Switch

by William Bayer

When Caroline returned he had finished a second beer. Her hair was still wet from her shower.

  "Sorry about those people. They're not important. Just tennis friends." She smiled.

  "Nice people. Don't apologize for them."

  "Boring people. And you're right—I won't." She studied him. "Something the matter? Bad this morning with Mrs. D?"

  He shook his head. "That went pretty much the way I thought."

  "But something's bothering you. I can tell."

  He nodded.

  "Want to talk about it?"

  "It wouldn't be the nicest story you ever heard."

  "Why don't you tell me anyway."

  He saw she was serious, waiting for him to speak. For a moment he hesitated. He'd resolved not to burden her with his case. But it was part of his life, it was gnawing at him, and now she was asking him to share. "Okay," he said, "but stop me when you've heard enough." Then he told her the saga of Switched Heads.

  She listened well. He could not imagine Sarah ever listening to him so well, or Lou DiMona, or any other detective's wife. Such women cut off or turned brittle when the conversation turned to work, as if the substance of a detective's life was so awful it was best ignored. But Caroline was different, had photographed a war, had been intimate with violence, cruelty and death.

  "...still got to look at that gym teacher," he said, "but I doubt there's anything there. Last night, standing behind the shower curtain, I had this feeling there were things I'd seen that hadn't registered on me yet. Things I knew but didn't understand, that kept backing out of reach. Thought about it again this morning and just now when you were changing. I keep coming back to those photographs." He glanced at her. "Ugly. Really ugly stuff."

  "I've seen a lot of ugly stuff. You want me to look at them?"

  "Would you?" She was marvelous; by some miraculous process she could read his mind.

  "Of course. But I'm no detective."

  "I wouldn't want you to be. I'd just like you to look at them as a professional photographer and tell me what you see."

  She stood up. "Okay. Let's go."

  "Drive into the city now?"

  "Why stall around? You want me to look. Take me in, Janek. I'm ready to go to work."

  As they drove into Manhattan he told her more. "I knew, soon as I got this, it wasn't going to be my kind of case. I'm good when I can see things through someone else's eyes, but this is so far from anything I can understand that I knew upfront I wasn't going to link in without pushing myself to a place I'd never been."

  Her eyes glowed outside the precinct house. She sniffed the air expectantly as they walked through and then up the stairs in back. "Perfect," she said, "that crummy smell." She smiled. "Criminals and cops."

  When they reached the squad room he exposed the wall where Aaron had mounted the crime-scene photographs. Then he withdrew to his swivel chair, waiting to hear what she would say.

  She stood before each shot, stared at it, then moved on to the next. The room was still. He could feel her concentration, the intensity of her gaze, although he could not see her eyes. Watching her from behind, he felt moved by her posture, the proud way she stood before each awful photograph.

  It was ten minutes before she spoke, a long time, time enough for a large amount of tension to build up. When she did speak finally, she didn't turn, but continued to stand with her back to him, facing the wall.

  "Photography's primitive, but these are powerful pictures. Tabloid style. It's all the rage today. Some of the serious young photographers are trying to imitate it. You know—shoot like street paparazzi, pop off flashbulbs and capture the hard surface of events. Stick these shots on the wall of a trendy gallery and some critic will come along and call them art. 'As sensational, powerful and pure as a blundering crime-scene photographer's work...' But this isn't a gallery. These were taken by a real police photographer. Still, there's something self-conscious in them. A special artistry. And power."

  She paused, peered at the wall again as if trying to discover what she meant. "No attempt to pretty up. This isn't the German School of Artistic Cruelty. No models posing like they're dead. These women are dead. But there's something going on."

  She paused again. "Maybe it's the tension. Between the artlessness of the camera work and the artistic way that everything's arranged. I don't know. Looks to me like the subject matter, the girls, their heads, the bedding, the blood—like all that's been arranged for maximum effect." She turned to him with a querying expression. "Guess that doesn't make much sense."

  "We'll see if it does," he said. "What do you mean by 'arranged?'"

  "Like it's been set up."

  "You mean whoever did this set things up so what he'd done would get photographed in this powerful way?"

  "I know that sounds crazy..."

  "Why don't you show me what you mean."

  She turned back to the wall. "The heads, of course. The faces and all that. But I'd go further. I'd say the wrinkles on the sheets. They're not random. Too perfect, too precise. You could spend an hour setting up shots like these, altering the bedding, creating shadows on the pillows, stringing out the hair, fluffing it out the way it's fluffed out here. It's as if killing them and switching them wasn't enough. As if he had to fuss with them afterward. Arrange things for his pleasure. You know—to please his eye."

  She paused again, but he didn't cut in; he could sense she had more to say. "There's another thing. Don't quite know how to explain it. But..." She paused. "It seems to me there's something almost loving in these shots. Not loving toward the victims. I don't mean that. But I feel somehow that afterward, after he did this cruel thing, they were handled...lovingly." She turned back to Janek, perplexed.

  They drove uptown in silence. He found a parking space near his building, then guided her on foot into Central Park. The sun, low in the sky, about to sink behind the apartment houses on Central Park West, cast a soft glow over the meadows and lengthened the shadows of the elms.

  He placed his arm about her waist as they strolled along a bridle path. There was a scent of foliage about to decay, the sweet smell of late-summer grass. To Janek the park, so roughly trod upon through July and August, became suddenly transformed. This living room of the city, so badly used for months, became a garden of delights. Each tree seemed etched from every other. Each leaf and bush asserted itself as unique. Even the vandalized streetlamps and ruined benches looked graceful despite abuse. He was suffused by a sense of beauty, the perfect symmetry of nature, of his and Caroline's place in the scheme, and was filled with a mellow happiness.

  He looked at her, could see that her thoughts were someplace else. Feeling her restlessness, he asked her gently what was wrong.

  "Just wondering—am I going to end up like that?" She glanced quickly at him, then stared ahead.

  "Like what?"

  "Those girls. The ones in your case."

  He tightened his arm around her. "How can you think a thing like that?"

  She shook her head. "Just seeing those pictures, the way the girls looked. Aggression, violence—my subjects maybe because they scare me so much and I'm working with them now to try and confront my fear. I've wondered why aggression intrigues me. I think I've always had this idea I was going to end up a victim of it, bloody, broken, maybe cut up. I have a recurring fantasy of myself trapped in a smashed-up car, with frightened people peering in through the windows and others trying to drag me out of the wreckage and my life just seeping away in a steady stream of blood. I look around and notice almost casually that one of my legs is gone. 'My goodness,' I say to myself, 'I seem to have lost my leg.' And then I close my eyes and die."

  She grasped him, placed her hand upon his chest so he could feel his heart beating against her palm. He wrapped her in his arms, stroked her hair and told her he would protect her from everything she feared. We all live under the threat of violence, he told her; that's what it means to live in a city—to have fear constantly in the background of our lives. So we protect ou
rselves by imagining the worst things that can happen, a kind of magical thinking, he explained, a sort of talisman against our fright.

  It was her first visit to his apartment. Her face was rapt as he unlocked the caged outer door, led her through the short tunnel beneath the steps, unlocked the solid door and showed her in. She looked around slowly, curiously, taking in each piece of his furniture. He watched as she moved about lightly touching his refrigerator, his reading chair, his bureau, his bed, and then the inherited workbench covered with the entrails of accordions and all of his father's special tools.

  She picked up a small accordion, opened it, touched several of the keys. The sound was blunt and awful. They laughed.

  "Play for me, Janek," she said. "Please play for me."

  He hesitated. He rarely had time to play; lately, when he touched the instruments it was only to be certain that they worked. His father's old accordions from Hungary and Austria were sentimental artifacts. But when she asked him to play for her he knew he could not refuse.

  He went to a closet, hauled out his best accordion, a Depression-era model made at the Damian shop. She withdrew to his bed, sat there with her elbows on her knees while he strapped on the harness and turned his workbench chair so it faced the room.

  He played some scales, warming up his fingers, then little melodies that whimpered through the pipes. He went on to melancholy carnival tunes, and when he felt limber and glanced at her and saw she was watching carefully he played Scarlatti for her, then shifted to Rimsky-Korsakov, then on to Khachaturian, playing louder and louder, fuller and fuller, playing on until the light faded from the windows and the room finally turned dark. She switched on the lamp beside his bed and he continued playing, all the music he had ever known. He played out of his love for her, played like a troubadour courting his lady, while she sat enraptured, her eyes never leaving his face, the two of them immersed in each other, enveloped by the sound.

  Limitless Depths

  They overslept Monday morning, woke languorously like lovers on a holiday, and then, as they were sipping coffee, Janek suddenly remembered that he had a case. He moved too fast then, shaved too quickly, and cut the underside of his jaw. He held a tissue to the wound but could not stanch the flow. Caroline inspected it, cleaned it for him, then pressed on it like a sorceress until, miraculously, it closed.

  When he was dressed she handed him his thirty-eight and watched keenly as he strapped it on. "They say you can tell a lot about a cop by the way he handles his weapon," she said. "But I think it's the putting on and taking off that really says the most. I like watching you do it. In the morning when you arm yourself you show me your competence and power. At night when you put it down gently on the bedside table you show me that you're vulnerable and that you don't have to prove you aren't."

  Driving her to Long Island City, he thought about what she'd said. It was fantastic the way she observed him, read the details of his life.

  On his way back to Manhattan, coming off the Queensboro Bridge, he got stuck in traffic—people fuming, honking, while a rookie cop on the ramp tried helplessly to undo the snarl. He looked at two men in the next car and tried to imagine that their heads were switched. There were two women in the car on the other side and he played the same game with them. He looked rapidly from one to the other, switching their heads in his mind. He put the traffic rookie's head on one of the women and then switched the heads in the car stalled in front. The more times he tried it, the easier it became. Back and forth, on and off, try his on her and hers on him—a strange disquieting exercise. He wondered what it would be like to go around the city for weeks working himself into that. Could get to you, catch you up, make you crazy, he thought. Start thinking like that, he thought, and it could lead to something very bad.

  It was nearly ten when he reached the precinct house, late for a special squad commander starting his second week on a priority double homicide. He took the steps two at a time, hearing trouble even before he reached the door.

  Sal and Stanger were standing at opposite ends of the squad room gesturing angrily while containers of coffee grew tepid on their desks. A full-scale shootout: Sal was giving it to Stanger for not checking Amanda's roof, and Stanger was lashing back as best he could.

  "What the fuck kind of detective are you? What kind of asshole investigation's that?"

  "Fuck you, Marchetti—you've been bugging me from the start. You're such a hotshot, what have you come up with? A big fat zero. Shit."

  Janek told them to shut up. Silence. Scowling. Then some cautious circling around. "This coffee's crap," snorted Sal. Stanger laughed. He announced that he was going to start checking on Amanda's dog-walk routine if that was okay with the lieutenant, and that his victim profile book on Amanda was waiting on the lieutenant's desk.

  Janek leafed through the loose-leaf notebook. "Looks like you got her down fairly well," he said. After Stanger left he spoke without looking up. "Really think it helps to crush his ego, Sal?"

  Sal apologized. "But just thinking about it yesterday pissed me off. Suppose there'd been something up there. Gone now, swept away, or washed away by the rain. He says he checked out the super, but how do we know? Can we trust him or do we have to double-check everything he does?"

  Sal left for an interview with an assistant DA about disputed evidence in another case. When Janek was alone he went to the wall and stood again before the photographs. Caroline had said the victim shots looked arranged. Now, when he studied them fresh, he saw what she meant.

  The phone rang. It was Sweeney. Hart wanted to see Janek at two o'clock. Back to the wall. "Arrange things for his pleasure, to please his eye," Caroline had said. Dr. Yosiro had spoken of a man who had presumed to create new human beings. So, someone artistic, creative, a creative killer. Someone who could turn a double murder into a puzzle, a design.

  Aaron came in. "Scratch Hazel Carter, Frank. But you were right about her social life. She and little Miss Tuttle make whoopie-do together in a high-rise off Gracie Square. Unfortunately it happens they spent that weekend at a friend's place in Dutchess County, which still leaves the gym as a possible starting point."

  "Well, I'm not scratching her yet, not before you check out the alibi. Talk to the 'friend.' Look at her hard. Be sure she's telling the truth."

  He told Aaron then about Caroline's analysis of the photographs and about his Saturday night walkthrough with Sal.

  "Sounds like you walked through a little fast," Aaron said. "You did the whole thing in an hour and a half, but she says it could have taken an hour at each end to fix things up. You know, there's something very relaxed about that. Certain and very confident."

  "Superbly planned."

  "Maybe perfectly planned."

  "He knew what he was going to do before he started. But do you think all that multiple stabbing was relaxed?"

  "That's what doesn't fit, that violent stabbing and then the precise and careful work afterward with the heads."

  "Two signatures. Two weapons. What about two people? Or one person with two personalities? My photographer friend said she felt he handled the victims 'lovingly.'"

  "Sure, kill them violently, then gently love them up. Once they stop moving you can do what you want with them. Mold them to your will."

  "But they're still warm and bleeding. You'd have to be a freak to be able to play with them and stay detached."

  "For Christ's sake, Frank, we know we're dealing with a freak."

  "An artistic freak."

  "Sure. A very artistic kind of freak."

  In the subway on his way downtown Janek played switched-heads with the other passengers. Crushed together on the seat, their heads at nearly the same level, it was even easier than in the car. Two high school girls side by side. Bang! Switch them. Then switch them back. If he shifted his eyes fast enough he could do it almost instantaneously. The process reminded him of police artists calling up features onto computer screens. A way to design people, or to redesign them. Police artists.
Someone artistic. A painter, sculptor or photographer. After his frenzy the killer was relaxed.... But there was still something gnawing away at the back part of Janek's brain. Forget it. Let it simmer. The thing now, he knew, was to improvise a theory he could use to dazzle Hart.

  He switched more heads as he crossed Police Plaza, and some more in the elevator on his way to Hart's floor. He switched a pair of secretaries walking toward him down the hall, but knew that the difference between imagining it and doing it was as great as the difference between fantasizing making love to them and raping them in a parking lot.

  "Anyone look at that engine yet, Lieutenant?" Sergeant Sweeney grinned at him from behind his well-ordered desk.

  "What?"

  "Your car. Remember—I drove your car."

  "Yeah." Janek nodded. "Didn't you mention a garage?"

  Sweeney snatched a card out of a drawer, scribbled "20% Discount" on it, stamped it with an NYPD seal, then initialed the back. Janek didn't like Sweeney and for a moment he thought about tearing the card in two and dropping the pieces on the desk. But then there was a buzz, Sweeney picked up his phone, listened, nodded and, in the special tone of an usher on intimate terms with power, whispered, "CD will see you now, Lieutenant," while he drew a neat line through Janek's name on his appointment list.

  Hart was pale. Like most of the chiefs he spent too much time indoors. Janek recognized the pallor, flesh cooked sallow by fluorescent lamps. And, as always, he was struck by Hart's eyes, cold lifeless glowing little stars.

  "So, how's it going, Frank? Things okay? That DiMona woman settling down?"

  "Looked in on her yesterday. She's doing about as well as you'd expect."

  "Good." Hart sounded pleased. "Better keep an eye on her anyway. I thought she looked pretty raw. Any clue yet what was going on with DiMona the last few weeks?"

  Janek shook his head.

  "Burnout, I guess. Post-retirement kind. Department commissioned a study some years back. We wanted to know the danger signs so we could put the wives on alert. If that wife of his had gotten the word she might have saved herself a lot of grief. So..." Suddenly Hart beamed. "How goes Ireland/ Beard?"