleasantly warm. He tipped his face to it, closing his eyes and basking in its intimate heat. A fantasy formed in his mind: living up here in the mountains with Chloe, opening a little restaurant with food from local farmers and “homesteaders,” cultivating a group of friends like these. His visits to the A-frame felt very distant from him. The stabbing itself seemed to have receded to a point of almost imperceptible remoteness.

  The little rural fantasy played on in his mind. A funny name for the restaurant occurred to him—Discomfort Food—and he chuckled softly, knowing it would amuse Chloe too. The talk around him had moved on from Grollier and he listened in again as it turned to the price of firewood, the surge in the local bear population, intrigues at the Klostville Town Board . . . There was something appealing about it all; an easy, expansive ordinariness he hadn’t encountered for a long time; not in the pinched conditions of his own life and not in the more luxurious spaces of Charlie’s either. Charlie’s wealth made him guarded, wary of people’s motives for befriending him, and he lived a rather solitary life as a consequence. He and Chloe had done almost no entertaining this entire summer. Even the people who were going to be ousting Matthew in a couple of days were, as it turned out, just a potential business partner and his family.

  Caitlin came out of the kitchen carrying a tray of plates and glasses.

  “They just had a guy from the sheriff’s department on the radio. The barman at the Millstream Inn remembers seeing Grollier in there the night he was killed. Apparently he got a call from someone and left in a hurry right after. They’re putting out an appeal for the caller to come forward.”

  Matthew forced himself not to look at Chloe, but he could feel her tighten beside him. The other guests began talking.

  “Can’t they just track the person down from the guy’s call records?”

  “Maybe his phone was stolen.”

  “They’d still be able to get the records, though, wouldn’t they, from the carrier?”

  “Depends what kind of phone it was.”

  Half-listening, he tried to gauge the seriousness of the development. Assuming Chloe had called Grollier on his Tracfone, and that Grollier had paid for that phone with cash, there was no reason to think the police would trace the call to Chloe. But what if she’d called him on his iPhone? Or what if the disposable phone had been paid for with a credit card and was therefore traceable? Or suppose Chloe decided, regardless, to come forward as the caller? Her good Catholic girl’s conscience was apparently flexible enough to permit an affair, but he wasn’t so sure it would allow her to obstruct the investigation of a murder.

  He turned to her. She was following the conversation with a plausible air of detached curiosity, even putting in the odd comment of her own. But there was a fragility in her bearing, a constriction in her smile, and even if no one else noticed it, he could feel the immense effort of self-control she was making.

  She smiled at him—he’d been staring, he realized—and he smiled back, wishing he could beam some strength at her, or at least a sense of how dangerous it would be, for both of them, if she lost her nerve.

  twelve

  “There are forty-five million people living in poverty in this country,” Charlie said, reaching for some smoked sturgeon he’d brought back from the city. “They can’t put up collateral for a big loan, but relatively tiny amounts of money can make a huge difference, and the thing is they pay it back! Or at least the women do. The women actually have a near-one-hundred-percent repayment rate.”

  It had rained in the night; a soft drumming like fingers on a desk, and it was still coming down steadily. Charlie was in a good mood. His deal was coming together, and in his exuberance he seemed to have forgotten his earlier reluctance to discuss it in front of Matthew.

  “Interesting,” Chloe said. She seemed composed, if not exactly relaxed.

  “Yeah, I think we’re going to make microloan-lending to impoverished women a centerpiece of our strategy.”

  “That’s excellent, Charlie.”

  “It’ll take some packaging, to get it across to investors, but it stacks up. It’s kind of exciting. We’re actually feeling rather proud of ourselves!”

  “You should be. Isn’t that great, Lily? Did you hear what Daddy said?”

  “That’s great, Daddy.”

  Matthew listened absently, smiling and nodding in the right places, though his mind was on other things. As of tomorrow he’d be gone for four days, which seemed a long time not to be able to follow developments firsthand, and this was nagging at him. Chloe’s state of mind, in particular, was something he felt he needed to monitor closely and he wasn’t going to be able to do that from the city. So far she seemed to have decided it was more important to protect her marriage than help the cops. But that could easily change, and he’d have preferred to be able to see it coming.

  Lily wanted to play Scrabble after breakfast. Matthew began to clear the dishes, but Chloe insisted he come and play with them.

  “We’ll clean up later.”

  They went into the living room and set up the board on the coffee table. For a while they played without speaking, lulled by the steady rain into a peaceful silence. Even Matthew was able to relax a little. His mind drifted back to that first game of the summer, when Charlie had been so unamused by his joke word “siouxp.” He found himself thinking of family Scrabble games when Charlie had come to live with them in London: the way he’d been torn between wanting to be a part of the household and wanting it known that he considered the whole rigmarole to be, in some crucial way, not “cool.”
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br />   “Coolness” had been extremely important to Charlie at fourteen, Matthew remembered. He’d arrived a year late at their school, which made it difficult for him to make his mark, or at least to get the kind of immediate high-status social ranking to which he seemed to feel entitled. Being cool had evidently been something he believed he could turn into a ticket to popularity. He was already somewhat cool, intrinsically, from the other boys’ point of view, just by being American, but he took a lot of trouble to finesse it. Matthew had shared a bedroom with him for over a year, so he’d been able to observe the process close up, and it had been a revelation. The Dannecker family had never been remotely interested in fashion or pop culture, but suddenly here was this boy in their home who, to Matthew’s admiring astonishment, would spend hours in front of the mirror, gelling his hair, trying on different outfits, with and without Ray-Bans, Discman, Yankees hat, Converse sneakers. Even on schooldays he’d do things with the school suit to sharpen it up. Fancy belts, a pair of cowboy boots he ordered from Arizona . . . But it had been about attitude also, Matthew thought, remembering the subtle sneer fixed permanently on his cousin’s handsome face at that time, and the way he had of rolling his eyes that made you feel ashamed of whatever crime against coolness you’d just committed. He’d do it when anyone in Matthew’s family used one of the pet words they’d held on to from when Matthew and his sister were little—“polly” for porridge, “mimi” for milk . . . It was just their way of amusing each other, but Charlie had made the whole family self-conscious about it.

  All of which had impressed Matthew deeply. He’d been Charlie’s fan from the start. He’d begun imitating him slavishly, which turned out to be a highly effective way of gaining his friendship. Charlie had seemed to enjoy having his younger, smaller acolyte at his side, piloting him across the schoolyard when he first arrived, or showing him how to get around London on the bus and Tube. Matthew had accepted his role as the junior partner unprotestingly, but he’d also felt proprietorial about Charlie. He’d liked showing him off, basking in the reflected glory, though he was also just plain proud of him in himself. He’d heard his sister describe him to a friend on the phone as “princely,” and the word had seemed to sum him up precisely.