Switch (26 page)

"What were you doing at the museum?"
Janek
asked.

"Using the library. They've got back issues of the scholarly film magazines." Aaron unfolded a clipping and passed it to
Janek
. He had underlined several passages in an article entitled "The Rage of Peter Lane":

...and when on the soundtrack we hear a chorale from a mass, the degraded crime-scene becomes a cathedral. Diabolic turns holy. The forbidden act of erotic murder becomes an artistic act of ritual sacrifice....

The detective: he is inevitable, and in all Lane's stories more or less the same—a clown, a man to be taunted, to be broken and scorned as he fails to solve his case. The killer goads him, makes him mad, and when he charges wildly the killer steps nimbly aside and the detective stumbles, confused, at nothing, at the air....

As they drove downtown he felt Aaron's stare.

"So why aren't you more excited, Frank? Usually when you get interested in a suspect you act a little more turned on."

Janek
exhaled. "Who says I'm interested?"

"What's the matter? You saw it. The crime scenes in his movies look like ours, and the movies are about the same kinds of crazy homicides."

"Too corny."

"Okay." Aaron pulled the car over and stopped. "I dug around on this guy. He's given a lot of interviews. One thing he says again and again, that he'd like to make a picture that would inspire a real murder."

"Grandiose talk. He's trying to sound gruesome. All the terror guys sound off like that."

"But suppose it's a little different from what he says." Aaron paused. "Suppose what he really wanted to do was make a movie about a murder he first committed himself."

L
ife imitating art; art imitating life: that did seem corny to
Janek
, but still he found Lane interesting.

Spalding was out of the case: for some reason the old man took a liking to Stanger, invited him into his apartment and confided his theory that the real target in the Ireland homicide had not been Amanda but her dog.

Ellis' friends were incredulous at the notion that anyone would think him capable of murder. His S&M fashion stills? Tongue-in-cheek. Orgies? Sometimes his guests got kinky and stripped. Homicidal sadist? You got to be kidding. Jack's a pussycat. Though, occasionally, he does overdo the hype.

Dr. Raymond Evans, Michael Hopkins and Nicholas
Karpewicz
were also out. And so was Hazel Carter: her weekend alibi had held up. But Cynthia Tuttle's records showed that on one occasion Brenda had joined a class just before Mandy's regular hour.
Janek
was intrigued. The girls had brushed very close, had likely seen each other, perhaps had even spoken in the changing room. He imagined the one suiting up, the other toweling off, as models and dancers gossiped at adjoining lockers. None of which, he knew, had much to do with the case, though he felt haunted by the possibility that they'd met.

That left the film director—if the window theory was to stand.
Janek
stared at Karp's sketch, the one that showed Lane as a brooding owl. He repositioned it on the squad-room wall so that Lane's eyes were on the row of crime-scene photographs.

Tuesday morning he called the squad together. "We're going to look at this guy real close. He hasn't met you, Sal, so you're the one to tail him. Covertly. No pressure. You lose him you pick him up later, right? Howell and Stanger: get photographs. There're plenty in the film magazines. Now, when you talk to the prostitutes you show them shots of Lane. Have they ever seen this guy? Is he a john? Aaron, you'll coordinate and start a background check. Usual sources—Defense Department, FBI. I want to know who he is."

"Jesus," moaned Aaron, "another book."

"Got to know him before I interview him. You think he likes to play games. Fine, we're stupid, just like the apes in his films. We're so stupid we don't even know we're in a game. Here's the strategy: we're looking at him, but no direct approach. When and if we find something, like that he made some memorable expeditions before he found his Amanda look-alike, I'll take a crack at him. And when I do I don't want to be a stupid cop."

A
aron's greeting Thursday morning: "I don't know, Frank. Are we throwing too much into this?"

Janek
glanced around the squad room. The place smelled of coffee and cigarettes. "Where are the other guys?"

"Sal's sitting in a car outside Lane's building. Stanger and Howell will be in later. The whores aren't up till afternoon."

"So what's the problem?" Already he felt tired. He'd spent the night thinking about Hart. His hatred surprised him; it went beyond anything he'd felt in years.

"The problem, Frank, is Lane. He's top of the list by default. We're five guys. And now we're all working on him full time."

"Thought you liked him."

"I
do
like him. But..." Aaron shrugged. "Is the allocation right?"

Janek
sat down. His mind was whirling. There were Tommy Wallace and Hart, and Switched Heads and Lane. "Got to allocate the way I feel, Aaron. May look like default, but I'm running on a hunch. I felt something at her window. Made me shiver. It's someone out there, someone who can see in. Lane fits. Right now I got to go with that. So—anything else?"

"Yeah. Sal's having trouble. It's not a one-man job. Even a normal, low-key surveillance you're talking at least three guys and you're better off with five. But Lane's not normal. Doesn't keep regular hours. Doesn't go to a job
_,
sleeps late, then stays out half the night. But the other morning Sal missed him. Doorman said he went out at dawn. Wanders around a lot, too. Like he'll take a series of subway rides, down to West Fourth Street, change to a Brooklyn train, then switch back to a train heading uptown. Or he'll ride down to City Hall, then walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Quite a few times Sal's lost him. No way he can keep up."

"Maybe Lane knows he's on him."

"Yeah. That's possible."

"If Sal's talking to the doorman—"

"Doormen know we're watching the neighborhood. Sal didn't let on he was particularly interested in Lane."

"Still—"

"Sure. He could know."

"So you want two more men."

"Would help a lot."

Janek
shook his head. "Hart won't give them to me."

Aaron nodded and turned back to his phone.
Janek
watched him awhile, listening to him work. Aaron was good, a superb telephone investigator.
Janek
wished he could tell him why he didn't want to ask Hart for anything.

L
ane didn't own a car. Which left the possibility he'd rented or leased one, or had used a stolen car that night. Which meant checking with all the car-rental agencies in the city, and the registry of stolen-car complaints going back three days before the homicides. None of which would prove anything, as Aaron and
Janek
knew perfectly well, since Lane could have rented a car in Philadelphia or Baltimore or anyplace within hundreds of miles. Or used fake ID to rent one. Or stolen one on Long Island or upstate. Or owned one he'd registered under an assumed name. Or had used a taxi whose driver hadn't responded to their call to check all destination lists. Or had taken a bus and hadn't been remembered because he'd carried the heads in a gym bag. Or had marched across Central Park carrying them in a backpack on an eccentric nocturnal urban hike. Which meant that a check of rental agencies and the registry of stolen-car complaints was hardly worth doing. Which didn't mean it didn't have to be done. Which it was. With the expected result. Which still didn't mean anything.

As Aaron put it to
Janek
as they shared another in an endless stream of pizzas at the Taco-Rico, "Well, at least we know one thing. He's got a driver's license. So we can assume he probably knows how to drive."

A
t the end of each day
Janek
would drive uptown, check the mailbox at his basement apartment, take a shower, change his shirt, then drive over to Long Island City to Caroline's loft.

He'd become a short-haul commuter and, he decided, he did some of his best thinking on the road. He developed a little ritual: As soon as he swung from the access ramp onto the
Queensboro
Bridge he would glance back at Manhattan in his rearview mirror. Darkness was falling earlier; the twilight vision he'd enjoyed the first time he'd driven to her—the glow behind the buildings, the luminous city set powerfully against the fading sky—was replaced now by the spectacle of lit skyscrapers standing guard before the black, impenetrable night.

The sight never failed to move him or to inspire some kind of idea. And when he arrived she would be there waiting for him, her loft filled with soft jazz music and softly dancing light, and he would take her in his arms and breathe in the scent of her body and her hair, and then they would drink wine and make love on her brass bed beneath her gently turning ceiling fan and sometimes he would feel less anger in himself and other times a tension he could neither fathom nor define.

J
anek
read Aaron's notes on Lane:

...won't go on talk shows. Rarely gives interviews. Conceals background by putting out contradictory stories on his past. At various times has claimed he was brought up: in Midwest; on Indian reservation; in rural community in California; that his father (named Jack Lane, Joe Lane, Harold Lane, etc.) was: barber (cf.
Hairdresser
), veterinarian, police officer (!), parole officer, and, alternatively, that subject doesn't know parents' names since he was orphan and brought up in foster home.... As far as can be determined subject has never mentioned mother or siblings.... Subject claims to have attended Princeton but name does not appear in college records. Claims that he studied filmmaking in Germany and worked as assistant to Munich-based director,
Schoendorfer
, check out....

A
aron managed to learn that neither the Defense Department, the Drug Administration nor the FBI had any knowledge of Peter Lane—a feat he accomplished informally on the phone by working through his network of law-enforcement friends. Old favors were reciprocated and new debts incurred, but answers to the most basic questions (names of parents, date and place of birth) eluded him. He could have obtained them if he'd been able to look at Lane's passport application, but that was protected by the Privacy Act of 1974. Lane had not been indicted for any crime, nor was he the subject yet of an officially sanctioned criminal investigation. And so, for all his brilliant telephone technique, his contacts, his coaxing and sweet talk, Aaron Rosenthal, to his immense surprise, could not manage to break through this single block.

One night on the bridge
Janek
thought about phoning Carmichael. And then he thought,
No. Not yet
.

He was worried. He sometimes got his cases confused. His mind would flash back and forth between them the way it had weeks before when he'd practiced switching people's heads.

Every case, he knew, had its solution. Switched Heads had a solution, and Wallace/
DiMona
had one, too. The trick was to find it, to look for it within the case, in the characters of the players, their weaknesses and strengths.

He thought,
There has to be a way to get to Hart, not to fight him on his terms but to make him fight on mine.

Aaron summarized his Peter Lane material in a thickening loose-leaf book he kept locked up with an extra yarmulke in the center drawer of his desk:

Subject has had numerous "girlfriends" but no long-term intimate relationships. Several informants speak openly of subject's detachment during, and quick loss of interest after, what they describe as "perfunctory" or "technical" sex....

Subject has no known close male friends....

Subject's reputation among technicians: businesslike and relentless. Among actors: "exploitive," "brilliant," "unscrupulous." Considered by those who have financed productions as extremely mercurial—"friendly and seductive" when backing to be gained but "indifferent and unreachable" once films completed and released....

On numerous occasions subject has expressed following view: "The test of the ultimate murder film would be its power to inspire an actual murder."

Cinema critic and psychoanalyst Dr. David Lee writes: "[subject's] films seem driven by obsessions derived from undefined, heavily masked psychological conflicts in [subject's] past: an overpowering matricidal rage in which all women are equated with prostitutes, and an unresolved early conflict with paternal authority symbolically represented by police."

"'Heavily masked psychological conflicts'?" Aaron gripped the phone. "What exactly did you mean by that?"

"Before I answer I'd like to know—"

"Listen, Dr. Lee—" Aaron met
Janek's
eyes and winked—"this man's been quoted as saying he'd like to see his films inspire homicides."

"But surely, you understand, he meant that in a certain spirit."