An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery (12 page)

It all went through Cohen’s mind as he looked at the young woman in front of him, ten years younger than her husband, now dead before he reached forty.

Cohen knew her future was not destroyed. In her eyes he looked hopefully for her understanding of that truth about the loneliness that still lay ahead, that her sorrow would pass to become an ache and then turn into a strange whisper late at night that came back not to haunt but to remind one of love. Instead, all he could say was, “I’m sorry,” so softly that only Hagit could actually hear him.

Bendor hitched his trousers. Behind him, Jacki and Shvilli came in, followed by “The Beast,” carrying two cameras and a large bag over a safari vest that went over the overalls, which were unzipped in the front far enough to reveal a thermal undershirt. Between the photographer’s oversize appearance, the district commander’s own huge girth, and the social worker coming down the stairs the room was becoming crowded.

“Come outside with me,” Cohen ordered Hagit, holding her left hand and leading her through the kitchen. He slid open the glass doors to the garden at the rear of the house, and she followed him out into the crisp air warming fast under the rising sun.

Flower beds of geranium and petunia, watered with drip irrigation from black tubing, bordered the lawn. He marched to the end of the garden, to the wall where the desert began abruptly on its other side. Except for a short rise of the highway over a last lip of hill to the far right, no sign of civilization marred the view beyond the backyard lawn Levy had planted.

They stood side by side staring out at the wild land just past the neighborhood’s edge. The sun was above the house, and in the precision of the clear air, their shadows lay long ahead of them on the rough texture of the ground.

A large boulder within his shadow’s grasp made Cohen play with the illusion and grab for the rock like a giant.

Then a distant truck on the road south shifted gears, its sound caught on a breeze driving across the surface of the desert. Cohen’s shadow let go of the rock as the highway sound dissolved into chimes hanging somewhere down the row of gardens. Then there was nothing except the wind.

“This won’t last forever,” he finally said, waving his hand at the view. Two nearby mounds partially framed a far-distant horizon marked by stubby plateaus, like a row of gapped teeth. But he was referring to her sorrow, not to the pristine view.

“I know,” she said. There was another pause. “I don’t blame you.”

“Don’t blame him, either.”

“I blame myself,” she admitted. “If I had let him tell me about his work … but I said no.” She spoke with deadly bitterness. “I wanted to believe in the good of people,” she said softly. “He worked with the evil.” There was a pause.

Cohen waited. “I closed my eyes, and now,” she said, her voice trembling, “Nissim’s are closed. Forever.” She heaved a deep sigh. But she did not let the tears flow or the anguish buckle her knees.

Cohen put his arm around her. “He was lucky to have you. Good for him. He was happy.” “Because of this,” she said, patting her stomach.

“And a good reason, too.”

“He used to love me,” she wept quietly.

“He did.” “Not as much as I loved him,” she said. “That’s why I didn’t want him to talk with me about his work. To free him to be himself, to be free to be with me. I wanted him to relax, to—” “You see,” he . “We both tried to teach him something,” he said, trying to soothe his own conscience.

“But he didn’t learn, did he?” she sobbed again, as if reading his thoughts.

“Nobody’s perfect,” he said, and realized that an unintended grin crept across his face, for he saw it mirrored in her own. Her smile in response came hesitantly at first and then turned wry, indeed resolved. For the first time since they met, he felt they had shared their love for Nissim, gone but not forgotten.

Dealing with sorrow is as difficult the thousandth time as the first, but practice makes perfect, so that it became easier over the years for Cohen to seal his sorrows away in secret vaults that only he could open. The signs pointing to those moments of mourning could be seen on his face.

The lines carved around his eyes and mouth, parallel and askew, creating junctures of expression that signified yet another riddle solved—or left behind as an eternal mystery —could be specific or so vague that sometimes even he, glancing in the mirror, wasn’t sure if he recognized the emotion that had caused his face to thus fall into place. He liked to think of himself as simple, though the world saw him as complicated, an dover that bridge he walked all his waking hours. Now, wanting to console her, all he could think of were the facts he knew and didn’t know and how they fit together to explain what had happened. Cohen was sometimes ready to take enormous risks, but with simple things he preferred to be cautious. Like driving when time was not a factor. He realized he was hoping to learn that Nissim’s death wasn’t an accident, because if it was, it would have been Cohen’s greatest failure that Levy had died senselessly. He needed information.

“We need to know how he died,” he tried.

“An accident,” she snapped at him, then regretting the bitterness, apologized. “It was bound to happen, wasn’t it?

I knew it would happen. It’s why I never wanted to know.

If I knew, I would think about it. I’d imagine him in those places, dangerous places, horrible places.” “We need to know what happened,” he said again softly.

“As close to the truth as we can. What exactly killed him.” “I already called the hospital. I told them they can use whatever they want from his body. For transplants. There should have been a card in his wallet, but they told me he was in the water, the mud, … oh God,” she bawled, and Cohen grabbed her to give her support. But she didn’t want his support nor need it, wresting her body away, surprising him with an agility disguised by the majestic bearing of her pregnancy. She pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and blew her nose. Then she sighed heavily, and nodded. “I’m okay. I will not break down.” “You will eventually,” he told her simply.

“Not in front of all these people,” she said.

“You might,” he pointed out. “I’m worried for the child.”

“I’ll be okay. He’ll be okay.”

“I’ll provide for the child, whatever is necessary,” Cohen said.

“I know,” she admitted. She had never fully fathomed Nissim’s refusal to take financial help from Cohen.

“Good,” he agreed.

They stood together quietly for a long moment of silence, each with their own thoughts. Cohen finally broke it. “He called you to say he’d be late. When?”

“Shabbat afternoon.” “I thought you made a tradition of the sunset.”

“When he was home,” she said angrily.

“Did he say when he’d be back?” “He said it would be late, after I went to sleep. It’s happened before. You taught him, after all. The job’s the life,” she said, trying not to be bitter.

“And he didn’t say where he called from? Eilat? Mitzpe?

Beersheba? Did he name any place at all?”

Hagit began to shake her head, but stopped, suddenly remembering something much more important. “They told me a wadi. Not where,” she said. She laughed slightly to herself. “You know, for the first time I want to know.

Where, when, how, all of it. Every detail.”

“We need the autopsy, the traffic report, and most of all, some intelligence from the field.”

“What do you mean, ‘ from the field’?” But before she could wait for an answer, understanding crossed her face. “You mean they don’t know where he was?” she asked him. “They don’t know what he was doing there?”

Cohen didn’t know whether to shake or nod. He just looked at her.

She almost laughed, realizing something. “It was bound to happen,” she said. “He deserved it, the bastard,” she added, “taking all those chances. It’s why I didn’t want to know.”

“But now you want to know,” he pointed out. He was about to ask her for a full recounting of her phone call from Nissim when they were interrupted by a voice calling out Hagit’s name. Cohen turned a moment after Hagit.

The sun that created such perfect shadows was suddenly in his eyes. He reached into his windbreaker pocket for a pair of black sunglasses. By the time he had them on, a squat bald man in a light blue shirt over a round belly and a bright-colored tie hanging below a reddish neck tight in the collar was reaching out to Hagit from two footsteps away. “Our mayor,” Hagit muttered under her breath to Cohen. And then she was letting the politician wrap his arms halfway around her. Despite lowering his voice, the politician’s condolence—“It’s a loss to the entire town”— sounded like an announcement. When he added, “and to me personally, of course,” it sounded like a question.

The frown in the lines of his face gave him the proper mourner’s expression, but his eyes gleamed with expectation, waiting for Hagit’s thanks. It was a symptom of an addiction Cohen knew all too well, the politician’s need to be acknowledged as helpful. Nissim had enjoyed that narcotic as well, Cohen had to admit.

Hagit was right, he thought. This was wrong. They should all leave her alone until the shivah began.

“Hagit?” he tried, “perhaps … ” But she interrupted him, perhaps misunderstanding his tone of voice.

“Rafi,” she said to the mayor, “this is Avram Cohen. He used to be Nissim’s commander.”

The politician nodded at him. “Nissim pointed you out to me at the housewarming. But unfortunately we didn’t get to speak then. Now, to all our distress, we meet under very different circumstances.”

Cohen racked his brain trying to remember the politician’s last name and political party. A clansman, Cohen remembered about the politician, able to call on a whole wing of a tribe for his campaign activists, distantly related through marriage to at least two members of the Knesset.

The newspapers predicted a bright future for him when he was elected as a young Turk with big plans for the sleepy town. So far, Cohen had understood from Nissim, the politician had delivered on at least some of his promises.

In the quiet of the lawn under the bright morning sun, for a second Cohen thought he could almost hear Nissim’s voice that afternoon six months earlier at the housewarming.

“If Rafi decides to head for the Knesset, Hagit thinks I could get elected mayor.” Nissim said it with irony, indeed with just enough curiosity about Cohen’s reaction to make the old detective realize that Levy had not ruled it out of hand. “Do you think you could get elected?” Cohen had asked then. Nissim was proud. “I did a year on foot in uniform inside this town. I know everyone and they all know me. They look up to me. They listen to me. Maybe she’s right.” Levy had ended the conversation with a wave to a neighbor coming into the garden, and a quick grin at Cohen before heading back to the barbecue grill. That was six months ago, the last time Cohen had seen Levy, when Hagit was barely three months pregnant.

“Uzan,” Cohen finally said, remembering the politician’s last name. It made the mayor’s greedy smile spread even wider. Cohen was still not used to the looks of expectation on the faces of people who know he was suddenly rich, and hoped for a handout.

“A tragedy. A tragedy. Poor Nissim,” Uzan said, the smile on his face at odds with both the words and their tone. “He did such good work here. A role model to the young people.” He lowered his voice. “And I understand you were like a father to him.”

“He was an orphan,” Cohen stated bluntly, for the record. “But father or not, I think there’s too much going on here right now for her.” He squeezed Hagit’s shoulder slightly, “Hagit?” he asked her, his eyes on the mayor, determined to send them all home.

But when he felt her body tense under his hand, he looked at Hagit and saw the glare of anger drying her eyes.

The Beast, followed by Shvilli, Jacki, and the principal, came out into the garden.

Hagit licked her lips, readying herself to speak. She opened her mouth, but there was only silence. Jacki stepped forward. But then Hagit found her voice.

“No.” She made the single word an announcement strong enough to make everyone pause. “No!” she repeated even more emphatically, her eyes darting from face to face.

“I will not have people telling me what I am feeling, or what I have to do, or what I want.” She turned on the mayor. “I know, Rafi,” she said, trying to keep exasperation out of her voice, “you want him buried here. My parents want me in Jerusalem. The DC,” she added, emphasizing the two syllables in a slightly louder voice, in case he was still inside the house, “wants him in the policeman’s plot in Beersheba.”

And then she looked back at Cohen. “It’s crazy, isn’t it?

Completely crazy. You know,” she said, looking at him.

“None of them even care what Nissim wanted. Tell them,” she demanded.

Cohen’s eyes turned to the people gathered on the lawn, each standing separately at a respectful distance from one another as if posed in tableaux and away from Cohen and the rotund mayor. “Nissim wrote a will.”

“And?” blurted the mayor.

“For one thing, he didn’t want a religious funeral, no Hevre Kadisha,” Cohen said.

“Bravo,” said The Beast, just loud enough for all to hear.

“Not even the police rabbi,” Cohen added to the district commander, who just then came out into the garden. “A memorial service—if Hagit wants. If the hospital—or the medical school—can use parts of his body, it is theirs.”

“Fantastic,” the photographer repeated. He began to lift a camera, but Cohen glared at him and The Beast relented.

“Please, everyone, come back later,” Hagit said softly.

“Tomorrow. The day after. Nissim’s gone, that’s true. But I will still be here tomorrow. And don’t worry, Shula,” she said, suddenly raising her voice to address the school principal, whose face was pinched into a worried frown. “I’ll be all right.”

Finally, Hagit turned to Cohen. “I think I will lie down now,” she said, “I’m very tired.” She said it with deliberate quiet, touching his hand, then leaning forward to kiss him on the cheek before walking through the still garden, as if none of them were there to watch her. The DC stepped aside. Hagit paused at the social worker, whispering something that made the woman frown and say something quietly to Bendor.