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After they hung up
Janek
asked himself,
Had Peter really wanted to get away with it?

N
ow that it was cool she rarely turned on the fan; the four blades hung silent and still above the bed. Often after she went to sleep he stayed up sitting on the couch, his thirty-eight beside him, an accordion in his arms, silently fingering the keys, waiting...perhaps for Lane.

He heard her move, turned to look, saw that her eyes were open and that she was watching him.

"What you doing, Frank?"

"Just sitting here."

"Thinking?"

"Yeah."

She smiled and closed her eyes.

I am her guardian,
he thought.
I must protect her from knowledge of her jeopardy.
And thinking that, he realized that he had finally, truly, entered into the madness of the case.

Later he saw her watching him again. "It's Lane, isn't it?" she asked.

Their eyes met. He could see that she knew, perhaps had known ever since the first intrusion.

H
art called. "What's going on with Switched Heads?"

"I got feelers out."

"Feelers. What the hell are 'feelers'?"

"We're investigating,"
Janek
explained.

"Yeah. Right. Well, you investigate. Investigate the hell out of the thing. Because I wasn't bullshitting you about that deadline, Frank. You're warned. Your time is running out."

H
e watched Lane's windows from Mandy's chair, saw the lights go on and off. Another time, when Lane didn't come home, he watched one of Ellis' parties and saw a girl with long straight black hair do a bump-and-grind striptease to the unison clapping of the other guests.

A
aron was onto something. He called to say he was leaving Cleveland for New Jersey in the morning.

Find me Jesse, Aaron. I need him now
.

H
e told her, "He lives on a knife's edge. The movies and homicides come out of the same stuff. He sees his mother as a whore and kills her over and over again. When he does it in a film he's acting fairly healthy. When he kills and switches heads he's monstrous. But his films are shallow—he never became a first-rate artist because he could never get beyond his mother. He got stuck. The old crime was always there. And he committed it, didn't just fantasize it like other kids. So now when he relives it the only thing he can do is try and make it puzzling and beautiful. Switched Heads is his latest design, very complicated, requiring lots of concentration, which spared him from having to face what it was really about. More than anything I want to see him put away."

T
hanksgiving was cold; December came in with a chill. One afternoon early in the month
Janek
went to his old apartment on West Eighty-seventh, took off his pants, hung them up carefully, pulled out an old accordion, sat down on his bed and filled the room with sound.

S
he was shooting on Sixth near Thirty-ninth when suddenly a streak of pain leaped across her throat, a terrible white-hot searing pain that made her yell.

"For a second or two I was in shock," she said. Then she saw a kid running away from her down the block. She reached up, found that the small gold chain she wore was gone. The kid had ripped it off her neck.

Janek
moved his fingers to the place where the chain had been torn, a thin red line, a bruise. "I thought, 'Well, baby, this is it,'" she said. "It was him, I thought, measuring me, measuring my neck for—" she shook her head and smiled—"dismemberment."

They were lying together on the bed. The whole evening she'd been pensive.
Janek
had had the feeling something had happened; he'd waited patiently for her to bring it up. "Then it came to me, that it was just street aggression, just a kid stealing a chain. And I knew then I could handle it. I could shoot aggression and live with it, too." She kissed him. "You know, Frank, I've changed these last few months. I'm stronger than I was. And I know the reason. You've been so gentle with me and strong. You were there when I was scared. You moved in here to protect me—of course I knew that. And by doing that and being the guy you are you've helped me work this through."

She kissed him again, then wrapped her arms around him and pulled him upon her. "God, I love you, Frank."

O
n December tenth, at nine-thirty in the morning, Aaron Rosenthal called.

"Got him, Frank."

At last! The model for all the blundering cops in all the awful films
.

"Living in a shack down here in rural Jersey. You wouldn't believe the place. Got a job, too. Typical old-cop job. Night watchman at this abandoned car racetrack."

"What's he like?"
Janek
could feel the excitement rising through his chest.

"Strange. Very strange. I don't think he's what you're expecting. For one thing, he's not fat anymore. Jesse's a very thin man now. Looks like Abe Lincoln until he opens his mouth. But then, Jesus, there's nothing there."

H
e took the
Metroliner
to Philadelphia, was met by Aaron at Thirtieth Street Station. Then they drove south in a rented Toyota Aaron had been using for a week.

A voyage from ignorance to knowledge
,
Janek
thought; or so he hoped—impossible to know until he met the man. They drove in silence across the girder bridge into Camden, through a petrochemical maze, past industrial parks and finally, when they reached the suburbs, past half-empty sterile shopping malls.

A cold day, below freezing with a harsh northwest wind that amplified the chill.

Aaron handled the car well, his bulky detective's body awkward in the seat, his hands resting lightly on the wheel. They didn't talk much, a few words in the staccato shorthand they'd been using with each other for months.
Janek
stared out the window at flat fields crusted lightly with snow and drifts caught in fences that showed the power of the winds that buffeted the hibernating farms. There were deserted barracks built of rotting planks set in clusters by the road, homes to the migrant workers who lived here through the picking season, moving northward with the harvest, ending up in the potato fields of Long Island, sustained by high-starch meals.

It was a bleak terrain.

At Millville they crossed the Maurice River, which they'd been following on and off, then took a secondary road that led them to Port Norris, a town set on a cove of Delaware Bay. Half a mile down a back street to a place called Bivalve on the map. Aaron said the locals called it "Shell Pile" on account of its huge piles of oyster shells, twenty and thirty feet high, encrusted now with snow.

A vision then, behind the piles, of a shantytown out of a nineteen-thirties photograph.

"How did you find this hole?" The first words
Janek
had uttered in ten miles.

"Asked around," Aaron said. He wasn't going to tell. Already known as a superb telephone detective, now he would become a legend—he had tracked a man who'd been missing for eighteen years to this hellhole in the Jersey mosquito country, this dead end of dead ends, this frostbitten waste-yard for human junk.

Across a landfill, then down a rutted road that hadn't been shoveled, the ice cracking beneath the tires. Aaron stopped the Toyota. They'd reached a dead end. There was a path leading off into a stand of pines. Aaron pointed.
Janek
nodded, got out of the car and walked forward alone.

A cabin in a clearing: it was not what he'd been expecting. He thought he'd find another wretched shack, the sort that dotted the landfill behind the shell piles. But this cabin was idyllic—built out of logs, well kept up, the firewood stacked neatly along one side, a curl of smoke rising from the chimney perfuming the frigid air.

Jesse was waiting for him. Aaron had told him another detective was coming from New York, and so evidently the old man had spent the day in his easy chair beside his wood stove, thinking, wondering, expecting...he did not know what.

Janek
searched his face for Peter's features, discovering them slowly in an unexpected form. The same hard gray eyes, same lips and ears, but the skin different, like leather stretched over his cheekbones and warmed by something powerful within. It was a beautiful face, he thought—great sadness in it, marks of past misery, but beatific too, as if it glowed with some special brand of knowledge.

Later
Janek
would understand that he had mistaken the nature of that glowing—that Jesse's face was enlivened by a long slow-burning pain.

He felt at home there and didn't know why: the cabin was different from anyplace he'd ever been. The man was special, too; he reminded
Janek
of drunks he'd seen on the Bowery when he'd been a boy, or the old man who'd tried to clean his windshield in the rain the night Sal had showed him the back shop behind Sweeney's garage. It was a face Caroline would want to photograph—something in it broken but also strong.

There was a chair waiting on the other side of the stove; Jesse, he knew, had put it there for him. And then when they began to talk, in the strange, slow, intuitive way that came spontaneously to them both, he found himself riveted by Jesse's voice, the deep throaty hoarseness of it and a metallic quality too, an iron sound that gave every utterance an edge.

"Aaron told you why I've come?" The old man nodded. "Then you understand."

When Jesse shook his head his throat quivered like a turkey's gullet.

"What don't you understand?"

"None of it," the old man said.

Janek
kept having to remind himself he was a detective interviewing an informant with special knowledge of a suspect in a murder case, because that role kept seeming wrong. He wondered how Jesse viewed their meeting: a detective from the city on a hunt, face to face with a ruined former cop.

As they talked it became evident they both thought Peter was evil.

"...Spent years trying to get my goat. Tried everything. Wickedness after wickedness. Wanted a
lickin
', I always thought, though it was guidance he needed—see that now. He didn't get it. Wouldn't give it to him. So he floundered, that boy, had to flounder. On the rocks, you know. The rocks we put there so he would break himself."

It was a kind of poetry he was speaking, an amalgam of simple words, clichés, and penetrating insights too.
Janek
listened, his eyes locked into Jesse's, his mind seeking to fathom the strange poetry. He began to view Peter's childhood then as an enormous struggle—the harder he pushed, the more Jesse withdrew into ineffectuality. Except it was not his son from whom he was withdrawing; it was his rage, his enormous rage at the woman, the boy's mother, Laurie, his wife.

‘'...She whored. Goddamn she did. And he knew it. Had to. We both knew and couldn't say nothing. Because it was there, between us, always. Always there. Always between us. He looked to me for what to do and I told him. Showed him she was ruining me. By my face. My look. My silence too. He saw and knew. I told him. Though we never talked."

In the end something had to give. Jesse knew that, realized now he had conveyed that to Peter, that the strains had grown too great for the boy, the pressure built too high. Peter could not sustain the mediator role—rage at his mother for what she was doing to Jesse, and contempt for Jesse for permitting her to ridicule him, cuckold him, play him for the sucker, for the fool.

"...Wanted to kill me. Sure of it. Saw it in him lots of times. So okay, I told him, kill me, go ahead. Won't make no difference. I'm dead inside anyway. But soon as I told him that, with my eyes, mind you, never out loud, he'd turn away and then he'd think of killing her. Which was what I wanted deep in me. Always. Use him, see, to get rid of her. Those were the rocks we put there for him. Couldn't swim his way out. Not from what we put between us and him. And what we
didn't
put there, either. The channels we left open, I mean. Had to drown, that boy."

The afternoon wore on, it grew dark, until
Janek
could barely make Jesse out. The old man left his seat to fetch a Coleman lantern. He pumped it up, lit it, then set it down beside the stove.

He moved gracefully, a strong lean old man, very thin as Aaron had said, the blubber accumulated as a failed
cop
burned away by years of wandering. Now, at last, he was back working at his first love, security work. He was a night watchman who guarded a worthless place. He laughed when he told
Janek
that. A perfect ending for a broken cop, his laughter seemed to say.

That Jesse understood the family conspiracy so well seemed to
Janek
a kind of miracle. Except that he had had eighteen years to brood upon Peter's matricide.

"...Wanted punishment. Know that. And my way of punishing him was always to ignore—which was, mind you, what he wanted, too. Pushed him further, see, to worse and worse. And when he finally did the worst of all—then
nothing
. No punishment. I messed things up so he'd be safe. My fault, I thought. Pushed him to it. Knew she did, too, but blamed myself. Because that's what I'd wished, see.
Wished
. Drove him by that, by what
I
wished
...."