Doppelgangster - Laura Resnick [57]
“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