Murder Duet: A Musical Case

by Batya Gur

  “That’s true,” said Michael. “There’s no doubt about it. It’s one of the things always brought up when hypnosis and its possible dangers are being discussed. A man won’t commit a murder under hypnosis unless he’s already murderous. But you’re not talking about hypnosis now, but about something else. And there are precedents for the kind of thing you’re talking about. People have committed murder in a fit of insanity and afterward not remembered it.”

  The blood drained from her already pale face, and her hands shook. “Then it is possible?” she whispered in a choked voice. “That something like that could happen. In that case, I’m a danger to everyone, and I should be . . . I can’t be left alone with Ido, with the children. . . .” She stood up, clutched her throat with both hands, and swayed on her feet. Michael stood up, too, and held her firmly. “You have to arrest me now, to take me away from here because I may have . . . I must have . . .” Her eyes rolled up and she began to jerk convulsively.

  He slapped her once and then began talking fast. It seemed to him that everything now depended on what he could recall about memory loss under similar circumstances. “Listen!” he said to her sharply. “Listen to me! Are you listening?” She didn’t move. “Listen to me. That’s not the way things work. I know one instance of a boy who killed his parents and his brothers and sisters in a moment of madness. He can’t remember anything about it. Nothing. Neither the moment when he picked up the Uzi nor the moment when he shot them dead. Twenty-four hours have been wiped out of his memory. Not only that moment, but everything that preceded and followed it. That’s not the way it is with you. You remember everything you did during the day. Go on, tell me what you did, and you’ll see that you remember all the rest. Everything surrounding the moment when you found Gabi lying there. Talk slowly. You have nothing to worry about regarding the children. I won’t leave you alone—with them or without them.” He put his hand on her arm. “Until we get to the bottom of this, you won’t be alone,” he promised. “But now tell me everything you remember up to the moment when you saw Gabi and what happened afterward. Everything, every detail.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t me?” she whispered with a hint of relief. She breathed more quietly. Her anxiety attack had passed. He himself didn’t know where he got his certainty from. If Balilty had heard him now, he would no doubt have raised his eyebrows and said something sarcastic, and Shorer would have said that it might be a very cunning technique, but he had never heard of it. How well do you really know her? he imagined Shorer mockingly asking him. And who knows anyone well enough to be able to predict all his actions? You’re again relying on a belief based on intuition. And the minute the first crack appears, the whole thing will come down like a house of cards. In The Big Sleep Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe fell in love with a murderess. But he himself wasn’t in love, and Nita wasn’t a murderess. This wasn’t a seedy private eye’s office in New York—there were no whiskey bottles at his elbow. This was a normal apartment. In the next room Balilty’s cold, sharp logic held sway—and a crying baby. Philip Marlowe had no baby. Nor did the woman he fell in love with. And again, above all, he wasn’t in love with Nita.

  She spoke slowly, trying with all her strength to concentrate. Someone knocked on the door. “Not now,” called Michael, and Nita trembled. Slowly she reconstructed the rehearsal. When she had described the work on the last movement of the Double Concerto, she said, with an effort: “And after that I don’t remember.” Michael asked about the packing up of the instruments, and about those who had remained onstage. He wondered if she’d noticed Gabi going backstage. She brought her eyebrows up in concentration. In a hollow, almost dead voice, she said she couldn’t picture it, and then immediately resumed talking in the halting stammer, as if in a dream. She brought her eyebrows together over the bridge of her small nose.

  “Do you remember seeing the concertmaster, Avigdor, on the stage then?” She shook her head weakly. “Or Mrs. Agmon, the violinist who was looking for Gabi?”

  “Nothing,” mumbled Nita, burying her face in her hands. “Nothing. A complete blackout.”

  “She wanted to talk to him about her husband,” he said, trying to jog her memory. But she shook her head firmly and said that it was all in darkness. She had no sensation of walking on the stage, she wasn’t certain she had been on it at all at that point, but she also had no memory of having been anywhere else. “It’s like an event from your childhood,” she said dully “that you don’t really remember, that you’ve only been told about, learned about from a photograph album. That’s much different from really experiencing it yourself. That’s what it’s like for me until the moment when I’m standing over . . . seeing Gabi.” Only now did a stream of tears begin to flow down her hollow cheeks.

  “There’s a whole bit,” she said through her sobs, “that I don’t remember. As if there’s an abyss in the middle.” Suddenly her body stiffened. She sat up straight.

  “What is it?” he asked tensely.

  “There was . . . once . . . I remember . . . in a hotel in Columbus, Ohio, where I stayed overnight after a chamber music concert, an old movie on television called The Three Faces of Eve. Have you heard of it?”

  “The Three Faces of Eve?” he asked, astonished. “I know that movie. Joanne Woodward, in a wonderful performance.”

  “She has two personalities, and one doesn’t know about the other. Even then it terrified me. I couldn’t sleep all night.”

  “It has a happy ending, with the third personality that triumphs in the end,” he said as if in a dream, remembering that his Uncle Jacques, his mother’s younger brother, had seated him on a wooden chair in a middle row, glanced at his watch, announced that he had to make a phone call, promised to be back soon, and only returned for the final scenes. Michael too had been terrified by the movie.

  “Eve Black, the one who comes out of Eve White, puts a rope around her little daughter’s neck and tries to strangle her,” said Nita absently, and she hugged herself. “And luckily her husband appears when the little girl screams, and then the woman loses consciousness and wakes up as Eve White, the housewife who suffers from headaches and doesn’t remember anything. I’ve also suffered from terrible headaches this past year.”

  Michael kept quiet and stroked her arm.

  “She told the doctor that she hadn’t done anything. She didn’t remember anything. She was convinced that she was innocent,” said Nita, agitated.

  He remembered Joanne Woodward’s meek housewife’s face twisting in pain, her hands clutching her lace collar. He also remembered a ridiculous hat.

  “It’s lucky you saw the movie,” mumbled Nita. “At least you don’t think I’m crazy. The doctor explains to her that she’s not mentally ill, but that she’s suffering from a split personality.”

  He was silent. His memory of watching the movie; worried because Uncle Jacques hadn’t returned, that the seat next to him was empty, of encountering fine acting for the first time. “She was fabulous,” he heard himself say. “It was totally convincing.”

  In a hoarse whisper Nita said: “What’s important is that it’s possible to pass from one personality to the another, and the one doesn’t know about the other. There was a rope around the little girl’s neck, and the woman pulled it with all her strength, like this.” Nita raised her fists and moved her arms apart.

  “Nita,” said Michael, pleated the bedspread. “Do you remember that one of your strings snapped a few days ago, and you replaced it?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you remember how many spare strings you had?”

  “He’s already asked me that,” she said in despair. “I don’t remember whether it was two or three. It was definitely not one, and certainly not four.”

  He led her into the children’s room and sat her down on the folding bed next to Ido’s crib. Sara, who was kneeling in the corner, smiled her soothing, white-toothed smile. She didn’t look more than thirteen.

  The bedroom had been turned into a confe
rence room. “What is it with her?” asked Balilty, who was sitting next to Michael on the double bed. He then remarked on “Dalit’s excellent performance, even though she has no experience.” Then he sighed. “Theo van Gelden can’t remember when he left the stage and went off to phone, or how long it took,” he complained. “It looks as if nobody here has a motive. And we haven’t learned anything new about Gabriel, either. Did you talk to that guy?”

  “I did. And there’s already a polygraph. And a reply from the lab about the surgical tape.”

  “So,” said Balilty mockingly, “have you caught me being sloppy?”

  “I sure have,” said Michael and looked, not without pleasure, at Balilty’s chubby face, which froze.

  “Are you serious?” said Balilty finally. His small eyes gleamed with suspicion.

  “Absolutely!” said Michael. “There were down feathers on the tape.”

  “I don’t believe it!” said Balilty, but you could see the wheels of his mind rapidly turning. “Down?”

  “Down!”

  “Like in a pillow? A quilt? That kind of down?”

  “Yes.”

  “On the surgical tape?”

  “On the tape that was on van Gelden’s mouth.”

  “From a pillow?”

  “Apparently. They’re comparing it now with the old man’s pillow. We’ll know more in the morning.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that they first suffocated him with a pillow?”

  “I’m not trying to tell you anything. The facts speak for themselves.”

  Balilty peered at him, and then in the direction of the door. “They haven’t been told?”

  “No, and they won’t know it so quickly either,” Michael warned.

  “No, of course not!” said Balilty. He looked horrified. “What can I say? It was a screw-up.”

  “You said it.”

  “Yes, yes. I said it. Would you have done it any differently?”

  “How should I know?” said Michael. “I’d like to think so. But to be honest, I don’t know.”

  “It seemed like an ordinary robbery,” contended Balilty. “How could I have guessed that they suffocated him first and only tied him up afterward?”

  “In our profession there’s no such thing as “it seems like,’” exclaimed Michael, regretting the authoritative, patronizing tone of his banal statement when he saw Balilty’s crestfallen face. “Forgive me,” he said.

  “Okay, I’ve already said it was sloppy. What do you want me to do now?

  “Think about everything from the beginning.”

  “Okay, I’m thinking. And what I think is that we should talk about it at the meeting tomorrow. Do you realize that it puts them in the clear?” he asked, nodding toward the living room.

  “How?”

  “They had a concert. And before that each of them was busy. They have alibis.”

  “So it seems.”

  “You yourself took her to the hairdresser’s before the concert. You told me so.”

  “Yes, but not her brothers.”

  “One of them is no longer with us.”

  “But he was then. And the second one is very much with us. At the moment, anyway.”

  “Do you think that . . .” Balilty sounded worried. “Then we have to put them under guard. In shifts. Around the clock.”

  “You’re heading the team, right?”

  Balilty nodded absently.

  “Then do it,” said Michael.

  Balilty looked at him uncomprehendingly. “Why are you making an issue of it?”

  “Because if I give the order to have them put under surveillance, people might say that I’m only worried about Nita and the baby and soon.”

  “You see,” said Balilty. “It’s already coming up. And we haven’t even begun yet.”

  8

  Anyone Who Wants to Live Outside Life

  The thought of Joanne Woodward’s face in The Three Faces of Eve assailed him again in the midst of the meeting, while Tzilla was standing at the table handing out, in order—first to Balilty and then to Michael, and to Dalit before Eli and Avram—the cups of coffee and omelet rolls Zippo had brought from the Yemenite’s stand on the corner of Jaffa Road. Puffing and panting, Zippo had returned from his mission and put the bags down in the middle of the conference table. He removed a small container from one of them, took off the cardboard lid with a flourish, and insisted that they all breathe in the smell of authentic Yemenite hilbeh. When Tzilla averted her face in disgust, he reminded her of the medicinal properties of the odoriferous spice, especially as an enhancer of virility. Part of Michael’s mind registered Tzilla placing the long roll wrapped in oil-stained white paper in front of him. As he looked at the stain he suddenly saw Joanne Woodward’s face filling the whole screen, an image he wasn’t at all certain was even in the movie.

  The face twisted, altered, contorted, and transformed itself into something completely different. The woman in the movie didn’t know what was happening, he said to himself in a panic as the face disappeared and he again stared at the oil stain. Each one of her personalities was separate. They lived in one body, even in one soul, and the “good” one knew nothing about the “evil” one. He barely remembered the details, even though he had seen the movie again on television a few years back. But something about the way the woman spoke when she was in her vicious, evil role, the echo of her hoarse, mocking alto laughter, rang in his ears. He thought he remembered her saying: “She doesn’t know anything about me, but I know everything about her.” Only then did he notice that he was stirring the sugar around and around in his cup and sprinkling drops of the black liquid onto the notes Eli had prepared for them. Zippo ate noisily and praised the sharp green sauce, offering it around with a generous expression. He smacked his lips, chewed noisily, and wiped the edges of his mustache. Dalit sat between Michael and Balilty, who sat at the head of the table and ran the meeting. It seemed to Michael for a moment that she was sitting too close to him, that the gap between them was closing, that she was edging her elbow over to his, that her knee kept touching his, accidentally on purpose. And maybe it really was by accident, he rebuked himself as he peeked at her profile, which looked completely detached from these contacts. The coffee break had been a good idea, he thought as he unenthusiastically chewed the fresh roll soaked in the frying oil. It had done something to dispel the heavy atmosphere in the conference room after Eli Bahar’s outburst against Balilty.

  There really was something infuriating about Balilty’s indefatigable jocularity. Even after a sleepless night, he kept cracking jokes, interrupting everyone, making ironic remarks about down pillows.

  Tzilla had passed around a summary of the lab report, and they all had studied the enlarged photographs of the feather particles in silence. The feathers on the tape that gagged Felix van Gelden were indeed identical to those from his pillow. Balilty’s remarks were irritating, too, in that they exposed his embarrassment at his slip-up.

  Michael blinked in order to dissipate the oppressive thought of The Three Faces of Eve, and he tried to concentrate on what was being said about how Felix van Gelden had apparently been suffocated. “It doesn’t take a lot of time or strength, a minute would do it,” said Eli Bahar. “With his emphysema, a minute’s pressure with the pillow would be enough. A child could do it, a woman easily.”

  “I wonder why they had to kill him if all they wanted was the painting. It would have been so much easier to steal it when he wasn’t home,” said Michael, and Balilty nodded, muttered, shifted in his chair, and then observed that Felix van Gelden himself had the painting examined by experts and its authenticity confirmed beyond a doubt, pigments and everything. Then he asked with a worried expression if they could “conclude that it was the same person involved in both murders.” His small eyes narrowed as if the light hurt them.

  “From the looks of things, it isn’t clear what the connection is. Maybe Mashiah has something to do with the painting, maybe he’s involved in it,” D
alit said hopefully, and she daintily extracted a slice of tomato and a strip of cucumber from her roll. She inclined her head toward the narrow corridor outside where Izzy Mashiah was waiting for his ex-wife to bring his passport.

  “And all this time, with all these complications,” said Balilty, “we’re forgetting the simple questions. Such as: Who stands to gain? I mean dirty things like money. Who stands to gain? We haven’t seen Gabriel’s will yet, if he had one. We’ll soon see. But what’s definite is that with Gabriel out of the picture what would have been divided in three parts—the old man’s house in Rehavia, the shop, whatever—will now be divided in two. I don’t know what she lives on. What does she live on?”

  “Savings and an allowance her father gave her. But she intends to go back to teaching and performing and recording,” replied Michael matter-of-factly, as if he had been asked about a historical date.

  “And her father left her the painting. We mustn’t forget that,” said Balilty. “And him?”

  “Who?”

  “The maestro.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about him if I were you. He makes a lot of money, and he’s got plenty.”

  “And he’s also got ex-wives and expenses, and so has Izzy Mashiah, who may stand to benefit from Gabriel’s will, if he left one.”

  “Half a million dollars isn’t garbage,” reflected Zippo aloud. “It has to mean something.”

  “It’s completely clear from the polygraph that Izzy Mashiah knows nothing about the painting. Nothing we don’t know, anyway,” Eli pointed out dryly.

  “But it’s also clear, so you said, that something had gone wrong in the relationship, that there was some sort of crisis,” Tzilla reminded them. The crease on her upper lip seemed deeper than usual, as if it had made up its mind to remain there forever, giving her mouth a tough, stern expression.

  “We’ll have to work on that, maybe this morning,” Eli muttered, and he looked at Balilty as if he were expecting an outburst. A flare-up before the coffee break had been on that subject.