Dressed for Death (13 page)

Brunetti finished his coffee and
set his cup down before he answered. ‘I don’t think there’s very much he can do
except wait for Burrasca to get tired of her or for her to get tired of
Burrasca and come back.’

‘What’s he like, Burrasca?’ Paola
didn’t waste time asking if the police had a file on Burrasca. As soon as
anyone in Italy made enough money, someone would have a file.

‘From what I’ve heard, he’s a
pig. He’s part of that Milano world of cocaine, cars with fast engines, and
girls with slow brains.’

‘Well, he’s got half of one of
them this time,’ Paola said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Signora Patta. She’s not a girl,
but she’s certainly got a slow brain.’

‘Do you know her that well?’
Brunetti was never sure whom Paola knew. Or what.

‘No, I’m simply inferring it from
the fact that she married Patta and stayed married to him. I imagine it would
be difficult to put up with a pompous ass like that.’

‘But you put up with me,’
Brunetti said, smiling, in search of a compliment.

Her look was level. ‘You’re not
pompous, Guido. At times you’re difficult, and sometimes you’re impossible, but
you are not pompous.’ No compliments here.

He pushed himself back from the
table, feeling that it was perhaps time to go to the Questura.

When he got to his office, he
looked through the papers waiting for him on his desk, disappointed to find
nothing about the dead man in Mestre. He was interrupted by a knock on the
door. ‘
Avanti
,’ he called, thinking it might be Vianello with something
from Mestre. Instead of the sergeant, a dark-haired young woman walked in, a
sheaf of files in her right hand. She smiled across the room at him and approached
his desk, looking down at the papers in her hand and paging through them.

‘Commissario Brunetti?’ she
asked.

‘Yes.’

She pulled a few papers from one
of the files and placed them on the desk in front of him. ‘The men downstairs
said you might want to see these, Dottore.’

‘Thank you, Signorina,’ he said,
pulling the papers across the desk towards him.

She remained standing in front of
his desk, clearly waiting to be asked who she was, perhaps too shy to introduce
herself He looked up, saw large brown eyes in an appealing full face and an
explosion of bright lipstick. ‘And you are?’ he asked with a smile.

‘Elettra Zorzi, sir. I started
work last week as secretary to Vice-Questore Patta.’ That would explain the new
desk outside Patta’s office. Patta had been going on for months, insisting that
he had too much paperwork to handle by himself. And so he had managed, like a
particularly industrious truffle pig, to root around in the budget long enough
to find the money for a secretary.

‘I’m very pleased to meet you,
Signorina Zorzi,’ Brunetti said. The name rang familiarly in his ear.

‘I believe I’m to work for you,
as well, Commissario,’ she said, smiling.

Not if he knew Patta, she wouldn’t.
But still he said, ‘That would certainly be very nice,’ and glanced down at the
papers she had placed on the desk.

He heard her move away and
glanced up to follow her out of the door. A skirt, neither short nor long, and
very, very nice legs. She turned at the door, saw him looking at her, and
smiled again. He looked down at the papers. Who would name a child Elettra? How
long ago? Twenty-five years? And Zorzi; he knew lots of Zorzis, but none of
them was capable of naming a daughter Elettra. The door closed behind her, and
he returned his attention to the papers, but there was little of interest in
them; crime seemed to be on holiday in Venice.

He went down to Patta’s office
but stopped in amazement when he entered the anteroom. For years, the room had
held only a chipped porcelain umbrella stand and a desk covered with outdated
copies of the sort of magazines generally found in dentists’ offices. Today,
the magazines had vanished, replaced by a computer console attached to a
printer that stood on a low metal table to the left of the desk. In front of
the window, in place of the umbrella stand, stood a small table, this one of
wood, and on it rested a glass vase holding an enormous bouquet of orange and
yellow gladioli.

Either Patta had decided to give
an interview to
Architectural Digest
, or the new secretary had decided
that the opulence Patta believed fitting for his office should trickle out to
where worked the lower orders. As if summoned by Brunetti’s thoughts, she came
into the office.

‘It looks very nice,’ he said,
smiling and gesturing around the small area with a wave of his hand.

She crossed the room and set an
armful of folders on her desk, then turned to face him. ‘I’m glad you like it,
Commissario. It would have been impossible to work in here the way it was.
Those magazines,’ she added with a delicate shudder.

‘The flowers are beautiful. Are
they to celebrate your arrival?’

‘Oh, no,’ she replied blandly. ‘I’ve
given a permanent order to Fantin; they’ll deliver fresh flowers every Monday
and Thursday from now on.’ Fantin: the most expensive florist in the city.
Twice a week. A hundred times a year? She interrupted his calculations by
explaining, ‘Since I’m also to prepare the Vice-Questore’s expense account, I
thought I’d add them in as a necessary expense.’

‘And will Fantin bring flowers
for the Vice-Questore’s office, as well?’

Her surprise seemed genuine. ‘Good
heavens, no. I’m certain the Vice-Questore could afford them himself It wouldn’t
be right to spend the taxpayers’ money like that.’ She walked around the desk
and flipped on the computer. ‘Is there anything I can do for you, Commissario?’
she asked, the issue of the flowers, apparently, settled.

‘Not at the moment, Signorina,’
he said as she bent over the keys.

He knocked on Patta’s door and
was told to enter. Though Patta sat where he always did, behind his desk,
little else was the same. The surface of the desk, usually clear of anything
that might suggest work, was covered with folders, reports; even a crumpled
newspaper lay to one side. It was not Patta’s usual
L’Osservatore Romano,
Brunetti
noticed, but the just-short-of-scurrilous
La Nuova,
a paper whose large
readership numbers seemed to rest on the joint proposition that people not only
would do base and ignoble things but that they would also want to read about
them. Even the air-conditioning, this one of the few offices to have it, seemed
not to be working.

‘Sit down, Brunetti,’ the
Vice-Questore commanded.

As if Brunetti’s glance were
contagious, Patta looked at the papers on his desk and began to gather them up.
He piled them one on top of the other, edges every which way, pushed them
aside, and sat, his hand forgotten on top of them.

‘What’s happening in Mestre?’ he
finally asked Brunetti.

‘We haven’t identified the victim
yet, sir. His picture has been shown to many of the transvestites who work
there, but none of them has been able to recognize him.’ Patta said nothing. ‘One
of the men I questioned said that the man looked familiar, but he couldn’t give
a definite identification, so it could mean anything. Or nothing. I think
another one of the men I questioned, a man named Crespo, recognized him, but he
insisted that he didn’t. I’d like to talk to him again, but there might be
problems in doing that.’

‘Santomauro?’ Patta asked and,
for the first time in the years they had worked together, succeeded in
surprising Brunetti.

‘How do you know about
Santomauro?’ Brunetti blurted out and then added, as if to correct his sharp
tone, ‘sir.’

‘He’s called me three times,’
Patta said, and then added in a voice he made lower but which was definitely
intended for Brunetti to hear, ‘the bastard.’

Immediately on his guard at Patta’s
unwonted, and carefully planned, indiscretion, Brunetti, like a spider on its
web, began to run his memory over the various strands that might connect these
two men. Santomauro was a famous lawyer, his clients the businessmen and
politicians of the entire Veneto region. That, if nothing else, would
ordinarily have Patta grovelling at his feet. But then he remembered it: Holy
Mother Church and Santomauro’s Lega della Moralità, the women’s branch of which
was under the patronage and direction of none other than the absent Maria
Lucrezia Patta. What sort of sermon about marriage, its sanctity, and its
obligations had accompanied Santomauro’s phone calls to the Vice-Questore?

‘That’s right,’ Brunetti said,
deciding to admit to half of what he knew, ‘he’s Crespo’s lawyer.’ If Patta
chose to believe that a commissario of police found nothing strange in the fact
that a lawyer of the stature of Giancarlo Santomauro was the lawyer of a
transvestite whore, then it was best to allow him that belief. ‘What has he
told you, sir?’

‘He said you harassed and
terrified his client, that you were, to use his words, “unnecessarily brutal”
in trying to force him to divulge information.’ Patta ran one hand down the
side of his jaw, and Brunetti realized it looked as though the vice-questore
had not shaved that day.

‘I told him, of course, that I
would not listen to this sort of criticism of a commissario of police, that he
could come in and file an official complaint if he wanted to.’ Ordinarily a
complaint of this sort, from a man of Santomauro’s importance, would have Patta
promising to have the offending officer disciplined, if not demoted and
transferred to Palermo for three years. And Patta would usually have done this
even before asking for details. Patta continued in his role as defender of the
principle that all men are equal before the law. ‘I will not tolerate civilian
interference with the workings of the agencies of the state.’ That, Brunetti
was sure, could loosely be translated to read that Patta had a private axe to
grind with Santomauro and would be a willing partner to any attempt to see the
other man lose face.

‘Then do you think I ought to go
ahead and question Crespo again, sir?’

No matter how great his immediate
anger at Santomauro might be, it was too much to expect Patta to overcome the
habit of decades and order a policeman to perform an action that opposed the
will of a man with important political connections. ‘Do whatever you think is
necessary, Brunetti.’

‘Is there anything else, sir?’

Patta didn’t answer, so Brunetti
got to his feet. ‘There is one other thing, Commissario,’ Patta said before
Brunetti had turned to walk away.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘You have friends in the
publishing world, don’t you?’ Oh, good lord, was Patta going to ask him to
help? Brunetti looked past his superior’s head and nodded vaguely. ‘I wonder if
you would mind getting in touch with them.’ Brunetti cleared his throat and
looked at his shoes. ‘I find myself in an embarrassing situation at the moment,
Brunetti, and I would prefer that it go no further than it has already.’ Patta
said no more than that.

‘I’ll do what I can, sir,’
Brunetti said lamely, thinking of his ‘friends in the publishing world’, two
writers on financial affairs and one political columnist.

‘Good,’ Patta said and paused. ‘I’ve
asked that new secretary to try to get some information on his taxes.’ It was
not necessary for Patta to explain whose taxes he meant. ‘I’ve asked her to
give you anything she finds.’ Brunetti was too surprised by this to do anything
but nod.

Patta bent his head over the
papers and Brunetti, reading this as a dismissal, left the office. Signorina
Elettra was no longer at her desk, so Brunetti wrote a note and left it on her
desk. ‘Could you see what your computer tells you about the dealings of Avvocato
Giancarlo Santomauro?’

He went back upstairs to his
office, conscious of the heat, which he felt expanding, seeking out every
corner and crevice of the building, ignoring the thick walls and the marble
floors, bringing thick humidity with it, the sort that caused sheets of paper
to turn up at the corners and cling to any hand that touched them. His windows
were open, and he went to stand by them, but they did no more than bring new
heat and humidity into the room, and, now that the tide was at its lowest, the
penetrating stench of corruption that always lurked beneath the water, even
here, close to the broad expanse of open water in front of San Marco. He stood
by the window, sweat soaking through his slacks and shirt to his belt, and he
thought of the mountains above Bolzano and of the thick down comforters under
which they slept during August nights.