The Butcher's Theater

by Jonathan Kellerman

  The door to the street swung open, letting in heat, and Rappaport from the Post walked in. Perfect. It was Rappaport’s byline on the murder story, and he was an American, Princeton grad, a former hippie type who’d interned at the Baltimore Sun. Young, Jewish, and fast-talking, but he didn’t mind a tipple once in a while.

  Wilbur motioned toward the empty stool on his left and Rappaport sat down. “Steve, old boy.”

  “Hello, Mark.”

  The Post man was wearing a short-sleeved safari shirt with oversized pockets, denim walking shorts, and sandals without socks.

  “Very casual,” said Wilbur appraisingly.

  “Got to beat the heat, Mark.” Rappaport took a bulldog pipe, tobacco pouch, and matches out of one of the big pockets and placed them on the bar.

  Wilbur noticed that the other two Israeli journalists were also informally attired. Long pants, but lightweight sport shirts. Suddenly his seersucker suit, button-down shirt, and rep tie, which had looked natty when he’d dressed this morning, seemed out of place, superfluous.

  “Righto.” He loosened his tie and pointed to the rolled-up Post. “Just finished reading your piece. Nice chunk of work, Steve.”

  “Routine,” said Rappaport. “Straight from the source. The police covered up the first one, fed us a false quick-solve, and we swallowed it, but there were rumors that it was too easy, too cute, so we had our feelers out and were ready for them the second time around.”

  Wilbur chuckled. “Same old bullshit.” He picked up the newspaper, used it for a fan. “Nasty stuff, from the sound of it.”

  “Very. Butchery.”

  Wilbur liked the sound of that. He filed it away for future use.

  “Any leads?”

  “Nothing,” said Rappaport. He had long hair and a thick handlebar mustache that he brushed away from his lips. “The police here aren’t used to that kind of thing—they’re not equipped to handle it.”

  “Amateur hour, huh?”

  The bartender brought Wilbur’s shrimp.

  “I’ll have some of that too,” said Rappaport. “And a beer.”

  “On me,” Wilbur told the bartender.

  “Thank you much, Mark,” said Rappaport.

  Wilbur shrugged it off. “Gotta keep the expense account going or the main office gets worried.”

  “I won’t tell you about my expense account.” Rappaport frowned. “Or lack thereof.”

  “Police beating their meat?” asked Wilbur, trying to get the conversation back on track. It was a little too obvious and Rappaport seemed to have caught it. He picked up the pipe, rolled it in his palm, then filled it, lit it, and regarded Wilbur over a rising plume of smoke.

  “Same thing back home,” said Wilbur, backtracking casually. “Stepping over each other’s feet and snowing the press.”

  “No,” said Rappaport. “That’s not the situation here. Major Crimes is a fairly competent unit when it comes to their specialty—security crimes, bombs left in trash bins, et cetera. The problem with this kind of thing is lack of experience. Sex murders are virtually unknown in Israel—I went into the archives and found only a handful in thirty years. And only one was a serial—a guy last year, cutting up hookers. They never caught him.” He shook his head, smoked. “Six months in Baltimore, I saw more than that.”

  “Last year,” said Wilbur. “Could it be the same guy?”

  “Doubtful. Different M.O.’s.”

  M.O.’s. The kid had been reading too many detective novels.

  “Two in a row,” said Wilbur. “Maybe things are changing.”

  “Maybe they are,” said Rappaport. He looked concerned. The sincere worry of a good citizen. Unprofessional, thought Wilbur. If you wanted to be effective you couldn’t be part of it.

  “What else you been up to, Steve?” he asked, not wanting to sound too eager.

  “Sunday puff piece on the new Ramat Gan mall—nothing much else.”

  “Till the next pseudo-scandal, eh?”

  Before Rappaport could reply, his shrimp and beer came. Wilbur slapped down his American Express card and called for another Turkey.

  “Thanks again,” said Rappaport, tamping his pipe out and laying it in an ashtray. “I don’t know, maybe we are changing. Maybe it’s a sign of maturity. One of the founders of the state, Jabotinsky, said we wouldn’t be a real country until we had Israeli criminals and Israeli whores.”

  We. The guy was overinvolved, thought Wilbur. And typically arrogant. The Chosen People, thinking they invented everything, turning everything into a virtue. He’d spent four years on a midtown Manhattan beat for the New York Post, could tell the kid plenty about Israeli criminals.

  He smiled and said, “Welcome to the real world, Steve.”

  “Yup.”

  They drank and ate shrimp, talked about women and bosses and salaries, finally got around to the murders again. Wilbur kept a running tab going, cajoled Rappaport into having another shrimp cocktail. Three more beers and the Post man started reminiscing about his student days in Jerusalem, how safe it had been, everyone keeping their doors unlocked. Paradise, to listen to him, but Wilbur knew it was self-delusion—nostalgia always was. He played fascinated listener and, by the time Rappaport left, had filed away all his information and was ready to start writing.

  CHAPTER

  31

  Ten days since the discovery of Juliet’s body, and nothing new, either good or bad.

  They’d narrowed the sex offender list down to sixteen men. Ten Jews, four Arabs, one Druze, one Armenian, all busted since Gray Man. None had alibis; all had histories of violence or, according to the prison psychiatrists, the potential for it. Seven had attempted rape, three had pulled it off, four had severely beaten women after being refused sex, and two were chronic peepers with multiple burglary convictions and a penchant for carrying knives—a combination the doctors considered potentially explosive.

  Five of the sixteen lived in Jerusalem; another six resided in communities within an hour’s drive of the capital. The Druze’s home was farther north, in the village of Daliyat el Carmel, a remote aerie atop the verdant, poppy-speckled hills that looked down upon Haifa. But he was unemployed, had access to a car, and was prone to taking solitary drives. The same was true of two of the Arabs and one of the Jews. The remaining pair of Jews, Gribetz and Brickner, were friends who’d gang-raped a fifteen-year-old girl—Gribetz’s cousin—and also lived far north, in Nahariya. Before going to prison they’d shared a business, a trucking service specializing in picking up parcels from the Customs House at Ashdod and delivering them to owners’ homes. Since their release they’d resumed working together, tooling along the highways in an old Peugeot pickup. Looking, Daniel wondered, for more than profit?

  He interviewed them and the Druze, trying to make some connection between Juliet Haddad’s Haifa entry and home bases near the northern border.

  Gribetz and Brickner were surly, semiliterate types in their mid-twenties, heavily muscled louts who smelled unwashed and gave off a foul heat. They didn’t take the interrogation seriously, nudged each other playfully and laughed at unspoken jokes, and despite the tough-guy posturing, Daniel started perceiving them as lovers—latent homosexuals perhaps? They seemed bored by discussion of their crime, shrugged it off as a miscarriage of justice.

  “She was always loose,” said Gribetz. “Everyone in the family knew it.”

  “What do you mean by ‘always’?” asked Daniel.

  Gribetz’s eyes dulled with confusion.

  “Always—what do you think?” interceded Brickner.

  Daniel kept his eyes on Gribetz. “She was fifteen when you raped her. How long had she been . . . loose?”

  “Always,” said Gribetz. “For years. Everyone in the family knew it. She was born that way.”

  “They’d have family parties,” said Brickner. “Afterward everyone would take a drive with Batya and all the guys would have a go at her.”

  “You were there too?”

  “No, no
, but everyone knew—it was the kind of thing everyone knew.”

  “What we did was the same as always,” said Gribetz. “We went for a spin in the truck and had her good, but this time she wanted money and we said fuck you. She got mad and called the cops, ruined our lives.”

  “She really fucked us up,” confirmed Brickner. “We lost all our accounts, had to start from scratch.”

  “Speaking of your accounts,” Daniel asked him, “do you keep a log of your deliveries?”

  “For each day. Then we throw it out.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Why not? It’s our personal shit. What’s the matter, the government doesn’t give us enough paperwork to store?”

  Daniel looked at the arrest report Northern Division had written up on the two. The girl had suffered a broken jaw, loss of twelve teeth, a cracked eye socket, ruptured spleen, and vaginal lacerations that had needed suturing.

  “You could have killed her,” he said.

  “She was trying to take our money,” protested Brickner. “She was nothing more than a whore.”

  “So you’re saying that it’s okay to beat up whores.”

  “Well, ah, no—you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t. Explain it to me.”

  Brickner scratched his head and inhaled. “How about a cigarette?”

  “Later. First explain me your philosophy about whores.”

  “We don’t need whores, Hillel and me,” said Gribetz. “We get plenty of pussy, any time we want.”

  “Whores,” said Brickner. “Who the hell needs them.”

  “Which is why you raped her?”

  “That was different,” said Brickner. “His whole family knew about her.”

  An hour later, they’d given him nothing that cleared them, but neither had they implicated themselves. During the nights of the murders they claimed to have been sleeping in bed, but both lived alone and lacked verification. Their memories failed to stretch back to the period preceding Fatma’s murder, but they recalled delivering parcels to Bet Shemesh the day before Juliet’s body had been found. A painstaking check of Ashdod Customs records revealed an early morning pickup; Shmeltzer was still trying to get hold of the bills of lading from the week of Fatma’s death.

  The timing vis-à-vis Juliet was feasible, Daniel knew. Bet Shemesh was just outside Jerusalem, which would have given them ample opportunity to drop off the packages, then go prowling around. But where would they have killed her and cut her up? Neither had residence nor connections in Jerusalem and the lab boys had found no blood in the truck. They denied ever laying eyes on Juliet or going into the city, and no witness placed them there. As for what they’d done with the afternoon, they claimed to have driven back north, spent the afternoon at a deserted stretch of beach just above Haifa.

  “Anyone see you there?” asked Daniel.

  “No one goes there,” said Brickner. “The ships leak shit in the water—it smells. There’s tar all over the beach that can gook you up if you’re not careful.”

  “But you guys go there.”

  Brickner grinned. “We like it. It’s empty—you can piss in the sand, do whatever you like.”

  Gribetz laughed.

  “I’d like for both of you to take a polygraph test.”

  “Does it hurt?” asked Brickner in a crude imitation of a child’s voice.

  “You’ve had one before. It’s in your file.”

  “Oh, yeah, the wires. It fucked us over. No way.”

  “No way for me either,” said Gribetz. “No way.”

  “It incriminated you because you were guilty. If you’re innocent, you can use it to clear yourselves of suspicion. Otherwise you’ll be considered suspects.”

  “Consider away,” said Brickner, spreading his arms.

  “Consider away,” said Gribetz, aping him.

  Daniel called for a uniform, had them taken back.

  A repulsive pair but he tended to believe them. They were low-impulse morons, explosive and psychopathic, playing on each other’s pathology. Certainly capable of damaging another woman if the right situation came up, but he didn’t see them for the murders. The cold calculation that had echoed from the crime scenes wasn’t their style. Still, smarter men than he had been fooled by psychopaths, and there was still the earlier Ashdod material to be looked at. Perhaps something would be found that refreshed their memories about Fatma. Before he ordered them released, he slowed down the paperwork so that they’d be cooling their heels for as long as possible, assigned Avi Cohen to drive up to Nahariya and find out more about them, keep a tight surveillance on them when they got home.

  The Druze, Assad Mallah, was also no genius. One of the peepers, he was a withdrawn, stammering type, just turned thirty, with jailhouse pallor, watery blue eyes, and a history of neurological abnormalities that had exempted him from army service. As a teenager he’d burgled Haifa apartments, gorged himself on food from the victims’ refrigerators, and left a thank-you card before departing: a mound of excrement on the kitchen floor.

  Because of his age he’d been given youth counseling, which never took place because at that time there’d been no Druze counselors; no one from Social Welfare had bothered to drive up to Daliyat el Carmel to bring him in. But he had received treatment of sorts—severe and regular beatings at the hand of his father—which seemed to have done the trick, because his record stayed clean. Until one night, ten years later, he was caught ejaculating noisily against the wall of an apartment building near the Technion, one hand gripping the casement of a nearby bedroom window, the other flogging away as he cried out in ecstasy.

  The tenants were a married couple, a pair of graduate physics students who’d forgotten to draw their drapes. Hearing the commotion, the husband rushed out, discovered Mallah, beat him senseless, and called the police. During his questioning by Northern District, the Druze immediately confessed to scores of peeping incidents and dozens of burglaries, which went a long way in clearing the local crime records.

  He was a blade man too. At the time of his arrest, there had been a penknife in his pocket—he claimed to use it to whittle and slice fruit. No forensic evidence had been found to contradict him at the time and Northern District had confiscated the weapon, which had since disappeared. At his trial he had the misfortune of drawing the only Druze judge at Haifa Magistrates Hall and received the maximum sentence. In Ramle he behaved well, got good recommendations from the psychiatrists and the administrators, and was released early. One month before Fatma’s murder.

  Another penknife had been found on him the day he’d been picked up for questioning. Small-bladed, dull, it bore no similarity to Levi’s wound molds. He was also, Daniel noticed, left-handed, which, according to the pathologist, made him an unlikely candidate. Daniel spent two sluggish hours with him, scheduled a polygraph, and made a phone request to Northern District for a loose surveillance: no intrusion into the village; keep track of his license plate; report his whereabouts if he went into town.

  At the same time, the Chinaman and Daoud were interrogating other suspects, working with dogged rhythm, going down the list. They agreed to do a good-guy, bad-guy routine, switching off so that the Chinaman would lean hard on the Jews, Daoud zero in on the Arabs. It threw the suspects off guard, kept them guessing about who was who, what was what. And reduced the possibility of racism/brutality charges, though that would happen no matter what you did. A national pastime.

  Two days later, ten of the sixteen had been judged improbable. All agreed to be hooked up to the polygraph; all passed. Of the six possibles, three also passed, leaving three refusers—the Nahariya buddies and an Arab from Gaza. Daoud was assigned to watch the Arab.

  Late in the afternoon, Shmeltzer came into Daniel’s office with photocopies of the customs material from Ashdod. During the days preceding Fatma’s murder, Brickner and Gribetz had picked up an unusually full load of cargo—part of an overflow shipment held up at the docks for three weeks due to a stevedore strike. The parcel
s were destined for the north-central region—Afula, Hadera, and villages in the Bet She’an valley, a good seventy kilometers above Jerusalem. Which was still driveable if they’d gotten off early.

  Daniel, Shmeltzer, and the Chinaman got on the phone, calling each name on the bills of lading, received confirmation that the buddies had been busy for two days straight, so busy that they’d spent the night in Hadera, parking their truck in a date grove belonging to one of the package owners, still asleep when the guy went to check his trees. He remembered them well, he told Daniel, because they’d awoken filthy-mouthed, stood on the truck bed and urinated onto the ground, then demanded breakfast.

  “Were there packages in the truck bed?”

  “Oh, yeah. Dozens. They stood right on top of them—didn’t give a damn.”

  Idiots, thought Daniel, they could have supplied themselves with alibis all along, had been too stupid or too contrary to do so. Maybe being thought of as potential murderers fed their egos.

  Dangerous, they bore watching, but were no longer his present concern.

  The Arab from Gaza, Aljuni, was their last chance—not that probable, really, except that he was a killer who liked blades and hated women. He’d carved up one wife in a fit of rage over improperly cooked soup, maimed another, and, three months out of prison, was engaged to a third, sixteen years old. Why did women hook up with that type? Latent death wish? Was being alone worse than death?

  Irrelevant questions. Daoud had nothing to report on Aljuni: The guy kept regular habits, never went out at night. No doubt he’d come to naught as a prospect. The winnowing of the sex files had been futile.

  He looked at his watch. Eight P.M. and he hadn’t called home. He did so, got no answer, and puzzled, phoned the message operator and asked if Gveret Sharavi had tried to get in touch with him.

  “Let me see—yes. Here’s one from her that came in at four forty-three, Pakad. She wants to know if you’ll be joining her, the children, and . . . it looks like the Boonkers—”