Switch

by William Bayer

  "I had to shoot him. Unfortunately I aimed too well. Tony got Scarpa in the head, but the creep survived. I got Terry in the chest. He was dead before the ambulance came.

  "Funny—for years I wondered if I'd chickened out. Took me a long while to realize I hadn't. It was later that I acted like a coward, when something closed up inside. That thing with Terry held me back, so I had to work up my pity-us-all theory which I've been using ever since as an excuse not to feel—anger, rage, revulsion, even love. You see, it's been more than Switched Heads and the thing with Al that's brought me back. It's been you. I know now I started to really feel again when I began to fall for you."

  She'd been watching him as he spoke, peering at him, as if he was an exiled king restored to a stolen throne. Just seeing that look on her, of admiration and awe, filled him with courage.

  "I have to tell you something, Frank," she said. "I think you and I are alike."

  "How do you mean?"

  "I love to hear confessions. At least the kind in which I'm the rescuing heroine."

  Stalemate

  The restaurant wasn't a cop place. It was an expensive seafood restaurant in the South Street fish-market area, a stockbroker's paradise full of guys yapping about liquidity and arbitrage. They knew Hart, greeted him as "Chief" when he and Janek walked in. The headwaiter seated them in a booth. Hart ordered Manhattan clam chowder, grilled sole and a bottle of white wine. "Lovely wine," he said after he chewed it awhile. Then he signaled the waiter to pour.

  While Janek talked he watched Hart eat his soup. There was a rhythm to the way he dipped his spoon. Janek tried not to let that annoy him as he toured the perimeters of Switched Heads and Peter Lane. Just as he was finishing the waiter brought their fish.

  "That it?" asked Hart as he began to bone his sole. He fileted it like a surgeon.

  "Isn't that enough?"

  Hart looked up from his handiwork. "No, Frank. Not nearly enough."

  "You heard what I—"

  "I heard every word. You got a goddamn kiss and some alleged artistry you think you saw in the crime-scene photos. And then you got a lot of psychological mumbo-jumbo that adds up to exactly zilch. You got no physical evidence, no witnesses and no plausible motive. Your suspect is a famous film director. The only connection between him and one of your victims is that he happens to have a view."

  "We know he goes to whores."

  "Screw the whores. So what that this guy Lane goes to whores? Half the men I know go to them and the other half are married to them. Take that to the DA and he'll puke all over it. What's worse, Lane will sue us for harassment." Hart lifted the skeleton out of his fish and laid it carefully on his bread-and-butter plate. "It's crap, Frank. A real crock. So tell me—what do you want?"

  "Extra men."

  "How many?"

  "Enough to watch Lane full time."

  "That's an awful lot of detectives. I don't know. If he's as smart as you say he is he's not going to do anything anyway."

  Janek didn't argue or nod. He watched Hart eat for a while. There was something disgusting about the way Hart chewed his fish. And the look on his face—the look of a man who had the world by the tail. Janek reached into his pocket and pulled out the snapshot Al had given Caroline. He propped it up against the salt and pepper shakers.

  Hart glanced at it. "So what's that?" He squinted at Janek to show he wasn't impressed.

  "Another case."

  "Looks like three young cops having a laugh." There was a sneer in his voice. He turned back to his food.

  "Three young cops. Except now two of them are dead."

  Hart shrugged.

  "You told me you didn't know Al when we drove back from the burial."

  "So I bullshitted you. So what? I invited you into the car to give you a case, not to reminisce about the past."

  "Why do you think he shot himself?"

  Hart puffed out his cheeks. "Beats me."

  "What do you mean it beats you? He called you that morning. What did you say to him?"

  "I didn't say anything. He started telling me."

  "Now, look—"

  "You look. Guy shot himself. No doubt of that. He did it—not me or anybody else. Whatever I said or didn't say, he's the one who pulled the trigger." Hart picked up the snapshot, squinted at it again, laid it down on Janek's side of the table, then gazed steadily into Janek's eyes. "You know I think very highly of you, Frank. Consider you one of my best detectives. There's a precinct command coming up in Brooklyn. Ever think about a captaincy?"

  "Sure, I'd like to be a captain. But I don't want a precinct command."

  "What do you want?"

  "I like to work cases."

  "Everyone likes to work cases. But if you're going to be a captain you have to do administrative work."

  "Then maybe I'm not ready yet."

  "Not ready to be a captain? Why the hell not?"

  "Just don't see myself shuffling papers."

  "There's retirement. You'd do a hell of a lot better if you went out at a higher grade."

  "The pension's important, but I'm a detective. Do I get extra men or not?"

  Hart gazed at him. "Never let go, do you? Get an idea into your head and hold on to it no matter what. You got some mystical idea about detective work, you some kind of metaphysician, Frank? I've heard that before and I don't respect it. A police career's about power. You either get more power or you stall in place."

  The waiter asked if they wanted dessert. Janek shook his head. Hart ordered pumpkin pie. "Reminds me of Halloween," he said. "Tricks and treats. Jack-o'-lanterns in the windows, then mashed pumpkin on the streets. Heard about this case where this guy slipped in some pumpkin, broke his back, sued the city, said Sanitation was 'irresponsible and derelict.' City attorney I know handled it. Told me he looked for precedents. 'Basically,' he said, 'what we were dealing with was a classic slipped-on-the-old-banana-skin case.'" Hart laughed. "Okay, so you like to work cases. Then stick to the case you got. You think Lane did it, go ahead and prove it. Or start looking at someone else."

  They sipped coffee in silence. Much as he hated Hart, Janek couldn't help but admire his cool. He appeared unshaken, and it occurred to Janek that maybe that was what had finally discouraged Al. There was no way to reach such a man; the smart move for Al would have been to put the case aside. But he couldn't do that, so he ate his gun.

  After Hart paid the check Janek saw his cold little eyes turn appraising once again.

  "I know your trouble. You think taking a captaincy would be selling out, like you're important enough to be offered a pact with the devil and so pure you can refuse it on the spot. Well, I got news for you. Enlisted man's pride—that's all the fuck it is. You and all the other assholes who like to work cases. Where does it get you? A stinking house in nowhere Queens and a stupid cow of a wife and a barbecue pit. Be smart, Frank, and think it over before you turn down what every detective in the division would give his left ball to have." He paused. "You got till the end of the year on Ireland/ Beard. After that the only extra personnel you're going to see is the guy I put in your place."

  He stood, picked up his raincoat, then bent down very close to Janek and whispered harshly in his ear.

  "Like I said, Frank, you think you got a case. But all you got are photographs."

  Getting Personal

  "Okay," he said, "first the record thing, then the mail thing."

  "The mail thing's much worse," she said.

  "Let's look at them one at a time."

  "I could be wrong about the record."

  "We'll see. Take me through them both again."

  They'd been listening a lot to an old Stephane Grappelli record. Caroline had one of those sleek Danish stereos done up in redwood and black with a hand-sized "control module" she could use to turn it on and off. When they decided to go to sleep she'd carry the module with her and place it on the little table on her side of the bed. (He kept his wallet, keys and thirty-eight on his side.) They'd settle in,
turn off the lights, continue listening and when they were ready to sleep she could click off the system without getting up.

  "...Okay, the next morning we didn't play music. You were in a rush and I had a tennis date. You left, I got my tennis stuff and left, and, yes, I locked the door. I came home around noon. Then I went out with my camera for a couple hours. I got home at maybe five o'clock. I remember I turned on the radio to listen to All Things Considered. I went into the darkroom, and when I got tired of the news I came out, clicked the phono button on the module, and that's when I started to hear that old Marriage of Figaro album I hadn't played in years."

  She looked at him and shook her head to show how crazy that had seemed.

  "So then?"

  "I came storming out. The Mozart was on the turntable, the album was where I usually leave an album, and the Grappelli was back on the shelf."

  "And as far as you remember you hadn't touched the stereo since the night before?"

  She nodded.

  "So how did it happen?"

  "Either I put the Grappelli away and pulled out the Mozart and put it on, which I absolutely do not remember doing, or someone else did it, which is very weird."

  "Me?"

  She nodded. "That's what I thought."

  "Why didn't you ask me?"

  "Forgot."

  "Forgetting's consistent with forgetting you changed it yourself."

  "That's why I wasn't sure. Until this afternoon, when I began to see the pattern."

  The mailbox incident was something else. She'd come home early that afternoon (she'd been photographing football scrimmage at an all-black high school in Brooklyn), unloaded her camera and started opening her mail.

  First she found a letter she'd received a week before, which she remembered placing on her desk to be answered. It was just the way she'd left it, still in its envelope, slit. Then she found two old phone bills from the summer which she'd paid, missing from the side drawer where she threw everything to do with business. And she found a plain envelope, white, business size, and in it, carefully wrapped, its edges Scotch-Taped so there would be no chance she could cut herself, a used razor blade. That sent her rushing to her bathroom, first to check Janek's razor, then the one she used to shave her legs. From which, she discovered, the blade was missing, which sent her rushing back to her desk to phone Janek at the precinct in a panic.

  While she waited for him she went through her business files, all her old bills and canceled checks. She couldn't find anything else missing but felt certain that there was. The person who'd done this, and who, she was sure, had also changed the record, had searched her home carefully, then helped himself to things she wouldn't miss. So that even as she was searching for more such things, she was shaking on account of her sense of this person's cleverness and power. There was a bold and fiendish intelligence behind his acts: an ability to understand her and then exploit her fears.

  "Felt like I was going crazy," she told him. "You know—currents of terror and rage. It felt like the worst kind of male aggression. Penetration against my will. Really the worst."

  Nothing had actually happened to her, she had told herself; the two incidents were a kind of prank. Except, of course, she knew they weren't. There was something insidious behind them and she had tried to think of what it was. Intimacy, she decided, the intimacy of that razor blade, and also the threat of it, for it was sharp and cutting, and the threat was somehow worse on account of the fact that the dangerous sharp cutting edges of that intimate item had been taped. As if to say, "They needn't have been taped." As if to say, "I, who did this, could have booby-trapped you if I'd wanted to." As if to say, "There could be other traps set around, other blades perhaps hidden in your gloves or shoes, places you wouldn't ordinarily look before you plunged in your hands or feet."

  So she had looked through everything carefully, found nothing else out of place, but now that he was with her she began another search. Since her violator had chosen to demonstrate his power by attacking her so intimately, then, she believed, it would be in intimate regions such as her drawers of underwear that he would have made further demonstrations.

  "But how do I know?" she asked, turning to Janek, her voice shaking, one of her bras dangling pathetically from her hand. "He could have taken some of them. God! I don't count the damn things. Some could be missing and I wouldn't even know."

  Struck by her expression of helplessness, he took her in his arms. When her trembling stopped he sat her down, then phoned a locksmith he knew who did contract work for the NYPD. He asked the man to come to the loft immediately with his best, newest, most impregnable lock, and while they waited he carefully examined the locks already on her door. With his own set of keys he tried each of them in turn, then squinted and looked closely at the cylinders. Her security lock was the only one that would have given a housebreaker any trouble. His inspection confirmed what he already knew, which was that either it had been opened with a key or there was another way into her loft besides the door.

  He went downstairs and inspected her mailbox, one of a set of vertical compartments imbedded in the wall. The mailman's lock on the top looked reasonably secure, but the small lock to her box could have been opened by a child.

  Upstairs again, he paced the walls, checking each window in turn. He opened them, stuck out his head, looked up and down—the building walls were sheer.

  He knew there had to be a fire escape, since the building had no separate fire stairs. But for some reason he had never noticed it and when he found it he realized why: the entrance to it was through the window of her darkroom, which she kept covered with a black shade and then a double set of black velour drapes.

  He pulled the drapes, raised the shade, found that the windowpanes had also been painted black. The clasp was not secured; he raised the sash. The fire escape led down the back of the building, a side he'd never seen.

  When he came out of the darkroom she was sitting on the couch. She didn't say anything, just followed him with her eyes.

  "The window wasn't locked in there," he said. "Anyone else have a set of keys?" She didn't answer. "Super? Friends?" When she didn't reply he took her face in his hands. "Look," he said, "I'm a detective. I love you and I want to help."

  She gazed at him, then held out her hands so he could see them shake.

  It could have been Lane, he knew, and also, possibly, Hart, but he didn't tell her that as he lay beside her staring up at the fan, admiring its slow revolutions, its slow inexorable strokes. After a while the even regularity of her breathing signaled she had finally fallen off to sleep. It had taken him hours to relax her. Now he lay on his back watching the fan cut slivers of light, putting everything he knew through the mill of his mind, grinding, pulverizing, then searching for signs and meanings in the dust.

  It was the same sort of fire-escape entry made into Amanda's except for the striking difference that this time it had been made during the day. A very risky venture and also diabolic. Janek was sure Lane was capable of it. But would he bother? Why take such a chance?

  On the other hand a surreptitious entry smacked of a professional job. Janek knew men who could have done it, and Hart knew such men, too. Knew even more of them, had all sorts of slick old detectives in his debt, men he could ask to do special favors, anything for a chance to please the Chief.

  He watched the fan, angry now he'd pulled off Sal. Even if Lane had shaken Sal the day of the entry, at least Janek would know that he had. And if Sal could account for Lane's movements that entire day, then Janek could be sure that it was Hart.

  Sal was busy backtracking through Hart's finances. What if he messed up and Hart found out? How badly would Hart feel threatened? Badly enough to do this? But a designed policy of slowly applied terror was not at all Hart's style. His style was a bullet in the head. And now there were too many: Janek's, Caroline's, Lou DiMona's, Carmichael's. Hart couldn't execute them all.

  He felt sticky, pulled away the sheet, lay naked to the breeze gene
rated by the fan. Caroline was right: there would be other traps. He grew tense as he contemplated what they might be. It had to be Lane. Now the Switched Heads case had turned personal just like the case of Tommy and Al. But he had no proof. He didn't even have enough to convince anyone Lane had done anything at all.

  He hadn't counted on their finding Nelly Delgado.

  Stanger and Howell brought her in late on a Thursday afternoon, a short, slim actressy redhead with sparkling dancing eyes. They had found a total of four prostitutes who could identify Lane from photographs; interesting information, inconclusive though suggestive of a pattern. But Nelly was different. She had a real tale and she told it to the five detectives from the center of the squad room, all ninety-seven pounds of her packed into an office swivel chair which she used to heighten the effect of her recitation, whirling herself around in it to dramatize important points.

  It had happened five years before; she couldn't remember the exact date, though she knew she would never forget the man. He'd come to her several times for ordinary sessions. Nothing remarkable until one day he asked if she'd be willing to enact a special scene. Sure, why not, she'd said; in those days she still aspired to be an actress. They made a deal (five times her normal fee); he instructed and rehearsed her and arranged to pick her up the following night.

  "The pickup," Nelly said, "was on the street. He wanted me to play it like a hooker. Dress cheap over black satin underwear, wear high, spiky heals, chew gum and swing my ass. I was to march up and down Eighth Avenue, Forty-second to Forty-sixth and back. He'd cruise, follow, watch me reject a couple johns. Then when he approached I'd tell him my fee, we'd strike a bargain, he'd hail a cab and take me off."

  Nelly stood up from the swivel chair to show them how she'd paraded, the exaggerated high-stepping haughty strut of a cartoon prostitute.