Switch

by William Bayer

  He believed in Brenda. There was enough of her there for him to reconstruct her life. He believed in her slow drift downward from aspiring actress through failed model to trick-a-day girl on the escort-agency list. He believed in her alliance with shabby-slick Prudencio Bitong, her love of late-night soul-food dinners, of revival screenings of romantic movies, Tracy and Hepburn, Bogart and Bacall. Her descent into the degradation of the weekly ad in the sex tabloid was balanced off by halfhearted attempts to pull herself back up. She paid a dentist four thousand dollars to straighten her teeth. She attended classes at the Hazel Carter Fitness Center, where she hoped to meet successful models who would help her resume a modeling career.

  Yes, Janek believed in Brenda. When he closed his eyes he could see the way she moved. He imagined her slipping out of bed beside a snoring john, padding to the bathroom, rinsing out her mouth, then examining herself in the mirror above the sink until she met her own eyes, froze suddenly and asked, "What will my life be like in twenty years?"

  He recaptured the rainy, sullen, New York afternoon she clung to Prudencio, sprawled out on her chocolate-colored couch, the way he stroked her and soothed her as he told her how they would make a fortune in Manila, and the way she smiled even as she knew that he was lying when he said he was saving his money to take her there and set her up in style.

  Janek imagined her delight as she aroused a sixteen-year-old boy who came to her terrified, then called her "candy-ass" as he strutted out. And the Thanksgiving Day trick with the balding Dayton businessman who took her out for a turkey sandwich afterward and pressed an extra fifty into her palm when he said goodbye. Brenda was there for him, alive between the lines. She had heart and a kind of passionate desperation. He even thought he might have liked her if she'd lived and they had met.

  But Amanda was different. She wasn't there, this Madonna with the self-drawn halo around her head. She was good, oh-so-very-good. Sal had said it first: "Little Miss Perfect—I don't buy that. I don't believe in that."

  She paid her bills the day she got them. She ironed her blouses, saved gift-wrap paper, sewed her own dresses from patterns in magazines. She wrote a bland letter home every Sunday, kept photographs of her sister's children on her desk. She ate health foods and subscribed to Audubon and headed up the blood drive at the Weston School.

  Janek looked for indications that belied the perfect image—her strange choice of friends, for instance, selfish demanding people he wouldn't have expected her to like. A sickly couple in their seventies, a complaining failed feminist writer, and Gary Pierson with his narcissistic tales of destructive transient love affairs. No doubt Amanda was attractive to these people, an attentive listener. She shook her head sympathetically and clucked at all the proper times. But was there the hint of a smirk in her responses, a smugness, a superiority? She chose people who would open up to her but to whom she would never have to show herself.

  Then there was the dog. Something peculiar and revealing about that dog, a sense that it had picked up her concealed feelings and turned them into obnoxious traits. Nobody liked the dog, named, maddeningly, Petunia—a nasty, yelping, snarling little creature who dragged Amanda along as if she were the one on the leash. This little darling leaped aggressively at strangers while Amanda smiled weakly as if the matter was beyond control. People in the building reported she muttered to it, "Oh, Petti, there's that bad man from the pharmacy," or "There's the mean woman who lives downstairs."

  No, Amanda did not ring true. There was more to her than Stanger had uncovered. Janek was not yet prepared to say she was a fake, but he felt the absence of a range of feelings he was sure she must have had. Envy. Rage. Inadequacy. Fear of sexuality. Panic at being so loveless, untouched and alone. A whole dimension of her character was missing and there was something infuriating about that, something that could make a person want to crack her porcelain exterior, something that could even drive a certain type of individual to want to stick her smug little head upon the body of a whore.

  Sal was amused that afternoon when Janek told him what he wanted to do. "Don't blame you, since Stanger swears he went over the place. We know what that means, don't we? But remember, Frank, Crime Scene spent a day there, too."

  Aaron stared at him curiously. "What do you expect to find?"

  "Maybe a real person."

  Aaron nodded and turned to Sal. "Frank's specialty. Dig out the secret life. But this time I think there's more."

  Janek nodded. "I'll be looking for her contempt."

  "You're beginning to dislike her, aren't you?"

  "I started out liking her fine."

  "But now you've turned." Then to Sal: "Hate the victim so you can identify with the killer. I've seen him do that before."

  Sal offered to return with him to East Eighty-first, but Janek said he wanted to make the search alone. He wanted to do it at night, too—felt that was important. And also he realized, though he didn't mention it, that if he did it then he could put off confronting Caroline.

  He called her, told her what he was going to do.

  "I understand," she said. "But I'll miss you, the way I did last night."

  Last night he'd passed just a few feet from her door. Why hadn't he gone up to her and wrapped her in his arms?

  "I'll miss you, too," he said. "But this is something I can't put off."

  "You don't have to explain. Anyway, you sound better now. I was worried this morning. You seemed so abrupt, and—I don't know. Maybe a little sad."

  When he hung up he asked himself if he was being stupid; it was so hard to believe that she had lied.

  Aaron sat with him as he ate a pizza at the Taco-Rico. "I was up half the night thinking about the resemblance. Even the names are similar. Brenda, Amanda—they end with the same three letters and they almost rhyme."

  "I don't think that means anything."

  "Neither do I. It just struck me, Frank, that's all. What's interesting here is that at first I thought we were looking for intersecting lives. But last night, when you talked about Brenda being hunted down and mutilated just because someone needed her face—well, that's different, that's intersecting destinies. And that sends shivers down my spine."

  The apartment smelled musty. The windows were closed the way he and Sal had left them. Janek didn't open them. He didn't want to sweeten the air.

  He didn't turn on the lights either, but sat in darkness in the reading chair letting his eyes adjust to the gloom. He had done this sort of thing many times before but had never gotten used to the feelings: a mixture of guilt at intruding upon someone's privacy and of pleasure at uncovering a hidden life. He had felt both things at Brenda's a week before as he had handled her things and searched her drawers. This expedition was different. He had come tonight to search out a concealed self, deliberately concealed perhaps even in anticipation of such a search. He knew that people who cloaked themselves worried often about what would happen if they were in an accident, whether their secrets would be found out, and, if they were, what the finders would think.

  There was always a stash. Brenda had one, that old coat pocket filled with cash and dope. Everyone had a place where he hid his valuables or his porn, old love letters, sex-ad correspondence, the diary he didn't want anyone to read. Amanda kept a diary, Janek was sure of it, a place to set down the feelings she kept pent up. Where was it? Hidden well, he knew, so that even a detective would not find it easily. The worst possible thing she could conceive would be to stand naked to a stranger. She would not want anyone to read her diary even after she was dead.

  He stood up but didn't turn on the lights. He preferred to use his flashlight to focus his search. He began slowly and quietly, trying the obvious places, not expecting to find anything in them but warming up as he toured the terrain. He looked behind her books, which were arranged flush to the bookcase ledge, checked the backs of her pictures, slid photographs out of frames, then examined the undersides of desk and dresser drawers where papers could be taped. He opened the kitch
en cabinets, plunged a fork into the flour and sugar canisters, went to the closet and examined the zippered compartments of her luggage. He tried the pockets of all her garments and then her refrigerator too—once, on a larceny case, he'd found a million dollars' worth of stolen bearer bonds stashed in packages of frozen peas.

  A classical hiding place for narcotics criminals was the bottom of the laundry hamper, the concept being that the soiled clothes would be so disgusting no sane investigator would want to pull them out. Amanda had no hamper and her laundry was practically immaculate, but his search brought him to her bathroom, into air sharp with the odor of the new plastic shower curtain he and Sal had hung. He could not resist. He pulled it aside, stepped into her tub and pulled it shut. Then he stood still, trying to locate the feeling of waiting coiled, anticipating, psyching himself up to strike.

  She'll come soon and then I'll get her. The feeling swirled through him, a hatred of Amanda, an irrational compelling hate. He cooled himself and tried to trace its source. I have to know her to hate her so much. I have to know her well. But how?

  He went back to the living room, sat down again. Willing up the hatred left him drained. He rested awhile, then resumed his work, asking himself questions as he searched.

  What were her evenings like, those many evenings she spent here alone? He tried to imagine them, came up with the dog squatting near the door to the kitchenette, her stupid eyes focused on Amanda, anticipating the strange rituals she alone was permitted to observe. The dog knew the real Mandy, the one no one else was allowed to see, the one who muttered savagely to herself and hissed beneath her breath, the Mandy who moved rigidly and compulsively, who would begin to shake if she found an object out of place. The dog's eyes would never leave her mistress, would absorb her actions for hours. Petunia could not talk, could not reveal; no need for Amanda to hide herself from this silent furry witness to her despair.

  Where was the diary?

  Janek began to move again, probing with his flashlight. He would not overturn furniture, pull the stuffing out of the mattress, or do the traditional detective's thing—tear the place apart. He wanted Amanda's diary to proclaim itself, cry out, "Read me: Know me by my pain."

  Come on, Mandy, come on, girl, show me where it is. Show me your anger, your rage, all those feelings that make you so ashamed. I feel for you. I understand. I can help you—maybe. But first, babe, you have to show me who you are.

  She would write in it in bed at night, he thought, with only the bedside light on and the radio tuned low to a late-night call-in show, a kind of background music of other people's grief. And the dog would stare at her, and she would prop the diary up against her thighs, and afterward she would put down the pen and turn off the radio, and then just before she turned off the light she would slip the diary away....

  Show yourself. Come on, Mandy. Where is it? Where?

  Not under the mattress. Too obvious—though he looked. Not inside the hassock; too difficult—though he unlaced it from the bottom, stuck his hand inside and felt. It would have to be a place that was easy for her to reach; she would be tired after she wrote in it and would not feel like going through a series of complicated moves. The tissue box? He ran his fingers around inside it. The wastebasket beside the bed, so neatly lined with a plastic bag? That would be clever, like the proverbial laundry hamper; if something happened to her it would most likely be thrown away unexamined.

  He turned it over onto the carpet, set his flashlight down beside the pile and spread the contents out. Disgusting—all those smudged-up papers, that discarded typewriter ribbon, those soiled tissues, the crushed-up and re-stuffed tampon box, that disposable vacuum cleaner bag.

  Oh, Mandy, what an awful mess, all that repellent trash. Stanger wouldn't want to touch it, and the Crime Scene mechanics wouldn't bother to examine it. But it's not like you to leave such slop around. I smell a put-up job.

  It was there: an envelope containing two one-hundred-dollar bills, a Krugerrand wrapped in a piece of wrinkled foil, a packet of letters and a spiral bound flip-over stenographer's writing pad.

  He looked at the letters first. They were written in French, postmarked Grenoble, dated several years before. These would be the love letters sent by the French boy to whom she'd been engaged, folded and unfolded many times, spotted here and there with tears. Janek did not read French, but he could imagine the story well—a quick rush of love and then its slow withdrawal; passionate outpourings terminated with a cutting "I truly believe we've made a mistake....”

  He settled back to read the diary. It was one o'clock in the morning when he finished. All the feelings were there, the ones he had expected: the anger, the disgust and the contempt.

  She disliked her students, called them "shallow" and "undisciplined." Her parents were "tiresome" and "insipid," but in another entry she wrote: "They are the finest human beings on this earth and I hate myself for having hurt them so." She had harsh words for Gary Pierson: "pathetic wretched creature." On a disliked colleague at Weston: "...would like to twist her head right off her neck." On the old couple she'd befriended whom she served so dutifully: "Sometimes when I watch them eat I want to stand right over them and puke." On her sister in Hawaii: "Moo-cow. Breeder. Sour-smelling kids." It was all there, the meanness she never showed, the ridicule, the Janus face.

  But the worst of her contempt was reserved for herself. Janek was disturbed by its intensity. She accused herself of mediocrity, contemplated suicide, then gave up the idea because it would "just be another typical Mandy mess." She described her life, then annotated her descriptions with one-word judgments:

  "Yuk!"

  "Barf!"

  "Puke!"

  "Everything about me is little," she wrote. "I hold a little job. I live in a little apartment. I own a little dog. I lead a worthless little life."

  "...loathe my body. At class can feel fire, but practicing stretches here at night I look down at my nakedness and feel hideous."

  "...can't stand my body or the way my mind works, holding on to nothing, going round and round and round."

  "Men don't move me. Think of being touched by one and then I want to puke." There were pages like that, cruel and merciless, a self-ridicule Janek could hardly bear. He had willed himself up to hate her so that he could imagine how her killer felt, but now, reading these denigrating self-assessments, he was filled with so much pity he felt tears rising to his eyes. He had come that night to know Amanda Ireland, her sorrow and her misery. Now, at last, she came alive for him, and then he remembered that she was dead.

  Near the end of the diary, in an entry dated in early August, Janek was struck by the pathos of a line: "A kiss goodnight. A stingy little kiss. If only it were real affection. Poor me here with Petti all alone..."

  When he finished reading he turned off the light, sat still in the reading chair again absorbing the gloom. He dozed awhile; when he woke up his watch read three-fifteen. He had spent most of the night, had found what he had come looking for, had discovered Amanda Ireland, and now he wondered if that brought him any closer to discovering why she had been killed.

  He went to the bathroom, urinated, then stepped into the tub. He did not draw the curtain this time, simply stood gazing at the sink, trying to empty himself of sympathy, trying to recapture again the killer's hate.

  I'm waiting here to stab her so I can take her apart and put her back together the way I've dreamed. My plan is complicated and dangerous. Why do I feel so confident?

  When he came back into the main room he nearly choked on the air. He went to the window, pulled it open, stood before it and exhaled. Then he noticed something on the carpet, laid his flashlight on the floor, knelt, and looked closely to see what it was. A slight depression, a rectangle, about two and a half feet by five. He went to the closet, found the green exercise mat he'd noticed before, brought it out, laid it in the space. It fit, of course, perfectly.

  So it was here by the open window, the same window through which her killer had
crawled, that she had done her exercises nude at night. Those difficult, limb-stretching, muscle-tearing exercises she practiced to win Hazel Carter's compliments in class. On the warm summer nights she would do them here with the lights off so nobody could see. She would turn and stretch until her body burned, a kind of ritual self-punishment, and the light from the bathroom, the light she'd leave on so there would be some ambient illumination in the room, would rim the curves of her straining body and outline her naked form against the dark.

  Janek stood there at the window. It was black outside. The warm September air was dank and thick. Suddenly he felt a shiver and backed away. There was something out there, something that made him feel exposed. Then, as he retreated into the room, many disparate thoughts which had been churning inside him for a week arranged themselves into a pattern, like iron filings strewn loose upon a piece of paper suddenly organized within the field of a powerful magnet held beneath.

  Snapshot

  He stayed in the apartment, dozing in the reading chair. Then, at first light, he pulled himself up and stood again before the window looking out. After a while he packed up his flashlight and the contents of Amanda Ireland's stash, left the apartment, carefully locked the door and drove downtown to the precinct house.

  They started drifting in a little before eight o'clock, Sal Marchetti first, then Stanger and Howell. They wandered in with their containers of coffee, their newspapers and their jelly rolls, observed Janek, unshaven, leaning back with his hands clasped behind his head, said "Good morning," then exchanged glances, trying to assess his mood.

  Aaron Rosenthal appeared at eight-fifteen. "Jesus, Frank, you've been up all night. You really look like shit."

  Janek smiled.

  "Want some coffee?"

  Janek shook his head.

  "Do we have to read him his rights before we drag it out of him?" asked Sal. "Or is he going to voluntarily confess?"