An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery by Robert Rosenberg

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