"That's a lot of heads."
"What are you tryingâ"
"You must dream about them."
"What?"
"All those heads. Ever get them mixed up? Switched? The heads, I mean."
"Look, young man, I don't know what you're getting atâ"
"You're a pervert, Hopkins. Five people in the building across say you are. They want you put away. I'm going to stick you in a lineup so they can pick you out. And then, Hopkins, you're going to be fucked."
Which, it turned out, was more or less what Hopkins wanted, or so Sal interpreted his confession when he reported it back to
Janek
later that night.
"Admits he's a peeper, Frank. Admits he gets off on it. Likes to peer out with the old
binocs
. Sure, he saw Amanda. Lots of times. But the crazy thing is he couldn't stand her. Hated it when she stood there stretching herself, because, get this,
she interfered with his view
.
Sounds crazy, I know, but I went home with him and it's true. And here's the kicker. That guy Ellis you're working on who gives the so-called sex partiesâstuff that happens at his place gets reflected in the windows of Mandy's building when the lights are off inside. In other words, if you live, like Hopkins, in the building next door to Ellis sometimes you can see what's happening at Ellis' place by looking at the reflections across the way. Because Ellis doesn't close his blinds. And he doesn't turn off his lights. So Hopkins sits at home and watches and sometimes late at night he sees these scenes. When I was there I didn't see much. Just some people sitting around sipping drinks. But I got the point. The windows on her brownstone act like mirrors. So Hopkins is peeping out at fucking orgies, Frank. To him Mandy was a nuisance. She was in his way."
There was something else too. Sal dropped the word "head" about forty-nine times before Hopkins finally picked up on it.
"I asked him then wasn't that what hairdressers call their clients. 'Not me,' he said. 'To me they're silly cunts.' So, Frank, there you are. Like Aaron saidâhe
is
a nasty little freak."
"N
o way, Lieutenant. This is one gentle guy. There're five kids all under ten crawling around up there, plus two dachshunds and four cats. Not to mention the fact that physically he couldn't have done it. He's got some kind of degenerative muscle-tissue disease."
Stanger had spent all of Thursday afternoon with the caricaturist, Nicholas
Karpewicz
, known as "Karp," watching him draw, listening to him speak on the phone, observing his relations with his children and his wife. But then, after he eliminated Karp, Stanger got interested in something else.
"The room where he works has this huge picture window. He owns the commanding position on the area. From up there you can see everything. So I start asking him about people. This couple I talked to. That single guy. The old bag in the garden apartment. And he knows who I mean, picks up on them right away. Starts doing little sketches, just a couple of strokes, and he gets them right, the faces, the expressions. That's his thing. Features. Heads. Later he draws in the body to make his comment. Maybe because he's sort of a cripple he's developed this way of letting the air out of people by sticking them on animals, a mule, say, or a goose.
"Anyway, I threw him some of our suspects. First Ellis. Then Lane the film director. Then I toss him Hopkins, who he's never seen. Then Evans. Then that old crank, Spalding. Ask him what kind of body he'd put under those guys. Right away he puts Spalding on a turtle."
Stanger laid Karp's sketches on
Janek's
desk. Spalding's huge head was sticking tentatively out of a tortoiseshell, a good caricature of a mean, frightened, over-armored recluse.
Dr. Evans' face, dominated by deep sad droopy eyes, was mounted on a miniature shaggy Saint Bernard. The watchful eyes of Peter Lane, the moviemaker, were implanted in a silent brooding owl. And Jack Ellis, the orgiastic fashion photographer, was depicted as an opportunistic baboon.
"I asked him finally," Stanger said, "to draw me his vision of Amanda. First he didn't want to do it. Then, I don't know why, he picked up his pen and started to draw. She came out kind of different from the rest."
Stanger pushed the drawing forward.
It was a chilling work
Janek
saw, a fine careful drawing bearing no relation to the other swiftly sketched cartoons. The background was black, with the girl emerging from it like a phantom, her body rigid, withholding, her face a mask, expressionless, yet yearning too.
A
aron was playing his cards close. When
Janek
asked how he was coming with Peter Lane he smiled, then lightly bobbed his head from side to side.
"Got to hand it to Stanger,"
Janek
said. "Didn't know he had it in him."
"Sal still thinks he's a fuck-up."
"He probably is. But maybe not a shallow fuck-up like we thought."
"It's either your guy or mine," Aaron said. "How you doing with Ellis?"
Janek
shrugged. "Maybe it's none of them, Aaron. Maybe my window theory's full of shit."
J
ack Ellis was the most likely perpetrator of Switched Heads:
He lived directly across from Amanda's, with a perfect view into her window.
He indulged conspicuously in drugs and kinky sex.
He was a professional fashion photographer accustomed to manipulating models.
Moreover, his work was notoriously cruel.
The moment
Janek
laid eyes on him he realized he'd seen him before. Recently. But he couldn't remember where.
"Just so we know where we stand,"
Janek
said, "you're a suspect in the Ireland case. I'm going to ask you questions. If you want you can call your lawyer first."
The Great Decadent Photographer was suddenly an innocent little puppy. Rarely had
Janek
seen a man so quickly abandon a pose. Ellis declined to call his lawyer; he had, he said, nothing to hide. Furthermore,
Janek
ought to know he fainted regularly at the sight of blood and detested violence of any kind.
As they talked
Janek
looked closely at his eyes. They were tight, mean, small-time shrewd, like the eyes of a mediocre estate lawyer. And then
Janek
remembered where he'd seen those eyes before: a fleeting image while leafing through a book.
Caroline had photographed Ellis for
Celebrities
in the same slackening pose she'd been after in all her subjects wherein the famous personality unwittingly revealed "the incipient decay of his public face."
"What did you know about the girl?"
"Nothing. I swear."
"Never looked out and saw her standing there?"
"Don't look out. People look in at me."
"You've noticed that?"
"God yes! They even call up and complain. 'At least buy some shades,' they say." Ellis laughed and shook his head.
"So why don't you buy some shades?"
"Don't like shades."
"And you don't care what people think?"
"If they don't like what they see they don't have to watch."
"Enjoy flaunting yourself, don't you, Jack?"
Big grin. "Sure." Ellis paused a moment, exhaled. "Please understand, Lieutenant, it's all PR. That's the business, the way this city works. I pay a press agent a grand a month to preserve a certain image."
"What's that?"
"The sinister photographer. The guy who shoots his models under attack by dogs. I don't use cocaine. Can't stand the stuff. The reason I don't buy shades is I'm putting on a show. It adds to the image when the neighbors start to bitch. Say I'm bringing down the neighborhood. Holding orgies. Terrific!" He looked down and then he met
Janek's
eyes. "Doesn't hurt, either, that there's been a murder across the way."
So,
Janek
thought, a man who wishes to impress. Ellis' public persona fit the crime, but Karp the caricaturist had seen through it. And so had Caroline. Recalling her portrait,
Janek
realized it was stunningly accurate, much more so than if she'd simply caught Ellis in a candid moment, for it exposed the contrast between his desperate longing for notoriety and the feeble quality of his effort.
S
aturday night Caroline served him a lavish feast of stuffed Cornish hens, endive salad and Italian cheesecake accompanied by a bottle of vintage
Amarone
. She seemed relaxed, and the way
Janek
read the dinner she was telling him she wanted to feel close to him again.
After they ate he went to her bookcase, pulled out a copy of
Celebrities,
opened it to her portrait of Ellis and asked her what the photo session had been like.
"Like most of them," she said. "He wanted desperately to be in the book."
"Think he's capable of cutting off a couple of women's heads?"
"That's a terrible question." But she thought about it. "Tell you the truth," she said finally, "I'm not sure he's capable of cutting up a steak."
"Did he come onto you?"
"I suppose he did." She smiled. "That's what my portrait sessions were all about. Get them to come onto my lens. Make them show me their best stuff. Then catch them just when they realized it didn't work."
Janek
nodded, amused. "So that's how you did it."
"That's the way. Hey, are you here as a detective? My lover? Or what?"
There was something then about the way she acted with him in bed that badly disconcerted him, something harsh and taking that canceled out the good feelings he had gotten from her at dinner. It was the same greediness he'd felt when they'd gone to bed after she'd called him from the tennis club to boldly announce her desire: a hard, disturbing, almost antagonistic style, different from the slow, giving, pleasuring sensuality of their lovemaking before their quarrel.
Afterward, pondering this change as she clung to him, her flesh hot against his back, he decided he couldn't keep his feelings to himself.
"Before we made love," he said sadly. "Now it seems
we
just..."
"What?"
"Fuck."
She pulled back abruptly, stared at him, her eyes showing bewilderment, then hurt. She got up, found her robe, put it on and tightened the sash.
"Yeah," she said, speaking carefully, "you're right." And then, after a pause: "What did you expect?"
"Please, Caroline, don't start going hard-boiled."
"When you use words like 'fuck,' I'm sorry, I start feeling hard."
"Last weekend you talked about 'tearing one off.'"
"Maybe that's the way it felt."
He stood up and began pulling on his clothes.
"Going home?" she asked.
"Dressing for battle. Want to watch me strap on my gun?"
"Fuck you,
Janek
!"
He turned to her. "I like direct anger. Better than having you take it out on me in the sack."
She gaped at him. "You weren't satisfied?"
"Come off it. That's not the point."
"What is the point? I seem to have lost it."
"Instead of punishing each other, why don't we try and talk."
"I wish that were possible. But you're so"âshe shook her headâ"stubborn."
"
Me?
"
"
You
.
With your solemn duty to the dead."
Dressed now, he stood over her, staring down into her sullen eyes. "What about
your
duty?" he asked. "Don't you have a duty to yourself?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"That you can't let a little matter like the fact your father was murdered go because 'I'm sick of it, I can't deal with it,' and a lot of selfish crap like that. You stand aloof and declare it turns you off, and now you're pissed because I won't go along. Tuesday night I started to tell you something, but you wouldn't let me finish. I went over to Hoboken and talked to a detective, the one working your father's case. Turns out there were loose ends. Turns out Al was onto something real. That's important, to be confronted even if it hurts. I don't see why you don't understand that, considering the sort of work you do."
"What's my work got to do with it?"
"Every day you go out with your camera hunting for aggression. Okay, here's some real aggression, you see it and you turn away." He paused. "Maybe because you don't have the luxury of looking at it through a lens."
She gazed at him hard. "That's rough,
Janek
. Really rough. And suppose you're right. Suppose I
do
distance myself. So what? I told you aggression frightens me. Which is why I'm working on it.
I told you that.
"
Watching her carefully, he saw a tremor in her eye and suddenly had a thought: that there was a connection between her fear and fascination with male aggression and her resistance to dealing with her father's death.