Switch (32 page)

He stood, stretched, then sat down again, this time more resigned. "Sal's doing a side job for you, isn't he?" He looked at
Janek
, then turned away. There was silence in the squad room then, both men sitting very still, as still as Lane,
Janek
thought.

"That's right,"
Janek
said.

"Well..."

"Doesn't have anything to do with Lane."

"So the rest of us just bust our asses, right?"

"Lane was onto him, Aaron. The stakeout wasn't any good."

Aaron nodded. "I get it. So now you guys are in business for yourselves."

"I'd like to tell you about it. I really would."

"I understand. Rabbi stuff. So, okay, tell me this: Why won't Hart give us extra men?"

"That's complicated."

"Well, shit, you know me, Frank. I can barely grasp..."

Aaron was hurt and
Janek
was angry with himself; he should have seen what was happening, should have read those anguished reproachful stares.

"Has to do with Al," he said. "Even Sal doesn't know that. He's working for me blind."

Aaron shook his head. "Three rabbi generations. Jesus!"

"It's all connected. Something between Hart and Al. When I let on I might know about it he dangled a precinct command. When I didn't bite, he gave me a deadline, the end of the year, and told me to screw off on the extra men."

"Well, you sure picked a great guy to have a feud with. Now I understand why you couldn't ask him for favors." Aaron paused. "I'm a good solid detective. I like to think I'm sometimes very good."

"You are."

"Sure. Maybe. But nowhere near your league. Potentially you're a great detective. You look deeper, see things, connect things up." Aaron stood, walked over to the wall and stared, as they had both done so many times, at the crime-scene photographs. "It was you who understood this case. Don't know that anyone else could have done it. Sure, someone might have thought of the window. Maybe I would have come up with that. But to know what to look for, to focus the search so that I was able to pick up on Lane so fast. And the way you figured out the meaning behind the switch—that was a stroke of genius." He turned from the wall to face
Janek
. "Okay, so we're going to get this guy." He smiled. "So how are we going to do it?"

"Back to the beginning. Re-examine the fundamentals."

Aaron nodded. "Yeah."

It was late when they left the precinct.
Janek
drove Aaron home. In the car his thoughts turned again to Hart.

"Suppose," he asked Aaron, "you had a case like Ireland/ Beard but different in one major respect. No possibility of getting a confession, no physical evidence, but the certainty there were accomplices. How would you attack?"

"Pretty basic stuff," said Aaron. "Locate the accomplices and turn them around."

"Suppose you're not in a position to offer a credible deal."

"Never knew a prosecutor who wouldn't deal."

"Suppose this isn't that sort of case."

Aaron thought about that. "It's the same situation even when you're in business for yourself. You get something on A you're willing to ignore if he'll help you by squealing on B. It's only tricky because it's not official, which means the deal depends on trust. It's like those wartime intelligence interrogations where they dangle a guy out of a plane. If he talks he comes back in; if he doesn't they let him go. An approach that only works if he's convinced the bargain will be kept both ways. To create that kind of conviction you got to believe in it yourself. But once you go that route, seems to me, there isn't any turning back."

When they arrived at Aaron's house in Brooklyn,
Janek
lightly touched his arm. "You think I'm getting in too deep."

"Going up against Hart." Aaron shook his head. "I don't know, Frank. That's a very heavy guy."

I
t came to him as he crossed from Brooklyn into Queens, Hart's sneering "all you got are photographs" ringing in his ears. A switch snapped between the two cases. Lane's films: something in them he'd felt but hadn't seen, something that had been haunting him for weeks.

T
hey viewed the complete works of Peter Lane in a shabby Times Square building filled with second-rung prop and costume houses and seedy rehearsal halls. A stale smell in the corridors of greasy take-out food and sweat. "It's either this," said Aaron, leading
Janek
into the screening room, "or our spotless Police Academy auditorium."

Ripper
;
Magenta
;
Hairdresser
;
Mezzaluna
;
Winslow Road
;
Film Noir
: the movies flickered by in a twelve-hour marathon that included short breaks for coffee, quick trips to the lavatory, a fifteen-minute lunch at an eggroll place across the street. "We're going for total immersion,"
Janek
announced, which was what he and Aaron got.

The movies exhausted them and hurt their eyes. Axes, razors, shears employed at pounding rhythms with repeated strokes. Moans of pain. Pants of ecstasy. Agonized stalking released in sudden vicious assaults.
Janek
couldn't reconcile the tony language of the critics with the gruesome stuff he was seeing on the screen. And he noticed Aaron becoming strange, sometimes mumbling to himself.

"See, basically there're two kinds of spatter films. The crummy, obnoxious drive-in stuff, like someone's got rabies and is going around biting people in the neck, and the class acts by Hitchcock, De Palma, guys like that. Thing about Lane you got to remember, he's in the second category. Has his following, almost like a cult. His stuff gets shown at festivals."

The next movie was
Winslow Road
.
The killer kept a garden behind his house on a middle-class suburban street, where, it turned out, he grew exemplary vegetables fertilized by the remains of the whores he lured to his potting shed and killed. There was a long sickening sequence set during a lightning storm during which he sliced up a girl with a pruning shears, then lovingly ground her into compost.

"There! Hear it on the sound track?" asked Aaron in the middle of this scene. "There's a chorus singing behind the thunder. Guess what? We're in a
cathedral
,
Frank."

In the end,
Janek
decided, the stories were pretty much the same. A ritual set of killings. A cat-and-mouse game with a stupid cop. An elaborate chase and an inconclusive finale—the killer disappearing, the cop left looking like a jerk.

But there was more. He sensed something deeper, a basic cryptic tale that stood behind these stories and gave them weight. Strange long silent looks between killers and cops, peculiar references to unexplained past events. It was as if there were some kind of
back
story known only to Lane, as if his characters shared the burden of a traumatic past.

Janek
leaned forward trying to concentrate. Perhaps it would be possible to enter Lane's mind. If he relaxed, just let himself slide into the films, then he might catch it—the same coiled anger he'd felt in Amanda's tub behind the curtain, the fury he felt some nights at Hart, the mad-dog killer part of himself he'd always feared and had tried to kill when he shot Terry years before...

L
ate that night, his mind still cluttered with murderous images, there came a searing thought: that the movies were about the past—guarded, stylized, heavily masked renditions of an old and haunting crime. A real crime.

He crawled out of bed, went to Caroline's darkroom, picked up the wall phone there and dialed Aaron at home. "Couldn't sleep either," Aaron said. "You got an idea?"

"He's concealing."

"We know that."

"Remember how much trouble you had getting the basic facts."

"Still don't have them."

"He's covering up."

"Sure. So what else is new? All psychos have backgrounds and try to conceal them." Silence. He could feel Aaron's resistance. "You sure this isn't just desperation, Frank?"

"No, I smell something real. And that it's the subject of the films."

"Well, they got to be about something, don't they?"

"Right. So let's find out."

"You talking about a deep background check."

"The deepest. Track the past, Aaron. There's a crime back there. In the movies he tries to tell us about it but can't quite get it out. What we got to do is find out what it is. Then, maybe, we can use it to open him up."

H
e decided to take the subway—it would be quicker than his car. He ran to West Fourth Street and jumped on an F train just before the doors clamped shut. "Stalking me," she'd said over the phone. "The same one, you know—the mind reader."
Janek
knew: the man who'd changed the record, the one who'd stolen the razor blade, the one, she'd said, who'd psyched her out.

A delay on the tracks. The train halted at the Fifth Avenue station. The doors jammed and people on the platform stared in with anger and disgust. He'd known that that razor blade was not going to be the end of it, that something else would happen and when nothing had happened he'd been relieved. A mistake. The subway doors opened and slammed during an incomprehensible public announcement. The train jerked forward.
What's that bastard done?

She was better composed than he; he was panting from running up her stairs. "It's so stupid," she said. "But I wish you could find him, Frank. Find out who he is and make him stop."

Though she always made her prints herself, she sent out her exposed rolls to be developed. When she accumulated a lot of film, say thirty or forty rolls, she'd drop the stuff off for processing and a day or two later she'd pick it up.

Which was what she'd done that morning. And around noon she'd begun to examine the contact sheets. And then she'd found the extra sheet and then she'd called the lab. They checked. She'd brought in forty-one rolls and gotten forty-one back, and nothing she'd shot was missing from the shipment, which meant she'd brought in the extra roll herself. Which meant it had been placed in the basket on the counter in her darkroom where she left her exposed rolls to pile up. Which meant it had been planted on her by the intruder, probably at the same time he'd changed the record and stolen the razor blade.

There was more. "What's on it?" he asked.

She swallowed hard and handed him the contact sheet.

He examined it with a magnifying glass, his heart sinking as he did. Thirty-six amateurish telephoto shots, some of them shaky, some not focused very well. But all of Caroline—walking, bicycling, shopping, playing tennis, coming out of her building, returning to it at the end of the day, buying a newspaper, scratching her ankle, raising her camera, living her life.

The prick
.

"Has a thing for me, doesn't he, following me around?" she said. "But I reconstructed the time frame from the locations and my clothes. All those shots were made before he changed the record. So, you see, Frank, that's not so bad. I mean, he hasn't really done anything at all since then. It's sort of like a time bomb. And today it just happened to go off."

"Know something, you're terrific. You've got every reason to feel scared."

"Maybe I am. A little, anyway. But then I feel it's not all that bad, not really all that aggressive. More like a game by one of those phone-freak types."

Janek
took her hand. "You're right, the game-player's usually harmless. Aggressive, sure, but sneaky. And underneath a sneak's more scared than you."

She smiled. To his amazement she was managing to shrug it off. But to
Janek
the message was stunningly clear:
I've been tracking your girl; I could have gotten her thirty-six times
.

A
aron made a breakthrough.

Through a cop he knew who worked crowd control on movie sets, he found a German-born script girl who'd lived briefly with Peter Lane. Her name was
Elga
Becker and this living together had occurred in Munich. Now
Elga
told Aaron, "I'd like to see him crawl through broken glass."

According to her, when they'd been lovers in Germany he'd confided that "Lane" was his mother's maiden name, that his real name was something else and that he'd been brought up in Cleveland.

Why did
Elga
hate him so? Seems when she came to New York and was looking for a job she called Peter for help and advice. He heard her out, then told her he didn't remember her very well. He hung up on her and she could never get through to him again.

"Nasty little thing," Aaron reported. "Bad breath and she sprays when she talks. Says when they made love he 'used his pecker like a dagger.' Then, she says, he'd lay his head upon her breast and sigh."

"Real romantic. You believe her?"

"Sure," Aaron said. "At least the part about the name."

"Then you better go out to Cleveland,"
Janek
said.