She saw it in the mirror almost every morning.
Despite this, in her thoughts, over the course of a few weeks, it was the Swiss tourist who had followed her that evening, at the party in the hotel and perhaps even before then. She was unable to free herself from him, as if even having freed her hands and legs from the ropes and having removed the scarf from her mouth, she was still there, bound hand and foot to the same bed. When she joined a meeting of a support group for rape victims, at the advice of the police, jealousy was awakened in her over the fact the other women knew who had attacked them, so she didn’t go there anymore. No one cast doubt as to whether she had been raped, but the fact that the rapist had never been found and took with him the ropes and the scarf, made it as if the rape, even in her eyes, was less real, and on the other hand prolonged it endlessly. So she, too, stopped searching for the Swiss tourist and began searching for the attacker among the bank employees and among the clients who arrived for meetings and among the men who sat next to her at the café or looked at her from their cars at a traffic light. And only during the last year did it seem to her that the ropes around her hands and feet were no longer so tight. And when she looked in the mirror she sometimes saw in it again something from what had once been her face.
Mali succeeded in falling asleep that night only in Daniella’s room, on the pullout bed.
She went into her room after covering up Noy and sat down on the bed that Daniella opens in order to lay her dolls on it, and Daniella turned to her in her sleep, reached her hand out to her hair, and a short time after this Mali fell asleep. Her sleep was deep, apparently, because she didn’t hear the key turning in the lock nor the door opening, and she woke up only when she felt Kobi next to her.
He sat on the bed and looked at her. She asked him, “What are you doing here?” as if this was no longer his home, and he said, “I just returned.”
“Where were you?”
He didn’t give her an answer to this question, not that night and in fact not afterward, either. They left the room so that Daniella wouldn’t wake up, and sat facing each other on the living room sofa. She said to him, “You left me alone all night. How could you do that to me?” From outside came a faint morning light, and a garbage truck was at work in the street. On Kobi’s clothes was the smell of alcohol and cigarette smoke, and his eyes were red. She asked him, “What happened to you?” and when Kobi said, “Mali, I need help,” she responded immediately, “Help with what? Help going to Australia? Do you need money for a plane ticket?”
Kobi didn’t understand what she was talking about, and when she said to him, “I spoke to your dad this morning,” he fell silent.
“What happened to you?” she said, “tell me what happened already. Don’t you see you’re torturing me? I can’t live like this any longer, Kobi. I didn’t do anything to you, right? I didn’t do anything to you.”
He looked to her lost and hopeless. But what he told her she couldn’t have anticipated. And even in retrospect she thought that there was no way to know that he was lying. He said, “Mali, the police are looking for me,” and she looked at his red eyes.
Actually the collapse was much greater than she had thought.
6
The news from the forensics lab arrived at the beginning of the second day of the investigation, when Avraham was on his way to the funeral. Rain wasn’t falling and the car window was open, and when the telephone rang Avraham closed it and lowered the volume on the radio. “Do you want the good news first or the bad news first?” Lital Levy asked him and he answered, “You’ve known me long enough, no?”
The good news was that from the traces of skin and blood that were found under Leah Yeger’s nails and between her fingers they succeeded in producing a man’s DNA. The bad news was the DNA produced wasn’t located in the database, nor did it belong to a relative of the rapist David Danon. He immediately asked her about Leah Yeger’s son, because from the moment he opened his eyes in the morning he thought about the testimony the son gave to Shrapstein at the station yesterday. “Did they check if it could belong to a relative of hers?” he asked and she said to him, “Of whose? Do you mean of the victim? Don’t think they checked. But they certainly could check. You want me to ask?”
It was usually like that, as Ilana always said: the second day of the investigation is the key day.
On the first day every angle is possible and every testimony or finding that is added to the case can become the start of a new investigatory lead. On the second day the possibilities dwindle because a few suspects have already been cleared and angles of investigation that appeared reasonable the day before are ruled out, and on the other hand, new testimony and findings merge with stories that have already started developing, filling them in with details and granting them force.
On the same morning, while Avraham was on his way to the cemetery, Commander Eyal Shrapstein was busy gathering testimony from foremen who worked on the street, overseeing renovations, and later on he stopped by to question one of the workers, a resident of an Arab village in the north by the name of Adnan Gon, who was absent from work on the day of the murder and the next day as well, and had been questioned in the past on suspicion of vehicular theft and aiding with the break-ins of homes. Ma’alul and Esty Vahaba called to the station the private investigator whom the Danon family had hired in order to gather incriminating evidence against Leah Yeger. And Avraham was the only official representative of the Israeli police at the funeral and for the most part kept his eyes on her son. He arrived early and waited among those gathered in the courtyard of the funeral home, at the salvation gate. The morning was warmer than the previous mornings, almost springlike. Avraham squeezed the daughter’s hands when he saw her and told her he was sorry for her loss, but he didn’t approach the son and watched him from a distance while he greeted the mourners. His wife and grown children stood next to him. What surprised Avraham when he understood that he had identified her son were his proportions, which Shrapstein hadn’t described in the interrogation report.
Erez Yeger was a broad, tall man, over six feet two, and his hands were gigantic.
A little after ten the burial society workers rolled the corpse on a stretcher to the funeral yard, and the small crowd gathered around it in a silent circle. Under the sheets the body looked so small to Avraham, as if it were the body of a small child. He was surprised when Leah Yeger’s children chose not to speak in her memory, and only an older woman, a friend apparently, spoke at length about the lovely years of her life, the years of raising the children and the shared trips abroad, before the suffering she knew in recent years. “Now you’re going to Yossi, who you loved so,” she said at the end of her speech, “and at least you’ll no longer have to miss him.”
The friend didn’t mention in her speech that Yeger had been murdered, as if she had died under natural circumstances. Nor was the rape mentioned except by implication, when she spoke about “the bad years.” Nevertheless it seemed to Avraham that all around him things were being whispered about the murder, and that the funeral mourners were staring at him. And for some reason, the police photographer who was asked to document the crowd of mourners, mainly photographed Avraham.
Afterward the short procession marched behind the stretcher through the paths of old and new graves to the burial pit. In the distance Chinese workers were crawling inside giant beehives that were being erected to house the dead who were yet to come. And it grew hotter and hotter.
Because there were few men in the crowd, Avraham, too, grabbed a shovel and helped to cover the hole into which Leah Yeger had been lowered. And when the rabbi began saying the prayer of the orphans for the dead, the kaddish, he found himself mumbling the opening sentences together with him, Yitgadal veyitkadash shemei raba, bealmah divrah chirutei, and then he suddenly bit his lips and stopped because he was not an orphan.
After the body was interred, Leah Yeger’s son fell on her grave, and Avraham waited until his wife and other mourners lif
ted him up and carried him to a nearby water fountain and rinsed his face, before he himself placed a stone on the narrow mound of dirt. Among the people who helped lay her to rest Avraham was the only one who knew almost nothing about her, and despite this he was supposed to try and understand the circumstances of her death, and he attempted to recall her face as he saw it in the picture that hung in the investigations room, and not the beaten face with the gaping mouth that he saw at the scene.
The gap between the testimony of Leah Yeger’s son during questioning, when he said he wasn’t in contact with his mother, and his behavior at the cemetery, bothered him. And when the son bent down and collapsed on the mound of dirt, almost in the position in which Avraham found his mother in her apartment, he suddenly thought how much he didn’t look like his mother. Perhaps he looked like his father?
Leah Yeger, daughter of Hannah and Yaakov Greenberg, was buried next to her husband, Joseph Yeger, who was born in 1951 and died three years earlier, before his time. Avraham couldn’t manage to remember if he had seen his photograph in her apartment.
Leah Yeger’s phone log was waiting for Avraham in his office when he arrived, with the information that the assailant’s DNA indicated that there were no family ties between him and the victim. On the list there were no calls from Ami Danon or from other numbers delivered by the rapist’s relatives, but two of them in particular shocked him. The day before the murder a lengthy telephone call took place between Leah Yeger and her son, in contradiction to what the son said to Shrapstein in his testimony. According to the log, Yeger called her son during the morning hours, and he didn’t answer. A brief time after this the son called her and their conversation lasted approximately seventeen minutes. The second number was the last one on the list and it shocked Avraham even more: on the day that the murder took place and exactly during the presumed time of the murder, two o’clock, a call was carried out from the telephone line in Leah Yeger’s apartment to the police. The attempt to call was made from the apartment’s landline, but the call was disconnected before it was answered.
Avraham circled the son’s telephone number with a blue pen, and immediately dialed the call center in order to clarify how they deal with calls that are disconnected before they are answered. “Do you call back if the call is disconnected?” he asked the operator, but she didn’t understand his question. “The number shows up for you on some sort of screen, no? Can you see which number called?” he asked again, and the operator explained that she at least doesn’t return calls that are disconnected unless an attempt is made again a few times. “Do you know how many kids call and hang up?” she asked. But someone did get back to Leah Yeger, even though a notation of the additional call didn’t appear in the log, because a policeman was apparently sent to her house. He asked Lital Levy to check if there wasn’t an additional call that was mistakenly dropped from the list and who were the operators at the call center in the afternoon the day before yesterday. He debated whether at that moment to call Erez Yeger in for additional questioning. According to the DNA he wasn’t the man who attacked his mother, so why did he lie to Shrapstein in his testimony and say that he hadn’t spoken with her for a few months?
When Eliyahu Ma’alul entered his room Avraham was still busy with just those two phone calls. Their conversation yesterday had been forgotten, at least by Avraham, but Eliyahu remained standing while informing him about the testimony of the private investigator hired by the Danon family. He said it was hard for him to believe that the investigator was involved in the murder or knew anything about it. According to him, the family employed him only during the trial, and he swore to Ma’alul that he didn’t tap Yeger’s phone nor illegally obtain any document or evidence. “So what did he do? What exactly did they pay him for?” Avraham asked, and Ma’alul said, “Mainly he followed her. And photographed her. But nothing came of it. They hoped to get evidence that she was meeting with men and to base their line of defense on the fact that according to this the sexual relations were consensual. And he hasn’t been in contact with anyone from the family since the end of the trial.”
Avraham told Ma’alul about the findings sent from the lab in Jerusalem and Leah Yeger and her son’s phone call, which Erez Yeger hid from Shrapstein in his testimony, and Ma’alul thought that they needed to call the son to the station immediately, despite the funeral, and asked Avraham if in Shrapstein’s eyes the son was a suspect in the murder, but Avraham didn’t know. He didn’t tell him in his office about the phone call that was carried out from the apartment to the call center but instead waited until they left the building and sat down on the stairs leading to the station.
“I thought you quit smoking,” Ma’alul said to him and still didn’t look him in the eyes as he always had, and when Avraham said, “I really did quit,” Ma’alul asked, “So why are we here?”
The reason was Benny Saban and the policeman who went down the stairs and disappeared.
Avraham told Ma’alul about the conversation with Saban and his request that he not concentrate on the neighbor’s testimony about the policeman who was in the building a short time after the murder. Now, when in the list of Leah Yeger’s calls there appeared an attempt to call the police, it was no longer possible to ignore it.
Ma’alul’s large eyes opened wide while he listened to him. And when Avraham finished speaking he told him in a whisper, “Don’t you even dare think about that, Avi. I won’t let you, do you hear? What, are you crazy? We’ll investigate that testimony like all the other testimony. And definitely now. They got back to her from the call center and someone was sent there and didn’t do what had to be done, we’ll report that exactly like we’re supposed to. And if you’re scared of Saban, let me—I’ll take that on myself, okay? It’ll be on me. I can’t believe you’re even considering this. And Benny Saban can go to hell.”
The conversation with Ma’alul encouraged Avraham because he felt that Ma’alul had forgiven him over the insult of his reprimand, but when he returned to his room he nevertheless picked up the phone receiver in order to call Ilana Lis. But then had second thoughts and hung up. Shrapstein called in order to update him on the testimony of the workers at the construction sites near the scene, and Avraham told him that Erez Yeger lied to him during questioning. Only while they talked did Avraham understand that if the son was involved in the murder then it was possible to understand the disconnected call to the police as well: had he injured his mother during an argument and then got frightened, dialed the police immediately himself and then changed his mind and fled? Maybe even she called when it seemed to her that the argument between them was liable to deteriorate into violence, but hung up in order not to put her son at risk? On the other hand, there were unambiguous findings from the lab that determined Erez Yeger could not have been the assailant.
Avraham spread out on the table the pictures taken at the scene as well as the paper he wrote on there, and read the sentence he wrote down in pen while gathering testimony from Leah Yeger’s daughter: He locked the door behind him?
Why in fact did he write it? Perhaps because he thought that locking the door indicated that the murderer didn’t flee from the apartment in a panic. He stuck around there. For a few minutes even. Tried to revive his mother and digest what had occurred. Had he called the police with the intention of turning himself in? But hung up when it occurred to him that he could disguise the murder as a burglary? He knew where her wallet was, and that’s why the scene was so orderly. He didn’t have to search. He locked the door behind him, because each delay in finding the body would enable him to get farther away from the place. Avraham read the question he had written again and again and then added additional questions next to it, to some of which it seemed to him there were now answers:
Why did she open the door for the assailant?
Was she waiting for him? Did she know he was coming?
Why didn’t he take anything other than the wallet?
Exactly when and how did he leave?
> Exactly as he had done in the hours after the murder, he imagined Leah Yeger drinking coffee in the kitchen when the knocking came from the door. Then she sets down the mug and gets up from her place. She walked slowly in the direction of the door, a distance of five or six steps, and Avraham opened the desk drawer and removed the pipe that Marianka bought him and chewed the end of the mouthpiece. The door to Leah Yeger’s apartment opened in his imagination, and he thought that he was able to see the man of large proportions who stood on the other side.
He called him immediately, but the phone was answered by a woman. She said that her husband was out driving, and when Avraham identified himself she added, “Just a moment,” and a short time later the voice of Erez Yeger could be heard. Avraham asked him to come to the station immediately, and when the son asked him why, he merely said, “For further questioning.”
The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything Page 8