To Kill a Matzo Ball (A Deadly Deli Mystery) (7 page)

Grant went on. “The good news, if there is any, is that there may have been a run through. A competitive marksman likes to reverse-engineer a target, if possible. Stand in front of the bull’s-eye and look back—gauge refraction of the glass, glare, obstructions, that sort of thing. So your shooter may have been among the customers this morning.”

That was good news if the customer had charged a meal. And owned a gun legally. And didn’t have someone who would lie to give him an alibi. A friend in New York was one of the Manhattan assistant DAs. It was alarming how often a perfect storm of evidence was needed to get grand juries to sign on the dotted line. And that was New York. In Nashville, where cousins or neighbors were often the alleged perps, Grant once told me that the task was even tougher.

When I got back to the deli, I made an early dinner to compensate for skipping lunch. I did not return the call from Candy Sommerton or Robert Reid of the
Nashville National
or anyone else who wanted an interview. The sun set on me playing solitaire on the computer and feeling very, very trapped. The office felt darker than it was, street sounds—never dramatic, not like in New York—being muted by the big wall of plywood and steel up front. I had closed the back door so the cats now had to stay cooped up. The strong smell of the disinfectant I’d used on the floor added to the choking claustrophobia.

I got up suddenly, as though I’d decided something. I hadn’t. It was just caged-tiger impatience. I stepped into the hall, failed to find any satisfaction in my surroundings. I went back to the office, minimized the card game, rubbed my eyes, and noticed the cards from Agent Bowe-Pitt and Banko Juarez.

And then something occurred to me. It was a ridiculous something, but it was better than nothing. As my
bubbe
used to tell me,
Az es zenen nito keyn andere mayles, iz a zumer-shprinkele oykh a mayle.

If a girl has no other virtues, even a freckle can be considered one.

I had just such a freckle, one I was betting Detective Bean had not noticed.

Banko Juarez was staying in the relatively new, inexpensive Page One Hotel on Commerce Street. The name had nothing to do with newspapers—I wasn’t sure how many of the clients would’ve gotten the reference anyway. It was all about making sure guests were reachable via all media “24/7 and beyond,” which, of course, made no sense. The gimmick was, if someone came to see you, even if you were out, the front desk texted you. That included vice cops, I guessed, given the girls I saw parked in the bar and the
alter kakers
bellying up to chat with them. There were also young people who had rented the multi-bed specials I saw advertised on a little billboard out front: a no-frills room with up to six cots.

I had called the etheric cleanser and made a $150-an-hour appointment to stop by the Page One at six. I also checked his website. Banko appeared to be a serious student of all things astral and beyond. He had posted videos and essays and financed his studies by going around the country by public transportation—vehicles that were also labs, I deduced—and doing his number on peoples’ energy centers. It sounded like a lot of Sanskrit-cum-Buddhist mumbo jumbo to me, but then, I’m sure that a stranger observing an Orthodox Jewish service would feel exactly the same, seeing the men swaying, speaking aloud, and then whispering, all of them turned out in their finest Hebraic wardrobe with
tallit
over their shoulders and stringy
tzitzis
under their shirts and
tefillin
draped on their arms and heads.

There were no house phones at the Page One. The desk announced all visitors. Banko told the buxom concierge with pale skin and straight black hair that reached her shoulders and screamed “wig” to send me up to 816, on the top floor.

“Ah, the penthouse suite,” I said to the young woman, whose name tag said Bananas.

“They are all penthouses with the lights out,” she said, with a deep southern drawl that surprised me. I wondered if that was part of their advertising campaign.

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said.

“If you would ever like to—” she began seductively.

“Not my inclination,” I said.

She smiled politely. “Nor mine, honey. I was going to say if you would ever like to visit our other spiritual guests, let me know. We have a group discount.”

“Clever. Who would these others be?” I asked because I was really, really curious who the other parts of this package deal would be.

“There is an acupuncturist who specializes in opening the libido and a hypnotist whose field is sexual inhibition and past-life regressions.”

“I didn’t know the two were linked,” I remarked.

“Everything is linked to sex,” Bananas suggested.

“Even your name,” I said.

She smiled overly sweetly. “That is my name. I was born to a poor mom who earned her living making banana fritters. Grew it into a nice business.”

“I see. Well, that’s quite a team upstairs,” I admitted, getting out of that little faux pas. “Do you punch a card or something?”

“No,” she smiled. “I remember faces.”

I stopped by the convenient ATM machine in the corner before going up. My face was red and my neck flushed from having inadvertently insulted the concierge. I couldn’t wait to get out of the lobby, but I had to wait for a well-dressed, chunky older man to finish pulling five hundred bucks in twenties from the machine. I wondered what he was getting for that. It seemed high just for an hour of sex, low for a night’s worth. But as a sixty-minute time machine? Maybe it was a bargain.

This guy, in his fifties, gets to feel like he did when he was in his twenties, only the girl has no hard-stops. It’s not just a time machine but an alternate universe machine, where Mr. Three Piece Suit is an irresistible young stud.

That could be an ad campaign for a new credit card: MasterCardAndSubmissive or BangOfAmerica.
“We give you credit for studliness
.
”
If only the law would get out of my way, I could turn the economy around in a week.

I went upstairs with enough cash for the hour, though if the etheric cleanser was as sincere as his website claimed, I had a feeling I could convince him to give me a bunch of extra hours for free.

Banko opened the door a moment before I knocked. That didn’t surprise me: the elevator had a particularly loud “bing,” no doubt to let occupants know that a guest had just arrived. Banko shut the door and followed me in. There were candles on the night tables, the wicks blackened. The air smelled of vanilla. I noticed the computer was active on the desk, with a jagged green line scrolling right to left like a polygraph.

“Is that me?” I asked.

“Yes indeed,” he said. “I isolated it from the vibrations at the deli. It told me you were here.”

“You didn’t hear the elevator?”

“Of course. But that could have been anyone.”

I bent in front of the laptop. This whole thing could be for show. The line could belong to anyone. “Has this been a profitable visit for you?”

“I don’t make a lot, but I don’t lose anything,” he said. “Unless I stand around talking.” He said that with a little laugh.

“Right.” I rose, pulled the money from my front pocket, counted out an hour’s worth, and put it on the desk. “I’m not here for a cleansing.”

He stood by the little kitchen area, which had the minibar, sink, and coffeepot. “What do you want?”

“Did you hear what happened after you left?”

“No,” he replied. Banko seemed genuinely perplexed.

I told him what had occurred and that maybe the police had not contacted him yet because he had paid in cash and they were looking at credit receipts first. He did not seem alarmed by the prospect of being interviewed, though I told him that, too, was not why I had come.

“I need to know, just between us, if this stuff is real.”

Banko looked at me suspiciously. “Why would you think otherwise?”

“For one thing, the hotel has you bundled with an acupuncturist and a hypnotist,” I said. “For another, I worked on Wall Street. I assume everyone’s selling snake oil.”

“Is that what I was doing in your restaurant? Putting on a show? Did you see me passing out business cards or soliciting business?” He was a little indignant. It didn’t seem to be an act. He shook his head. “Civilians.”

“Say again?”

“You lump everyone together. New agers, yogis, ghost hunters, alien abductees. It’s all the same crazy soup to you.”

“Hey, the hotel did it. Now who’s generalizing?”

He came over, swept up the money, handed it back. “I am not responsible for how the hotel ‘bundles’ its services.
My
research is real. The planes below and above the astral are real. Etheric cleansing is real. You can have that for free.”

“I don’t want it for free,” I told him. “I want it to be real. I need it. I just wanted to be sure.”

The hand with the money remained extended. His expression remained suspicious, guarded. “Explain.”

“My explanation has two parts. First: it’s possible that someone involved in the shooting was in my restaurant this morning, casing it out.”

“Why is that possible?”

“Because the police believe it,” I said. “But let’s assume it’s true. You might have recorded that individual on your computer. There could be an elevated spike, like you just said you saw with my arrival.”

“I
did
see it.”

“Yes, sorry. Anyway, that’s part number one. Part number two is a little more interesting. Did you ever try matching someone’s etheric lines?”

He hesitated before answering, the pale blue eyes hooding over. Maybe crashing in a hooker hotel had put him on guard against entrapment.

“This is on the level,” I said. I took out the photo of the flyer. “The police found these stuck to trees along a stretch of highway. I thought, if you’re on the level and we drive around that part of town, it’s possible we might ID whoever put them up. You could make legal history, getting a conviction based on someone’s etheric readout.”

Banko took the photo from me. He read the flyer, shook his head slowly. “I don’t like hate.”

“Who
does?
”

“The haters,” he replied. “They’ve got all this anger stored in their body, fueled by their chakras, their astral barriers trapping that like a psychological greenhouse effect. They get rid of it by hating.”

He lost me at “chakras,” but I was glad to see him engaged. I wasn’t sure that my plan—if I could call it such, since it was as sketchy as a doodle—would get us anything other than driving around, calling attention to ourselves, and possibly drawing the SSS out as a result. Still, it was better than sitting at the deli playing solitaire.

“So I repeat my question,” I said. “Have you ever tried it?”

He finally lowered his hand and looked at me. “Yes. In places like this.”

“Sex motels?”

He nodded. “That’s why I come here. This is much nicer than most, you know.”

“I didn’t, but that makes sense. It is in the heart of the city, not on some rural route.”

“Upscale, downscale, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Here, I get highly elevated readings—at night, downstairs, in the lobby, at the bar. Then I go down the halls and see if I can find those same individual etheric lines in the rooms.”

“Wow. That’s a little Peeping Tommy. Don’t get me wrong, it’s impressive, but also intrusive.”

“Maybe, but I need the elevated energies to develop my next gen software.”

“Why not go to a gym or a sports event?”

“I’ve tried going to arenas and stadia, but they don’t let me use my laptop,” he said. “At a gym I get physical exertion, but not elevated interpersonal connections. That’s what I require to break through the astral barrier. The person-to-person connection.”

I sighed. This was gibberish. It wasn’t necessary that I understand it, but I wanted to. I pulled the chair from the desk. “Mr. Juarez, I’ve got you for another fifty minutes, give or take. I want you to explain this from the top in lay terms.”

I sat. He paced as he spoke.

“You understand that we have energy, electrical impulses in our cells, in our muscles, in our minds.”

I nodded. I remembered that much from high school biology. That and reproduction. As long as he didn’t go anywhere near mitosis or the nitrogen cycle, we were good.

“Human beings have nine forms of existence,” he went on. “There is, at the root of everything, the etheric plane. That’s the ideal form of ‘you’ inside your mother’s womb. It includes all your genetic information, residue from past lives—or racial memory, if you prefer—stored in your mother and all the positive energy your parents provide while you’re in the womb. Your physical body is poured into that etheric shape. So you’ve got the physical plane and the etheric plane, and on top of those are the emotional and mental planes. Those are all packed inside a shell we call the astral plane. Got that?”

“I do.” And I did. I could buy the etheric stuff—it sounded a lot like a soul to me—and the rest I knew I had. Maybe not in harmony, but I knew they were there.

“The astral plane is sort of where the ‘self’ ends and interactions with others begin,” he said. “Beyond that are planes we don’t need to get into now, aspects of ourselves that deal with all of humankind and the cosmos. My area of interest is what gets through the astral barrier. In order to communicate with others, even to simply look at them, we expend or take in energy. That has a particular color, a particular vibration. It can be measured.”

“How?”

“As I told you this morning, by me.”

“Oh, right. You’ve trained yourself to receive?”

“More like ‘to trap.’ When my hands are cupped, like so”—he held them as if he were holding a crown waist high, contemplating his ascension to the throne—“I sample the energy that’s around me. There is a sensor in my USB port that reads me.”

“How?”

“It’s got several ant-like antennae suspended in the center,” he said. “They vibrate when I do. I wrote the program and built the plug-in. It’s pretty impressive.”

“Sounds like it,” I said, trying to hide my renewed dubiousness over fluttering hairs and a sudden feeling that this was a
behema
-sized waste of time. But there was always the way, way outside chance it could work.

“I gather your program matches incoming etheric energy with whatever you’ve recorded?”

“Exactly. What’s great is that it doesn’t even have to filter out my own vibrations because those are part of the original recordings.”

“That
is
great,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound too sarcastic. “Do you have any appointments for tonight?”

“One, at seven. She ‘liked’ my Facebook page, saw that I would be here. I get at least one gig from that in every city I visit.”

“God bless social media,” I said. Actually, that got me thinking: I wondered if I could just ‘like’ the High Holy Days so I wouldn’t have to go to temple, deal with the crowds. “Do the vibrations have to be fresh?”

“You mean, recent? As in, the person having been in a place lately?”

I nodded.

“No, they have to be there now. The device simply isn’t sophisticated enough to record energy residue. I’m not one of those idiot ghost hunters.”

“Right.” It was marginally reassuring to know that even among these kooks there was a pecking order of craziness. “So what do you think about going out there, seeing if we can pick up the vibrations of bad guys who may be in the area?”

“For what kind of fee?”

“Free.”

He made a face. I didn’t.

“What you get from this experiment is proof that your system can be used in crime fighting,” I told him. “If that happens, I see a reality TV series in your future.”

He stopped pacing as he considered the proposition. “Hmm. That
is
a possibility, isn’t it?”

“Damn right.”

He thought a moment more. “All right. I’ll do it.”

“Swell. I’ve got a sympathy call to make. How about I pick you up at nine?”

“All right. Where are we going?”

“Hadley Park, off Interstate 40,” I said. “A place where there are eleven trees.”

“Sounds a little vague.”