While I waited, I looked at Dahlia. She seemed completely relaxed. There was a gleam in her eye, as though she was anticipating the moment in which I'd be made to feel foolish for ever suspecting her.
Dr. Lipowsky had a Polish accent and a cultured voice. He asked me what I wanted, and I told him to wait a minute and brought the phone over to the sofa and handed it to Dahlia. They exchanged pleasantries, and then Dahlia instructed him to answer any questions I had regarding her health, both current and past.
"Mr. Lapid has my utmost confidence," she said, her tone straddling the fine line between seriousness and mockery. Then she handed the phone back to me and sat with a tiny smile on her lips while I and Dr. Lipowsky conversed about her.
The picture Dr. Lipowsky painted was grim and left no room for doubt. Dahlia was severely handicapped. Her injuries made walking a painful ordeal, one she could not sustain for long. Five years ago, at the time of Anna's murder, her condition was worse still. I did not ask him specifically, but the very idea that she would journey across town to Trumpeldor Cemetery and then viciously slaughter a healthy young woman was preposterous.
"Satisfied?" Dahlia said, once I had hung up the phone.
I returned to the chair and dropped into it. I was tired, and my hunger was back with a vengeance, biting the inside of my stomach with its invisible teeth. I knew it was more than a physical need. The collapse of my theory regarding Dahlia was getting to me. I rubbed my face with both hands hard enough so my skin felt raw.
"Don't feel bad, Mr. Lapid," she said. "I'm not displeased with you."
"That's big of you. Most people get angry when they're accused of murder."
"What I see is that you've been doing your job, just as you told me you would. You've even managed to turn up a witness. Where did he come from?"
"It's not important."
"If you say so. And he said the killer had a limp?"
"He said there was something wrong with the killer's walk. A limp is just one possibility."
"That's rather vague, isn't it?"
I shrugged, then felt the need to defend the fruits of my labor, meager though they were. "It's better than nothing. Did your husband ever have something wrong with his walk?"
She shook her head regretfully. "I'm afraid not."
"Know anyone else who has?"
"No one but myself."
I nodded, wishing like hell I'd gone to Greta's instead of here. This was shaping up to be a big waste of time, and God, was I hungry.
She said, "I'm flattered, you know."
"Flattered?"
"That you think me capable of such an incredible feat of acting, faking a handicap such as mine for five years."
"From what I understand, you have an exceptional talent."
She smiled in what looked to be genuine pleasure. "That's nice to hear." Then her expression turned bitter. "But if you think I'd have given up acting for so long, even to commit the perfect murder, you don't know me at all."
Does anyone know you? I wondered. Or is the real you always hiding behind some role you're playing?
"Maybe you'd have seen it as the ultimate professional challenge," I said, in another spurt of defensiveness, this one of the very reason I had come here this evening.
She thought about it and gave a tiny nod. "Maybe I would have."
I pushed myself to my feet. "I should be going."
"Mr. Lapid, I hope this matter with the limp, or whatever it was, does not cause you to think my husband is innocent of this crime."
"Mrs. Rotner, as of yet I have not reached any conclusions."
"Good. Because he's guilty. Remember that."
I assured her I would and exited the living room. I was walking quickly through the short hallway with its twin galleries of pictures when my gaze caught on a particular photo. I stopped abruptly and leaned in for a closer look. Then I lifted the photo from its nail and brought it with me back to the living room. Dahlia was exactly where I'd left her.
"Forgot something, Mr. Lapid? What's that in your hand?"
"A photograph. Perhaps you can tell me what it shows?"
She took the framed photo from me, glanced at it, and gave me a questioning look. "It's Isser, on stage."
"What's the play?"
"The Life of Jacob Greenstadt. Written by some forgotten Jewish playwright from the nineteenth century that virtually no one has heard of. I've no idea how Isser came to learn of the play or why he loved it so. He worked very hard on that role. He thought it would be one of his most celebrated."
"And it wasn't?"
"It flopped. Ran just four times. Isser was crestfallen." A sneer turned her face into a sinister mask. "I wasn't in it," she added significantly.
"And is that a cane he's holding?"
She looked again at the picture, then back at me. Her eyes had inched wider. "Why, yes it is."
"The character had something wrong with his walk?"
"A sort of dragging shuffle. Isser trained quite hard at it. Hobbled back and forth across this living room each night in the weeks before the play."
"So he would know how to fake such a walk anytime he wanted to?"
"Indeed he would, Mr. Lapid," she said. "Indeed he would."
The cruel smile on her lips and the glint of mischief in her eyes made my skin turn cold. More than ever I wanted to be away from her, but curiosity kept me rooted to the spot.
I said, "There's one thing I wonder about."
"And what is that, Mr. Lapid?"
"If you despise your husband so much, why don't you divorce him?"
She drew herself even straighter in her seat, though she'd been so erect that I had not thought that possible. "I don't believe in divorce. It may be right for other people, but not for me. I see by your face that you don't understand."
I agreed that I didn't.
She said, "Are you married, Mr. Lapid?"
"I was."
"Are you divorced?"
"No," I said, my throat tightening.
"So she's dead?"
I nodded. It was easier than saying the word.
"In the war in Europe?"
"Yes."
"I'm sorry," she said, and she sounded completely honest, though with this queen of deception you could never know for sure. "And when you were married, could you ever conceive the possibility that one day you would declare, for all the world, that you were no longer hers and she was no longer yours?"
"No," I said truthfully.
"That's the way it is for me, too. I cannot see myself ever saying that Isser isn't mine and I am not his. That thought is unbearable. But I can see him humiliated or jailed or even dead. All that is no problem."
20
Waking early the next morning, I read for twenty minutes and smoked a couple of cigarettes at my window. Then I shaved and ate breakfast. Two pieces of rough bread smeared with soft cheese and a cup of ersatz coffee.
As I ate, I thought about Isser Rotner. His false alibi. The fear that had tormented his sleep the night of the murder. His ability to fake a limp. I did not have proof of his guilt, but I felt I was getting closer.
Still, until I had such proof, I needed to keep an open mind. There were other people who'd known Anna. One of them might be the murderer. Ofra Wexler certainly had a motive, and I refused to eliminate her from consideration, her diminutive stature and Meltzer's opinion notwithstanding.
I thumbed through the notes I had taken at the police station, listing names and addresses of various actors and actresses, plotting a route for the morning. The closest, Leon Zilberman, had lived just a stone's throw away on Rashi Street, but when I got there ten minutes later, I discovered he had moved.
My next stop was city hall, where I spent fifteen circuitous minutes trying to locate Haggai Geller. When I finally found his office, his secretary told me he was on a work-related trip and wouldn't be back in the city till the day after tomorrow at the earliest. I gave her the telephone number at Greta's Café and asked her to have her boss call me when he returned.