Switch

by William Bayer

  All the dialogue and sound effects were for Sweeney's benefit. Now the back of the sergeant's shirt was soaked. He knew the crunch was coming, the moment of truth. His mind would be working now at triple speed, and Sweeney, Janek knew, wasn't dumb.

  "Want to talk about it?" Janek asked. The same diamond-hard whisper he'd used before. Sweeney struggled to nod. "Then talk," Janek said. Then: "Oh yeah, the gag."

  He got out, went around to the left back door, opened it, grabbed hold of Sweeney around the knees and pulled him roughly off the seat and halfway out. When his face was resting on the edge of the car floor he eased him onto the ground, because he didn't want to injure his head.

  He nodded to Caroline. She was sitting, door open, in the driver's seat, busy stripping wires. Janek set Sweeney so he could see her, then reached around and untied the gag. He unwrapped it slowly. When it was off Sweeney was panting hard.

  "You got about six minutes," Janek said. "You can start talking now."

  "I don't—"

  "Listen, Sweeney. This is it. We're through fucking around."

  "Put him on his back," Caroline said. She said it perfectly, like she didn't care if he talked or not. Her eyes were perfect, too—cold hard points gleaming in the night.

  Janek rolled Sweeney over so he was lying parallel to the car, then squatted down beside him. If Sweeney wanted to look at Caroline he had to turn the other way. The idea was to make him twist back and forth as he struggled to watch them both.

  "So, tell me."

  "Won't stand up."

  "Who gives a shit about that?"

  "Who's she?" He gestured toward Caroline.

  "She's a person who wants to blow you up."

  Sweeney stared at her. "Seen her before. Where?"

  "My rabbi's burial," Janek said.

  Sweeney shook his head. He couldn't figure them out. "You're bluffing. This is some kind of bullshit stunt."

  "Suit yourself." Janek nodded to Caroline. Sweeney twisted his head to look at her.

  "Okay, what do you want?"

  "What's Hart's connection to the garage?"

  "No connection. My baby all the way."

  "Fine. Then you can burn alone. She's going to blow you up little piece by little piece."

  Sweeney twisted around to look at her again. She was molding the explosive now.

  "Little charges," Janek said. "Maybe your thumbs first. Then a couple fingers. Then maybe your balls. Then, when she gets tired of the screaming, she'll go ahead and do your guts."

  "You're fucking crazy."Then: "Why?"

  "Really don't know who she is?"

  Sweeney shook his head. She had placed the caps in the explosive. Now she was looking very competent the almost loving way she was closing the plastic around the caps.

  "Tommy Wallace's daughter."

  "So what?"

  "You ordered Tommy killed."

  "Bullshit I did!"

  "See." It was Caroline who spoke this time. "Told you, Frank. It's okay, too."

  "You're both crazy."

  "Sure we are. She said you'd deny it. That's why she wants to blow you apart."

  "You're a cop, Janek."

  "So?"

  "You can't let her do it."

  "All the same to me." Janek stood up.

  "Wait a minute. Why? Just tell me why."

  "Because it's personal and I don't interfere in personal stuff." Janek paused. "Well, so long, Sweeney." He walked over to Caroline.

  Her charges were ready. She was attaching the wires to the switch. "I'll move the car," he said. "Blow that up, too, we're really stuck." They laughed. She got up, brought her charges and wires over to Sweeney, stood staring down at him lying hog-tied face-up on the ground.

  Janek started the ignition. This was the turning point. If Sweeney believed them he'd have to deal. If he didn't, if they'd lost him...Janek didn't want to think about that.

  Call me now, motherfucker.

  "Janek!"

  He turned. Sweeney's eyes were panicked. "Yeah?"

  "I'll give you the garage."

  "Already got it."

  "You said—"

  "Tell you what—I'll trade you."

  "What?"

  Janek got out of the car, came over, stood beside Caroline. Sweeney looked helpless writhing in his bonds. "Don't care about the garage and neither does she. What we care about is Hart. Hart ordered Tommy Wallace killed. Wanted him out because he thought he was being blackmailed. Supposed to look like a gangland execution but wasn't done all that well. And now there's a Hoboken detective who can show that Wallace's body was stashed in a stolen car stripped in your back shop. You think your goon mechanics will keep quiet, but they won't—not when they find out we're talking homicide. You got one chance, Sweeney. Come over to Hoboken with us now, give evidence against Hart and I'll see you get a deal on Wallace. About the same as you'd get for chopping cars, four to five, something like that. But meantime the garage carries on, it's yours, still making money, making plenty for you when you get out. You'll do hard time, sure, but not like Hart. He's Chief. He'll really get it. You'll be lost in the shuffle. Hart ordered the killing, so he's the guy who ought to pay. That's the deal. The garage for Hart. Take it or leave it. Up to you." Janek glanced over at Caroline. "She's got a grievance and far as I'm concerned she can take care of it any way she likes."

  Sweeney looked into Janek's eyes and then into Caroline's and then at Caroline's hands. She was fluttering her fingers the way Jamie Sullivan had taught her.

  "Forget it, Frank," she said.

  Janek nodded. He looked at her charges. "Never mind the little ones. Tape the big one to his belly and do it all at once."

  And then it happened, so fast Janek could hardly believe it. Burned, broken and bluffed out, Sweeney began spontaneously to talk.

  What was strangest of all, Janek decided later, was the way he addressed himself to Caroline. As if he owed her the story, as if he needed to justify himself to her, as if it was very important that she understand his relatively minor role in the execution plot.

  Janek tape-recorded everything, breaking in to ask questions, pinning down times and places, getting details so that if Sweeney decided to recant he'd still have enough to make a decent case. But he didn't think Sweeney would recant or claim they'd forced him to confess. The garage deal was too good and, more important, Janek thought, once Sweeney betrayed Hart, no matter under what duress, he would find it nearly impossible to feel loyalty toward him again.

  He found a phone booth in Lyndhurst and dialed the number he'd been harboring for months.

  It was one o'clock in the morning. Carmichael's wife answered. He could hear her nudging Carmichael awake. "Get up, Jim, Some cop from Manhattan. Says it's urgent. Wake up...."

  "Who the hell—?"

  "Janek."

  "Who?"

  "Frank Janek. Lunch at the Clam Broth House. We talked about the Wallace case."

  "I remember you. Why you calling now?"

  "Oh, Carmichael," Janek said, his voice lilting, high on what he'd done, "I got a terrific gift for you, the Big Case you've been waiting for. So wake up and get your ass down fast to your station house and get a stenographer and be ready to read a man his rights. Meet you there in fifteen minutes. You're going to be famous, you lucky, lucky cop...."

  Hours later, after he'd called Lou and told her what had happened, he stood on a Hoboken pier, facing Manhattan, a hundred million lights sparkling in the towers across the river, the city luminous against the cold black winter night.

  She called his name. He turned. She was holding her camera to her eye. He faced her lens straight on. She pressed her shutter.

  Click.

  It would be a photograph he would study all the rest of his life, bringing it out whenever he questioned what he had done. Then he would look into his face, his eyes, searching for his passions, the costs he had paid, and, for all the brilliance of his end games, the melancholy that filled him when his two great cases were f
inally solved.

  It was a great photograph, he thought, the city soft but present in the background, the face of the detective sharp, his features etched, filled with fatigue and triumph, sadness too. The face of a man who had made a dangerous journey into a lawless country that for years he'd been too frightened to explore. But with love and luck the man had made the crossing back. All that was in the picture. She had caught him cold, he thought.

  SPECIAL AUTHOR’S EDITION SUPPLEMENT

  “SWITCH”: Q&A WITH WILLIAM BAYER

  Q: How did you come up with the concept of the switched heads?

  A: As you can imagine, I get that question a lot. The glib answer is that I’m a sick pup. How else could I come up with such a thing? The guys who produced the four-hour TV miniseries (titled “Doubletake,” broadcast on CBS) told me that when the story was first pitched to them they wanted to gag! But the truth is that the idea didn’t come to me all at once, but evolved over time.

  Q: Can you say more about this evolution?

  A: Like a lot of people who lived in New York, I was fascinated by the famous Hoffert-Wylie case, also sometimes called “the Career Girls Murders.” Two educated upper-middle class young women roommates were found murdered in their Upper East Side apartment. There was a lot more to Hoffert-Wylie than that; an innocent man was convicted of the crimes and later exonerated. But what struck me was the notion of two murdered roommates. And then I got this idea: what if each girl was found in her bed, but the girls’ heads had been switched?

  Q: Why didn’t you go with that?

  A: I felt that, though it would be a very cruel act, it wouldn’t be that difficult for the murderer to set up. I wanted something even more fiendish, difficult and complex. I remember considering two murders, one on each coast, again with the heads switched. Of course this would have been almost impossibly difficult since the killer would have to transport the heads cross country. In the end I came up with a head switch between a young woman living on the Upper East Side and another living on the Upper West Side. I liked that cross-town idea a lot. It kept the story in Manhattan, and allowed me to play with women who were opposites: a high-class call girl and a teacher at a fancy private school.

  Q: The madonna-whore thing?

  A: That’s what the detectives think at first, but of course it turns out to be a lot more complicated. Still, the difference between the victims is very important. I wanted this to be a totally psychological crime, one that Janek would have to solve psychologically. He would have to figure out what the killer was trying to say. Personally, I’m not interested in crime solving forensic techniques, the kind of stuff you see on CSI. I like psychological crimes.

  Q: Is this the first Janek novel?

  A: Actually Janek appears first in an earlier book, Peregrine. He’s a major character there, but not THE major character. He’s also somewhat different. In Switch, I kept some of his qualities from Peregrine, eliminated others, then fully fleshed him out. Switch is very much Janek’s book. He’s the dominant character, as he is in the other two novels in the series, Wallflower and Mirror Maze, and in the seven TV movies broadcast on CBS in which he was portrayed by the actor, Richard Crenna.

  Q: How do you feel about those TV movies?

  A: I think the first two, both four-hour miniseries, were excellent. I had nothing to do with Doubletake except as author of the source material, but I felt the teleplay and the production were top-notch. I wrote the second four-hour, Internal Affairs (not to be confused with a movie with the same title starring Richard Gere; we sold them our title) as an original teleplay, and I was quite pleased with how it came out. The other five were all two-hour shows, and they were filmed in Toronto simulating New York. I was involved with several of them as writer and/or story provider. I think those five range from okay to quite good. Crenna gave excellent performances in all of them. But as the budgets got reduced, there were too many compromises. I remember wishing the Janek movies had been as good as the movies in the British series Prime Suspect. Regretfully, they weren’t.

  Q: It’s kind of odd that there were more Janek movies than Janek novels.

  A: I went along with the movies, because that was fun, but I didn’t want to be the kind of writer who’s saddled for life with a series character. Some authors have done well with that kind of career, and I was advised several times that that was the route to wealth and fame. But I didn’t want to restrict myself to Janek. I felt that I said all I had to say about him in the three novels I wrote. I had other literary projects in mind, other areas I wanted to explore. I like Janek a lot but feel that if I had continued with him the books would have become less good. I find that often with series characters created by writer colleagues. The first couple of novels are excellent, then you get the impression they’re just churning them out. I didn’t want to do that and I guess I’ve paid a career cost for that decision. But no regrets.

  Q.You mentioned wanting to keep the novel in New York.

  A: That was very important to me. I wanted the city, particularly Manhattan, to be a major “character.” I worked hard on capturing the city as seen through Janek’s eyes. I was living there while I wrote the Janek books, and I had definite feelings and perceptions about it, so whereever I could, I painted in images and vignettes, sometimes just a line or two, to etch out the city, giving Janek a milieu the reader could see, hear, feel, taste and smell.

  Q: You say you’re not interested in forensics, but you seem to know a lot about police work.

  A: I hung out with several NYPD cops during those years. Went out on patrol with them, hung around the precinct house, stuff like that. I was living in Greenwich Village, so I knew the Sixth Precinct pretty well. I was very interested in depicting the lives of cops, the great variety of types who go into that kind of work, their pride, needs, anxieties, reactions. I tried with the other detective characters (Sal, Aaron, Stanger, Howell) to show different facets of what it’s like to be a New York cop. But most of all I wanted to explore the psycho-moral drama of Janek’s life, the things he cared about, his obsessions, his approach to his work, how far he’d be willing to go to make a case. And in Switch he goes very far.

  Q: There’s a loneliness about him.

  A: Yes...and a loneliness about the other characters too. The victims, especially Mandy, are lonely people. The killer is lonely. As is Caroline Wallace. I liked working with that, especially in the love affair between Janek and Caroline. The way they fulfill one another is for me that’s one of the strongest things in the novel.

  Q: I notice you don’t call it a mystery.

  A: I don’t think of myself as a mystery writer. I don’t care about puzzle clues and things like that. I came to crime fiction from an ambition to write real novels, books with deep characterizations and a strong sense of place, combined with the kind of strong narrative drive you get in a murder story. I like really good novels set in the worlds of crime and espionage. Most so-called mysteries don’t do much for me.

  Q: In the book there’re several mentions of switched heads being a great case, and at the end when Janek solves it there’s a line of patrol cars filled with cops assembled to show respect for his achievement. He goes down the line shaking hands, taking his bows so to speak.

  A: I believe in the notion of a great case as a career goal for a serious detective. I got to know an NYPD detective, Ed Zigo, who’d cracked the Son of Sam case, and he felt great pride on account of that. At the end of Switch, when Janek phones Carmichael to deliver a great case to him (bringing down the Chief of Detectives of New York City, no less!) he says: “You’re going to be famous, you lucky lucky cop.” I think in every profession there are people who become great, who seize an opportunity which may fall to them, a once-in-a- lifetime opportunity, and embrace it. That’s what happens to Janek when he’s assigned switched heads. He takes the case and solves it and by so doing proves his greatness to his colleagues and to himself. At the end of Switch I wanted to capture that exhilaration.

 
; Q: You post a Ross Macdonald quote at the start of the novel. Is that the key to the novel?

  A: Certainly, to use Macdonald’s words, the novel is about cases that cleave “down through the strata of the past.” Janek must go deep into the past to solve both switched heads and the DiMona-Wallace-Hart case. I put in that quote partly as an homage to Ross Macdonald, whom I regard as one of the greatest of the “old master” crime fiction writers, and also to signal a level of ambition to my readers. I set out to write a really deep detective novel and wanted my readers to know that going in. It’s for them to say whether I achieved my goal.