To Kill a Matzo Ball (A Deadly Deli Mystery)

by Delia Rosen

  “Gwen,” I said. “Is that your Christian name?”

  He looked at me. “Buddhist.”

  “I meant—is that your first name, entire name ... ?”

  “My last name is Juarez. I was adopted by a Puerto Rican hotelier and his Danish wife. They were Catholic and Lutheran. I chose a different path.”

  “Clearly. Well, it was good to meet you.” I tucked the new check under the first. “Enjoy your second course.”

  I had been negligent, my duties undone, as the hostile looks of Raylene and A.J. informed me. But part of my job was to make newcomers feel welcome, and except for the part about doubting that food could talk, that’s what I was doing. Even though I was supposed to just get him out of there.

  I behaved for the rest of the rush, hustling here and there as if the boss were watching. Which I was, I guess. I didn’t even notice when Banko Juarez headed out, his dairy products untouched, his bills paid with a twenty and a five tucked under an unused spoon. The milk went back in the refrigerator for my cats. Banko did leave a nice tip, though, along with his business card, which I slipped in my apron pocket after glancing at it. I did not recognize the 305 prefix, and there was no address, just a website. I also had no idea what etheric cleansing was, but if it was anything like a high colonic, I did not want to know anything more about it.

  I got to grab a mug of coffee, black, and closed my office door a little before ten. My mother used to say it was nice to sleep the sleep of the just at night after a long workday. After rushes, I sat the sitting of the just. My dad’s old office chair was unsteady, and the vinyl was torn; the orange cushion had been crushed flat from the year I’d been sitting in it, but it was always a blissful place to plant my tuchas.

  I’m not one of those people who social-networks, since I don’t care what someone is doing or feeling at every given moment; if any of my friends from New York want my input, they call. There weren’t many of those: no one had been down to visit since I came here. We’re all busy, but New York people seem to be busiest when the alternative is to head to the South, even a city as culturally rich as Nashville. The attitude up there is pretty much that they have it all up there, unless it’s in Europe. They will zip across the ocean.

  I get e-mails from people I have generally superficial relationships with down here, like slumlord Stephen R. Hatfield, who has a kind of thuggish fascination with me and keeps suggesting we do this or that, attorney Dag Stoltenberg, who worked for my uncle and my dad and occasionally checks in, or Robert Reid, who publishes the Nashville National and still feels guilty about dating me without revealing his ulterior motive. Then there’s Stacie, my almost half-sister, who worked for me a while before heading to Southern California with her fiancé. Through one of my old Wall Street connections, I got her a job as a teller in San Diego. She grew up poor and wanted to be around money. I couldn’t blame her since, in my experience, being around money inspires you to want to make money. It’s up to the integrity of the individual how that goes down. And of course I get a few messages each week from Detective Grant Daniels, my former inamorato, who had gone from liking me to hating me and was now somewhere in the middle. He sends links to articles he thinks might interest me even though they don’t. Or they probably wouldn’t if I bothered clicking on them. I send him polite responses, nothing more. I don’t want anything more.

  The e-mails I was looking for now were special deals from my vendors. These usually came early in the day, after the morning orders had been filled. Produce was especially volatile, and I could always make some kind of soup or potpie or even dried and seasoned chips with less-than-perfect veggies. It had been Dani’s vegan-y idea to make and bag chips and overcharge for their healthfulness. It gave Newt something to prepare between rushes, and since we’d started two weeks ago we were doing okay with them from a spin-rack at Thom’s post. I cut Dani in for ten percent of the net. I wondered what would happen when the waif was making as much from Katz Nips as she was working her butt off on the afternoon shift. The answer was not going to make me happy—but, once again, I get ahead of myself.

  Thom thrust her head in to tell me I had a visitor, Ken Chan.

  “I’ll be right out,” I said, grabbing the expanding folder where I kept menus and forms. We had those on our website but, like my uncle, I prefer to have hard copy to refer to. I finished my coffee and hustled out. The man standing beside the counter surprised me. He was about thirty-one or two, five-foot-three, bald, round-faced, and as thin as one of those ribbon-ties that come on a store-bought bag of bread. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt with sleeves cut off at the shoulder. His upper arms were bony, and both arms looked like noodles. He did not seem to be classically “in shape.”

  I offered my hand, and he accepted with the most tortured fingers I’d ever seen. They were knotted with tendons, turned this way and that from years of training, with nails that were longer than any I’d ever seen on a man.

  “They’re useful for grabbing an opponent or raking the eyes, eagle-claw style,” he said, noticing my stare.

  “Sorry for being so rude,” I said.

  “Curiosity is not rude.”

  “Thanks for that. I’m not from fighters. My only war wounds are cuts from the slicer and some stitches. How long have you been doing this?”

  “Kung fu? Since I was three years old.”

  “Wow. I was still trying to master finger painting at that age.”

  “Did you master it?”

  “Not really, but I had fun making a mess,” I said. “Though, come to think of it, I started playing piano when I was five. It’s like an artistic bat mitzvah. All young Jewish girls do it.”

  “Each culture has its way of addressing fine motor skills.” He chuckled. “When I was young, about five or six, I started training for grabs and strikes by plunging my stiff hands into pails filled with sand, then pebbles, then rock,” he said. “It makes them strong, but as you’ve noticed, the bones do not emerge unimpacted.”

  I looked him over. “You have, what, zero body fat too?”

  “I have always been lean.”

  “You don’t eat a lot of potato pancakes.”

  He smiled. “I eat vegetables and fruit, and occasionally fish,” he said, eyeing one of the cellophane bags beside Thom.

  “They’re four ninety-five a bag,” Thom said dryly, clearly put off by our conversation. She went into her sell spiel: “Zero fat. Zero cholesterol. Big taste.”

  Thom was not so svelte, and she mistrusted anyone who was thin. That came from her devout religious background, she said. Thom associated skinniness with asceticism and self-denial. That meant skinny people had something to atone for. That meant they were sinners. She said that big, beautiful people suffered from occasional gluttony but were otherwise happy enough not to sin in other ways. One could argue with that logic but not dislodge it.

  I pulled a bag from the rack and gestured toward a corner table. “On the house. You can munch while we talk.”

  He thanked me with a nod as we made our way through the dining area. I stopped at the near-empty counter and did a double take: a man at the end was working on a laptop. For a moment, I thought crazy Banko had returned. Had that entire conversation really happened? It already seemed like a strange, murky dream. But there was part of me that had to admit being a tiny bit impressed: as my mother used to ask when I was dating a dot-com entrepreneur or a financial blogger, “He makes a living at this?” I often wondered what she would think of the likes of her friend Mr. Feld, who once ran a flea market but had moved from a corner parking lot on the weekend to proliferate on eBay.

  I leaned toward the heat lamps. “Luke, would you bring an egg-free matzo ball, and a latke, gefilte fish, and horseradish sampler?”

  “Is it Passover already?”

  “Must be. You’re plaguing me.”

  Luke made a face as I caught up with Chan. He held out my chair. That felt nice. He sat, placing his cell phone on the table and folding his hands in front of him.<
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  Setting up the menu took all of five minutes. Chan told me most of his students were carnivores who would chow down after they’d been tested and their guests would eat everything else. So it was the typical deli meat, potato salad, cole slaw, pickles, latke, farfel menu. Luke arrived with the samples I thought we’d need just as Chan was handing me his credit card. I returned to the table after giving it to Thom, just he put down a toothpick that had been stuck in a section of latke.

  “That was good,” he said.

  “Are you new to our cuisine?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I haven’t seen you here before.”

  “Do you remember everyone who eats here?”

  “Only when they show up again,” I told him truthfully. “Otherwise, who cares about them?”

  He laughed. “I understand. I am new to the area, not to deli food. I used to live in New York City.” He must have seen my face brighten because his did as well. “You too?”

  “Born and raised and missing it. Where did you live?”

  “On Mott Street, near Bayard.”

  “God, I love that area!”

  “As did I,” he said wistfully as he sampled half of a tomato pickle. “But there was an ugliness underneath.”

  “What kind? Drugs?”

  “Worse,” he said. “You know about the triads?”

  “No. What are they?”

  “They’re a criminal element that thrived for decades in Hong Kong under British control,” he said. “Their name comes from their use of triangle designs to mark their territory. These ruthless people have been driven from Hong Kong by the Chinese, and when they came to America, they moved into our neighborhood. They were not just selling drugs and trafficking in human beings, they were also hiring extortionists, kidnappers, and assassins to extend their influence. Young people were coming to our school for training to fight in gangs. I could not abide that. It is not the lesson I wish to teach.”

  “Understandable, and sad. How long have you been here?”

  “Six months. You?”

  “Fourteen months,” I told him.

  Thom arrived with the credit card slip, which he signed. She was miffed about the free bag of chips I’d given him. I ignored her.

  “Why Nashville?” I asked him.

  He smiled. “I love country music, especially Johnny Horton. ‘In 1814 we took a little trip . . . ’”

  I joined in, and we sang a few more measures of “The Battle of New Orleans,” which had also been a favorite of my uncle’s, along with “Sink the Bismarck.” I remember him playing them both on our Baldwin upright when I was a kid. I wasn’t smiling from the memory or the song but from the joy in Chan’s eyes.

  “You go to any of the local clubs?” I asked.

  “Often. I enjoy watching people move. That is how kung fu was developed—by watching nature in its untamed state. My forebears were not permitted to have weapons, so they defended themselves by learning from the mantis, the snake, the eagle, bamboo moving in the breeze.”

  “I like that,” I said. “I always thought it was something the Japanese invented for World War Two.”

  “Their arts are judo and jujitsu,” he said. “It came to these shores after the war. Soldiers brought it back, and a few schools were opened. Kung fu was a closely guarded secret until Bruce Lee brought it into the open.”

  “What’s the difference between them—judo, karate, kung fu?”

  “National styles have their own cultural character reflecting the nature of the people,” he said. “The short answer is that Japanese forms are outward reaching. They are basically big, circular motions that use an adversary’s attack against him. Kung fu comes from here,” he touched his sternum with those sharp nails. “It rises from your own center, your own chi—your energy. It is very, very powerful. You can use it literally to push a person across a room with just your fingertips.”

  “That’s something I could use here,” I said. “You’d be surprised how many marriages, business relationships, and first-time novelists decide to go crazy over lunch.” I noticed him looking at the matzo ball. “It’s okay. There’s no egg, no animal products. We use gluten as a binder.”

  “I am not a vegan. I would eat egg if not for the cholesterol.”

  He picked up the shrimp fork Luke had put on the plate, then did something deft with his fingers that turned the fork tiny ties-down. He poked it into the matzo ball and picked it up. He continued to look—at the matzo ball? I couldn’t tell.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  He was silent, suddenly contemplative. I looked more closely at him and noticed that he wasn’t looking at the matzo ball but at the napkin holder directly behind it. The silver side of the freshly filled container showed a distorted reflection of what was behind me, outside the window in the busy street. I couldn’t make anything out. Just as I turned to see what had gotten his attention, Ken Chan threw himself to the floor, an arm extended across my chest, taking me with him. The matzo ball flew skyward, the fork still in it, exploding when it hit the side of the counter—but not due to the impact.

  It had been shot.

  Chapter 2

  It’s a funny thing about chaos. It happens right away, surrounds you before you are even consciously aware of any danger. There’s tumult, a rumbling, a darkening, or a noise—like the shot that sent the matzo ball flying—and then it’s all around you, like a sewing needle that binds everyone with the same long thread.

  I saw it in New York whenever a motorcycle would rev suddenly or a truck would cough or a car would swerve or a nutcase would scream in a small bodega or some homeless guy would suddenly decide to veer in your direction while you were walking the dog.

  In this case, there was an object in motion and the loud crack of the gun. Both stimuli triggered the same sudden, purely physical fight-or-flight reaction in everyone around me. Everyone chose flight, and sensibly so.

  As carefully as I could remember before panic partially wiped my brain, Chan had moved before the bullet even struck. He took me to the floor and lay on top of me, and that was why his back instead of my front took the rest of the gunfire. I could feel him pulse as each one hit, his thin frame twitching against me. Ironically, each was like a little heartbeat in different parts of his body.

  I could hear screams from inside the deli, from the street, from my own throat. My cries had more of a whimpering quality as blood quickly pooled on the floor, warming and soaking my left side, and Ken Chan went from warm, breathing, and purposely protective to lifeless but still positioned between me and the fusillade.

  The gunfire seemed to last for a week. I’m sure it wasn’t more than five seconds. My first thought was that I didn’t feel wounded or numb anywhere; my second thought was for my staff. I rolled my savior onto his back, his dead eyes staring up, as I kicked my heels back against the blood. I grabbed a chair to my right, got on it, looked around.

  “Everyone! Answer me!”

  It was stupid, but that’s what came from my mouth. My hearing was heightened by the crack and crash of the glass. There was a flood of mixed, indecipherable, high-pitched cries, chairs scraping the floor, loud shouts, and horn honks through the broken window, so I looked around. I saw Thom rising from behind the register, which was untouched by the shooting. Customers had crouched or dived for cover on the floor, but no one appeared hurt. A.J. was standing behind the counter, near the hallway, frozen in place with a tray of beverages. Raylene was just coming down the hall from the lavatory. Luke and Newt had been in the kitchen.

  The attack had been localized on the table where we were sitting. The front window was shattered, and the street was empty, people evidently having bolted for cover.

  I heard screaming. It was Thom, and she was stepping over customers and shoving aside chairs people had vacated to get to me. I saw her, saw she was looking at my chest with horror, saw that my apron and sleeves were soaked with blood.

  “It’s not mine,” I said, hearing my
own cottony voice, as though someone else was speaking. I patted my chest, sides. “I’m okay.” Nothing hurt except my elbow, which had hit the tile floor.

  “Lawsy,” Thom said when she saw the body of Ken Chan.

  I pulled off my apron, draped it over him. The bag of chips was beside him, torn open by a bullet, the particles floating in the widening puddle of blood turning from green and orange and yellow to red.

  I heard sirens. I felt hands on me, Thom’s hands, pulling me away from the body.

  “Come to the office,” she said.

  “No.” I backed against a stool, sat on it, leaned back against the counter. “I’m okay.”

  “You just survived a drive-by shooting.”

  That refocused my attention. “Is that what it was?”

  “That’s what it was. Just like when I was a little girl,” Thom said. “Supremacists fired at us from their pickup while we worked our farm.”

  “Did you see them?”

  “Only their tail end as they drove away,” Thom said.

  Luke brought me water. I ignored it. I told Thom to see to the others. I was vaguely aware of Raylene telling the few customers they should wait for the police to provide statements. I couldn’t stop looking at the dead man. Whether by instinct or—more than likely, as I replayed the moment in my mind—by design, he had saved my life. I was overwhelmed as I realized how I had been avoiding men for the last few weeks, yet one had just shielded me, someone he barely knew. Maybe my perspective had gotten a little self-centered.

  Speaking of which, by the time Detective Daniels arrived I—and the dead man—were the only ones left in the restaurant. The humming in my ears had dissipated, and every sound seemed super-sharp now, like digital. Especially the sound of footsteps on shattered window glass.

  “Wait out here,” I heard a voice say. I looked over as Grant walked in the door, which a uniformed NPD officer was holding open. Grant was a solid six-footer with broad shoulders and a square, determined jaw anchored by a strong, determined chin. His eyes found me at once. He seemed concerned and relieved at the same time.