Doppelgangster - Laura Resnick [116]
“Stay out of the business?”
“Yes. But I realized how serious this was. How dangerous. So I told Sally to stop.” She shook her head. “But Sally just didn’t believe they’d kill him. Because he was married to me, and the don was fond of me.”
“I thought the don had tried to strangle you?”
“Yes, well, he has a peculiar way of showing his fondness,” she said coldly.
“So . . . Sally wasn’t killed for marrying a Gambello widow?”
“You read too many tabloids,” she said. “Oh, Don Victor threw a violent tantrum the night I told him I had married Sally. That part of the gossip is true. But Lucky calmed him down—”
“Lucky was there?”
“Lucky was always there. I think he’s a workaholic,” she said. “He told the don I was too young to remain a widow for the rest of my life. He pointed out that a priest had married me to Sally, so it couldn’t be undone. And also that the two families weren’t at war, after all. Well, not at the time, anyhow.” She shrugged. “A week later, Don Victor sent me a wedding gift and his blessings.”
“Well, that’s a story that’s become very garbled in the retelling.”
“Truth is seldom as well known as gossip.” She shook her head. “And Sally wound up dead, anyhow.”
“So the don ordered Lucky to kill him because he kept stealing from the Gambellos? Even after two warnings?” It wasn’t a clean slate, certainly, but it was much more in keeping with the man I had thought Lucky was.
“And ten years later, the Corvinos killed Eddie for ratting on them to the FBI.” She sighed. “I haven’t chosen my husbands as well as I might have done.”
“Who exactly killed Eddie?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t want to know.” The settled expression of resigned unhappiness came over her face again. “It’s business. I stay out of it.”
When I came upstairs to the bookstore, Max asked, “Should I go downstairs and guard the doppelgangster?”
I shook my head. “She says she wants some time alone. I checked her bonds in case it was a trick. But they’re secure.”
Max was sitting at the table, reading Middle High German. The area all around us was still covered with doppelgangster detritus. There were several large piles of mingled feathers and dirt, scatterings of pebbles and bird bones, dust all over the place . . .
“We should clean this place,” I said.
“Yes,” Max said.
We looked at the mess for a moment longer.
Then he went back to reading, and I sat down at the table with him.
“Max,” I said, “what will we do with her?”
“It, my dear.” He looked up from his book. “It.”
“We can’t keep it tied up down there forever. In fact, if doppelgangsters need to sleep or, uh, use the facilities, we can’t even keep it like this all night. And you know we can’t, um . . .”
“Dispatch it? We’ll have to, at some point, Esther.”
“Lucky won’t stand for it,” I said with certainty.
“That mystical entity’s existence endangers a human woman’s life.” Max closed his book and set it aside. “It must be destroyed.”
“Oh, Max, I feel weird about this. I just had girl talk with her—it. I don’t see how we can . . . you know.”
“Girl talk?”
“We talked about men.”
“Ah.”
“It’s disturbing how much that thing seems like the real Elena. It remembers her whole life.”
Max nodded. “Right up until the moment of its creation. But it has no knowledge of what happened this afternoon, Esther. Of your encounter with the real Widow Giacalona.”
I nodded. After a moment, I said, “I still think Buonarotti’s involved in this. Everything we said earlier today about him as a likely accomplice still holds true.”
“Yes,” Max said thoughtfully. “That’s a good point.”
“And last night, he got fresh with the widow. Very fresh, from the sound of it. She’s furious about it. I doubt a woman who’s chosen to marry three times would be shocked by roving hands, so I think Buonarotti must’ve gotten pretty rough.”
“You think he tried to force himself on her?”
“Yes. And she pushed him down the stairs.”
“Having met him, I suspect he would be enraged rather than contrite,” Max mused. “And today the widow’s