“Not only that,” Balilty said. “The person who knew about the door also had a key to enter through the back of the String Building without passing through security the night Tirzah was killed. I’d also like to remind everybody that I spoke with the guy who oversees the broadcasts—write that down, will you, Tzilla?”
“First tell me what it was about.”
“I talked to the guy who oversees the broadcasts,” he repeated, making himself sound important. “You’ve got to talk to the behind-the-scenes people, it’s a no-brainer talking to the VIPs, it’s the ones who aren’t in the spotlight that—”
“Balilty,” Tzilla said impatiently, “what did he say?”
“The guy’s in charge of all the technical matters, decides if something gets broadcast or not, and he sits in the central control room, it’s like the master control center. All the satellite stuff passes through there, so, for example, broadcasts from the Knesset on Channel Thirty-three come through master control. What’s important to remember here—write this down, Tzilla—is that there’s nobody there between one and four in the morning. The room is open, and anyone can just walk in. At night all kinds of equipment goes missing over there.”
Balilty spread his arms as if to say, Voila!
“So?” Tzilla said. “How does that connect to our case?”
“It means,” said Balilty vaguely, “that there are all kinds of hiding places, limitless possibilities. It’s impossible to know who has access to what.”
“Even who might have had access to Matty Cohen’s medicine,”
Sergeant Ronen noted. “We’ll never solve that riddle, you can be sure of that. If a guy takes a prescription on a regular basis, how can you prove that someone sneaked him an extra dose?”
“Nothing’s impossible,” Balilty said as though speaking from experience. “But let’s start from the end and work backward.”
“The end,” Michael said, “already presents us with an enigma: the Orthodox Jew with the burn marks who disappeared as though he’d never existed. Nobody saw him or heard him.”
“We’ve put together a composite of him,” Tzilla reminded them all.
“It’s been distributed, there’s not a squad car in the city without one.
And they broadcast it on the five o’clock news. Did you see it?”
“I was busy,” Michael answered, “but I was thinking that maybe—”
Balilty was staring at him, concentrating hard. Suddenly he sat up straight and said, “Forget about it, I already thought about that, and it won’t work.”
“How do you know what he’s talking about?” Eli Bachar sputtered furiously. “Why don’t you let him finish?”
“I know what he’s going to say,” Balilty bragged. “Because great minds think alike, okay? He’s thinking that maybe the burned religious guy is really Benny Meyuhas, right?”
Michael nodded.
“Why, so they’ll think he’s Sroul?” Balilty asked for clarification. “As if their friend Sroul had come back to Israel?”
“Who’s Sroul?” Ronen asked.
“You mean like a disguise?” Lillian asked.
“Why not?” Tzilla interjected. “After all, we’re talking about a director here, he’s got access to all kinds of costumes. He’s also knowledgeable about the possibilities.”
“The Border Police have no record of his entering the country, at least under that name,” Eli Bachar said.
“That’s fine,” Balilty said dismissively, “but he could have entered with a different passport under another name. With an American passport and an American name.”
“We haven’t managed to make contact with his family in Los Angeles,” Eli Bachar said. “We’ve been trying since this morning, but there’s no answer, only an answering machine.”
“But directors really got all kinds of possibilities,” Tzilla persisted.
“They have got possibilities, not got, ” Emmanuel Shorer said from the doorway.
“I was talking about Benny Meyuhas,” Tzilla said, glaring at Shorer as he entered the room, closed the door, and took a seat. “And the burned guy,” she added.
“All right,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Don’t mind me, I’ll try to follow along.”
“There are two things that stand in the way of this hypothesis,”
Balilty said. “One is the difference in height, which is of course possible to change. Benny Meyuhas is a lot shorter than Sroul, according to Aviva’s description. But the other—and this I do not believe can be changed, it depends on Aviva’s hearing—is the voice. She talked at length about the guy’s voice, said it was a different voice, the kind you can’t forget. And she knows Benny’s voice really well. She’s certain it’s a different voice.”
“Okay, that just reinforces what I said before, that we’ve got to get something out of Benny Meyuhas,” Rafi said. “In my opinion he suits our criteria to a tee.”
“We’ve been putting more and more pressure on him, and he still won’t talk,” Lillian said. “What more can we do?”
“Dig around like Eli did today,” Michael said. “What came out of all your investigations, Eli?”
“Not much,” Eli Bachar answered. “I put tape recorders on your desk, but we really didn’t get anything new from them. That actress just keeps repeating her version of events, that she was with him at his house. In the end we got it out of her that she was with him in the bed—‘for the purpose of consoling him,’ she says—and then somebody rang the doorbell and at first he didn’t want to answer but the person kept ringing and ringing and so finally he went to open it, told her not to leave the bed, to wait for him there and not to move, and she was afraid it was Hagar, her producer.”
Balilty snorted. “Producer? More like guard dog, shadow, always at his side, dying to have him for her own. If she’d found that little actress in his bed, that would’ve been the end of her. It was hard enough on her that he was living with Tirzah; but if she’d found him with some young actress? Whoa! That wouldn’t have been a pretty sight.”
Eli Bachar said, “At first she said she didn’t hear anything, said the bedroom door was closed because Benny had closed it on his way out.
So we did an experiment, went there to try it out.”
“Good job,” Balilty said. “You’re a pretty thorough guy.”
There was hostility in Eli Bachar’s green eyes as he stared at Balilty.
“I stayed in the bedroom while Coby went to the front door and spoke in a normal voice. I could hear him— not the words, but I could hear his voice. On a hunch I told her she may not have left the bedroom, but she certainly must have opened the door to listen. At first she said,
‘No way,’ and denied it, but eventually, when I put some pressure on her—”
“Pressure, hah!” Balilty grumbled. “What kind of pressure? You couldn’t exactly threaten to arrest her!”
Eli Bachar ignored Balilty. “So then she says, ‘I cracked the door open a tiny bit, just to know who it was,’ and she told me it was a man’s voice, one she’d never heard before. Then she heard Benny Meyuhas—he sounded all excited—and the other guy’s voice again, then the door slammed and that was that. He didn’t come back. Time went by and he didn’t return, so she got up, got herself dressed, and waited in the living room. Eventually she went home.”
“Hang on a minute,” Rafi said. “He never came back to the bedroom? He didn’t get dressed first? It’s winter —the guy couldn’t have gone out without shoes. I mean, he was in the middle of f—”
“We asked about that,” Eli Bachar said, cutting him off. “You better believe we asked about that. She said he’d left his clothes in the living room, that’s where they’d gotten started—”
“Every man has his own style,” Balilty muttered.
“No,” Eli Bachar said. “This guy isn’t that type. He’s no philanderer. I understand that he was showing her unedited clips from their film, it wasn’t … she’d come to offer her condolences, I don’t know exactly—”
“It always starts somewhere,” Balilty concluded. “Some people learn from the experience of others. You bring a pretty young woman home with you, show her some film clips, you’re an important director. What’s the big surprise? Then things move into the bedroom.
Doesn’t surprise me in the least.”
