Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

  “Mr. Bashari,” said Michael softly, “you know we haven’t found her handbag, or a diary. Does she . . . Did she have another appointment book, with all those activities?”

  “I don’t know.” Ezra Bashari sighed. “You probably think that I . . . that I didn’t take an interest, but that’s not true. What she told me, I heard. She has . . . She had . . . When she laughed, the whole house . . . the whole street . . . the whole world was full of light.”

  “Maybe you can recall some details? Facts?” tried Michael.

  Ezra Bashari shook his head from side to side. “When she said things, I listened very carefully. But she didn’t talk much about facts, what she’d done and where she’d been. Only sometimes. I know one or two of her girlfriends, I know Rosenstein the lawyer. Sometimes she would go down to Tel Aviv to go out in the evening, and then she would sleep at a girlfriend’s house. Sometimes she would stay late at work. And there were always her plans to study.”

  “What did she want to study?’

  “Singing, and abroad, in America. Her brother . . . We have a son who lives in America. He was sent there by his company here and he—”

  Naeema Bashari came into the room, carrying a large envelope with exaggerated care. Her husband buried his head in his hands again, and Michael, to whom she silently held out the envelope, took colored photographs out of it and placed them in his lap.

  There were twenty photographs or more: Zahara in an army uniform; Zahara in a checked shirt dangling outside her jeans; Zahara in a wet T-shirt, her head flung back and water dripping from her hair; Zahara in a long red dress—“at her older brother’s wedding, eight years ago . . . She was fourteen then,” said Naeema Bashari in a cold voice; Zahara in shorts, in a white bathing suit, stretched out on her side smiling at the camera, with a boy kneeling next to her.

  “Who’s this?” asked Michael.

  Naeema Bashari polished the lenses of her glasses and brought the picture close to her eyes. “I think his name is Yossi, but I’m not sure,” she said, and handed the photo to her husband.

  “Not Yossi, Eitan,” said the father. “Eitan Sachs, the son of Yehuda Sachs from the bank. Don’t you remember that he used to take her to the beach? They went to high school together,” he explained to Michael. “He isn’t in touch with her anymore.”

  “Sachs? Ashkenazi?”

  “That was when she was still in school,” explained Naeema Bashari. “He didn’t count as a man.”

  For a moment the murder was forgotten and it was as if Michael and his team were leafing through an ordinary photo album and admiring a successful daughter together with the parents. He picked out a large black-and-white photo of Zahara in a black evening dress, her smooth black hair combed in the style of an Egyptian princess and covering half her face. Her mouth was open and her two hands were clasping a microphone. “Zahara singing, at a wedding . . . ,” the mother said, and choked.

  Michael cleared his throat. “We’ll take these pictures with us,” he said. “And we’ll give them back,” he hastened to add when he saw the alarm in her face. “We’ll also have to do a search of her room, with your permission.”

  “There’s probably also a video from a performance of hers,” interjected Sergeant Yair.

  “We don’t have one. Maybe in her room. Her brother Netanel has one,” Naeema Bashari said, and looked anxiously at her husband, who opened his palms in front of him.

  “Do whatever is necessary,” he said in a cracked voice. “We won’t get in your way.”

  Michael nodded to Tzilla. She left the room again and a moment later came back in. “They’re on their way—the Criminal Identification Unit. Ten minutes, no more.”

  “You can get started,” he said to Yair. “If Mrs. Bashari can take you to her room, you can get started.”

  “I’m going through everything very slowly,” Sergeant Yair explained when Michael entered the room afterward. The closet was open, and its contents were already lying on the striped rug, ready to be collected by the Criminal Identification people. Sergeant Yair sat on the narrow bed and around him were strewn papers, photos, an empty little perfume flask, old diaries in colorful plastic bindings, postcards, greeting cards, notebooks, beads, hairpins, a rusty key, an earring set with red stones, brass bracelets, an inside-out cigarette package with a phone number written on it. “Do we need this?” he asked Michael, who had spread some sheet music on his knees.

  “I need everything,” answered Michael, and from the shelf up against the opposite wall he pulled a stack of yellow cardboard files. “Everything. Just put it in piles, and later they’ll come from Criminal Identification and put it all in bags. We won’t do the sorting here.”

  “What’s in there?” asked Yair, indicating the yellow files with his head. Michael was leafing through one of them.

  “A catalogue,” murmured Michael as he turned the pages. “It’s a catalogue of Yemenite women’s clothing and jewelry.”

  “Take these, too,” Michael said, and handed the other files to the sergeant, “but just don’t start looking through them now. There are all kinds of charms and spells there.”

  “To cancel a spell or the Evil Eye,” murmured Yair, “take the living silver called zaibak and the white stones found in—what’s this?—the gizzard of a black rooster . . .”

  “Show it to me,” demanded Tzilla as she entered the room, and the sergeant handed her the cardboard file.

  “Leave that alone now,” scolded Michael. “What else have you found?”

  “This, in the top drawer.” Yair pointed at a small paper bag. “There are some pills here, and a doctor’s prescription. I don’t know what it is.”

  Michael looked at the prescription and the pills. “These are birth control pills,” he said, and held the packet out to Tzilla, who examined it and nodded.

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “I’ve seen some like that,” he replied, but she was already busy with something else.

  “The date is from last year,” she said.

  “Look at that,” wondered the young sergeant. “Here we have birth control pills, and there we have how to exorcise spirits from the body and how to tell fortunes. How do they go together?”

  “Nu, people are a complex thing,” said Michael, “and when you rummage in a person’s life like that, it’s only surprising when there are no surprises. Write down the doctor’s name; maybe he’s also the doctor who took care of the pregnancy. And I want the diary from last year, with the phone numbers and all that. You’ll probably find it with the rest of them,” instructed Michael.

  “I’ve already found it.” Yair took a small booklet out of his pocket. “I knew it was the most important. And I also looked at the names a bit. Here’s the name of that friend of hers, that journalist you mentioned, Orly Shushan, with her phone number in Tel Aviv, and also her mobile. And also her parents’ phone number in Jerusalem. And there are also other people’s names here, women and men and also—”

  “We’ll check it out in a little while,” said Michael. “What’s that over there, those papers in the corner of the drawer?”

  Yair spread out the packet of forms on his lap. “Look,” he said in astonishment. “These are mortgage forms, filled out. Where she planned to buy an apart . . . It’s in her name, look. It’s very strange, isn’t it? Why would a girl who wants to study abroad take out a mortgage? Unless she wanted to invest, but then her parents don’t . . . And there’s also a letter of guarantee from a lawyer—Rosenstein and Nahir, Attorneys-at-Law. But I don’t understand where this apartment is.”

  “Show that to me,” Michael said, and held out his hand for the yellow forms. “It says here ‘Railroad Street,’ don’t you see? It’s an application for a mortgage on an apartment on Railroad Street. Yes, this is a letter from Rosenstein the lawyer saying that he guarantees the payments. Okay, Balilty is talking to him now. We’ll have to summon. Try to get hold of Balilty; I want to talk to him,” and as he spoke he went back to the
living room holding the forms.

  Naeema Bashari had never heard of any plans to purchase an apartment. Ezra Bashari demanded to see the documents.

  “There’s no contract,” said Michael after he had looked through them. “There’s no purchase contract. They don’t give a mortgage without a contract. That I do know.”

  Ezra Bashari returned the papers to Michael with a dismissive gesture. “I don’t understand this,” he said bitterly, “but there are a lot of things I don’t understand, and this is the least of them.”

  “Do you know the apartment?”

  “I know the building, from the address,” said Ezra Bashari. “Sometimes I go past there on my walks. It’s an Arab house. They’ve added two stories to it and spoiled the way it looks, and now there’s some Jew living there from France. Southern France, as they say here. That is, Morocco. He made money fast and finished it fast. From jewelry, I think. Diamonds or something.”

  “And she never said anything to you about the apartment?”

  “Not a word,” Ezra Bashari replied, and lowered his eyes. “Not a word. All this is happening so suddenly. This isn’t the daughter I knew. A person doesn’t know his own children, his flesh and blood. What have we come to?” he muttered, and collapsed back into the sofa, burying his face in his hands.

  Tzilla took the documents and put them under her arm, as Yair came into the living room and held out the mobile phone to Michael.

  “You wanted Balilty,” he reminded Michael, who just kept looking at the extended phone.

  “I’m on my way to you,” said Balilty. “With her brother and all the—”

  “Netanel Bashari?”

  “Not that one . . . I don’t know where he is . . . ,” admitted Balilty grudgingly. “The younger brother, Bezalel.”

  “Bring the lawyer, too,” whispered Michael. He moved down the hall to the front door, and in a low voice he told Balilty about the apartment that Zahara Bashari was about to buy.

  “Where is it? What’s the exact address?” Balilty demanded.

  “Not on the phone,” warned Michael. “Come here and we’ll talk.”

  “He definitely won’t want to come with me, that Rosenstein,” said Balilty. “You know how it is with lawyers. You’ll have to do it officially, a summons for questioning and all that.”

  “Tell him that we found the mortgage papers,” said Michael. “He’ll definitely come, you can be sure of that.”

  “You want all of them there together?” said Balilty in astonishment.

  “All of them,” affirmed Michael, “and if there’s a riot here—I want to see it.”

  “Have you worked out who the doctor is?” he asked Tzilla, who took a closer look at the packet of pills.

  “Dr. Antar, I think. Do you want me to find out now?”

  “Now, yes. Whether she was a regular patient of his, whether he knew she was pregnant. And also if he knew by whom, all that.”

  It was about half an hour after Michael spoke to Balilty that a black BMW stopped in front of the house. A short, elderly, thickset man wearing a dark gray suit got out. In front of the wooden gate to the yard he stopped and adjusted his blue tie, and only then did he open the gate and enter the yard. The evening light broke on the thick lenses of his glasses when he paused on the path and looked at the front door, as if gathering his courage to go in.

  Michael, who saw him from inside the house, hastened out. “Attorney Rosenstein?” he asked. “I’m Chief Inspector Ohayon, the head of the investigating team.”

  “I’ve never had anything to do with crime,” the lawyer said, and held out a limp hand to be shaken. “I deal with real estate and bankruptcies, always. I’ve never—”

  “Zahara Bashari worked at your office,” Michael said, and drew him into the yard.

  “For two years,” said the lawyer, “and I’ve already told that other gentleman—I didn’t catch his name—that she was like a daughter to me and we all—”

  “Like a daughter.” Michael decided to strike immediately. “Yes, that’s obvious, from the guarantee for the mortgage that you’re prepared to give her.”

  Rosenstein blushed.

  “It’s strange, even if it’s someone who’s like a daughter,” said Michael, “for a sharp lawyer like you to be prepared to make a commitment like that, isn’t it?”

  “What are you implying?” asked the lawyer in a stern voice. “I’m here only because I care . . . Because I wanted to tell her parents . . . You know that this is an official investigation and you have no right to—”

  “Not ‘official,’ and we haven’t read you your rights,” promised Michael, “just to help us get started with something. If you were really close to Zahara Bashari, and if she was so important to you, you certainly don’t object to helping solve what happened to her.”

  The lawyer wiped his face with a checked handkerchief and sighed. Michael thought about his former father-in-law, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor who became a diamond merchant and got rich, and didn’t deny his daughter anything even during the years she was Michael’s wife. Yozek, who was a model grandfather to their son Yuval, also had the habit of wiping his face with a cloth handkerchief when he was tense or emotional.

  “Her parents didn’t know anything about the plan to buy an apartment.”

  “It was an excellent investment, I told her. She could pay the mortgage from the rent. She wanted to go abroad to study.”

  “A girl who’s going abroad to study doesn’t conduct a relationship like that with a man,” Michael said, and looked at the wooden fence and at a young woman getting out of a taxi and rummaging in a large shoulder bag.

  “What relationship?”

  “The kind of relationship in which someone buys an apartment for a lady,” said Michael.

  “I didn’t . . . I didn’t buy any apartment,” the lawyer said, and loosened the knot in his tie. “I have already explained to the other gentleman, that one, at my office. On the day he asked me about, I was out of town, at meetings. I have—”

  “Which day was that?”

  “Monday, he said. He asked about Monday, and I only got home at midnight. After midnight, because my wife and I were at the opera after my meetings. I don’t—”

  “A father-daughter relationship?” Michael, asked and looked at the petite girl who opened the gate and came into the yard. Her curls shook as she walked forward in tight green jeans that emphasized the fullness of her thighs.

  “Excuse me,” Michael said, and addressed the girl, who came toward him with heavy steps up the stone path, her bulging big brown eyes fixed on him. “Are you Orly Shushan?”

  “And who are you?”

  “Police,” said Michael. “I’m from the police, and if you’ll just wait a moment . . .” He turned around, opened the front door and called to Tzilla. When she came out, he whispered something in her ear, and she went up to the girl with the curly hair, who was looking her over. Her prominent eyes were focused on Tzilla, but they were expressionless.

  “Look,” said the lawyer apologetically. “I’m a man of seventy-two, more than twice her age—three times. I have a daughter who could be her mother. How can you think that . . . I also don’t do things like that. My wife and I . . . we have a good marriage. There’s nothing more stupid than an old man who gets tempted into a thing like that. And stupid I’m not. What do I have to talk about with a girl of twenty-two? Pretty, absolutely pretty, likeable, nice, intelligent. Sure, but not a woman for me. I’m already after prostate surgery . . . You people, you get, you should excuse me, stereotypical ideas. Your colleague . . .” A heavy Polish accent was suddenly audible in his speech; his lower lip, which was very thin, drooped and his expression resembled the bitter ducklike expression that would cross Michael’s former father-in-law Yozek’s face when something was not to his liking. “He already hinted at all kinds . . . I’m not saying that you have to go gently in an investigation like this, but believe me, you’re mistaken, and this is such a banal mistake.”<
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  “And the apartment?”

  “Look,” said the lawyer. “I’m prepared to speak frankly with you.” He looked around and moistened his lips. “The apartment was an investment. I’ve already got an apartment downtown, and my daughter is fixed up in the United States and she won’t be coming back to Israel, and we have too much. I didn’t buy it for her and I didn’t take any risk. I had an interest in getting my hands on that apartment because of . . .” He paused.

  “Because of?”

  “Look, it’s a very desirable neighborhood now. There are very few apartments in Arab houses like that on the market, and especially ones that don’t need renovation. It’s a real bargain, that apartment, and with times being what they are, with the situation and everything, it’s the ideal time to buy real estate. Every new immigrant and every leftist who has a high opinion of himself is looking for an apartment in an Arab house. But I have enough, and I don’t need anything else to declare to the tax authorities.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Michael. “It’s a bargain, but you don’t need it, so then what? You give a bargain like that to a junior secretary as a gift? How much are we talking about here?”

  “One hundred sixty thousand dollars for eighty meters on Railroad Street, southern exposure, renovated like new, from the bailiff. The owner went bankrupt. It’s a real gift, for free.”

  “So you just give a gift to a nice girl?”

  “It really does sound stupid . . . but that’s not the way it is. There was a matter of professional rivalry here. There was someone who wanted to buy it. In short, the details aren’t important. It would hardly have cost me anything.”

  “They are important, the details,” said Michael, “and you know that they are important. But let’s assume we can postpone the names and the dates in this matter, and you tell me the main points in brief, please.”