To Kill a Matzo Ball (A Deadly Deli Mystery) by Delia Rosen Read Free Book Online Page B

weren’t standing so far back that I burned my tuchas twice on the coffee machine.
    “Call if you need me or if you hear or see anything,” he told me.
    “This hasn’t exactly been reassuring,” I told him.
    “Sorry. We deal with information. Those are the facts and the suppositions.”
    “Fine. But before you go and before I stay, do you have any reason to suspect that my home may be a target?”
    “We have to assume it may be.”
    There were enough qualifiers in that to make me feel like I was talking to the Duchess of Wonderland. “What I mean is, I have to go back and get my cats, some clothes, and I’d like to take a shower. That should be safe enough, right? In and out?”
    He considered that. “I was planning to go out and have a look around your neighborhood, at the neighbors,” he said. “If you can leave now—”
    So the answer was no, it’s not safe. I took another slug of coffee. “Let me just get my keys. You can follow me.”
    “I’ll go on ahead,” he said. “I’d like to be in the area when you get there.”
    “All right,” I said.
    He nodded a good-bye, then left. Watching him was like watching a low, solid storm cloud move across the city. The door opened and shut quietly, letting in a flash of sunshine that was like lightning. Then I was alone in the dark, dealing with the fear that had suddenly replaced my sorrow. With that feeling came a renewed sense of What the hell am I doing down here? I loved my staff, but they were culturally foreign to me and still employees. I enjoyed my customers, but they didn’t know pastrami from corned beef. Ex-pats? Whenever I met them, I clung like they were the Messiah. That should tell me something. I didn’t belong. I didn’t want to be here. I shouldn’t be here. I wasn’t having fun.
    You aren’t beholden to anyone, I reminded myself. Why don’t you sell the place and leave? But I knew the answer even as I asked the question. Because you don’t really have anywhere to go, anything or anyone to go to.
    I looked at Agent Bowe-Pitt’s card. It listed a landline, a fax, and his cell phone under his name. It seemed official. If he was trying to lure me to my house to kill me, he’d gone to a lot of trouble. Especially when he could have just busted into my “invasible” home.
    I decided that this was not the time to make impulsive decisions. Instead, I would take the time to figure out which of my bubbe Jennie’s grandmotherly sayings applied: A shlekhter sholem iz beser vi a guter krig or Kolzman es rirt zich an aiver, klert men nit fun kaiver.
    A bad peace is better than a good war or As long as one limb stirs, one does not think of the grave.
    I put Bowe-Pitt’s business card on my desk, beside that of Banko Juarez, then I took a turn around my wounded but cleaned-up deli. The air was heavy with Lysol. Except for that, without the staff, without the customers, without the daylight or the city intruding, the deli was very much me. It was my hard work that made it grow from just above break-even to solid profitability. It was my personality in the design of the menu, the place mats, the local paint-by-number flea market paintings on the walls, the improvements and changes and decorations I had brought to it over the past fourteen months.
    I glanced down at the photograph, at the words, at the arrogant hate. And a third phrase came to my intellectual New York feminist Jewish brain.
    Shtuppes.
    Shove it.

Chapter 5
    My home was a forty-year-old colonial that my late father and his brother had shared on the brilliantly named Bonerwood Drive. I shared it with the cats, some of my New York furniture, and, I’m told, a clutch of African-American Civil War laborers who were interred somewhere beneath the cellar. I wondered what Banko Juarez would make of them. I’d already tried witches, and you may recall how that turned out.
    The mutty cats were transplants from New York. They were my loyal friends and companions during the acrimonious