Murder Duet: A Musical Case

by Batya Gur

  “Explain to me what you mean, and then we’ll leave the subject. Tell me why I’m not—”

  “I mean that real detectives are dangerous idealists. They work on the premise that there’s a world with laws, a nearly utopian world. They’re filled with the certainty that their mission in the world is to discover the truth at all costs. It seems to them that they’re capable of restoring the disrupted order of the world. At the same time they’re constantly in contact with and exposed to the cruelty and darkest motives of human beings, and in order to protect themselves, in order not to be contaminated, they have to in some sense live outside of life. There’s nothing more rare than a happily married detective, with two or three children, who comes home in the—”

  “That’s in books,” he interrupted her angrily. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! Why, in this very investigation, on this very case, there’s a married couple, close friends of mine, and they—”

  “I was speaking more about the classic detective mentality. Your friends are apparently not made of the same material that you are. You know very well what I mean. I can see it in your eyes. Even Gabi, who was quite detached, said to Izzy—Izzy told me—that you seemed to him a sad if not tragic man, and quite alone. I was very impressed by this, coming from Gabi. Maybe these originally were Nita’s words. Gabi didn’t notice people much, and he certainly didn’t have any deep insights about them. What he said impressed me so much that I immediately went and read up on your past. A baby needs an adoptive family that is involved and present and alive.”

  “How dare you assume such things about me without . . . without—”

  “I’ve had a lot of experience. Do you know how many people have passed through my office?” And again, despite the cruelty of the words themselves, and despite his feeling—a kind of certainty as nagging as a toothache—that she was absorbed in a purely narcissistic exercise, as if she had been waiting for an opportunity to say these things simply because they were her idea, the tone of her voice nevertheless was kind, with something soft and compassionate in it. “I’m assuming that you’re intelligent and honest with yourself. Somewhere or other you knew that it wasn’t going to work even before Gabriel van Gelden was murdered.”

  “That’s not true,” he said firmly. “I saw no reason why it shouldn’t work. And I still don’t. I know that I can give the baby things that . . . And I can definitely live . . . live with Nita. It can be a lasting relationship . . . all our lives.”

  “All our lives,” said Ruth Mashiah dismissively. “It’s unlike you to talk in such clichés. What do any of us know about all our lives?”

  He looked past her shoulder and said nothing.

  “Gabi told Izzy that it wasn’t a romantic attachment,” she remarked gently. “I’m talking to you privately. I haven’t made any use of my inside information. Gabi told Izzy, and he didn’t know that Izzy would tell me. Izzy apparently forgot what I do for a living. If you believe in that kind of forgetting.” He looked at her in silence. “I intended to ask you to come and see me in my office, but then this happened.” She shuddered.

  “Gabi didn’t know a thing about his sister. Besides, things change,” he said like a child.

  “It’s not really relevant,” she said gently. “You don’t seem suitable to me, but maybe we’ll find the mother. . . . Wanting isn’t enough to make you suitable. She’s only two months old.” Then she added, rebukingly: “You can still have a baby if you decide to. Do you know how many couples who can’t have children have been waiting for how many years? Ten years? And here we have a healthy two-month-old baby! How can I give her to a man who lives alone and, what’s more, is a detective!”

  The time has come to attack, he said to himself. “You said that Izzy told you everything.”

  “A lot,” she corrected him. “Nobody tells anybody everything, as you surely know.”

  “Okay, a lot. For example, do you know where Gabriel was at the time his father was murdered?”

  She frowned and pressed her fingers to a spot in the middle of her forehead. “It was on the day of the concert that opened the season, right? Izzy was at a conference in Europe. No. I don’t know anything about that.”

  “And about the recent crisis in their relationship?”

  “Crisis?” She sounded genuinely surprised. “What crisis?”

  “We understand from things that came up in the interrogation, in the polygraph, that there was a crisis.”

  Again the fine, delicate eyebrows met over the slanting brown eyes, which seemed to retreat inward in an effort to concentrate. Michael was suddenly reminded of her ex-husband’s eyes. “I don’t know. It seems to me, because of the circumstances, his father and everything that Gabi was in an almost manic mood before his father died. And then, of course, after he died—”

  “Okay, a mood, call it that. But maybe you know what it was about?”

  “Family affairs, things connected with Gabi’s father.” She seemed to be making an effort to remember. “You understand,” she said, leaning forward, her hands on the desk and her little fingers interlaced, “Izzy’s like a child in some ways. He was sometimes afraid of Gabi. Especially when Gabi withdrew into himself, Izzy would think that he didn’t love him anymore, that it was coming to an end. In Izzy’s eyes, love could be over from one day to the next. He’s like a child. Sometimes it drove me wild to see how hard he tried to please him.”

  “There’s no difference between a homosexual couple and . . .” Michael mused aloud.

  “What did you think?” said Ruth Mashiah, surprised. “I told you before, the dynamics are those of any couple. Sometimes Izzy would ask me not to tell Gabi that we’d met. Especially not if we’d had a good time. Say we’d eaten a good meal in a restaurant. Once, after I happened to mention to Gabi that I’d been at an Italian restaurant in Tel Aviv with Izzy, Izzy was furious with me because Gabi had accusingly told him that by not telling him about it himself, Izzy had made him, Gabi, look like a monster of jealousy.”

  “You said it was an idyllic relationship,” Michael said reproachfully.

  “But it was idyllic!” she said, surprised. “What do you expect from an idyll in the real world? In the real world, between two people in an intimate relationship, there’s almost always an element of deceit. Because of fear—mainly because of fear. Fear of jealousy, fear of hurting the other person, and especially fear of losing the loved one. You know it yourself. That’s why you live alone,” she said quietly. “And me, too,” she added in a whisper. “It’s hard to accept these things. But there was really love there.”

  “And dependency. And fear. And secrets,” added Michael.

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “And what happened recently? In their relationship?”

  “First of all the new ensemble. Getting it going swallowed Gabi up. He was busy with it all the time. Then there was the ghastly death of Felix van Gelden. Gabi was very, very attached to his father, and the fact that he was dead, and the manner of his death . . . I think he was depressed. He was certainly in mourning. And aside from that, and in addition to everything else, Izzy felt guilty for not being here when it happened. Even though he cut short his trip, left in the middle of the conference, and came back. Besides that . . . A few days ago he told me that Gabi was worried about something, and that he wouldn’t tell him what it was. That there was some lawyer or something, someone who called him from Amsterdam.” She rubbed her forehead again. “I have a headache,” she apologized.

  “From Amsterdam?” Michael glanced at the running tape recorder, and wondered how he was going to play the tape back to the team. He decided to erase the first part of the conversation.

  “That’s what Izzy told me a few days ago. But I don’t remember, because I didn’t always have the patience to listen to all the details of what was bothering him. Sometimes he really is like a bitchy woman.” She smiled. “It’s impossible to avoid stereotypes,” she said apologetically.

  “How will Gab
riel’s death affect your life?” he asked directly.

  She nodded and sighed, as if the question was only to be expected. “From the financial point of view it won’t really change anything,” she reflected aloud. “From the emotional point of view it will be harder for me now. Izzy will be more dependent than ever and maybe even . . . Maybe he’ll even want to come back home and I . . .” Her eyes strayed with a lost look around the room, and for the first time she seemed to have lost her confidence, her omniscient certainty. There was something in the sight of her eyes darting from him to the door that encouraged him with its human weakness. “You’d like him to come back?” he guessed.

  “Not really,” she said after a long silence. “I’ve already become accustomed to the freedom of living alone. And I also have relationships with other men. . . . Nothing serious,” she admitted. “But at least they have something normal about them, if you know what I mean. There may be some thought of repair, of restoring the structure that was destroyed, things like that. But no, not really,” she said firmly. “Gabi’s death, for me, and also for Irit, is a disaster.”

  He looked at her in silence.

  “I’ve only just realized that. I didn’t know up to now, I had to think about it,” she explained with surprise. “But I really didn’t kill him,” she said suddenly. “I don’t know how sure you can be of that now, but I feel the need to say it. I didn’t kill him and I have no idea who could have killed him or why.” Her mouth tightened for a moment. Her finger pressed the middle of her forehead. “And neither did Izzy,” she added.

  After that she agreed immediately to a polygraph test, consented to haying her bank accounts examined, signed forms, waived the right to a lawyer, and agreed to sign the statement he would draw up. “Anything I can do to help . . .” she said as she stood up, and she added quickly, “as far as Gabi’s murder is concerned.” When she was at the door she stopped and turned around: “But if you need help now with Nita, considering her emotional state of mind, I’ll be happy to do anything I can. How is she really?” she asked with concern, approaching the desk. He switched off the tape recorder, and on an impulse of despair, in response to a dangerous craving, as part of his mind, shocked by his rashness, was warning him against it, he told her.

  9

  Better, I Think

  The sight of the gleaming gold medallion swaying rhythmically to and fro before Nita’s eyes aroused in him a feeling of participation in some ancient rite. This feeling would not have existed, of course, he observed mockingly to himself, if it had been a polygraph test and he himself had been asking the questions. He stood in the corner of the big room, far from the medallion. The psychiatrist had his back to him, hiding Nita’s face as she sat before him. There was something about the instruments themselves, he said to himself—the scratching of the polygraph machine’s needle and its tracing of the graphs, the objectivity of the measurements—that neutralized the ritual sensation evoked by the gleaming gold medallion swaying from side to side in the steady hand in front of the woman seeking redemption. The calm, monotonous voice, at once authoritative and suggestive, announced: “You are tired. . . . Your eyes are heavy. . . . You want to sleep. . . . Your eyes are closing.” These words canceled time and conjured up dank caves, forests, tribal witches. At the same time, he knew that hypnosis was a simple technique. How it worked had been explained to him long ago by Elroi. And only a few minutes earlier Ruth Mashiah had given him a lecture about it. The psychiatrist’s broad back hid Nita’s face, but not her feet in the pale, narrow shoes whose toes pointed up as she stretched her legs in what appeared to be a state of total relaxation.

  “I don’t think it’s possible,” Elroi had said that morning, as Ruth Mashiah and Michael sat in his office. His usually reserved, calm face hid his shock. Only something in the way he shook the bowl of his the pipe over the wastepaper basket, absentmindedly scattering crumbs of blackened tobacco around it on the floor, betrayed something of his agitation. “You know it’s not just inadmissible evidence, it’s also against the law. Just forget about it,” he said almost with disgust as he rose from his chair.

  Ruth Mashiah, who had insisted on accompanying Michael to Elroi’s office, rested her chin on her palms. “This is a woman in great distress,” she said, “and since we have her full cooperation, I don’t see how it can be against the law.”

  “Look, Ruth,” said Elroi in the tone of voice that had given him a reputation for patronizing condescension, “we’ve known each other for a long time, and I know you as a person for whom ethics, professional ethics, are a matter of overriding importance,” he said rebukingly. Only when they were standing at Elroi’s office door had Ruth Mashiah mentioned the fact that they had been at the university together. “We dated when we were young,” she said with a smile before knocking at the closed door, “and now he’s the chief police psychologist.”

  “I tell you the following: First of all—and you know this, too,” he said, nodding at Michael—“the use of pentothal, or any other so-called truth serum, is forbidden, not even in order to identify a rapist. And in most instances hypnosis is, too. It’s obvious from what you’ve said that the lady in question is a suspect. At least for the time being,” he quickly added at the sight of Michael’s face as he opened his mouth to say something. “At the moment she’s a suspect,” he said. “She’s not just a witness you’re trying to get an identification out of. No one in our department will do it. No one here will perform hypnosis in this case.” He tapped his pipe on the edge of the round glass ashtray and looked at Michael. “You seem very involved in this case,” he said carefully. “Do you have you any special interest in the lady? I mean any personal interest?”

  There was a momentary silence. Ruth Mashiah rescued Michael from his attempt to formulate a reply by stating firmly and decisively: “It’s a matter of distress. She’s in severe distress, and we thought we could kill two birds with one stone—”

  “It’s out of the question!” said Elroi, and he sat down again. “If she’s in distress, refer her to a specialist, and then, if he decides that she needs hypnosis as part of her therapy”—he spread out his arms—“go right ahead. I’d be the last to object. You won’t have any difficulty finding someone, Ruth. You know enough people in the profession, and it would be better if hypnosis were recommended by a psychiatrist. What does Miss van Gelden herself say about it?”

  “She . . . she doesn’t—” stammered Michael.

  “She’s in a terrible state,” Ruth Mashiah quickly intervened. “She’ll agree to anything that will bring her relief.”

  Elroi made a skeptical face. He squared his shoulders, which were square enough to begin with. “And you want to use whatever comes up in this hypnosis for purposes of the investigation?” Michael shrugged and Elroi sucked on his empty pipe. “I know you use all kinds of tricks with your suspects,” he said, and he averted his face.

  “She’s not a suspect yet,” protested Michael.

  “You’re not prepared to see her as a suspect,” Elroi corrected him coldly, “but that’s what you yourself made me think she is. Without intending to. On the contrary.” And in a weary tone, as if he knew it was pointless, he repeated: “You know that we only use hypnosis with witnesses, and even then it’s not admissible, because it isn’t clear what comes from authentic memories, and what’s been planted in the suppressed memory. Especially when we’re dealing with a suspect. Even if we were talking about retrieving the memory of a human face,” he reflected aloud, “for instance that of a rapist,” he explained to Ruth Mashiah. “A rape victim is capable of repressing the memory of her attacker’s face. Even then truth serum is out. Even if popular legend says that the intelligence services use it. About which I don’t care to comment.”

  “The problem,” said Michael, “is that we don’t have any time. I have to know today whether we’re dealing with a witness or a suspect, and this is the only way.”

  “Why today? What’s so urgent?” demanded Elroi.


  Michael floundered. He didn’t know how to explain the significance of his coming meeting with Shorer that evening, and so he said only: “I promised Emanuel Shorer to clear it up by this evening.”

  “Shorer knows that you’re talking to me about hypnosis?” Elroi asked, astonished. “He’s going along with the idea?”

  “He doesn’t know about it,” Michael reassured him. “We haven’t discussed methods, but the conclusions have to—”

  “What about his daughter? Has she given birth? She should have had the child by now,” Elroi recalled, but he didn’t wait for a reply. “I’d rather you didn’t go into the details,” he said quickly. “I have a definite feeling that I don’t want to know any more than I have to. I have a bad feeling about this whole business,” he said, turning to Ruth Mashiah. “But if you want to refer her to someone for help, on your own initiative, there’s no problem with names. I can give you a few. Just remember that I don’t know anything about it.”

  Ruth Mashiah shook her head. She had no problem finding someone, she knew the serious people in the field, she said, and for the first time she mentioned Dr. Schumer’s name.

  “I thought of him, too,” admitted Elroi unwillingly. “For the hypnosis. But I’m not sure that he—”

  “But he’ll be able to tell us, we can rely on his ethics and responsibility, and he’s had a lot of experience,” said Ruth Mashiah, raising her frizzy little head. “He’s the one they called on to wake that girl up, after she’d been in a hypnotic trance for a week and they couldn’t bring her out of it. Do you remember the case?”