Fry Me a Liver

by Delia Rosen

  I had to figure this out, which meant going back there. I wondered if part of my return was an unwillingness to let go; better a dead deli than no deli. It was a sad thought, because it meant that I had nothing else to turn to.

  Before going back, I checked my messages. There was a new voice mail from Kane, but it was from his alter ego:

  “Captain Health is off work at four p.m. today and is offering to assist Ms. Gwen Katz in whatever activity she is engaged in. Should her plan include dangerous sleuthing, so much the better. For beyond aiding the young and ailing, there is nothing Captain Health enjoys more than righting wrongs and solving crime.”

  It wasn’t weird, like the first time I’d met that persona; it was silly and stupidly irresistible. I called and got him on the phone.

  “This is Soup Queen—a.k.a. Latke Lass a.k.a. Matzo Maid—and she gratefully accepts your offer to help her go a-sleuthing,” I said.

  “Excellent,” he said, managing to drag it out to four syllables. “Where are you?”

  “At the Owlet, but I’ll meet you at the deli.”

  “Wait outside for me,” he said. “There may be danger if you go in alone.”

  “I’ll wait,” I assured him, making a mental bet that he showed up in costume. I gave myself even odds on that one.

  I was wrong.

  Kane showed up as Kane, but with a gleam in his eye that I had first seen at the hospital and not thereafter. He had been charming and outgoing, which is why I ended up staying the night, but helping was clearly what his inner life was all about. I even found myself questioning how harshly I had judged him when he said he liked finding ways to give people loans. He really was about spreading joy and goodwill, even over the resistance of cynics like me.

  He parked on the street a block away and got there before me, since I always went to the garage. I liked knowing my car was in a brightly lit place covered by security cameras. I didn’t drive in New York, but I never understood those people who spent a half hour or more driving round and round looking for a parking spot when there were so many parking garages. Yes, they were expensive—but peace of mind was worth that to me.

  “You thought I was going to appear in costume, didn’t you?” He grinned.

  “I confess, I did.”

  “And I have to admit I was tempted,” he said. “But I didn’t know how that would play if there were cops guarding the place. I didn’t want to make things difficult for you.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said.

  There was one police officer out front, but he was texting. He recognized me, nodded, and resumed what he was doing. There were no longer any engineers working inside. The structural situation had apparently been stabilized, even though the Department of Codes and Building Safety had been along to put in their two cents with a red UNSAFE sticker on the glass door.

  I told the officer we were going inside to look through the personal stuff that had been hauled from the basement. He waved us under the yellow tape. Kane held it up so I could go under. I’ve got to admit, the gentlemanly stuff had an effect.

  The deli was even more dismal than before given the late afternoon light. I went to the heap of items. The larger things, like the microwave, were sitting by themselves. The smaller pieces like ladles and cleavers were thrown in a stack about three feet high and six feet long. I used a broom handle to push things aside.

  “What are you looking for?” Kane asked.

  “Anything from my office,” I said. “Someone apparently used duct tape to keep the door from locking. I assumed it was to take something out before or after hours. Now I’m wondering if it was to put something back in.”

  “Any ideas what?”

  “None,” I admitted. “But I’m not seeing anything here that came from my office. Nothing of mine personally and nothing corporate. Just metal and electronics.”

  Kane cocked his head toward the front door. “Security here isn’t exactly airtight. Someone could have come in already and done whatever they intended to do.”

  “True,” I said.

  We went to my office. I took the flashlight from the desk and shined it around. Everything looked pretty much as it did the last time I was here. Kane took a Swiss Army Knife from his pocket and flipped out a built-in LED survival light.

  “Nifty,” I said.

  “Never know when there will be a power outage or terror attack,” he said. He shined it away from the desk, which is where I was focused. He examined the shelves where I had the various slipcase ledgers and corporate documents. “Check this out,” he said.

  I turned and looked at a spine where his light was shining.

  “My uncle’s recipe book,” I said.

  “Did you use it recently?”

  “No.”

  “There’s a drag mark in the dust on the shelf,” he said.

  Damned if he wasn’t right. The shelf was forehead high for me, but he could see the scuff marks clearly.

  I withdrew the book from the shelf. There was no dust on the top of the book, either. When I removed the fat elastic band, no fine gray powder fell from underneath.

  “Looks like someone took it out and put it back,” Kane said.

  “Yeah. But why?”

  “Are these secret?”

  I shrugged a shoulder. “Yes . . . but if anyone was really dying to make my horseradish at home, all they had to do was ask.”

  “I’d bet that someone wanted to make more than horseradish—”

  “Loch in kup,” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “It means I need this like I need a hole in the head. Could that be what they were all talking about?”

  “Who and what?”

  I put the book back and turned toward the door. I walked into the corridor slowly, thoughtfully. “A restaurateur from California was with us in the cellar, and claimed to be sampling all the local cuisine,” I said. “Name’s Benjamin. He just admitted that he was down there before the blast because he was looking the place over to make an offer. He said one of the employees helped him get in. But what if that wasn’t why he was here at all?”

  “Why else? To steal your recipes?”

  “Exactly. He and his girlfriend, Grace, have a Tex-Asian restaurant already. What if he was simply planning to steal all my recipes and was downstairs to photograph the book, was making copies when the kitchen caved in. He couldn’t have put it back like he’d planned with all the cameras and security around. So Newt helped him again—”

  “Again?”

  “He let him in before I got here.”

  “Bad boy,” he said, imparting the mild phrase with genuine displeasure.

  “Then, while we were trapped, Newt hastily ripped off a piece of duct tape and put it on the door so Benjamin could get back when the heat died down. The tape tore going on, not coming off.”

  “Where do you keep the roll?”

  “Behind the counter.”

  Kane went to get it. “Not here,” he said.

  “Newt must have taken it with him,” I said.

  “He would have thought to keep the door from locking with everything else that was going on?” Kane asked.

  “I guess so. Maybe he was hyper-scared. Maybe he was wondering if Benjamin was the one who caused the explosion.”

  “Is that possible?” Kane asked.

  “Why not? Maybe he was planning to open a new restaurant here and wanted me out of the way.”

  “That’s a lot of death and destruction to cause just to bring new cuisine to Nashville,” Kane said.

  “I guess, though it’s probably no crazier than blowing up a deli to kill a mayoral candidate or any other reason I can think of.”

  Kane looked into the dark kitchen. “Still, I don’t think these events are related, the theft of the book and the explosion.”

  “How so—,” I started to ask, but resisted adding “Captain Health?” Kane was in full-steam-ahead crime-busting mode.

  He stepped from the office. After checking t
o make sure the officer was still busy texting, he shined the flashlight toward the kitchen.

  “What have the cops told you about the explosion?” he asked.

  “Shtikl,” I said. “A whole lot of nothing.”

  “Shtikl,” he repeated the word. “Is that re-leated to ‘shtick’? A comedian’s act?”

  “Actually, yes,” I said as we started down the corridor. “It’s a little piece of a performance.”

  “Nice to know,” he said. “I wish I had studied another language. You’re very lucky.”

  I had never thought of it that way. I could get by in Yiddish, and it helped me to pick my way through German, though I wouldn’t consider myself fluent. Still, he was right. I was lucky to have that resource in my head.

  “You said you didn’t think Benjamin and the explosion are related,” I said. “Why?”

  “Because there was no way of knowing what might have happened to him when it went off,” Kane said.

  “But he didn’t expect to be down there.”

  “Correct. Don’t forget, though, if something went wrong, he had an accomplice in the diner—his girlfriend. She could have gotten him out or made an anonymous phone call about the bomb.”

  “Good point,” I said.

  “Unless he didn’t know about the bomb,” he added thoughtfully. “She might have wanted him dead.”

  “That’s . . . an interesting theory,” I said. She hadn’t struck me as the type. Which, of course, was why she just might be. “But then surely Benjamin would have suspected something. He’s many things but not stupid.”

  “Does she pretend to be?”

  “Maybe a little,” I admitted.

  “It could be she’s fooled him,” he said. “It’s like Captain Health tells his children. We have to be strong and fight diseases because they never do any good. People are the same way. If they committed industrial espionage and coerced one of your people to help them, I wouldn’t put anything past them.”

  We reached the kitchen. The back door was closed now and it was dark save for the small light from the flashlight. My God, this was a horrible thing to see, the tiles around the hole sagging inward, wooden beams visible underneath the floor on the far side, propping it up like it was a mine shaft.

  “This isn’t going to tell us very much,” he said in a whisper as his light probed the darkness.

  “How do you know that?”

  “They cleaned everything up.”

  “What were you looking for?” I asked.

  “Evidence of the delivery system,” he said. “You know—a bucket, a briefcase, something like that. You can see where the bomb first hit.”

  “I can?”

  “Look at how some of those tiles are a little melted,” he said, using the flashlight to indicate the raw edges of the side of the hole nearest us. “The blast was somewhere around where we’re standing and the heat was hot enough to melt the ceramic component of the tiles. That could have been what saved you.”

  “How so?”

  “It took a second to melt. You slid instead of dropping.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “You seem to know an awful lot about this stuff. How do I know you didn’t set the bomb?”

  “You don’t, nor I you,” he replied.

  “You think I tried to blow up my own store? And me with it?”

  “I don’t think so, but it isn’t impossible, is it?” he asked. “Maybe you’re in a deep financial hole so you get the insurance and get out.”

  He had a point. Whenever my father would read about a factory fire in the papers, he called it “Jewish lightning.” The owners would simulate an act of God for a payday. The implication was that while anyone would take a risk like that, Jews were more inclined because of the profit motive.

  “To answer your question,” Kane said, “I took a couple of criminology classes in college. The stuff just fascinated me, the result of a lifetime of reading Perry Mason and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle along with Batman comics. That was before he was the Dark Knight, when he was still the world’s greatest detective. I thought it might be fun to be a private eye, but my folks had other ideas. As what you might call ‘white trash,’ it was important for me to have standing in the community.”

  That made me sad. Then again, it was no different from all eastern European émigrés, who wanted something better for their kids than scrubbing floors and stocking grocery shelves, even if they had to force that choice on them.

  “You want to stake them out?” he asked.

  “What? Who?”

  “The lovebirds,” he said. “Benjamin and Grace. We should see what they’re not showing or telling people.”

  “How?”

  “See where they go, what they do.”

  I have to admit, the prospect appealed to me. Those two fressers from California had corrupted an admittedly corruptible employee with the promise of advancement in their corrupt world. That may not have defined “supervillain” in Captain Health’s world, but it meant “rotten people” in mine.

  “If you’re serious, let’s do it,” I said.

  “I’m very serious,” he said. “I love doing this . . . with you.”

  That was sweet and a little oxymoronic. It reminded me of the Bounty mutineers who told Fletcher Christian they were proud to be with him after setting Captain Bligh adrift in a longboat. That sentiment ignored the fact that mutiny was a hanging offense. In this case, stalking was probably very, very illegal.

  But so was industrial espionage. And blowing up a deli.

  I wanted whoever had done this.

  Chapter 14

  Thinking that Benjamin and Grace may have seen my car when I was here—or peeked out to see it so they could watch for it in the future—we drove Kane’s van to the Owlet and parked across the street. Darkness had settled in and we parked away from the streetlights. It was like an honest to God FBI surveillance . . . minus all the necessary equipment.

  “The G-men used to just eyeball their quarry in the early days,” Kane said as he poured me coffee from his thermos.

  “Were there G-women in those days?” I asked.

  “I suppose so,” he said. “I’m sure they didn’t do the same kind of field work, though.”

  “No, I’m sure of that. They were probably all Mata Haris.”

  “I’d bet they weren’t all seductresses,” he said. “Some were probably secretaries or scrubwomen.”

  “Jobs where women would hardly be noticed,” I said with a little bite.

  “Well, yes,” Kane said, pouring coffee for himself in a ceramic mug. “Isn’t that the object of undercover work?”

  He had a point.

  “And I’ll bet they had African American bootblacks and white men hawking papers or pretending to be lushes at bars,” he added. “Anyone who wouldn’t stand out. People who are ordinarily invisible.”

  “Makes sense,” I had to admit. Sometimes feminism shouted louder in my ear than cold, sane reality.

  “The only minority I ever belonged to was ‘nerd,’” Kane went on thoughtfully.

  “Were you oppressed?”

  “Not really,” Kane said. “Growing up, I wasn’t big on sports or cars or any of the usual things boys are interested in. For book reports, I read novels about the Lone Ranger and the Shadow. I worked out at the gym, I ran, I swam, because I was determined to look like Batman. I was at least physically intimidating, so people kind of made a wide circle around me.”

  “Girls too?”

  “Girls especially. They were very clique conscious. It was toxic to be seen with an outsider. My dad used to worry that I was ‘queer,’ as he called it. He tried to get me interested in watching football. I asked him how come his men in tights were any straighter than my men in tights? He couldn’t answer that one.”

  “Pretty funny,” I said. I looked out the window. “They could decide to stay in for the night.”

  “You said they’re connoisseurs, right? They’re going to want to sample what they can whi
le they’re here.”

  Another good point. Kane was pretty sharp at this detection stuff.

  We sat silently sipping coffee. All was dark around us, quiet. Kane was a gentleman, didn’t even put a hand on my knee, which both pleased and annoyed me. There’s the dichotomy, right? No wonder guys can’t figure us out; we don’t know ourselves.

  We chatted a little about people we knew in common—mostly my customers and his, which happened to include Elsie Smith of the Owlet—and finally the couple emerged. They were dressed for dinner, Benjamin in a sharp blue blazer, Grace in a satin sheath of the same bright blue.

  “That’s them,” I said.

  “I figured,” Kane said. He watched them carefully. “Look—they’re not holding hands, not walking arm in arm.”

  “They’re not even talking,” I said. “But it’s more than just a business relationship. At least, that’s what he said.”

  “If you can believe anything he tells you,” Kane observed.

  Benjamin took out his cell phone and started tapping on it. Grace did not look over. She was busy examining the gardens that lined both sides of the walk. Spotlights, hidden inside shrubs beyond them, threw a charming light along them and the cobblestone path. Grace paused to take a photo with her cell phone.

  “She obviously likes the nighttime design,” Kane said.

  “They’ll steal from anyone, anywhere, anytime,” I added bitterly.

  “They’ve already admitted that,” Kane said. “We’re here to find out what they maybe aren’t admitting.”

  The couple went to their rented car. Benjamin did not open the door for Grace and went straight to the driver’s side. Either she didn’t approve of chivalry, they’d been together a longer time than I thought, or he just didn’t give much of a damn about her. But before either opened their door, they had a conversation across the hood of the car and then apparently changed their minds about driving, and they headed down the sidewalk together—still not holding hands.

  “So what do we do, follow them on foot or in the van?”

  Kane was quiet, contemplative.

  “Captain Health?” I said.

  “Following them isn’t going to tell us what we really want to know, is it?”