To Kill a Matzo Ball (A Deadly Deli Mystery) (15 page)

“Copy that,” he replied.

There was a two-story building across the way, one that stretched nearly the full length of the block. Because of a setback in the rear, it was easy to pull over a trash can or milk carton and get up to the roof of the first level, then take the external fire stairs on the sides to finish the ascent. Or, as the officer had suggested, it was accessible via a two-hander: one person boosts another up. They had clearly cleaned up after themselves as well, again.

Grant fixed those strong eyes on me. “We can move you somewhere a little more secure,” he said. “A hotel or even a hospital room.”

“I’ll be okay, I guess, as long as I stay out of the doorway,” I said. “I wonder, though, why whoever it is keeps shooting? Why not a homemade bomb or something?”

“Easier to trace, especially if it doesn’t work,” Grant said. “And then there’s collateral damage.”

“Like Ken Chan wasn’t?”

“That was out of the shooter’s control,” he said. “I’m going to have a talk with the officers, make sure they don’t get pulled away for any reason. You sure you’re all right?”

“As well as a gal with a bull’s-eye on her back can be.”

He smiled, then left. Thank God he was being professional Grant and not personal Grant. I needed the room and freedom to
plotz
inside. I shut the door, slid into the chair, and stared at my ham on a hard roll. I had no desire to finish it. I had no desire to move. A fear of my own mortality, of possible lurking death, caused my hands to start shaking on the armrests. I gripped the worn leather tighter.

And lost it.

I bit my right forearm so no one would hear me, really shoved that sucker in my mouth.
What was happening? How had I come to this place in my life?

The tears were like a squall, hard but short-lived. My crying spells were usually like that. I poured out the pity, then got my act together to do what needed to be done. One thing I had always been able to do was muster a good offense to serve as my defense.

Someone was at the other end of that rifle. Someone who might be related to a person who had been in my deli two mornings ago. Whether or not I knew names or noticed what people were wearing or carrying, I saw every face in the place. About eighty percent of those people were known from credit cards. The police were interviewing them. The other twenty percent were in my head—buried by the shooting.

I had an idea. It might not be a good one, but it was better than sitting here. I went to the safe and got a couple hundred dollars in cash.

Before Grant left, I asked him for a ride. I figured there was no harm: if he saw me go out, on foot, or hail a cab, he would only follow me anyway.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To the Page One,” I said.

“
Why?
”

I trampled his horrified expression by heading for the door and replying, “To search for clues.”

Grant did not come inside with me. It would scare the clientele who might recognize him, and it wouldn’t do his reputation a world of good. Though, I thought, it might loosen him up a little. One of his problems is he was always wound tight. Yes, always.

My friend was behind the counter, the big-bosomed, up-selling concierge. She gave a sly grin when she saw me.

“Another reading?”

That surprised me. Banko said—

Banko lied,
I realized.

“No,” I replied. “You mentioned a hypnotist?”

“Dr. Cagliostro.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Everything about me is quite real and very, very serious,” she said, pushing her chest forward a little.

Cagliostro was the nom de guerre of eighteenth-century Italian occultist Giuseppe Balsamo. It had the right sound for the job, I’d give him that. “Can you call up to see if he has an opening?”

She let the smile flower. “Your name again?”

“Gwen Katz.”

“Just a minute,” she said and placed the call. She did not take her eyes from me the entire time. I looked away, noticed I was in the crosshairs of a security camera, wondered if she was sending one of those images to Cagliostro’s room since she hadn’t said anything after hello and giving my name. About a half minute later she hung up and told me to go to room 826.

I went up and stopped at 816 en route. I listened. I didn’t hear anyone inside and decided to call. I punched in the number and listened again. It did not ring inside. I hung up before Banko could answer.

All of which means nothing,
I reasoned.
He could be out. He could be doing a reading
. I continued down the hall.

Dr. Cagliostro was not what I was expecting. For one thing, she was a woman. For another, she looked about ninety. Her skin was paler than that of the lady at the desk and she was as thin as a meaty skeleton. She wore sunglasses, but she was not blind. She was dressed in white slacks and a white blouse. She wore a red shawl and was barefoot. Her white hair was pulled into two tight braids. She had no makeup on, not even lipstick on her wide mouth.

“Come in,” she said.

I entered, and she shut the door behind me. The room was not like a hotel room: she obviously lived here and had dressed it to suit her Victorian tastes. It also smelled of cigar smoke. Hers, I guessed, from the box of Havanas on the dresser. There were ornate hooded lamps that cast low, yellow light and equally arch furniture. The drapes were heavy and red and looked like they were on loan from
The Phantom of the Opera.
What really caught my eye, though, were a pair of framed diplomas for Dr. Adrianna Cagliostro. One was a psychology degree from Columbia University, 1940. Another was a degree in psychiatry from Johns Hopkins.

As my
bubbe
used to say,
Klugheit iz besser fun frumkeit. Wisdom is better than sanctimony.

“Sit there, please,” the woman said in a voice like sandpaper. “Place two hundred dollars on the table beside it.”

I counted out the twenties, then sat in a massive wing chair. She scooped the bills in a clawed hand and stuffed them into her breast pocket. She sat in an armchair beside the larger seat.

“What do you wish to know?” she asked.

“I own a deli in town,” I said. “I want to see who was eating there two mornings ago. I want to see their faces again.”

“Shut your eyes,” she instructed.

I obliged. It wasn’t that much darker with my lids closed since the largest lamp, beside the bed, was directly in front of me. But the ruddy amber light
was
relaxing. I was surprised, but not startled, when I heard her voice close to my ear.

“Were you sitting in your deli that morning?” she asked.

“In my office, yes.”

“You are sitting in your office now,” she said. “But not today—that morning. Look around. What was on your desk?”

“Unpaid bills and an inventory sheet,” I said. “I was going to get to them later.”

“Pick up the inventory sheet. What was on top?”

“Potatoes,” I said. “We had a run on
latkes.
I needed them badly.”

“Potatoes,” she repeated. “Potatoes. Look at the writing, but don’t speak.”

I looked. I saw my scrawl on the legal pad.

“Look at the next item, but don’t speak.”

It was bread. That was always in the top five. Rye on top, white next, whole wheat after that. Then hard rolls.

“Next item,” she said.

Kosher salt. I was going to get that at the grocery store.

“Next.”

Napkins. People were slobs. Old ladies stole them to use at home. I always needed them.

“Next.”

Coffee. That was partly my fault. I drank enough to float a . . . a matzo ball.

“
A matzo ball,
” I said. In my head, I saw the one on Ken Chan’s plate.

“Shhh,” the woman said. “Next.”

Milk. Eggs. Butter. The usual. I saw my customers slathering butter on pancakes, pouring milk in coffee . . .

“
They use so much,
” I murmured.

“Put the list down and look around the office again,” she said.

I did. I saw the photos. The computer. The door—

“See the light as it was that morning.”

I have no windows, but there was light in the hall. It was crisp. I had a big window, still. I smiled. The world had not yet gone wonky. The window was there, the diner was open for business.

“Get up and go to the dining room,” she said. Her voice was a whisper, floating in my ear, in my head.

I got up, heard the squeak of the chair, walked into the diner. There were people—

“What do you see?” she asked. “You may speak now.”

“Customers,” I said. It was the damnedest thing: I could
see
them. I was there.

“Walk among them.”

I did. I knew the deli so well that my brain effortlessly reconstructed it. I was sliding between the tables, slipping around chairs, looking at coffee cups to see if they were empty and plates to see if they were finished—and also at faces. The regulars, like our mail carrier Nicolette, bus driver Jackie and her girlfriend Leigh, who fixed my car, bank teller Edgar Ward, advertising exec Ron Plummer, and Brownie, Blondie, and Big Red of the Repeat Returners Club. There were tourists: you could always tell them from the tour book, the iPads with maps, and the cameras. Then there were the local newbies, of which there were not very many. People around here tended to have their favorite pit stops and watering holes. They liked having a waitstaff who knew how they wanted their eggs or fries or coffee.

I tried to look at the new faces. I hadn’t really spoken to any of them, so I didn’t really remember them. I reached the end of the dining area, turned around, came back. I saw bodies—

“Relax. Slow down,” the voice beside me said.

Right. I was pushing myself.
How did she know?
Because she’s done this before,
shmendrick.
Or maybe my closed eyes were darting around, like I was in some kind of mad REM sleep. Which maybe I was.

I looked at the people sitting by the counter. I didn’t know two of the people. But one—one had a sweatshirt I recognized. I’d seen the logo on a bicycle parked behind Chan’s school. TSU.

The guards were from TSU. But this wasn’t a guard. A student? That was no help. A lot of students ate at the deli.

Then I stopped short. I saw myself. And sitting with me was Ken Chan. I think I moaned, but it sounded far off.

“What’s wrong?” the voice asked.

“I see someone who is about to die.”

“What is he doing?”

“We’re talking,” I said. “Laughing.”

I hesitated, looked around. Chan was reaching for the matzo ball. He forked it. He lifted it over his cell phone.

“You are smiling,” the voice said. “Is there anything you need to see there?”

“Yes,” I told her. “Just a moment.”

Everything seemed to be in slow motion. I looked at him, at his eyes, at his hand, at the napkin holder. I heard his phone vibrate. He glanced at it, then looked away—to his right, my left. I saw the napkin holder just as I had seen it that morning. There was nothing to see in the polished aluminum, just a blur. He wasn’t looking at that.

“His ring,” I said. “He’s looking at his wedding ring!”

Then the hand became blurred, and there was a flash. I gasped, and the hypnotist took my hands and shook them lightly and told me to come to her.

I did, at once. I actually felt myself pulling at those spindly fingers to get back. I opened my eyes and looked around the room. It seemed strange to be where I actually was and not where I had imagined myself to be. I can’t say I had actually
remembered
myself being in the restaurant or I couldn’t have seen myself. It was just an elaborate construct of memories that the woman had helped my brain pull together.

I thanked her and left the room quickly. I didn’t even bother with Mr. Etheric Cleanser. I wanted to tell Grant what I saw, not because I expected him to put any credence in it but because I needed to talk it out.

Grant was sitting in his car half a block from the hotel so as not to scare the clientele. I sat in the passenger’s seat, sipped some of the coffee he had bought himself, and told him what I saw . . . what I thought. He was skeptical, as I expected. And he humored me, which I also expected. But that was okay. I needed a sounding board, not an advocate.

“Assuming there’s anything to it, Gwen, what do you think it means?”

“Why would Ken Chan have been looking at his wedding ring?”

“Why would any man?”

“Maybe he felt blessed,” I suggested. “Maybe he’d screwed up and had an affair and regretted it. Maybe he got Miss Mui pregnant and was wondering what to tell his wife? Maybe he was regretting that he was married to his wife and wished it were Chingmy’s ring he was wearing.”

“Maybe he suspected there was a contract on him and he was saying good-bye,” Grant suggested.

I gave Grant a look. “He had given me a catering order. We were just talking happily about New York. He was about to eat one of my matzo balls. Why think that?”

“We recovered his phone,” Grant said. “There was an unanswered call at that time. It was from”—he caught himself as he was about to confide in me, changed course, and said, “Someone we interviewed.”

“Come on, Grant,” I said. “Who? What’s going on?”

“I can’t tell you about the status of an investigation.”

“Why? Do you trust me any less than you did a couple of months ago?”

“No,” he said. “But what I did then was wrong.”

He was right about being wrong, but it still ticked me off. “Grant, I’m being shot at. If not
at,
then around. I’d like to know if I’m the target!”

“I don’t know.” He had been looking down. Now he looked directly at me. “And going to see crazies like this one, like Mr. Juarez, isn’t going to get you any closer to answers. You need to hunker down and stay out of sight as much as possible.”

He was right about that too. But we both knew what was wrong about the cornerstone of that approach: me.

“If I were that kind of person we would never have met,” I said. “I would be safe in the city I grew up in, a city I know. Over the last fourteen months I feel like I’ve always had a target on my forehead.”

“That’s not uncommon in public service jobs—”

“Because I’m Jewish,” I told him.
God, what a lump this man could be
. “Just tell me if I’ve got the SSS gunning for me or whether I’m just caught in the crossfire of some Chinese vendetta.”

He was still looking at me. “I’ll say this,” he said after some consideration. “Both are potential triggers. Along with a third possibility.”

“A what?”

“The officer who was shot a couple of weeks back, Sergeant Frank. The only people who knew where he was going were cops.”

“The girl he was with? She knew—”

Grant shook his head. “First time there.”

“Ow. But what does that have to do with me?”

“Agent Bowe-Pitt believes the SSS had a hand in that. Like any secret society, who knows where they are connected?”

I took a moment to process the information. Then I looked back at Grant, into his eyes. I could see that he wanted to share that with someone—his concern, his sadness, his disappointment. “Thank you for telling me that. I’m sorry.”

“The PD’s good folks, good apples,” he said. “Sometimes one has a worm. It’s bound to happen. I’ve been on edge leaving people at the deli—that’s why I’ve had two there, why I or Detective Bean has been trying to keep an eye on the place. Why I followed you.”

“I see. Thanks again. I’d like to go back there now, I think.”

“You sure? Like I said, there are other places.”

“I’ll be okay,” I assured him. “I’ll sleep in the walk-in freezer.”

For a moment he believed me. Then he snickered. “Just stay away from the doors, okay?”

“You don’t have to remind me. And you don’t need to sleep in your car.”

He snickered again. Now that he’d let down his guard, he was clearly on edge, not just about me, I suspected, or even the possibility of a rogue cop, but the fact that someone was shooting up the city and he had been powerless so far to make any headway.

We drove the short way in silence. He saw me to the door, shut it behind me, and spoke to the officer out front—perhaps sizing him up? Grant was nothing if not a good cop. Ironically, I think he was doing his own version of taking an etheric reading.

I retired to the kitchen, heard Grant crunching through the alley to the fence to talk to the cop there. Both officers were new to me; Grant obviously wanted to make sure I wasn’t being watched by the cops who had let a couple of bullets slip through and a gunman slip away. I shut the back door but did not bolt it. A minute later I heard Grant back around front, and I listened from my office as he talked to the forensics team that was just finishing up on the bullets and their trajectories. From his tone of voice—just the low, tense sound of it, not the words I couldn’t hear—I knew he wasn’t happy.

I shut the door and sat down to ponder the sketchy new information
I
had to work with: Chan’s ring and his wistful gaze, which didn’t seem to give me anything particularly helpful, especially if I wasn’t actually remembering it but imaging how I remembered it—perhaps prompted, subconsciously, by my abductor asking me what else Chan could have been looking it. Then there was a student at the deli and at the school, which hardly counted as a novelty in either place. And finally we had a possible leak in the thin blue line, which could be dangerous to all concerned and might also be what Agent Bowe-Pitt was keeping
his
eye on.