Murder Duet: A Musical Case

by Batya Gur

  “I’ll tell him myself, in a minute, or do you want to? We can do it from here, right now,” he said, rousing himself and pointing to the telephone.

  Michael raised his hand. “Later, and not by phone. Were you and Gabriel close?”

  Theo cleared his throat, dropped his eyes, rubbed his hands, and raised his head. “It depends on what you call close. When we were small we were together a lot, we studied with the same violin teacher, Dora Zackheim. Have you heard of her?”

  Michael nodded faintly.

  “We both studied with her, but we’re very different, we were always different in everything, and in the last few years we haven’t really talked, and we had all kinds of disagreements.”

  “You were in competition with each other,” Michael ventured. “Sibling rivalry.”

  “Sibling rivalry is an exaggeration,” said Theo, making a face. “Too dramatic. I don’t know if there even really was any competition. It would be more correct to speak of differences, differences of temperament, of distance. Gabi was an introvert, closed off, and I, well, I . . .” He smiled. “You already know something about what I’m like.”

  “So he never spoke to you about his relationship with his companion, with Izzy? You don’t know if they were on good terms? If they’d quarreled recently?”

  “Not as far as I know,” said Theo, embarrassed. “I never heard of any problems between them. It makes me a little uncomfortable to realize how little I know about my brother’s private life,” he admitted. “Everyone in my family, except for me, is so secretive, I’m the only one everyone knows everything about,” he added in a plaintive, even pampered tone, which suddenly betrayed a kind of affectation that made Michael wonder if this was how he got his way with others, especially women. “As far as Izzy’s concerned, I hardly know him . . . I didn’t see them together often, I didn’t see Gabi often, for that matter. Especially not recently. I’ve been abroad, and he’s been traveling a lot. Before my father’s death, the last times we were all together, I think, were at our father’s birthday and on the anniversary of our mother’s death.” He suddenly fell silent and looked at Michael with a startled expression on his face. “You’re not thinking of Izzy!” he exclaimed, evidently shocked. “That he came here and . . .” He gave a brief laugh. “Nonsense. What nonsense! Like some stupid movie!”

  “You didn’t see him around here today?”

  “No.”

  “What exactly happened backstage? Where were you when Gabriel was there?” asked Michael casually, as he returned the cello to its case.

  “Me? Where was I?” Theo said in confusion and frowned as if he were trying to remember. “I . . . I think I was with the timpanist. I hadn’t succeeded in getting what I wanted from her during the rehearsal, and I was still working with her. . . . The rehearsal had ended at about half past one. Some of the people started to disperse, some stayed behind. Gabi had a meeting scheduled with all kinds of possible additional candidates for his ensemble, and he left the stage. I didn’t notice exactly when, and afterward, I think, they began looking for him because he’d disappeared, and then Nita went backstage and . . . the rest you know.”

  “But nobody was wandering around backstage? Nobody saw anything?”

  “I don’t know, really,” Theo said apologetically. “I was busy . . . we were supposed to have a dress rehearsal tomorrow morning, and the timpani . . . I wasn’t paying any attention.”

  “You, at any rate, never left the stage during all this time?”

  “What time? After the end of the rehearsal?”

  Michael nodded.

  “Not that I remember. I don’t think so.” Theo hesitated. “Maybe just . . . but I don’t remember if that was after the rehearsal or during the break. I think it was during the break. I had to make a phone call, but my memory’s terrible, you can’t rely on it. Yes, now I realize that people were wandering around, it would have been very risky for . . . for whoever did it. At any moment someone could have . . . But in the end it was poor Nita who found him.” Suddenly his face took on an expression of alarm. “Are you asking about me? Do you want to know what I was doing? Are you trying to suggest . . . ?” The expression of alarm had given way to one of indignation. His handsome lips twisted. “Me?” he asked heatedly.

  Michael was silent.

  “Are these questions supposed to be about what you people call an alibi? Are you asking me about an alibi?”

  “Were you on the stage all the time?”

  Theo nodded. The indignant expression did not leave his face.

  “So who was close to Gabi, aside from Izzy?” asked Michael as he looked through the window at the cars drawing up outside the building. He saw returning orchestra members he recognized, their faces showing confusion, and newspaper and television reporters from the two channels with photographers and cameramen in tow. Even if he left through the artists’ entrance, he thought with a feeling of dread, their cameras would flash in his face. He had always hated that, but this time it was out of the question, he decided, absolutely out of the question. Let them talk to Balilty, he said to himself Only the front entrance was visible from the window, and he was sure that Balilty would be arriving through the side entrance.

  “Really close? Maybe Nita,” said Theo hesitantly, and he swallowed, his Adam’s apple rising and falling. “Closer than me, at any rate.” He threw his head back and massaged the back of his neck. “Look,” he said, “I . . . please don’t think . . . I loved Gabi, but it’s complicated. We’re very . . . we were very different, two different people. I was closer to our mother, Gabi was his father’s son.” The corners of his lips twisted. “We’re completely different. Nita, too. In our approach to music we were very different, even though we both played the violin. Other musical families,” he said bitterly, “see to it that each child plays a different instrument, but when Gabi wanted a violin too, nobody objected. They let him have what he wanted. And Dora Zackheim, too.”

  “She preferred him,” Michael guessed.

  Theo shrugged his shoulders. His lips pouted. You could imagine him as a child. Sulky, but pretending to be indifferent, with the charm of someone aware of his own good looks, but full of suppressed resentment. He lowered his head and remained silent.

  “Did he ever talk to you about intimate subjects? Personal things?”

  Theo blinked and looked at the tips of his shoes. “No,” he admitted with an effort. “I didn’t know much about him, and ever since I realized what his relationship was with Izzy . . . I was completely confused, the possibility had never even occurred to me, and my father . . . poor man.” He chuckled. “Me with all my divorces, Gabi with his boyfriend, Nita with her illegitimate child—none of us the way we were supposed to be.”

  “Did it bother him? Your father?”

  “I don’t know,” Theo admitted. “How much can you know about your father if he chooses not to talk? He never reacted when he heard things about us. When Nita got pregnant and that character of hers—not that we ever met him, but I made inquiries—when he left her in the lurch like that, and she was so broken up, my father didn’t even take an interest in how she was. I tried to talk to him, both about her and about Gabi—tactfully, of course, about Gabi—but he never said a word. In serious discussions—you have to remember that I wasn’t here much either—he would sit in that armchair of his, where . . . where he was . . . where they found him, and say nothing. Not a word. Nita did speak to him once about Gabi after I tried. I think that with her he was more communicative. To me, at any rate, he said nothing.”

  “What’s your brother’s friend like?”

  “I hardly know him. I only met him a few times, and Gabi didn’t say: This is my lover—only, this is Izzy. All I know about him is that he’s a mathematician. He’s polite, with a gentle manner. He knows something about music, too, he’s studied it and even plays the harpsichord. He’s very big on original instruments, on historical performance—authentic music,” he added with a curl of his lip. “Gabi
once told me that he’d learned a lot from him, and he talked about him as if he were a real musician, but I’ve never heard him play. To me he spoke very little . . . and I know that he never liked . . .”

  A knock on the door interrupted him. “They told me you were here,” said Yaffa from Forensics, looking around the room. “I thought you’d want to know . . .” she added and glanced at Theo, who stopped pacing, drew himself up, measured her with a practiced appraising look, letting his eyes dwell on the region of her groin, which was emphasized by her tight jeans, and then looked straight into her eyes with a quizzical stare.

  Michael gestured toward Nita in order to hush Yaffa, and went over to the door. “What didn’t he like?” he asked Theo with his hand on the door handle.

  “What?” Theo replied in confusion.

  “Izzy,” Michael insisted. “You said that he didn’t like something. What didn’t he like?”

  “Oh,” said Theo, remembering, and he waved his hand dismissively. “It’s not important. He didn’t like my interpretation . . . the way I conducted all kinds of things, especially classical works, Mozart and Haydn, but he was critical of my Brahms, too. He told me once that he disagreed with me about the trumpets and drums I was using. He said that I should use the kind that were used in Brahms’s time. He said this in connection with the German Requiem—but that’s got nothing to do with . . .”

  Michael looked at Nita, who lay still, and then went out and shut the door behind him. “I thought you’d want to know that we’ve combed the scene,” Yaffa whispered. “We haven’t found anything, and we’ve begun searching the hall. Maybe we should search the offices, too. We’re combing every inch of the stage and the hall now, but it’s a big area, it’ll take time. And Balilty’s waiting for you in the hall.”

  “Tell him I’ll be with him in a minute,” said Michael, and he felt his pulse racing, as if something decisive was about to take place. He went back into Theo’s office and asked Theo to wait for him there. “We’ll take Nita home soon,” he promised, and he set out for the hall, via the stage.

  From the floodlit stage—where the Forensics crew was crawling on their knees, collecting crumbs with tweezers and dropping them into small plastic bags—the hall looked dark, even though it too was also fully lit, and there, too, two men were crawling between the rows to comb the carpet for clues. Michael stood at the edge of the stage and shaded his eyes, and only then did he see Balilty, sitting in the last row before the gallery, on the row’s next to last seat before the aisle, his legs stretched over the seat in front of him, rolling a scrap of paper between his fingers. When Michael reached him he saw that it was a bubble gum wrapper. The popping of the gum had been audible from a distance. Balilty put the wrapper down on the seat to his left, sat up straight, and patted the empty seat on his right. “I hear it was a real horror movie,” he said as he folded his hands on his paunch. “Slit throat, pool of blood, the works.”

  Michael nodded.

  “The whole press corps is waiting outside. It’s the van Gelden family, after all. The papers will be filled with it by this evening. Eli’s put people at all the entrances, no one’s being allowed in. The whole building’s the crime scene, no?”

  Michael sighed.

  “Your majesty sent for me,” Balilty reminded him as he turned his face toward him. The expression of satisfaction, almost gratification, twinkling in Balilty’s eyes for some reason failed to arouse Michael’s indignation. “Van Gelden, Gabriel, throat slashed,” he remarked to the air. “You surely want to tell me that the two murders are connected. Do you want to get your hands on the stolen painting case, too? The first van Gelden case? Is that what it’s about? Did you see the piece of ass they put on your team? I’ve had my eye on her for a month already. What a body!”

  Michael nodded. He lit a cigarette and held the match in his hand. Balilty stood up, went over to the corner of the hall and came back with a rusty lid, and laid it on the back of the seat in front of them. He sat down noisily and folded his hands ceremoniously. “Is that all you want from me?” he asked provocatively. “You didn’t have to drag me here for that. You could have sent for the file. Believe me, you’d be no further along than we are. We don’t have a single lead.”

  “Maybe Gabriel van Gelden was the legal heir to the painting,” remarked Michael.

  “I would have told you that. Actually, van Gelden’s will divides up the property pretty fairly between them. I checked it out. The shop’s divided between the three of them, the cash too, the house and the painting go to your girlfriend. You’ve made a good deal there,” he said, winking audaciously. “And he even gives her permission to sell them.”

  “To sell the painting?” Michael was astonished.

  “That’s what it says: And she may do as she pleases with them.’ Which I take to mean that she’s entitled to sell the painting.”

  “So why didn’t he sell it?”

  “Do I know? He preferred to wait. Maybe the market was weak, what do I know? He didn’t lack funds. It was a family heirloom, don’t forget, and then there’s the Holocaust. You know what it’s like with them.”

  “It’ll have to be looked into further,” said Michael, sighing.

  “What did you think, that I didn’t check out the will? That I didn’t check with Zurich and Paris if anyone ordered the break-in? Is that what you wanted me for?” Balilty repeated.

  “No, not only for that,” Michael admitted.

  “What then?” Balilty said sharply, turning his body with a sudden movement, like a sleepy tiger momentarily awakening. “You don’t need any more manpower. The whole police force will be here soon. They even took Tzilla off her case for you. If Shorer weren’t preoccupied now with other things, if the Commissioner weren’t busy with the state controller, they would have shown up here themselves hours ago. We’re involved with very important people here, very, very important—so what do you need me for?” The provocative question expressed deeply felt humiliation as well as triumph at soon being invited into areas to which he had previously been denied entry. “And you?” he added in a softer voice. “You shouldn’t be here at all, you’re part of . . . never mind, it doesn’t matter. What can I do for you?”

  “I want . . .” Michael restrained himself. He had to tread carefully, to choose his words so that Balilty would trust him and not go on the defensive and put obstacles in his path. “I want you to be part of the Special Investigation Team. I want to ask you to be in charge of the case officially, or at least to work with me on it.”

  Balilty nodded noncommittally, leaned back in his seat, again stretched his legs over the back of the seat in front of him, and said nothing.

  “First of all, it’s logical because of the connection with old van Gelden’s case,” said Michael hopefully, but Balilty didn’t react. “You understand,” continued Michael, “I have a problem here. I know the people involved, especially the sister, but I want this case. By chance, by luck, I’ve been at loose ends, between things, so they put me on it, and I want in. Eli and Tzilla have already talked to me,” he added quickly. “I don’t have to be told all over again how unhealthy it is, and how impossible it is to be objective when you’re an interested party. Not that I am an interested party, but I am involved, and that’s exactly why I’m asking you, because I trust you to clue me in if I miss anything because of my involvement. You’ll see things where I can’t see them, or don’t want to see them. And of course I won’t be able to interrogate Nita. And anyway,” he added briskly, “the two cases now have to be connected.”

  Balilty took a deep breath, puffed out his cheeks, and blew the air out noisily. I’ll have to think about it,” he said after a long pause. “I’ll have to think about it a lot. It isn’t simple. First of all, I may be in the midst of something, and second, it’s going to be a difficult case. From what Eli and Tzilla tell me, I understand that any one of these klezmers could have . . . That’s almost a hundred people—look at what’s going on here—and you’re living
with this woman!”

  “I don’t live with her. I’ve got an arrangement with her about . . . about the babies.”

  “Do you remember what I told you a few days ago? When you came to my office, and I told you that there was a logic behind doing things in the normal way, like everyone else? And by the way, how’s the search for the mother going? They’ll never find her, I tell you, never. But whether they find her or not, don’t you think you’ve gone a little crazy about all that? The last thing you need in your life is a baby. Since when have you been so crazy about babies?”

  Michael sighed. “How much time do you need?”

  “To think about it? Let’s say an hour or two,” said Balilty. He winked and smiled. “Do you think I don’t know that I’m a total idiot? We both know what will happen in the end. But I’ve got my principles. I have to think about it and I am thinking about it. I may be an idiot, but I wasn’t born yesterday. I know when I’m being an idiot. At least I’m not like all those women who run after you with their tongues hanging out. I think, and they don’t.” Michael waved his arm dismissively and was about to say something like, “Which women?” But Balilty put a hand on his arm and stopped him. “Like everyone else, I’ve got a soft spot for you, Mr. Ohayon. I’m like putty in your hands. What is this, anyway? You whistle and I come? Without a second thought? I have to think of myself too, no?”

  “What risks are you taking? What’s so terrible about what I asked for?”

  “Are you kidding?” said Balilty, and he stretched his legs out again, folded his hands on his paunch, and stared at the stage and the people crawling around on it. “I’ll be given the title of head of the SIT, and my role will be to cover your ass? You’ll do exactly what you like, and I’ll be your puppy dog, and we both know it. And even so, I’m not saying ‘no’ on the spot, please note,” he said, pausing and waving his finger. Then his body relaxed and he added, with resignation: “You’re simply used to getting everything you ask for. You think no one can resist your charms. Well, it takes more than a pair of brown eyes to melt me,” he said, staring at the stage. “Even if they’re yours. And don’t frown like that,” he warned as he turned back to Michael. “That won’t get you anywhere.”