Free To Kill a Matzo Ball (A Deadly Deli Mystery) by Delia Rosen

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