Dressed for Death (2 page)

‘What time did you get here this
morning?’

‘Seven-thirty. Same as always.’

‘What were you doing in the
field?’ Somehow, the way he asked the questions and the way the other one wrote
down the answers made Cola feel they suspected him of something.

‘I went out to have a cigarette.’

‘The middle of August, and you
went out into the sun to have a cigarette?’ the first officer asked, making it
sound like lunacy. Or a lie.

‘It was my break time,’ Cola said
with mounting resentment. ‘I always go outside. I like to get away from the
smell.’ The word made it real to the policemen, and they looked towards the
building, the one with the notebook incapable of disguising the contraction of
his nostrils at what they met.

‘Where is she?’

‘Just beyond the fence. She’s
under a clump of bushes, so I didn’t see her at first.’

‘Why did you go near her?’

‘I saw a shoe.’

‘You what?’

‘I saw a shoe. Out in the field,
and then I saw the second one. I thought they might be good, so I went through
the fence to get them. I thought maybe my wife would want them.’ That was a
lie: he had thought he could sell them, but he didn’t want to tell this to the
police. It was a small lie, and entirely innocent, but it was only the first of
many lies that the police were going to be told about the shoe and the person
who wore it.

‘Then what?’ the first policeman
prompted when Cola added nothing to this.

‘Then I came back here.’

‘No, before that,’ he said with
an irritated shake of his head. ‘When you saw the shoe. When you saw her. What
happened?’

Cola spoke quickly, hoping that
would get him through and rid of it. ‘I picked up one shoe, and then I saw the
other one. It was under the bush. So I pulled on it. I thought it was stuck. So
I pulled again, and it came off.’ He swallowed once. Twice. ‘It was on her
foot. That’s why it wouldn’t come off’

‘Did you stay there long?’

This time it was Cola who
suspected lunacy. ‘No. No. No, I came back into the building and told
Banditelli, and he called you.’

The foreman nodded to confirm
this.

‘Did you walk around back there?’
the first policeman asked Cola.

‘Walk around?’

‘Stand around? Smoke? Drop
anything near her?’

Cola shook his head in a strong
negative.

The second one flipped the pages
of his notebook and the first said, ‘I asked you a question.’

‘No. Nothing. I saw her and I
dropped the shoe, and I went into the building.’

‘Did you touch her?’ the first
one asked.

Cola looked at him with eyes wide
with amazement. ‘She’s dead. Of course I didn’t touch her.’

‘You touched her foot,’ the second
policeman said, looking down at his notes.

‘I didn’t touch her foot,’ Cola
said, though he couldn’t remember now if he had or had not. ‘I touched the
shoe, and it came off her foot.’ He couldn’t keep himself from asking, ‘Why
would I want to touch her?’

Neither policeman answered this.
The first one turned and nodded to the second, who flipped his notebook closed.
‘All right, show us where she is.’

Cola stood rooted to the spot and
shook his head from side to side. The sun had dried the blood that spattered
down the front of his apron, and flies buzzed around him. He didn’t look at
them. ‘She’s at the back, out beyond the big hole in the fence.’

‘I want you to show us where she
is,’ the first policeman said.

‘I just told you where she is,’
Cola snapped, voice rising up sharply.

The two policemen exchanged a
glance that somehow managed to suggest that Cola’s reluctance was significant,
worth remembering. But they turned away from him and from the foreman and
walked around the side of the building, saying nothing.

It was noon and the sun beat down
on the flat tops of the officers’ uniform caps. Beneath them, their hair was
sopping, their necks running with sweat. At the back of the building, they saw
the large hole in the fence and made towards it. Behind them, filtering through
the death squeals that still came from the building, they heard human sounds
and turned towards them. Clustered around the back entrance of the building,
their aprons as red with gore as Cola’s, five or six men huddled in a tight
ball. Used to this curiosity, the policemen turned back to the fence and headed
towards the hole. Bowing low, they went through it in single file and then off
to the left, towards a large spiky clump of bush that stood beyond the fence.

The officers stopped a few metres
from it. Knowing to look for the foot, they easily found it, saw its sole
peering out from beneath the low branches. Both shoes lay just in front of it.

The two of them approached the
foot, walking slowly and looking at the ground where they walked, as careful to
avoid the malevolent puddles as to keep from stepping in anything that might be
another footprint. Just beside the shoes, the first one knelt down and pushed
the waist-high grass aside with his hand.

The body lay on its back, the
outer side of the ankles pressed into the earth. The policeman reached forward
and pushed at the grass, exposing a length of hairless calf. He removed his
sun-glasses and peered into the shadows, following with his eyes the legs, long
and muscular, following across the bony knee, up to the lacy red underpants
that showed under the bright red dress that was pulled back over the face. He
stared a moment longer.

‘Cazzo
,’ he exclaimed and let the grass
spring back into place.

‘What’s the matter?’ the other
one asked.

‘It’s a man.’

* * * *

Chapter Three

Ordinarily,
the news that a transvestite prostitute had been found in Marghera with his
head and face beaten in would have created a sensation even among the jaded
staff at the Venice Questura, especially during the long Ferragosto holiday,
when crime tended to drop off or take on the boring predictability of
burglaries and break-ins. But today it would have taken something far more
lurid to displace the spectacular news that ran like flame through the corridors
of the Questura: Maria Lucrezia Patta, wife of Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta,
had that weekend left her husband of twenty-seven years to take up residence in
the Milano apartment of - and here each teller of the tale paused to prepare
each new listener for the bombshell - Tito Burrasca, the founding light and
prime mover of Italy’s pornographic film industry.

The news had dropped from heaven
upon the place beneath just that morning, carried into the building by a
secretary in the Ufficio Stranieri, whose uncle lived in a small apartment on
the floor above the Pattas and who claimed to have been passing the Pattas’
door just at the moment when terminal hostilities between the Pattas had
erupted. Patta, the uncle reported, had shouted Burrasca’s name a number of
times, threatening to have him arrested if he ever dared come to Venice;
Signora Patta had returned fire by threatening not only to go and live with
Burrasca, but to star in his next film. The uncle had retreated up the steps
and spent the next half hour trying to open his own front door, during which
time the Pattas continued to exchange threats and recriminations. Hostilities
ceased only with the arrival of a water taxi at the end of the
calle
and
the departure of Signora Patta, who was followed down the steps of the building
by six suitcases, carried by the taxi driver, and by the curses of Patta,
carried up to the uncle by the funnel-like acoustics of the staircase.

The news had arrived at eight on
Monday morning; Patta followed it into the Questura at eleven. At one-thirty,
the call came in about the transvestite, but by then most of the staff had
already left for lunch, during which meal some employees of the Questura
engaged in quite wild speculation about Signora Patta’s future film career. An
indication of the Vice-Questore’s popularity was the bet that was made at one
table, offering a hundred thousand lire to the first person who dared to
enquire of the Vice-Questore as to his wife’s health.

Guido Brunetti first heard about
the murdered transvestite from Vice-Questore Patta himself, who called Brunetti
into his office at two-thirty.

‘I’ve just had a call from
Mestre,’ Patta said after telling Brunetti to take a seat.

‘Mestre, sir?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes, that city at the end of the
Ponte della Liberta,’ Patta snapped. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard of it.’

Brunetti thought of what he had
learned about Patta that morning and decided to ignore his remark. ‘Why did
they call you, sir?’

‘They’ve got a murder over there
and no one to investigate.’

‘But they’ve got more staff than
we have, sir,’ Brunetti said, never quite certain just how much Patta knew
about the workings of the police force in either city.

‘I know that, Brunetti. But two
of their commissarios are on vacation. Another broke his leg in an automobile
accident this weekend, so that leaves only one, and she’ - Patta managed to
give a snort of disgust at such a possibility - ‘leaves for maternity leave on
Saturday and won’t be back until the end of February.’

‘What about the two who are on
vacation? Surely they can be called back.’

‘One of them is in Brazil, and no
one seems able to find the other one.’

Brunetti started to say that a
commissario had to leave word where he could be reached, no matter where he
went on vacation, but then he looked at Patta’s face and decided, instead, to
ask, ‘What did they tell you about the murder, sir?’

‘It’s a whore. A transvestite.
Someone beat his head in and left his body in a field out in Marghera.’ Before
Brunetti could object, Patta said, ‘Don’t even ask. The field is in Marghera,
but the slaughterhouse that owns it is in Mestre, just by a few metres, so
Mestre gets it.’

Brunetti had no desire to waste
time on the details of property rights or city boundaries, so he asked, ‘How do
they know it’s a prostitute, sir?’

‘I don’t know how they know it’s
a prostitute, Brunetti,’ Patta said, his voice going up a few notes. ‘I’m
telling you what they told me. A transvestite prostitute, in a dress, with his
head and face beaten in.’

‘When was he found, sir?’

It was not Patta’s habit to take
notes, so he had not bothered to make any record of the call he had received.
The facts hadn’t interested him - one whore more, one whore less - but he was
bothered by the fact that it would be his staff doing Mestre’s work. That meant
any success they met with would go to Mestre. But then he thought of recent
events in his personal life and came to the decision that this might well be
the sort of case he should let Mestre take any and all credit for - and
publicity.

‘I had a call from their
Questore, asking if we could handle it. What are you three doing?’

‘Mariani is on vacation and Rossi’s
still going through the papers on the Bortolozzi case,’ Brunetti explained.

‘And you?’

‘I’m scheduled to begin my
vacation this weekend, Vice-Questore.’

‘That can wait,’ Patta said with
a certainty that soared above things like hotel reservations or plane tickets. ‘Besides,
this has got to be a simple thing. Find the pimp, get a list of customers. It’s
bound to be one of them.’

‘Do they have pimps, sir?’