Doppelgangster - Laura Resnick [109]
“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.
“No,” he said. “No. You got it all wrong.”
“Lucky,” I said, sorry to be breaking his heart, despite everything he’d done. “She’s got the motive to commit these murders. Now we need to find out if she’s got the means.”
“She ain’t got the motive! She ain’t like that! She’s pure of heart.”
“I think you’re not seeing this cl—”
“You don’t know her! I do! I’ve known her for thirty years,” he insisted. “Ever since Anthony married her. I admit she’s hotheaded, but she’s not a killer.”
“Look, I understand that you—”
“And can you really picture her blowing Danny away with a shotgun?” Lucky demanded.
“I’m trying not to picture anyone doing that,” I said. “But maybe she can handle a shotgun, Lucky. It’s an unusual method of murder for a woman, but it’s certainly not unprecedented. And we’re dealing with an unusual killer, after