Dressed for Death (9 page)

There was no air-conditioning and
no fan in the room, and it reeked of cheap cigarettes, an odour which Brunetti
imagined he could feel sinking into his damp clothing, into his hair. ‘Signor
Feltrinelli, I am asking you to do your duty as a citizen, to help the police
in the investigation of a murder. We are seeking merely to identify this man.
Until we do, there is no way we can begin that investigation.’

‘Is he the one you found out in
that field yesterday?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you think he might be one of
us?’ There was no need for Feltrinelli to explain who ‘us’ were.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s not necessary for you to
know that.’

‘But you think he’s a
transvestite?’

‘Yes.’

‘And a whore?’

‘Perhaps,’ Brunetti answered.

Feltrinelli turned away from the
window and came across the room towards Brunetti. He extended his hand. ‘Let me
see the picture.’

Brunetti opened the folder in his
hand and drew a Xerox copy of the artist’s sketch from it. He noticed that the
damp palm of his hand had been stained a brightblue by the dye of the paper
cover of the folder. He handed the sketch to Feltrinelli, who looked at it
carefully for a moment, then used his other hand to cover the hairline and
study it again. He handed it back to Brunetti and shook his head. ‘No, I’ve
never seen him before.’

Brunetti believed him. He put the
photo back into the folder. ‘Can you think of anyone who might be able to help
us find out who this man is?’

‘I assume you’re checking through
a list of those of us with arrest records,’ Feltrinelli said, voice no longer
so confrontational.

‘Yes. We don’t have a way to get
anyone else to look at the picture.’

‘You mean the ones who haven’t
been arrested yet, I suppose,’ Feltrinelli said and then asked, ‘Do you have
another one of those drawings?’

Brunetti pulled one from the
folder and handed it to him and then handed him one of his cards. ‘You’ll have
to call the Questura in Mestre, but you can ask for me. Or for Sergeant Gallo.’

‘How was he killed?’

‘It will be in this morning’s
papers.’

‘I don’t read the papers.’

‘He was beaten to death.’

‘In the field?’

‘I’m not at liberty to tell you
that, Signore.’

Feltrinelli went and placed the
drawing face up on the draughting table and lit another cigarette.

‘All right,’ he said, turning
back to Brunetti. ‘I’ve got the drawing. I’ll show it to some people. If I find
out anything, I’ll let you know.’

‘Are you an architect, Signor
Feltrinelli?’

‘Yes. I mean I have the
laurea
d’architettura.
But I’m not working. I mean I have no job.’

Nodding towards the tissue paper
on the drawing-board, Brunetti asked, ‘But are you working on a project?’

‘Just to amuse myself,
Commissario. I lost my job.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Signore.’

Feltrinelli put both hands in his
pockets and looked up at Brunetti’s face. Keeping his voice absolutely neutral,
he said, ‘I was working in Egypt, for the government, designing public-housing
projects. But then they decided that all foreigners had to have an AIDS test
every year. I failed mine last year, so they fired me and sent me back.’

Brunetti said nothing to this,
and Feltrinelli continued, ‘When I got back here, I tried to find a job, but,
as you surely know, architects are as easily found as grapes at harvest time.
And so ...’ He paused here, as if in search of a way to put it. ‘And so I
decided to change my profession.’

‘Are you referring to prostitution?’
Brunetti asked.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘You’re not concerned about the
hazard?’

‘Hazard?’ Feltrinelli asked, and
came close to repeating the smile he had given Brunetti when he opened the
door. Brunetti said nothing. ‘You mean AIDS?’ Feltrinelli asked, unnecessarily.

‘Yes.’

‘There’s no hazard for me,’
Feltrinelli said and turned away from Brunetti. He went back to the draughting
table and picked up his cigarette. ‘You can let yourself out, Commissario,’ he
said, taking his place at the table and bending down over his drawing.

* * * *

Chapter Eight

Brunetti
emerged into the sun, the street, the noise and turned into a bar that stood to
the right of the apartment building. He asked for a glass of mineral water,
then for a second one. When he had almost finished that, he poured the water at
the bottom of the glass on to his handkerchief and wiped futilely at the blue
dye on his hand.

Was it a criminal act for a
prostitute with AIDS to have sex? Unprotected sex? It was so long since
policemen had treated prostitution as a crime that Brunetti found it difficult
to consider it as such. But surely, for anyone with AIDS knowingly to have
unprotected sex, surely that was a crime, though it was entirely possible that
the law lagged behind the truth in this, and it was not illegal. Seeing the
moral quicksand that distinction created ahead of him, he ordered a third glass
of mineral water and looked at the next name on the list.

Francesco Crespo lived only four
blocks from Feltrinelli, but it might as well have been a world away. The
building was sleek, a tall glass-fronted rectangle which must have seemed, when
it was built ten years ago, right on the cutting edge of urban design. But
Italy is a country where new ideas in design are never prized for much longer
than it takes to put them into effect, by which time the ever-forward-looking
have abandoned them and gone off in pursuit of gaudy new banners, like those
damned souls in the vestibule of Dante’s
Inferno,
who circle round for
all eternity, seeking a banner they can neither identify nor name.

The decade that had elapsed since
the construction of this building had carried fashion away with it, and now the
building looked like nothing so much as an upended box of
spaghettini.
The glass in the windows gleamed, and a small patch of land between it and the
street was manicured with precision, but none of that could save it from
looking entirely out of place among the other lower, more modest buildings
amidst which it had been erected with such futile confidence.

He had the apartment number and
was quickly carried to the seventh floor by the air-conditioned elevator. When
the door opened, Brunetti stepped out into a marble corridor, also
air-conditioned. He walked to the right and rang the bell of apartment D.

He heard a sound inside; but no
one came to the door. He rang again. The sound wasn’t repeated, but still no
one came to the door. He rang the bell a third time, keeping his finger pressed
to it. Even through the door he could hear the shrill whine of the bell and
then a voice calling,
‘Basta. Vengo.’

He took his finger off the bell,
and a moment later the door was yanked open by a tall, heavy-set man in linen
slacks and what looked like a cashmere turtle neck. Brunetti glanced at the man
for an instant, saw two dark eyes, angry eyes, and a nose that had been broken
a number of times, but then his eyes fell again to the high neck of the sweater
and found themselves imprisoned there. The middle of August, people collapsing
on the street from the heat, and this man wore a cashmere turtle neck. He
pulled his eyes back to the man’s face and asked, ‘Signor Crespo?’

‘Who wants him?’ the man asked,
making no attempt to disguise both anger and menace.

‘Commissario Guido Brunetti,’ he
answered, again showing his warrant card. This man, like Feltrinelli, needed
only the slightest of glances to recognize it. He suddenly stepped a bit closer
to Brunetti, perhaps hoping to force him back into the corridor with the
offensive presence of his body. But Brunetti didn’t move, and the other man
stepped back. ‘He’s not here.’

From another room, both of them
heard the sound of something heavy falling to the floor.

This time it was Brunetti who
took a step forward, backing the other man away from the door. Brunetti
continued into the room and walked over to a thronelike leather chair beside a
table on which stood an immense spray of gladioli in a crystal vase. He sat in
the chair, crossed his legs, and said, ‘Then perhaps I’ll wait for Signor
Crespo.’ He smiled. ‘If you have no objection, Signor...?’

The other man slammed the front
door, wheeled towards a door that stood on the other side of the room, and
said, ‘I’ll get him.’

He disappeared into the room
beyond, closing the door behind him. His voice, deep and angry, resounded
through it. Brunetti heard another voice, a tenor to the bass. But then he
heard what seemed to be a third voice, another tenor, but a full tone higher
than the last. Whatever conversation went on behind the door took a number of
minutes, during which Brunetti looked around the room. It was all new, it was
all visibly expensive, and Brunetti would have wanted none of it, neither the
pearl grey leather sofa nor the sleek mahogany table that stood beside it.

The door to the other room
opened, and the heavy-set man came out, followed closely by another man a
decade younger and at least three sizes smaller than him.

‘That’s him,’ the one in the
sweater said, pointing to Brunetti.

The younger man wore loose
pale-blue slacks and an open-necked white silk shirt. He walked across the room
towards Brunetti, who stood and asked, ‘Signor Francesco Crespo?’

He came and stood in front of
Brunetti, but then instinct or professional training seemed to exert itself in
the presence of a man of Brunetti’s age and general appearance. He took a small
step closer, raised a hand in a delicate, splay-fingered gesture, and placed it
at the base of his throat. ‘Yes, what would you like?’ It was the higher tenor
voice Brunetti had heard through the door, but Crespo tried to make it deeper,
as if that would make it more interesting or seductive.

Crespo was a bit shorter than
Brunetti and must have weighed ten kilos less. Either through coincidence or
design, his eyes were the same pale grey as the sofa; they stood out sharply in
the deep tan of his face. Had his features appeared on the face of a woman,
they would have been judged no more than conventionally pretty; the sharp
angularity conveyed by his masculinity made them beautiful.

This time it was Brunetti who
took a small step away from the other man. He heard the other one snort at this
and turned to pick up the folder, which he had placed on the table beside him.

’Signor Crespo, I’d like you to
look at a picture of someone and tell me if you recognize him.’

‘I’d be glad to look at anything
you chose to show me,’ Crespo said, putting heavy emphasis on ‘you’ and moving
his hand inside the collar of his shirt to caress his neck.

Brunetti opened the folder and
handed Crespo the artist’s drawing of the dead man. Crespo glanced down at it
for less than a second, looked up at Brunetti, smiled, and said, ‘I haven’t an
idea of who he could be.’ He held the picture out to Brunetti, who refused to
take it.

‘I’d like you to take a better
look at the picture, Signor Crespo.’

‘He told you he didn’t know him,’
the other one said from across the room.

Brunetti ignored him. ‘The man
was beaten to death, and we need to find out who he was, so I’d appreciate it
if you’d take another look at him, Signor Crespo.’

Crespo closed his eyes for a
moment and moved his hand to brush a wayward curl behind his left ear. ‘If you
insist,’ he said, looking down at the picture again. He bowed his head down
over the drawing and, this time, looked at the face pictured there. Brunetti
couldn’t see his eyes, but he did watch his hand suddenly move away from his
ear and move towards his neck again, this time with no attempt at
flirtatiousness.