Dopplegangster (38 page)

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Authors: Laura Resnick

BOOK: Dopplegangster
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“Why bother, when there’s so much
necessary
alarm to be had?”
“—but before he left to see his superior, Lucky said that it’s not entirely impossible that you and I are now in some danger from the Corvino family.”
“Oh. Right. The thought had occurred to me.” I said, “Also to Lopez. When he got here tonight, he wanted to take us into protective custody. But now I think he wants to put me in a loony bin and you in a maximum security prison.”
“That sounds most incommodious.”
“Indeed.”
“Lucky says that since you’re a dame and I’m an old guy, and we’ve never whacked anyone, we won’t be high on the hit list if the two families go to the mattresses—”
“You’re learning his dialect, I see.”
“—but we should nonetheless take reasonable precautions until he knows exactly what the Corvinos’ intentions toward us are.”
“Such as?”
“He recommends that I keep the bookstore closed for the time being. And since I can ward this building against mundane intruders—as well as their firearms—you are to sleep here tonight.”
Actually, that sounded fine by me. It had been an exhausting day. The tense journey to Brooklyn, Danny’s murder and Vinny’s strange story, followed by a mind-numbing evening of doing more reading about apparitional bilocated doppelgängerism . . . All capped off by
two
awful confrontations with Lopez, during one of which I had watched him get decapitated. All in all, I realized I’d have trouble just crawling as far as the nearest bed now, never mind making it all the way home to be murdered in my own apartment by Corvino hitters.
Max said, “Hieronymus’ rooms on the third floor are vacant, if you think you would be comfortable there.”
“Hieronymus.” I grimaced.
“The accommodations are modest, but adequate for your temporary needs, I think.”
I thought about it and gave an involuntary shudder. “Oh, I don’t think I want to sleep in a bedroom that was recently inhabited by a demented young wizard who would have wound up killing half the city if we hadn’t, er, sent him away.” Remembering what we had done to Hieronymus made me think of Lopez again, which made me feel anxious and weepy. “My nerves are frayed enough as it is, Max. I’ll just sleep on your couch.”
He nodded. “Nelli usually sleeps on the couch, but I feel certain that she would be pleased to relinquish her usual place to you, given the circumstances.”
“I’m wiped out. I think I’ll go straight to bed.” I stood up. Nelli, who’d been sitting nearby, rose to her feet, too, and yawned. I asked Max, “Are you coming upstairs now?”
“In a little while,” he said. “I need to meditate and focus my strength to ensure this building is well protected for the rest of the night.”
I nodded, turned, and walked to the back of the shop. Nelli followed me. I opened the stairwell door so we could ascend to Max’s sparsely furnished apartment on the second floor. I’d only been there once before, but I knew where the bathroom was. I went in there, turned on the light, and conducted a quick and very basic nighttime toilette. Then I poked gingerly around the apartment for a few minutes in search of a blanket. I found a worn but clean cotton quilt that was folded up and lying in a cedar chest in Max’s monklike bedroom. I took it back into the living room, turned out the light, and lay down. I would sleep in my comfortable knit dress. The couch sagged a little, but was relatively comfortable. Unfortunately, though, only days after her arrival in this dimension, it was already redolent of Nelli. I would definitely need a shower in the morning.
Nelli didn’t seem to mind my being in her usual sleeping place, but she mistakenly thought the couch was big enough for two. Without warning, she cheerfully climbed on top of me and started settling herself into the cushions with contented little snuffles, impervious to my attempts to shove her off. After a brief argument which didn’t seem to faze her a bit, I decided that as long as I could breathe, I was too exhausted to care about retaining feeling in my legs. And although I thought at first that her snoring would keep me awake all night, it wasn’t very long before my own fatigue overcame the noise. I sank into oblivion and slept like the dead until late the next morning. I didn’t even hear Max come upstairs and go to bed, nor go back downstairs again to resume his work sometime after sunrise.
And as is so often the case, getting enough sleep for the human brain to function effectively made a tremendous difference. The following day, I woke up knowing who the killer was and why Lopez had been targeted.
20
 
“T
he Widow Giacalona?” Max said when I confronted him in his laboratory with my revelation.
“Yes! I was so exhausted and upset last night, I couldn’t see it at the time.” The truth had hit me within minutes of waking up. I had raced downstairs without a shower, my hair in a rat’s nest and my clothes stinking of Nelli, to put the facts before Max. “And it’s probably a good thing Lucky’s not here. I don’t think he would listen to reason. He’s in love with her, you know.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Who hates the Corvinos and the Gambellos enough to kill men in
both
families? Elena Giacalona. Why? Because a Gambello killed her second husband, and a Corvino killed her third.”
“I can see how that might stoke vengeance in her heart,” Max said sadly.
I started pacing as I reviewed the next point. “Johnny Gambello was a useless
momzer
who was no threat to a rival family. Danny Dapezzo, a Corvino capo, even played cards with him, for goodness sake! The Corvinos had no reason to whack him. And Don Victor had forbidden any of the Gambellos to kill him. But who hated Johnny enough to want him dead? The woman who’d lost her first husband because of Johnny!” I told Max, “Anthony Gambello died horribly, leaving Elena a widow, because Johnny masqueraded as Anthony while having an affair with a violent drug lord’s girlfriend.”
“Good heavens!” Max said.
“The night before last, when I got to St. Monica’s a little early for the sit-down, I told Elena that Lucky and I had encountered an apparition of Johnny after his death. And
she
tried to convince me that’s not what I had seen, that I was mistaken about the timing.”
“But isn’t that what Detective Lopez thinks, too?”
“Yeah, but that’s because he thinks I’m delusional.”
“Might not the Widow Giacalona also think you’re delusional?”
“Might not the Widow Giacalona,” I said, “be trying to cover up the trail of her handiwork by insisting I saw the real Johnny Be Good and not an apparition?”
“It does sound feasible.”
I continued, “Elena wouldn’t spare Johnny just because he was under the Shy Don’s protection, the way others have spared him. It’s hard to believe she cares what the old man wants, and easy to believe she’d like a chance to make him grieve. After all, Victor Gambello not only ordered the death of her second husband, he also tried to strangle her for the sin of marrying a Corvino!”
“Zounds!”
I recalled thinking at one point during my conversation with her that Elena didn’t look wholly sane. I had thought it was excessive religious fervor. Could it instead have been homicidal mania?
“Who would be crazy enough to
want
to start a new Corvino-Gambello war? Who would do something so dangerous and destructive?” I concluded, “The widow who hates both families so bitterly!”
“It is a most convincing theory,” Max admitted. “Is Detective Lopez investigating her? Is that why he has been selected as the next victim?”
I sat down suddenly, feeling sick and guilt-ridden. “No, that’s my fault.”
He blinked. “How is that possible?”
“I told her about Lopez. That he was a smart, honest, hardworking detective who was investigating the case. And although I didn’t mean to, I think I gave her the impression that he and Lucky were cooperating on the investigation.”
“Oh.”
“Lucky,” I elaborated, “who murdered her second husband.”
“And between her loathing of Lucky and her fear that Detective Lopez could pose a serious threat to her plans . . .”
“The following day—yesterday—Lopez’s doppelgangster suddenly appeared.”
Max frowned. “But not Lucky’s.”
“What?”
“Why did she duplicate Detective Lopez before Lucky?” Max mused. “Indeed, why did she kill Charlie Chiccante rather than Lucky? It sounds as if Charlie played no direct role in her sorrows, whereas we know that Lucky did.”
“I assume she’ll get around to Lucky,” I said. “We’ve got to stop her before she does. Let alone before she duplicates Lopez again and curses him with certain death!”
“When I saw her at St. Monica’s,” Max said, “she did not strike me as a patient woman. To say the least. And her hatred of Lucky was, er, energetic. So I find it puzzling that he was not her first victim. Nor does he even seem to be her fourth intended victim.”
I thought about this for a moment. “We talked yesterday about the killer gaining psychological power over his—
her
—victims with the weirdness of these murders. Maybe she’s enjoying toying with Lucky, building up the anticipation. Maybe she has intended all along that he’ll be her
final
victim, rather than her first. And that by the time he sees his doppelgangster, it’ll terrify him witless.”
“Hmm. Yes, I can easily believe that of the person behind these killings. As I’ve said before, this seems to be a subtle and devious individual.” He frowned. “But I find it
less
easy to believe such patience and planning have been exercised by the emotional, volatile, direct woman whom we saw in that church.”
“We hardly know her, Max. She could be acting, to conceal her true nature.”
“Ah! Yes.” He thought it over. “
Yes
. Certainly my sense of our adversary is that this is someone quite capable of concealing his—or
her
—nature from others.”
“So what do we do now?”
“The sorcerer—or sorceress—creating these doppelgangsters must have a workshop or laboratory. At the very least, an elaborate altar of some sort. And finding this would give us conclusive evidence that the widow is indeed the killer. It would also enable us to destroy her means of creating any more of these deadly creatures. And such a discovery may also lead us to any remaining doppelgangsters roaming the city so that we can dispatch them.” He nodded decisively. “Ergo, we must search the widow’s abode.”
“Her home?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know where she lives,” I said.
“It seems likely that Lucky would know.” His gaze met mine. “And I don’t think we should deceive him about our reasons for asking.”
I sighed and said, “He won’t like this.” But I pulled out my cell phone and called the old gangster.
“Esther!” Lucky said when he answered his cell. “Are you at Max’s?”
“Yes. Where are you?”
“With the boss.”
“Still?”
“I’m about to leave. He’s agreed to talk by phone today with the boss of our mutual acquaintances.”
I frowned. “The boss of our mutual acquaint . . . Oh! You mean the don of the Corv—”
“No names on the phone, kid,” Lucky admonished.
“Huh? Oh. And, er, the other boss? Has he also agreed to have this conversation?”
“I’m still workin’ on that,” he said. “But luckily, after what happened to the departed yesterday, there’s a few boys in that camp—I think you know them—who are urgin’ their boss to consider it.”
I puzzled this over for a moment, then realized he meant that some or all of the Corvino soldiers whom I had recently met—Fast Sammy Salerno, Mikey Castrucci, Nathan, and Bobby, as well as Vinny Dapezzo—were telling the famously dapper Don Carmine Corvino that the Gambellos might not be responsible for Danny’s bizarre death.
Lucky continued, “But it’s a very delicate situation, and everyone’s real jumpy. So if anyone else should happen to wind up dead, things are gonna go up in smoke around here.”
“I see.”
“I’m heading over to St. Monica’s to talk to Father Gabriel about Charlie’s and Johnny’s funerals. Then I’ll come back to the bookstore.”
“The funerals?” I said. “I thought the cops didn’t want to release the bodies?”
“Yeah, they’re still draggin’ their heels, but they can’t hold the bodies forever,” he said. “They must have strong stomachs at the police morgue. Do you know how much a corpse stinks after a few days if it ain’t been embalmed?”
“No, and I don’t want to know,” I said firmly.
“So how we doin’ at your end with solving our problem?”
“Better,” I said, meeting Max’s anxious gaze. “We have a suspect.”
“Yeah?”
I threw caution to the winds and used her name.
As expected, Lucky was utterly appalled by my theory. He interrupted me with angry arguments and protests so often, it took me three times as long to explain my reasoning as it should have taken. After I had laid it all out for him, he remained adamant in his denials.

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