An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery by Robert Rosenberg

room-turned-study, sipping his thick black mud drink made like instant with Turkish ground coffee, the broadcaster finished with the weather story and was talking about Israel’s latest demands in the peace process. Cohen checked his watch and turned on the television to CNN.
    The American weatherman spoke softly as he moved across the screen, blocking Spain and giving Cohen a view of the Eastern Mediterranean. Two low pressure areas had converged at the intersection of the three continents.
    From Africa, a band of clouds raced across the Sahara from southern Libya up into Egypt, thickening as it stabbed into the Mediterranean where it met the second swirl of clouds that bulged down from Greece and Turkey.
    He glanced at his umbrella in the corner by the front door and again at the TV screen. The fast motion satellite picture’s cloud cover flipped forward, showing the storm’s breakup starting in the south. From Beersheba south, the sun would be shining in the Negev. He didn’t need a raincoat, he decided, despite the rain pattering evenly on the glass canopy above the seventeen steps down to the back of the garden. He trotted past the deep green foliage of his garden, around to the front of the house, almost slipping when he jumped a puddle to avoid getting his sneakers wet.
    Slowly but surely, he drove through the empty streets of the early morning city until down the mountain to the coastal plain, and heading south on the highway to the Negev, he was beyond the ice and able to speed.

12.
    Sunk in his memories, he drove automatically. By the time he reached the bridge over the wadi north of Beersheba, Army Radio was carrying Nissim’s name as part of their report on the road death toll. To Cohen’s are, they were specifically noting Levy was a senior police officer, so his death in a car accident made a natural peg for their daily traffic death report. “Even trained police officers,” the broadcaster was saying, “have to be careful on the roads. This month’s road accident death rate already set a new record.”
    Leaving the mumble of Beersheba behind, he felt his head clear as the speedometer rose and the clear air left behind by the departed storm rushed in from the open window, chilling his face even while the sun tried to warm it. Like the struggle of sensation on his face, his memories of the dead challenged him not to weep. He didn’t, but his face was grim as two hours and seventeen minutes after leaving Jerusalem, he turned left onto an avenue wider than the two-lane road from Beersheba to Eilat and entered what had once been a gray little town but which was growing some color.
    Nissim had helped in the town’s self-improvement campaign, of that Cohen was sure. But what really made the difference was on his left: a low-slung high-tech park made of one-and two-story light blue buildings sat behind a row of newly planted palm trees that grew a little taller than the dark blue Mercedes gliding out of the park under an electronically operated barrier, which was guarded by a security guard in a simple uniform. Cohen drove another fifty meters past another three palms in the median strip before reaching a billboard promising a country club at Neve Darom, the southern oasis.
    He followed the arrow to the right, and headed toward the new neighborhood of misproportioned two-story apartment blocks with slanting red-tiled roofs where Nissim and Hagit had bought their first home. The houses stood in awkward rows a couple of hundred yards into the desert, on a still-new black asphalt road already scarred, Cohen noticed, by tire rubber laid down by bad drivers or teenage joy riders. The country club would have a swimming pool and health spa, tennis courts, and an auditorium, said the signs hanging on a wire fence concealing the hole in the ground where the foundations would go for the complex. The last time he had been there, for the housewarming, there had only been a sign inviting people to the model home at Neve