Switch

by William Bayer

  "Yes." Her voice was distorted by the intercom.

  "Frank Janek."

  The buzzer throbbed.

  The lobby was spacious, befitting a building of its era. There were bicycles chained to a rack bolted to the granite floor. Thick gray walls and iron stairs—she lived up two lengthy flights. There were two lofts to a floor, industrial-steel doors set opposite on the landings. As he climbed he could hear the muffled thump of rock music coming from another loft above.

  "Hi." She inspected him, then stepped back to let him in. She was wearing the same gray skirt she had worn at the cemetery, a different blouse, and sandals now in place of expensive shoes. There was warmth in her smile; she wasn't tense. Again he noticed the perfection of her legs and the dark-brown beauty of her eyes.

  There was a galley kitchen along one wall. He could smell Chinese food. She poured him a glass of wine, told him to make himself comfortable while she reheated their dinner and fluffed the rice.

  He looked around. The loft was large and nicely done. A vast wooden floor, glossy like the floor of a gym, windows on three sides, a row of structural pillars with modified Doric capitals. He noticed a pair of tennis racquets and cans of balls in a basket near the door. She had set a bottle of soy sauce on the dining table, had laid out chopsticks and napkins, little teacups and a bowl of fruit.

  He explored, ran his hand along the headrail of her brass bed, set beneath a slowly revolving ceiling fan. He found his way to a grouping of chairs, chrome legs and sling seats, arranged in an entertaining area with a couch. In one section there was a darkroom—he smelled the faint odor of photographic chemicals. She worked, cooked, ate, bathed and slept in this enormous space.

  On the walls between the windows she had hung huge mounted photographs.

  "This all your stuff?"

  She turned from the stove. "Yeah. My private gallery. Prices on request."

  He took his time examining her work, pausing before each photograph. There were two shots taken in Vietnam: dog-tired soldiers in a trench, their eyes smoldering in faces dark with agony and fatigue; an old Vietnamese woman looking up with terror, the sky behind her filled with fluttering helicopters looking ominously like wasps. There was an action shot of a boxer Janek recognized as a coming middleweight; she'd caught the moment of impact of a punch, the features distorted, the cartilage crushed against the facial bones. There was a shot, too, of a Russian chess champion, intense, studying his position, an interesting combination of concentration and fear in his eyes. She was good. She knew what she was doing, her work was powerful and there was something fearless about her eye.

  She was bringing the food over to the table.

  "Can I help?"

  "No, thanks. I got everything. Sit down."

  "Well," he said, "this stuff looks good. Not the usual carry-out."

  "It is good. Eat." She heaped pork with black-bean sauce on his plate. "I made you this morning before you came over. I knew it was you from the way Al described you once."

  He was amused to hear police jargon. "Made you," he smiled at that. "How did he describe me?" he asked, fumbling with his chopsticks, wondering if he should ask her for a fork.

  "Said you moved like Robert Mitchum. And you do, Janek. In a way you really do. Do you mind if I call you Janek? Al always did. He never called you Frank. Janek's a good name. Seems so right for a police lieutenant. Do you mind?"

  He said he didn't mind. She smiled at him and he smiled back. He liked her. She was as direct as her photographs. She didn't flinch or blink when he looked her in the eye.

  "Sorry about this morning. I didn't mean to be so abrupt."

  "That's okay. I was glad when you came over. I didn't know anyone there and I felt kind of outside the thing. But I wanted to be there anyway."

  "You and Al were pretty close, I guess."

  "Is that a question or a fact?"

  "Neither. More like a feeble query."

  "We were friends. I liked him. He liked me."

  "Not lovers?"

  "No, we weren't. It could have gone that way, at least maybe in Al's mind, but not in mine and I made my feelings clear. We gave each other signals and after that we settled down. He used to come by afternoons. He liked to sit around and talk. I liked listening to him. He talked about his work and I talked about mine. Sometimes when I was working in the darkroom he'd just sit out here reading magazines. It was good to have him around. We enjoyed each other's company. And that's all there was."

  So—they just sat around and talked afternoons; they were friends and nothing more. He believed her, had no reason not to, but still, he thought, it was a curious relationship, the old beat-up depressed retired cop and this very attractive, no-nonsense young female photographer.

  "You really liked him?"

  "He was a great guy. Told terrific stories. Loved talking about his old cases, and he had a lot of good ones to talk about. He was a real person. That's what I liked. And I guess, too, he reminded me a little of my dad. Maybe that's what we had going—a sort of father-daughter thing." She looked up at him. "I'm the daughter of a cop."

  "NYPD?"

  She nodded.

  "So we're part of the same family."

  "Guess we are. You, me, Al, and maybe one hundred thousand other people too."

  "You said Al mentioned me."

  She nodded. "He liked you very much. He was your rabbi, he told me, and I knew what that meant: the guy who watched out for you and gave you advice when you started out. He was proud of you, Janek, that you'd done so well and made lieutenant, even after that business with your partner. He said you took a lot of static over that but that you rebounded from the tragedy and turned into one of the best detectives around. He said you understood people and that's what being a detective was all about. He said you were better than he'd ever been, but maybe not so great as you liked to think."

  "He really said all that?" Janek was surprised at how smoothly she poured it out. And, too, that Al had told her about Terry, and had used the word "tragedy"—the very word he had denied to him while standing that morning by his grave.

  "He said you were very good, but you thought you were better than very good."

  He laughed. "I'm not sure I ever thought I was all that great."

  She laughed, too. "Well, maybe Al was wrong."

  A pause. Their eyes met. Then he asked her about her work. She'd done two books, she said, the first when she was starting out, a very emotional collection of stuff she'd shot in Vietnam. She'd gone out there practically as a novice. "I was very ambitious, I wanted it all. I wanted to win the Pulitzer Prize. I stayed a couple years, made good contacts, got pampered a lot by the press corps and the military because I was a woman. I was lucky. Nothing happened to me. I know now I was reckless, but back then I thought I was blessed. Anyway, the book got good notices and when I came back here I wanted to try something different, so I went into my cruel period. That's what I call it now."

  "I thought I detected a cruel streak." He gestured at the blowups on the walls.

  She shook her head. "No, not like those. My cruel-period stuff was—well, it's a little hard to explain." She laid down her chopsticks, got up, fetched an oversized book, brought it back to the table, then watched his face as he flipped the pages and looked.

  It was called Celebrities, a book of portraits of film directors, painters, famous writers, other photographers, and she seemed to have caught them all exhibiting a sad and vacant stare. Janek understood what she meant by "cruel"—there was a sameness about these people, not a physical sameness, since they were men and women, young and old, but something similar in their expressions, repeated in their eyes: meanness, selfishness, vanity, and beyond all that a sense of emptiness and vacancy, even disappointment with their lives.

  He nodded. "Yes, I see. You got them all to pose a certain way. How did you manage that? I imagine some of these people were upset."

  "Some, I guess." She shrugged. "I really wasn't trying to be mean. Just looking
for something, a kind of after-effect. I'd tell them to pose, they'd puff themselves up, then I'd catch them with a second click just as they were letting out their air. I wasn't trying to say they were phonies, though that's what a lot of people thought. I was working on the premise that even the most handsome, most beautiful, richest, most successful, most secure, glamorous and confident people are vulnerable. Not that they're vain, but that they're human and that time and age will break them, too."

  She had looked right at him, giving him the feeling she was telling him something important about herself. And as he looked at the portraits again he saw exactly what she meant. Her pictures weren't cruel so much as compassionate. "I guess if you'd taken shots like these of drunks and bums, no one would have accused you of being mean."

  She laughed. "They would have called me pretentious. Mocked me for an unearned social conscience. But because my subjects were rich and famous everyone assumed I was putting them down. I wasn't. All I was saying was that their confidence was a mask, that they lived with the same background fear as the drunk and the bum—that even when life is sweet, it's much, much too short."

  He was startled to hear her say such a thing. She was young to have worked from such a vision. But he could tell from the portraits that the vision was deeply felt, not a borrowed sentiment. He looked at her again. He hadn't expected her to be like this. He had taken her for a model when in fact she was an artist. "I can see why Al liked to come around," he said. "He may have told good stories, but you're pretty special yourself."

  She smiled; she liked his compliment. "We didn't talk like this much, Janek. We really just bulled around. It was fun. That's all it was. An honest friendship. Pleasure in each other's company."

  "How did you meet?" She was loading more food onto his plate.

  "That was a funny thing. I play tennis fairly regularly at a club a mile or so away."

  "That thing on the river under the plastic bubbles?"

  She nodded. "That's the place. I generally bicycle over there. I use my bike a lot around the neighborhood. Anyway, one day I was riding home and I hit a pothole and fell down. I got bruised and twisted my ankle, and Al just happened to be walking by. He came over, helped me up, and checked my leg to see if I was hurt. He was very nice and he ended up walking my bike and supporting me as I limped back here."

  "I bet he offered to carry you up the stairs."

  "He was very sweet. I could tell right away he was a cop. When he got me to the door I thought the least I owed him was a drink. So I asked him in and we just started talking while I soaked my ankle, and that's how it started. And it just went on from there."

  A nice story—it pleased Janek, sounded like the sort of gentle pickup Al would make. A little too slick, maybe, especially the coincidence that Caroline's father had also been a cop, but such things happened and he had no reason to doubt her. He reminded himself he wasn't interrogating a suspect, just checking up on Al and his absences from home.

  "Lucky meeting for both of you. When did all this happen?"

  "Couple of months ago. Late June, I think."

  "Did he ever talk about a case?"

  "That's all he talked about. There were so many. But if you mean did he talk about a particular one, no. He'd just go on from one to the other in a chain."

  So there it was—Al had told Lou he was working on an old case because she wouldn't have understood a friendship with a girl half her age. She wouldn't believe Al just came here to talk and listen, a release from the prison of the house, a chance to laugh with someone young.

  "I had no idea he was depressed," she said. "I just couldn't believe it when I heard he shot himself. There was no sign of anything like that. He was happy when he was here. Sometimes we'd order in Chinese food like tonight, and he'd stay on until I'd throw him out. 'Go home, DiMona,' I'd tell him. 'Get your butt out of here so I can take a bath.' We'd listen to music. Play chess and talk. He seemed a reasonably happy man."

  "He kept it from you, obviously. You were probably the only nice thing he had going the last few months."

  "But why, Janek? Why did he do it?"

  He shrugged. "Old detectives, cops—it happens to us a lot. One of the highest suicide rates. No one's sure exactly why. They warn us about it. Preach to us about depression. Something to do with the job. We end up tired, disillusioned, bored. All that stress and tension, that confrontation every day year in, year out, and then suddenly nothing but your thoughts and then you start to brood. Guys take it different ways. I knew Al twenty-five years and I wouldn't have figured him for what he did. Except I've known other guys I didn't figure for that kind of move, and they surprised me, too, so now I'm not all that surprised."

  He helped her carry the dishes to the galley, rolled up his sleeves, rinsed the dishes, then handed them to her so she could place them in the dishwasher.

  "This is very domestic. You're a domestic guy."

  "It's been a while," he said. "I'm divorced a couple years. I usually eat at a delicatessen, or buy carry-out and eat off paper plates. Not much in the way of appliances where I live. Got a coffee maker and a toaster. That's about it."

  They sat in her chrome-and-leather chairs after everything was stowed away, and she told him about her current book, the one she was working on now. It was called, tentatively, Aggression. The blowups on the walls were part of it. She was shooting men at moments of physical stress: prize-fighters, football and hockey players, a truck driver yelling at a pedestrian, a cop collaring a thief, lawyers quarreling, a fencer about to thrust, a bullfighter facing horns. "The aesthetic of male aggression," she told him. "It's always fascinated me. Maybe that's why I like talking to cops so much. You guys see it all the time. You live with it constantly. Most of us just see people in vapid moments, but you see them at the heights of stress."

  "Interesting. Sort of a curious subject for a woman."

  "Come on, Janek, you don't believe in stereotypes. Anyway, male aggression can be a turn-on. I saw more than my share of it when I was covering the war, and I found myself attracted at times. So, the subject is aggression, but there's a strong erotic theme. What's next? I wonder. Still lifes? Water swirls in the sand?" She shook her head. "Wish I knew. Not going backwards, that's for sure."

  It was nearly midnight when he left. It had been an exhausting day—the funeral, the switched-heads case—but for all of that he felt refreshed. Caroline Wallace was extraordinary; he couldn't put her out of his mind. As he drove back to Manhattan he found himself starting to envy Al. Friendship with a woman like that—how very lucky Al had been.

  The Mystery of Destruction

  Chief Medical Examiner Gerald Heyman was not his usual cheerful self. "I told Hart straight out," he said, "don't send any more of your goons down here."

  Dr. Heyman was in his early fifties, with a permanent tan and the look of a man who jogged laps around Central Park at dawn. His iron-gray hair was parted in the middle. His chin was squared off and he sat rigidly in his chair behind his precisely ordered desk.

  "We have our temperamental flare-ups. We're human beings, too. But we're also professional men and we observe the normal courtesies. When we have a disagreement we talk it over. Sometimes voices are raised. What we don't do is try and settle things with fists. Another thing we don't do is get pieces of bodies mixed around. When someone's been dismembered, and I don't care whether it's limbs or heads, we tag the pieces and keep them together, and the photos always back us up."

  "There was never any question of a mix-up. Hart was very clear to me on that."

  "Fine. I just want to make sure you know where I stand. I don't want this to reach a point where some baby prosecutor or some simpering defense attorney starts claiming we made the switch down here."

  "I don't think that's going to happen."

  "I predict, absolutely, that it will."

  "The photos would certainly dispute such a claim."

  "Exactly."

  Well, then, Janek was tempted to ask, who gives a goo
d goddamn?

  He restrained himself. No point in being argumentative. Dr. Heyman, satisfied that he had conveyed his position, turned him over to David Yoshiro, the deputy examiner who had performed the autopsies.

  Yoshiro was a short, serious, formal young Japanese-American who wore black-frame glasses and seemed dwarfed in his starched white coat. He spoke neutrally, methodically, in a deep resonant voice.

  "Ireland was stabbed through her shower curtain once in the back and an even dozen times in a cluster pattern across her chest. I found pieces of the curtain in the wounds. She was then carried or dragged to her bed, unrolled, turned over and decapitated as if by an executioner—a single powerful blow straight across the back of the neck. Later the killer or executioner made an effort to affix the Beard head to the place where the Ireland head had been. He cut both of them in the same place, so the pieces fitted together fairly well."

  Really, thought Janek, this is an atrocious case. Absolutely nauseating. "What about Miss Beard?"

  "I count eleven wounds, also in the chest. These were deep plunges, grouped closely around the heart. The extra thrusts were not necessary. Clinically speaking both women were killed almost at once. Beard was stabbed through a sheet, decapitated from the back the same as Ireland, then turned over so that Ireland's head could be pushed onto her neck. I have the impression that the heads were transported in plastic bags. Carefully, too, because the hair wasn't bloodied much. No finger marks anywhere. The killer was very careful. I suspect he handled the heads through the plastic, pulling the bags off slowly once he had them mounted the way he liked."

  Plastic bags. It was Wednesday—if the bags had been dropped into a street barrel, the evidence had long since been ground up in a cartage truck.

  "How close in time?"

  "Certainly within a couple hours. I'd say that Ireland was murdered first. I can't swear to that, but there are signs."

  "Weapons?"

  "Two. The stabbing weapon, a sharp-pointed hunting or kitchen knife, and the decapitation instrument, a long-bladed knife, very sharp, very heavy, very fine. The work was precise—single blows. The executioner did not hesitate. It is not that easy to decapitate. You can hack and hack. But in this case it was accomplished with a single stroke." Yoshiro made a gesture as if bringing down from over his head a sword gripped in both his hands.