Pattern crimes

by William Bayer

  "What're we supposed to do? Wait till he kills the kid?" David sat up. "Okay, let's bust him."

  Dov and Micha smiled, then the three of them stepped into the hall. Uri and Shoshana were waiting. Dov gave them the thumbs up. Everybody grinned.

  Uri approached Peretz's door, then walked backward slowly on the tips of his toes counting off the paces in pantomime. He took a deep breath, psyched himself up like a man about to lift an enormous weight. Then, his features set, he ran forward and flung himself against the door.

  The lock snapped easily, the door gave way, and all five of them rushed inside. Peretz and the boy, both nude, were embracing on the bed. They turned, there was a moment of silence, the detectives gawking at the lovers, the lovers gaping back. Then pandemonium. The boy panicked. He screamed, jumped up, charged forward, trying to slip between Shoshana and Dov. Uri caught him, grasped him in his arms, then lifted him up, wriggling, off the floor. While he struggled, Peretz sprawled upon the bed, threw his hairy legs apart, and thrust his genitals forward as if they were an offering.

  "So garbage men-which one of you is going to suck me off?"

  "Fuck yourself, you fuckin' pervert." Shoshana glared at him and spat.

  Seven-thirty A.M. They were back in Jerusalem down in the cellar of the Russian Compound, in a small windowless sound-proofed interrogation room. A single light bulb, protected by a grille, burned brightly overhead. Two straight-backed wooden chairs, one small worn wooden table with microphone, a cement floor slightly slanted toward a drain. A narrow slit of inch-thick safety glass exposed the proceedings to Rafi and the video-camera operator seated in the observation cubicle next door. The dank damp stench from a leaking sewer pipe mingled with the smell of human sweat.

  "Tell me about it," David said.

  "The 'tell-your-story' method? Don't be an asshole, Bar-Lev. I used to interrogate guys all the time."

  "So why did you go to the symposium?"

  "Hey! Was that a setup?" Peretz gave David a mock two-fingered salute.

  "Why did you go?"

  "Fascinated."

  "By what?"

  "The marks."

  "What about them?"

  "Already answered that."

  "You said you heard they were like the marks you used to leave. I want to know who said they were."

  "And I told you I heard it around. You can't keep something like that quiet, not here. Cops tell other cops. Medical examiners tell the wives. Nurses drop in on autopsies. Pretty soon everybody knows."

  "Who told you?"

  "An old army friend, and that's all I'm saying. I don't squawk on guys who help me out."

  "What makes you think this guy helped you?"

  "He was one of the few who didn't turn on me when things got tough. He knew about our unit signature, and he heard about how these bodies were getting marked. Called me, said he thought I ought to know. Well, I tell you, I was pissed. Someone out there forging my signature-I wanted to know who the fuck he was."

  Forging his signature: on that subject, it seemed to David, Peretz was deranged. As if the five killings were some sort of forgery case; as if the issue of "forgery" was what it was about.

  "How many nights were you watching me?" Something crafty now in Peretz's eyes.

  "I ask the questions."

  "But not the right ones. Eight nights. Surveillance started the second night of Passover. It was carried out by approximately a dozen men, led during the day by that huge Germanic type who smashed his way into my room, and at night by the fuzzy-headed kid wearing the funny T-shirts. So tell me: Am I right?"

  David turned toward the observation slit to show Rafi how he felt. Their high-powered surveillance had been a farce. Peretz had picked up on them within the hour.

  "Don't feel bad, Bar-Lev. You're looking at maybe the top reconnaissance man in Israel. I got the highest marks ever recorded at Ranger School. Your guys were good but I'm the best. I like urban tracking games. I could have played them with you guys for weeks. That part was fine. The part that wasn't was that you thought I'd killed without a reason!"

  There it was again, the self-righteous rage coupled with mockery and arrogance. A truly unbearable man, David thought, the kind you send out on reprisal raids.

  "…so I led you a good chase, staying home all day, going out at dusk, testing to see whether I could throw you off. Even sent you a little note in the garbage. Get it?" Peretz laughed. "Yeah, I think you did. Okay, a joke. Nothing personal, Bar-Lev." He leaned back balancing his chair on its two back legs. "Anyway, it was from my discovery I couldn't throw you off that I figured out how many of you were there." He moaned. "How I wanted to go into the Park, find someone, bring him home. Went in once but your guys were all over me. That's when I decided maybe my strategy wasn't right."

  "What strategy?"

  Peretz leaned forward again. "Method I'd worked out to clear my name. Make it easy for your people to follow me, reasoning that sooner or later the motherfucker would strike again, and then, since you had me under close surveillance, I'd be cleared and you'd go on to someone else. But after that foray into the park I realized I was a prisoner. So I thought: 'I'11 go down to Tel Aviv and find myself a boy. Then, if they stop me, I'll finally have it out with them, and that'll be the end of that.' " He laughed.

  David stepped outside to talk to Rafi. He found him, wearing an expression of supreme disgust, puffing smoothly on his pipe. "So?"

  "Makes a pretty fair case for himself."

  "Could be a bluff."

  "You'll check it out."

  "Story on the marks won't hold unless he identifies his 'old army friend.' "

  "He won't, David. Man like that won't tell. Not his style." Rafi shook his head.

  "So what does that prove? That he can stonewall?"

  "Getting on your nerves?"

  "Damn right he is!"

  "You had too much invested in him."

  "Maybe so. And maybe the reason I had so much invested in him was because I didn't have any other place to invest."

  "That's why I want you out of here. Go home, relax, take the rest of the day off. You're tired and you're over-involved. I'm going to throw in a regular interrogation team."

  "Come on, Rafi, it's my case."

  "They're experts."

  "He's an expert, too, don't forget." Then he thought: Screw it! "Fine. You're right. Put them in. I am tired. I will go home. See you later. Good-bye."

  He woke late in the afternoon. The apartment seemed lonely without Anna. He missed her cello in the corner and her music stand which she'd folded up and stored away. Her make-up jars were gone from the dresser, the closet was half-empty, and he missed her earrings and her pearl necklace which she liked to leave on the little table beside the bed.

  He went out to walk. It was nearly sunset. The air was scented with the fragrance of the wildflowers that had sprouted all over the city's hills. It took him twenty minutes to follow the road that circled the Hinnom Valley, ascend to Mount Zion, pass the bell tower of the Church of the Dormition, then enter the Old City through the Zion Gate.

  Once inside the Jewish Quarter, away from traffic, he moved quickly through the maze of angled alleyways, courtyards, hidden gardens, plazas, rebuilt synagogues, and carefully preserved archaeological sites all pristinely uniform now that the ruined quarter had been rebuilt. There were boutiques up here, tiny groceries, religious shops, galleries, restaurants and cafes, but he was interested in none of these, was intent instead upon finding his favorite overlook.

  After a few false starts that led to dead ends, he found it finally by following a slinky Jerusalem cat. It was a narrow terrace beside an elegant apartment building, nothing more than a tiny balcony containing a single bench. At its edge there was a low wall, its hollow center planted with wisteria. From here there was a steep drop exposing the view: below the great pedestrian plaza; above the brooding silent Dome of the Rock; and in between the magnificent sight he'd come to see -- the Western Wall.

 
At this hour the light was intense, endowing the Wall with a special quality as if its enormous stones were somehow illuminated from within. This was the luminescence that he loved -- Jerusalem's stones were famous for reflecting light, but only the city's natives knew how at certain times of day they changed color, turned red-gold, then almost seemed to burn.

  The huge plaza was dotted with people -- perhaps a thousand in a space that on Holy Days could contain a hundred thousand or more. David watched them: black-suited Hasidim whirling, dancing; solitary old religious men, wearing tefilin, rocking rhythmically as they prayed. Tourists in shorts and T-shirts gawking. A group from Poland choking, weeping. A wedding party rushing about for the traditional photograph before the sky turned dark. Panhandlers, soldiers, mystics, crazies, Jews who longed for reconciliation and others who favored expansion of the Zionist State.

  Nightfall was at hand; in minutes the sun would disappear. And then, from the minarets in the Valley of Shiloah, David heard the muezzin call the Arab faithful to prayer. The voices echoed, overlapped across the valley, haunting cries that God was Great. The murmuring of people below on the plaza, the cries from the valley, the bells tolling in the churches on the hills -- this, he recognized, was the Jerusalem of the guidebooks, the city where members of three great faiths lived together in perfect peace.

  But it was not his Jerusalem. His was a very different city: tense and angry as a wound-up spring, inhabited by criminals, whores, dope dealers, sex-killers, filled as much with evil as with good. And the three great religions -- he knew about them too, how, beneath the facade of harmony, fanatical factions plotted to spill each other's blood, seize every shrine and stone, and then claim the city exclusively for themselves.

  But still he loved the place.

  Micha said it had to be Peretz, that his alibis had to be faked. "Too pat," Micha said. "It all suddenly ends the night we start watching him? Come on! Then he cruises the exact spot where Halil Ghemaiem was picked up. What a joke!"

  "Go ahead. Punch a hole in it," Dov said. "Just one tiny little hole."

  They'd been over it a dozen times. Peretz was on vacation in Egypt when Susan Mills and Ora Goshen had been killed. An airtight alibi. A group tour. A dozen witnesses. All Israeli and Egyptian borders closely watched. No way he could have slipped out of Cairo, then back in time for the Nile cruise. He didn't have alibis for Ghemaiem and Schneidrman, but the first night of Passover, when Yael Safir was picked up, he'd attended a seder at the home of friends.

  But Micha was a chess player, his mind reeled with plots and schemes, and so he devised a theory of conspiracy, a second killer who murdered the women while Peretz killed the men.

  "So who's the second killer?" Moshe Liederman asked.

  "It's possible. It could work."

  "Yeah, it could," David agreed, "if you could name both conspirators, show they knew each other, and then prove that they conspired."

  "Say two freaks get together, they agree to use an identical method and arrange airtight alibis for the murders they don't commit."

  Shoshana said that sounded like a movie she'd seen, Strangers on a Train.

  "How do they get together? Answer an ad in the Jerusalem Post?"

  "Great try, Micha."

  "It was just an idea."

  "So now what do we do?"

  "Forget about Peretz. Start tracking down guys from his unit," David said.

  "You didn't 'fail,' " Rafi said. Hard mid-morning light striped his office floor and walls. "The symposium idea was good. You developed a suspect. No break-ins, no wiretaps. From a technical point-of-view, your investigation was a model."

  "He's crazy, Rafi. You know that. He could have done it. He's crazy enough."

  "Maybe, but he didn't. So now-"

  "Yeah. The investigation-must-go-on."

  Rafi nodded. "Go back to it. Less pressure now since the killings stopped, and Horev-Isaacson hit the news."

  Aaron Horev and Ruth Isaacson: adulterous lovers found murdered in their love nest. This new murder case, assigned by Rafi to his regular homicide team, had fascinated the public. People couldn't get enough of it; it rang true to them, was imaginable, a crime of passion, not crazy like the serial case.

  David asked for a last meeting with Peretz, a final go at him before they sent him home. Rafi agreed. "But be gentle, David."

  "Of course. What do you think? I'm going to hang him by his heels like a Turk?"

  Rafi laughed. "Watching the two of you I got the feeling you didn't like each other very much."

  "So we don't. So is that any reason we can't do a little business? He knows who was in his unit. I need a list. That way I don't have to track down every fuck-up who's ever been in a military prison."

  The final go-around took place in a corner booth at Fink's, a small, cozy, dark, and very middle-European restaurant-bar, a hang-out for politicians and up-scale foreign journalists.

  Waiting for their table, David and Peretz bantered lightly about who was going to be the guest of whom. They struck a bargain, Peretz would pay for the drinks and David would buy the dinner.

  After they sat down and ordered goulash, Peretz planted his elbows aggressively on the table.

  "You hate my guts."

  "Hate may be too strong a word."

  "Cut the crap. I don't even care."

  "So why do you bring it up?"

  "Ah, the analyst's son." A mocking smile.

  "Should I be impressed you checked me out?"

  "Didn't have to. I knew your brother. Quite the handsome fellow was Gideon Bar-Lev. He and I used to play tennis. Well-are you surprised?"

  "Since you ask, I wouldn't have thought you'd have been quite each other's type."

  "Oh, we were each other's type all right. He just had a lot of trouble admitting it."

  David said nothing.

  "What's the matter?"

  "What are you driving at, Peretz?"

  "How much do you know?"

  "I don't know anything."

  "Really?"

  "Are you telling me you went for him and, poor you!, he didn't give in?"

  "Who says he didn't?"

  "Who cares?"

  "You care all right. You hate the thought."

  "Oh, I get it. Now that he's dead you can smirk around about how he was a queer." David shook his head. "You're fucking impossible to talk to, you know."

  Peretz seemed to make an effort to calm himself. When he spoke again the hostile edge was gone. "Maybe you're right. Talking's not my thing. Fighting is. But now I can't do that anymore." He took a long swig of beer. "You know why they got rid of me?"

  "Way I heard it, they thought you played a little rough."

  Peretz shook his head. "Wasn't that. It was my…proclivity. They couldn't handle it. Not in their manly army." He laughed.

  "So, you see yourself as quite the tragic figure."

  "More like a first-rate officer who served his country well and then got screwed." Peretz shook his head again. "Know something, you're not like Gideon. You don't even look like him. He was delicate and you're kind of burly. The difference, I guess, between a pilot and a cop."

  "Why are you so contemptuous, Peretz?"

  "I'm not-at least not of everyone. But I am, I admit, contemptuous of you. You should be in the army not the police, out in the field where the real murderers are running loose." He made a sweeping motion. "Oh, I know what you think, that I'm some kind of psychopath, that we're all the same, terrorists and counter-terrorists, bunch of nuts running around blowing each other up. I know your type. Don't believe in reprisals. Think it's self-defeating. Think the way to end the cycle is to sit down, talk it out, nobody gets too little or too much. That's the kind of bullshit you hear in the soft elite circles where nobody puts anything on the line. 'We all have to live together here on this Holy Land, nod good morning to each other, be polite, ask after each other's wives, make the desert bloom, blah-blah, blah-blah.' Meanwhile, of course, we hate each other's guts. But never mind tha
t, just share the blessings and respect each other's precious faiths. The old bullshit. See, we're enemies, Bar-Lev. I'm contemptuous of you, and now that you know my views I'm sure you feel the same." He started to eat. "Incidentally, a very attractive lady at the bar keeps looking over this way."

  David turned. It was Stephanie Porter, seated on a stool between two standing American newsmen. She mouthed "Hi." He did the same. She smiled, then turned back to her friends.

  "Who is she?"

  "A free-lance journalist."

  "Been giving you that look, the kind that says 'I'd like to get inside his pants.' "

  "You're vulgar."

  "Yeah, sorry about that."

  "Look, I still have a case to solve. I could really use your help."

  "I knew we weren't here on account of our shared political beliefs. So what do you want?"

  "List of the guys who were in your unit."

  "Don't have a list."

  "You could write one up."

  "Tell me why I should."

  "Because of the marks."

  "A lot of people knew about those marks."

  "Sure, but your old unit's the place to start. You say you're pissed off because someone forged your signature. Now here's your chance to get even, help catch the forger and bring him in."

  "Don't sweet-talk me."

  "Please consider what I said."

  "I have considered it."

  "And?"

  "I can't see any reason I should help."

  "Why not?"

  "You think it's all a joke, don't you? 'My signature'-you think that's cute. But, see, to me it isn't cute. I invented it, just like I chose the guns we carried and the boots we wore and everything else. I decided everything. I handpicked every man. I was feared from Beirut to Damascus. I loved that work, loved the sport of it. That unit was my life."

  "Look, Peretz, I never said-"

  "Let me finish, Bar-Lev. The way I look at it, the person who killed those people tried to set me up. He carved my name onto them to try and pin his crimes on me. So now I'm going after him. If he was one of my old boys, I'm going to find him, too. When I do, I'm going to punish him. And when I'm done doing that, I'm going to break his head."