Pattern crimes

by William Bayer

  For a long while he stared, across the Hinnom Valley, through encrusted olive trees and cypresses toward Mount Zion, the Mount of Olives, the Dome of the Rock brooding upon the Temple Mount. Beyond the chilled glass, Jerusalem was silent; the only sound he heard was Anna breathing lightly in her sleep.

  He looked toward her. Her cello stood in the corner like a sentinel. Her comb and face cream and pearl necklace lay entangled on the little table beside the bed. The planes of her face glowed like the moonlit roofs. Her thick black hair was glossy as a cat's.

  He reached for the gray silk dress in which she'd performed that evening, from which a quarter hour before he'd watched her step so carefully. It lay just where she'd left it, across the back of the couch. It was still damp from her concert, and he remembered the droplets he'd wiped from her forehead in the dressing room and again in the car before they'd driven home.

  He held the silk to his lips as he tried to match his breathing to the slow even rising of her chest. He loved her and he wondered then whether he could only love a mystery-women who were puzzles, crimes that were difficult to solve, designs he sensed but could not read, this city in which he'd been born and raised but whose pattern he had never grasped.

  The first killings came with the spring.

  The snow melted quickly; the runoff was huge. By late March the Judean hills were coated with desert grass, almond blossoms, and budding poppies. Before dawn, the smoke from fires in Bedouin camps drifted in to perfume the city. The sky above Jerusalem was a deep dark blue and the winds brought air so cold and pure it seemed to cut one's lungs.

  When the telephone rang, David was sipping coffee. Anna wore a white terry cloth robe and her hair was still wet from her shower. Her eyes followed him as he carried the phone to the window and peered out into the dawn. He was looking for something a thousand meters across the valley. He nodded when he found it-a tiny whirling light.

  "I can see your flasher, Rafi."

  "So you could have been a witness. Want to come over here? It's cold."

  "Are you calling because I live across the way?"

  "David, David-what a question!" David pulled the receiver from his ear; the patch-in with the patrol car was bad. "…have to leave, have a meeting. Want you to take a look before things get disarranged. No need to take charge. There's a sergeant here already. So-is there a pattern? Maybe. We'll talk about it later in the morning. But it's really cold. You have gloves? If you don't, maybe Anna does. But don't bring her, David. I don't think she'd like it. See you later…" Rafi's voice drifted off and then the connection was cut.

  The body, discovered before sunrise by an Arab boy riding his horse along the walls, lay amidst stones and other debris between the Dung and Zion gates. The limbs protruded at terrible angles no living creature could simulate. Crumpled, David thought. She was killed somewhere else, then brought here and dumped. Thrown out of a car like trash.

  Liederman was in command. David knew him slightly, a small graying middle-aged man with thick glasses and a wizened Polish face. An old-style Ashkenazi policeman recruited in the 1950s, before the force was flooded with immigrants and cops were classified with garbage men.

  "Rafi says wait for you." Liederman's voice was hoarse, his fingers stained from smoking. He wore a beaten-up leather commando jacket. "Says I should tell you everything."

  "So go ahead. Tell me."

  Liederman shrugged as he danced from foot to foot to fight off the morning chill. "She's young, maybe eighteen, twenty. Throat cut. Beaten and mutilated. Found naked under that old army blanket there. No ID. No idea who she is."

  An empty tourist bus rounded the corner, stopped, and blocked the road. The driver peered at them and then at the body.

  "Hey! Get him out of here," Liederman yelled at one of his men. "Keep traffic moving. I told you that."

  "Jewish?" David asked.

  "How the hell should I know?"

  Use your instinct."

  "I don't have any instinct. I'm just an old cop. This year, thank God, I retire."

  "Ask him." David gestured at the Arab boy who was sitting on the ground; his horse was grazing the sparse plants that grew along the base of the wall. Liederman grinned and fumbled with his Polaroid. David walked closer to the body, shivered, and stared down.

  The girl's face was puffed. Her skin was already turning blue. Her cheeks were marked, two shallow vertical slashes across each, cut quickly, David thought, like a pair of bars drawn across a check.

  There were similar pairs of marks, harsh, ugly, brutal, cut into her lips and breasts and a neat slit across her throat. Very little blood. No expression on her face, no frozen look of agony or fear. She was very young. Her eyes were closed and there was a residue of kohl around them. Attractive, perhaps even pretty. He could hardly bear to look at her. He turned away.

  Liederman called to him. He was standing with the Arab boy. "He thinks she's Jewish," he said.

  David walked over. "You've seen her?" he asked the boy in Arabic.

  The boy nodded. "She stands by the Damascus Gate."

  "A prostitute?"

  The boy nodded again. He was wearing two brown sweaters, the outer one old and torn.

  "A Jewish prostitute?"

  "I think so."

  "Did you ever go with her?"

  The boy shook his head.

  "You ride down here every morning?"

  He explained that he exercised the horse, which belonged to his uncle who lived beyond Ramat Rahel on the road to Bethlehem.

  "So why ride this way?"

  "I ride her to Shiloah. Besides I find it beautiful."

  David looked around. "Yes, you're right. It is beautiful here. Especially just at dawn."

  The boy stared deeply at David, then patted the neck of his horse. He had the very gentle sort of Arab-Christian face that always filled David with guilt. No angry PLO kid from Hebron University but a sweet thin Jerusalem boy with large sad injured eyes.

  There were more cars now. Cops were blowing their whistles trying to keep the traffic moving up the hill. People gazed out of car windows, their faces curious and disturbed. An ambulance arrived. Several pedestrians stopped by the side of the road to watch. David looked over at Abu Tor, found his building, wondered if Anna was standing before the large window rubbing her hands together, or sitting on her stool in the middle of the room already at work practicing her scales.

  Liederman followed David to his car. "How did you know he'd know if she was Jewish?"

  "I'm a detective."

  "Yeah, I see that. But how did you know?"

  "Just a guess."

  "A good one. I've heard about you. I've heard you're very good." Liederman threw down his cigarette, then leaned in through the window so he could speak in confidence. "Rafi wouldn't have called you here if he wasn't going to give this to your section. If it turns out she was definitely Jewish, this could turn out to be a pretty interesting case."

  David waited. The sun was up, already caressing the walls. In a few minutes it would strike full force and set Jerusalem aflame.

  "…I never worked a good case, never worked anything that wasn't shit. I can't wait to retire. I've got other things to do. I have an archive. Books, old newspapers, documents. It's stashed in a room in the German Colony. An old lady's house. I do odd jobs for her, stay there when she's gone and keep an eye on everything. And for that she lets me have the room."

  "What sort of archive?"

  "Early 1940s. Poland. My father's collection. And I've added to it on my own. Thing is, I wonder if you'd come out one day and look it over. You've a good eye. You see things. I've heard that and now I know it's true."

  "What could I see in all your papers?"

  "Well, you might see something if you looked." Liederman stopped. "You don't like that kind of study, do you-examining the past?" He backed away. "I'm sorry. You're young. You were born here. People born here don't like that kind of thing. I understand."

  "I'm thirty-six years old,
" David said. "Examining the past is my passion. If you think I can help, then of course I'll look at your stuff. Sarah in Rafi's office has my schedule. Pick a day when both of us are free."

  At ten that morning he was sitting in the office of Rafi Shahar, Chief of Criminal Investigation, staring at stripes on the terra cotta floor projected by the sun through Rafi's blinds. Through the open window he could hear the buses grinding their way up Jaffa Road, and in the courtyard patrol cars revving up. He could also hear phones ringing unanswered in other offices, and echoes from the hall beyond the door, people striding, talking, cursing the coffee machine, and the quick high-heeled steps of the Moroccan girl who worked in Superintendent Latsky's office, who wore tight sweaters and used henna on her hair and fought with her fingernails and for this had been dubbed "The Claw."

  Rafi sat back, his eyes watery and sad. The sun made a halo around his balding head. He held the headset of his phone between his cheek and shoulder and drummed his fingers on his desk. Every so often he nodded at Sarah Dorfman, who sat at her little table across the room listening on the extension and taking notes.

  Finally, when Rafi put down the phone, the stripes on the floor compressed. David looked up; the back of Rafi's chair was crushing the blinds against the sill.

  "So?"

  "Nasty marks. Unusual."

  "That's all you have to say?"

  "Well -"

  "What?"

  David glanced back at Sarah Dorfman, then down at the floor. "Maybe whoever killed her marked her to say 'She's mine, belongs to me.' "

  He looked up at Rafi, saw his eyes enlarge behind his glasses. Since the day David had met him, he'd been aware of the sadness in his eyes. Rafi was only five years older, but his remaining hair was graying above his ears and he had developed the pale complexion and growing paunch of a ranking officer who now, to his great regret, was forced to work behind a desk.

  "Marks of ownership. Interesting, David. You've always had an interesting kind of mind."

  Rafi stared at him a moment, then leaned forward. From the clutter on his desk he picked out a pipe. Pipes and orchids: Rafi liked Turkish tobacco and bred air orchids in his greenhouse after work. Though David considered him a friend, he was aware of the methods by which Rafi distanced himself: hiding at work behind clouds of aromatic smoke, performing his solitary hobby behind a wall of glass.

  Rafi lit his pipe, then selected a file folder. He pushed it across the desk. There were photographs inside. As David examined them, he felt his stomach tighten. When Rafi spoke again, it was in a hoarse whisper that filled the little room.

  "Same marks. Cheeks, breasts, lips. Found ten days ago in a wadi on the side road that leads up to Mevasseret. A nun from St. Louis, U.S.A. Staying at the Holyland Hotel. Doorman saw her get into a car, thinks it had Tel Aviv plates. No one else saw her after that."

  Rafi pushed across another folder containing another set of photos. The same marks, except this time they were on the face and body of a boy.

  "…Halil Ghemaiem. Arab street kid. Drug user. Male hustler. Sometime transvestite prostitute. Worked the beach in Tel Aviv. Picked up about one A.M. last Tuesday by a well-dressed gentleman. Driven away in a foreign car. Found dumped up here five days ago behind the Augusta Victoria Hospital at a construction site."

  David heard a snap. Rafi's chair was crushing the blinds again. "You see what we have here, David? Marred flesh, consistently marred flesh. We have a pattern crime and," Rafi paused, "perhaps our first Israeli serial murder case."

  Rafi accompanied him to the hall, stood with him as he fed coins into the coffee machine, getting half of them back, trying different ones from his pocket. The machine finally delivered scalding coffee with a hiss; it overflowed David's plastic cup.

  "…kind of thing that happens in America. So maybe if we're lucky it'll turn out the killer's an American." Rafi started banging on the machine; he hadn't gotten his coins back and hadn't gotten any coffee either. "But suppose he's Israeli? Wouldn't surprise me much, the way things are going these days. A suburban housewife in Haifa feeds rat poison to her husband. A nice South African-born gentleman, technician at the Weizman Institute, injects his aging mother with kerosene. Beautiful kibbutz kids refuse to join the army. My younger brother, a tank commander, wants to move to New York and drive a taxi."

  Rafi stood back and gave the machine a tremendous kick. Coffee started gushing out. He often spoke to David like this, bitter, ironic, contemptuous of what he called "the new mores," which he blamed upon the present government.

  "A government elected by pickle sellers, so what should we expect? Much as I hated the old light-unto-the-nations crap, it was a lot better than this meanness we exhibit now." He sipped some coffee. "Still, David, now that we've got ourselves a crazy American-style society, isn't it time we got an American-style murder case? Long overdue, but," he shook his head, "very very difficult to solve. Random victims, no prior connection-don't need to tell you how tough that's going to be. A great big mess." He gazed at David. "I'm handing it to you. Refuse if you like-I'll understand."

  "It's a pattern crime, Rafi. How can I refuse?"

  "You can't." Rafi slapped him gently on the back. "Get the dossiers from Sarah. And give my best to Anna." He shook his head. "I like her, David-very much. What will she think of us when she hears about all of this?"

  As he walked back to the Pattern Crimes offices, he turned over Rafi's phrase: "Consistently marred flesh." Of all the possible pattern crimes, he thought, consistently marred flesh was probably the worst. The PC Unit, of which he was commanding officer, was located on the second floor of Jerusalem District Police Headquarters in a complex of buildings known collectively as the Russian Compound, a hundred meters up from Bar Kokba Square.

  The building was old, its ceilings twenty feet high, and its cavernous tiled corridors, lit by fluorescent lamps suspended from iron chains, echoed and re-echoed with the footsteps of cops, clerks, detectives, prisoners, informers, witnesses, and an occasional lost citizen looking for a place to lodge a complaint. The beaten-up pay telephones and recalcitrant soup, coffee, and candy machines in these corridors were notorious, the interlocking squad rooms a maze. Few outsiders could find their way around this rabbit warren carved out of what once had been the huge intimidating offices of police officials in the period of the British Mandate.

  David Bar-Lev did not think anyone would be intimidated by his office, barely wide enough to contain his desk. Dossiers were crammed into bookcases. A bulletin board was crowded with overlapping notes. There were two heavily chipped black metal chairs, two telephones, and a carefully cropped photograph of his daughter, Hagith, with just the left hand of his ex-wife, Judith, showing beside her arm.

  Although the walls here had been soundproofed and a false ceiling installed for privacy, David always left his door open to the room where the rest of the PC Unit worked. Here the partition walls were barely taller than a man so that raised voices and ringing phones from the squad rooms of adjoining units swirled together and merged. No single word was ever intelligible out of all this restless sound, but David felt there was an underlying harmony. "Crime and Torment," he called it, as if it were a piece of music, a piece he sometimes struggled to decode and at other times loathed so much he would make up any excuse no matter how absurd to escape it, fleeing the building, taking to the streets, even driving out into the Judean hills…and sometimes even then it would still ring in his ears.

  "Shoshana!"

  She appeared almost instantly in his doorway, a short young woman with eager black eyes, tight black curls, and olive skin. "Where's Dov?"

  "Working the Rehavia burglary case. A lady came in. Said she saw some of her silverware in East Jerusalem. He went out to check."

  "Micha…?"

  "With Uri having coffee. My turn next unless things start picking up."

  "So you're bored, Shoshana?"

  "Not really bored. It's just that here I never get a chance to fight."

  S
he'd been in a narcotics unit when David met her, an unhappy office mascot. She wasn't getting along with her boss and was angry at being assigned to cover the phones while the boys got to work the streets. She had the plump fresh cheeks and guileless smile of a high school girl, but there was cunning behind the facade. David liked her, and when he saw her perform at a police karate competition, all flashing black eyes and short black curls, he was so impressed by her self-assurance he arranged her transfer to Pattern Crimes.

  "We don't fight. We investigate. If you like to fight so much, go back into the army." She grinned. "While you're considering it, go downstairs and see if you can find us a halfway decent car."

  "Where are we going?"

  "We're going to check out a place where an American nun was dumped."

  He heard her footsteps as she ran out through the squad room; he was fascinated by her sudden entrances and exits. One moment she was there and the next was gone, yet he could never remember actually seeing her come or go.

  He told her to drive, thought that might use up some of her restless energy. The car, a dilapidated white Subaru, had ripped seats and dented fenders. On their way up Jaffa Road, he told her what he wanted her to do.

  "Get good photos. Then go with Uri to the Damascus Gate. He stands aside while you talk to the women, as nonthreatening and sympathetic as you can be. Find out who she is. Name, address, everything. Did anyone see her get picked up last night? Does she operate for a pimp? It may turn out the kid was wrong. Maybe she wasn't a prostitute. But talk to them anyway. See if they heard about any guys who like to cut. Tell them about the marks, but not about the breasts-we're going to keep that to ourselves…"

  There was a traffic jam in front of the Mahane Yehuda market, trucks and cars stalled, blasting one another with horns. A woman lugging a market basket wove her way across the street. A group of schoolchildren, five- and six-year-olds, waited with perfect discipline at the curb.

  "What the hell is this?" Shoshana wiped her forehead; it was eleven o'clock and getting hot. David thought of Anna practicing, her bow cutting across the strings, filling the apartment with dark rich sounds. Every so often she too would wipe her brow.