Doppelgangster

by Laura Resnick

  Well, Gabriel had said his partner was proving to be more trouble than he was worth. Apparently the priest had decided it was time to help him shuffle off this mortal coil. Once Buonarotti came face to face with his own perfect double, he’d be easy pickings. Perhaps the priest intended to bring about the three-way war by giving up Don Michael to the other two families now that he was vulnerable.

  Holding me by the throat, his gun pressed to my head, the doppelgangster hauled me down the pitch dark hallway. We paused at the doorway leading to the choir gallery, and my captor leaned against it, listening. We heard voices shouting on the other side of it.

  “No, not that way,” he muttered.

  “There’s another way?”

  “Stairway to the courtyard.” He dragged me to the end of the hall. “It’s how I came up.”

  “No, those stairs aren’t safe,” I protested as he dragged me toward them.

  “That’s just what he tells people to keep them out of here,” Buonarotti said dismissively.

  He took his hand off my neck long enough to open a door. Despite his comment, I was still anxious about descending a staircase in complete darkness with a gun pressed to my head. I was equally anxious about going anywhere with a murderous doppelgangster.

  So it was a relief when I heard a man’s voice coming from somewhere beyond the bottom of the stairs.

  Buonarotti went still and covered my mouth with his hand, pressing the gun harder against my head. Along with the voice, we heard a gurgling electrical noise, like someone switching channels on a radio. This was followed by a metallic sounding voice. I couldn’t make out the words, but I gave a reflexive start when I realized what the sound was: a walkie-talkie.

  And then I realized what the voices were talking about. I could make out a man saying, “Shots fired,” and giving this address.

  Someone was talking on a police radio. There was a cop at the other end of these stairs!

  I tried to cry out. Buonarotti squeezed my throat so hard I nearly blacked out. He shut the door and then dragged me back to the other door, the one that led to the choir gallery.

  “One sound,” he whispered, “and I’ll kill you.”

  I was coughing helplessly from the abuse to my throat, so this seemed like a pretty stupid threat. He opened the door a crack and listened.

  We both heard Gabriel whispering, “No, there’s a cop in the courtyard! We need to leave this way.”

  Buonarotti—the real one—whispered back, “How do you think we’re gonna get past Lucky? He’s between us and the door.”

  The doppelgangster’s body, which was pressed up against mine, stiffened. “Who the fuck is that?” When I didn’t respond, he prodded, “Who’s with Gabriel?”

  “You are,” I said.

  “Huh?” He made an irritated sound. “Dumb broad.” He opened the door and dragged me through it.

  The gallery was pitch dark, too. Buonarotti and Gabriel weren’t giving Lucky a target by illuminating themselves.

  “You and your bright ideas,” Buonarotti said to the priest. “I can’t see a fucking thing.”

  “Then neither can Lucky,” Gabriel said. “We’ll slip past him.”

  And then a familiar voice at the far end of the church shouted, “Police! Weapons down! Police! Drop your weapons! I’m a cop!”

  Lopez! Every cell in my body got a flood of renewed energy as I recognized the voice.

  “Hey, I’m not armed!” Lucky shouted. “Don’t shoot! I am not armed!”

  “That liar,” Buonarotti muttered.

  “Lopez!” I cried.

  “Esther! Stay down!” He didn’t even sound surprised to hear my voice. “Lucky, is that you?” he called.

  “Yeah. Watch out! Buonarotti’s the killer! He’s so off his rocker, he’ll whack a cop!”

  “Where is he?” Lopez’s voice was coming from a new position. He was getting closer to us.

  “I think he’s up in the gallery,” Lucky called.

  The doppelgangster drew in a sharp breath through its nostrils, thinking this meant itself.

  “What’s wrong with the lights?” Lopez shouted.

  “Not sure,” Lucky replied.

  “Shit! I don’t have a flashlight.”

  “Listen, cop!” the doppelgangster shouted, its mouth so close to my ear that I flinched. “I’ve got your girlfriend!”

  “Who the fuck is that?” said Buonarotti in the darkness.

  In the dormitory hallway behind us, on the other side of the door we had come through, I heard a man shout, “Police! Weapons down! NYPD! Drop your weapons! This is the police!”

  The doppelgangster shouted down to Lopez, his voice carrying through the darkness, “I’ve got her right here, and I’ll blow her head off!”

  “He’s lying! His gun’s empty!” Lucky said.

  To clarify the situation, the doppelgangster fired a shot.

  “Holy shit!” said Lucky.

  “Who the fuck is that?” said Buonarotti.

  “Lucky,” I shouted, “there’s a dopp—agh!” The hand on my throat tightened.

  “Esther?” Lopez shouted. “Esther!”

  At our backs, on the other side of the door, the cop again called, “Police! Drop your weapons now!“

  “Esther!” Lopez shouted, his voice coming closer. Something crashed to the floor. “Goddamn it! Don’t any of these lights work?”

  The doppelgangster ordered, “Throw down your gun and get on the floor facedown, cop! I’m getting out of here! I’ve got your woman! You get in my way, and I swear to God, I will kill her!”

  “Esther!” Lopez shouted.

  “Answer him,” the doppelgangster said. “Tell him to let us pass.”

  I was coughing, unable to speak. In the hallway behind me, I heard a scuffle, a faint thud, and then a groan. The door behind us opened.

  “Esther! Goddamn it, where are you? Esther!” And then Lopez screamed, “I want LIGHTS!”

  The lights came on, blazing throughout the church. The sudden brightness made my captor and me both flinch. I squeezed my eyes shut as they stung and watered. The creature dragged me closer to the door behind us, ensuring that we remained shielded from Lopez’s sight by the dramatic velvet curtains that framed the broad balcony.

  “Freeze!” Lopez shouted, presumably at Buonarotti, who now stood exposed on the balcony with light blazing gloriously down upon him.

  “What the fuck…” Buonarotti said.

  As my eyes adjusted, I saw the mobster staring at me with an expression of appalled amazement. Then I realized he wasn’t staring at me.

  The doppelgangster sucked in its breath. “What the fuck…“

  Buonarotti’s gaze flashed to the disheveled priest who stood blinking and shielding his eyes, only an arm’s length away from him. The snarl of murderous hatred on Buonarotti’s face revealed that he knew his partner had betrayed him. He screamed—an inarticulate bellow of rage—and started beating Gabriel.

  “Freeze!” Lopez shouted somewhere below the two men on the balcony. “Freeze!”

  The gangster knocked down Father Gabriel, then reached for the candelabra I had knocked over earlier tonight.

  “I’ll shoot!” Lopez warned.

  “I’ll kill you, you bastard!”

  “Don’t do it!” Lopez shouted.

  Buonarotti picked up the candelabra and screamed at the cowering priest. “I’ll kill you!”

  A gunshot went off.

  Buonarotti cried out and staggered back, and blood rolled down his arm. I didn’t understand what was happening for a moment. Then I realized that Lopez had shot him.

  Undeterred by his bullet wound, Buonarotti stumbled back toward the priest, screaming, “I’ll kill you, you bastard! I’ll kill you!”

  “Stop!” Lopez warned. “Don’t make me shoot you twice!”

  The priest turned to run this way, apparently forgetting there was a doppelgangster in his path. Not to mention a woman who had just beaten the shit out of him.

>   He stopped suddenly in his tracks, staring in sorrowful defeat. But he wasn’t looking at us. He was looking past us.

  “I was good, wasn’t I?” he said, his voice flat.

  I stared at him blankly.

  Then from behind me, Max answered, “You were very talented.”

  The priest turned and dove over the balcony railing.

  I choked on a startled scream and lunged forward reflexively as the body crashed into the wooden pews below the balcony. The doppelgangster was startled enough to release its grip on me.

  I got to the railing and looked down. It was a long drop, but survivable. The priest, however, had thrown himself head first into a bank of pews. He lay at a horrid angle, his neck evidently broken and blood pouring from his shattered skull.

  Lopez ran to the body and then leaned over to press his fingers against the neck, checking for a pulse.

  “Is he dead?” Lucky called from the other side of the church.

  “Yes,” Lopez said after a moment. “Dead.” His voice was grim.

  I made a choked sound. Lopez looked up and saw me.

  “Esther! Get out of there!” He quickly raised his gun to aim it at something on my left.

  I realized that the wounded Buonarotti, standing to my left, was also looking over the railing and that I was much closer to him than was wise. I turned to flee, then stumbled and halted. The doppelgangster was in my path. But only for a moment. Max swung the bloody hand ax—the one that Gabriel had used this evening to kill a chicken—and decapitated it.

  Buonarotti starting laughing as if the funniest thing in the world had just occurred to him. Within moments, he fell clumsily to the floor and just sat there, rocking back and forth, laughing, and saying over and over, “I’m a dead man! I’m a dead man!” His bleeding arm didn’t seem to bother him.

  Behind Max, I saw an unconscious cop in uniform.

  Max followed my gaze, then said, “I was afraid the doppelgangster would harm him. It seemed best to remove him from the equation.”

  Nelli stood over the cop, holding her injured foot gingerly in the air. She snuffled the fallen man with concern. When the policeman groaned, her tail wagged with relief.

  Lopez’s running footsteps carried him up to the choir gallery via the long spiral staircase we had climbed in the dark earlier tonight. When he reached us, instead of covering the hysterically laughing Buonarotti with his gun, he pointed it at Max.

  “Put the ax down, Max,” he said.

  “Pardon? Oh!” Realizing that his holding a bloody ax had been misinterpreted as a hostile gesture, Max set it down. “I hope I didn’t alarm you.”

  “What the hell happened to McDevitt?” Lopez snapped.

  “Who?” I said.

  “The cop lying on the floor behind Max!”

  “Oh! That’s my fault entirely, I’m afraid,” Max said. “I hit him with the ax handle.”

  “Why, Max?”

  “I believed him to be Don Michael. Who was threatening to kill Esther.” Max added helpfully, “It was very dark, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” Lopez said. “And the blood on the ax would be from what, exactly?”

  “A chicken,” I blurted.

  “A what?”

  “A chicken. Um, I guess that’s where all these feathers came from.” I kicked a pile of doppelgangster detritus with my foot. “The chicken.”

  “Father Gabriel killed it with the ax.” Max shook his head sadly. “He also threatened us with the ax. I’m afraid he was involved in some most unsavory activities. The Church wouldn’t approve at all.”

  “He was in league with Buonarotti!” I said.

  “I know.” Lopez glanced at the wounded mobster. The arm had only been nicked; it was bleeding, but didn’t look serious.

  I said, “Buonarotti’s been committing these murders!”

  “I know,” Lopez said.

  “You do?“

  “Are you all right?” Lopez asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you doing here?” he asked me.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “How would I know?” he said in exasperation.

  “Well, what are you doing here then?”

  “I asked the local patrolman to keep an eye on the church and let me know if anything unusual happened. So when he saw a woman, two men, and a huge dog entering furtively around midnight tonight, he called me. And since I had a feeling I knew who he was describing, I told him to stand by, and I came here. By the time I arrived, he thought he’d heard shots fired.”

  “Oh.” I frowned. “Wait a minute. It’s just the two of you?”

  “At the moment, thanks to Max assaulting a police officer,” Lopez said, “it’s just the one of me.”

  “Who turned on the lights?”

  “What?”

  “Who got the lights working again?” I asked.

  Lopez shrugged and looked at me and Max. We looked at each other.

  “Well, whatever brought the power back on,” Lopez said to me, “I’m just glad it happened. I thought you’d be dead in two more seconds.”

  Max was staring at him.

  Lopez noticed. “What?”

  I stared, too, remembering the fierceness in his voice at that moment: I want LIGHTS! And suddenly there had been light, in answer to his command…

  I blinked. Oh, good grief, what was I thinking?

  Don’t be ridiculous. It was just… coincidence.

  Max kept staring hard at Lopez, his posture erect, his gaze intent and speculative. Lopez stared back, probably thinking again about having Max’s place searched for drugs.

  “Max?” I prodded, feeling uneasy.

  “Pardon? Oh!” Max smiled. “Er, you were saying, detective?”

  “I’m all done saying. Now it’s your turn.” Lopez said to me, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “We, uh…” I looked at Max.

  Max looked at Nelli, who had by now limped to his side. Nelli looked at Lucky, who came up the staircase at a slow, painful pace, grimacing as he reached the top step. She wagged her tail.

  Lucky said, “I’m gettin’ too old for my work.”

  “What ‘work’ was going on here tonight?” Lopez said, keeping an eye on Buonarotti, who was still sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth as he laughed hysterically and occasionally shouted, “I’m a dead man!”

  “Ah, forget it,” Lucky said genially. “You can take all the credit. We was never even here.”

  Lopez look at all three of us for a long, tense moment.

  Then he sighed. “Well, my backup will be here in about two minutes. So if you were never here, then you need to be gone before then.”

  “Really?” I said. “You’ll let us leave? We don’t have to talk to Napoli or anyone?”

  “Esther,” Lopez said wearily, “the very last thing in the world that I want right now is to spend the rest of the night… No, the rest of the week… No, the rest of my career trying to explain to Napoli and my captain what you were doing here tonight with them.” His glance encompassed Max, Lucky, and Buonarotti.

  “Oh.”

  “We’ve got tainted physical evidence and conflicting witness statements. The, er, chicken-slaughtering priest who’s just committed suicide may be an accessory to murder. We recorded a phone conversation today in which Buonarotti brags about whacking Chubby Charlie, Johnny Be Good, and Danny the Doctor—”

  “He talked about it on the phone?” Lucky looked appalled.

  “—but he sounded so crazy in that conversation that I thought he seemed well on his way to making a credible insanity plea…” Lopez took another look at Buonarotti, who was now shrieking with laughter. “Even before now.” He shook his head. “Overall, I don’t think either side is going to want to take this case to trial.”

  Lucky said, “So Buonarotti will go to a prison for head cases. The priest will get buried. This mess will go away quietly
. Sounds good to me.”

  I looked at Max, who looked much the worse for wear. “Yes,” I said slowly. “I guess that is for the best.”

  We heard sirens approaching.

  “Go,” Lopez said. “I won’t cover for you if you’re still hanging around when they get here.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “But someday, Esther…”

  “Yes?”

  “Someday you’re going to explain to me what the hell that crap is that’s all over your face and hands. You look like you’ve had the worst tattoo accident in history.” His gaze swept our group. “All three of you, actually. And your little dog, too.”

  26

  “I was wrong about your boyfriend,” Lucky said. “He may be a cop, but he watched our backs when it counted. He’s a stand-up guy.”

  “I don’t think he’s my boyfriend,” I said morosely.

  “You ain’t sure?”

  “I haven’t talked to him since that night.”

  We stood outside St. Monica’s on the day of Father Gabriel’s funeral, watching the mourners leave. I had initially resisted attending the funeral Mass of the demented killer who’d tried to manipulate three crime families into a war as well as kill me, Elena Giacalona, and Connor Lopez. But Max and Lucky had convinced me that we had to wrap up this one last piece of business.

  So now we were loitering outside the front door of St. Monica’s with Nelli, keeping an eye on the mourners—to see if a doppelgangster attended the service.

  Buonarotti was the final deadly duplicate that Father Gabriel had made, as far as we knew from what we had witnessed upon destroying the demented sorcerer’s altar. But I agreed that we’d rest easier if we made absolutely sure.

  Nelli, with her injured paw wrapped in a fresh bandage and healing nicely, observed everyone leaving the church as the service ended, just as she had observed them entering.

  The priest’s funeral was heavily attended by members of all three of the crime families with which Father Gabriel’s life and evil works had been connected. Many non-felonious parish members were also in attendance. In particular, there were lots of tearful women mourners.

  Lucky said, “So your boyfriend figured out—”

  “Can you just call him Lopez?” I asked.