To Kill a Matzo Ball (A Deadly Deli Mystery) (21 page)

Then came flying back toward me like a cannonball.

Limbs buckled and bodies whirled.

It happened so fast that Banko didn’t have time to react before one of those bodies, the one that answered the door, bowled him over like a duckpin. He landed hard on the computer that was lying on the bed.

I just stood there with a ball-gag in my mouth. My hands were free, but it took me a moment to realize that the man who had been holding me was no longer behind me. He had gone to help his friend, who went flying when the door opened. I saw a leg come through the door, the bottom of a sole find the burly man’s face, the round white head snap back hard, and then the flurry of punches and cries that sent the young racist to the cheap carpet.

A young man came straight in. That was the thing that had stunned me about the attack. It was perfectly straight. Dressed in jeans and a TSU sweatshirt, the attacker came through the door, shouting these wild cries like you see in martial arts movies. He knocked bully number one down with a straight-from-his-sternum series of punches, then kicked and walloped thug number two out of the way. In about two seconds, maybe three, he stood before me, the king of the
zetzes
.

It’s pretty sad that, even when he was undoing the ball-gag, I knew him only as “the guy who had a TSU sticker on his bicycle.”

“Thank you,” I wheezed, as he dropped the B&D toy to the floor.

He nodded sharply, turned to Banko. Thug number one was trying to get up, but he went back down when, without even looking at him, the martial artist placed a side kick in his jaw. I didn’t bother to shut the door. Other students had begun to gather in the hallway. A few cheered softly; some applauded. A couple took cell phone pictures.

I put myself between them and my savior. If there were other members of the SSS, I didn’t want them to know who had beaten up their comrades. I did that while I was shutting the door. The guy who answered it had been knocked far enough inside the room that I didn’t even have to move his legs to do that. He had also been knocked hard enough that his jaw was already discolored. Broken, I guessed.

No more hate speech for a while,
I thought with satisfaction.

The quick glance I’d had down the corridor also told me that the monitor wasn’t in much better shape. He lay sprawled like a broken jar of mayo, all white and drippy and still kind of collapsing rather than actually moving.

I turned back toward my trembling, wriggling captor. I picked up the rifle case that was beside him and set it against the head of the bed. Banko really did look like a carp on a hook. I had seen men afraid of Jewish women in my life, most of them cowed and some of them even terrified, but I had never seen a man so desperate.

“Don’t hurt me!” Banko wailed as the young man picked him up by the front of his shirt. “I’m not part of this group!”

I walked over to the twin bed. “Let me guess,” I said. “You’re just the IT guy.”

“Right! That’s right!”

“I should make you clap,” I said.

“What?”

“Clap once for yes, two for no. Like a trained seal, you miserable, rotten bigot.”

“I’m not!”

I moved my face closer to his. The martial artist helped by pulling him up higher. The kid’s balance was amazing; he adjusted his knees slightly, lowered his center of gravity, and was able to life the dirt bag higher.

“
A klog is mir,
what was I thinking?” I said. “You’re just a misogynist who makes money from women who sell their bodies and likes humiliating those who don’t. That taste in my mouth isn’t plastic, it’s Gulden’s!”

“No, no, I’m not like that at all!”

I sneered but refrained from spitting. I pulled the computer out from under him and tossed it onto the other bed. I looked at the young man who was holding him. “What’s your name? Or should I just call you the Lone Ranger?”

“Christian,” he said.

That was almost funny, under the circumstances.

I looked around, found the ball-gag, and stuffed it in Banko’s mouth. “I’ve heard enough for now. Let’s just keep him here till the police arrive.”

Christian snapped off Banko’s belt, flopped him on his face, and tied his hands behind him. I asked him if he were sure he wanted to stay. He said he did. I hoped he didn’t get in trouble for his heroics. When I texted Maggie from the car and asked if she had a guardian angel she could send over, I hadn’t actually thought I would need one. Now I was not only glad but also humbled. The lessons Lung Wong had taught him, had given his own life for, were clearly something very special.

And it was pretty clear, now that I thought about it, that Lung Wong
had
died protecting me. It was that thought which kept my soul from sinking as I looked at the Nazi flag tacked to the wall above Banko.

I was sure someone outside had already called the police. I was surer when my tush vibrated again. I looked at my phone. The previous message was from Maggie, telling me that help was just a few steps away. The new message, a voice mail, was from Grant. I texted Maggie first, blessing her from the bottom of my
kishkes
and thanking her, before I called Grant back. I had a good idea what he wanted.

“Yes,” I said. “The nine-one-one is about me.”

“I’m en route,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Thanks to one of Ken Chan’s students I am.”

The call was interrupted by the arrival of campus security. I hung up on Grant and was instantly alert as I recognized the faces of the men who stood outside the room. This looked like it would be round two . . . but that worry existed only for a moment. The sadness in the eyes of the foremost guard—the name on his tag said Baker—was not quite like anything I had seen in our previous encounter. He bent low over the student who had opened the door. He felt his neck for a pulse, then bent low to listen to him breathing. The other two guards stood behind him, motioning students to move along. Christian stood beside me, on alert, lithe and strangely fluid as a cobra.

Baker asked one of the other men to call for an ambulance. “I don’t want to move them to the infirmary until they’ve been checked out,” he said. The guard then noticed the handgun on the floor. He sighed, rose slowly. His eyes shifted to me and to my guardian. What he said next was as surprising as anything I’d heard since my female gym teacher hit on me: “I’m sorry this happened to you.”

Christian didn’t relax his stance—the gun was still on the floor, still within reach—but I did.

“Thanks, but why?” I asked.

“This is my son Vince,” he said. “We were looking for him that night when you were in the park. I knew he was into this crap and might have been attending one of their secret rallies on campus, but I had hoped—” Baker’s voice stopped suddenly as his eyes took in the room. “I had hoped he wasn’t being influenced by this other cracker. Apparently, I was mistaken.”

“You knew about the German flag?” I asked.

Baker nodded. “I didn’t like it. But I also didn’t want to push him away. I wanted him to have somewhere to turn.”

“Is he . . . I mean, do you think he—?”

“Is he the gunman?” the guard asked when I couldn’t quite get it out. “That’s not his rifle,” he nodded to the other side of the room. “I pray he is not.” Now his eyes shifted to Banko. “Is that the guy who was seated with you in Hadley Park?”

I nodded.

“Is he behind this?”

“More than likely,” I said.

Banko yelled into the ball-gag. The guard looked at me curiously.

“He had that in my mouth,” I explained. “How’s the hall monitor—the one who didn’t stop the boys when they brought me in with a gun at my back.”

“He’s unconscious,” Baker said. “Lots of blood around his nose.”

“There is a police baton beneath him,” Christian said. “He attempted to use it.”

“Yeah,” Baker said. “Colin isn’t very perceptive.”

I heard sirens outside. Baker stepped back in time to see the police enter the corridor. Grant paused in the doorway only long enough to make sure he didn’t contaminate any evidence when he stepped in. Another detective I didn’t know remained in the hallway, directing police to start gathering students for interviews.

Grant’s expression was one of earnest concern. I was glad to see it, and him. I took a moment to gather my wits and turn to Christian.

“I can’t thank you enough for what you did,” I said. “Sorry you had to get caught up in this.”

“I didn’t ‘have to,’” he said. “It was my choice. And it was the right one.”

There was nothing sentimental about what he said. Nothing personal. I could have been a stranger or an abused dog. But he
had
come running and put himself in harm’s way. That was all that really mattered.

“I’m going to wait in the hall,” he told Grant as he stepped around him.

Grant nodded as he himself stepped around the two men, who were beginning to stir. He took me to the back of the room, by the window, to make room for the medics. He also wanted to keep an eye on Banko, who was wiggling around and groaning.

“So this is the SSS,” he said. “Your catch, your trophy.”

“I would rather it not have been,” I said.

“I’ll have Detective Nørgaard take it all down. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t hurt.”

“Maggie Chan had one of the kids from the martial arts school keeping an eye on me,” I said. “It was hairy, but only for a little while.”

His mouth turned slightly on one side. “For all you knew, he might have been one of the people who abducted you.”

“I trust Maggie,” I said. “I don’t think that was her doing.”

“It wasn’t,” Grant said.

“What?”

“We were just about at the bottom of that when we got the bulletin about the attack here,” Grant said.

“You going to share or torture me?”

“For now? Torture. I’ll be able to tell you a little more when Detective Bean gets back.”

“Where’d she go?”

“I’ll tell you that, too—later.”

Just then, the giant milk pudding of an FBI agent appeared in the doorway. He was togged-out in his biker look for his gig at the hotel. He looked in with an expression of satisfaction.

“So we’ve got them both,” he said, looking at Banko. “I just arrested his partner, Bananas Bundy. She admitted being a stand-in for the gunman on the roof of the building across from the deli. They knew the window would be reflecting glass then and needed a mock target. They also know it would be tough to see
out
then, giving them cover.”

“What made her fess up?” I asked.

“I found news chopper footage when I went to check on what Candy Sommerton may have shot,” he said. “It was a totally routine traffic report, but when we processed the image, there she was without her wig.” He turned to Grant. “She also admitted that she had fingered your officer, Marcuz Frank, to the SSS because he was harassing their brothel. Mr. Juarez here recorded his lines and tracked him to where he and his girlfriend were parked. When we go over the books, I think we’ll also find that the hotel was the source of financing for the group.”

“Hookers and neo-Nazis, a class operation from top to bottom,” Grant said to Banko, who was no longer struggling but just lying there, deflated. This was a guy as
famisched
as they came.

As if more evidence were needed, Bowe-Pitt remarked that the only African-American employees at the hotel seemed to be hookers. My guess, and that of the G-man, was that there would be an investment group somewhere in the shadows that took them to other white supremacist groups.

I went out in the hall to the rec room, where the police were setting up on the tables to take statements. As I walked into the spacious room, Richard Richards came running in. His face was flushed from running, but it was big and open and strangely
happy
. He was actually smiling by the time he reached me.

“I just heard on my radio,” he literally blurted out. “Then you didn’t throw in with that whoremaster !”

“Me?” I asked. In the time it took to enunciate those two letters, the clouds cleared and the sun shone down, and I understood Richard Richards and his sudden standoffishness. “You thought I was involved with criminal activities?”

“You kept on hanging with a guy who—you saw, right there on his computer—had a stable of fillies.”

That was so endearingly bizarre I didn’t even know what to say. I guess I would forever be Gwen Katz of Manhattan: it never occurred to me that someone would be so morally offended by me that he would turn on the ice. But here was that man, acting as though I’d just walked off a C-130 after two years’ deployment in Afghanistan.

“I was just helping to find some killers,” I told Richards. “God, I sold my interest in the hooker hotel months ago.”

That stopped him short. I actually had to tell him I was kidding.

But now it was my time to talk to the tall, warm hunk of Danish named Detective Casper Nørgaard, who had the kind of blond hair and blue eyes that would have been the envy of Banko Juarez and his crew. For fifteen minutes, though, he was mine. And it was a happy quarter hour of telling him everything that had happened, despite the wedding band and a reference to one of his kids asking if she could take classes at the Po Kung Fu martial arts school.

Sometimes, just plain normal was just plain satisfying.

Grant conferred with Richards while I gave my interview. Like Detective Bean, Detective Nørgaard used an iPad. With voice recognition. I spoke, it transcribed. I signed the tablet and was done.

Thinking of Detective Bean, I couldn’t help but think how she would be sorry she’d missed this big bust. I told Grant to give her my thanks for her part in this.

“You can tell her yourself,” he informed me.

Although it was probably safe to pick up my cats and go home now, that was not where I was headed. Because Grant still had work to do, Richards agreed to bag the rest of his class today and give me a lift—to Po Kung Fu Academy.

The ride from TSU was quite different from the ride we had taken earlier. Richards was open, chatty, and smiling. I was actually kind of annoyed; I was the same person I’d been two hours ago, but his perceptions were different. Everything about our dynamic had been out of my control and based on a fiction. And people wonder why I’m cynical about dating. Besides, my mind was back at the dormitory with Detective Nørgaard. It was good to have a pure girl crush, even if it wasn’t going anywhere.

Richards did not know why we were headed to the school, since Grant had not shared that information. But I had a good idea what was up when we arrived. Through the window I saw Detective Bean and several cops. I saw a woman I did not know; she had an infant in her arms. I also saw Maggie holding the hand of a man I had not laid eyes on before. It didn’t take a detective to know who that might be.

Richards waited outside, in his car. As I walked in, all eyes turned toward me. The ones I saw first, the ones that were like black olives in a salad, were those of Aunt May. She, and a young man beside her, were in handcuffs. Those eyes held me only for a moment, however, as Maggie came between us, pulling a tall older man toward me.

“They told me you were all right,” she said, with open, honest relief.

“As all right as I ever get,” I smiled, as she embraced me lightly.

My genetic self-deprecation was lost in the chasm between the cultures. Maggie stepped back, drew the man forward, and said, “Ms. Katz, this is my husband, Ken Chan.”

Ken Chan was nearly six feet tall, slender, with gray hair worn in a crew cut and a long, tranquil face creased with experience and age but not in a way that suggested wear and tear. Just wisdom.

“I’m honored,” I said sincerely, shaking his hand.

He smiled warmly and bowed slightly. “You have done a great service to our family.”

That puzzled me. A lot. I had gotten the fake Ken Chan killed—because, clearly, he
had
seen the gunman, possibly in the napkin holder, possibly blocking the sun as he rose to take his shot. Lung Wong had acted to protect me.

“I’m not sure what good I could possibly have done . . . ,” I said, and then my eyes drifted to Auntie May.

Detective Bean had followed the Chans over. She took me by the arm and walked me toward the door.

“May Wong is the one who abducted you,” Bean said. “She and one of her sons.”

“Why?”

“To make sure you didn’t know that Lung was impersonating the real Chan.”

“But she told me about Lung the next day.”

“It seemed she was afraid that the truth was starting to come out anyway, and she needed allies. If she let you in on the ‘secret,’ she might win your sympathy, “ said Bean. “All of this was about limiting the size of her financial exposure. If Lung could not be found before the triads were broken in Chinatown, she was off the hook for the wife and child.”

“How much could that have cost her, given the price she’s going to have to pay now?”

“She’s facing fifteen to sixty years for this. She just fessed up to more, though, which I suspect is her way of plea bargaining.”

“More—about what?”

“She was heavily invested in massage parlors in Chinatown, which got hit hard during the recession. She also lost a bundle with a broker up there,” she looked at her iPad, “fellow by the name of Sammo Biau.”

I grinned. “That little
dreykop,
” I said. “She had an office near his, denied having known him. I knew she was lying. He was a big
macher
in that hood.”

“I have no idea what you just said, but I’ll want to talk to you about it—in English.”

I shook my head sadly. “So she was in debt, and one or two kids and spousal support arrangements would have put her under.”

“Just one of them was a burden she couldn’t handle.”

I knew that feeling, not from my own finances but from people around me who got hit hard in 2008. That “common wisdom” about Wall Street having sucked dough from the wallets of Main Street was pure fabrication. Despite what the politicians said as they tossed cash at the too-big-to-fails and union businesses, everyone got hurt except for those institutions.

Bean continued. “When it became clear that the school was a target, I called the NYPD to find out what I could about calling off the New York connection. They put me in touch with Chan.”

“So it was you who called him from the NPD.”

“Correct. I urged him to get back here, since it was possible his wife and students were potential targets of the Muis, the gangsters, or the SSS—it really didn’t matter at that moment. All that mattered was that someone was gunning for them. He agreed to come back as soon as he pulled the trigger on a gang leader he was following.”

I looked away from Bean. “So are the woman and child Lung’s from New York?”

She nodded.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “He helped take down the triads—
and
he brought the widow and child down here?”

“Point of honor,” she said. “He is doing what Lung would have wanted. If he didn’t have to join the family business, Lung would have stayed in New York and supported her.”

“I like this honor thing,” I said.

Bean agreed. “He’s a special man. When he heard about the shooting, about the danger to his family, he stayed focused on what he needed to get done at that moment before coming back. Maggie was even cooler. She knew too that whoever the target was, she had to hold this end together.”

“That was why she was calling from pay phones,” I said. “In case the triads had someone down here, listening or watching.”

Bean nodded.

The detective went back to where Auntie May was being held. I decided it was time to go. I would come back some other time, to thank Maggie again and hopefully fill the order Lung Wong had placed for the postponed belt test.

I walked into the night and thanked Richards for waiting, but told him I’d like to walk back. He asked if I was sure. I told him I was. He said he really wouldn’t mind taking me back. I didn’t tell him to take his puppy-dog enthusiasm and Sunday school morality and
shtup
it. I just started walking.

I was feeling lighter and better than I had in a long time. It wasn’t just having the sniper off my back and my kidnapper heading off to prison. I felt as though the last few days had also been an emotional crucible. I wasn’t sure what, if anything, had actually been solved. I was still happily estranged from Grant, suddenly disinterested in Richards, and suffering teen-like palpitations from that
shagetz
love god back at the dorm.

I guess that was the point. Nothing had been solved, but I was still smiling.

For me, that was a pretty big victory.