"Why would I lie?"
"I don't know. For fun, maybe. Or just to prove to yourself that you still have what it takes. A woman like you, unable to act on stage, would probably derive great pleasure out of putting one over on someone. Someone like me."
"I'm not lying to you. You have my solemn word on that."
I nodded noncommittally, knowing from experience how little some people's word was worth. I had no way of knowing whether Dahlia was such a person. But as she said, I should be able to confirm or refute at least part of her story without difficulty.
I said, "Why did you lie for your husband?"
"For the most stupid and juvenile reason: I loved him and he asked me to."
"No hesitation?"
"None whatsoever."
"You must have wondered where he'd been that night. Did you ask him?"
"He told me he was at the theater. Isser is a perfectionist, very dedicated to his craft. The theater was about to put on a new production. Whenever Isser is preparing for a new part, he spends hours upon hours at the theater, rehearsing his lines over and over, working out exactly where to stand on stage as each word leaves his lips."
"He does this alone?"
"There are general rehearsals in which the entire cast takes part, but Isser often stays late and continues working well into the evening and night." She paused. "We used to do this together, many years ago." Her tone had turned wistful, and for a moment I could imagine how she'd been when she was young and whole and deeply in love with her husband.
She still felt a measure of admiration for him—the way she'd told me about how he prepared for a role made that quite clear. But did she still love him? Surveying her now, with her expression distant and almost dreamy, I couldn't say one way or the other. But if she did, it was a love that had lost much of its sweetness and had filled the ensuing void with a rancid stew of bitterness and resentment.
"So you believed him?" I said, breaking the spell, bringing her back into the moment.
She blinked and cleared her throat. "Again, without hesitation."
"Did you ask him why he'd lied to the police?"
"No. I assumed it was so they wouldn't bother him with their pesky questions, and also to preclude any malicious tongues from wagging. People in our line of work are often targets of nasty gossip."
Scratching my forehead, I took a moment to process all that she'd told me. I had not written anything down, believing initially that all I was about to hear were the carefully woven lies of a lonely, possibly deranged woman. But the more I heard, the more I began to question this assumption.
She might have been toying with me, but if so, this was an expensive game she was playing. Even affluent people did not go around throwing thirty liras on trifling amusements, and I did not see how I could possibly provide her with more than just that.
Similarly, I did not believe that she was anything less than sane. And that left me with but one conclusion. She was telling me the truth.
Still, it was a bizarre beginning to a case, as bizarre as I'd ever experienced, one that gave birth to a host of questions. The first of which was: "What's changed?"
She quirked an eyebrow. "What do you mean?"
"Why do you not believe your husband anymore?"
"Because I know things about him now that I did not know then."
"Such as?"
"That he's a liar. A liar, a deceiver, and a cheater."
Which did not surprise me. I had suspected this was what lay behind her reversal of trust. "Your husband cheated on you?"
"Cheated, cheats. His unfaithfulness is nothing new."
"But your discovery of it is?"
"More or less. I've known for a few months."
She said this without a sliver of hurt showing, without the slightest chink in her armor of steely dignity. Yet I could tell that she was deeply wounded by her husband's betrayal. And her being here, cooped up in this apartment, had allowed this injury to simmer and fester inside her, augmenting her pain, stoking her anger.
Gently, I said, "Cheating on one's wife does not make a man a murderer, Mrs. Rotner."
Her mouth tightened. "I'm well aware of it, Mr. Lapid. I am neither a fool nor a child."
"I assure you I did not mean to imply either of those things."
Her expression relaxed, but not all the way. She was still angry, either with me or with her husband. Or perhaps it was with another person, as her next words suggested.
"He cheated with Anna Hartman," she said.
Which explained her harsh reaction when I'd said that she and Anna Hartman had been friends. It also told me that this was not about finding justice for a murdered woman. This was about revenge. Dahlia wanted to avenge a betrayal. A betrayal by her husband.
This was not the first time I'd encountered a love that had soured. When I was younger, before the war, before Auschwitz, this sort of thing would just slide off me. Now, after losing my wife in the gas chambers, I could not help but marvel at the fathomless depths to which love could plummet. And this gave me a sharp pang of sadness and loss and longing for my dead wife.
I swallowed the lump that had formed in my throat and said, "Why would he kill her? What would be his motive?"
"I don't know. Perhaps they quarreled. This is what I'm hiring you to find out."
"Did the police know they were lovers?"
"If they did, wouldn't they have asked me about it?"
Not necessarily, I thought. Not if they believed the alibi Dahlia had given her husband as unquestioningly as she thought they did.
In that case, they might have stayed quiet about it, judging this to be a private matter between a man and his wife, unrelated to their case. Given that they were men themselves, the officers might have felt a kinship to Isser Rotner and chosen to keep his infidelity hidden from his wife. Ironically, Dahlia's acting talent might have worked against her in this instance, as it could be the reason why she had remained ignorant of her husband's philandering for so long.
Another question came to me. "How did you suddenly discover your husband is unfaithful?"
"Someone told me."
"Someone? Who?"
"It doesn't matter. It has nothing to do with this case. I was simply informed that my husband is currently sleeping with another woman, and once I was, it was as though blinders had been removed from my eyes. I have a lot of time to think these days, a lot of empty hours to fill with reliving the past. I realized this has been going on for years, with various women. In retrospect, I should have known. There were signs, plenty of them. I suppose I did not want to see them for what they were." It was plain by her tone how much she detested herself for this unawareness.
"So you have no actual proof that they were lovers?"
She gave me a cool stare. "Mr. Lapid, I may have been blind before, but I see clearly now. Trust me, they were lovers. I remember how they looked at each other, the smiles they exchanged, like they had a secret only the two of them knew. Oh, they were lovers, all right, and they were laughing at me and my obliviousness the whole time."
This time, her loathing was not aimed at herself but squarely at her living husband and the dead Anna Hartman.
It felt strange hearing this murdered woman talked about with such venom, when just about all I knew about her were her name and profession, when she was but a faceless victim to me. Did she deserve all this rancor? I had no problem speaking ill of the dead, but only if they'd lived a life that justified it. At the moment, I knew practically nothing of the life Anna Hartman had lived.
I considered what I did know so far. I had a victim, the day on which she died, the location, and, perhaps, the cause of her death. All this, and much more presumably, had been known to the police investigators at the time, and they had failed to apprehend the culprit. The only thing I knew that they didn't was that Isser Rotner's alibi was bogus. And, perhaps, that he and the victim had been engaged in an illicit affair.