An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery (14 page)

Jacki shook her head.

“So what do you say, boss? We have a deal?” Shvilli wanted to know.

Cohen shook his head sadly. “Not like this, Misha. Not in a storm.”

“You left in a storm,” Shvilli protested.

“They pushed him out,” Jacki reminded Shvilli.

“He was there,” Cohen reprimanded her with a reminder that she only heard the story from Nissim.

He looked into their eyes, and then into his own soul.

“No,” he decided. “I am not going to take responsibility for you two making rash decisions. I am not making any rash decisions. You asked me if I want to go with you. I do, but—” The phone ringing inside made him stop. “Jacki?” He asked her to answer it, but before she could respond, after two brief rings it stopped.

“Hagit must have answered,” Shvilli realized first.

Cohen looked at Jacki. And from the upstairs window above their head Cohen heard a scream. Jacki was the fastest of the three back into the house and up the stairs.

Shvilli came in second. By the time Cohen reached the second-story landing, Jacki was shouting “her water broke, her water broke!” and Shvilli was at the phone, calling an ambulance, while Hagit lay on the floor where Jacki found her, a lopsided puddle growing on the carpet beneath her, sobbing, “he was murdered, he was murdered. They told me it was an accident, but he was murdered.”

And for the first time since Shvilli called him that morning, Cohen felt his own tears creeping into his eyes.

Only when the baby boy was wrapped in swaddling and the mother was sleeping soundly did Cohen feel free to act. He called the inspector general from the pay phone in the maternity ward at Beersheba’s Soroka Hospital.

“You know I can’t allow that,” the inspector general said.

“Yes,” said Cohen softly.

“You aren’t going to run off investigating on your own, are you?” the inspector general warned.

“I’ll do what I can to help,” Cohen promised.

“To help. Not interfere,” the country’s top cop ordered.

“Who got the tza’ham?” Cohen asked, using the bureaucratic acronym for the special investigating team that would be formed.

“Shuki Caspi.”

“Who?”

“Caspi. A good boy. Born in Beersheba. Knows the territory.

Bendor brought him in from the paratroopers, and he learned fast.”

“I heard that Russians, in Eilat … “

“See, that’s just what I mean,” the inspector general complained. “You think we don’t know that? Avram, the force didn’t stop working just because you’re retired.”

The inspector general’s secretary came onto the line, reporting that the prime minister’s office was asking for him.

“I’ve got to go, Avram. I’m sorry about Nissim. We all are. That’s why I promise we’ll do our best to find his killer. I promise. If Caspi needs you, he’ll call. And when we have something, I promise personally to call you and let you know.”

Cohen hung up. A red-eyed woman was staring at him, waiting for the phone. He stepped away and considered his course of action.

Down the hall, Jacki was still at Hagit’s side, joined by Hagit’s parents. Shvilli was back at police headquarters, trying to get onto the tza’ham. “If you’re going to work for me,” Cohen had said, “my first order is get onto that tza’ham.” Shvilli took the command at face value, trusting Cohen.

“Too much perhaps,” Cohen muttered to himself now, considering his options. A sign in the little lobby where the elevators opened to the maternity ward told him that pathology was in the basement. The elevator stopped at each floor, going all the way down. He stood in the corner and watched as gurneys rolled on and off, visitors searched for departments, and doctors and nurses cursed the elevator’s slow pace. In the basement, he followed the signs through a maze of windowless tunnels that finally came to an end in front of wide-swinging doors. An empty gurney was parked outside the doors. He looked through the little glass window in the left door.

It was dark. He pushed open the door and pulled out his cigarette lighter for some light, then added a cigarette to his palm, lighting it to kill the smell of chemicals that the air-conditioning couldn’t hide. The six slabs were all clean stainless steel with basins built into the surfaces. No bodies were in sight. He moved slowly through the large room, heading toward a row of filing cabinets against a distant wall. Beyond the cabinets was a door wide enough to allow two gurneys to pass.

The first was locked. They were all locked. But on the desk was a computer monitor glowing with the blue and yellow of a program’s menu. The screen’s light illuminated a stack of files on the desk. The third folder was Nissim’s.

A registration page reported the arrival of the body at 03:13 that afternoon. That was more than five hours ago, Cohen thought angrily. The pathology should have been done as soon as the body arrived, even if it meant the pathologists had to work around the clock.

He scanned the form listing the various tests that the pathologists would seek. Another document in the file was the donor’s card found in Nissim’s wallet, saying the body’s parts could be used. The fourth was a piece of hospital stationery. A doctor’s scrawl that Cohen held close to the computer screen light to read reported that a preliminary examination found an entrance and exit for what appeared to be a bullet. “A general workup for suspected murder” was to be performed the next day, the doctor ordered. Cohen slapped the folder closed and left the lab, losing his way twice in the maze of underground tunnels before finding a set of stairs that took him to the first-floor lobby of the hospital and then the elevators back to the maternity ward.

It was close to nine, and the last of the relatives and friends of the new babies born or about to be born that day were on their way out. Hagit was in the last room on the right of a long corridor with four wards of four and six beds on each side. Her bed was beside the window. Her parents sat with their backs to the view of the dusty city.

Jacki stood behind them. Hagit had woken, cried, and taken gratefully the sleeping pills provided by the head nurse on the floor, said Jacki. “She’s coming home with us, as soon as the doctors let her go,” Hagit’s mother whispered angrily at him. Her husband kept his eyes on the sleeping woman. Cohen remained silent. “Look at her, does she look like she’s in any condition to take care of herself right now, let alone a baby?” the mother demanded.

“First let’s hear from the doctors that she’s all right,” Cohen finally said. “Jacki?” he asked the policewoman to join him in the corridor.

“This is all your fault, you know,” Hagit’s mother hissed at Cohen’s back as he left the room. Hagit’s father looked up at him, and even from across the room, Cohen could see the old man had been crying.

Jacki and Cohen waited in the hall while a family including three children, two new grandparents, and a pair of great grandparents—each held by the arm of one of their children—walked slowly by, stage whispering about the latest new member of the family.

“More problems,” Jacki told Cohen after the family was gone. “Misha called. He says the investigation’s totally locked on Kobi Alper—and they won’t let Misha into the team.” Cohen sighed. Alper was Nissim’s first big case when he went from Yeroham Station to Southern District headquarters as deputy chief of Intelligence.

Nahum Nahmani and Buki Abutbul, brothers from two different fathers, had disappeared. They had run the meat processing plant their mother inherited from a third paramour.

One night, they just never came home from work.

Levy had made forensics return three times to the plant.

He had worked informants on the street and case files from the past. Kobi had had to discipline the two younger competitors. If they had only tried to steal the brother’s territory, it would have been a dangerous situation. But they stole Kobi’s own drug supply, to capitalize the move against him. It took Nissim three months, but he managed to bring Kobi to court. The judges sent Kobi to Ramie for two life sentences. It would be at least twenty years before Kobi had any chance of getting out. Kobi had made it clear—first in interrogation, and then in court—that he would get Nissim. “You tilted the balance, you maniac,” he had shouted at Levy when the sentence was handed down.

“You’ll pay for it.”

That had been more than a year ago. Cohen had followed the case in the papers. Nissim had called the night Kobi went down. “What do you think he meant when he said I tilted the balance?” Nissim had asked.

“You were a new force in town. Maybe there were arrangements you disrupted,” Cohen suggested. “Just keep your eyes open. And watch your back.” “I’m worried about Hagit,” Nissim had said.

“Can Kobi run a contract from Ramie?” Cohen asked.

“I doubt it. He was all force himself. He had to pay his followers. And he’s running out of money. I hear he needs a new lawyer for his appeal.”

It took Levy a month to make absolutely sure that Kobi had no more friends on the street and another month to convince his wife that behind bars Kobi was no danger to either of them.

“Was Kobi making a comeback?” Cohen asked Jacki.

“Making new friends?” “Enemies, more like it,” Jacki said.

“What else did Shvilli say?” “They told him he could do what he wanted with the Russians, but as far as they were concerned, Kobi ordered it.”

Cohen shook his head. “Where is he now?”

“Ramie, of course.”

“No—Shvilli.” “Making phone calls, he said.” “He said he wanted to go to Eilat. Someone named Yuhewitz?” “Boris,” saidjacki.

“Shh!!” a nurse hissed at them, striding up the corridor from the nurses’ station. “Visiting hours are over. You aren’t supposed to be here,” she ordered, then walked past two steps to look into the ward where Hagit’s parents were still at their daughter’s bedside. “You’ll have to go, too.”

While Hagit’s parents gathered up their belongings, Cohen asked Jacki where he could find Shvilli. “The Rendezvous club,” she told him. “It’s Shvilli’s main hangout.

You can’t miss it, on the left hand side, leaving town south into the Negev.”

Cohen nodded and headed for the elevators behind the nurses’ stand. “Just remember that I’m in,” Jacki said loudly to his back, making the nurse shush her. Cohen waved a hand to show he’d heard. He didn’t stop at the elevator, taking the stairs two at a time down the four flights to the ground floor and then out to the parking lot to his car.

Was he conducting his own investigation? Was he ignoring the inspector general’s strict orders not to get involved?

He couldn’t say right then. But he did know that he was doing the only thing he could do and not feel dead. It took him less than fifteen minutes to reach the other side of the desert town, which except for the mall—OPEN UNTIL MIDNIGHT shouted the banner hanging outside, trying to drum up business—seemed to have gone as deeply to sleep as the new mothers back at the hospital.

But at the Rendezvous nobody was sleeping. A Sunday night is ordinarily quiet even in Tel Aviv’s hottest entertainment spots, let alone sleepy Beersheba. But the Rendezvous was full. Mercedes and Hondas, BMWs and two Rovers—all cars costing more than twice what an average Israeli family needed for two years—were lined up in the dusty lot outside the low-slung building at the edge of an industrial park still more under construction than built.

A bored blonde in a low-cut leotard greeted him at the door. The sound was deafening to his ears. A man with shiny black hair, wearing a blowsy red satin shirt and tight black pants, was singing in Russian, accompanying himself with an electronic keyboard sitting on a stand beneath his fingers.

More than two-thirds of the tables—and there must have been at least fifty—were taken. Some of the tables were lined up in long rows, filled by groups of families or friends. At other tables, couples dined alone. Many were singing along with the entertainer.

“You want to sit down?” the hostess asked him in Hebrew heavily accented by Russian.

He ignored her, scanning the smoky crowd for Shvilli.

Finally he spotted him, at one of the long tables in the center of the room, sitting on a chair pulled up to the head of the table but slightly away from it, beside a squat, neckless man who was concentrating on pouring a shot of vodka into a short glass. Shvilli was leaning forward, whispering something into the fat man’s ear. The man finished pouring, put down the bottle, and then, still listening to Shvilli, picked up the glass. Shvilli suddenly sat back, keeping his eyes on the man, who held up the glass, and appeared to shout something in Russian. Cohen wouldn’t have been able to understand it, but he also couldn’t hear it because of the crowd’s enthusiasm for the song. But he saw the lively party sitting around the length of the long table in front of the fat man gradually turn to him. So did the people at two other tables nearby. The man was making a toast.

Many at his table picked up their glasses. From almost twenty meters away, Cohen could see that nobody cheered as the fat man downed his glass in one shot, followed by everyone else at the table—including Shvilli.

“You Russian?” the hostess now asked Cohen, in Russian.

But he was concentrating on his former undercover man. As Shvilli lowered the glass he had been holding, he noticed Cohen waiting at the entrance to the restaurant.

Shvilli said something to the fat man, then stood up, patted him on the back, and wound through the crowd, clapping over his head with the crowd, encouraging the singer.

The hostess must have noticed Cohen’s reaction, for suddenly she was much more interested in him. “You know him?” she asked in Russian. At least that’s what he assumed she asked from the tone of her voice.

But he didn’t answer, watching Shvilli’s face for a clue of whether to greet him or ignore him. The truth was that Cohen did not know the details of Shvilli’s cover. So he shrugged, with honest ignorance and feigned apathy.

Shvilli waltzed past like a slightly drunk celebrant regretfully on his way out to his car to go home, grabbing Cohen at the neck like a dancer in time to the tune, and turning the older man, who nearly stumbled.