It's his eyes, Janek thought. Empty eyes, shiny and hard like wet gray stones. Unwavering eyes, utterly still. Eyes without affect.
They sat facing one another on long black leather sofas, a large square glass coffee table in between. Nothing on the table. Nothing on the walls. The apartment cold, pristine, the floors painted a hard-gloss white, the young man sitting silent, still—watching, appraising, waiting for him to begin.
Janek had puzzled over photographs before the meeting. Peter hadn't looked like the sort who would make the kind of films he did. No brooding countenance, no tormented brow. Rather a regular, bland unlined face, light brown hair cut short like a college boy's, the features empty, inexpressive, blank like a sentry's. Like a marine sentry, Janek thought, on duty, on guard.
"Detective Rosenthal tells me you're interested in the Ireland homicide." No reaction, no anxiety, just that blankness in the eyes. "The investigation's bogging down. Thought I'd drop by and pick your brains."
Peter smiled, as if to say: "Okay, go ahead. Pick." The photographs, Janek realized, did not do justice to his eyes. Or to his stillness; the guy just sat there, didn't move.
"Have any theories?"
Peter cocked his head. Theories? Was Janek serious? "Told Rosenthal I saw the girl. Couldn't have missed her if I'd wanted to."
Janek leaned forward. "Tell me," he said. "What did you see?"
Peter stared straight ahead. Finally, he spoke. "She did these stretch deals, bare ass, around eleven every night. Wondered what she was up to. Whether she was asking for it. Or what."
"Asking for what?" Janek asked. He shifted position. Lane had seated him so that a ray of the late afternoon sun was shining directly into his eyes.
"That's what I wondered: 'Or what?' That's what I wondered about."
Janek shook his head. "That's not what I meant."
"What did you mean?"
"What did you think she might be asking for?"
"Oh, I see. Well, that's what I asked myself." He spoke in a maddeningly laconic tone of voice, then sat back. He smiled the small cool smile of a man who'd just delivered a message: Push and I'll concede you nothing; press and you'll find I'm made of stone.
The shaft of light fell between them now, cutting across the room like a sword. Watching his suspect through the curtain of sparkling dust, Janek was struck again by Peter's stillness. No fluttering, no nervous energy, just an inappropriate tranquility. Janek had seen that same calm before in certain Vietnam vets he'd met. A quiet that screamed. A hush that roared. It was there in Peter's eyes.
"You were fascinated by her?"
"Interested. Thought it could make a brilliant scene. The girl so provocative, offering herself. But holding back too. She didn't wiggle her boobs."
"What was she like?"
Lane thought about it. "Hard to say."
"She was practicing for her exercise class."
"She should have pulled the blinds."
"Suppose she had? You think she'd still be alive?"
Peter ignored the question. "There were reflections. Stuff going on. Interesting, the way she'd be there stretching and then she'd turn off the lamp and the scene would change and suddenly you'd see what was happening across the way.
Peter was speaking now like a director explaining a scene, but his animation rang false to Janek—as if he were feigning emotions he didn't feel but thought he ought to show.
"...kind of superimposure." Lane squinted as if imagining it. "Connections. Opposites. Great visual idea. Filed it away. Then, when I read she got herself killed, got to thinking about it again...."
He lowered his eyes, pausing as if weighing whether to go on. Mind-fucking me, Janek thought.
"Could make a powerful opening. Knew that. But knew there had to be someone else. Man. Watcher. Voyeur. Guy like me. Guy living across the yard. Ever see Rear Window? About this photographer, Jimmy Stewart. His leg's—"
"Seen it."
"—in a cast. Pure cinema. Lock yourself up and see what you can do. You're in this one room with your camera. Got to tell your story from there. Got to play fair. Can't show anything the guy can't see. Can't take the camera into the girl's apartment. Rules of the game."
"Rules? Play fair?"
"Fair with the audience. That's the challenge—can you tell your story from that room across the yard? Can the guy looking into the victim's apartment plan the crime just from what he sees?"
"Plan the crime? I thought Jimmy Stewart solved it."
Peter shrugged. "Well, there's the difference." He stopped talking then, as abruptly as he'd started, peering closely at Janek, waiting for him to take up the thread. And as he let the silence hang between them, Janek was struck by how shrewdly he'd reversed their situation, from one in which a detective had come to measure a suspect to one in which the suspect signaled he didn't care.
"Well," Janek said after they had sat in silence for a time, "suppose you put in a cop." Peter looked at him. "With a suspect, a film director, in whose movies he's noticed similarities to the crime." Peter nodded. "Now suppose this cop decides to try and trap his suspect by turning the script around."
"How do you mean?"
"Making it come out opposite from the way it always does in the suspect's films."
Peter studied him. "This is a pretty highfalutin' cop you're talking about."
"Well, what do you think?"
Peter squinted. "Needs complications. Psychological dimensions. The cop's fear of failure and of being made to play the fool. And physical violence—something that could happen to him or to someone he cared a lot about." Lane paused. "Still, the real drama would be the struggle between the two. Not who wins, who loses; that wouldn't matter much. But the struggle, the confrontation. The killer taunting the cop. The cop doing a terrible burn. The killer calm as rain...."
It was the master bedroom window which had the perfect view of Amanda's apartment. Lane brought Janek to it last. They stared down at her window together in silence; though a good hundred feet away it looked much closer in the gathering dusk.
If Janek had had any doubts about his voyeur theory, all of them were settled now. Amanda had been so close, so clearly visible, and the ladder from her roof stood there begging to be climbed.
Peter spoke first. "What do you think happened over there?"
Janek turned to him; Peter was searching his face.
"I'll tell you," Janek said, "I think the killer wanted to murder a hooker."
"She didn't strike me that way."
"She wasn't like that and her killer knew it. So he had to work things out."
"If he wanted a whore why pick her in the first place?"
"You've put your finger on it. That's the crux of the case." Peter's gaze on him was steady now. "His script demanded a whore but no matter how hard he tried he couldn't make Amanda into one. The challenge, remember? Trying to shoot an entire picture from a window?" Janek turned back toward Mandy's building. He spoke slowly, rhapsodically, wanting to hold Peter's attention now. "I imagine him watching her night after night, standing at his window the way we're standing now at yours, peering out, studying her, working up hatred for her on account of the way she refuses to play her part. Days go by. Weeks. His rage mounts up. He wants to degrade her. Knock her down. Make her dirty. Make her crawl. Then, at last, an idea. Comes to him in a flash. As satisfying as it is brutal. A way around the dilemma of the prospective victim who has refused the coveted role. If Amanda won't be a whore he'll make her into one. He'll find a real whore, one who resembles her, kill them both and then exchange their heads. That way, in a single stroke, he'll double the magnitude of his crime. He'll create two dead and mutilated sluts instead of one, and turn his act into a puzzle that will taunt and defeat the police."
He turned back to Peter before he finished speaking. The curiosity was gone. Peter's face was still again.
"Well?"
"That's a truly incredible story."
"Don't believe it?"
"You got enough going on over there without dragging in a second girl."
"What's wrong with a second girl?"
"Farfetched. Grandiose."
"Funny," Janek said. "I've seen a couple of your movies. Compared to them I'd say my story's pretty solid."
Lane looked at him. "What did you think of them?"
"What?"
"My movies."
"Oh." Finally, a soft spot. "Found them disturbing, to tell the truth."
"They're meant to be."
"Sure. But I don't mean the way you think."
"How do you mean?"
"Oh, I don't know." He worked to keep his tone mild and free of rancor. "Felt that for all the blood and gore in them, in the end they lacked real blood." He waited a moment for Lane to respond, but the director's eyes remained blank. "Your characters are made of cardboard, Peter. And most of your visual ideas are borrowed from Hitchcock. I know there're critics who say you have a powerful vision but, frankly, I don't think you do. You see, when I looked at your stuff all I could feel was the wounded little guy who'd made them up. A cop-hater with a chip on his shoulder serving up a pathetic little rage."
It was an enormous insult. As Janek delivered it he carefully studied Peter's face. His eyes were empty and his body still, like a sentry guarding a vault.