To Kill a Matzo Ball (A Deadly Deli Mystery)

by Delia Rosen

  “She called me,” Luke said. “She wanted to come down—I told her not to. I said I’d come and see her as soon as the police were done.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “Okay, look. I want you all to go home. I’m going to stay and clean up—”

  “Not alone you ain’t,” Thom said.

  “Alone I am,” I insisted. “You are all going to march out the door and not look to your right. There are reporters out there, and if you want to talk to them, it’s your call. Just remember that if you go down that road and you lose it, you’re a viral video. So I suggest you just keep your eyes down and your mouths shut and let the police help you through if necessary. If anyone doesn’t feel like driving, we’ll call a cab.”

  “I’ll drive whoever doesn’t want to,” Newt said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ve called to get the place fixed up over the next few days, and obviously there won’t be any eat-in. But I still want to open the kitchen for takeout.”

  “People will think we’re cashing in on the shooting,” Raylene said.

  “People are pathetic gossips,” I told her. “If we don’t open they’ll say, ‘I hear they’re closing,’ even if they haven’t heard that.”

  “They do like the sound of their voices,” Thom said.

  “Exactly. So we do that starting tomorrow. I’ll be outside with menus, explaining the situation to anyone who asks and dealing with anyone who thinks it’s in bad taste.”

  A.J.’s mouth twisted. “I was actually wondering that. Isn’t it?”

  I looked at her. “How do you honor a man who did what that stranger did? By putting your life on hold or moving ahead?”

  “I would say a little of both,” she replied. “Maybe put up a sign that says we’ll be open for table service on Friday and not advertise that we are open for takeout.”

  My instinct was to tell her no. But I needed my staff to be on board. It could be that they needed a day off. I looked at Newt, then Luke, then Thom. “I had planned to bring everyone in—but you three are the ones I’d need most. What do you want to do?”

  Thom answered first. “I just want to go to church and get on my knees and stay and thank God for your life and pray for the soul of the man who gave his. But I can do that tonight and be here tomorrow.”

  I looked at Luke. “I kinda want to be with Dani, and I think she wants to be with me. But I’ll do what you say, boss.”

  Newt shrugged and said, “Whatever works for you.”

  I did not rule over a democracy. But I’d asked, and the staff had answered. “All right,” I said. “Tomorrow it is.” I looked at A.J. “But I appreciate that you told me your concerns.”

  She smiled weakly. A.J. and Raylene liked me, I think. But, older by a score of years than the kitchen crew and waitstaff, they looked out for the kids in the trenches. Because Thom looked out for me, they waged the proxy wars so we didn’t have to fight. If this wasn’t a first, it was a rarity.

  I hugged everyone individually, then told them to go. Luke considered going out the back door and climbing the fence, but I vetoed that. I told him that if the cops saw him, they might think he was a finger man for the shooter, hiding out there.

  As they left, I thought about the credit card receipts and wondered if there had been someone here. It seemed absurd: you wouldn’t need to case a place you were going to shoot up from the outside. At least, I couldn’t think of a reason. Unless they figured I might take him to the office. It would be easy to get a peek inside when someone went to the loo.

  And then do what with that information ? I wondered.

  Could be that someone signaled the car that we were sitting in the dining room and it was okay to pull the trigger. Literally.

  I shut my brain down as I went to clean up the blood. The cops outside saw me bring out the mop and bucket and made sure that even the people on the outside of the tape moved along. That included Candy and her camera operator. My nemesis protested, and her videographer tried to get a shot of the bucket, but I went over, shut the door, and pulled down the shade. There was still the jagged hole that had been ripped through the center of the window, destroying most of “Murray’s.” But the blocked-off sidewalk and moving traffic made it impossible for anyone to linger. Why they would want to do that was a puzzle. I used to think that rubbernecking was an atavistic bloodlust, but those same people would look away from a squirrel or deer that had been hit on the highway or a bird that had flown into a window and snapped its neck. Maybe it was a secret dislike for humankind. Or a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God reaction. I didn’t know, other than that I never had it.

  I turned off the overhead lights and moved the tables and chairs back, creating an arena-like feel to the big oval of blood. I stared at it, transfixed. The blood was deep, oxygenated red in the daylight, with a syrupy consistency. There were streaks and smears, almost like strong brushstrokes, where the body had been moved or dragged. There were no footprints. The awful canvas was pure Ken Chan, save for the part on the top, near the counter. That was my collaboration, a diaphanous, wing-like shape where my arm and hip had been.

  Part of me—a part I honestly didn’t recognize—wanted to preserve it as a memorial, rope it off like at a museum. Another part of me—also from Gwen Terra Incognita—started examining it like an ink blot. But it was asymmetrical, so I didn’t see any images. I thought of clouds, wondered if there was some kind of shape, a message from beyond.

  All of that flashed through my head in a moment. It lasted about as long as it took to sigh tremulously, suck down another breath, then push the mop across the oval of blood. I began to clean before the horror in my heart rose up and challenged my resolve. I told myself to keep going, that life was marked by the ripples it caused and not the fluids that drove the engine. This wasn’t the man who had saved me. He was gone.

  I moved quickly, then urgently, then almost frantically. The blood was now just a messy film on the floor, dirty water in a pail. There weren’t even any nicks in the floor from bullets. Ken Chan’s slender body had absorbed them all. I worked by rote as I relieved the moment when I had been in that chair, the one just ahead of me. I suddenly savored the thumping of my heart, the anxiety in my belly, the air in my throat—being alive. And as the blood vanished and that seconds-long eternity stopped replaying, when every pop of a closing trunk or bang of a rolling delivery truck door returned to being just background noise, not gunfire, my brain went somewhere else.

  I had been going back and forth about visiting the martial arts school Chan had founded, about meeting the family he left behind. If not for me, he might still be alive. I didn’t know if I wanted to subject myself to those looks, that raw sadness or hate. But as I swabbed the tile and wrung the man’s blood into a bucket, I decided I had to go. I needed those ripples of his life to permanently wash away the blood at my feet.

  Chapter 4

  The last thing I needed was another visitor.

  I had just been outside in the fenced-in area out back, at the drain in the center of the asphalt. Pouring the contents of the bucket down a storm drain seemed more fitting than spilling it down the sink. For one thing, I wasn’t sure I could lift the filled bucket. More important, it was closer to the earth, more like a burial. So that’s where Mr. Chan went.

  The task was a little lighter by then. Under the early afternoon sun, I found myself remembering his expressions as he sat at the table. It was strange how I’d cycled through the entire mourning process in about a half hour.

  By two PM a truck had arrived from Umberto Professional Repairs. Like so many people down here, Umberto Delmonico and his son Vittorio had been friends of my Uncle Murray.

  “He fed me on days when I went solo and couldn’t pay him,” the older man said. “I’m glad I can be here for his niece.”

  I had heard that before from people, but under the circumstances, it propped me up no less than he did with the big piece of plywood in my front window frame. Umberto and his rugged young son braced it with a thin
steel crossbeam on the inside.

  “Nothing’s getting through that,” Umberto said when they were finished. Then he threw a muscular hand around him. “Don’t let the darkness get you down. It will pass.”

  I tried to hold on to that as I put the furniture back in place, though the arrival of Lawrence Bowe-Pitt changed that.

  I was in my office, answering e-mails from friends who had learned about the attack on the news. I heard the front door open and rolled my chair into the hall. A hulking white man stood just inside. He looked like the Michelin Man. He flipped out a little leather cardholder. There was a badge on top; he moved it to catch the light so I could see it from where I sat.

  “Good afternoon. I’m Resident Agent Lawrence Bowe-Pitt of the FBI field office in Nashville,” he said. “Are you Ms. Katz?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I speak with you?”

  I didn’t bother pointing out that he already was. “Sure.”

  He had a voice like butter melting in the southern sun. Dressed in a charcoal-gray suit and thin black tie, the man mountain made his way toward me. I knew we’d never fit comfortably in the office—if he fit at all—so I went back into the kitchen.

  I once met Bill Bradley, the former New York Knicks forward and senator, who ended up with an investment banking firm. Bradley stood six-five and seemed very, very tall. This man was about the same size but seemed even bigger than that because he had shoulders like an ox and a head that seemed a little too small for his massive frame.

  I wasn’t staring, but as he neared there was hardly a place you could turn where he wasn’t. I had kept the coffee on and offered him a cup.

  “No thank you,” he said, in a voice that seemed to echo within that cavernous form, rolling around a few times before emerging from his thin-lipped mouth.

  I went behind the counter and got some for myself. He followed me out.

  “Don’t you people usually travel in pairs?” I asked.

  “Budget reductions do not always make that possible,” he said. “And this is not, strictly speaking, an investigative visit.”

  “No? What is it?” I asked. I poured, sipped the coffee bitter and black, stayed where I was, and looked back at him. I wanted to be where the cop at the door could see me. I didn’t know why, but I did.

  He came around the counter, his back to the door. There was no way the cop could see me now. If this guy wasn’t the real deal, I was in serious trouble. I had no reason to believe he was a fake other than my own post-traumatic jitters, inherent mistrust, and doubt that this man could have worn even the extra-largest standard-issue FBI gear.

  “We have been keeping an eye on all of the businesses like yours in Nashville,” Agent Bowe-Pitt went on. “Nothing intrusive—just drive-bys several times a week.”

  “Why is that?” I asked, though I pretty much knew what he was going to say. “Like yours” was about as transparent a euphemism as one could use. He meant that some mouth-breather out there had it in for Jews.

  “While it’s possible that someone knew Mr. Chan would be here, that’s a little too fluid a situation for me.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Someone would have to have been tracking him,” the agent said. “Given how often he was probably alone at his school, tailing him here doesn’t seem to make the best sense. It’s not impossible, of course, and there are some stupid killers out there, but it’s not the best working theory.”

  “What is your best theory?”

  “We’ve been tracking a well-funded group of radical white supremacists, the SSS,” he said. “It stands for Shock, Shoot, and Slaughter. Mr. Chan, being of Asian descent, a foreigner, new in the city—that would have been something to attract their attention.”

  My first reaction? I didn’t think that a bunch of homicidal rednecks would have had the wit or creativity to conceive of a mash-up between the SS and the KKK. Maybe they had hired an image consultant. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was an opportunity there—rebranding hate. Legitimizing the illegitimate, the way nations did.

  “You heard about the cop who was shot off-road two weeks ago?” he asked.

  I nodded. It was big news for several days. Marcuz Frank, an off-duty police officer, had taken his date to a romantic spot off Briley Parkway. It wasn’t really romantic; it was isolated and located in a woody depression not visible from the road. The gal was abducted, and the cop was fatally shot in the head. She was found later, strangled, in a rusting, abandoned truck.

  “We believe that was the work of this group,” he said. “The officer was African-American. The woman was not. The first flyers were found the next morning, not far from there.”

  “Had the couple been seen around town?” I asked. “How did they know?”

  “We don’t know,” Bowe-Pitt said.

  “I assume you know who these people are?” I asked. “Some of them, at least?”

  “We don’t,” Bowe-Pitt admitted.

  “Then how do you know they’re well-financed?” I asked. “A bunch of fliers pinned to trees isn’t exactly high overhead.”

  “No, but invisibility is,” he said. “These guys leave no data fingerprints anywhere. Either there are no cell phone or Internet communications, which isn’t likely, or they are using highly sophisticated hardware and software. That costs.”

  True enough. It wouldn’t be possible for a bunch of killer hillbillies to hide for very long without help.

  “They’ve also been schooled in up-to-date security practices,” he went on. “We have a flyer they posted. None of the word groups or letter sequences show up in any of our searches. And we don’t know that they’re remote country inhabitants, which I presume is what you meant by the hillbilly reference. For all we know they may be local business owners. Restaurateurs, perhaps.”

  Well, he sure put me in my place—making a point of using the slightly French-inflected word restaurateurs. Maybe I deserved it. I probably seemed like a snotty intellectual feminist to him, which I sort of was.

  “What about the money? Any idea where it’s coming from?” I asked.

  “Cash doesn’t leave a paper trail,” he said. “You know the local economy. We’re looking into businesses where cash can be skimmed.”

  There was a thoughtful silence, and I flinched as he slid a beefy paw into his jacket. I was prepared to hurl hot coffee in his face. But he didn’t produce a shiv or garrote. He was holding a five-by-seven photograph of a flyer. He handed it to me. The original document was yellow and pinned to a tree. It said in a bold inkjet typeface:

  THE U.S. IS FOR US

  ARYANS ONLY

  R VOICES WILL BE HERD

  SHOCK SHOOT SLAWTER

  “I assume the typos are mistakes,” I said.

  He looked at me as if to ask “What typos?”

  “I mean, unless it’s a creative flourish,” I added quickly, turning the photo so he could see and pointing. “‘Heard’ as in audio, ‘herd’ as in a bunch of cattle. It could be a metaphor. And maybe ‘slawter’ is a service mark. I know. You can use it in commerce and see who sues. Then you’ve got them.”

  He continued to stare with practiced patience. I didn’t imagine he met very many normal or well-composed people during his investigations: either they were bad guys or victims. I was anxious and babbling, but I couldn’t help myself. As much as you hear about people hating, as much as your relatives pounded it into your skull, it’s different when it’s in your backyard—and potentially in your storefront. It turns your knees and bowels to water. You just want to run. Or flow, whichever gets you away best under the radar.

  “I sincerely do not know about any of that,” Bowe-Pitt remarked. “We found eleven of these flyers two weeks ago—”

  “Eleven? Isn’t that the number of states in the Confederacy?”

  “It’s also the number of trees located in Hadley Park, out of view of security cameras,” Bowe-Pitt told me.

  Okay, I thought. I will say nothing more.


  “We have no leads on who might have put those up, other than a strand of thread that was attached to one of the nailheads,” he went on. “We believe it’s from a workman’s glove, cotton with a trace of plastic coating. Electrical worker, perhaps. We’re looking into it.”

  “That’s a pretty impressive deduction from a piece of thread.”

  “We have a real good lab in Memphis,” he said. “Of course, it could also mean a Nashville Electric worker pulled over to relieve himself and happened to lean on the tree. We’re looking at gloves from workers on this afternoon’s assignment sheet as well.”

  “You ought to wear gloves while you check those gloves,” I said.

  The agent ignored my quip.

  “I checked with the NPD,” he went on. “They will be leaving an officer posted outside tonight. I suggest, if it’s possible, that you sleep here. Your home property is invasible.”

  My home property is invasible? What the hell kind of inflated thought process came up with that? Probably the same linguistic moron who told weather forecasters to refer to the afternoon as “afternoon hours” and humidity as “humidity values,” as well as turning signs to “signage” and minutes to “minutage” and other idiotic neologisms.

  Now I was babbling inside instead of out. I shut my brain up and listened.

  “All right,” I said.

  “None of this is to say that we know for certain you were the target,” he went on.

  That’s what “knowing” is, I mentally corrected him. Being “certain.” I told my mind, again, to put a ball-gag in it.

  He plucked a business card from that little leather wallet, which seemed lost in his fleshy hand. He laid it on the counter, beside the photograph of the flyer, and gave it two taps of his finger. He probably would have handed it to me if I weren’t standing so far back that I burned my tuchas twice on the coffee machine.

  “Call if you need me or if you hear or see anything,” he told me.

  “This hasn’t exactly been reassuring,” I told him.

  “Sorry. We deal with information. Those are the facts and the suppositions.”