Dressed for Death (27 page)

‘If I had made her wear her seat
belt, she’d still be alive.’

‘Lorenzo, stop it,’ Brunetti
said, voice rough, but not with anger. They were back in the Questura by then,
sitting in Vianello’s office while they waited for their reports of the
incident to be typed out so that they could sign them and go home. ‘We can go
on all night like that. I shouldn’t have gone to meet Crespo. I should have
seen that it was too easy, should have been suspicious when nothing happened in
Mestre. Next we’ll be saying we should have come back in an armoured car.’

Vianello sat beside his desk,
looking past Brunetti. There was a large bump on the left side of his forehead,
and the skin around it was turning blue. ‘But we did what we did, or we didn’t
do what we didn’t do, and still she’s dead,’ Vianello said in a flat voice.

Brunetti leaned forward and
touched the other man’s arm. ‘Lorenzo, we didn’t kill her. The men or the man
in that car did. There’s nothing we can do except try to find them.’

‘That’s not going to help Maria,
is it?’ Vianello asked bitterly.

‘Nothing on God’s earth can ever
help Maria Nardi again, Lorenzo. We both know that. But I want the men in that
car, and I want whoever sent them.’

Vianello nodded, but he had
nothing to say to this. ‘What about her husband?’ Vianello asked.

‘What about him?’

‘Will you call him?’ There was
something other than curiosity in Vianello’s voice. ‘I can’t.’

‘Where is he?’ Brunetti asked.

‘At the Hotel Impero in Milano.’

Brunetti nodded. ‘I’ll call him
in the morning. There’s no sense in calling him now, to add time to his
suffering.’

A uniformed officer came into the
office carrying the originals of their statements and two Xerox copies of each.
Both men sat patiently and read through the typescripts and then each signed
the original and both copies and handed them back to the officer. When he was
gone, Brunetti got to his feet and said, ‘I think it’s time to go home,
Lorenzo. It’s after four. Did you call Nadia?’

Vianello nodded. He had called
her from the Questura an hour before. ‘It was the only job Maria could get. Her
father was a policeman, so someone pulled strings for her, and she got the job.
Do you know what she really wanted to do, Commissario?’

‘I don’t want to talk about this,
Lorenzo.’

‘Do you know what she really
wanted to do?’

‘Lorenzo,’ Brunetti said in a low
voice, warning him.

‘She wanted to be an elementary
schoolteacher, but she knew there were no jobs, so she joined the police.’

All this time, they had been
walking slowly down the steps and now walked across the lobby towards the
double doors. The uniformed officer on guard, seeing Brunetti, saluted. The two
men stepped outside, and from across the canal, from the trees in Campo San
Lorenzo, came the almost deafening chorus of birds as they courted the dawn. It
was no longer the full dark of night, but the light was so far only a
suggestion, one that turned the world of thick impenetrability into one of
infinite possibility.

They stood on the edge of the
canal, looking over towards the trees, their eyes drawn by what their ears
perceived. Both had their hands in their pockets and both felt the sudden chill
that lay in the air before dawn.

‘This shouldn’t happen,’ Vianello
said. Then, turning off to the right and his way home, he said, ’
Arrivederci,
Commissario,’ and walked away.

Brunetti turned the other way and
started back towards Rialto and the streets that would take him home. They’d
killed her as though she were a fly; they had stretched out their hands to
crush him and, instead, had snapped off her life. Just like that. One minute,
she was a young woman, leaning forward to say something to a friend, hand
placed lightly, confidently, affectionately on his arm, mouth poised to speak.
What had she wanted to say? Was it a joke? Did she want to tell Vianello she
had been kidding back there, when she got into the car? Or had it been
something about Franco, some final word of longing? No one would ever know. The
fleeting thought had died with her.

He would call Franco, but not
yet. Let the young man sleep now, before great pain. Brunetti knew that he
couldn’t, not now, tell the young man of Maria’s last hour in the car with
Vianello; he couldn’t bear to say it. Later, Brunetti would tell him, for it
was then that the young man would be able to hear it, only then, after great
pain.

When he got to Rialto, he looked
off to the left and saw that a vaporetto was approaching the stop, and it was
that coincidence that decided him. He hurried to the stop and got on to the
boat, took it to the station, and caught the morning’s first train across the
causeway. Gallo, he knew, would not be at the Questura, so he took a taxi from
the Mestre station, giving the driver Crespo’s address.

The daylight had come when he
wasn’t paying attention, and with it had come the heat, perhaps worse here in
this city of pavement and cement, roads and high-rise buildings. Brunetti
almost welcomed the mounting discomfort of the temperature and humidity; it
distracted him from what he had seen that night and from what he was beginning
to fear he would see at Crespo’s apartment.

As it had been the last time, the
elevator was air-conditioned, already necessary even at this hour. He pushed
the button and rose quickly and silently to the seventh floor. He rang Crespo’s
doorbell, but this time there was no response from beyond it. He rang again and
then again, holding his finger on the bell for long seconds. No footsteps, no
voices, no sound of life.

He took out his wallet and
removed from it a small sliver of metal. Vianello had once spent an entire
afternoon teaching him how to do this, and, even though he hadn’t been an
especially good pupil, it took him less than ten seconds to open Crespo’s door.
He stepped across the threshold, saying, ‘Signor Crespo? Your door is open. Are
you in here?’ Caution never hurt.

No one was in the living-room.
The kitchen glistened, fastidiously clean. He found Crespo in the bedroom, on
the bed, dressed in yellow silk pyjamas. A piece of telephone wire was knotted
around his neck, his face a horrible, stuffed parody of its former beauty.

Brunetti didn’t bother to look
around or examine the room; he went to the apartment next door and knocked on
the door until a sleepy, angry man opened it, shouting at him. By the time the
laboratory crew arrived from the Mestre Questura, Brunetti had also had time to
call Maria Nardi’s husband in Milano and tell him what had happened. Unlike the
man at the door, Franco Nardi didn’t shout; Brunetti had no idea if this was
better or worse.

Back at the Questura in Mestre,
Brunetti told a just-arrived Gallo what had happened and turned the examination
of Crespo’s apartment and body over to him, explaining that he had to go back
to Venice that morning. He did not tell Gallo that he was returning in order to
attend Mascari’s funeral; already the atmosphere swirled with too much death.

Even though he came back to the
city from a place of violent death, came back in order to be present at the
consequences of another, he could not stop his heart from contracting at the
sight of the bell towers and pastel facades that swept into view as the police
car crossed the causeway. Beauty changed nothing, he knew, and perhaps the
comfort it offered was no more than illusion, but still he welcomed that
illusion.

The funeral was a miserable
thing: empty words were spoken by people who were clearly too shocked by the
circumstances of Mascari’s death to pretend to mean what they said. The widow
sat through it all rigid and dry-eyed and left the church immediately behind
the coffin, silent and solitary.

* * * *

The
newspapers, as was only to be expected, went wild at the scent of Crespo’s
death. The first story appeared in the evening edition of
La Notte,
a
paper much given to red headlines and the use of the present tense. Francesco
Crespo was described as ‘a transvestite courtesan’. His biography was given,
and much attention was paid to the fact that he had worked as a dancer in a gay
discoteca
in Vicenza, even though his tenure there had lasted less than a
week. The writer of this article drew the inevitable link to the murder of
Leonardo Mascari, less than a week ago, and suggested that the similarity in
victim indicated a person who was exacting a deadly vengeance against
transvestites. The writer did not seem to believe it necessary to explain why
this might be.

The morning papers picked up this
idea. The
Gazzettino
made reference to the more than ten prostitutes who
had been killed just in the province of Pordenone in recent years and attempted
to draw a line between those crimes and the murders of the two transvestites.
Il
Manifesto
gave the crime two full columns on page four, the writer using
the opportunity to refer to Crespo as ‘yet another of the parasites who cling
to the rotting body of Italian bourgeois society’.

In its magisterial discussion of
the crime,
II Corriere della Sera
veered quickly from the murder of a
relatively insignificant prostitute to that of a well-known Venetian banker.
The article made reference to ‘local sources’ who reported that Mascari’s ‘double
life’ had been an item of common knowledge in certain quarters. His death,
therefore, was simply the inevitable result of the ‘spiral of vice’ into which
his weakness had transformed his life.

Interested by this revelation of ‘sources’,
Brunetti put a call through to the Rome office of that newspaper and asked to
speak to the writer of the article. That person, when contacted and learning
that Brunetti was a commissario of police wanting to know to whom he had spoken
when writing the article, said that he was not at liberty to reveal the source
of his information, that the trust that must exist between a journalist and
those who both speak to and read him must be both implicit and absolute.
Further, to reveal his source would go against the highest principles of his
profession. It took Brunetti at least three full minutes to realize that the
man was serious, that he actually believed what he was saying.

‘How long have you worked for the
newspaper?’ Brunetti interrupted.

Surprised to be cut off in the
full flood of his exposition of his principles, goals, and ideals, the reporter
paused a moment and then answered, ‘Four months. Why?’

‘Can you transfer this call back
to the switchboard, or do I have to dial again?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I can transfer you. But why?’

‘I’d like to speak to your editor.’

The man’s voice grew uncertain,
then suspicious, at this, the first real sign of the duplicity and underhanded
dealings of the powers of the state. ‘Commissario, I want to warn you that any
attempt to suppress or call into question the facts I have revealed in my story
will quickly be revealed to my readers. I’m not sure if you realize that a new
age has dawned in this country, that the people’s need to know can no longer
be—’ Brunetti pushed down the button on his receiver and, when he got a new dial
tone, redialled the central number of the newspaper. Not even the Questura
should have to pay to listen to that sort of nonsense, and certainly not at
long-distance rates.

When he was finally connected
with the editor of the news section of the paper, he turned out to be Giulio
Lotto, a man with whom Brunetti had dealt in the past when both of them had
been suffering exile in Naples.

‘Giulio, it’s Guido Brunetti.’

‘Ciao,
Guido. I heard you were back in
Venice.’

‘Yes. That’s why I’m calling. One
of your writers’ -Brunetti looked down at the byline and read out the name - ‘Lino
Cavaliere, has an article this morning about the transvestite who was murdered
in Mestre.’

‘No. My deputy read it last
night. What about it?’

‘He talks about “local sources”
who say the other one, Mascari, who was murdered last week, was known by people
here to have been leading a “double life”.’ Brunetti paused for a moment and
then repeated the words: ‘ “double life”. Nice phrase, Giulio, “double life”.’