Dressed for Death (29 page)

‘Change?’

‘Into your ...’ Brunetti began
and then paused, wondering what to call them. ‘Into your working clothes? If
people think you work on the railways, that is.’

‘Oh, in a car, or behind the
bushes. After a while, you get to be very fast at it; doesn’t take a minute.’

‘Did you tell all of this to
Signor Mascari?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Well, some of it. He wanted to
know about the rent. And he wanted to know the addresses of some of the others.’

‘Did you give them to him?’

‘Yes, I did. I told you, I
thought he was police, so I told him.’

‘Did he ask you anything else?’

‘No, only about the addresses.’
Canale paused for a moment and then added, ‘Yes, he asked one more thing, but I
think it was just sort of, you know, to show that he was interested in me. As a
person, that is.’

‘What did he ask?’

‘He asked if my parents were
alive.’

‘And what did you tell him?’

‘I told him the truth. They’re
both dead. They died years ago.’

‘Where?’

‘In Sardinia. That’s where I’m
from.’

‘Did he ask you anything else?’

‘No, nothing.’

‘What sort of reaction did he
have to what you told him?’

‘I don’t understand what you
mean,’ Canale said.

‘Did he seem surprised by
anything you said? Upset? Were these the answers he was expecting to get?’

Canale thought for a moment and
then answered, ‘At first, he seemed a little surprised, but then he kept asking
me questions, as if he didn’t even have to think about them. As if he had a
whole list of them ready.’

‘Did he say anything to you?’

‘No, he thanked me for the
information I gave him. That was strange, you know, because I thought he was a
cop, and usually cops aren’t very ...’ He paused, hunting for the proper
expression. ‘They don’t treat us very well.’

‘When did you remember who he
was?’

‘I told you: when I saw his
picture in the paper. A banker. He was a banker. Do you think that’s why he was
so interested in the rents?’

‘I suppose it could be, Signor
Canale. It’s certainly a possibility we will check.’

‘Good. I hope you can find the
man who did it. He didn’t deserve to die. He was a very nice man. He treated me
well, decently. The way you did.’

‘Thank you, Signor Canale. I wish
only that my colleagues would do the same.’

‘That would be nice, wouldn’t it?’
Canale said with a winsome smile.

‘Signor Canale, could you give me
a list of the same names and addresses you gave him? And, if you know it, when
your friends moved into their apartments.’

‘Certainly,’ the young man said,
and Brunetti passed a piece of paper and a pen across the desk to him. He bent
over the paper and began to write and, as he did, Brunetti watched his large
hand, holding the pen as though it were a foreign object. The list was short,
and he was quickly finished with it. When he was done, Canale set the pen down
on the desk and got to his feet.

Brunetti got up and came round
his desk. He walked with Canale to the door, where he asked, ‘What about
Crespo? Do you know anything about him?’

‘No, he’s not someone I worked
with.’

‘Do you have any idea of what
might have happened to him?’

‘Well, I’d have to be a fool not
to think it’s related to the other man’s murder, wouldn’t I?’

This was so self-evident that
Brunetti didn’t even nod.

‘In fact, if I had to guess, I’d
say he was killed because he talked to you.’ Seeing Brunetti’s look, he
explained, ‘No, not to you, Commissario, but to the police. I’d guess he knew
something about the other killing and had to be eliminated.’

‘And yet you came down here to
talk to me?’

‘Well, Signor Mascari spoke to me
like I was just an ordinary person. And you did, too, didn’t you, Commissario?
Spoke to me like I was a man, just like other men?’ When Brunetti nodded,
Canale said, ‘Well, then, I had to tell you, didn’t I?’

The two men shook hands again,
and Canale walked down the corridor. Brunetti watched as his dark head
disappeared down the steps. Signorina Elettra was right, a very handsome man.

* * * *

Chapter Twenty-One

Brunetti
went back into his office and dialled Signorina Elettra’s number. ‘Would you
come up to my office, please, Signorina?’ he asked. ‘And could you bring
anything you’ve discovered about those men I asked you to look into this week?’

She said she would be delighted
to come up; he had every confidence that this was true. Brunetti was, however,
prepared for her disappointment when she knocked, came in, and looked around,
only to find the young man gone.

‘My visitor had to leave,’
Brunetti said in answer to her unspoken question.

Signorina Elettra recovered
herself immediately. ‘Ah, did he?’ she asked, voice level with lack of
interest, and handed two separate files to Brunetti. ‘The first is Avvocato
Santomauro.’ He took it from her hand, but even before he could open it, she
said, ‘There’s nothing whatsoever worthy of comment. Law degree from Ca’
Foscari: a Venetian born and bred. He’s worked here all his life, is a member
of all the professional organizations, married in the church of San Zaccaria.
You’ll find tax returns, passport applications, even a permit to put a new roof
on his home.’

Brunetti glanced through the file
and found exactly what she described, nothing more. He turned his attention to
the second, which was considerably thicker.

‘That’s the Lega della Moralità,’
she said, making Brunetti wonder if everyone who spoke those words did so with
the same heavy sarcasm or if this was perhaps no more than an indication of the
kind of people he spent his time with. ‘The file is more interesting, but I’ll
let you take a look through it and see what I mean,’ she said. ‘Will there be
anything else, sir?’

‘No, thank you, Signorina,’ he
said and opened the file.

She left and he spread the file
flat on his desk and began to read through it. The Lega della Moralità had been
incorporated as a charitable institution nine years ago, its charter
proclaiming it an organization seeking to ‘improve the material condition of
the less fortunate so that the lessening of their worldly cares would aid them
more easily to turn their thoughts and desires toward the spiritual.’ These
cares were to be lessened in the form of subsidized houses and apartments which
were owned by various churches in Mestre, Marghera, and Venice and which had
passed into the administration of the Lega. The Lega would, in its turn, assign
these apartments, at minimal rents, to parishioners of the churches of those
cities who were found to meet the standards established by the joint agreement
of the churches and the Lega. Among those requirements were regular attendance
at Mass, proof of baptism of all children, a letter from their parish priest
attesting that they were people who maintained the ‘highest moral standards’,
and evidence of financial need.

The charter of the Lega placed
the power to select among applicants in the hands of the board of directors of
the Lega, all of whom, to remove any possibility of favouritism on the part of
Church authorities, were to be laymen. They were themselves, as well, to be of the
highest moral character and were to have achieved some prominence in the
community. Of the current board of six, two were listed as ‘honorary members’.
Of the remaining four, one lived in Rome and another in Paris, while the third
lived on the monastery island of San Francesco del Deserto. The only active
member of the board living in Venice, therefore, was Avvocato Giancarlo
Santomauro.

The original charter provided for
the transfer of fifty-two apartments to the administration of the Lega. At the
end of three years, the system had been judged to be so successful, this on the
basis of letters and statements from tenants and from parish officials and
priests who had interviewed them, that six other parishes were led to join,
passing another forty-three apartments to the care of the Lega. Much the same
thing happened three years after that, when another sixty-seven apartments,
most of them in the historic centre of Venice and the commercial heart of
Mestre, were passed to the Lega.

Since the charter under which the
Lega operated and which gave it control of the apartments it administered was
subject to renewal every three years, this process, Brunetti calculated, was
due to be repeated this year. He flipped back and read the first two reports of
the evaluation committees. He checked the signatures on both: Avvocato
Giancarlo Santomauro had served on both boards and had signed both reports, the
second as chairman. It was shortly after that report that Avvocato Santomauro
had been appointed president - an unpaid and entirely honorary position - of
the Lega della Moralità.

Attached to the back of the
report was a list of the addresses of the one hundred and sixty-two apartments
currently administered by the Lega, as well as their total area and the number
of rooms in each. He pulled the paper Canale had given him closer and read
through the addresses on it. All four appeared on the other list. Brunetti
liked to think of himself as a man of broad views, relatively free of
prejudice, yet he wasn’t sure whether he could credit five transvestite
prostitutes as being people of the ‘highest moral standards’, even if they were
living in apartments which were rented for the specific purpose of helping
tenants ‘turn their thoughts and desires to the spiritual’.

He turned back from the list of
addresses and continued reading through the body of the report. As he had
expected, all of the tenants of Lega apartments were expected to pay their
rents, which were no more than nominal, to an account at the Venice office of
the Banca di Verona, which bank also handled the contributions the Lega made to
the ‘relief of widows and orphans’, donations paid out of the funds raised from
the minimal rents paid on the apartments. Even Brunetti found himself surprised
that they would dare a rhetorical flourish like this - ‘the relief of widows
and orphans’ - but then he saw that this particular form of charitable work was
not undertaken until Avvocato Santomauro had assumed the leadership of the
Lega. Flipping back, Brunetti saw that the five men on Canale’s list had all
moved into their apartments after Santomauro became president. It was almost as
it having achieved that position, Santomauro felt himself free to dare
anything.

Brunetti stopped reading here and
went and stood at the window of his office. The brick facade of San Lorenzo had
been free of scaffolding for the last few months, but the church still remained
closed. He looked at the church and told himself that he was committing an
error against which he warned other police: he was assuming the guilt of a
suspect, even before he had a shred of tangible evidence to connect the suspect
with the crime. But just as he knew that the church would never be reopened,
not in his lifetime, he knew that Santomauro was responsible for Mascari’s
murder and for Crespo’s, and for that of Maria Nardi. He, and probably
Ravanello. A hundred and sixty-two apartments. How many of them could be rented
to people like Canale or to others who were willing to pay their rent in cash
and ask no questions? Half? Even a third would give them more than seventy
million lire a month, almost a billion lire a year. He thought of those widows
and orphans, and he wondered if Santomauro could have been led so to overreach
himself that they, too, were part of it, and even the minimal rents that
reached the coffers of the Lega were then turned around and paid out to phantom
widows and invented orphans.

He went back to his desk and
paged through the report until he found the reference to the payments made to
those found worthy of the charity of the Lega: yes, payments were made through
the Banca di Verona. He stood with both hands braced on the desk, head bent
down over the papers, and he told himself, again, that certainty was different
from proof. But he was certain.