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by William Bayer

  But there was more. He sensed something deeper, a basic cryptic tale that stood behind these stories and gave them weight. Strange long silent looks between killers and cops, peculiar references to unexplained past events. It was as if there were some kind of back story known only to Lane, as if his characters shared the burden of a traumatic past.

  Janek leaned forward trying to concentrate. Perhaps it would be possible to enter Lane's mind. If he relaxed, just let himself slide into the films, then he might catch it—the same coiled anger he'd felt in Amanda's tub behind the curtain, the fury he felt some nights at Hart, the mad-dog killer part of himself he'd always feared and had tried to kill when he shot Terry years before...

  Late that night, his mind still cluttered with murderous images, there came a searing thought: that the movies were about the past—guarded, stylized, heavily masked renditions of an old and haunting crime. A real crime.

  He crawled out of bed, went to Caroline's darkroom, picked up the wall phone there and dialed Aaron at home. "Couldn't sleep either," Aaron said. "You got an idea?"

  "He's concealing."

  "We know that."

  "Remember how much trouble you had getting the basic facts."

  "Still don't have them."

  "He's covering up."

  "Sure. So what else is new? All psychos have backgrounds and try to conceal them." Silence. He could feel Aaron's resistance. "You sure this isn't just desperation, Frank?"

  "No, I smell something real. And that it's the subject of the films."

  "Well, they got to be about something, don't they?"

  "Right. So let's find out."

  "You talking about a deep background check."

  "The deepest. Track the past, Aaron. There's a crime back there. In the movies he tries to tell us about it but can't quite get it out. What we got to do is find out what it is. Then, maybe, we can use it to open him up."

  The Hunt

  He decided to take the subway—it would be quicker than his car. He ran to West Fourth Street and jumped on an F train just before the doors clamped shut. "Stalking me," she'd said over the phone. "The same one, you know—the mind reader." Janek knew: the man who'd changed the record, the one who'd stolen the razor blade, the one, she'd said, who'd psyched her out.

  A delay on the tracks. The train halted at the Fifth Avenue station. The doors jammed and people on the platform stared in with anger and disgust. He'd known that that razor blade was not going to be the end of it, that something else would happen and when nothing had happened he'd been relieved. A mistake. The subway doors opened and slammed during an incomprehensible public announcement. The train jerked forward. What's that bastard done?

  She was better composed than he; he was panting from running up her stairs. "It's so stupid," she said. "But I wish you could find him, Frank. Find out who he is and make him stop."

  Though she always made her prints herself, she sent out her exposed rolls to be developed. When she accumulated a lot of film, say thirty or forty rolls, she'd drop the stuff off for processing and a day or two later she'd pick it up.

  Which was what she'd done that morning. And around noon she'd begun to examine the contact sheets. And then she'd found the extra sheet and then she'd called the lab. They checked. She'd brought in forty-one rolls and gotten forty-one back, and nothing she'd shot was missing from the shipment, which meant she'd brought in the extra roll herself. Which meant it had been placed in the basket on the counter in her darkroom where she left her exposed rolls to pile up. Which meant it had been planted on her by the intruder, probably at the same time he'd changed the record and stolen the razor blade.

  There was more. "What's on it?" he asked.

  She swallowed hard and handed him the contact sheet.

  He examined it with a magnifying glass, his heart sinking as he did. Thirty-six amateurish telephoto shots, some of them shaky, some not focused very well. But all of Caroline—walking, bicycling, shopping, playing tennis, coming out of her building, returning to it at the end of the day, buying a newspaper, scratching her ankle, raising her camera, living her life.

  The prick.

  "Has a thing for me, doesn't he, following me around?" she said. "But I reconstructed the time frame from the locations and my clothes. All those shots were made before he changed the record. So, you see, Frank, that's not so bad. I mean, he hasn't really done anything at all since then. It's sort of like a time bomb. And today it just happened to go off."

  "Know something, you're terrific. You've got every reason to feel scared."

  "Maybe I am. A little, anyway. But then I feel it's not all that bad, not really all that aggressive. More like a game by one of those phone-freak types."

  Janek took her hand. "You're right, the game-player's usually harmless. Aggressive, sure, but sneaky. And underneath a sneak's more scared than you."

  She smiled. To his amazement she was managing to shrug it off. But to Janek the message was stunningly clear: I've been tracking your girl; I could have gotten her thirty-six times.

  Aaron made a breakthrough.

  Through a cop he knew who worked crowd control on movie sets, he found a German-born script girl who'd lived briefly with Peter Lane. Her name was Elga Becker and this living together had occurred in Munich. Now Elga told Aaron, "I'd like to see him crawl through broken glass."

  According to her, when they'd been lovers in Germany he'd confided that "Lane" was his mother's maiden name, that his real name was something else and that he'd been brought up in Cleveland.

  Why did Elga hate him so? Seems when she came to New York and was looking for a job she called Peter for help and advice. He heard her out, then told her he didn't remember her very well. He hung up on her and she could never get through to him again.

  "Nasty little thing," Aaron reported. "Bad breath and she sprays when she talks. Says when they made love he 'used his pecker like a dagger.' Then, she says, he'd lay his head upon her breast and sigh."

  "Real romantic. You believe her?"

  "Sure," Aaron said. "At least the part about the name."

  "Then you better go out to Cleveland," Janek said.

  Aaron left that afternoon.

  He was counting days now. Halloween was uneventful: the usual number of "treats" that turned out to be drug-soaked brownies, and "tricks" that turned out to be razor blades concealed in fruit. He pondered his cases. Was Caroline in real jeopardy? He wasn't sure and the possibility worried him; he carried it around.

  He grew tired of waiting to hear from Aaron and began to drive aimlessly about the city. He revisited the crime scenes, asked himself if there could have been something important that he'd missed.

  He found himself acting nervous in the squad room, irascible with Stanger and Howell.

  "I need more Nelly Delgados," he shouted. "So find them, dammit, before this case turns to total shit."

  Sal called: "The garage belongs to Sweeney. Not his brother-in-law like he says. They do a fairly decent job, maybe not the best in town, but you could pay more and do a lot worse without trying very hard. The guys who work there, they seem like competent mechanics. But a friend of mine says he's spotted hoods."

  "What kind of hoods?"

  "That's what I'm going to be checking out. And also into a sort of parallel operation that seems to be taking place around the back."

  Indian summer: warm air, hazy skies, comfortable lazy days. The parks were filled with joggers, the museums with European tourists. Skaters on the rink at Rockefeller Center cut flowing figures in the ice.

  Always, when he drove across the bridge, Janek would look back at the city and wonder at its beauty and its power. And then as he came off the ramp in Queens he would think of Caroline, how much he loved her, her vulnerability, her smile when she greeted him and how being with her and staring into her soft brown eyes would soon relieve his stress.

  He kissed the side of her neck that pulsed after they made love, the place where she said she thought her skin was we
ak and a vein or an artery was perilously exposed.

  "Think it's over?" she asked.

  "All those things grouped together, and nothing more since then."

  "Sometimes—"

  He kissed her neck again. "You know no one can get in here now. This loft is like a vault."

  She was quiet and after she fell asleep he slipped quietly out of bed and walked along the walls, pausing at each window, leaning forward and peering down through the blinds at the empty streets.

  It was 2 A.M. There'd just been a terrific rainstorm. Janek pulled off the Major Deegan onto the East 134th Street exit ramp. As he approached the traffic light he locked his door. When he stopped, an elderly black man with desperate eyes approached with a bottle of Windex and a rag.

  Kind of pointless since it had just rained, Janek thought. But the man started to clean the windshield anyway. Janek shrugged, waved him around to his side of the car, rolled down his window and handed him a buck.

  He spotted Sal's Chevrolet a block short of the Third Avenue Bridge. He pulled ahead of it and parked. A few seconds later Sal slipped into his car.

  "On time even with the rain. What do you want to do? Look, or talk it over first?"

  "Let's look," Janek said.

  They got out. Janek followed Sal up the street past a closed tire-repair shop, a string of junk stores, through the debris of discarded rubber treads and bent-in hubcaps that cluttered the way. The ramp to the Third Avenue Bridge loomed before them in the night. The air was sticky. Manhattan glowed across the Harlem River, the tops of its towers shrouded in fog.

  Sal led him across a yard of broken bottles and smashed bricks, then to the door at the back of an abandoned tenement. "Stay close," he whispered. Sal stopped, listened, then turned back to Janek. "Pushers operating here. Should be clear this late, but you never know. Better follow in my footsteps. They lay booby traps sometimes."

  Janek watched while Sal pried the door. A sliver of light caught the pry-bar and made it shine. Inside there was gloom. All the windows of the building had been covered with sheet aluminum. Sal switched on his flashlight, and Janek followed him closely to the stairs. There was rubble—broken doors, beat-in stoves, burned-out timbers—but the stairs, surprisingly, were intact and were clean as if someone had recently swept them with a broom.

  They moved up, a flight at a time, pausing at each landing, listening. Once Janek thought he heard the rustling of rats. There was the sound of water dripping, residue of the rain still seeping in.

  Sal led him out an open door onto the damp black asphalt roof. They had climbed four stories and now had a view of the surrounding territory—more abandoned residential buildings, ruins of still others which had burned, and access to the roof of a neighboring structure which Sal, crouching beside him, pointed out. "That's it."

  "What?"

  "Back shop," Sal whispered. "The legit setup faces the street and it's open all day. Then there's the alley—used for deliveries. Then this other structure where they only work at night."

  "Men working in there now?"

  Sal grinned.

  "How'd you find it?"

  "For starters had some work done on my car. Then I hung around. Local pushers clued me in. Could have made some collars if I hadn't traded back my evidence."

  Sal was good: a narc detective who knew how to shake down pushers and trade for information.

  "Frank, you ought to see the parade of cops coming around here with their fancy foreign jobs. Porsches. BMWs. Mercedes. Got to wonder where they get the dough."

  They moved carefully to the side of the roof. There was a rickety ladder lying against the low roof wall. Sal pulled it up and lowered it over the side. "Only a seven-foot drop," he said. He held the ladder until Janek got off. The roofing over the back shop was slippery. Now that Janek was on it he understood the setup. There were two buildings, the one they were on and the front building, which had a slightly lower roof. There was a twenty-foot gap between the structures. To move a car from one garage to the other it would be necessary to open a set of sliding iron doors in each.

  Sal led him to the skylight, a low walled hut with a pitched roof composed of safety glass. The panes had been painted black on the inside, but there was a patch that had escaped the brush, small, less than an inch in diameter, but large enough to peek through when they brought their faces close.

  It looked busy down there: a dozen men wearing safety masks, with wrenches, bolt clippers and acetylene torches, stripping and chopping cars. The vehicles were arranged in parallel rows like corpses in a morgue. The mechanics played the role of forensic pathologists methodically dismembering the vital parts.

  They crept back to the ladder, climbed back onto the tenement roof, then Sal pulled the ladder up and placed it back against the wall.

  "What do you think?"

  "Begging for a raid."

  "But you're not going to call a raid, are you, Frank?"

  Sal led him back down, using his flashlight to point out debris. Regrouping by the exterior door, he paused to light a cigarette.

  "Not bad, huh?"

  "How long have you known?"

  "Four days."

  "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "Had to link it to Sweeney first."

  "Did you?"

  Sal smiled. "Better than that, I think. The way I figure it the front shop, Sweeney's shop, makes an enormous profit. They got to, since they're billing customers for what are basically free parts. Knock off the special discount to cops and the profits still are huge, since their only real costs are overhead and labor. It's a classic. The stolen cars are trucked into the alley and the leftovers are trucked out at dawn. They move the good parts over to the front garage and for all I know they got a wholesale business to get rid of the surplus too. Okay, that back shop, that's a separate operation. Different ownership, different business name. Owned by a company owned by another company owned by still a third. We'd have to subpoena records to be sure, but funny thing—since I had that printout on Hart I knew his wife's holdings, and that third company was on the list." Sal's voice turned cocky; he knew he was onto something good. "Now, everyone knows Sweeney's Hart's man, that if you mess with Sweeney you mess with Hart. So it figures they're in this together, with maybe Hart acting as banker through his wife. Chances are they can both wriggle out of it in case the operation blows. Neither one is stupid. They'll have a story. Claim they didn't know there was work going on at night. Claim they didn't know anything, that the back shop was just for storage. You know: 'I think we got just the part you need, Sergeant Maloney, in the storage room on the shelf.' They only own the building, after all—they're not responsible for an illegal business some crook's set up in back. Doubt either one of them's even been in there with witnesses around. Still, if you ask me it's kind of stupid having the two operations so close."

  "No, that figures," said Janek. "Just like Hart. So arrogant."

  "Yeah." Sal looked at him, perhaps a little surprised by his intensity. "I know this is really important to you, Frank. That's why I've been busting myself."

  "You've done a terrific job. Now what about those hoods?"

  "Going to start on that tomorrow. I'll park opposite the end of the alley and see who comes out the door."

  "Be careful. I'm looking for muscle, guys Sweeney could order to do very bad things."

  "Going to burn them, aren't you?"

  Janek nodded. "Sweeney, probably."

  "Not going to be easy."

  "Don't worry." He clapped Sal on the shoulder. "I'll think of a way."

  He told her, "It's always tough when you take a stance, because then there're lines you have to cross. It's a dangerous territory on the other side. Terry wanted to go in there and when he finally did he couldn't return. For years that was a lesson to me. Don't stray across, you might get caught. But now I know there are times when you have to go in no matter the fear of no return. The thing I fear most of all now, you see, is that I might blow out my brains one Sund
ay morning because I knew I'd been afraid."

  "He's going to whores again, Lieutenant."

  "What?"

  Stanger and Howell had entered the squad room with wild eyes.

  "You didn't know?" Stanger asked.

  "How the hell would I know that?"

  "We thought Marchetti—" Stanger was glowing.

  "Sal's been off Lane for weeks. He's been working another angle."

  "Oh. We just kind of figured..." Janek understood: Stanger thought he'd found something that would show Marchetti up.

  "Well, don't just stand there. Find out what the fuck he's doing with the whores."

  Aaron finally called from Cleveland.

  "Found the house. Ticky-tacky West Side neighborhood. Run-down. About what you'd expect."

  "What would I expect?" Janek asked.

  He could hear Aaron trying to control his breathing, getting ready to spring a surprise.

  "About what you'd expect for a cop. Ohio state trooper, name of Jesse Dill."

  Janek's heartbeat quickened. "You're not—"

  "No bullshit, Frank. So maybe you were right, goddammit. Maybe the films are connected to his early life. Tell me something—how do you come up with stuff like that?"

  "I'm just a detective. Stop stalling. Tell me more."

  "Give me a couple days. It's been years. Most of the neighbors are different. I only found one person so far who remembers them as a couple. But there's something here. I can smell it."

  "What kind of smell?"

  "Bad. Very bad." Aaron paused. "Detail you ought to know about. It's a normal house, one bath, working-class with add-on garage. And the people who own it now don't have any kids. But I see this rusty old basketball hoop set up on the garage, so I ask them why they put it in. Say they didn't, that it was there when they bought the place, and they bought direct from this guy Dill." Aaron paused again. "You hear what I'm saying, Frank. Our friend Peter—he had a normal childhood. The great devil, the whore-killer—he practiced layups in his driveway. Jesus...."