Switch

by William Bayer

  "Let him have his fun," said Aaron. "So far fun has not been the distinctive feature of this case."

  Stanger and Howell, not yet admitted to the circle of intimacy, tried to grin as if they were. Aaron pulled a yarmulke out of his pocket, dusted it off, then set it gently on his head. Sal opened his Wall Street Journal and checked the values of his bioengineering stocks.

  "Funny thing..." They all turned to Janek instantly. "Monday, when Hart was putting the screws to me I told him we weren't going to solve this by good old-fashioned detective work. I said it to annoy him and he was plenty annoyed. But now it looks like I was wrong." He turned to Stanger. "I know you talked to the people in her building. What about the people across the way?"

  Stanger looked frightened. "Amanda's building?" Janek nodded. "I did the usual."

  Sal groaned. "What's that?"

  "Canvassed the people in the brownstone just across. Then talked to the supers and doormen in the other buildings that face the back. Asked them to query their residents when they got the chance. Then I made up notices and posted them around."

  "Laundry rooms and lobbies, right?"

  "That's where I put them, Lieutenant."

  Janek nodded. "Up to me to decide if you should have taken it further than that."

  Stanger, relieved, took a long sip of coffee. Janek paused while the others pulled their chairs around his desk.

  "Here's how it goes. I want to kill Amanda and do a number with her head. Aside from finding Brenda, which is another story, there're certain things I need to know. First, I need to know her well enough to want to kill her, which means I've picked her out without her knowing it and have a way of observing her unseen. Second, I need to know where she lives, the layout of her apartment, that there's a ladder down from the roof to her balcony, and that she doesn't keep her window locked. Third, I need to know that when she takes her dog out at night she's away long enough for me to get in there and hide, and that when she comes back she releases the dog and goes into the bathroom to brush her teeth. Now, unless I'm her roommate the only way I can know all those things is to live in a building that faces her apartment with a good view into her window and her life.

  "This morning I stood at her window and counted all the other windows I could see. I may be off by a few—we're going to have to make a sight-line chart—but my rough count was seventy-four, which includes the ones in the brownstone across, the two houses on either side of it, the back of the building on the corner of Park Avenue, and the upper floors of the tall building that fronts on Eightieth Street. Seventy-four windows may boil down to thirty-five residences. Figuring an average of slightly more than two adults per residence, we're talking outside eighty possible killers, eighty possible voyeurs."

  Aaron shook his head. "I like it, Frank. Now, of course, we check them all."

  "One by one, methodically the way Hart likes. Two teams: you and Stanger; Sal and Howell. Three lists: people who were home that night; people who say they were out but can't substantiate it; people who were out and can. Don't go in like you're looking for suspects. You're just checking with everyone who could have seen something. No big deal about alibis. Just let them tumble out. No hint you think it was somebody with a view of her apartment. But be sure and check the view. Slow, patient interviews like you've got a lot of time. Names, ages, marital status, professions and rough personal impression should do it the first time around. Spend as much time with the old ladies and children as you do with the big, strong, male headhunter types. Hang out. Absorb the gossip. Discover the painters, writers, sculptors and photographers. The spooky voyeur guy in Seven B. The seventeen-year-old who drools in the elevator at the girls. Get used to the folks and make sure that they get used to you. Be helpful. Hold open doors and offer to carry grocery bags. Caricature yourselves so each of you is well defined. Howell the Jolly. Stanger the Hawk. Marchetti the Confessor. Rosenthal the Wise. Above all, be tiresomely methodical. Forget things, go back and double-check, then go back and check again. Sooner or later names will emerge, for our short list, the suspects we're going to look at very hard. If we're lucky they may come quickly, but I wouldn't count on it. I have a feeling this may take quite a while."

  At last a theory, a concept that would confine them, a territory limited by Janek's idea. Never mind that he might be wrong—it was a strategy and it made sense. No more floundering. No more screwy discussions about why someone would want to do a switch. Focus in on one of the homicides. Stick to Amanda. Forget Brenda and the switch for now. Stanger and Howell were beaming; this was the kind of investigation they understood.

  Janek stood up. It was time to go home and get some rest.

  "Terrific, Frank," said Sal, patting him on the back.

  Aaron ceremoniously removed his yarmulke and escorted him to the door. "You're good, Frank. But we already knew you were. I'm feeling better about this now." They paused at the head of the stairs. "You didn't say whether you found her stash."

  Janek pulled out the hundred-dollar bills and the Krugerrand. He handed them to Aaron to send to her parents in Buffalo.

  "That it?"

  "Not much else. The voyeur idea hit me when I found out she practiced her exercises nude at night."

  Aaron smiled. "Wonder how you knew about that. There was more, wasn't there? You went in there looking for contempt."

  "I found it."

  "And you worked with it."

  He nodded. "I wanted to degrade her, bring her down. Wanted to—very much. And then every time I stood in her tub I felt extremely confident. Full of myself, you know. Very strong and powerful. I knew I must have studied her quite a while to feel like that."

  "Think he dry-runned it?"

  "Positive. To be so sure he must have been in there before. But you notice he didn't bother to fudge things up. It's as if he wanted us to see how precise and sure he was." Janek paused. "There's something else. If I'm right there's a good chance he saw me and Sal crawl in there on Saturday night. And last night he may have seen me, too. I had this feeling. He'd have seen my flashlight stabbing around in the dark and the bathroom light going on and off."

  "Then soon as he hears we're working the buildings he'll know we've figured it out."

  Janek nodded again. "Something to look for, but I get a feeling, from all that confidence, that he's so sure of himself he won't care that we've figured it out."

  He went home, shaved, showered and tried to sleep, but found that he could not. The exhilaration he had felt as he stood at Amanda's window was supplanted now by conflicting thoughts of Caroline. It was always like that: he would experience a moment of illumination, and then another problem would rise and fog his view. To be a detective, he knew, was to be embroiled in an endless investigation. Cases flowed together. He solved some and stored others in the files. But the Big Case, the sum of all the others, was the mystery of human passion, and that case was never solved.

  He missed her—her body, her hair, her eyes, missed holding her and feeling her hands upon him, and her lips. But more than any of those things he missed his belief in her. He had longed for a woman without guile or tricks, thought he had found one, and now he wasn't sure.

  He called her, got her answering machine. She was out shooting someplace in the city. He had a key to her loft. He could go over there and wait. But he was afraid that if he did he would not be able to resist searching through her things.

  He spent the late morning walking the Upper West Side, observing the faddish shops on Columbus and Amsterdam which presaged, he'd read, a retail renaissance. He saw repulsive vinyl garments proffered by young salespeople who wore punk hairdos and lizard belts with tooled clasps.

  Growing weary of modishness, he bought two eggrolls from a vendor and wandered into Central Park. He found a bench, sat down, sprinkled on some soy sauce from a plastic pouch, ate, then sat silent like a middle-aged man out of work.

  Two equestrians slowly cantered by, an elegant couple in hacking jackets and boots. They were quarrelin
g over the price of a cooperative apartment. The man kept repeating, "Six hundred K is tops," while the woman pouted and shook her head.

  A little while later a no-hands bicyclist collided with a jogger. A perfunctory apology. An epithet. Then anger mounting rapidly, ready to explode. People stopped. Janek tensed. Then the ugly moment passed. The bicyclist drove away and the jogger staggered off with bloodied knees.

  Feeling he'd had enough for a while of the human race, Janek decided to try the Museum of Natural History. He entered and spent an hour gazing at aggressively postured stuffed animals. The bears especially intrigued him, so cuddly and threatening, and he stared with wonder at the whales. Realizing he was wasting his day, he strode purposefully to the primitive-man exhibits and studied headhunter totems to remind himself he had a case. Headhunting, he saw, could be an art form, a concrete way to deal with guilt and rage. But even while he was thinking this he was growing increasingly apprehensive about the evening, trying to figure out some way to broach himself to Caroline.

  Late in the afternoon he reached her from a phone booth. They agreed that he would bring over carry-out food and she would open one of her better bottles of wine.

  The rush hour was on by the time he reached the bridge: little surges forward, then hard applications of the brakes; the traffic did not crawl so much as jerk its way across. A week since their dinner in Chinatown, a week since they'd first made love. When he reached her building he still had no idea what he was going to say.

  She kissed him as he came through the door. "Oh, Janek..." she whispered, lovingly. Then she helped him spread out the food. "Beautiful. And so much more than we can eat." Which was true: he had spent almost fifty dollars, on imported prosciutto, smoked Scotch salmon, lobster salad and black Russian bread. They stared at the array together, then she placed her arm around his waist. "Crazy old detective." She squeezed him close.

  He opened the wine, they sipped and nibbled. She told him she'd spent her day photographing sanitation workers aggressively heaving trash into cartage trucks, and he told her what he'd finally seen in the Switched Heads crime-scene photographs.

  "Interchangeable—why didn't I see that?"

  "Because you looked too deeply. The trick was just to glance at them and squint."

  As they talked he watched her carefully, listening for false notes but finding none. She seemed so real he felt disloyal searching for signs of stress and inauthenticity.

  After they'd stuffed themselves, having barely devoured half the food, he decided it was time to make his move. Ever since he'd met her there'd been a subject she'd toyed with but about which she'd never opened up. He would start with that and see where it led them. He waited until her talk wound down, then caught her eye and spoke.

  "What kind of guy's your dad?"

  She looked at him curiously. "Why do you ask me that?"

  "You've mentioned him a few times. I know it's significant to you to be the daughter of a cop. But you've never told me anything about him. Not even if he's still on the force."

  "He's not," she said. Suddenly she was tense.

  "So, what's he doing now?"

  "He's not doing anything. He's dead."

  "I'm sorry, Caroline. You never told me." Which was strange, he thought. "When did he die?"

  "Beginning of the summer."

  "How did it happen?"

  "What difference does it make?" she snapped. She met his eyes, lowered hers, then spoke quietly. "He was killed."

  "Killed?"

  "I think 'rubbed out' is the expression they used. Look, I don't know why you started on this, but I'm getting the feeling it's not all that casual. If that's true, okay, but at least admit it. And tell me what you want to know."

  "We're just talking," Janek said softly. "It's you I want to know." He paused. "If you'd rather not..."

  "No, no," she said. "I guess I've been avoiding this." She seemed to relax a little then. "It's such an awful thing, so miserable. And there really isn't much to tell. Dad was a cop for a few years when I was little. Then he left the force. He went into business, failed at it and about that time left my mother and moved away. He owned a bar for a while and then he lost that too. He was sort of a marginal character in the end. A drinker, gambler, that type of man. He used to come around to see me, not especially often, and I can't remember a time he did that I didn't smell whiskey on his breath. He'd call on Christmas and my birthday. When my Vietnam book came out he asked for copies so he could give them to his friends. In the end he got involved with mobsters—in debt to them, I think. The story I got was that he didn't pay up and that he antagonized important people. So they made an example of him, killed him gangland style. A bullet in the back of the head, then his body stuffed into the trunk of a stolen car."

  "Where did this happen?"

  "Jersey. Where else? They said he was probably shot in the Meadowlands. The car was left on a Hoboken street."

  "And that's it."

  "Isn't that enough?" A touch of anger in her now.

  Janek spread his hands. He could feel her anguish. He wanted to comfort her, but he was sure that there was more. "Since I'm a detective and your father was murdered, there's a chance I could find out more about it, if you were interested."

  She turned away.

  "What's the matter?"

  "I can't stand to talk about it. I really can't."

  "Have you been talking about it to someone else?"

  She didn't answer, and then, suddenly, he understood. "You talked about it with Al, didn't you?"

  She turned back. "You knew that?" He shook his head. "But—"

  "How did you meet him?" Janek asked.

  He was watching her closely now. He saw her begin to speak: she was going to repeat the story she'd told. When she stopped he knew she was not a practiced liar. He felt relieved, then loving toward her, and then that the time had come to clear the air.

  "You fell off your bike just as Al happened to be walking by. I'm sorry, Caroline. I can't buy that. Al didn't take walks, especially in neighborhoods he didn't know." She turned away again as if ashamed she'd been found out. "Listen—I believed your story at first. I thought it sounded a little pat, but I bought it anyway. I liked you. I didn't have any reason not to believe you, and that day I got assigned a horrible case, so maybe my mind wasn't as sharp as it should have been. But it bothered me. There was something wrong. I didn't think about it again until the other night. Now I feel it's important that we clear this up. Not because how you met Al is so important in itself, but because we have to be straight with each other or we won't have anything at all."

  "I see," she said. "Well, of course you're right. That isn't how I met him, though I did fall off my bike and there was a man who helped me up and walked me home. I thanked him at the door and never saw him again. I spliced that story in. Not too well thought out, I guess."

  "Why make up a story at all?"

  "Because I didn't want to go through all this."

  "Through what?"

  She paused as if deciding whether she should answer. When finally she looked up he knew she was going to tell the truth.

  "Al called me blind one day last June. He introduced himself and asked if he could come over here and talk. Sure, I said; why not? So he came and he was upfront about the reason. He told me he was a retired detective and that he and Dad had been good friends years ago. He hadn't seen much of Dad in a long while, but he thought there was more to his death—no, he didn't tell me that till later on. He just said he wanted to find out who killed Dad and why, and he asked me a lot of questions and pretty soon he realized I didn't know anything at all. And then it was just the way I told you. He started stopping by afternoons. We became friends. We liked each other. I liked listening to him and having him around. So the only thing I told you that wasn't true was the way we met, the accident."

  She stopped as if waiting for his next question, then remembered he'd already asked her why she'd lied. "I didn't know you, Janek. You came up t
o me in the cemetery, then you called that night and said you wanted to ask some questions. I didn't know what you were after. I assumed it was about Dad and I was sick to death of that. So when you asked me how I met Al I combined the story of the bike accident with a true account of our relationship."

  "I still don't see—"

  "I just didn't feel like having another detective coming around talking about that awful case. I felt that if I told you about it you'd want to take it over, and then you'd get obsessive about it the way Al did, and I knew I couldn't deal with that. And there was something else." She paused. "I had this strong reaction to you. I didn't want to spoil it or mix it up with Dad. Who cares now what gangsters killed him? He's dead. Al shot himself. I mean—I've had enough."

  "The next night we became lovers. Why didn't you tell me then?"

  "What difference would it have made?"

  "I can understand why you fibbed at first, but later, when we got so close, didn't you want to clear it up?"

  "I just have. It's cleared. I think you knew all this anyway."

  Janek shook his head. "I didn't know about your father or Al's interest in him. I didn't know any of this until just now."

  "Then you really are a terrific detective. You bluffed me out and now I've spilled my guts. There's nothing else untrue between us. I feel good about that. I'm glad we're clear."

  He tried to smile but found he couldn't.

  "Still don't believe me?" she asked.

  "It's not just a question of how you met," he said. "I asked you if Al was working on something. You told me he wasn't. And now it turns out you knew he was."

  "It didn't seem all that important at the time. More like something his wife was curious about. He wasn't working officially, so it didn't weigh on my conscience. Anyway, it concerned me and my father, not Al, or Al's wife, or even you." She left her chair, came over to his side of the table, sat down next to him and took his arm. "You thought I was perfect and now you're disappointed. I've confessed everything. Can't we leave it alone awhile?"