Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

  “But you knew her well?”

  She nodded again, and with her eyes she asked Peter for confirmation.

  “It’s okay, Nesseleh,” said Peter, encouraging her with his look and promising that “this man” wouldn’t do anything bad to her; to Michael he explained that she was Yigal’s little sister. “She’s my mate,” he said in English, and Michael nodded and recalled things that Eli had told him about the Jerusalemite electrician and his Australian boyfriend.

  “Nessia, she sees things,” he explained to Michael, still in English, as proudly as if he had raised her himself. “There are kids like that who see things, aren’t there?”

  “Of course there are,” Michael replied, and turned to look at Nessia. “So you probably saw Zahara Bashari a lot?”

  “Mrs. Jesselson says she’s dead,” said Nessia hoarsely.

  “It’s true, I’m very sorry to say,” answered Michael, and with a grave and serious expression he said to her: “And I thought you could help us.”

  He saw the panic in her eyes. “I’m just asking if you saw her. Did you see her on Monday or Tuesday?”

  The girl lowered her eyes and concentrated for a moment, and then she raised her head and said, “Yes. On Monday morning, when I went out with Rosie.” She looked at the dog.

  “Do you remember what time that was?” He looked at the pink Mickey Mouse watch that peeped out from under the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

  “I don’t know exactly,” she said in a tone of complaint. “Early. My mother had already gone to work. Rosie wanted to go out.”

  “Before eight in the morning?”

  The girl nodded. “Earlier,” she added in a limp voice. “Maybe seven. A cab had already come for her.”

  “For Zahara?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you speak to her?”

  Slowly the girl shook her head.

  “She got into a cab? And that was the last time you saw her?”

  The girl hesitated again. “No, no, I didn’t see her after that.”

  “Maybe,” said Michael as if he had just been struck with a wonderful new idea, “maybe you remember what she was wearing?”

  The girl nodded her head, but she did not say anything and plucked at the cuff of her sweatshirt.

  “Can you tell me what she was wearing?” he tried.

  “The coat, it was sort of, like, blue,” she hesitated. “It was pretty, with no buttons. Open, like.”

  “And under the coat?”

  “There was something red. Maybe?” the girl said, and shivered.

  “Do you remember if she had a handbag?”

  He looked at her hands, which had begun to tremble.

  “I didn’t see,” she whispered, “but there was always . . . a big black bag. A big one.”

  “And did you see her dress, too?”

  “Pants,” she said all of a sudden, decisively. “Black pants. Velvet, under the jacket. And boots. With high heels. Suede boots.”

  “Black pants, black boots, a blue coat and a black bag?”

  “And also”—she indicated her neck—“red.” Immediately she covered one hand with the other, as if to get them to stop shaking.

  “And after that did you see her again?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “But usually you’d see her?”

  The girl nodded her head.

  “Every day?”

  “No. Just if she went out or came home.” A hint of pride crept into the girl’s voice.

  “Did you speak to her?”

  The girl shook her head again and bit her lower lip. “No,” she whispered. “She didn’t . . . She . . . I . . .”

  “You were shy?” suggested Michael, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Eli Bachar drumming with his fingers on the roof of the car.

  The girl nodded vigorously and bit her lip again. “But I heard the way she sang,” she offered.

  “At a wedding?”

  “No,” she panicked. “In her room . . .” And suddenly she panicked even more and went silent.

  “When you were standing outside?” suggested Michael. “In their yard?”

  “Not in the yard, not in the yard,” she promised. “Outside, from the fence . . . when I was walking Rosie.”

  “And the last time, on Monday morning, with the coat and the taxi?” he asked.

  She nodded again and looked at him expectantly.

  “Was she like she always was? Like every morning?”

  “I couldn’t see well,” she apologized. “She . . .” Her thick eyebrows knitted together, then suddenly her broad face lit up and the freckles on her cheeks gleamed: “She was talking on her mobile phone. Yes, and her face was down, like this, and I couldn’t see it well, and her hair was also covering everything.”

  “Tell me, Nessia,” Michael said slowly, and glanced over at Peter, who was listening with his head down and his eyes narrowed—it was hard to tell what exactly he had understood of what she said—“when you took the dog for a walk, in the evening, or maybe in the morning . . . Do you take her out every evening and every morning?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you’d go past Zahara’s house?”

  The girl nodded and looked at him expectantly.

  “So maybe sometimes you saw visitors coming to see Zahara?”

  For a moment she looked across the street and her eyes opened wide, and then she shrugged her shoulders and said: “No, I didn’t see anybody. Sometimes . . .” She went silent.

  “Sometimes . . . ?”

  “They’d come to pick her up.”

  “Who? Who would come?”

  “They would come, with a car, and she would come out. Sometimes she also waited outside until they came.”

  “Who? People? One? Two? A man or a woman?”

  “All kinds of people, and also a man,” said Nessia after thinking for quite a while and giving Peter a panicked look.

  “In a car?”

  “Yes.”

  “An older man?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nessia. “I didn’t see his face.”

  “In a big car?”

  She moved her head in an ambiguous way.

  “Surely you know all about cars,” he flattered.

  “Sort of.”

  “Do you remember what kind of car it was?”

  “Silver color,” said the girl without thinking. “Not big and not small. Silver color.”

  “Was it a Subaru?”

  “No, not a Subaru. I know Subarus. And Beetles, and Toyotas.” Her eyes lingered on the red Toyota.

  “I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” said Michael after thinking a moment. “I’ll give you and Peter my phone number, and if you—”

  “If I remember something later, I’ll phone you?” said the girl. “Like I saw on television?”

  “Right. Just like on television. If you remember anything.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether it’s big or small,” said the girl.

  “Exactly. I see that you have a good memory for shows you see on television,” Michael said, and handed her a handwritten note, and then he handed another slip of paper to Peter and looked in his eyes and moved closer to him. “She knows more,” he whispered.

  “Undoubtedly,” Peter said in English, and looked at the child. “She knows a lot.”

  “And will she talk to you?” Michael glanced at the girl, who was staring at the sidewalk but obviously trying hard to hear what they were saying.

  “I can only try,” Peter said, still in English, then narrowed his eyes to two slits. “Children are unpredictable.”

  “Yes, I know,” Michael said with a sigh, and explained that he didn’t want to pressure her now.

  Peter agreed that it was best to let her be in the meantime, and especially now, when her mother was coming, and with his eyebrows he gestured toward a woman limping down the street carrying two large plastic bags. After a few energetic tugs the dog agreed to turn around, and swiftly the girl gave on
e last glance up the street, and Michael saw her alarm.

  “Where do you want all this?” asked the policeman who stood at the door of his office, pointing to some black plastic bags. “The Criminal Identification Unit asked where to put it.”

  “You brought everything here? Including the clothes?” asked Michael.

  “No, they left the clothes there. You asked that they search them, so they’re checking them now.”

  “Leave those with us,” said Balilty. “We’ll go through them here. That is, some of us will.” He looked at Sergeant Yair. “Bring them to the small room, and start working. Let’s see you build a profile.”

  Yair looked at Michael. “After the staff meeting?” he asked.

  “I say the other way around. First a profile, then the meeting.”

  “And in the meantime you’ll be deciding who does what, as if this were your special investigation team. Huh?” Eli Bachar said, and noisily stirred the coffee in his glass.

  “Guys! Guys!” Michael called out. “We haven’t even begun and you’re already . . . We’ve organized sandwiches for you, haven’t we? Just be quiet a minute, without this kindergarten stuff, and we’ll decide on the order of things.” He turned to Balilty: “What about the mobile phone? Have you checked it out?”

  “Here.” From his shirt pocket Balilty took a folded piece of paper and spread it out. “Here, take it. I have a copy. She had a lot of incoming calls, but only two outgoing calls on Monday, to the list. Don’t ask how much we had to run around until . . . Never mind. If we had found the phone itself it would have been better, but you didn’t find it.”

  ‘“The wicked man, what does he say? You and not I,’” quoted Eli Bachar in a mutter.

  “This,” said Balilty, indicating the first number on the list, “is Moshe Avital’s phone number. He called her twice. Here’s the time, in the next column. And there are other incoming calls: Netanel Bashari phoned her, and her parents, Linda O’Brian, her boss, Rosenstein, her friend the reporter. See? There’s a whole column here . . . The whole world phoned her, but there are only two outgoing calls, and they’re both to the Tel Aviv Hilton.”

  “The Hilton is a big hotel,” muttered Eli Bachar.

  “She called the hotel switchboard,” said Balilty. “I’ve already looked into it: On that day the hotel was full. There were five conventions there, three of high-tech companies, one of travel agents and one of the Vintners Association. Not to mention ordinary guests.”

  “So we don’t know who she was looking for,” summed up Eli Bachar, “and we’ll never know.”

  “That woman is waiting for you outside,” said Balilty to Michael, and as he opened his sandwich he pulled out of it thin, nearly transparent slices of yellow cheese with holes. “I promised her an answer as to when you could talk to her, so she shouldn’t just wait around. Why isn’t there feta? There goes my diet. They give me yellow cheese, on white bread. If my doctor knew about this—”

  “There wasn’t any feta. I asked, but they were out of it, and they don’t have pita,” explained Yair.

  “Big deal—she’s just a journalist,” Eli Bachar said, and sprinkled some salt on his sandwich. “Since when do we tell people how long they’ll have to wait?”

  Balilty shook a long, sharp finger at him: “Don’t you start looking down on journalists,” he warned. “Just don’t you spoil my relationship with them. Half of my informers are journalists . . . I, in any case, need a few more things from her. What should I tell her? How long will this meeting last?”

  “I don’t know . . . An hour, two hours,” said Michael distractedly.

  “An hour and a half, final price,” summed up Balilty. “I’m sending her to the Turk around the corner so she can eat something in the meantime, okay?”

  “There’s no Turk,” Sergeant Yair pointed out. “Today’s a holiday. He’s closed. You think I went all the way to Emek Refaim just for the fun of it? It’s lucky that the café there is open, otherwise you wouldn’t even have yellow cheese.”

  “What a life,” grumbled Balilty. “The Sabbath isn’t the Sabbath and a holiday isn’t a holiday. No wonder this country looks the way it does.”

  No one answered him, and he left the room and came back after a moment. “The hag left. Are they organizing a funeral? Who’s going to the funeral the day after tomorrow?” He looked around. “The day after tomorrow at eleven. Who’s going?”

  “I can go,” said Tzilla, “if you organize the bag for me.”

  “Is that a problem? Bring it and we’ll organize it. This one? The black one? Should we buckle it for you?” asked Eli Bachar, and without waiting for a reply he took the bag and left the room with it.

  “It’s not good to have a husband and wife on the same special investi gation team,” said Balilty into the air of the room. “And who’s going to take care of the children? Don’t they have a mother and father? Today’s a holiday. You don’t have to work together.”

  No one replied to the remark, which had become a regular part of the routine of the special investigation team they had just put together. “Ask the Turk if it isn’t a holiday today,” said Balilty.

  Tzilla spread out the worksheet and Michael lit a cigarette and and set it down on the lid of the instant coffee tin before he dictated to Tzilla the list of people to be questioned, whom he divided among them.

  “Give me that lawyer Deri again, and I also want Moshe Avital,” said Michael.

  “Deri?” asked Eli Bachar as he came back into the room and handed the bag to Tzilla. “Which Deri? A relative of the sainted Aryeh Deri?” To Tzilla he said: “They’re fixing the buckle for you. You’ll have to be careful with it. It’s a supersensitive camera. Something brand-new, the latest word.”

  “He means Deri Aharon, the lawyer who wanted to buy the apartment from the bailiff, the one Rosenstein wanted and that Zahara Bashari was . . . ,” explained Tzilla. “And I also asked Einat to come work with us,” she said to Michael.

  “Einat’s good. She has brains,” said Yair, “and she’s also a pleasant person, because when I worked with her—”

  “We know, we know,” said Balilty. “You already told us last time, with the Danino couple. Don’t you remember? In the end you’re going to marry her from wanting to work with her so much. And then what? Sabbaths and holidays, and the children with no mother and father.”

  “What are you warning me about? She’s really nice,” Yair said placidly, and turned to Michael: “She can work with me on the material, okay? If we go through the things tonight, then first thing in the morning, even before the funeral . . .”

  The muddy sediment was revealed at the bottom of the glass as Michael sipped the last bit of coffee. “I just want to see everything before you write up the report about it, still in the sorting stage.”

  Yair nodded and pushed aside the bottle of mineral water and the grapefruit juice and the empty coffee cups. When Michael began to assign tasks, all the tensions were forgotten, and even Eli Bachar didn’t look bitter when he was told that he had been allotted the two Bashari brothers. “Right after the funeral,” stipulated Michael. “While they’re sitting shiva. We can’t wait. And also the parents, at the same time, each of them individually. And now I want us to have a look at the neighbors’ statements. Yair, you spoke to—what’s their name?”

  “The ones who live on the other side? Beinisch. I spoke to the wife, Clara Beinisch, and with her husband, Efraim Beinisch, but not with their son, Yoram Beinisch. He wasn’t home. I’ll talk to him later.” He looked at his watch. “I arranged with him for an hour from now, there.”

  “Beinisch is from Hungary, no?” clarified Balilty. “Last year at Passover we were in Budapest, three days in Prague and two in Budapest. Incredible goulash, and everything’s dirt cheap.”

  “There aren’t good relations between them,” said the sergeant. “Those two families—a world war, but that’s how it is when people live in two-family houses. Either they’re like one big family or they are
the worst enemies. I know this from the moshav, because—”

  “They’re asking you when they last saw her,” interrupted Balilty, “so what are you bullshitting about?”

  “It could be connected,” protested Yair.

  Michael sighed audibly.

  “Okay, I’ll stick to the facts at this stage,” conceded Yair. “The mother saw her for the last time on Saturday evening, the father hasn’t seen her for a week or more and the son, Yoram, already told me on the phone that he had seen her a long time ago, he didn’t remember when. He usually comes home late and doesn’t see anything.

  “That is to say—there’s nothing,” noted Balilty with satisfaction.”

  “They weren’t in the mood for me,” explained Yair, “because the son’s fiancée had come from America, and there’s . . . It’s a big deal for them. He’s an only child.”

  “What are they warring about?” asked Michael.

  “That’s already part of the neighborhood history, and nobody knows by now. Some people say that it started as soon as the Beinisch family moved in and took over the parking, and some say that Naeema Bashari put a curse on Clara right when they moved in, and some . . . They called the police twice, but it didn’t end.”

  “In every neighborhood there are feuds between neighbors. It doesn’t end in murder,” remarked Eli Bachar.

  “No?!” Tzilla leaped up. “What are you talking about?! Almost every day there’s nearly a murder here, and it’s just luck that—”

  “Nearly isn’t the same thing,” said Eli Bachar.

  “I—the grocery store, the man in the grocery store saw her on Thursday morning, early, right when he opened, at six-thirty. She bought milk, bread and—I don’t understand why—sanitary napkins.”

  “He remembered all that? A week later?” wondered Michael. “It’s a very busy grocery store. I can’t see how—”

  “First of all, she didn’t pay for it but signed for it, and Mr. Bashari doesn’t like to take things on credit, so the grocer writes down exactly what they take, and in addition to that she ordered a bottle of wine from him. I’ve got it written down here, and in addition to that he said that if Zahara Bashari comes to the grocery store first thing in the morning he knows that he’s going to have a good day. Every entrance of hers is an event. He remembers what she was wearing and everything—”