Doppelgangster - Laura Resnick [50]
Actually, Lucky was trying to get me a cab, but I decided that fell under the heading of Too Much Information.
“That’s why I called,” Lopez said. “I’m really sorry about this . . .”
“What?”
“I have to cancel.”
“Oh.” I looked down at my sexy dress as my heart sank. “You do?”
“I just got called in to work,” he said.
“I could wait for you.” A cool evening breeze drifted across my bare shoulders, and I realized I’d left my wrap down in the crypt. “Or meet you somewhere later?”
“I don’t want you to do that,” he said with obvious regret. “I think this is going to take most of the night.”
“What happened?”
“Johnny Be Good Gambello was just found dead.”
“What?”
Lucky and Max looked at me.
“Yeah, they just fished him out of the East River,” Lopez said. “The initial estimate is that he’s been dead for twenty-four hours.”
10
“Whaddya mean, an ‘operation’?” Lucky demanded.
“Apparition,” I corrected, waving my research book at him. “According to this, an apparition can be corporeal even if the person it’s replicating is already dead.”
“Huh?”
“While I would much rather not hear myself say something like this aloud,” I told Lucky, “apparently it’s possible for an apparition of Johnny to look and sound real while he’s already sleeping with the fishes.”
“So now we got operations and doppelgangsters?”
“Actually, a doppelgangster is a type of operation. So, even though he was dead at the time, I think we saw Johnny’s perfect double yesterday.” I repressed a shudder of revulsion and tried not to think about the way the doppelgangster had eyed me in my little black dress.
“A type of operation? How many types do they got?” Lucky demanded.
I consulted the book again, one from a large pile that Max had suggested I peruse when I arrived at his bookstore this morning. He was currently down in the laboratory in search of a rare scroll or something.
After the initial shock of hearing that they had just been talking to a dead man, Max and Lucky both came to the obvious conclusion as we stood on the sidewalk outside of St. Monica’s yesterday evening: The body pulled from the East River had been incorrectly identified.
They were right, I realized when I calmed down, it couldn’t be Johnny Gambello. It must be some other Elvis impersonator. An understandable mistake. Lopez would discover the error once he arrived at the scene. And apart from the fact that the discovery of the corpse had ruined my plans for the evening, it had nothing to do with us or our strange problem.
Naturally, we called Johnny’s cell phone, just to assure ourselves that he was alive and kicking. He didn’t answer. This made us uneasy, but Lucky insisted it didn’t mean anything. After all, Johnny was a mook who lost one cell phone after another. Or maybe he had turned it off because he’d gone straight from the church to a poker game. In any case, we had just seen Johnny, so we knew the day-old body in the river was someone else.
Soothed by this sturdy logic, I went home to eat Chinese food alone in my pajamas and fantasize about what might have been. Lopez spent the night working, as I later learned from a text message he sent me (not wanting to wake me). Max went home to commune with his familiar. And Lucky, who never seemed to sleep, woke me bright and early the following morning to break the news that the corpse from the East River was indeed Johnny Be Good Gambello.
Johnny’s wife, who hadn’t seen him in several days (which wasn’t unusual, I gathered), had identified the body. The Gambellos were going into mourning. And the Shy Don was pressuring Lucky to find out who’d killed the mook.
“So how many types of operations do we need to be worrying about?” Lucky prodded now, as I continued peering at the text in my hands with tired eyes.
I said, “An apparition can be a doppelgänger, an alter ego, a ghost or spirit, a poltergeist, a remnant or revenant, the result of an out-of-body experience, an astral projection, an etheric body, or a . . .” I took a wild guess at the pronunciation. “A fylgia—but this last one seems to have more to do with shapeshifting