Dopplegangster Read online

  “Only by reputation.”

  Napoli said, “Good God, you’re dating a mob girl?”

  “No,” Lopez said.

  “Wait a minute!” Lucky bristled. “Are you sayin’ you’re breaking up with Esther, you bozo? Now? Tonight? After the poor kid just saw Chubby Charlie get whacked? What kind of a man are you?”

  “I’m not breaking up with her,” Lopez said, starting to look like his head hurt.

  “No? Well. Okay, then.” Restored to good humor by this news, Lucky gestured to a few of the wiseguys in the crowd. “Hey! Guys! Esther’s boyfriend just got back to town! Come say hello! Tommy! Freddie! This is Esther’s fella.”

  Tommy Two Toes said, “Yo!”

  Freddie the Hermit said, “Hey!”

  Lopez said to me, “I can see that you and I have a lot to talk about.”

  “I can explain this,” I assured him.

  “So you are dating a Gambello girl?” Napoli said coldly.

  Lopez said, “Esther, I doubt anyone can explain this.”

  Jimmy “Legs” Brabancaccio came over and extended a beefy hand to Lopez. “So you’re the guy who stole our Esther’s heart, huh?”

  “ ‘Our’ Esther?” Lopez repeated darkly.

  “Your girl’s got a great voice,” Jimmy Legs said. “Golden pipes. She’s gonna be a big star someday. Her name in lights on the Great White Way.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Hey, Ronnie! Come over here and say hello to Esther’s fiancé,” Jimmy urged.

  “We’re getting married?” Lopez said.

  “I never said that,” I told him. “I swear.”

  Ronnie Romano folded his arms and shook his head. “I ain’t makin’ the acquaintance of no cop. Not unless what he’s got a warrant for my arrest and I can’t in no ways avoid the association.”

  “Aw, come on, don’t be like that,” said Jimmy. “You’ll hurt Esther’s feelings.”

  “Then she shouldn’ta got mixed up with no cop,” Ronnie said with a scowl. “Shoulda found herself a nice rib-eye or somethin’.”

  “Rabbi,” I corrected automatically.

  “Esther!” someone shouted, pushing through the crowd.

  “Now what?” Lopez muttered.

  “Angelo,” I said, recognizing the busboy who worked a lot of the same shifts I did.

  “Angelo Falcone,” Napoli said quietly to Lopez. “Busboy and wannabe.”

  “You okay?” Angelo asked me. “I heard you was with Charlie when he bought it.”

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” I said.

  “And you,” Angelo said, turning on Lopez and Napoli. “You can’t pin this on me!”

  “We weren’t planning to, Angelo,” said Napoli.

  “No way you can pin this hit on me, man!”

  “Okay,” said Lopez.

  “I got an alibi!” Angelo said, puffing out his skinny chest.

  “Okay, you can go now,” Napoli said.

  “I got witnesses!”

  “Good to know,” Napoli said.

  Angelo scowled at them. “I’ll call my lawyer!”

  “Go do that,” said Lopez.

  “Now?”

  “Now would be good,” Lopez said.

  “Yeah? Okay.” Angelo added, clearly relishing the phrase, “He’ll eat you for breakfast!”

  “Okay,” Napoli said absently, checking something in his notebook.

  As Angelo departed, Lucky noted, “He’s very ambitious.”

  “Indeed,” said Lopez.

  Another flash went off.

  “We’ve got to get your girlfriend—er, the witness—out of here,” Napoli said to Lopez.

  “Who called the photographers?” I asked, annoyed by the flashing lights.

  “No one. They’re like vultures, they just know,” Napoli said.

  “They monitor police radio communications,” Lopez told me. “And flock to the scene of anything that sounds juicy.”

  “Especially when it’s a mob killing,” Napoli added irritably. “That’s sexy.”

  “Come on.” Lopez took my elbow and tried to guide me away from Lucky. “Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  Napoli said, “We’re taking you into protective custody.”

  “What? No!” I pulled away from Lopez. “You can’t do that! I haven’t done anything!”

  Lopez put his hands on my shoulders, trying to calm me. “We know that, Esther. But you’re a material witness in a mob hit. And the tabloids have already got your name. So you’re in danger now.”

  “But I didn’t see anything!” I protested.

  “Yeah, like everybody else here,” Napoli said in disgust. “Six cops have been canvassing for almost an hour, and nobody saw anything. Of course.”

  “But I really didn’t!” I cried.

  “Esther—”

  “No! Listen to me!” I jerked myself out of Lopez’s grasp and backed away.

  When he reached for me again, Lucky stepped between us. “I don’t care if you are her boyfriend, that don’t give you the right to manhandle her!”

  “I’m not manhan . . .” Lopez paused for a moment, then evidently decided to change course. “Esther, we need to go somewhere sane and take your statement.”

  “I’ve given my statement three times already!” I said, still agitated by the word “custody.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry,” Lopez said soothingly. “But we’ve got to go over every detail—”

  “There are no details!” I insisted. “I didn’t see the killer! I didn’t see how it happened! All I saw was Chubby Charlie suddenly die right in front of me! After he’d asked me to help him! Or sort of asked me . . . Or . . . I’d offered, anyhow, and now he’s dead!”

  The whole ton of bricks came crashing down on me then. Stress, tension, anxiety, confusion, fear, guilt. All of it. I started crying.

  “Now look what you done!” Lucky snarled at Lopez. The old wiseguy put his arm around me and handed me a clean, white hanky. “She’s an actress. She’s very sensitive!”

  “I know that,” Lopez snapped. “I date her. Now get your hands off her.”

  “Whoa, he’s got a pair, your boy,” Lucky said to me. “I like that in a person.”

  “Both of you, stop,” I said wearily. “Everyone, please stop.” I wiped my eyes and gave a watery sigh.

  Lopez looked like he wanted to apologize to me, but he said nothing. Napoli looked ready to arrest everyone on Mulberry Street.

  “I’m not going into custody,” I said.

  “All right,” Lopez said, ignoring a scathing look from Napoli. “We’ll just talk about what happened. And then we’ll talk about your safety.”

  “Okay.” I took a breath and got a hold of myself. “I was looking at Charlie,” I said. “Talking to him. He seemed hysterical. I was trying to calm him down.” I described the tinkling sound of breaking glass I’d heard, and the sharp whistling sound followed by the soft thud, and I explained what I had seen. “And that’s all I saw. Charlie, with that horrible look of surprise on his face and the blood spreading on his chest. I didn’t see or hear anything else. Or anyone else. He fell to the floor, and I started screaming.”

  “Who was in the restaurant when it happened?” Napoli asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Come on, Esther,” Napoli said.

  “You can call me ‘Miss Diamond,’ ” I said coldly.

  Lopez closed his eyes, as if praying that none of this was really happening.

  “You didn’t recognize any of the customers?” Napoli prodded. “You expect me to believe that?”

  “Charlie was sitting off in an alcove, and he came in a little early tonight. Most of the regulars hadn’t shown up yet. I didn’t know any of the customers who were sitting near him, and I don’t remember who else was in the restaurant.” Mostly I just remembered Charlie keeling over dead.

  “And you didn’t hear a car pull up outside?”

  “No.”

  “You
didn’t see the shooter on the other side of the window?”

  “No, of course not,” I said. “Charlie wasn’t sitting anywhere near the—”

  “Detectives, we have a big problem,” one of the CSU cops said, interrupting us.

  “What?” Napoli asked.

  “Come inside and have a look.”

  “We’re a little busy here,” Napoli said tersely.

  “You need to see this,” the CSU cop insisted. “Both of you.”

  Napoli gave an irritable sigh. “All right.” He signaled to two patrolmen to join us. He pointed at me and said to them, “This woman is a material witness in this homicide. You are to keep an eye on her and keep her under control. Do not—I repeat, do not—let her move from this spot until we get back.” Then he turned and followed the CSU cop back into the restaurant.

  Lopez hesitated, giving me a look of mingled concern and exasperation. “Are you okay?”

  “I want to go home.” I felt exhausted and emotional. “Can’t you take me?”

  “Not yet. We need more informa—”

  “I’ve told you everything I saw.” I put my hand on his chest, wishing he would put his arms around me again. “Please make Napoli let me go.”

  “That’s not how this works, Esther.” His voice was firm, but his gaze softened as he brushed my hair behind my ear. “You’re not—”

  “Lopez!” Napoli shouted, having stuck his head out of the door of Bella Stella.

  I glared at the bald detective.

  Lopez raised a hand in acknowledgment but kept his eyes on me. “I have to go inside to see what CSU’s problem is,” he said, stepping away from me. “Don’t do anything but stand here and wait for me to come back. Okay?”

  I shrugged. “Okay.”

  He looked at me for another moment, his expression suggesting he wasn’t sure I’d comply, then turned and went into the restaurant.

  This was not exactly the reunion that I had been picturing for us. I doubted it was what he’d imagined, either.

  “Not seein’ nothing,” Lucky said, distracting me from my morose musings about my love life. “Always the smart choice.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s a good policy, kid. I’d stick with that story. Even if your boyfriend is a cop who needs his button.”

  “So to speak.”

  I knew that getting your “button” was one of the ways wiseguys referred to becoming “made” men or getting inducted into a crime family. Lopez was new at OCCB and wanted to make a good impression, of course. To belong, to move up the ladder. I was well aware that tonight was a setback for him, and that I was the cause.

  “But I really didn’t see anything, Lucky,” I said. “I mean, how could I? As I was trying to tell Detective Charm a few minutes ago, Charlie wasn’t sitting anywhere near . . . Oh, my God!” I clutched Lucky’s arm as I realized what I was saying.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Charlie was sitting in that little alcove at the back of the restaurant!”

  “He couldn’ta been,” Lucky said, shaking his head. “They’re saying the shot that killed him was fired through the front window.”

  “I know. But I was standing right next to him, and he was back in that alcove when he was shot.”

  “But you can’t even see the alcove from the window.”

  “And since when do bullets go around corners?” I said.

  Lucky whistled. “No wonder the cops got a problem.”

  We both turned our gazes to the restaurant. Inside, through the restaurant’s front window—which bore a hole from the shot fired tonight—I could see Lopez talking to a CSU cop. They’d figured out the problem, all right. Lopez made a smooth motion with his right hand while he backed away from the window, still talking to the other cop. After a moment, he shook his head and went back to the window with a frown on his face.

  Lucky said, “Your boyfriend’s trying to follow the trajectory. And it don’t work.”

  I frowned, thinking about various episodes of Crime and Punishment that I’d seen. “Could Charlie have been hit by a ricochet?”

  Lucky thought it was over for a moment, then shook his head. “Not where he was sitting. Not if that bullet came through the front window.” After another moment, of watching Lopez talk with the CSU cop, he added, “Betcha that’s what they’re saying right now, too.”

  “So how could that bullet have hit Charlie?”

  “And who the hell fired it?” Lucky glanced dismissively at the two patrolmen and added, “Everyone outside is actually telling the truth, Esther. No one saw nothing.”

  “Really?” It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone but me was telling the truth.

  “Yeah. Put it all together, and it don’t make no sense.” Lucky shook his head, frowning like Lopez now. “I’m telling you, it’s like Charlie got popped by a ghost.”

  4

  Detective Napoli and a patrol officer took me to the OCCB’s charmless headquarters to get my statement. Lopez, whom Napoli obviously didn’t want anywhere near me, stayed at Stella’s to keep working on the problem the cops were having with the crime scene.

  I figured they were looking for evidence of a second gun. Or at least a second bullet. Because the shot fired from the street, through the front window, couldn’t have been the shot that killed Chubby Charlie. But it was still the only one the cops knew about by the time I left the scene. And unless the killer could see through walls and program his bullets to turn corners, there was no way the shot that came through the window could have killed the mobster.

  If I hadn’t been hysterical after watching Charlie die, I might have realized this right away. Or maybe not. I’m an actress, not an assassin. My familiarity with guns, bullets, and firing trajectories is limited to what I see on Crime and Punishment.

  But Lucky, whose knowledge of such things seemed to be encyclopedic, was baffled.

  The cops seemed to be baffled, too. In between bouts of questioning me, Napoli had several exasperated phone conversations with CSU personnel back at Stella’s, and one very exasperated conversation with Lopez.

  At least, I assumed it was Lopez, since there was one point at which Napoli snapped at his caller, “Miss Diamond is fine. Now keep your mind on your job, goddamn it!” I doubted that any other cop at Bella Stella was asking after my well-being.

  Napoli asked me a lot of questions about myself, about that evening at Stella’s, and about Charlie. He didn’t ask how I knew Lopez, though. He didn’t even allude to the acquaintance. But I had a feeling he’d be asking Lopez plenty about it, once they were done processing the crime scene.

  “You seem very tight with the Gambellos,” Napoli observed, handing me a diet soda after we’d been talking for a while.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I’m just a waitress. I’ve been working at Stella’s on and off since last year, but only when I don’t have a real job—an acting job. I’m not an insider there, and I don’t socialize with anyone there. I like the place because Stella is a good employer and the customers tip well.”

  “Oh?” Napoli affected casual surprise. “I thought Stella and a number of her customers seemed very fond of you tonight. Protective, too.”

  “I think they were mostly trying to annoy the cops.”

  Actually, I did have warm relationships with Stella and Lucky. And since a number of the restaurant’s regulars liked the way I sang, they often asked to sit in my section and I was on cordial terms with them. But I definitely wanted to quash Napoli’s attempt to suggest that I was cozy with the Mafia.

  He persisted, “I thought they seemed to count you as one of their own.”

  “I’m not Italian,” I said. “And I think you know, Detective Napoli, that people in that walk of life would never think of me as one of the family. So to speak.”

  “Meyer Lansky was Jewish, but he and Lucky Luciano were like brothers.”

  “Meyer Lansky was a gangster. I’m an actress waiting tables in between roles.”

  “But you
see a lot at Stella’s, I’ll bet.”

  “I keep my head down and mind my own business,” I said firmly. “For the most part, I’m not even sure which of Stella’s customers is or isn’t a Gambello. They don’t carry business cards or wear matching shirts, you know. I realize there are real mobsters at Stella’s, and I know who the more famous ones are. That’s all.”

  “Famous? Like Chubby Charlie Chiccante?” Napoli prodded.

  I nodded. “Charlie has been in the news too many times for me not to know who he is. Er, was.”

  I was, I admit, prevaricating a little. I didn’t like Napoli, and I was uneasy about his evident conviction that I knew a lot more than I did.

  A number of the wiseguys who hung out at Stella’s, like Tommy Two Toes and Jimmy Legs, had also been in the news, so I knew about them. And wiseguys aren’t discreet. The reputations of guys like Lucky Battistuzzi, Frankie the Hermit, and Ronnie Romano were openly acknowledged by the customers at Stella’s, as well as by the staff.

  But in cases where I didn’t know someone’s reputation, his status was usually easy to guess. If a man was always in the company of made guys and seemed to be working with them, it was a safe bet that he was also a made guy, a “button man,” someone who’d gotten “straightened out.” If someone seemed welcome on the fringes of those tight circles but obviously wasn’t an insider, he was “connected,” an “associate,” or a “friend of ours.” These were all terms I’d heard wiseguys use to describe various shady men and tough guys who had friendly relations with the Gambello crime family or who wanted to become part of it.

  And then there were the Buonarottis. None of them were really regulars, but a few members of that crime family showed up every week. The Buonarottis were less powerful than the Gambellos and so, with the brashness born of insecurity, they liked to make sure Stella’s servers knew who they were—made guys, button men, Buonarotti soldiers. Guys with “juice”—power, influence, clout.

  We also had many customers who shared the mannerisms and unfortunate fashion sense of wiseguys (loud shirts, shiny shoes, gold jewelry, and an ill-advised fondness for colorful sweat suits), but who weren’t criminals. Sometimes it was easy to tell them apart from the mobsters, but not always.