“What’s wrong? Don’t you like all these photos?” Lillian goaded her.
The camera panned to the corkboard overhanging the desk, to which were pinned rows and rows of black- and-white photographs: hundreds of uniformed Japanese soldiers, their hands held high over their heads in surrender; seated Wehrmacht soldiers, hands on their heads; in the corner of the corkboard, a large photo of dark- skinned soldiers sitting in the sand, their feet bound; American soldiers, their heads bowed, facing Japanese officers.
“Check it out,” Balilty hooted. “What an album he’s got! He should collect them into a book.”
Michael, too, watched the film and thought about The Family of Man, a collection of photographs he had encountered in his youth and which Becky Pomerantz, the mother of his good friend Uzi from high
school, had particularly liked. She was, as well, the first woman to seduce him, teaching him to love music and good books like The Family of Man, with its impressive photographs. Becky Pomerantz had taught him to smoke, too, when he was seventeen. How he wished he had a cigarette now. If only he had a cigarette, his powers of concentration were certain to improve greatly. Maybe he should take up smoking again, just for the duration of this investigation, then he would give it up for good. He wished someone could approve such a plan, where he could smoke just for a few weeks. But then he’d have to endure this torment of quitting all over again. He passed his fingers over his face and touched his bottom lip lightly, just at the most comfortable spot for a cigarette, and resumed watching the cassette.
“That’s Rubin’s collection,” Natasha was explaining defensively. “He calls it his ‘pacifist’s collection.’ What’s wrong with it? Would you prefer naked girls?”
Lillian’s face appeared on-screen, watching Natasha with height-ened interest, giving her her full attention. “First of all,” she said, “of course naked girls would be better. They’re lots prettier, don’t you think?” She smiled mysteriously. “Second of all, I thought you had something going with Hefetz. Are you involved with Rubin, too?”
Balilty glanced at Lillian and whistled. “Good job, Miss Lillian,” he said. “I see they taught you something over in Narcotics.”
“I’m not involved with Rubin,” Natasha said quietly on the screen as her pale face—especially her cheeks and chin—turned deep red, bringing out her bottomless blue eyes. “And it’s all over with Hefetz.”
Michael noted that she had not bothered to ask Lillian how she knew about Hefetz and that she accepted as a given the fact that Lillian knew everything about her. Nor did it seem that she cared. “Rubin is just nice to me, he was nice right from the beginning, and it doesn’t have anything to do with … nothing to do with …” Her voice faded, and Lillian waited a moment before asking her next question.
“Nothing to do with what?”
“Sex,” Natasha said, then covered her face with her hands.
“How about we get right to business,” Lillian suggested. “We don’t have all the time in the world for this. The question is, where were you between, say, ten and eleven o’clock?”
“I was … I was with Schreiber. First I went to the bathroom, then I was in Aviva’s office—I took over for her for a few minutes so she could go to the ladies’ room or something—and after that with Schreiber. I was waiting for Zadik … I was hoping to talk to him,”
Natasha said.
“You were in Aviva’s office?” Lillian asked. “Right at the scene of the crime, no?”
“I didn’t budge from there,” Natasha said. “Everyone saw me there.
You can ask anyone.”
A loud knock on the door could be heard from the monitor, then the door opened and the film ended.
“That’s all?” Tzilla asked, disappointed. “That’s all there is?”
“That’s all,” Lillian affirmed. “After that Benny Meyuhas turned up, and things got crazy. But I checked out her alibi, and it’s all true. Aviva confirmed it, Hefetz saw her—”
“Hefetz! Oh, that’s a good one!” Eli Bachar said mockingly.
“Okay, there were others. Schreiber told me they were in a side office, not far from the hallway door that —”
“Schreiber’s crazy about Natasha,” Eli Bachar told them. “We have to take that into consideration.”
“What’s going on over there? Is everybody nuts for that scrawny little chick? She looks like a famished orphan,” Balilty said, astounded.
“Some guys like that type,” Tzilla assured him. She stole a glance at her husband. “There are some guys you can’t even know what’s going to turn them on.”
“Was there any time you had the feeling she was covering something up?” Michael asked Lillian. “With your experience dealing with drug addicts, you must be an expert on liars.”
Lillian smiled. “I can tell you that Natasha did not seem like an addict or a liar. Schreiber seemed pretty high the whole time, but I don’t think it’s anything more than ordinary dope.”
“And neither of them—Schreiber or Natasha—has a motive,” Balilty pondered. “Rubin either, for that matter, don’t you think?”
Lillian nodded.
“Anybody want more pita bread or something?” Tzilla asked. No one responded. “Then I’m going to get rid of all this, it’s making me gag.”
“Let’s get back to the murder itself,” Michael said, reminding them that someone could only have entered the room through the secret door during the half hour Zadik was alone, unless the murderer was the ultra-Orthodox Jew who had entered and exited through Aviva’s office. “We’ve already determined the guy was wearing a maintenance man’s coveralls,” Michael said. “The coveralls remained in the office, and the forensics people are certain they’ll find some evidence on them, but even if they don’t find anything but Zadik’s blood, we still have —”
“The T-shirt,” Tzilla said.
“But doesn’t that mean that the person who put on the coveralls knew that the maintenance man would be working in Zadik’s office?”
Lillian asked. “Did he come in wearing coveralls, or did those belong to the maintenance man? I don’t understand.”
“Apparently he entered in street clothes,” Eli Bachar said. “In any event, no one recalls having seen a maintenance man or technician in the hallway.”
“At Israel Television that doesn’t mean a thing,” Balilty noted quietly. “Those people don’t seem to notice anything: who shoved Tirzah Rubin, the Orthodox guy with the burns—”
“So he used the coveralls that some maintenance man had left there earlier?” Lillian persisted. “Then he must have known they’d be there.
Or how about this, which is even more confusing: he told Zadik,
‘Hang on a minute, let me step into these coveralls before I bash your brains with a drill.’ Like, ‘Let me just put these clothes on so I won’t get myself all messed up.’” She glanced around with the air of a little girl showing the grown-ups how smart she is.
“No, darling.” Balilty sighed. “Don’t you remember what we said about Zadik’s autopsy? I mean, we discussed this this afternoon, and you were certainly there: we said that the pathologist found a large bruise on the base of Zadik’s skull, near the neck, which indicates that he lost consciousness first, and only then there was the business with the drill. Capisce? ”
“The guy rammed him with the tool, he didn’t drill a hole in his head. That’s why there was no noise,” Eli Bachar explained.
Lillian hung her head. “The official results from the pathologist haven’t come back yet,” she claimed. “I don’t remember all that because I haven’t seen it in writing.”
“So you’re going to have to take my word for it, sweetheart,” Balilty said softly. “First the guy cracked him over the head, then, when Zadik lost consciousness, he pulled on the coveralls and creamed him with the drill. Got it now?”
“Do me a favor, Danny,” Tzilla said as she wrapped her arms around herself, “spare us the gory details, will
