Black Cat Weekly #97

Chapter 5-1

byDetective Stu Mertz noted that it smelled like Goldie’s Deli in the apartment. His partner, Detective Albie Green breathed in deeply and agreed. “Chicken soup and matzo ball,” he said. There was something else and he wrinkled his nose when he realized what it was. A faint odor that reminded him of boiled ham, and that certainly wouldn’t have come from Goldie’s. They didn’t serve treyf.

They found the victim, Ronald Friessen, in the kitchen, and Green had been right about the chicken soup and matzo ball, and in a way, also about the boiled ham smell. Friessen sat slumped in a chair, dead, his hands bound behind his back with plastic zip ties. A quart of chicken soup had been poured over his face and lay puddled beneath him. Small pieces of chicken, carrot, and celery trailed from his face to his bare feet. Friessen’s eyes were open, and his expression looked like he had died of indigestion, but that wasn’t the cause of death. What killed him was the matzo ball sticking out of his mouth. The medical examiner, Dr. Jonah Goodwin, explained that the large lump of matzo, which looked big enough to choke a horse, was more than big enough to choke Friessen.

“The killer poured scalding hot chicken soup over the victim’s face, and then pushed the matzo ball down his throat, blocking off his airway.”

“The soup couldn’t have come from Goldie’s then,” Mertz remarked. “Theirs is tepid at best.”

Albie Green shuddered over the thought that the boiled ham smell he had picked up came from the victim’s scalded flesh. “If we got you matzo balls from local delis, would you be able to tell me which one this came from?” he asked.

Goodwin gave him a peevish look. “What do I look like, a cook?”

“I’ll ask forensics,” Green said.

There was no indication that this was a robbery turned homicide. No witnesses either. Since it was past lunchtime and both of their stomachs were rumbling, Green and Mertz decided to take a tour of delis in the greater Los Angeles area and collect matzo ball samples, and maybe have a pastrami on rye and a Rueben sandwich while they were at it. At Sam’s on Vine, Mertz burnt the roof of his mouth on the chicken soup, and his matzo ball was certainly ginormous enough to choke a man to death. He waved over the counter guy.

“Is the soup always this hot?” he asked.

“Always,” the counter guy said proudly. He pointed to a sign on the wall that read: Warning! Our chicken soup is a three-blower!

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The counter guy pantomimed blowing three times on a soup spoon.

“Do you sell a lot of soup to go?” Albie Green asked.

“It’s our best seller.”

Mertz asked, “Give me a rough idea how many quarts of this stuff with matzo balls you sold today?”

“Dozens, at least.”

Green groaned. Even if they were to get a list of everyone who used credit cards to buy the soup, the killer could’ve paid cash. Still, there were certain procedures to follow. They’d get the list of customers even though cash customers wouldn’t be included, and they’d see if the crime scene lab could match up Sam’ matzo ball with the murder weapon. After the counter guy moved away, Green told Mertz the plan.

“That would only help us find the killer if he knew the victim,” Mertz said. “We both know this is the work of a deranged serial killer.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Come on, Albie. It’s been like clockwork now. Every six months we’ve been getting one of these twisted serial killers. First it was the Ice-Cream Scoop Killer, then the Chopped Liver Killer, and six months ago the Fruitcake Killer. And now it’s the Matzo Ball Killer.”

“We’ve only got one victim,” Green insisted stubbornly between bites of pastrami and rye. “Until there’s another body, this isn’t a serial killer.”

Mertz had blown three times on a spoonful of soup. He grimaced when he found the soup still too hot. “Fine,” he said. “Be that way. We’ll be finding another body soon.”

Green was still working on his sandwich but was also eyeing the deep-dish apple pie, which was looking tasty.

“You don’t know that,” he argued, although he wasn’t sure he believed otherwise. Something awfully strange was going on.

The lab identified Sam’s on Vine as the source of the deadly matzo ball. While the recipe for matzo balls was common among the local delis—matzo meal, eggs, salt, chicken fat (three of the delis substituted vegetable oil for this—and Green made a mental note to never set foot in those delis again), and baking powder—Sam’s was the only one to also add rosemary, which was present in the murder weapon. Green and Mertz spent the next two days looking into anyone who might’ve had a motive to kill Ronald Friessen, while Detectives Larry Trimble and Caitlin Grant interviewed Sam’s customers who had used a credit card on the day of Friessen’s murder. It was approaching dinner time on the second day following the matzo ball murder when Green received a call that there was another victim.

“I told you there’d be another one,” Mertz said.

“This is ruining my appetite,” Green groaned.

The new victim was a thirty-two-year-old hipster dude in Venice by the name of Sheldon Schwartz who, like Friessen, had a quart of scalding chicken soup poured on his face and a matzo ball stuffed down his throat. As with Ronald Friessen, there were no witnesses, and the two detectives decided to strategize over dinner at their favorite downtown LA Chinese restaurant. Mertz was shoveling kung pao chicken onto his plate when he casually suggested there had to be a mastermind at work.

Green at that moment had accidentally bit into a hot chili pepper and was pouring a glass of water down his throat. Sweating profusely from the hot pepper, his voice came out as a croak as he asked Mertz what he meant by a mastermind.

“Why don’t you wash your face first?” Mertz suggested. “You’re spritzing.”

Green waved a waiter over so he could ask for more water, and then told him to leave the pitcher. He wiped his face with a napkin and his voice was still a croak when he insisted that any mastermind talk was nonsense.

“These are all deranged lone wolves,” Albie Green said. “Maybe this Matzo Ball Killer was inspired by those other sickos to come up with a more perverse way to kill his victims, but there’s no one out there pulling the strings.”

“It wouldn’t be too hard to top the Fruitcake Killer,” Mertz said with a smirk. “Bludgeoning his victims to death with a stale fruitcake? Pretty lame, if you ask me. But we’re still going to need to talk with Creasley and Filken.”

Roy Creasley, the Ice-Cream Scoop Killer, and Scott Filken, the Chopped Liver Killer, were housed at the same maximum-security prison. They wouldn’t be able to interview Trent Davies, the Fruitcake Killer, since he died after being pushed off the roof of a fourteen-story building at the conclusion of a harrowing chase. It had been more than just a harrowing chase with Davies. The madman had broken into Albie Green’s house and gotten the drop on Green. He and his wife Mimi would be dead now if it wasn’t for his trusted bulldog Bowser. While the fiend Davies prepared himself a celebratory steak dinner in Green’s kitchen (and sticking the fruitcake in the freezer so it would be especially deadly), Bowser gnawed through the ropes binding Green’s hands. The odd thing was, they also had harrowing chases with Creasley and Filken, and in Creasley’s case, he had kidn*pped Mertz and was seconds away from using his ice-cream scoop on him before Green rushed in and saved him. In Filken’s case, he had abducted Green’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Meagan, and was seconds away from cutting her open and making chopped liver out of her vital organ like he had with his six other victims when he was stopped by Mertz.

Green had to admit all these harrowing chases, abductions, and last-second rescues were unusual, to say the least. Even though it seemed utterly preposterous, there was a chance his partner could be right and there was a puppet master at work—an evil genius recruiting serial killers and further, devising their bizarre methods of killing. Perhaps even helping them select their victims.

“We’ll talk to both of them tomorrow,” Green agreed.

* * * *

Roy Creasley tipped the scales at two hundred and eighty pounds, and at only five feet five, he was a cube of hardened flesh, almost as wide as he was tall. He sat across from the two detectives, his meaty hands manacled to the table, and Green was amazed at how much his round bald head resembled a flesh-colored bowling ball; even Creasley’s small dark eyes added to the illusion by looking like finger holes.

“If you want me to talk, you gotta first give me a bowl, a gallon of rocky road, and an ice-cream scoop,” Creasley demanded.

“We’re not letting you anywhere near an ice-cream scoop,” Mertz said. “We’ll give you a bowl of rocky road, but that’s it.”

Creasley flashed him a smile, his teeth the size and color of small corn kernels. “You can’t blame a guy for trying.” His smile quickly disappeared, and his expression became one of petulance. “And I’ll need hot fudge with the ice cream!”

Mertz agreed to the hot fudge.

“Deal,” Creasley said. If it wasn’t for the manacles, he would’ve crossed his butcher-thick arms in smug satisfaction.

It took an hour to arrange the ice cream and hot fudge, and the bowl was placed tantalizingly out of reach of the Ice-Cream Scoop Killer, and he didn’t appear particularly happy about that. In fact, he began pouting like a five-year-old about to throw a tantrum.

Green said, “You get the ice cream only after you answer our questions.”

“Then ask them already! The ice cream is getting melty!”

Mertz said, “Were you working with anyone?”

Creasley gave him a confused look. “What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I asked you. Did anyone help you with the murders?”

Creasley scrunched up his face as if he couldn’t understand why anyone would ask him that. “Why would anyone have helped me?”

Green, annoyed, said, “Answer the question.”

“No, of course not.” Creasley showed an indignant look. “I did them by myself.”

Mertz said, “Were you at any time in communication about what you were doing?”

“What?”

“Did you tell anyone about how you were killing your victims?”

“Why would I have done that?”

Albie Green reached across the table and edged the bowl of ice cream several inches further away from Creasley. “Answer the question yes or no.”

“No.”

“Did anyone help you pick your victims?”

“No.”

“Or suggest that you use your scoop as a murder weapon?”

Creasley smiled again, showing off his corn kernel teeth. “That was all my idea.”

Mertz asked, “Why’d you kill them that way?”

Creasley looked at him as if he were dense. “You can only scoop so much ice cream. How about it? Can I have my rocky road now before it turns into soup?”