An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery (6 page)

“Look, Benny. This isn’t for me. Dinners, banquets, luncheons, receptions. Interviews, speeches. It’s not for me. I don’t know how to be polite to people—and that’s what people want. I’m tired of smiling at people I don’t know and listening to people like Kaplan. This is not for me.”

Lassman lowered his voice and pointed Cohen to a set of stairs that led into a huge banquet hall, draped with tapestries of hunting scenes, courtrooms, and at the far end, largest of all, a crucifixion. They were alone, except for a pair of women setting a distant table.

“Avram, I know you’re paying for this trip for me. I appreciate it.” “The money’s not important,” Cohen said.

“For you. But for me it is. Very important. I’m counting on this book’s success. They’ve spent a lot. They want to make it back. If they do, the success rubs off on me, too.

After all, as far as they’re concerned, I discovered you.” He paused, realized what was wrong with what he said, and added “in the literary sense.” “So you can stay. I told them you can speak for me.”

“They don’t want me to speak for you. I don’t want to speak for you. I wanted this trip to try to sell my books, as well as yours. But I’m also here with you. If you walk out, it looks bad for me. They’ll wonder if they can trust me not to back out of a contract. I didn’t want to say this, but remember, Avram, we have a contract, too.” “You’d sue me, as well?” Cohen asked.

“If you pull out now, we’re both facing a huge lawsuit,” Lassman tried. “You and me.” “Both of us?” Cohen asked.

“Well, I’m liable, too. And for me, it’s a lot of money— especially considering the book was expected to do well, very well. If you made the public appearances. I helped you get this book published, Avram. I shouldn’t be punished because you suddenly aren’t happy with it.”

The money wasn’t the problem. It was Lassman’s emotional blackmail, even if so poorly presented, that made Cohen wince. It was an old story in Cohen’s life, an Achilles’ heel made even more vulnerable by the knowledge that money couldn’t solve every problem. Lassman’s career was on the line. And even if the book was a mistake, when Cohen needed help on it he had asked Lassman.

“I was serious,” Cohen said. “I’ll pay them back the money, if that’s what they want. They have the book. And I’ll make sure you don’t lose. It’s enough. I’m not made for speeches. For politics.”

“Come on, Avram, you were great back there,” Lassman insisted. “Carey loved it—except for when you walked off.

He wanted more. Kaplan did you a favor. He made you look good. Poor Tina. She’s devastated. She’s been a fan of his for years. But forget Kaplan, he’s crazy.” Lassman smiled at the irony. “You said so yourself.”

“Everybody seems to think so,” Cohen said, remembering Francine. “But it’s not Kaplan. It’s the whole business. I didn’t know it would be like this. I didn’t know,” he repeated.

“We still have that dinner tonight,” Lassman said, with hope in his voice that maybe Cohen’s talk about leaving was just that—talk.

Cohen nodded, almost sadly. “As long as I’m here, I must. I signed the contract—and I don’t have a lawyer here to get me out of it.”

“I’ll go with you.” “Thanks, Benny,” Cohen said. “But no need. I want to be on my own for a little while. I’m just going upstairs to get a raincoat and then I’ll go out for a while.”

He rode the elevator alone to the sixth floor, going back to the room he had left that morning. Turning into the corridor heading to his room at the end of the hall, he nearly fell over a chambermaid’s cleaning cart, startling the woman pushing it down the hall.

“Sorry, sorry,” the tall young woman muttered in German in a very low voice, but Cohen barely noticed, glancing at her profile as she kept her face lowered, stepping aside as she moved on toward the service elevator he had noticed at the far end of the corridor.

He watched her receding figure for a second, before turning up the corridor to his door. The chambermaid had piled his laundry in a corner, for the third evening in a row leaving a printed flyer from the hotel management saying that they had a laundry service—all he had to do was fill the folded bag that lay on top of the pile; she had made a stack of the magazines he had bought for the plane trip and didn’t read because he had used two double cognacs to get to sleep for the five-hour flight. His single suitcase was closed, on the low bench at the foot of the bed. She deserves a tip, he said to himself as he headed to the bathroom, picking up one of the magazines he had bought in the airport for the flight.

It was a computer magazine. Cohen’s original sin in writing the manuscript had begun with the acquisition of a personal computer. By the time the book was done, he was facile enough on the machine to database his record collection and recipes. In the months he waited for the final proofs, he learned how to make images with software, and lately he had been trying to create slide shows that went with specific recordings.

So he sat on the toilet, reading Wired, waiting for his bowels to move. Nothing happened, and once again he regretted the way all the carefully nurtured routines of his life had broken down as a result of the book.

Sighing, he dropped the magazine on the floor in front of the toilet seat, pulled up his pants, and stood in front of the mirror over the sink, looking into his own eyes, asking himself what to do.

Go? Stay? None of the lines of his face, none of the flecks in his silver-gray eyes, nothing told him what to do.

His mind said he should stay. His heart told him to leave.

He was known for following his instincts, for an intuition that was right more often than not. Cohen’s method was always to look for what was wrong in the picture, even if it was sometimes a picture that only he could see.

Behind him, the white plastic shower curtain was drawn closed. He had found it open, and he left it open. He had very little experience in hotels. None in German hotels.

Why would the curtain be closed, he suddenly wondered.

He turned around and looked at the curtain, then took two strides and yanked it to his left.

A young woman, eyes bulging, tongue protruding, naked except for a pair of white panties and Cohen’s unused blue tie embedded into the skin around her neck, lay leaning into the corner of the tub, staring blindly at Cohen’s own tired eyes.

Only someone who had read his book, who knew Cohen and his background, would have understood why the man didn’t gasp in horror. Death was an old companion in his life.

He stood there, looking down at her for a long minute, and then used some toilet paper to pick up the phone so conveniently hanging on the wall beside the toilet. He asked the operator to send a hotel security officer to his room. The receptionist did not ask why he needed a security officer. He did not say.

He was careful not to touch anything, except the door, which he opened the same way he had picked up the phone, with two dabs of dampened toilet paper on his thumb and forefinger. But while he waited for the hotel security officer he began a thorough search of his own in the room until finally, he got down on his hands and knees and with his fingernails lifted the hem of the bed cover to look under the broad double bed.

Just then, there was a knock at the door. “Security?” Cohen shouted out, still on the floor, almost paralyzed by what he was seeing.

“Avram?” It was Lassman. “One more thing … “

“Benny, get away. Now.”

But before Benny could say anything, another voice came from the doorway. “Herr Cohen?” “In there,” said Lassman from the door.

“Security?” Cohen called out.

“Yes. My name is Mathis,” said a young man’s voice coming into the room.

“Do you have any bomb disposal experience?” Cohen asked, still kneeling on the floor, still staring at the elbow pipe bomb, its clock aimed upward so he couldn’t see the timer, wires leading into the slit cut into the cloth of the box frame beneath the mattress.

“A bomb?” Mathis asked.

“A bomb?” Lassman repeated.

“You’d better call your local bomb squad,” Cohen suggested, uncomfortably standing up, his knees aching from the effort. “Don’t touch that door,” he commanded, as Mathis stepped in, naturally reaching to close the door.

“And homicide,” Cohen added.

A blond man in his mid-thirties with a military haircut and posture to go with it, Mathis froze long enough for Lassman, behind him, to exclaim “fantastic.”

“In the bathroom,” Cohen directed Mathis. “And you,” he pointed to Lassman, “not a word. Silence.”

Mathis went into the bathroom, and came out quickly, swallowing hard to halt vomiting, but at the same time pulling a small communications device out of his inside jacket.

“Marina something,” the security officer said, unable to precisely identify the dead chambermaid. “I’m new on this job. I really should contact my boss.”

“First the bomb squad. There’s a timer. But it’s facing up, so we can’t see it. Take a look.”

Mathis swallowed again, nodded, and then got down on his hands and knees beside Cohen, flashing a penlight on the object under the bed. It was a short elbow-pipe bomb.

Cohen could see the timer, but it was too murky in the pen lit darkness to see how long they had left before it would explode. If that’s all he had seen, he would have suggested they lift the bed away from the bomb for a better look.

But there was something far more ominous. Three wires ran from the device into the cut through the fabric. “Now will you call the bomb squad?” Cohen demanded, “and then your boss?”

Mathis obeyed. Cohen stayed a moment longer on the floor, looking for a sign that the bed had been moved.

There was none that he could spot—no depressions in the carpet that showed the legs had stood elsewhere. Forensics would sweep the carpet, of course, and do much more. He sighed, knowing it wasn’t his case, and knowing that by touching any of his belongings, he could harm the investigation.

But all he really wanted to do was go. He sighed as he climbed back to his feet and found himself face-to-face with Lassman.

“What are you doing here? I told you to get away.” “Are you kidding?” Benny said. “Who do you think did it?”

Cohen glared at him.

“C’mon,” Benny begged. “You must have some ideas.”

“Let me think,” he snapped at Lassman and turned around and went to the window, opening it. The street was six floors below, but there were no cars parked on the three-lane road opposite the hotel. Beyond was a dark portion of the park that divided the thoroughfare. In the glitter of city lights in the rain outside his window, it was impossible to spot a lookout for the explosion. So he worked on his memory. He was certain there was a mole above the chambermaid’s jaw line. She had very dark eyes. Black hair. He wasn’t sure how long. She wore a cap. Her nose. Maybe it had been broken in the past? When he paused to let her pass, he watched her walk—she had a narrow bottom, her shoulders much wider. Her calves were muscular, shapely. The shoes. They were black. Boots, not the uniform footwear he had seen on other hotel staff. It suddenly occurred to him that the chambermaid he saw in the corridor might have been a young man. He returned to the face in his mind, wishing he had noticed the chambermaid’s hands.

“I figure Nazis—or their kids,” Lassman said confidently.

“Either that or someone you must have sent here for relocation after a trial.”

“You came up wanting to tell me something,” Cohen said, not wanting to discuss the bomb with him. Not until he knew more than what he knew.

“Yeah, thought you might want to know. Carey’s not discounting the offer to repay the advance money. But he’d want damages—additional money to recoup other costs. A full two million.”

When he opened the window he could hear the sirens.

Now the green-and-white police cars began arriving down below. He saw the hotel general manager, to whom he had been introduced his second day there, greet the first officers to arrive outside the hotel. In another moment, Cohen realized, the organized chaos of a crime scene over which he had no control would erupt around him. If he were the lead officer on the case, would he regard the visiting author as a suspect, given what was known so far?

The police wanted to evacuate the entire building and conduct a search of the hotel for another device. The hotel management didn’t want that, of course. For a few minutes there was a standoff in the corridor far down the hall from the open door to Cohen’s room.

The sappers noted that if the bomb went off, it would destroy the bed, but the meter-thick cement floors of the old building that had survived Allied bombing would barely be damaged.

“Maybe there will be a twenty-centimeter hole in the floor. You can fix that,” the sapper told the worried hotel manager, who begged the police not to evacuate the hotel.

“There must at least be a search for other bombs,” Cohen pointed out.

“Please, Mr. Cohen,” said the senior officer on the scene, Helmut Leterhaus, a local State Police Criminal Investigations department commander. “Allow us to handle this.”

The corridor quickly filled with plainclothesmen and uniforms. Officials—from the local branch headquarters commander of the BKA; and from the END, the agency for the protection of the Constitution, which in the old days of the Berlin Wall conducted counterespionage against East Germany, but now focused on countering industrial espionage as well as terrorism. An officer from GSG9, the German counterterrorist unit, attending the fair on a private visit, was also alerted to the attempted bombing. And a young Israeli diplomat, assigned to the Israeli pavilion at the fair by the foreign ministry, also wanted to know if Cohen needed any help.

All he wanted was to leave. To go home. Leterhaus was right. He had no position in an investigation of the murder or the bombing attempt. Yes, it appeared aimed at him— though he was still not certain. But he had convinced himself that he was done with investigations.

Certain that whoever had planted the bomb had planned it well in advance—“The chambermaid,” he told anyone who asked, “must have surprised the assassin. The murder was clearly an accident on the job.”—Cohen doubted whether there would be another attempt on him in the coming days. But he was certain that he would be safer at home, where he had control over his environment.