SWITCH
By William Bayer
First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Copyright 2011 by William Bayer
Cover Design by David Dodd
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ALSO BY WILLIAM BAYER FROM CROSSROAD PRESS:
NOVELS:
Pattern Crimes
I had handled cases which opened up gradually like fissures in the firm ground of the present, cleaving far down through the strata of the past.
—Ross Macdonald, The Chill
A Burial in Queens
The air was bad the day of Al DiMona's burial—hot, close, sulphurous. The sky was pewter undercast in yellow and there was a noxious smell, an oil-refinery smell, as if the cemetery were in New Jersey instead of Queens. It was one of those August mornings when the streetlights still burned away; perhaps the person who was supposed to turn them off had forgotten or overslept.
Janek looked closely at the others gathered around the grave, recognized a few familiar faces, old detectives, retired cops with sagging jaws. Lou, of course, the widow—she already had the frantic look that said, Now I have to worry about the mortgage and growing old alone and getting the oil changed. And Dolly, the daughter—her letter had been there on the card table along with the half-finished crossword puzzle and the woodworking tools and that pathetic, half-carved wooden flute. She'd written she'd decided to relocate to Houston and could she park the kids for a while and a lot of selfish crap like that. Maybe Dolly's letter had done it, Janek thought, or maybe it was something else. It didn't matter. The trigger had been ready. Whatever made Al pull it was meaningless beside the fact that it had been ready waiting to be pulled.
He had imagined the scene: Al sitting at the card table staring into space, the sound of Lou moving around upstairs, sorting out the linens, then scouring the bathroom sink. It was a hot, humid Sunday morning and the front closet smelled like a dry-cleaning shop and the neighborhood was quiet and there was a shiny thirty-eight in the front-hall-table drawer and it took just a couple of seconds to step over there and get it out and stick it in his mouth and pull one off.
Upstairs Lou froze, her sponge poised, the roar of the shot fading slowly, sinking deep, deep into her brain. She knew right away, didn't even have to think. She'd been to the funerals, had heard about these things, knew all about these Sunday-morning things. A year into retirement, the worst time, the time you have to worry most about. She knew, and Janek could see her frozen there in the bathroom, not even shaking, standing still as a mannequin until the sound was finally gone. She might have looked half quizzically at her sponge, dropped it into the bowl, then moved to the head of the stairs and peeked down until she could see Al's feet sticking out into the hall.
It would be then, when she saw the worn soles of his shoes, that the bitterness would have come, feelings of despair and betrayal and unfairness too, of how horribly unfair this was. She had worried, prayed, somehow gotten them through the violent risky years only now to have to face the insidious Sunday-morning violence inside. She had known this was coming, had seen it coming for months, was afraid to mention it, afraid he'd blow up if she urged him to see somebody, talk it through and get some help. She tiptoed down, stared at him, made sure he was really dead, then turned into the kitchen and picked up the wall phone and called Frank Janek because Frank was loyal and Frank would know what to do and Frank would take charge of everything—good old trusty Frank.
A melodrama, Janek thought, a drab, lousy, middle-class melodrama. Not even a tragedy, because a cop's guilt is too petty and his honor too ambiguous and his flaws too minor to give him tragic stature. His torment comes from little things, not grandiose schemes to place himself above the gods. And so his self-inflicted death is a whimpering little end, just another hot-August-Sunday-morning-old-cop suicide.
There had been a time, Janek remembered, when he might have taken that way out, just after he'd killed Terry Flynn and men turned their backs on him and squad rooms turned still when he walked in. It was not remorse over defending himself but for dealing death instead of injury, and the loneliness he'd felt afterward, and the nightmares and the rejection and the endless questions he'd asked himself and the answers he'd never found. Now he wondered how many of the others had thought about suicide, as he looked at the dozen old detectives squeezed together beside Al's grave. They had the heavy-lidded eyes of men who lived by private codes. They stood there thinking about Al and what he'd done on Sunday and whether there wasn't something inside themselves they didn't know about that would come out when there were no more cases left to work, turn upon them and devour.
The priest was muttering. Janek could barely hear him. The yellow-pewter sky was cleaved by jets and there was a tree in the cemetery choked with blackbirds shrieking out complaint against the heat. Hart was there, Chief of Detectives, his tight little eyes sparkling in his squat and sweaty detective's face. Hart would never shoot himself—no way, thought Janek, not Hart. If Hart went mad he'd kill someone else. You did either one thing or the other—that's what the police shrinks said. You turned it all against yourself or else you turned it on the world.
There was someone else at the burial and she didn't fit in with the widow and the daughter and the Chief and the old detectives who had come to pay respects to Al. She was a tall, lean young woman in her early thirties, with very good legs and an expensive camera hanging from her shoulder. Her light-brown hair was layer-cut, she was dressed very well, her face was beautiful and she stood still and very straight.
Janek studied her, then he squinted as he recalled Lou's words on Sunday after they had taken Al away:
"... he was working on something, Frank. That's why none of this makes sense. He said it was an old case, one of those old ones that gnawed away at him, and he had some new ideas about it now that he had so much time to think. He said he was going to go back over things, check some things he'd forgotten at the time. He went out afternoons. Sometimes he'd stay out till nine or ten. He was working. I could tell. I hadn't seen him like that in years. He came alive, you know, the way he used to be in the old days when he was onto something and closing in. Maybe—I don't know. Maybe it was important. Maybe if he found something, Frank—you see, that might explain ..."
Janek had nodded, though he hadn't thought Al's actions needed explanation; the scene in the house that morning, he thought, had just about said it all. But Lou was convinced Al had been working and there was always the possibility that he had, so Janek had said he'd check it out when he had the time and Lou should save everything, any papers Al might have left around the house or in his clothes, and even then it had occurred to him that maybe Al had had something going on the side. But not a girl with legs like this, a Leica on her shoulder, expensive shoes, clutching an expensive purse. She looked like a model; she wouldn't have noticed Al, wouldn't have bothered with him if she had. Who was she? Why was she here? Why was she standing as if she wanted to be here and, also, apart? Janek decided to talk to her after the burial. If she left too fast he could catch up with her at the gate or by the cars.
The priest was finished. They were lowering the coffin. The blackbirds were shrieking even more. Lou still had that frozen, frantic widow's look and Dolly was sniffling and Hart was looking straight at Janek while he whispered to a uniformed sergeant at
his side. The sergeant stepped back to detach himself from the group. Janek did the same; he wanted to edge closer to the girl. A second later the sergeant was at his side. He laid his hand on Janek's arm.
"Chief asks if you'll ride back with him." It was Sweeney, guardian of the portals, who sat at the desk outside Hart's office directing traffic—detectives, journalists, politicians, supplicants.
"Can't," Janek whispered. "I got my car."
"Give me the keys."
"What?"
"I'll drive it in for you. Give it back to you downtown."
"I wasn't going downtown."
"You are now, Lieutenant." Sweeney shook his head and smiled. How funny, his smile seemed to say—Janek didn't understand; years in the department and still he didn't know an invitation to ride with the CD was nothing less than a command.
The gathering was breaking up. Janek hurried toward the girl. She smiled softly when he introduced himself. Her forehead was damp and her eyes were brown and moist. "Al mentioned you," she said. "He trusted you a lot."
"I'd like to talk to you about that." She stared at him curiously. "Could I have your number?"
She studied him a moment. "Sure." She reached into her purse and handed him a card.
Hart
"Air's bad," said Hart. "Like breathing fumes." He rubbed the back of his neck and peered out the window with disgust. They were on the Triborough Bridge; girders were whipping by. Hart's ears stuck out and his gray hair was shaven practically to his scalp. The big black car was air-conditioned. They sat in the back; the driver was a cop.
Janek turned, saw his own car driven by Sweeney trailing them at fifty feet. "Didn't know you knew Al."
Hart turned to him slowly. His small cold blue eyes twinkled like freezing little stars. "I try to get to these things even if I didn't know the guy. DiMona was a detective after all."
"He was a close friend."
"Your rabbi—yeah, I heard. Well, it's a lousy thing, Frank. Ought to take away their guns. Never bought this idea they should keep them. Look what they do with them. Eat them for Sunday brunch." The Chief shook his head, tightened his lips, about as sensitive an expression, Janek knew, as Hart could bring himself to make. It was a major effort for Hart to pretend to be a human being. Still Janek wondered why he had bothered to attend the burial.
"...Not working on anything important you couldn't dump now if you wanted to?"
So that was it. Hart hadn't come to pay respects to Al but to talk to Janek on the way back into town.
"Got something for you, Frank. You have to take it over right away. Your kind of case. Psychological." Hart winked as if he'd made some kind of private little joke.
"Everything's psychological."
"This is psycho-logical." He grinned, pleased with himself; master of wordplay, he wouldn't need a ghostwriter when he retired and wrote his book.
Janek waited to hear about it, but now Hart was onto something else. "...couple asshole detectives acting like goddamn four-year-olds. Embarrassing scene, personally embarrassing to me, at the Medical Examiner's yesterday afternoon." He glanced at Janek. "You want to hear?"
"Sure. What happened?"
"Couldn't believe it. Couple of goddamn four-year-olds." Hart wiped his forehead. There was still a strip of sweat above his lip. "Two homicides over the weekend. One in the One-nine, the other in the Twentieth. Monday morning they find this schoolteacher. You probably read about it in the papers." Janek had read about it: a female teacher at a private girls' school found murdered in an East Side brownstone; the afternoon papers had made a big deal about it because the school was classy and the woman lived at a good address. "The second one was on the West Side. Tenement building. All-night call-girl type. They found her Monday, too, but we didn't say much about it then even though there was something peculiar that connected the two cases which we weren't actually aware of until yesterday afternoon." Hart grinned. "Tell you one thing, Frank. You never had a case like this."
"Like what?"
"Hold on. I'm getting to it. Understand that what I'm telling you isn't going to the papers." He turned in his seat so he was facing Janek. His voice turned serious. His tiny eyes were boring in. "The heads were switched. Get what I'm saying? The head of the teacher was with the body of the hooker and the other way around. Now, you see what that means. Someone took an awful risk. Ever hear of anything like that? Like a terror movie or a book."
Janek looked down at the floor of the car. Hart's shoes were elevated—he hadn't noticed that before. He didn't know if it was the smell in the air, or Al's suicide, or the thought of heads being switched, but whatever it was, it was starting to make him sick.
"...The killer decapitates victim A, then goes crosstown and decapitates B, then takes B's head back to A's apartment and places it with her corpse, then goes back crosstown with A's head and places it so it looks like it goes with B."
Maybe much simpler than that, Janek thought, but Hart was probably right—you usually don't carry around a victim's head when you go out to kill someone else. Hart was right about the risk, too, and that the case was psychological. Some sort of crazy statement by a psychopath. But it was not the kind of case he liked.
"...There has to be a reason, right? That's where you come in. Figure it out. I'm handing it to you. Two heads on a silver platter. Interested?"
"What happened at the Medical Examiner's?"
Hart groaned. They were speeding down the FDR; the UN Building was just ahead. "Couple of jerkoffs got the calls. Stanger in the One-nine. Howell in the Twentieth. Know them?"
"Stanger—vaguely."
"Then you gotta know he's a jerk. Take it from me, Howell's just as bad. Okay, Stanger gets a lousy ID on the teacher from her building super. They cart her downtown and then there's some trouble getting someone from the school to look at her, and her parents live in Buffalo, so they can't get down here right away. Meantime, Howell gets the hooker, they cart her down, and at noon yesterday the ME starts to scream. There's a mixup. The heads are switched. Like someone fucked the bodies up."
"They're not perfect down there. They get sloppy, too."
"I know, but not this time. We got photographs. That's the way the bodies were found. Anyway, Stanger and Howell rush down there and they get into a fight. 'Whose case is this anyway?' 'You got my head. I got yours.' 'Let's switch them back and do our own investigations.' 'No sweat—we'll go our separate ways.' They tried to make some kind of bullshit deal, with the photos staring them in the face." Hart shook his head. "Can't believe it. Next thing they started swinging. A fistfight down there between the bodies with the whole staff of pathologists looking on. Why? Because they're morons. They're both detectives, they each got a homicide, each guy wants to work his own case, and if they have to share—I mean God forbid the two killings should be connected!—then they both know one of them's going to end up getting screwed."
"So now you need a lieutenant from outside."
They were passing under the Brooklyn Bridge. "I need a real detective, for Christ's sake, Frank. That's why I'm givingthis to you."
Two men were waiting in Hart's outer office. Janek recognized Stanger; the beefy one, he guessed, was Howell. They were sitting at opposite sides of the room studying the carpet. Stanger had a black eye. Hart didn't acknowledge them. Janek followed him in.
"Set yourself up in that special squad office on the second floor of the Sixth. I'll call Taylor and tell him you're coming. You'll want some of your regular people, I guess."
"Sal Marchetti and Aaron Rosenthal."
"Don't know Marchetti. Aaron's good. Now what am I going to do about those repentant jerks out there?" Hart motioned toward the waiting room.
"They drew the calls."
"Yeah. And disgraced the division. Still, if you can stand them you can have them. Just sit here and nod while I tell them what kind of creeps they are."
Stanger and Howell were called in, and Hart went at them mercilessly. They were assholes. Jerkoffs. Four-y
ear-olds. He ought to discipline them. He ought to take away their shields. But this time he was going to be generous. He was going to give them a chance to redeem themselves. It was one case now, Janek's case. They were both going to work for Janek, and they were going to work their butts off, too. Any questions? No questions—good. Then get the hell out of here. And one other thing—not a word about the switch. Any leaks on that and the ax will fall, and then there'll be four goddamn heads rolling around the morgue.
When Janek left, Sweeney handed him the keys. "Nice car, Lieutenant, but something funny about your engine. I happen to know an honest garage. They give a good discount to NYPD."
Hallowed Ground
Stanger made the presentation from the middle of the room, a studio apartment on the top floor of a brownstone on East Eighty-first. Howell stood back against the door. Sal Marchetti stayed close to Janek. Aaron was busy and would join them the following day.
Stanger and Howell had made up. They were serious and tried to act competent and Janek was glad of that. But he had trouble concentrating. His mind kept drifting back to Al. He knew he had to bear down, give shape to this investigation. More than forty-eight hours since the discovery of the first body, a crucial period, usually the most crucial in a murder case, and this time there were two homicides and the time had been squandered away.
"Amanda Ireland," Stanger said. "Taught French at the Weston School. When she didn't show up Monday—they're running some kind of summer makeup session now—someone called, and when she didn't answer the phone, the art teacher, male, Caucasian, a friend, taxied down here and got the super to open up. Soon as he saw the mess he turned away and vomited. Neither he nor the super looked too closely, which was why they didn't observe the other girl's head."
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