Switch (6 page)

"You said 'too perfect.' Now, just what does 'too perfect' mean?"

"I don't know."

"Symmetry?"

"Sure there's symmetry when you switch heads around."

"We know that already. But is there something else?"

"There is something, Frank. Something that hits you until you look too hard and then you don't see it anymore."

"So what is it, for Christ's sake?"

Aaron stood back, shook his head. "Beats me."

"Well, I'll tell you what I think it is. Arrogance. Conceit. 'I defy you to solve this crime. I defy you to figure it out and find out who I am. I did it and I'm
superkiller
and you cops are suckers. You'll never find me and if you do I'll never tell you why.'"

Aaron nodded. "Yeah. There's definitely that, and maybe something else, like our killer set this up to drool over. I think that's what I mean by contrived."

Something to look for, if and when a suspect came along. The murders were bizarre. Maybe that was it: they were
too
bizarre. As if they were
meant
to be bizarre—crimes that were bizarre were generally not committed that way intentionally.

Janek
planted his elbows on his desk, rested his forehead against his fingers. When Sal came in he felt relieved; he could stop thinking about how crazy this case was going to get.

Sal read to them from notes. "Taxi sheets covered. Notices up in the fleet-company garages. Circulars out to the owner-drivers. So far no one remembers any particular
crosstown
passengers that night. Bus drivers don't remember, either. 'Don't even look at them,' they say. Bus driver/passenger relationships tend toward the superficial. I guess that's what they mean."

"I see this investigation is broadening your sensibilities," Aaron said.

"I'm getting to be a regular
crosstown
-transit expert, yeah. Talked to some of the doormen. Nothing yet. They have special weekend shifts. The men rotate. I'll try a few more tonight."

When Stanger and Howell called,
Janek
told them to come in. When they arrived the five detectives pulled their chairs into a circle.
Janek
turned to each of them in turn. Aaron took notes on a legal pad.

Stanger reported that Amanda Ireland's parents were in town, staying at a Tenth Avenue motel. "Very nervous people. The kind that hate New York. The father
ID'd
her. Mother wouldn't go. I didn't mention anything about the switch. Thought maybe you'd want to talk to them and bring that up yourself."

"I do want to talk to them,"
Janek
said. "Set it up at the motel. No reason to mention the switch unless, of course, they're not sufficiently outraged."

"Oh, they're outraged all right."

"They say anything about boyfriends? She ever mention anyone in her letters?"

"No one except this art teacher, the one from the Weston School. But he's gay. Very upfront about it. Nice kid. They were close. In fact—"

"Bring him in."

Stanger looked surprised. "I spent a couple hours with him, Lieutenant. He's okay. Remember, he threw up."

"Something funny there. If he's an art teacher why didn't he notice he was looking at someone else's head?"

"He's very sensitive."

"A lot of killers are sensitive. If they were close they exchanged confidences. He may be holding something back. Maybe Amanda liked girls. You get to stay the good guy, Stanger. I want a go at him myself."
Janek
turned to Howell. "What about the pimp?"

"There was one. People in the building saw him. And they were seen together on the street."

"Who is he?"

"An Oriental. Funny name.
Bitong
. Supposed to be very slick. Soon as I find him I'll haul him in. I got a theory maybe he was trying to teach a lesson. Switching the heads and all as a warning to his other girls. You know, like you get your head cut off if you don't do like you're told."

"Doesn't sound very slick to me. Why the schoolteacher and why the switch?"

"Who knows? Chinese mumbo-jumbo. Maybe Amanda was doing high-class tricks for him. East Side. You know—discreet."

"Forget it," snapped Stanger.

Howell ignored him. "Or maybe Amanda was just a target of opportunity. I mean I try to put myself in a whore's place." They all broke up at that. "I'd be scared shitless by what happened to Brenda. I'd kiss the Chink's behind all night and never think of crossing him again."

"We're getting too theoretical," said
Janek
. "What have you got on johns?"

"She ran an ad in
Screw.
Every other week. With a telephone number, too. What's odd about that is that when they advertise they usually work in pairs. Two girls. Roommates. That way there's some protection in case they run up against a creep. Running a phone ad's just one notch up from the street, and on the street at least you get a look at the guy. With a phone ad you're working blind. Calls from out-of-town businessmen, kids, crazies too. Anyone. Everyone. There's no protection against weirdoes. Working alone like that, Brenda took a chance every time she opened up her door."

"I like that better than the pimp-punishment idea," said Sal. "A blind call. He sounds good on the phone. She lets him in figuring she can handle him. Then he turns on her, so fast she doesn't have time to raise her hands. Whores get nailed like that all the time."

Howell was getting edgy.
Janek
could see he'd already thought of that and now was thinking that Sal and the rest of them were treating him like he was dumb.

"A reasonable theory," said
Janek
, "and so is the pimp. We have to talk to the pimp to eliminate him, anyway. Now let's look at Howell's target-of-opportunity idea, look at it and turn it around. Say Brenda's the target of opportunity. She's easy. All you got to do is call her, act smooth and set up a date. But Amanda's not easy. She's not going to let you in. So say you're after Amanda and you want to do a switch, you need another head, right, so you pick up
Screw,
pick out a whore, and make an appointment—the whore's sole function is to provide you with that second head. Then you see Brenda's just a randomly chosen victim, and it's Amanda who's really interesting."
Janek
glanced at Stanger. "We got to know much more about her. And how, for sure, he got in. It makes a big difference if he came in off the fire escape or if she opened up the door. If Amanda let him in it's a whole new ball game, because that means she knew him, she's the focus and Brenda's just auxiliary."

They all nodded. At least
Janek
had a theory that Amanda was the prime target, even if there were no grounds to say that yet. Before they broke up he urged them again to look for connections. "If the girls knew each other, or if their paths crossed, then at least we have a place to start. Until then we're working in the dark. So far we got a lot of notions but no clear idea what we're dealing with. Is this a one-time double homicide with a purpose, or a thrill-kill that could turn into a series? That's something we all better think about, too, because if the guy who did this thinks he's getting away with it, he just might try it again."

W
hen he was finally alone in the office he telephoned Caroline Wallace.

"Hey,
Janek
, I was hoping I'd hear from you." She seemed genuinely pleased that he had called.

"That was fun last night. Now it's my turn." He suggested he drive over, pick her up and take her to dinner in Chinatown.

She brought her camera with her, the same
Leica
he'd seen at the burial, slung over her shoulder with half a dozen leather containers for film dangling from the strap. No equipment bag; she said she liked to travel light. She never went out without her camera, she said, since she never knew what she might happen to see.

In
the car he asked if she'd had it with her the day she'd fallen off her bike and been picked up by Al.

"Always the detective, aren't you?" She was amused. Then she frowned. "No, I didn't take it to the tennis club. There'd been some pilfering in the locker room."

"So you don't always carry it with you."

"I guess I don't. You're a very clever man." She smiled, raised her camera, leaned back against her side of the car, took a shot of him driving and smiling back.

He took her to a restaurant he liked, upstairs on Mott Street where the food was cheap and good and the waiters didn't speak English very well. She took a couple more shots of him while he ordered. He played up to her by clowning with the waiter. Click. Click. He liked the idea of being photographed. She must like me, he thought, or else she wouldn't bother.

"You Chink out a lot, don't you,
Janek
?"

"Yeah, but two nights running is maybe pushing it a little bit."

"In China they Chink out every meal, so I guess we'll both survive."

"Tomorrow," he told her, "I may Chink out again. I got to interrogate a Chinese pimp."

She said she'd like to photograph him conducting an interrogation.

"To catch my aggression?"

"Sure. Especially when you bang him around. You do bang them around, I hope. My dad used to tell me how cops know how to hit a guy, work him over real good, without leaving any marks."

"Yeah. Back in 1902. I knew you were a cop-hater. Cops' kids always are."

"I think cops are the best, finest, gentlest men around." She was serious and he was only sorry he didn't agree.

"What attracts you to aggression?"

"Just my hang-up, I suppose."

"Only men, right?"

"Female aggression might be interesting, but in the book I'm sticking to the men."

"Is this book going to be a put-down?"

"Of your gender?" She laughed. "No. Not at all. There's an elegance about male aggression. The poses. The stance. The eyes. The look. It's the best part of being human. We're social animals. Aggression makes the world work. And so, too, I guess, does gentleness, but that's another book."

"I can imagine," he said, looking at her closely, "that you could do a book on that."

"Mothers cuddling babies. Lovers kissing tenderly. It's been done to death, and anyway it's too maudlin for me just now."

The food came steaming and they attacked it greedily. He complimented her on her dexterity with chopsticks. She told him she'd had quite a bit of experience using them during her two years in Saigon. He asked her what it had been like out there, especially at the end during the final siege and the collapse, and as she talked about it, told him her war stories, it occurred to him that she was recounting her adventures the same way as a man. A very engaging trait, he thought, since she was most attractively feminine. He knew that young women were different now, that their lives could be as adventurous as a man's without their turning masculine. He'd seen it occasionally in young female detectives, but this was the first time he'd experienced it socially, a thought that made him feel old, as if the world had passed him by.

She was sympathetic when he expressed this feeling, and also mildly amused. She said she figured him for early fifties, and when he confirmed that he was fifty-one she said she didn't think that was old at all.

"Al was what? Sixty-six or something. He was old, and he'd retired. He lived in the past, in his old cases, but you're engaged with the world now. No, the world hasn't passed you by,
Janek
. I have the feeling you're right on top of things, and very much in your prime."

He liked her for saying that, liked her more than he wanted to admit, and now he wanted to examine that liking, growing in him at such an exceptionally rapid rate, because he was feeling something he hadn't felt in years, and it frightened him a little because it had been so long.

He had been conscious for some time that all his relationships were tainted by his work. The searching look he applied to people, his constant quest for motives, strengths and weaknesses, figuring how to play someone, seize psychological advantage, manipulate, interrogate, break a person down—all of that, which was the essence of being a good detective, seemed to work against any possibility of intimacy. He had wondered if normal relationships were possible when everything from buying a newspaper to making love to a woman seemed to be part of some vast investigation that circumscribed his life. It was as if he could never escape his work. Except now, sitting in this restaurant with Caroline, he was feeling something else.

Attraction? She was very attractive, of course, but he felt something more. His liking of her fogged his instincts. She was no longer just a good-looking woman but someone he felt tender toward. And since he knew she could not possibly feel the same way toward him, he warned himself to be careful lest he get banged up.

They lingered over tea, talking casually. It was hard for him to believe they had met only the morning before. The crumbs of their fortune cookies and the little paper strips lay before them on the table. Finally they got up,
Janek
paid, and then they walked the teeming streets, looking into grocery stores, sniffing sharp aromas, gazing up at laundry drying on fire escapes, hearing strange utterances chirped from windows by old Chinese women with straight-cut hair.