An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery (17 page)

More calls needed to be made. He dug out Phillipe Bensione’s card. The photographer’s cellular number was busy.

Cohen took a bite of croissant, surprised at how good it was, and used the redial button twice, trying to get through to the photographer to no avail.

He had hopes for better photos of the scene than the one that Yediotb splattered on page one. The photographer had crouched between the sun rising over the Arava, and the car had settled into about thirty centimeters of almost yellow mud on the highway beneath the Negev’s eastern cliffs. The wide angle showed all the way from the white on-red license plate that identified it as a staff car for the police to the tip of a winch crane mounted on the back of a tow truck. There it was, the head slumped against the steering wheel, the black-and-white mop of curly hair muddied by the yellow of the wet desert and the newspaper’s tabloid ink. The only red in the picture belonged to the license plate. But there was no doubt the man in the picture was dead.

He stopped at a bank and wrote a check for cash for fifty thousand shekels. The teller looked at him disbelievingly, but her expression changed after she called his bank branch in Jerusalem. “In two-hundred shekel notes please,” he said. Sometimes, he knew, cash could be much more effective than a weapon.

The teller, in her early twenties, probably just out of the army, said she needed the manager.

“No problem,” said Cohen, waiting another twenty minutes before finally pocketing the cash into five bulky envelopes of ten thousand each, which he stashed in the inside pockets he had sewn into his windbreaker.

Half an hour later he was turning off the Haifa Road into the north Tel Aviv neighborhood of Ramat Aviv Gimel. They had begun building the neighborhood just north of the university in the seventies, but in the mid eighties, with the opening of the commercial center and the completion of its country club, Ramat Aviv Gimel had flourished so that eventually it had become the setting— and name—of a television soap opera about a family ruling a fashion empire from the flashy address.

Cohen found the building at the most northwest corner of the neighborhood. He drove slowly through a parking lot. It was half full. Jeeps, family sedans, passenger vans, and at least three sports cars. Jacki had said Witkoff liked fast cars, Cohen remembered. He paused, foot on the brake, in the middle of the lot, thinking, looking. Three cars, lined up beside one another, caught his eye. A BMW sports car, a Mercedes two-seater, and a Land Rover. Their license numbers were consecutive, registered at the same time. All were models that could not be bought directly off a showroom floor, brought into the country as private imports. When Jacki called back to ask what to do with the photocopies, he’d ask for Witkoff’s registration numbers.

They should be on the driving record.

Then he pulled out of the lot to park across the street on the north side of the building. Beyond, there was only the green and yellow wild mustard scrub that covered the sand dunes stretching all the way to Herziliya. To his right below the rise on which the entire apartment block sat was the Haifa Road carrying cars and trucks north. Beyond the road were more sand dunes, but Cohen imagined that from above the penthouse one would have a view of the landing strip at little Sde Dov Airport. And beyond that was the sea.

He got out of the car and lit a cigarette, smoking as he leaned against his car looking at the twenty-story-high building. All he could see of the penthouse was that Witkoff had turned the open space on the roof into a garden.

A mother and a teenager who was wearing a leg cast and was on crutches came out of the building’s lobby and down to the sidewalk where the mother unlocked a gray sedan too old to belong to the building. “You heard what the doctor said,” he heard the woman say to the boy. “You were very lucky. Lucky, you hear me? So I don’t want to hear any more about motorcycles from you.” She didn’t even glance at Cohen after she made the U-turn and drove away.

He flicked away his cigarette and crossed the street to the building’s main entrance, facing north toward the southern sand dunes of Herziliya. No security guard that he could see was watching from inside the glass lobby, but nonetheless a video camera was pointed at him from under the ceiling of the exterior lobby where he checked the mailboxes, looking for Witkoff’s name. Yes, he had the right building. The penthouse was apartment number thirty-nine.

He went to the panel of intercom buttons, standing so the camera would only get a shot of his back, and pressed Witkoff’s once, a full beat long. Nothing happened. He tried again, shorter. Still nothing. A third tap at the button.

“Da, da,” a female voice answered, then asked in a tone that Cohen understood, even if he didn’t know Russian, “Who is it?” “From the electric company,” Cohen said in Hebrew.

“I no know electricity,” the woman stammered in pidgin Hebrew. “Video, video,” she instructed.

“Electricity,” Cohen said. “I’m not the cable man. Electricity.”

“Televizia. Look televizia,” the woman’s voice said.

He turned to face the camera, smiled at her, and then pulled out his wallet and showed her a business card. It was the photographer’s. But he doubted she could make out the writing, let alone read the Hebrew. “Electric company,” he tried again, giving a quick grin to the camera then turning to face the door.

The buzzer went off. Cohen pushed through the glass door into the lobby. Enough sun had poured into it to make the central heating redundant. He wiped slight beads of sweat that gathered on his forehead.

When the elevator opened he found himself in a small corridor with only one door. A young platinum blonde woman in jeans and a blue shirt tied into a halter was peering through the crack in the open apartment door as he came out of the elevator.

“We had a report about a problem here,” he said, opening the fuse box cabinet set into the wall opposite the elevator doors.

“No. No problem here,” the woman said in Hebrew with a whiny Russian accent. But she opened the door a little more.

He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Hot.” He smiled at her. “Water?” he asked, with an exaggerated pantomime of a man drinking, smiling at her with all the charm he could muster.

She smiled, and leaving the door open, left the entrance and disappeared into the apartment. He followed the clicking of her heels on the marble floor.

Through a short lobby, he came into a broad expanse of living room with a sixteen-person dining table and two distinct sitting areas, including one for a wide-screen television screen and a baby grand piano. A broad wooden desk stood in the near corner, holding an elegant pen set and a switchblade for a letter opener. No papers or ashtrays, no coffee cups or opened books littered its surface.

Cohen was looking for anything that would give him a sense of Witkoff the person. So far, all he had was a neatness that was almost unnatural. There were photographs, all including a man with short cropped gray hair. He assumed that was Witkoff.

In the kitchen, immediately to his right, he heard a cupboard close, then the clink of a glass on a counter.

Just then, his eyes fell on the last thing he expected to see: on a side table next to a rocking chair, he saw something that truly shocked him: a copy of the German edition of his book.

In the kitchen, water was running in the sink. He strode across the room, his sneakers silent on the stone floor.

The clicking of her heels on the stone floor suddenly resumed. He put down the book, but remained standing in the middle of the room.

“Hey!” she cried.

He flung up his hands, showing he had not touched anything, surrendering to her. It made her pause and look at him thoughtfully for a second, and then she found the word. “Out, out. Now.” She said it like she was shooing a stray animal.

He smiled again and took a step forward, telling her in Hebrew and gesturing that he was sorry, but asking to use the bathroom, as well.

Again that made her pause, considering her alternatives.

Sweat beaded on his forehead. She nodded.

“Thanks,” Cohen said. “Which way?” he signed, pointing at two doors and a corridor entrance that exited from the main room, itself easily bigger than his entire apartment at home in Jerusalem.

She sighed and pointed at a door to his right. He patted his belly softly, as if to say it was very weak, and closed the door behind him. His stomach was fine. He dropped the toilet seat so she could hear, if she was waiting beyond the door. Then he waited. Thirty seconds went by. He grunted slightly, then sighed, wanting to make her think he’d be a while.

Sure enough, after another few seconds, he heard her mutter something to herself, and then her footsteps tapped their rhythm away from the door. He waited another few seconds, then opened the door a crack. It gave him a view of most of the big room. He peeked around the corner. She wasn’t in the room.

He strode to the book, picked it up, and thumbed through it quickly. It had been read. Maybe twice, or more.

Axoffee stain marred one page, another was dog-eared. It was the chapter that explained the witness relocation program to Germany.

A phone rang through the apartment. He froze for an instant, and then the ringing stopped. He heard her voice, speaking in Russian. It gave him more time. He thumbed through the pages again, looking for notes, anything to indicate why Witkoff would have the book. This time he found something that he missed the first time. It made his hand shake slightly.

The book was inscribed “With gratitude.” No date was added to Benny Lassman’s autograph. Nor did the handwriting say to whom the gratitude was addressed.

The clicking of the woman’s heels on the stone floor suddenly began approaching from somewhere behind him in the depth of the apartment’s other rooms.

For a second he was tempted to take the book. But its absence would draw attention to his presence. He didn’t think the woman was reading the book, but he had the feeling that as long as he left it in its place she wouldn’t make the connection between the grim face on the cover and the electrician with the smiling pantomime of drinking water.

So he put down the book exactly where it had been and went back to the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

“Finish?” she asked through the door.

He flushed the toilet, running water in the sink for a second before he opened the door, drying his hands on a small guest towel. “Thank you,” he told her, relief on his face, walking past her with a smile that turned grim as soon as she closed the door behind him.

“No interviews about me,” Cohen had said that night in Frankfurt, when, on Cohen’s heels right up to the boarding gate for the flight to Rome, Benny had kept insisting that they had another best-seller to write. “No,” said Cohen. He didn’t want to deny Lassman the chance to make a living. He just didn’t want to draw any more attention to himself. “There’s nothing I can do to stop you. But I don’t have to cooperate,” he had explained to the writer.

“I’ve got a good relationship with Leterhaus,” Lassman had said, referring to the German cop running the case. “I can do it from his point of view. Hell, I can do it from my point of view.” “In fiction,” Cohen warned.

“I can’t let this get by me, Avram,” Lassman had tried, appealing to Cohen’s loyalty. “You’ve got to understand that. You can afford to let the ihoment pass. I can’t.”

That was when they were still in Frankfurt. Cohen sighed then, as he did now, speeding on the highway to Jerusalem, using one hand on the wheel, the other on the cellular phone, trying to get through to the reporter. The number had been busy since he left Tel Aviv. It was still busy as Cohen crawled through the constantly clogged entrance to town, past the foreign ministry and through the Valley of the Cross until he was at the Gaza Road.

There he took a left, and three streets into Rehavia, he took a right, then another, finding a parking spot half up a sidewalk at the end of the cul-de-sac.

Lassman lived on the ground floor in the back of a six flat apartment building in the neighborhood. The weight of the wet snow from the storm had broken tree branches that Cohen had to skirt as he strode down the slate path around the building into the back garden. The sun had been almost warm in Tel Aviv. In Jerusalem, the mountain altitude cut the heat, and even in the ostensible shelter of the buildings around him there was a strong breeze. In the shade of the old Rehavia trees that enveloped Lassman’s unkempt garden and patio, very little sunlight gleamed through the leaves. It was cold.

“Benny?” Cohen shouted, banging on the peeling white door.

“Who is it?” Benny called out from inside.

“Cohen.”

“Avram?”

“Open up, it’s cold out here.”

Instinctively, by habit, Cohen slipped a foot into the door as Benny, unshaven and red-eyed, wearing a bathrobe over a T-shirt, trousers, and two pairs of thick mismatched army socks, opened a crack to the cold.

“What the hell is your connection to Alex Witkoff?” Cohen demanded, pushing past Benny into an overheated low-ceiling living room and study.

Lassman’s computer screen glowed in the semidarkness of the room, along with a table lamp on the desk and another bulb burning over a small kitchenette.

“Who?”

“Witkoff, Witkoff,” Cohen said impatiently, unzipping his jacket. “Owns a chemicals and trading company. Lives in Tel Aviv. Russian millionaire, possibly dirty. Probably,” he added.

“Believe me, Avram, I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“You autographed the book for him. ‘ for all your help,’ you wrote, ‘ gratitude,’ ” he added, quoting directly.

They were eye to eye. Cohen could smell Lassman’s breath and sweat and realized the writer was sick with the flu. “That’s what you signed in his copy of the book.”

“I signed a lot of those books,” Benny protested, then coughed so badly he bent over, grasping his lungs, grimacing in pain.

“You wrote ‘ gratitude,’ ” Cohen pointed out again.

“For what?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lassman said anxiously, then broke into a cough.