To Kill a Matzo Ball (A Deadly Deli Mystery)

by Delia Rosen

  His approach took me by surprise. “How do you know I’m a survivor?”

  “I read up on you,” he said.

  “What, like secret files?”

  “Good lord, we don’t have a lot of time for those. It’s not like the old days. No, I looked at newspaper articles. There was a mention of your divorce in the New York Post—”

  “Phil wanted to hurt me by hurting my business,” I added bitterly.

  “—and the interviews you gave to the press when you moved here. They all told me you have some steel in you. The individual I see before me is a little beaten but still unbowed.”

  “So what do I feel?” I asked, sipping coffee. “I feel like the pieces don’t fit.”

  “How so? Don’t think about it—just talk.”

  “We’ve got a martial arts school with possible gang-affiliated enemies up north, white supremacists, three oddly nosey guards, a Jew who has been here fourteen months and never had hate directed at her, and random acts of violence that seem to have come from nowhere. I don’t think they’re all related. There are too many players.”

  “And those are just among the ones we’ve been looking at,” Bowe-Pitt agreed.

  That was one oddly worded statement. Extrapolating from what Bowe-Pitt had said earlier, it suggested that there could be more suspects he wasn’t yet looking at and there could be more he didn’t even know about.

  “Got any leads?” I asked, surprised by my boldness.

  “No.”

  “Thoughts?” I asked, refining my word search.

  “A few,” he replied.

  “Anything you’d like to share?”

  “Only by asking you this in the name of being thorough,” he said. “What is the nature of the tension between you and Detective Daniels?”

  Of course, my first reaction was to throw the coffee mug at him—which I refrained from doing. My second reaction was to override the first. My third reaction was to wonder exactly what bothered me about the question: the invasion of my most private privacy or the implication that Grant had gone from being a bad choice for me to being homicidal. My fourth reaction, the one that stuck, was curiosity about why he was asking.

  “It’s a relationship that is over,” I said. Before he asked, I said, “I ended it.”

  “Do you know if he’s seeing anyone else?”

  “I don’t, and if he is I don’t remember him ever talking in his sleep or calling out the name of an ex at an inopportune moment,” I added. “Even so, any mountain we climbed did not rise high enough for him to want to kill me.”

  He smiled just a little at that. I hoped I’d covered everything in my reply.

  I had to admit, once I’d calmed down, that I respected his asking a tough question. I hoped it wasn’t intramural squabbling but a sincere effort to eliminate a remotely possible link.

  “Since you’ve been down here, five dead bodies have ended up on your doorstep—two literally,” he said. “Except for mass murderers, serial killers, and the Civil War, that’s a Nashville record. Any thoughts on that?”

  “If I believed in karma, I’d blame it on my or someone else’s past life. Just rotten coincidence.” Strangely, that question didn’t bother me. It was one I’d asked myself.

  Grant walked in with his colleague. “May I talk to you, Gwen? In the office?”

  I don’t know why I looked at Bowe-Pitt—other than that he was ginormous and in the way—but I did. His face was impassive again. I moved around him, slid by Detective Bean, and joined Grant and Banko in the office. Seated in my squeaky chair, Banko looked totally harried, worse than before. His left hand and forearm were draped protectively across his laptop. I lay a comforting hand on his shoulder, and he flinched. Grant knew from experience that the door was pretty porous, so he didn’t bother to close it.

  “I’d really like to take Mr. Juarez’s computer for a forensic analysis,” he said to me.

  “You haven’t told me why—” Banko insisted, his voice shriller than usual, more desperate.

  “I have,” Grant said to him. “I’ve also told you that you can cooperate or I can get a court order.”

  “And I’ll say it again: I have proprietary software in that machine, and you’re not getting it,” Banko said. “There is nothing in the computer that will be helpful to you.”

  “Sonic recordings of a gunshot are useful in cases like this,” Grant replied.

  “They are not sounds; they are etheric energy,” Banko said.

  “Whatever they are, they may be helpful.”

  That was pretty flimsy, and we all knew it. Grant probably wanted to rule out Banko as a possible accomplice, and I could certainly see both sides. I could also see Grant’s damp, muddy trench coat and the muck on his cheeks and chin. I was not unaware of how he had protected me in the park. I owed him this one.

  “How about this, Detective,” I suggested. “We do the whole thing right here. Your tech guy comes in, checks out the computer while Mr. Juarez watches.”

  “Checks out the etheric file,” Banko said. “Just the file.”

  “Just the file,” I agreed.

  Grant looked at me with hooded, disapproving eyes. He knew I knew what he wanted. I indicated for him to back off by widening my eyes. I let him know, with a look, that I would handle this.

  “How do I know I can trust them?” Banko asked. “Someone could load the software into a flash drive and I’d be screwed.”

  “Okay then,” I said. “What if we do it in the open, in the dining area, where we can all see everything that’s going on? No flash drives. No plug-ins. Just a police person at the keyboard under your direction.”

  “We don’t even know if anything can be retrieved from the laptop,” Banko said. “It’s been through a lot.”

  “That’s true too,” I said, “in which case this’ll be a very brief project.”

  “When would they do this?” Banko asked. “I wasn’t planning on being here past tomorrow morning.”

  “Tonight,” I suggested, my eyes drifting to Grant. “Now.”

  Grant and Bean both recoiled a little, but Banko seemed a little better with that.

  “What about compensation for my time?” Banko asked. If he had nothing else, the man had baitsim.

  “I’ll kick in an hour, Detective Daniels will pay the other half,” I said. “That’s three hundred bucks total.”

  I glanced at Grant and Bean. They looked like they’d just got a snootful of bad milk. I’d explain later that I knew something Grant did not: when a person is getting paid for something, they let their guard down. If Banko had nothing to hide, he would, for money, give the forensics person some room to work. If he were concealing something, he’d still hover like a hummingbird.

  Unless I ran interference. I didn’t think the NPD was buying the etheric energy angle at all. I was, though. Banko had said in the park that we had a match. My game plan was to get him to do that comparison work, off his flash drive, on my office computer while Grant’s tech person monkeyed around with Banko’s machine. I would promise to watch Banko’s computer while he checked the lines.

  “So,” I said. “We’re all very tired—at least, I am. And some of us could probably use a little dinner. I’ll take care of that, and I’m guessing that Mr. Juarez can still leave tomorrow—assuming we have an arrangement here, as my garment industry mishpochas used to say.”

  Banko pretended to consider the offer, then accepted with a nod.

  Grant said, “We do.”

  “Great,” I said. “Mr. Juarez, why don’t you set up where you’re comfortable?”

  Bean went into the dining area to get a tech person over ASAP. I stepped back into the hall to allow Banko and his computer egress. As I did, I could see an admiring smirk on Bowe-Pitt’s lips. I wouldn’t say that we had a “thing” going, but we understood one another and admired each other’s technique.

  I was guessing that he wouldn’t be going anywhere during this phase of the investigation. Which was fine with
me. If someone was gunning for Nashville’s favorite deli owner, the more law I had around me, the better.

  Chapter 11

  I was a little unnerved having Buddha in my kitchen.

  I finally realized that was who Agent Bowe-Pitt reminded me of. Not the teacher of the Noble Truths, but the quiet soul who realized that all things must come to an end. He was going to let us all run ragged until the only one left standing was the killer or killers. And run we did.

  I liked the NPD tech guy, thirtysomething Richard Richards. Liked him a lot. He was a civilian who worked for the department’s Information and Technology Division, cute and possibly single. He was not part of any criminal investigation unit but was judged to be the best data-recovery expert in the city. He had grown up in a trailer without electricity and, from his earliest childhood, had learned how to “borrow” juice from others. He started by replicating Benjamin Franklin’s kite-with-a-key experiment— which resulted in electrocuting a mouse in a cage—when he was just seven years old.

  “I was trying to jump-start a TV I found in the junkyard,” he told me, while he set himself up in front of the computer. “I didn’t understand about wall sockets or generators or how it all worked, but I learned. Second-degree burns from small transformers, from car batteries and jumper cables, are a great teacher.”

  He had a backwoods manner that put Banko at ease: his big blue eyes and blond hair and clean-scrubbed face, without a hint of midnight stubble, made him seem innocent, trustable. He looked at the grime-encrusted keyboard with a twisted mouth and a sigh.

  “This looks like a Titans football via Minnesota,” he said.

  Not being a sports fan, I guessed that meant a game played in snowy muck.

  I suggested that Banko eat his dinner, which I’d left in the office—as he and I had discussed while I prepared the platter. We were working on a little butcher-block table near the oven, away from Agent Bowe-Pitt.

  I said quietly, “You want to show the detectives, the FBI, that you are onto something with etheric readings, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then you should go and get the results while they’re all here and looking to break the case,” I told him. “These guys are fishing. They need to bring something actionable back to the precinct, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So give them a match. I’ll watch your laptop while you find out which of those squiggly lines from the park was at the deli when Ken Chan was killed.”

  He seemed dubious. Whether it was the proprietary software or something else, I couldn’t be sure.

  “You’ll let me know if he gets the thing up and running?” he asked.

  “The instant I see a welcome screen through the mire.”

  He looked along the corridor at the two detectives, who were standing in the open front door, waiting for their guy.

  “I’ll do it,” Banko said. “But you’ve got to watch them.”

  “Like Shylock with his accountant.”

  Banko made a strangely puzzled face at that as I finished making dinner and Richards entered the deli.

  Richards was seated at the counter, and I hovered over him so that Banko would see me every time he leaned back in the chair and looked over. I kept Grant and Bean away, and Bowe-Pitt had remained in the kitchen, reading texts and e-mails. The new arrival used a paper napkin to gently, almost lovingly wipe the screen of shmutz while he waited to see if it would boot. That was when he told me about his background and I told him about mine. I noticed that he wasn’t wearing a ring. Actually, I didn’t notice: I looked. It didn’t mean he wasn’t married or even straight, but it was good to know.

  Then the computer spoke in a high, grinding voice.

  “That’s not good,” he said. “Gunk in the gears.”

  He typed fast, and a moment later white letters scrolled swiftly down a black screen.

  “What’s that?”

  “A diagnostic program I created,” he said. “I use it to poke around in the hardware, look for areas of compromise.”

  “How did you upload—?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “I’m downloading whatever raw data is in there, however compromised and garbled.” He tapped the cell phone he wore on the left side of his belt, away from the office. “The wonders of Wi-Fi.”

  I felt a little guilty. I must have looked it.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, crossing his arms as he waited. There was a tattoo of a kite on his right bicep. “Detective Bean gave me my parameters. I’m turning a scrupulously blind eye toward installed programs.”

  It was strange to hear words like “scrupulously” riding that clucky backwoods accent to my ear. I know. It was stereotypical of me, biased, and all the things I hate that people do to Jews. But I consider myself immune since I’m the first to remark, at least to myself, on the antithetical behavior of my own people, like when one of my schnorrer cousins picks up a check or I get through a dinner with my childhood JAP friend Marci without her whining nasally even once.

  “Is this the data that’s going to your phone?” I asked, nodding at the screen.

  “No. It’s showing me the pathways to the data and jumping over sections that were compromised in the fall. I’m not going to learn anything from—”

  He stopped. So did the computer—or so it seemed. There was a long stretch of black before the white letters started up again.

  “That’s weird,” he said. “I already passed the file I wasn’t supposed to look at.”

  “Meaning?

  “That black space? That’s a file that no one’s supposed to see.”

  My conscience pinged harder. The not-seen file was what I personally wanted to see.

  “What do I do?” he asked.

  “Did it download to your phone?”

  “A black-line copy would have,” he said. “It will look like the censored sections in government documents.”

  “Can you remove the black lines?”

  “Possibly,” he said. “It’s easier if I use this computer.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “A couple of hours,” he said.

  “I should’ve put Ambien in the gefilte fish.”

  He looked up at me. “Say again?”

  “Nothing. We only have it for a few minutes.”

  “Then I’ll have to work with the download,” he said. “I’m pretty good at this. I should be able to get something from it.”

  Those last two words came out like “frawmt.” It was adorable.

  That was how this was going to be done. Richards finished the download, the computer choked on its own diagnostic, and he called the detectives over. Banko emerged as well, looking wary. I was angry at him: after all that, he was hiding something. Maybe it was none of my business; maybe it was porn; maybe it was politically incorrect blog posts—who knows? But he could have told us if we were wasting our time. And saved me a hundred and fifty bucks, which I was thinking of getting back from him with the edge of a meat cleaver, if necessary.

  “This mule’s dead,” Richards said when everyone had gathered round.

  I was watching my now-nemesis. He seemed relieved. Unfortunately, since he wasn’t supposed to know we’d run into his firewall, I couldn’t very well challenge him on it. Not unless my life depended on it—which it might.

  Grant and Bean nodded gravely. They had known exactly what he was doing. Richards shut down the computer and closed the lid.

  “Sorry, Mr. Juarez.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I was expecting as much. In the meantime, I want to tell you all something.”

  Agent Bowe-Pitt wandered over as Banko was speaking.

  “I have a flash drive that has my etheric line readings on it,” he said and shot a look at Grant. “Only my etheric readings. As I explained earlier, those are energy radiances that come from individuals without their being aware of it, sort of like radio waves. Anyway, one of the individuals Ms. Katz and I encountered tonight was in
the deli this morning, before Mr. Chan was shot.”

  “One of the guards—or the man walking the dog?” Grant asked.

  That stopped Banko like a custard pie in the face. “I don’t—I’m not sure,” he sputtered.

  In Banko’s defense, that hadn’t occurred to me either. Not that this let them off the hook, but we were so fixated on the guards we didn’t bother to notice anything about the other man. I made a face and looked at Grant.

  “Is there some way to find out if the dog walker did eat here that morning?” I asked. “He could have been eyeballing me for someone.”

  “Anyone with a telescopic nightscope could have eyeballed you,” Grant said.

  “Not with the glow coming from that computer screen,” Agent Bowe-Pitt pointed out. He was standing behind the two detectives, a wall of devil’s advocacy. “That would have washed everything else out. The proximity of one man at two shootings—whoever that man was among the etheric lines—would seem to merit attention.”

  Grant doesn’t like sharing authority. He likes being humiliated even less. I saw the flesh redden around his collar, threatening to reliquefy the mud splatters.

  “We will be checking everyone out, of course,” Grant said. “Thanks very much for your input.”

  “You are very welcome.”

  Bowe-Pitt’s politeness was worse than his initial comment. Grant left after counting out one hundred and fifty dollars and tossing it on the counter. Detective Bean looked like she wanted to say something to Agent Bowe-Pitt, but didn’t. Richard Richards rolled his lips together, slipped from the stool, and extended his hand to me.

  “I had a really pleasant experience here,” he said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Richards.”

  “You are very welcome, Ms. Katz,” he said with the kind of southern grace and sincerity that accomplished what Grant’s huffing did not: it showed Bowe-Pitt there was a better way to handle people. Then again, Grant’s reaction was apparently exactly what Bowe-Pitt had hoped to get. Otherwise he wouldn’t have done what he did.