Janek gave them leeway: each could pursue his suspect in his own way. And so by their divergent strategies they revealed themselves as detectives and as men.
Howell was confused by Dr. Raymond Evans, perhaps disconcerted by the absence of a hard surface upon which to hammer. Accustomed as he was to brittle whores and sleazy pimps, his tough-guy manner proved ineffective. In the end the therapist refused him nothing except eyes downcast with shame.
Howell brought him in for questioning. Just before the crucial passage of his interview he invited Janek to the one-way window to watch his suspect take the heat:
"So you saw her?"
"Sure."
"How many times?"
"I'd say around a dozen."
"Turn you on?"
"Not in the slightest."
"Why not?"
"It's showing, not watching, that turns me on."
"What did you feel?"
"Pity. I thought she might need help—"
"Might?"
"—couldn't be sure about her motives. Was her exposure accidental? Did she know she could be seen? Did she care? I watched her enough times to be fairly certain she wasn't acting out. Then I stopped. No point after that. Wasn't a case anymore of...there-but-for-the-grace-of-God."
Janek knew then that Raymond Evans had not killed Mandy Ireland, let alone switched her head with that of Brenda Beard. Evans was a compassionate man who relieved his suffering by treating others. Howell would eventually see that, too, he thought, although the detective continued the questioning another hour.
Sal Marchetti chose to play hard-ass; Michael Hopkins' lie to Aaron about owning binoculars was an insult to be repaid. Sal made the rounds again of residents in Amanda's building. Had the hairstylist across the way been spying into windows or had he just been watching birds?
"Birds!" exclaimed the silver-haired woman who lived in the apartment below Amanda. "He'd have to climb halfway out his window to see high enough." Would she be willing to swear out a peeping-Tom complaint? "I most certainly would! You ought to lock him up."
Armed with affidavits from five complainants, Sal confronted the voyeur late Friday at his hair salon. Hopkins, about to leave for his weekend home, was extremely irritated by the intrusion.
"I told that other detective—"
"Nice place you got here. How many heads you do a day?"
"I personally see eight or so clients. But I don't see what that has to do—"
"Eight heads, huh?"
"I supervise eighteen or twenty more."
"That's a lot of heads."
"What are you trying—"
"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 at—"
"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 parties—stuff 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 said—he is a nasty little freak."
"No 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.
Aaron 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."
Jack 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.