Free Dopplegangster by Laura Resnick Page B

understood. Oh, and something about a dope.”
    “A dope?”
    “Um . . . a doppio ?”
    “Doppio.” Lucky frowned, puzzled. “A double?”
    “Yes! He kept babbling about a double.”
    I’d told Napoli about this, too, but he had dismissed it—just as I had dismissed it when Charlie was clutching my arm and raving about it. Napoli went over and over some parts of that conversation with me, though, since he found it noteworthy that Charlie believed he was going to die. The detective obviously thought that, somewhere in that ranting, Charlie had made a revealing statement about the anticipated homicide that I’d either missed, forgotten, or was deliberately concealing.
    Lucky asked me, “What about a double?”
    I thought back. At the time, I’d been convinced Charlie was having a medical or psychotic episode, and I’d been more concerned with trying to get help than with listening to him.
    “He said something about the evil eye,” I said.
    Lucky clutched the pew in front of us. “The evil eye?”
    “I thought it sounded silly, but he—”
    “Hah! Don’t mock the evil eye, kid.”
    “He said he’d seen his perfect double. That it looked, walked, and talked like him. I thought he had looked at a mirror and had a hallucination, but he insisted it was real. He said that he’d looked into its eyes, that it had spoken to him, and so now he was marked for death. I know it sounds crazy . . .” I spread my hands.
    Lucky rubbed his jaw as he thought it over. I noticed he needed a shave. “But is it crazy?”
    “Well, something was certainly affecting his brain,” I said. “Remember how strangely he behaved the other night? The night he came back to the restaurant and acted . . .” The memory suddenly hit me in a completely different light. “Acted as if . . .”
    Our eyes met.
    “As if,” Lucky said, “he hadn’t been to dinner yet.”
    “Hadn’t asked me to sing for him,” I said. “Hadn’t been inside the restaurant at all yet.”
    “As if he was . . .”
    A chill crept through me. “A different Charlie.”
    “A second Charlie,” Lucky said.
    “Charlie’s perfect double.” It took me a moment to realize my jaw was hanging open. “My God, Lucky, we saw him! It? Er, the double.”
    He nodded. “The same night we saw Charlie.”
    “So which one of them was the real Charlie?” I wondered. “And which was the double?”
    “I dunno. They both looked like Charlie to me.”
    “And they both behaved exactly like Charlie,” I said.
    “But one was a fake. A ringer.”
    “Why?” I wondered. “And how ?”
    “And where the hell did it come from?”
    “That was the last thing Charlie said before he died,” I recalled. “That he didn’t know who had sent it.”
    Lucky thought it over. “So did Charlie’s double whack him?”
    “Wouldn’t someone have seen it? Charlie’s double was every bit as big as Charlie, after all.”
    “Yeah, that’s another problem we got. If the double was the hitter, did it become invisible or something?”
    “Has anything like this ever happened before?”
    Lucky shook his head. “I been in the business more than forty years, kid. I never seen or heard of nothin’ like this. It’s weird . I got no idea what to do about it.”
    Wondering just how big a can of worms I was opening, I said, “I know someone we should talk to about this.”
    “Not your boyfriend,” Lucky said firmly.
    “No,” I said. “Definitely not him.” Lopez might have me locked up in a padded cell if he knew what I was planning to do. “Lucky, I’d like to introduce you to Max.”

5
     
    Z adok’s Rare and Used Books was a cozy shop in an old, ivy-covered townhouse in a quiet street in the West Village. The discreet exterior meant that few window shoppers or casual browsers ever entered the bookstore. But since the shop specialized in rare and expensive occult books, many of them written in ancient languages, it wasn’t really a foot-traffic kind of business,