An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery by Robert Rosenberg Page B

waist-high wall separating the gardens, she had to walk down her walkway to the still unpaved sidewalk, onto the asphalt street, around a ten-year-old gray Subaru sedan pulled up onto what would have been the sidewalk, past the parked police cars, and only then enter the path to the house. She sidled past Cohen, Shvilli, and Jacki, mumbling “pardon me” with a Russian accent before disappearing into the house.
    “Do we know why Nissim was out on that road?” Cohen asked in a voice as low as the neighbor bringing food to the house of the mourners.
    “It could be anything,” said Jacki. Shvilli just shook his head sadly. Jacki’s wide mouth squirmed downward into a frown, and she, too, shook her head no.
    “And Hagit doesn’t know, either,” Cohen said in a tone that made the statement into a question to which he already knew the answer. Shvilli and Jacki exchanged glances but their expressions didn’t need words to confirm Cohen’s guess.
    Cohen looked back at the district commander’s car.
    “Does he know?” Cohen asked, indicating District Commander Ya’acov Bendor’s car.
    “He knows how to jump out of airplanes. He wouldn’t know how to fill out an accident report, let alone read one,” Jacki said.
    Shvilli frowned at her, but, uninhibited by the responsibility of active service, Cohen could smile. Like her, he was not necessarily impressed with army officers’ trading in their greens for blues. It took most of them too long to learn that the police might wear uniforms and have a chain of command, but that civilians were not the enemy. Ya’acov Bendor had come out of the paratroopers’ brigade as a colonel who realized he’d never make general, and parachuted into the police where he was promised a promotion to commander—the equivalent of a general in the army.
    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