Doppelgangster

by Laura Resnick

  “Do you both have so little faith in my talent?” I demanded. “You think I can only get this role with the help of extortion or magic?”

  “What?” Lucky said. “No!”

  “No,” Max said. “Of course not!”

  “I was just tryin’ to help.”

  “I merely hoped to lend you my assistance, as you lend yours to me.”

  “In that case,” I said, “wish me luck, guys. And just stay out of it, otherwise.”

  “Ah! All right,” Max said. “As you wish. Good luck!”

  “You shouldn’t say that to an actress,” Lucky chided Max. “They’re very superstitious, these theatrical types. You gotta say, ‘Break a leg!’ Ain’t that right, kid?”

  I smiled at Lucky. “That’s right. It’s the accepted phrase.” I added to Max, “But I’m not that superstitious, so I accept wishes for good luck in any form. Though the best wishes in the world will be wasted if I can’t even get the audition,” I grumbled. “I’ll have to try calling Thack again later.”

  I also hoped his other client would agree not to sue the production company, since a lawsuit might put a damper on Thack’s ability to get C&P auditions for his actors. And I really wanted that audition, since my immediate professional future consisted only of waiting tables. I found that so depressing that I resolutely turned my thoughts to something else.

  “Did you say there’s something in book?” I asked Lucky.

  “Hey, that’s right! I did.”

  “Ah, you found something?” Max asked.

  “I gotta give credit where credit’s due.” Lucky gestured to Nelli. “This familiar of yours, Doc? She’s workin’ out okay.”

  “She chews things,” Max said in an aggrieved tone.

  Nelli snorted and gave herself a thorough shake. The propeller-like motion of her enormous ears made me fear I’d get injured if I stood too close to her.

  “What’s in the book?” I prodded.

  Lucky extended his arms to hold the volume well away from his aging gaze as he read aloud, somewhat haltingly, “ ‘A bilocated individual can be in two places at the same time. After replication, the two portions of the human form may become widely separated from one another. The double—that is to say, the duplicate, the replicate—can be seen by others. It frequently speaks in a voice and performs actions identical to those of the real person. The clothes it wears are also replicas of the original clothing.’ “

  I looked at Nelli. She wagged her tail.

  I said to Lucky, “This is the book the dog found?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t say ‘dog’,” Max whispered, casting an anxious glance at Nelli.

  “I’m impressed,” I admitted to Max. “I know you conjured her and all that, but I really thought she was just a dumb mutt.”

  Nelli growled at me.

  “I apologize,” I said quickly. “I think it’s the ears. Are you sure you don’t want to rethink that part of your look?”

  The sudden chiming of bells indicated that someone was entering the shop.

  “Dr. Zadok?” a male voice called. “Maximillian Zadok?”

  “Yes?” Max rose from the table and went past the surrounding bookcases.

  I shifted uncomfortably under Nelli’s wounded gaze. “It was just a suggestion. Forget I mentioned it.”

  “You hurt her feelings,” Lucky said critically. “You should be more careful about what you say.”

  “At least I haven’t whacked any of her mates,” I snapped.

  Lucky grunted and glared at me.

  “Federal Express,” said the stranger by the door.

  “Ah! Excellent!” Max said.

  I realized the package must be the delivery of books about doppelgangers that Max was expecting from Jerusalem. Remembering that conversation made me remember the cab ride, which made me remember my ruined evening—which made me remember that I’d left my wrap at the church. After talking to Lopez by phone outside St. Monica’s, I’d been so stunned that I’d forgotten all about it until after I got home.

  So, while Max was opening his Federal Express package, I found a phone book and called St. Monica’s. I told the administrator who answered the phone that I had left an item of clothing in the crypt yesterday evening. She checked the church’s lost-and-found box but told me my wrap wasn’t there.

  “It’s probably still in the crypt,” I said. “I’ll stop by the church for it when I get a chance. Or if you happen to find it before then, would you hold it for me?”

  “Of course.”

  “My name’s Esther Diamond,” I said. “Father Gabriel knows me.”

  “I’ll tell him you called.”

  As I hung up, Lucky eyed the large, ornate volumes Max had unpacked, and asked, “Them’s the German books you been waiting for?”

  “This is marvelous!” Max said. “When I was young, it would have taken a year to borrow books from a colleague as far away as the Holy Land!”

  “Welcome to the twenty-first century, Max,” I said.

  Nelli sniffed the books with mild interest, then turned in a circle three times and lay down near Lucky.

  I returned to the subject at hand. “So based on what Lucky and I have been reading, I think that what we met with last night was a bilocated apparition.”

  “It says here,” Lucky added, referring to his book, “that this thing ‘cannot easily be distinguished from the real individual.’ “

  “Yes, that does sound like what we’re dealing with.” Max frowned thoughtfully as he nodded. “A form of bilocated apparitional doppelgangerism.”

  “Are we still sure it’s doppelgangerism?” I asked. “I know that Charlie saw his doppelgangster and took it as a warning of imminent death, but—”

  “So did Johnny,” said Lucky.

  “What?” Max exclaimed.

  Max and I gaped at Lucky. He looked pleased with the effect his statement had on us.

  The old gangster said, “Johnny Be Good saw his own perfect double before he got whacked.”

  11

  I said, “Johnny saw his doppelgangster before he died?”

  “Yep. That was one of the calls I made while you was reading and Max was downstairs. I talked to Johnny’s grieving widow.” Lucky rolled his eyes, and his ironic tone indicated that Mrs. Gambello wasn’t as heartbroken about her husband’s death as Johnny Be Good might have wished. “I just didn’t want to have to say this twice, so I was waiting for Max to come back upstairs.”

  “Well?” I prodded.

  “Johnny come home the other night, laughing and babbling about how he just seen a guy who looked exactly like himself. He was drunk off his rocker, like always, so his wife ignored him.”

  “So he saw it?” I suddenly felt cold.

  Lucky nodded. “The missus says that Johnny claimed the guy he saw was a dead ringer for himself. A perfect double. He told her he could’ve sent this other guy home to her bed, and she’d never know the difference. Except for…” Lucky lowered his eyes and shrugged. “Er, Johnny thought his double would lack his amorous talents and that’s how his wife would know the other guy was an imposter. But she says Johnny overestimated himself in that regard, so if the double had any more imagination than a dog, that’s how she’d know it was a ringer.”

  When Nelli picked up her head and stared coldly at Lucky, he said to her, “Hey, it’s wasn’t me. I’m just repeating what Johnny’s wife said. And she don’t know from dogs, so let it go.”

  Nelli sighed and put her head back down on her paws.

  “And that,” Lucky continued, “was the last time Johnny’s wife saw him. He left the house at some point the next day, while she was out, and he ain’t been home since. Ain’t called, neither.”

  “So Johnny’s doppelgangster hasn’t visited his home,” Max mused.

  “Unless that was his doppelgangster,” I said. “Pretending to have seen itself.”

  “Huh?” Lucky said.

  “I mean—”

  “Oh! Never
mind, I get it.” Lucky added, “Based the estimated time of death, I figure Johnny was whacked sometime after his wife saw him and before Mickey Rosenblum played poker with him.”

  And according to the morning papers, Johnny was knocked unconscious before being dumped in the river, so his death did indeed seem to be murder.

  “So Mr. Rosenblum was playing cards with Johnny’s doppelgangster,” Max mused.

  “If that really is Mickey I been talkin’ to on the phone.” Lucky rubbed a hand over his face. “I hope so. I like Mickey.”

  “And now we know both victims saw their perfect doubles shortly before dying,” I said.

  “Doppelgangerism.” Max’s voice held conviction. “Charlie knew he’d been cursed. Johnny Be Good just didn’t understand what he was seeing.”

  “That’s easy to believe,” muttered Lucky.

  “But what is the purpose of these doppelgangsters?” Max wondered.

  “At a guess,” I said, “murder.”

  “Yes, but why has such an elaborate phenomenon accompanied the murder of these two individuals?” Max asked. “Were they especially important men? Did they have unique powers?”

  Lucky shook his head. “Charlie was a good earner, but he wasn’t hard to replace. We moved someone up into his spot by yesterday, and we expect Charlie’s, uh, branch of the business to continue running smooth without him. And, God forgive me for speaking ill of the dead, Johnny was a useless momzer. It’s not like his death is a kick in the nuts for us, even though the boss is upset about it.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Could the guy you promoted to Charlie’s spot be behind this?” And then Johnny’s murder, I supposed, would be misdirection, an attempt by a rising Gambello mobster to keep suspicion off himself.

  Lucky shook his head. “No, he’s in Charlie’s spot now because we trust him. He was headed for something good anyhow, so he sure didn’t have to whack another Gambello to get it. Plus he knows what would happen to him if he did that and we ever found out. And he ain’t the doppelgangster-creating type. You can trust me on this.”

  “So we’re back to regarding the Corvinos as the most likely suspects for killing Gambellos?” I said.

  “The most likely,” Lucky agreed.

  “Unless Doctor Dapezzo had indeed been replicated, too,” Max pointed out.

  “We need to find out for sure,” Lucky said, casting an accusatory glare at his silent cell phone.

  “And there’s something else we need to find out,” I said. “Where are Charlie’s and Johnny’s doppelgangsters now?”

  Lucky’s jaw dropped. “Holy Mother!”

  Max’s eyes widened. “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Charlie ate dinner a second time at Stella’s on Thursday without being aware it was his second visit of the evening. Or so he said. So we can theorize that Lucky and I saw his doppelgangster that evening, though we still have no idea which diner was Charlie and which was the double,” I said. “Johnny’s doppelgangster was talking to us yesterday. And now, as far as we know, no one has seen either of them since the hits. So where are they?”

  “Hey! Hey, wait! I got it!” Lucky skimmed his book, and then rested his finger on a particular paragraph. “It says here, ‘The bilocate—that is to say, the replica—is always formed of e… eph… ephemeral substances enchanted through mystical means. While it looks, sounds, feels, and perhaps even smells genuine, its very nature means that it lacks the in… intrin… intrinsic permanence of normal human matter. This is presumably why every recorded bilocate—of which, it must be admitted, there are very few instances…’ Madonna, this writer is wordy! Uh, every recorded bilocate… ‘has only been known to exist for a short span of time, and no bilocate has ever been recorded developing an independent existence of its own.’ “

  “Ah.” Max nodded. “Of course.”

  “Of course, what?” I said.

  “Don’t you see, kid?” said Lucky. “A doppelgangster is created, given the contract, and then vanishes when the hit is completed. The perfect assassin!”

  “No, I don’t see. Johnny was already dead when we met with his ‘bilocate,’ ” I pointed out.

  “Hmph.” Lucky frowned in thought.

  “Why,” Max wondered, “would the entity creating these doppelgangsters want at least one of them to continue masquerading as the victim after he’s deceased?”

  “Of course!” Lucky jumped up. “I got it!”

  Startled, Nelli jumped up, too, tail wagging, tongue lolling as she panted and gazed expectantly at Lucky. Max and I gazed at him expectantly, too.

  “Okay, Charlie’s death occurred in front of witnesses, no way to hide that,” Lucky said. “But Johnny… He was found in the river. If you want to get rid of a body quick, that’s a good place to put it.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “Apart from getting a corpse out of your car trunk real fast, if you’re worried about getting caught with it—er, speaking theoretically, that is,” Lucky said.

  “Of course,” Max said.

  “Apart from that, any forensic evidence that was carelessly left on the body deteriorates a lot faster in the water than on land. Plus, you can always hope that something living in the water eats the corpse.”

  “Do we have to go into this much detail?” I asked.

  “My point—”

  “And you do have one?”

  “—is that dumping a body in the river is one way to confuse the trail for the cops. And however the hell Charlie’s shooting happened, that’s obviously confused the cops, too.”

  “That’s for sure,” I said, thinking of Lopez and Napoli.

  “And what’s gonna confuse ‘em even more?” Lucky prodded.

  Max and I gazed at Lucky in bewildered silence. His expression suggested that we were disappointing students at a seminar on the Way of the Wiseguy.

  “We ain’t the only people,” Lucky continued, enunciating carefully out of consideration for our slow wits, “who saw that doppelgangster walking around and living Johnny’s normal life, even after Johnny was floating face down in the East River.”

  “Oh.” I rubbed my hands over my face as I realized what he was saying. “Oh.”

  “Oh, my goodness,” Max said. “That explains it.”

  “There will be contradictory witness statements about when Johnny was last seen or could have died,” I said.

  “Exactly!” Lucky was pleased we had finally caught the train.

  “But ever since Johnny’s body was found, no one has seen or spoken to his double. Including us.” I shuddered when I realized, “That… that thing suddenly decided to leave our meeting in the crypt. Somehow it knew! Knew that its original had just been found dead and its lifespan was over.”

  Lucky nodded. “It sensed that its job was done. That it was time to sink back into whatever eph… ephemeral substances it came from.”

  “But how did it know?” I asked. “And how did something that seemed as stupid as Johnny’s doppelgangster—”

  “A perfect replica of Johnny,” Lucky muttered.

  “—manage to conceal the sudden awareness of Johnny’s death from us?”

  “I hypothesize,” Max said, “that it was created that way. I suspect the creature may not have known that Johnny Be Good’s body had been found. It may not even have killed Johnny. We must keep in mind that poor Chubby Charlie saw his perfect double, but no one saw who killed Charlie, even though many people were present and the doppelgangster, based on what we know so far, is a visible, tangible phenomenon.”

  “So if we’re not sure the double killed Johnny Be Good, and we’re not sure it even knew he was dead…” I spread my hands in a helpless gesture.

  “Keep in mind the short lifespan that Lucky has mentioned. I suspect the creature was created to last only until the death of the original was discovered,” Max said. “At that moment in time, and quite possibly without knowing why, the doppelgangster felt a sudden compulsion to depart. Shortly thereafter, I suspect
, it ceased to exist.”

  “So…” Lucky thought it over. “The reason we ain’t seen Charlie’s doppelgangster since before he got whacked is because there were witnesses to his death.”

  Max nodded. “There was no interval between Charlie’s death and the discovery of his demise. I postulate that his double ceased to exist almost immediately thereafter. But in Johnny Be Good’s case…”

  I said, “The river has damaged the evidence, and there are witnesses who’ll confuse the trail considerably because they saw or spoke to ‘Johnny’ hours after the forensic estimate suggests that he was already dead.”

  “The police will be forced to conclude,” Max said, “that a serious mistake was made in the collection or interpretation of the physical evidence. And they’ll never be able to pinpoint what it was.”

  “So the killer doesn’t even need an alibi for the time of the murder,” I said. “Because the cops will never be sure when it happened.”

  “Meanwhile, in between when Johnny’s wife last saw him and when he turned up dead, no one was lookin’ for him because no one knew he was missing.” Lucky said with reluctant admiration, “This is one slippery hitter. The cops’ll never figure out who whacked Johnny. Or Charlie.”

  I looked at Lucky. “And you know who else might never figure this out?”

  Lucky let out his breath and nodded. “The Gambello family. The Corvinos found a hitter that can pick us off like wooden ducks at a carnival shooting gallery. And we might never figure out who it is or how he’s doing it.”

  “You’ve got two deaths in the family, and you’re just guessing it’s the Corvinos,” I said. Lopez was just guessing, too. “But I don’t see how that makes sense. Not with a killer as smart as you say this one is. Surely the Corvinos must know you’ll suspect them and hit back. So why isn’t the killer trying to make these deaths look like an accident?”

  Lucky shrugged. “Because in our line of work, one death might be an accident, but two is always a business problem. No matter what it looked like, we’d suspect the Corvinos by the time the second guy bought the farm. So why bother to disguise it? For the Corvinos, the main thing is to keep the cops from nailing them for these hits.” As his phone rang, he added, “Betcha they’re enjoying this.” He glanced at the readout. “It’s Danny.”