To Kill a Matzo Ball (A Deadly Deli Mystery) (3 page)

“That’s something I could use here,” I said. “You’d be surprised how many marriages, business relationships, and first-time novelists decide to go crazy over lunch.” I noticed him looking at the matzo ball. “It’s okay. There’s no egg, no animal products. We use gluten as a binder.”

“I am not a vegan. I would eat egg if not for the cholesterol.”

He picked up the shrimp fork Luke had put on the plate, then did something deft with his fingers that turned the fork tiny ties-down. He poked it into the matzo ball and picked it up. He continued to look—at the matzo ball? I couldn’t tell.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

He was silent, suddenly contemplative. I looked more closely at him and noticed that he wasn’t looking at the matzo ball but at the napkin holder directly behind it. The silver side of the freshly filled container showed a distorted reflection of what was behind me, outside the window in the busy street. I couldn’t make anything out. Just as I turned to see what had gotten his attention, Ken Chan threw himself to the floor, an arm extended across my chest, taking me with him. The matzo ball flew skyward, the fork still in it, exploding when it hit the side of the counter—but not due to the impact.

It had been shot.

It’s a funny thing about chaos. It happens right away, surrounds you before you are even consciously aware of any danger. There’s tumult, a rumbling, a darkening, or a noise—like the shot that sent the matzo ball flying—and then it’s all around you, like a sewing needle that binds everyone with the same long thread.

I saw it in New York whenever a motorcycle would rev suddenly or a truck would cough or a car would swerve or a nutcase would scream in a small bodega or some homeless guy would suddenly decide to veer in your direction while you were walking the dog.

In this case, there was an object in motion and the loud crack of the gun. Both stimuli triggered the same sudden, purely physical fight-or-flight reaction in everyone around me. Everyone chose flight, and sensibly so.

As carefully as I could remember before panic partially wiped my brain, Chan had moved before the bullet even struck. He took me to the floor and lay on top of me, and that was why his back instead of my front took the rest of the gunfire. I could feel him pulse as each one hit, his thin frame twitching against me. Ironically, each was like a little heartbeat in different parts of his body.

I could hear screams from inside the deli, from the street, from my own throat. My cries had more of a whimpering quality as blood quickly pooled on the floor, warming and soaking my left side, and Ken Chan went from warm, breathing, and purposely protective to lifeless but still positioned between me and the fusillade.

The gunfire seemed to last for a week. I’m sure it wasn’t more than five seconds. My first thought was that I didn’t feel wounded or numb anywhere; my second thought was for my staff. I rolled my savior onto his back, his dead eyes staring up, as I kicked my heels back against the blood. I grabbed a chair to my right, got on it, looked around.

“Everyone! Answer me!”

It was stupid, but that’s what came from my mouth. My hearing was heightened by the crack and crash of the glass. There was a flood of mixed, indecipherable, high-pitched cries, chairs scraping the floor, loud shouts, and horn honks through the broken window, so I looked around. I saw Thom rising from behind the register, which was untouched by the shooting. Customers had crouched or dived for cover on the floor, but no one appeared hurt. A.J. was standing behind the counter, near the hallway, frozen in place with a tray of beverages. Raylene was just coming down the hall from the lavatory. Luke and Newt had been in the kitchen.

The attack had been localized on the table where we were sitting. The front window was shattered, and the street was empty, people evidently having bolted for cover.

I heard screaming. It was Thom, and she was stepping over customers and shoving aside chairs people had vacated to get to me. I saw her, saw she was looking at my chest with horror, saw that my apron and sleeves were soaked with blood.

“It’s not mine,” I said, hearing my own cottony voice, as though someone else was speaking. I patted my chest, sides. “I’m okay.” Nothing hurt except my elbow, which had hit the tile floor.

“Lawsy,” Thom said when she saw the body of Ken Chan.

I pulled off my apron, draped it over him. The bag of chips was beside him, torn open by a bullet, the particles floating in the widening puddle of blood turning from green and orange and yellow to red.

I heard sirens. I felt hands on me, Thom’s hands, pulling me away from the body.

“Come to the office,” she said.

“No.” I backed against a stool, sat on it, leaned back against the counter. “I’m okay.”

“You just survived a drive-by shooting.”

That refocused my attention. “Is that what it was?”

“That’s what it was. Just like when I was a little girl,” Thom said. “Supremacists fired at us from their pickup while we worked our farm.”

“Did you see them?”

“Only their tail end as they drove away,” Thom said.

Luke brought me water. I ignored it. I told Thom to see to the others. I was vaguely aware of Raylene telling the few customers they should wait for the police to provide statements. I couldn’t stop looking at the dead man. Whether by instinct or—more than likely, as I replayed the moment in my mind—by design, he had saved my life. I was overwhelmed as I realized how I had been avoiding men for the last few weeks, yet one had just shielded me, someone he barely knew. Maybe my perspective had gotten a little self-centered.

Speaking of which, by the time Detective Daniels arrived I—and the dead man—were the only ones left in the restaurant. The humming in my ears had dissipated, and every sound seemed super-sharp now, like digital. Especially the sound of footsteps on shattered window glass.

“Wait out here,” I heard a voice say. I looked over as Grant walked in the door, which a uniformed NPD officer was holding open. Grant was a solid six-footer with broad shoulders and a square, determined jaw anchored by a strong, determined chin. His eyes found me at once. He seemed concerned and relieved at the same time.

He motioned for the rest of his team except for the medic to wait as he came over, carefully sidestepping anything in the immediate vicinity of the body. He stepped between me and the body, his back to me, as the doctor squatted, took the man’s exposed wrist between his fingers—it was already a bluish white—and made sure he was dead. He laid it back down and shook his head. Grant motioned him off. He turned to me.

“Were you hit anywhere?”

“No.”

“Any breaks, cuts—?”

“I’m all right. He protected me.” I rolled my chin in the direction of the body.

“Who is he?”

“Ken Chan,” I told him. “He has a martial arts school. New in town, just six months out of New York.”

“I know the school,” Grant said. He took me gently by the upper arm. “I’m going to get you to the ambulance, have them check you out.”

That was probably a good idea, but my mouth didn’t want to work at that moment. I nodded.

Police tape was already up, so the onlookers and picture takers and cell phone videographers were back a distance as I was walked out to the ambulance. I don’t crave attention, and ordinarily the gawkers would have made me very uncomfortable. But I was alive. As I began to realize how close I came to that no longer being the case, the more I didn’t care about the crowds—and the more my heart began to drum and my breath to speed up. Grant went back inside when he had handed me over to an EMT. She sat me on a gurney in the ambulance, which is where it really hit me: the young woman had barely gotten the band around my arm to take my blood pressure when I started to panic.

“I need to get out,” I said.

“Ma’am, we really need to make sure nothing’s broken or—”

“No. I’m fine. I’m leaving.”

In the past year I’d slipped on water, grease, slices of tomato, and a pork chop. I’d taken worse falls than this. Still, when I stood, it was unsteadily. Her partner, who was a five-foot
petsl,
put his hands on my shoulders to convince me to sit back. I rolled my arms and shrugged him off; he held up his hands in the universal “it’s your ass” sign and turned to enter the session in a laptop on the medicine cabinet behind him.

I walked cautiously down the little fold-out stepstool. The
tzimmes
inside didn’t have to do with the fall but with the event itself. As I reached the sidewalk and turned to my left, I saw, for the first time, my shot-up deli window. It was ugly, unfamiliar, dead. I had a vision, probably from my great-great relatives having talked about it, of broken Jewish storefronts in Germany before the war. I felt nauseous, something that didn’t happen often. Police were photographing the pavement, the asphalt, were walking around with tape measures that stretched from the window to imaginary points at the curb. That’s the sad thing about urban police. They know the drill.

Back inside I saw Grant and his team surrounding the body, collecting evidence. The rest of the staff was in the kitchen talking to another detective, one I didn’t know, a woman of color. I walked that way, not wanting to be around the body. The woman was talking to Newt by the back door, which was opened to the fenced-in area and dumpster. Luke and the rest of the waitstaff were standing behind the stainless-steel table where I’d scooped out the cottage cheese. They were huddled, round-shouldered and whispering, like Shakespearean conspirators. Thom was at the other end of the table, in front, leaning on one hand and clutching a napkin in the other. She was staring low, at nothing, while her mouth moved. In prayer, I was certain.

I walked over to her and touched the sleeve of her floral-pattern blouse. She grasped my hand without looking at me or stopping her silent prayer. She touched the napkin to her eyes. I hugged her arm lightly.

Newt came over and quietly informed me that the detective would like to talk to me. I nodded, squeezed Thom’s hand—noticing now that my fingers were swollen and hurt—and went over to the open door. The woman’s eyes were fresh, alert, sharp like those of one of my cats. She was about six-one and built like she belonged on a beach volleyball team. Her hair was straightened and pulled back in a very severe ponytail. She was probably in her early thirties but carried herself as though she was older, battle-hardened. I saw a long scar on the back of her right hand when she extended it.

“Detective Jill Bean,” she said.

“Gwen Katz.” She had a grip like giant pliers.

“Ms. Katz, I’m sorry to have to do this now, but we need to talk while the memory is still fresh.”

“A half hour ago I was talking to a man who’s dead now. That’s pretty fresh.”

“I understand, but sometimes there are details—”

“This event is like canned goods,” I said. “It’ll keep a very long time.”

I hadn’t intended to make a joke, but it sounded like one and it fell flat. Detective Bean gave me a mild if-you-say-so look before asking if I wanted to sit. I told her no. I leaned against the jamb with the smell of the kitchen to my right and sun-ripened trash to my left. It fit the situation. She turned on her iPad voice recorder and asked me to tell her what happened in as much detail as I could remember.

As my staff quieted, apparently listening to every syllable I uttered, I told the detective everything from the moment Ken Chan walked in until Grant walked me out. She did not interrupt. When I was finished, she asked what I had seen when I looked out the window.

“I saw the tail end of a car, a motorcycle, and the front of another car,” I told her. “There were flashes, like sunlight hitting the window, and then the room turned over as Mr. Chan threw me to the floor.”

“Did the flashes originate in one of the vehicles or on the sidewalk?”

“It was from above the street, definitely not the sidewalk.”

“How far above?”

“I think—about the height of a delivery truck.”

“A rooftop, perhaps?” she asked.

“Maybe. Yes, probably.”

“You’re sure.”

“There was a pedestrian—she looked across the street. Up, I think.”

“So there was the tail end of a car, a motorcycle, the front of another car,
and
a pedestrian. They all may have seen the shot?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What did this pedestrian look like?”

“A woman. Short. With a dog. She was dressed in jeans and a white blouse.”

“Were there earbuds? Was she listening to music?”

“I don’t know. Most likely. Everyone does.”

“Okay. You’re sure there was nothing else.”

“Yes. Isn’t there surveillance video?”

“We’re checking,” the detective said.

“You say Mr. Chan threw you . . .”

“It was more like he stuck his arm out and pushed me.” I showed her, with my hands, how we were sitting at right angles to one another.

“He clotheslined you,” she said. “It’s like when you run into a clothesline you didn’t see and it knocks you flat on your back.”

“That’s pretty much what happened,” I agreed, “except that I wasn’t moving before that. He provided all the force. His arm didn’t look strong, but it was.”

“Had you ever met Mr. Chan before today? Know anything about him?”

I shook my head. “The first contact I had was when he phoned this morning.”

“He called first?”

“Yes.”

“What showed up on your phone? What name?”

Good question. I had forgotten about that. “May Wong,” I told her.

She wrote that down. “The number is still on your phone?”

I nodded.

“Did he say anything about his personal life?” she asked.

“He said he left New York because of pressure from gang members.”

That got her attention. “Did he mention any affiliations?”

“He said something about the triads.”

“You say he was ordering food for a belt test,” she said. “When was that for?”

“Tomorrow night.”

I choked on the words; I don’t know why. It hit me behind the eyes, and I started to sob. The detective stepped back to give me space, and I turned away. I looked out at the clear, sharp sunlight smeared by my tears. Maybe I had just realized that this wasn’t about me or even Ken Chan. What was supposed to be a happy time, a joyous place, would now be a scene of mourning. I wondered suddenly if I should cater whatever kind of memorial service they would have. Would that be a welcome gesture or in poor taste? I would have to find out.

“Was he married?” I asked.

“Yes, with a young daughter,” the detective told me. “We have someone with them now.”

“Those poor people.”

“What about other impressions?” she asked. “Did he seem relaxed, attentive?”

“He sampled the food, wanted to be sure the menu would please his students and their guests, and—”

“What?” she asked as I hesitated.

I was replaying the moment in my head. Then it hit me. “No, he wasn’t looking at the matzo ball. I thought he was, but he was looking just past it. At the napkin holder?”

The detective scrolled backward on the tablet, which was auto-transcribing what I told her. “You said he was looking at the matzo ball. Now you think it was the napkin holder?”

“I don’t know. It didn’t seem like he was seeing something, actually, but thinking something. I just don’t know.”