SNEAK PREVIEW! Chapter 3 "It's Your Damned Toenail!"

Donald came home from work to find his mom slumped over her keyboard; he rushed to her side to confirm that she was among the living.

"Mother!"

The ancient woman slowly raised her head and upper torso, her left hand was digging at the keyboard.

"You scared the crap out of me, What the hell are you doing?" Donald said.

A little smile creased Mary;s lovely face as she held up her hand and the bounty within.

"Got it!" she said.



"You frightened me to death just to dig out a fingernail."

"It's a toenail.  I wish you'd stop flinging them all over the place when you;re done cutting them."

"Okay.  Okay."

"You're such a pig," Mary Frances said.

"Yeah.  Yeah.  What's for dinner?"

While the old woman worked in her tiny kitchen, Donald rested on the couch, surfing channels on his 15-inch television/VCR combo.  A DVD player collected cat hair in its box -- the key to a much better entertainment experience -- but it hadn't been used in the year since Don had bought it, thanks to his ineptitude with machines of any kind.  Finally finding ESPN, he was soon absorbed in University of Miami versus Florida State football highlights, unconcerned with his mother's kitchen labors.

"When's dinner gonna be ready?" Don said.

"What?"

"I said, when's dinner gonna be ready?"

"Hmmmm?" Mary Frances asked.

"Oh for chrissakes, when are you going to get a hearing aid?"

"I don't need a hearing aid.  I hear just fine?"

Donnie shook his head and went back to the highlights, a Jeremy Shockey over-the-shoulder touchdown grab of a slow-moving spiral from Ken Dorsey, shown for the third time backwards and forwards, in slow-mo, stop-action, and finally from the Goodyear Blimp.

"I hope someday they get a freaking Tourette's-cam complete with audio": Donald thought.
"That would be    amazing, with lots of crazy movement.

Suddenly he saw on the periphery that there was no sigh of his mom in the kitchen.

"Where the heck are you, mom?"

Don never knew when the old girl would slip outside to empty a tiny bag of garbage down the :shoot as Gene Meadows, the building's janitor spelled it on the computer-generated sign he'd posted above each floor's trash shoot that read:  "Drop your trash down the shoot and don't put it on the floor, please."

Mom loved to do as much work as she possibly could, while Donald let her do exactly what her bent body could bear.  Intuition told him that she'd benefit by doing as much as she could, physically and emotionally.  Plus, being as lazy as a fat tick after breakfast, Donnie was always happy to let someone else do the work for him.

"Jorsujapeeg," Mary Frances said.

"What?"

"Hmmm?"

"Oh forget it," Donald said as he took the 17 foot journey from his perch at the rear of the condo to the kitchen, whose deepest boundary was less than 6 feet from the front door.  Any excessive effort pained the aging writer.

Upon discovering his mom stooped over so far that the palm of one hand was flat on the floor, while the other was engage din a futile attempt to grasp a long grape stem.  She finally latched her middle finger onto one of he stem's tiny ganglia-like offshoots that had been strong enough to hold a plump black seedless grape but not elusive enough to escape Mary Frances' persistent digits.

"You are such a pig," she said.

"So you have said, ad nausea," Donald said.

"What?"

"I said you always say that."

"Thagzbicimtoo."

"What?"

'THAT IS BECAUSE IT IS TRUE," mom shouted

"Yeah.  Yeah.  I'll be more careful."

A half of football later, Donald was snoring away on the couch while the University of Miami's Band of the Hour marched on the Orange Bowl's manicured field.  Awakened  from his strange dream (he'd walked from North Miami Beach to Winston-Salem, North Carolina with a knapsack filled with deviled eggs on his back). Don heard the cat's claws digging up and down his scratching pad and dropped his right hand to stroke Lazaraus' head.  Except Lazarus was nowhere to be found, it being time for the creature's 5-hour mid-afternoon nap.

Instead, the scratching sound came from the kitchen.  There Donald found a peculiar team effort.  Mary Frances crouched down in her divining-rod position, right in front of the fridge, while Lazarus reached beneath the appliance, swiping at an object that had found its way in that small shadowy area, a repository for dust, dirt and paper wads errantly swatted there by the cat.

Mary's right hand was coated with a thin veneer of neath-the-fridge slime (thank goodness she wasn't given to bouts of nose picking, Donnie thought).

The feisty old woman was urging the cat to complete his missioin.

"Little baby.  I know you can."

"He can do what, mom?"  Donnie said.

In the five minutes it took Mary Frances to inform Don what the critter and she were looking for, Lazarus had dislodged the object with one energetic slap.  Across the kitchen rolled a gorgeous men's ring, which even while in flight could do little to hide its splendor.

THE HISTORY OF MAH JONG (excerpt from several chapters from the beginning)

The history of the game of Mah Jong is nearly as complex and intriguing as that of its country of origin.  Its seeds were planted in a climate of rigid class division, political intrigue, and the game lived on through the death of Chinese dynastic rule.  Created by an elite class of aristocrats some 4,000 years ago, Mah Jong was such a closely guarded secret among its practitioners that it wasn't introduced to the lower elements of Chinese society until 1911. Mah Jong finally made its way to New York City in 1920, where it became an instant sensation.  Part of its charm and mystique is a product of language barriers among the many Chinese dialects and English as spoken in the melting pot known as Manhattan.  Consequently, the Chinese rules became merely suggestions to the Americans.  The translations of the tiles with their Chinese characters were improvised.  As a result, Mah Jong morphed into a hodgepodge of games whose standards and practices varied from home to home, neighborhood to neighborhood.  But never before had a vintage Zambian emerald ring been injected into its crazy quilt fabric

THE MAH JONG MURDERS Chapter One (Continued)

Mother and Son

After picking Carmillia's brain with the limited energy she had left on this humid summer day, Mary Frances hobbled toward the 3rd floor elevator, cane in hand, along with a huge canvas purse with green stenciled drawings of three Shih Tzu pooches on front and back, a gift from her daughter, Hanna, who owned three of the nervous creatures.  As usual, some kindly soul helped Mary Frances into the elevator.  By the time the two reached the ground floor, Mrs. Cohen had issued a half-dozen, "what's" and received an equal amount of "What's that's."  The conversation continued all the way to the swimming pool nearest Mary Frances' building, a healthy jaunt that would take a young person about 5 minutes, and our gentle octogenarian nearly 25.


Jade Winds' easternmost swimming pool was a source of rich data for Mary F's computer-like mind.  On any given afternoon she'd find a group of Russian men and women alternatively speaking their national tongues and Yiddish, the multi-textured, polyglot lingo that Jews from around the world ingeniously created to make communication possible even as they moved from homeland to homeland, chased away by one form of bigotry after another.  Although a typical discussion among Mary Frances and her Russian neighbors could test the will of a marathon runner, Mrs. Cohen always left with plenty of gossip and historical information which she gladly shared with her family members.


"You know that old woman with the curly red hair?" Mary Frances said.


"What woman with curly red hair?" her middle-aged ne'er-do-well son replied.


"You know.  Mrs. Cherbov , the one with the son whose ex-wife lost their estate in a poker game."


At this point, Donald Cohen would inevitably revert to his I can't understand you maneuver, even though he had acquired a fluent understanding of Mary Francesese over the decades.

SNEAK PREVIEW! Chapter One

The Maj Jong Murders
A Mary Frances Cohen Mystery
By Donald Owen Cohen


The ancient woman looked like a question mark.  Her southward posture brought her head halfway down to the ground.  Her piercing vision narrowed by macular degeneration had declined, but she was still able to detect a straight pin on the floor, even in shrouded light.  Left with 2/3 of her original hearing, Mary Frances Cohen's audio recognition was low, but she made up for it by forcing her friends, relatives and every one she'd meet in the grocery store and other stops along the way to repeat what they'd said.

"What's that?" she'd say sweetly in a gravelly voice rendered almost unintelligible after a bout with laryngitis in her youth.

On this late August afternoon, Mary Frances' discussion with her neighbor, Carmillia, a stocky little Haitian woman who resembled an ebony hued fire hydrant, centered on the weather:

"It's gebbun kinahot," Mary Frances said.

"What?" said Carmillia.

The conversation bounced back and forth for about ten minutes, until Mary Frances had discovered that Carmillia's son was in jail on a DUI bust, her sister had to return to Haiti to get some money from her ex-husband, and that the entire building was being overrun by termites.  Such was the way that the affable 89-year old Jewish woman with the Catholic names gathered a wealth of information, some profound and some less than trivial, but all of it important to Mary Frances Cohen.

Widowed at age 64, Mary Frances never put much gusto into the dating scene.

"All those little mumzers want to do is grab my tits," she said after an encounter with a pudgy fellow formerly from New Jersey who'd lived in Mary Frances' condo complex for nearly 15 years.  Sy Horowitz had been her final date, and the brief encounter with the breast-grabbing nebbish ended when Mary Frances laughed at little Sy's attempt to invade the land of milk and honey.

Yet, the Charleston, West Virginia-born retiree was rarely bored.  She had a weekly mah jong game that rotated among the homes of the four participants.  Plus, computer solitaire, looking after her three kids, two of whom were card-holding AARP members and the youngest, a 54-year old drifter whose main purpose in life had never been known.  To say that Mary Frances Cohen was happy in her dotage would be inaccurate.  For the active-minded woman was often mired in mild depression when her brain wasn't engaged.  Little did she know what excitement lie ahead.