Dressed for Death (28 page)

‘Oh, Christ, did he put that in?’

‘It’s all right here, Giulio: “local
sources. Double life”.’

‘I’ll have his balls,’ Lotto
shouted into the phone and then repeated the same thing to himself.

‘Does that mean there are no “local
sources”?’

‘No, he had some sort of
anonymous phone call from a man who said he had been a customer of Mascari’s.
Client, whatever you call them.’

‘What did he say?’

‘That he had known Mascari for
years, had warned him about some of the things he did, some of the customers he
had. He said it was a well-known secret up there.’

‘Giulio, the man was almost
fifty.’

‘I’ll kill him. Believe me,
Guido, I didn’t know anything about this. I told him not to use it. I’ll kill
the little shit.’

‘How could he be that stupid?’
Brunetti asked, though well he knew the reasons for human stupidity to be
legion.

‘He’s a cretin, hopeless,’ Lotto
said, voice heavy, as though he had daily reminder of that fact.

‘Then what’s he doing working for
you? You still do have the reputation of being the best newspaper in the country.’
Brunetti’s phrasing of this was masterful; his personal scepticism was evident,
but it didn’t flaunt itself.

‘He’s married to the daughter of
that man who owns that furniture store, the one who puts in the double page ad
every week. We had no choice. He used to be on the sports page, but then one
day he mentioned how surprised he was to learn that American football was
different from soccer. So I got him.’ Lotto paused and both men reflected for a
moment. Brunetti found himself strangely comforted to know that he was not the
only man to be burdened with the likes of Riverre and Alvise. Lotto apparently
found no comfort and said only, ‘I’m trying to get him transferred to the
political desk.’

‘Perfect choice, Giulio. Good
luck,’ Brunetti said, thanked him for the information, and hung up.

Though he had suspected something
very much like this, it still surprised him by its obvious clumsiness. Only by
some stroke of extraordinary good fortune could the ‘local source’ have found a
reporter gullible enough to repeat the rumour about Mascari without bothering
to check if there was any basis in fact. And only someone who was very rash -
or very frightened - would have tried to plant the story, as if it could keep
the elaborate fiction of Mascari’s prostitution from unravelling.

The police investigation of
Crespo’s murder, so far, had been as unrewarding as the press coverage. No one
in the building had known of Crespo’s profession; some thought he was a waiter
in a bar, while others believed him to be a night porter at a hotel in Venice.
No one had seen anything strange during the days before his murder, and no one
could remember anything strange ever happening in the building. Yes, Signor
Crespo had a lot of visitors, but he was extroverted and friendly, so it made
sense that people came to visit him, didn’t it?

The physical examination had been
clearer: death had been caused by strangulation, his murderer taking him from
behind, probably by surprise. No sign of recent sexual activity, nothing under
his nails, and enough fingerprints in the apartment to keep them busy for days.

He had called Bolzano twice, but
once the hotel’s phone was busy, and the second time Paola had not been in her
room. He picked up the phone to call her again but was interrupted by a knock
on his door. He called,
‘Avanti,’
and Signorina Elettra came in,
carrying a file, which she placed on his desk.

‘Dottore, I think there’s someone
downstairs who wants to see you.’ She saw his surprise at her bothering to tell
him, indeed, at her even knowing this, and hastened to explain. ‘I was bringing
some papers down to Anita, and I heard him talking to the guard.’

‘What did he look like?’

She smiled. ‘A young man. Very
well dressed.’ This, coming from Signorina Elettra, who was today wearing a
suit of mauve silk that appeared to have been made by especially talented
worms, was high praise indeed. ‘And very handsome,’ she added, with a smile
that suggested regret that the young man wanted to speak to Brunetti and not to
her.

‘Perhaps you could go down and
bring him up,’ Brunetti said, as much to hasten the possibility of meeting this
marvel as to provide Signorina Elettra with an excuse to talk to him.

Her smile changed back into the
one she appeared to use for lesser mortals, and she left his office. She was
back in a matter of minutes, knocked, and came in, saying, ‘Commissario, this
gentleman would like to speak to you.’

A young man followed her into the
office, and Signorina Elettra stepped aside to allow him to approach Brunetti’s
desk. Brunetti stood and extended his hand across the desk. The young man shook
it; his grip was firm, his hand thick and muscular.

‘Please make yourself
comfortable, Signore,’ Brunetti said then turned to Signorina Elettra. ‘Thank
you, Signorina.’

She gave Brunetti a vague smile,
then looked at the young man in much the same way Parsifal must have looked at
the Grail as it disappeared from him. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘If you need
anything, sir, just call.’ She gave the visitor one last look and left the
office, closing the door softly behind her.

Brunetti sat and glanced across
the desk at the young man. His short dark hair curled down over his forehead
and just covered the tops of his ears. His nose was thin and fine, his brown
eyes broad-spaced and almost black in contrast to his pale skin. He wore a dark
grey suit and a carefully knotted blue tie. He returned Brunetti’s gaze for a
moment and then smiled, showing perfect teeth. ‘You don’t recognize me,
Dottore?’

‘No, I’m afraid I don’t,’
Brunetti said.

‘We met last week, Commissario.
But the circumstances were different.’

Suddenly Brunetti remembered the
bright red wig, the high-heeled shoes. ‘Signor Canale. No, I didn’t recognize
you. Please forgive me.’

Canale smiled again. ‘Actually,
it makes me very happy that you didn’t recognize me. It means my professional
self really is a different person.’

Brunetti wasn’t sure just what
this was supposed to mean, so he chose not to respond. Instead, he asked, ‘What
is it I can do for you, Signor Canale?’

‘Do you remember, when you showed
me that picture, I said that the man looked familiar to me?’

Brunetti nodded. Didn’t this
young man read the newspapers? Mascari had been identified days ago.

‘When I read the story in the
papers and saw the photo of him, what he really looked like, I remembered where
I had seen him. The drawing you showed me really wasn’t very good.’

‘No, it wasn’t,’ Brunetti
admitted, choosing not to explain the extent of the damage that had made that
drawing so inaccurate a reconstruction of Mascari’s face. ‘Where was it that
you saw him?’

‘He approached me about two weeks
ago.’ When he saw Brunetti’s surprise at this, Canale clarified the remark. ‘No,
it wasn’t what you’re thinking, Commissario. He wasn’t interested in my work.
That is, he wasn’t interested in my business. But he was interested in me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I was on the street. I’d
just got out of a car -from a client, you know - I hadn’t got back to the
girls, I mean the boys, yet, and he came up to me and asked me if my name was
Roberto Canale, and I lived at thirty-five, Viale Canova.

‘At first, I thought he was
police. He had that look.’ Brunetti thought it better not to ask, but Canale
explained, anyway. ‘You know, ties and suits and very eager that no one misunderstand
what he was doing. He asked me, and I told him that I was. I still thought he
was police. In fact, he never told me he wasn’t, let me go on thinking that he
was.’

‘What else did he want to know,
Signor Canale?’

‘He asked me about the apartment.’

‘The apartment?’

‘Yes, he wanted to know who paid
the rent. I told him I did, and then he asked me how I paid it. I told him I
deposited the rent in an account in the owner’s name at the bank, but then he
told me not to lie, that he knew what was going on, so I had to tell him.’

‘What do you mean, “knew what was
going on”?’

‘How I pay the rent.’

‘And how is that?’

‘I meet a man in a bar and I give
him the money.’

‘How much?’

‘A million and a half. In cash.’

‘Who is he, this man?’

‘That’s exactly what he asked me.
I told him he was just a man that I met every month, met at a bar. He calls me
during the last week of the month and tells me where to meet him, and I do, and
I give him a million and a half, and that’s that.’

‘No receipt?’ Brunetti asked.

Canale laughed outright at this. ‘Of
course not. It’s all cash.’ And, consequently, they both knew it went
unreported as income. And untaxed. It was a common enough dodge: enormous
numbers of tenants probably did something similar to this.

‘But I do pay another rent,’
Canale added.

‘Yes?’ Brunetti asked.

‘One hundred and ten thousand
lire.’

‘And where do you pay it?’

‘I deposit it in a bank account,
but the receipt I get doesn’t have a name on it, so I don’t know whose account
it is.’ ‘What bank?’ Brunetti asked, though he thought he knew.

‘Banca di Verona. It’s in—’

Brunetti cut him short. ‘I know
where it is.’ Then he asked, ‘How big is your apartment?’

‘Four rooms.’

‘A million and a half seems a lot
to pay.’

‘Yes, it is, but it includes other
things,’ Canale said, then shifted about in his chair.

‘Such as?’

‘Well, I won’t be bothered.’

‘Bothered while you work?’
Brunetti asked.

‘Yes. And it’s hard for us to
find a place to live. Once people know who we are and what we do, they want us
out of the building. I was told that this wouldn’t happen while I lived there.
And it hasn’t. Everyone in the building thinks I work on the railways: that’s
why I work nights.’

‘Why do they think this?’

‘I don’t know. They just sort of
all knew it when I moved in.’

‘How long have you lived there?’

‘Two years.’

‘And you’ve always paid your rent
like this?’

‘Yes, since the beginning.’

‘How did you find this apartment?’

‘One of the girls on the street
told me.’

Brunetti permitted himself a
small smile. ‘Someone you’d call a girl or someone I’d call a girl, Signor
Canale?’

‘Someone I’d call a girl.’

‘What’s his name?’ Brunetti
asked.

‘No use my telling you. He died a
year ago. Overdose.’

‘Do your other friends -
colleagues - have similar arrangements?’

‘A few of us, but we’re the lucky
ones.’

Brunetti considered this fact and
its possible consequences for a minute. ‘Where do you change, Signor Canale?’