Murder in Jerusalem (40 page)

“Here's the list you asked for,” she told Michael with open animosity, handing him two sheets of paper. “All the names and their jobs and their reasons for needing to be here. That's what you wanted, wasn't it?”

Michael ignored her question, eyed the pages she had handed him, and said, “If this is the case, then all the people listed in the left-hand column should be available for questioning now.”

Niva nodded.

“And where are they now?”

“In the newsroom, like we were told. They're waiting for you to take them in. Isn't that the way it works?”

Michael left the canteen and went up the stairs to the newsroom. Sergeant Yigael was waiting for him in the doorway and informed him excitedly that Tzilla was looking for him. “She says they've given you a cell phone, sir,” he said, unsure how far he should push this. “She says you never have it on. But I told her there's no reception in the canteen.” Michael fished around in his pockets; his phone had remained with Eli Bachar, who undoubtedly had left it off. “She asked for you to call her,” the sergeant said. “She said it was urgent.”

Yaffa dialed her own cell phone for him, mumbling something about intelligent people with no technical sense at all, and handed it to him. Without fanfare or small talk Tzilla told him he would need to attend a meeting of the Special Investigations team “before police headquarters turns into a madhouse, what with everyone being investigated.” She added, “Everyone's already waiting for you. There's a van outside waiting to bring you here.”

 

“There's so much material that it's hard to know where to begin,” Tzilla complained when everyone was already seated, busy eating and drinking. Only after eight o'clock, during a scheduled break in the investigations and searches, was she able to gather the entire team for a meeting. “In any event you people need to eat something,” she had claimed to Michael. “After such a long day and being involved with investigations you couldn't very well have had time to eat. Balilty's brought pita bread and hummus and fixings”—she pointed to the table in the corner of the room—“we've got everything, coffee, too, just get Eli here for me since he hasn't been answering his cell phone or his beeper, and bring Balilty back from wherever he popped out to for a minute, I have no idea where, but that minute has stretched into half an hour just like always with Balilty: if you manage to catch the guy you can never let him go.” While she was talking she opened the door and looked out into the hallway. “Danny Balilty,” she called out. “Has anyone seen Danny Balilty?”

Two doors opened, and in one stood Balilty. “What are you shouting for?” he asked, feigning innocence. “I told you I'd be there in a minute, didn't I? Geez, what's the big deal? Are you people waiting for me? Everybody else is already there?”

Michael smiled as he listened to Tzilla assure Balilty that they were waiting only for him, but at that moment he heard Eli Bachar's voice as he entered, breathing heavily, asking, “Is there coffee?” He sank into a chair, then noticed the Hanukkah menorah in the corner, three candles burning. “What's going on here?” he bellowed. “Since when do we celebrate Jewish festivals around here, like little kids or the Orthodox?”

“As long as we're on the topic of children,” Tzilla said, “why don't you pop home sometime? The kids haven't seen you for two days and I can't leave here. Your mother brought them in earlier to light candles and we tried to find you, but there was no reaching you. Anywhere.”

“So that's it,” Eli Bachar mumbled. “I knew that menorah looked familiar. Isn't that the one Dana made in kindergarten?”

Michael sighed and fished a new toothpick from his shirt pocket.

“Try a cigar,” Balilty counseled him. “Hold an unlit cigar in your hand and see how satisfying that is.”

Michael regarded him for a moment, then shook his head. “Too soon,” he said. “Too soon, too close to when I gave up smoking. Try me again in another month.”

“If you haven't gone back to cigarettes by then,” Balilty teased him. Michael ignored the comment, Balilty's invitation to a duel.

“Let's get started,” Michael said. In a quiet voice he read out the known facts from a summary prepared by Tzilla, mentioning the two previous deaths and Matty Cohen's digoxin, and emphasizing that Zadik's murder removed any possibility that the other two deaths could have been accidents. “The assumption under which we are working—until we have reason to believe otherwise—is that we're talking about a single murderer,” he concluded.

“About the digoxin,” Lillian asked, crinkling her forehead, “did Matty Cohen take too much of it, or what?”

“Four times too much,” Tzilla said. “He took four times what he should have.”

“On purpose?” Lillian asked.

“He neglected to inform us,” Tzilla answered coolly.

“I'd like to suggest,” Balilty interjected, “that we deal with Zadik first and move backward, because with Zadik the case is clear. We're talking about half an hour, hour maximum. Pretty tight alibi.”

“It only looks that way, like it's really clear,” Eli Bachar said. “Lots of people were in the building, dozens of them. Do you have information on everyone who was around?” he asked Tzilla. She explained that there was no list of the employees, only the guests, who were made to show identification before entering the building.

“First of all,” Michael explained, “it certainly seems we're looking for someone on the inside, I'd say someone
very
much on the inside. Not a guest.”

“Because of the door,” Lillian noted.

“Because of the door,” Michael agreed. “It's clear that if the murderer entered from the hallway door, then it has to be someone who knew about it, which in my opinion narrows the possibilities considerably.”

“Not only that,” Balilty said. “The person who knew about the door also had a key to enter through the back of the String Building without passing through security the night Tirzah was killed. I'd also like to remind everybody that I spoke with the guy who oversees the broadcasts—write that down, will you, Tzilla?”

“First tell me what it was about.”

“I talked to the guy who oversees the broadcasts,” he repeated, making himself sound important. “You've got to talk to the behind-the-scenes people, it's a no-brainer talking to the VIPs, it's the ones who aren't in the spotlight that—”

“Balilty,” Tzilla said impatiently, “what did he say?”

“The guy's in charge of all the technical matters, decides if something gets broadcast or not, and he sits in the central control room, it's like the master control center. All the satellite stuff passes through there, so, for example, broadcasts from the Knesset on Channel Thirty-three come through master control. What's important to remember here—write this down, Tzilla—is that there's nobody there between one and four in the morning. The room is open, and anyone can just walk in. At night all kinds of equipment goes missing over there.” Balilty spread his arms as if to say, Voilà!

“So?” Tzilla said. “How does that connect to our case?”

“It means,” said Balilty vaguely, “that there are all kinds of hiding places, limitless possibilities. It's impossible to know who has access to what.”

“Even who might have had access to Matty Cohen's medicine,” Sergeant Ronen noted. “We'll never solve that riddle, you can be sure of that. If a guy takes a prescription on a regular basis, how can you prove that someone sneaked him an extra dose?”

“Nothing's impossible,” Balilty said as though speaking from experience. “But let's start from the end and work backward.”

“The end,” Michael said, “already presents us with an enigma: the Orthodox Jew with the burn marks who disappeared as though he'd never existed. Nobody saw him or heard him.”

“We've put together a composite of him,” Tzilla reminded them all. “It's been distributed, there's not a squad car in the city without one. And they broadcast it on the five o'clock news. Did you see it?”

“I was busy,” Michael answered, “but I was thinking that maybe—”

Balilty was staring at him, concentrating hard. Suddenly he sat up straight and said, “Forget about it, I already thought about that, and it won't work.”

“How do you know what he's talking about?” Eli Bachar sputtered furiously. “Why don't you let him finish?”

“I know what he's going to say,” Balilty bragged. “Because great minds think alike, okay? He's thinking that maybe the burned religious guy is really Benny Meyuhas, right?”

Michael nodded.

“Why, so they'll think he's Sroul?” Balilty asked for clarification. “As if their friend Sroul had come back to Israel?”

“Who's Sroul?” Ronen asked.

“You mean like a disguise?” Lillian asked.

“Why not?” Tzilla interjected. “After all, we're talking about a director here, he's got access to all kinds of costumes. He's also knowledgeable about the possibilities.”

“The Border Police have no record of his entering the country, at least under that name,” Eli Bachar said.

“That's fine,” Balilty said dismissively, “but he could have entered with a different passport under another name. With an American passport and an American name.”

“We haven't managed to make contact with his family in Los Angeles,” Eli Bachar said. “We've been trying since this morning, but there's no answer, only an answering machine.”

“But directors really got all kinds of possibilities,” Tzilla persisted.

“They
have got
possibilities, not
got,
” Emmanuel Shorer said from the doorway.

“I was talking about Benny Meyuhas,” Tzilla said, glaring at Shorer as he entered the room, closed the door, and took a seat. “And the burned guy,” she added.

“All right,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Don't mind me, I'll try to follow along.”

“There are two things that stand in the way of this hypothesis,” Balilty said. “One is the difference in height, which is of course possible to change. Benny Meyuhas is a lot shorter than Sroul, according to Aviva's description. But the other—and this I do not believe can be changed, it depends on Aviva's hearing—is the voice. She talked at length about the guy's voice, said it was a different voice, the kind you can't forget. And she knows Benny's voice really well. She's certain it's a different voice.”

“Okay, that just reinforces what I said before, that we've got to get something out of Benny Meyuhas,” Rafi said. “In my opinion he suits our criteria to a tee.”

“We've been putting more and more pressure on him, and he still won't talk,” Lillian said. “What more can we do?”

“Dig around like Eli did today,” Michael said. “What came out of all your investigations, Eli?”

“Not much,” Eli Bachar answered. “I put tape recorders on your desk, but we really didn't get anything new from them. That actress just keeps repeating her version of events, that she was with him at his house. In the end we got it out of her that she was with him in the bed—‘for the purpose of consoling him,' she says—and then somebody rang the doorbell and at first he didn't want to answer but the person kept ringing and ringing and so finally he went to open it, told her not to leave the bed, to wait for him there and not to move, and she was afraid it was Hagar, her producer.”

Balilty snorted. “Producer? More like guard dog, shadow, always at his side, dying to have him for her own. If she'd found that little actress in his bed, that would've been the end of her. It was hard enough on her that he was living with Tirzah; but if she'd found him with some young actress? Whoa! That wouldn't have been a pretty sight.”

Eli Bachar said, “At first she said she didn't hear anything, said the bedroom door was closed because Benny had closed it on his way out. So we did an experiment, went there to try it out.”

“Good job,” Balilty said. “You're a pretty thorough guy.”

There was hostility in Eli Bachar's green eyes as he stared at Balilty. “I stayed in the bedroom while Coby went to the front door and spoke in a normal voice. I could hear him—not the words, but I could hear his voice. On a hunch I told her she may not have left the bedroom, but she certainly must have opened the door to listen. At first she said, ‘No way,' and denied it, but eventually, when I put some pressure on her—”

“Pressure, hah!” Balilty grumbled. “What kind of pressure? You couldn't exactly threaten to arrest her!”

Eli Bachar ignored Balilty. “So then she says, ‘I cracked the door open a tiny bit, just to know who it was,' and she told me it was a man's voice, one she'd never heard before. Then she heard Benny Meyuhas—he sounded all excited—and the other guy's voice again, then the door slammed and that was that. He didn't come back. Time went by and he didn't return, so she got up, got herself dressed, and waited in the living room. Eventually she went home.”

“Hang on a minute,” Rafi said. “He never came back to the bedroom? He didn't get dressed first? It's winter—the guy couldn't have gone out without shoes. I mean, he was in the middle of f—”

“We asked about that,” Eli Bachar said, cutting him off. “You better believe we asked about that. She said he'd left his clothes in the living room, that's where they'd gotten started—”

“Every man has his own style,” Balilty muttered.

“No,” Eli Bachar said. “This guy isn't that type. He's no philanderer. I understand that he was showing her unedited clips from their film, it wasn't…she'd come to offer her condolences, I don't know exactly—”

“It always starts somewhere,” Balilty concluded. “Some people learn from the experience of others. You bring a pretty young woman home with you, show her some film clips, you're an important director. What's the big surprise? Then things move into the bedroom. Doesn't surprise me in the least.”