An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery (11 page)

A sudden sob from inside the house broke the quiet.

“Who else is here?” Cohen asked Shvilli.

“The social worker, two neighbors, her school principal.” “What else do we know?” “Hagit says he left on Saturday morning,” Shvilli reported. ” ‘,’ he told her.”

“Early? Late? A sudden decision?” Cohen rattled off the questions. He didn’t want to have to interrogate the widow. He knew he would nonetheless. A sudden gust of wind carried the sound of a motorcycle’s sudden downshift on the highway a kilometer away. Shvilli’s expression changed as he glanced off toward the distant bike, as if the sound were a scent he knew.

“Jacki?” Cohen called on her, like a teacher calling on a student. He feared the worst, needing preparation for what lay ahead, knowing Nissim learned much from him, but worried he might have learned too much. Secrets are the true trade of the investigator. Sometimes, Cohen taught Levy, to bring one secret into the open, another must be hidden in the dark.

But the throaty acceleration of the motorcycle and Shvilli’s reaction to its arrival distracted her.

“Just what we needed,” Shvilli muttered cynically as the all-black Intruder, its rider in black-and-blue plastic overalls and wearing a scuffed white helmet, rumbled down the wide street toward them.

“Ska,” Jacki commanded, even though Shvilli was three grades above her in rank. “I heard he was down there.

Maybe he knows something.”

“He’s a vulture and you know it,” Shvilli shot back, “they all are.” “Press?” Cohen asked. Though he didn’t completely agree with Shvilli, his distrust of journalists was legendary.

He had used a few, but only when he had both the upper hand in the relationship—a shared secret that Cohen, not the reporter, controlled—and a need to move the investigation further.

Jacki nodded. “The Beast,” she added. “That’s what they call him. His name’s Phillipe.”

“French,” muttered Shvilli.

The biker pulled up in the space between Cohen’s car and the district commander’s. He made a small ceremony of dismounting, starting with stopping the engine and kicking down the stand. Then he took off his black gloves, unstrapped the helmet, and finally swung his leg over to get off the motorcycle.

“Jacki?” Cohen called her aside as Shvilli headed down the walkway toward the biker, who went to the back of his bike where he unlocked a large box plastered with bumper stickers of every political stripe, thus mocking them all.

Levy’s assistant tore her eyes away from the photographer and stepped closer to Cohen.

“Tell me,” he said.

“Nissim went out some time after nine o’clock on Friday night. Hagit was tired and decided to go to sleep after the news. Nissim said he’d stay up. On Saturday morning, she found a note saying he had to go out, for work. Nothing out of the ordinary. Usually if he worked on Shabbat he’d be home by sunset. They made it a tradition, to try to have sunset together on Shabbat.”

“But he wasn’t back by sunset,” Cohen pointed out.

“He called her.”

“When?”

“Saturday afternoon. Said he’d been delayed. And would probably be back late.”

“It was pouring. A flood. Didn’t she say something? Tell him to wait until morning?”

When Jacki didn’t answer, Cohen added another question.

“Didn’t you ask?”

“I didn’t want to make her feel guilty.” He sighed but didn’t criticize her. He would have criticized Levy if under different circumstances it had been Levy who had had a chance to ask a witness questions. He would ask Hagit the question. Jacki was looking down, trying to avoid his eyes.

“And she didn’t ask where he was?” Cohen asked in a tone of voice that said he knew the answer.

“You know her. She didn’t want to know anything about his work.” She paused, then lowered her voice. “If you ask me, she treated the job like it was the crime.”

Cohen did not want to argue with the assistant. “Is Bendor asking questions?”

“He tried, but Hagit … ” she paused, interrupted by a loud voice at the end of the walkway, making her eyes shift from Cohen’s weary gaze to Shvilli with the biker, who without his helmet revealed a totally bald head over a thick neck.

“He was my friend, too,” the newsman biker suddenly shouted from the sidewalk.

“But you’re here to work, aren’t you?” Shvilli answered back.

“Oh God,” Jacki blurted, “I don’t know why Nissim put up with him,” she said to Cohen, apologizing for the Russian.

“Shvilli!” Cohen snapped, making Shvilli pause. The Beast looked toward Cohen, wonder on his face about the identity of the white-haired man in the windbreaker, gray twill trousers, and white scuffed sneakers who had the power to protect him from Shvilli. The Georgian stepped back, as if called by the bell to his corner, a sly smile on his face. The Beast nodded respectfully toward Cohen, grinned at Jacki, and then even more ceremoniously than before, turned his back on Shvilli and began unpacking his camera bags.

Cohen turned back to Jacki. She was smoothing back her hair with one hand, her eye on the photographer. “But Hagit what?” Cohen pressed, interrupting the unconscious preening for the camera.

“You know her, she’s very, very … “

“What?” Cohen asked, knowing the answer.

“Emotional,” Jacki decided, not wanting to are the old detective. “She said she is waiting for you to show up so she can finally, finally … ” Jacki wasn’t able to find the words.

Cohen helped her out sorrowfully. “So she can finally lay the blame,” he mumbled, to himself as much as to Jacki. She nodded ever so slightly.

He gave one final glance to the photographer, ignoring Shvilli’s glare, and headed into the house to meet his accuser.

During the years he had worked for Cohen, Levy had dated a lot of women, usually only one at a time, usually a beauty (with a preference for blondes), but always, only, someone with whom to share fun—when Cohen gave him time off— and never for a longtime commitment. So Nissim didn’t prepare Cohen for an introduction to the woman he announced would be Mrs. Levy. One day he just showed up with Hagit and said she was the one. Cohen could only believe that Nissim, by virtue of the unprecedented announcement, was serious. Yet knowing Nissim’s past, he wondered if the commitment would last. So for a while, whenever Cohen encountered Hagit—perhaps half a dozen times during the first year she was with Levy—he watched her with a natural curiosity that she clearly interpreted to mean suspicion. There was also no doubt in his mind that she was also suspicious of him. Levy looked up to Cohen, all the worse, as far as Hagit was concerned, because Nissim loved Cohen and Cohen loved the police, so Nissim loved the police. Hagit did not.

She made no secret of her distaste for the job—the way it kept Nissim away from home, indeed, put him in danger. But she also loved his self-sacrificing readiness for public service.

Complicating matters, Nissim lapsed into adultery a year after the wedding, confessing the indiscretion to Cohen, whose response was simple. It was not an order or a suggestion, merely a statement of fact, the logical conclusion deduced by the evidence.

“If you want to save the marriage, you will confess,” Cohen had said simply. Nissim did.

A year later, Hagit was pregnant and they bought a house with a government-subsidized mortgage, a loan against Nissim’s pension plan, and the dowry that Hagit brought to the marriage. As usual, Nissim turned down the money Cohen had offered to help.

Now, less than a month before the due date, Nissim was gone and Cohen had to face Hagit alone. He shuffled into the house, past the narrow staircase that led to the second floor, left to the living room. It turned into a semiopen kitchen at the rear, beyond which lay a green lawn of tightly mown buffalo grass bright under the desert’s yellows and the white sun rising into the pale blue of an almost cloudless sky.

The furniture was simple, a living room set with a matching three-person sofa, a two-person couch, and a single armchair. Beyond it was a small oval table covered with platters of food, paper cups, open bottles, and a tall electric kettle boiling away, all for the coming week’s visitors.

Two women were in the kitchen area. The blonde neighbor who arrived just after Cohen was washing dishes. A tiny elderly woman with dark leathery skin that brightened the fading colors of her flower print dress fussed with a dish towel, wiping down the counter, keeping beady eyes on the living room and entrance.

District Commander Ya’acov Bendor, his uniform tailored to fit his huge girth, occupied the three-person sofa, alone. His entire posture indicated that he was a man without any regrets. Opposite Bendor was a slender woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a business suit and with a stack of papers on the slope of a lap made by her crossed legs.

As Cohen entered, Bendor was listening intently to the woman. She was leaning forward over the stack of papers, speaking in a low voice to the district commander. Her black hair was streaked by white shocks at the temples.

Too well-dressed for the Beersheba station’s social worker, Cohen thought. The principal, he decided. Hagit’s boss. Bendor’s gaze floated back and forth between the principal’s eyes and her long legs. Neither noticed Cohen at the door.

Hagit was nowhere to be seen. Cohen walked through the living room without pausing, silencing the principal and startling the senior officer on the sofa by ignoring him.

Spotting an open jar of instant coffee, Cohen scowled, but he picked up a spoon from the counter and looked for a spare coffee cup. The blonde neighbor turned to him with one in her hand.

“Where’s Hagit?” he asked her. Bendor eyed him with curiosity for a second longer, then returned his gaze to the principal, who resumed speaking in a low voice.

“Upstairs,” the neighbor whispered. “With the social worker.” Just then, Bendor heaved himself upward from the sofa with a grunt. Cohen took the cup from the blonde woman and asked if there was any mud coffee—finely ground Turkish coffee that must gradually settle at the bottom of the cup before it can be drunk. “I’m sure Nissim must have kept some,” Cohen said softly. The blonde neighbor started looking in the cupboards. Bendor cleared his throat.

“Perhaps someone could tell Hagit that I had to go,” said the former paratrooper, heaving himself to his feet with a grunt and the order. It was not a bellow but an announcement, loud enough for everyone in the house to hear, whether on the first floor or the second. But while he spoke to the room, his eyes were on Cohen. They had never met, but Cohen was sure that Bendor recognized him.

Cohen’s eyes shifted to the district commander’s ranks on the epaulett, and ever so slightly nodded respectfully to the olive branches and the star. He would have traded all his money in exchange for the authority—and responsibility— the grades gave their owner. But instead of looking back at Bender’s eyes, Cohen noticed movement on the stairs to his left, over Bendor’s shoulder. Hagit was coming down the stairs. It was difficult to tell if she was walking slowly because of her mourning or because of the weight of her pregnancy, but she took each step carefully, almost regally.

She wore a housecoat that made a flowing tent hanging from the circumference of her stomach. Her dark brown hair, thick and curly, had fallen from its braid, and framed her tanned face with a tangle that almost hid her eyes from everyone until she reached the district commander, held out her hand, and softly said, “Thank you for coming.”

Ben-Ya’acov took her hand but her reflexes were quick as she stepped backward just a moment before he began leaning forward to offer her a fatherly embrace.

“It will be very hard to replace him for all of us,” he said.

“For you, and for us, too, he was family.”

Hagit nodded, and then, noticing Cohen behind the overweight district commander, froze and shifted her stare to Cohen’s tired face, suddenly ignoring the senior officer.

Cohen put down the coffee cup and turned his palms to Hagit, as if to show he hid nothing and that he had nothing to offer that could comfort her except his embrace. It was an instinctive reaction, but she made him wait, and in her eyes he could see her trying to make up her mind whether to accept his silent condolence.

“Shalom, Avram,” she finally said, walking toward him, reaching into his hug. “You loved him so much,” she whispered into his ear as they leaned toward each other, Cohen careful not to bump her belly, so ripe and ready for birth it made him wonder if the baby would wait for its due date during the trauma of the coming days.

Hagit pulled a thick curl of hair away from her face. Her light green eyes—usually bright, now deadened—looked directly into Cohen’s own sorrow-struck face. Her eyes gave away her mother’s European roots, but her father was a North African, and he gave her light coffee skin and deep brown, curly hair.

In the sandy town she hated so much at first, she had found a place to be herself. Trained to be a high school teacher, when Nissim was thrown by the job into the desert town right after Cohen’s fall, Hagit found herself in front of a classroom full of elementary school kids. By the time Cohen could face facts and realize he wasn’t going to get back his active duty badge, Hagit was in love with the town and Nissim was moving up the hierarchy fast with a promotion to Beersheba.

“I can get there in twenty minutes with the siren,” Nissim had bragged, finding his own rationale for looking ahead rather than behind. “And I can lift a chopper if I have to get somewhere fast. But the drives in the district are beautiful—and the roads are getting better all the time.

The road from Mitzpe to Eilat—it’s a lot more beautiful than the Arava ruler. And the peace, Avram, the peace … “

Already, Levy twice met with his counterpart from Jordan, to begin a practice of coordination along the border.

Tourism across the Jordan Rift Valley was already changing the landscape. With two border crossings to Jordan, and one at Taba to Egypt under Levy’s purview as chief of Intelligence for the Negev, he saw a great future for the region—and a lot of work for him as a cop. “I’ll bet that a Southern District commander gets to be inspector general by the end of the century,” he had vowed to Cohen, as if promising to carry Cohen’s flag on all the way to the inspector general’s job. Nissim was always ambitious.