Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

  “He’s waiting outside, in his car. The boss said it was okay if he waited for—” Alon said.

  “So let him wait. Because he isn’t leaving here before I clear up a few points with him.”

  “Yair is on his way here. He’ll be here any minute,” noted Michael.

  Balilty was annoyed. “What’s Yair?” he demanded. “Some kind of Buddha? I don’t have the patience for his serenity. Where, oh where, is Eli Bachar?”

  “On vacation. Don’t you remember? You told them to go to Turkey, so they listened to you and went. They’re coming back tonight,” replied Michael, crushing the cigarette butt with the heel of his shoe.

  “So we’ve decided that it’s a man?” asked Yaffa.

  “Why, who would she fuck with? With a woman?” said Balilty derisively. “With a woman it doesn’t leave traces.” He roared with swift laughter and cut it off with the question: “Didn’t you hear Solomon talk about a fuck?”

  “It is not certain that there was sexual contact,” said the pathologist, who had approached the top of the ladder with the brown leather valise. “For now, it’s just an intuition. Only in the laboratory, with a smear, will we be able—”

  “Okay, okay.” Balilty flung up his arms in a gesture of submission. From the small tin box he held in his right hand he took out a cigarillo and tapped its end. “Tomorrow all of us will be the wiser.”

  “Even if someone took her wallet or her purse from here,” said Michael Ohayon, “we’ll find it in the end. No one would take a thing like that home. Anyone who doesn’t want to incriminate himself throws things like that away or hides them, and doesn’t keep them at home.”

  “There’s always a first time,” warbled Solomon, who had already begun to gather his implements into the leather case.

  “You won’t find anything if they took it home to Beit Jalla or Beit Sahur,” said Balilty decisively. He turned to the pathologist and said: “So what do you say?”

  “I can’t swear to it,” said the doctor as he shut the leather valise, “but it looks to me like she’s been here maybe since yesterday, but late at night. I don’t think it was any earlier than that. And you’re also saying that there’s this slip from an ATM from ten o’clock last night, so it couldn’t have been before then. But we’ll be wiser tomorrow, after the autopsy at the Institute. I’m telling you, this is just from what I can see, gut feeling and experience, and because of the rigor mortis.” He addressed Michael as if Balilty weren’t there, and Michael recalled how the two had been at loggerheads in the case of the cabdriver who was found with his throat slit next to his vehicle. It turned out that it was the pathologist who was mistaken then, but now Balilty, who usually preferred to act as if he didn’t hold a grudge, completely ignored the way the pathologist was ignoring him and asked: “Strangulation? Is that final? With this delicate rag?” He pointed to the red silk scarf that Yaffa had deposited in a plastic bag. “This would have torn in a minute, wouldn’t it?”

  The doctor shrugged. “That’s the way it looks now, strangulation, but maybe not with this rag, as you call it, but with two hands over the scarf, without touching the skin directly. There are some bruises on the neck—you’ll see the photographs.” He placed his foot on the first rung of the ladder.

  “There are two things I want to know,” said Balilty. “First of all, how did they get in here in the first place, and secondly, what did he crush her face with? With a blunt instrument?” There was scorn in his voice as he enunciated the cliché that gives absolution for the need to be precise about a murder weapon.

  “How can I tell now, without an autopsy? We’ll find traces on her skin and we’ll tell you. Did you find any instrument here that crushes faces?” replied the pathologist crossly. “It would help us if you did find it. That’s something he didn’t take home, whatever it was.”

  “We’ll find it,” promised Balilty. “If necessary, we’ll find it. And how did they get in here?”

  “A few years ago there was an office here,” pondered Michael, “high-tech or something. Most probably keys were floating around everywhere. It’s your job to find out who had a key,” he said to Balilty.

  “Who’s going to take the valise down for me?” asked the pathologist. “Vlodya is already downstairs, and I’m not sixteen anymore,” he added joylessly. “For me it’s a major project to climb down like that—and they’re also going to have a problem with the body. How are they going to get it out of here?”

  “We’ve already moved more complicated things,” said Balilty. He lit the thin cigar and sent up a thick, gray cloud of smoke from it.

  “I need her in one piece,” warned the pathologist, “if you want all kinds of answers to all kinds of questions.”

  Alon approached the top of the ladder, holding the brown valise by its handle. Solomon, who still had gloves on, held on to the sides of the ladder. “You’ll be at the autopsy,” he said. It was both a question and a statement of fact, and Michael Ohayon nodded affirmatively.

  “When will you get there?” asked Solomon. His foot was already on the third rung. “When they get her out of here,” promised Michael. “This is going to take a bit more time.”

  “So I’m going home to sleep,” warned the pathologist. “I need a few hours of sleep a night, and tonight I’m not going to get any. I’m not a youngster anymore. Let me know when you leave here. I’ll be waiting for you there.”

  “Can you already say more or less when you’ll know the details? How long will it take for you to finish there?” Balilty called out to Dr. Solomon on his way down the ladder. Without waiting for a reply, Balilty turned to Michael to scold him again about the apartment, and again the amazement was heard in his voice: “Even God consults. Read the Bible and you’ll see—even God,” and he waved his hands at the roof tiles.

  “Sure God consults. Where? In the Book of Job? And did you notice who he consults? And did you see what came of it?”

  “Don’t change the subject. We’re not discussing the Bible now, and you don’t do a thing like that on your own,” hectored Danny Balilty. “Did you sign? Just tell me if you’ve signed any papers. Did you give them any down payment?”

  Before he got an answer to his question he was diverted by Alon, who for the past few minutes had been bending and searching among the water tanks. “I’ve found it!” he cried. “Here, inside the water tank! I checked the tanks one by one and suddenly . . .” From the large water tank inside which his head was hidden, he pulled out a broken board, and Balilty’s mutterings stopped at once.

  “I think this is it,” Alon said, and moved toward the spotlight, holding the board in both hands and examining it closely. “There are stains, but we’ll only know when we get this to the lab whether it’s blood and whether it’s her blood and all that . . .”

  “Of course it’s blood, and not so old,” said Balilty, who had moved to take a look at the dark board with Michael, thus releasing him from the obligation of admitting in a noncommittal way that indeed he had signed a memorandum of intent, though he had been warned that such a signature had the validity of signing a real contract. After admitting a thing like that, there would have been no point in reminding Balilty of his own impetuousness: Balilty suffered from it only in his relationships with women, never in money matters.

  Alon was wrapping the board in plastic sheeting pulled from the roll on the concrete floor when Balilty started to speak again: “I told you: I know that building, and not just from my childhood. And I know about all kinds of complications, if you don’t check with a lawyer and the Land Registry. Look, not long ago I told you about the case of my Sigi’s boyfriend. His parents were looking for an apartment and they found one and signed, and then it turned out that the mother there was still alive and only the father had died and there were troubles with the inheritance and the probate. They put it up for sale after the father died, but the mother has Alzheimer’s and she could easily live for another ten years and no lawyer will be able to get it registered in th
eir name at the Land Registry and they’ve already paid a third and now they’re stuck. Did you know that?”

  Michael nodded, but Balilty ignored this. “You’ve signed and you’ve also given them a down payment? How much did you give them?” And without waiting for a reply he said angrily: “What’s got into you, and who have you spoken to, anyway? With her?” he nodded in the direction of the ladder that Linda had descended a while ago, and his nod was accompanied by a derisive snort and a cloud of gray smoke. “That woman? She’d never tell you things like that. She has her own interests, that one. As far as she’s concerned, you just buy it and she gets her percentage and then you can bang your head against the wall, and until they put it in the Land Registry the worms will have eaten you.”

  “In fact, she did tell me about all kinds of difficulties and even warned me about complications, and we checked everything at the Land Registry,” said Michael.

  The corpse with the smashed face and the red scarf wound around its neck, and the way he was standing there next to the spot where she had been murdered, spared him for a moment the necessity of explaining why he was acting out of character—he, who for many long years had never contemplated the possibility that he might have a home of his own. He had ignored all the pressures applied to him by the people closest to him and his friends—and Balilty was among the most forceful of them—and he had never considered moving out of his rented apartment and getting himself “out of all this already” (in the words of Balilty, who had several times dared to mention the woman upstairs, saying that every time Michael went up or down the stairs he expected to hear her door opening and then her voice calling him back). And when the pressures increased—Yvette, Michael’s older sister, who couldn’t stand his rented apartment anymore, had sent his friend and commander Shorer to talk to him—he insisted that the location and shape of places to live were external matters and unimportant, and in any case he never spent much time at home. (“Look at the kind of person you are,” Emmanuel Shorer had said to him. Shorer felt himself responsible for him and for directing his life, not as a father, but as a big brother or a close uncle, because he was the one who had brought Michael into the police force. “You always come up with theories that suit the conditions and justify them,” and Michael ended the discussion with silence or with the excuse that he didn’t have enough money and strength, and certainly not for an apartment he would really want.)

  Were it not for Alon from Forensics, and were it not for Yaffa, who now stretched her arm under one of the water tanks, Balilty would not have let him alone, and finally he would have been dragged into answering and telling him about the family council that convened at the beginning of the summer, and the way all his brothers and sisters rallied, and their decision to ignore all his refusals (“He can’t move into another rented apartment in one of those projects in those new neighborhoods,” said Yvette, the eldest, who moderated the discussion. “Ever since he got divorced—How long ago was it? Twenty years ago?—he lives like a gypsy. What is he, a student? He’s not a little kid anymore”). They had put together, jointly, each of them according to what he or she could afford, half of the sum needed for an apartment that would suit him.

  Until now, he hadn’t shared his thoughts about retiring with Balilty. He hadn’t yet explained to him that a revolutionary step like buying an apartment was also connected to the possibility that he might be spending more time at home, and maybe he would even conduct his investigations from there, if he followed his own hankering and the urgings of Eli Bachar, his veteran assistant, who wanted the two of them to start their own private investigations firm.

  But the explanation to Balilty could be postponed, he thought morosely: There are people who get insulted if you don’t accept their opinion. He did not hold a grudge against Balilty, whose vulgarity and irritability had been exacerbated by the dieting regime he had finally imposed on himself, after he’d experienced symptoms of a heart attack. Until the doctor had warned him that his insurance premiums would go up, he could not give up the stuffed vegetable and meat delicacies in which he especially delighted late at night, and now he had distanced himself from them and had devoted himself to exercise and to “rabbit food”—peeled carrots and washed lettuce leaves that made him sigh every time they passed near the market, where he used to relish, even late at night, a skewer of cow’s udder or stuffed spleen.

  For a long time they stood silently by the corpse and watched Alon carefully put the contents of the coat pocket into small plastic bags, which he sealed and wrote on with a purple marker.

  “Who knows what else there is in those water tanks,” muttered Balilty. “For years they’ve been standing here. So, you’ve bought an apartment? That’s it? It’s final?” He returned to his crossness and Michael nodded and turned to look behind the water tanks, in case a wallet or a purse with something that would identify the corpse was there after all.

  “What do you mean you bought an apartment?” Balilty burst out again. “What sort of thing is it to buy an apartment just like that? Did you check it out? Did you ask? Has anyone even seen it? Even if he lives in Tel Aviv you could consult him. He’s not a child anymore, your son. Why didn’t you come to me? You know I know about these things. Why didn’t—”

  Michael sighed. “Later, Danny. We’ll talk about it later,” he promised. “Now we have a job to do here, don’t we?”

  “If we hadn’t come to have a look before the renovations, this body would have rotted here for another month,” said the architect suddenly. She was standing beneath them, at the bottom of the ladder. “It was only because of Ada, who’s a thorough person and wanted to see the space again, before they break through the ceiling once and for all. If it weren’t for that, we wouldn’t have found her so quickly.”

  Michael went down to the bottom floor. “Do you have any idea who she is?” he asked the architect, who shook her head.

  “How? Without a face?” She trembled and turned her face toward the ladder. “And they haven’t got a clue either,” she added, gesturing toward Ada and the contractor. The two of them were whispering together in the corner of the room, into which large sacks of sand had already been brought. “This apartment has been empty for years,” explained the architect. “There were problems with the transfer of ownership and squabbles between heirs, and all kinds of drug addicts hung around in the yard.”

  Balilty went quickly down the ladder. “Tell me,” he said to the architect in a threatening tone, and Michael, who knew what was coming, tried to calm him down with his hand. “Can you explain how a person buys a house in this neighborhood, half of which is abandoned property and the other half—”

  But something interrupted him, and it wasn’t Michael; loud and clear from the entrance to the apartment came the voice of Sergeant Yair (“Where is it?” he asked), whom Balilty called the “bucolic Buddha” because of his serene temperament, and sometimes “the farmer” because of the examples from the world of agriculture that he would add to his explanations. Eli Bachar, who had reluctantly brought Yair into his most recent cases, called him “Miss Marple” because of his stories from the moshav, the cooperative village where he was born.

  “Where are you?” Yair now called. “Downstairs they told me upstairs but I don’t see any upstairs here and there isn’t any electricity.”

  “Look up,” Balilty snorted, and stuck his head into the rectangle that had been torn into the ceiling between the ground floor and the roof. “Up here it’s illuminated like a basketball court. Usually your head’s in the clouds, isn’t it? But be careful when you come up, so you won’t scare her away.”

  “You want me to climb up that ladder?” asked the sergeant, moving toward them.

  “Like ivy,” replied Balilty, and even in the dimness it was obvious how much pleasure this retort gave him.

  Michael glanced at the renovations contractor, who was standing by the large window overlooking Bethlehem Road. He was stroking his short beard and sneaking glances around h
im. He had never seen her in his life, he said in English. He had returned here only a few months ago after years of living in the United States.

  “Do you still need us here now?” asked Ada Efrati. Her voice sounded lower than he remembered.

  “Yes,” said Michael after thinking a moment. “I think you should come with us to make a statement right now. Also about the keys—who had keys and who didn’t, because they didn’t break in here. They opened the door with a key.”

  The renovations contractor retreated backwards.

  The architect, who was looking at the contractor, went up to him and touched his arm. “Does he also have to come?” she asked.

  “He most certainly does!” said Balilty.

  “But he doesn’t have anything to with—,” tried the architect.

  “But he does, he most certainly does,” said Balilty, pursing his lips. He turned to the contractor and said something quickly to him in Arabic.

  “What did he say?” whispered the architect.

  “He’s taking him in the squad car,” explained Michael.

  “So he’s also taking us in the squad car,” declared Ada Efrati. “He’s with us, we’re together. Don’t you have anything to say about this?” she demanded of Michael.

  “I’ll come after you in my car. I’ve got a few more things to do here,” he said, without looking at her.

  “Leave your vehicles here,” ordered Balilty, and they proceeded down the long corridor to the front door.

  “Are you saying you have no idea who she is?” ascertained Balilty.

  “I told you,” burst out Ada Efrati. “I’ve never . . . And with that smashed-up face . . . Even if I had happened to see her once by chance, how could I . . . No, I really don’t know.”

  “I need all your phone numbers, and also his,” said Balilty, gesturing toward the contractor with his eyebrows. “Was anyone here planning to go abroad for the holidays?”