Dressed for Death (40 page)

‘That’s all,’ Malfatti said.

Brunetti rose and signalled to
the young officer to come with him. ‘I’ll have this typed up and you can sign
it.’

‘Take your time,’ Malfatti said
and laughed. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

* * * *

Chapter Twenty-Nine

An
hour later, Brunetti took three copies of the typed statement down to Malfatti,
who signed them without bothering to read it. ‘Don’t you want to know what you’re
signing?’ Brunetti asked him.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Malfatti
replied, still not bothering to raise himself from the cot. He waved the pen
Brunetti had given him at the paper. ‘Besides, there’s no reason to think
anyone’s going to believe that.’

Since the same thing had occurred
to Brunetti, he didn’t argue the point.

‘What happens now?’ Malfatti
asked.

‘There’ll be a hearing within the
next few days, and the magistrate will decide if you should be offered the
chance of bail.’

‘Will he ask your opinion?’

‘Probably.’

‘And?’

‘I’ll argue against it.’

Malfatti moved his hand along the
barrel of the pen and then reversed his hold on it and offered it to Brunetti.

‘Will someone tell my mother?’
Malfatti asked.

‘I’ll see that someone calls her.’

Malfatti shrugged his
acknowledgement, moved himself lower on the pillow, and closed his eyes.

Brunetti left the cell and went
up two flights of stairs to Signorina Elettra’s alcove. Today she was dressed
in a shade of red seldom seen beyond the confines of the Vatican, but Brunetti
found it strident and out of tune with his mood. She smiled, and his mood
lightened a bit.

‘Is he in?’ Brunetti asked.

He got here about an hour ago,
but he’s on the phone and he told me not to interrupt him, not for anything.’

Brunetti preferred it this way,
didn’t want to be with Patta when he read Malfatti’s confession. He placed a
copy of the confession on her desk and said, ‘Would you give him this as soon
as he’s finished with the call?’

‘Malfatti?’ she asked, looking at
it with open curiosity.

‘Yes.’

‘Where will you be?’

When she asked that, Brunetti
suddenly realized that he was completely displaced, had no idea what time it
was. He glanced at his watch, saw that it was five, but the hour meant nothing
to him. He didn’t feel hungry, only thirsty and miserably tired. He began to
consider how Patta was likely to respond; that increased his thirst.

‘I’ll go and get something to
drink and then I’ll be in my office.’

He turned and left; he didn’t
care if she read the confession or not, found that he didn’t care about
anything except his thirst and the heat and the faint grainy texture of his skin,
where salt had been evaporating all day. He raised the back of his hand to his
mouth and licked it, almost glad to taste the bitterness.

An hour later, he went into Patta’s
office in response to his summons, and at the desk Brunetti found the old Patta:
he looked like he had shed five years and gained five kilos overnight.

‘Have a seat, Brunetti,’ Patta
said. Patta picked up the confession and tapped the six pages on his desk,
aligning them neatly.

‘I’ve just read this,’ Patta
said. He glanced across at Brunetti and laid the papers flat on his desk. ‘I
believe him.’

Brunetti concentrated on
demonstrating no emotion. Patta’s wife was somehow involved with the Lega.
Santomauro was a figure of some political importance in a city where Patta
hoped to rise to power. Brunetti realized that justice and the law were not
going to play any part in whatever conversation he was about to have with
Patta. He said nothing.

‘But I doubt that anyone else
will,’ Patta added, beginning to lead Brunetti towards illumination. When it
became clear that Brunetti was going to say nothing, Patta continued, ‘I’ve had
a number of phone calls this afternoon.’

It was too cheap a shot to ask if
one of them had been from Santomauro, and so Brunetti did not ask.

‘Not only did Avvocato Santomauro
call me, but I also had long conversations with two members of the city
council, both of whom are friends and political associates of the Avvocato.’
Patta pushed himself back in his chair and crossed his legs. Brunetti could see
the tip of one gleaming shoe and a narrow expanse of thin blue sock. He looked
up at Patta’s face. ‘As I said, no one is going to believe this man.’

‘Even if he is telling the truth?’
Brunetti finally asked.

‘Especially if he’s telling the
truth. No one in this city is going to believe that Santomauro is capable of
what this man accuses him of doing.’

‘You seem to have no trouble
believing it, Vice-Questore.’

‘I am hardly to be considered an
objective witness when it comes to Signor Santomauro,’ Patta said, dropping in
front of Brunetti, as casually as he had placed the papers on his desk, the
first bit of self-knowledge he had ever demonstrated.

‘What did Santomauro tell you?’
Brunetti asked, though he had already worked out what that would have to be.

‘I’m sure you’ve realized what he
would say,’ Patta said, again surprising Brunetti. ‘That this is merely an
attempt on Malfatti’s part to divide the blame and minimize his responsibility
in all of this. That a close examination of the records at the bank will surely
show that it was all Ravanello’s doing. That there is no evidence whatsoever
that he, Santomauro, was involved in any of this, not the double rents and not
the death of Mascari.’

‘Did he say anything about the
other deaths?’

‘Crespo?’

‘Yes, and Maria Nardi.’

‘No, not a word. And there’s
nothing that links him to Ravanello’s bank.’

‘We have a woman who saw Malfatti
running down the stairs at Ravanello’s.’

‘I see,’ Patta said, uncrossed
his legs and leaned forward. He placed his right hand on Malfatti’s confession.
‘It’s worthless,’ he finally said, just as Brunetti knew he would.

‘He can try to use it at his
trial, but I doubt that the judges would believe him. He’d be better off
presenting himself as Ravanello’s ignorant tool.’ Yes, that was probably true.
The judge didn’t exist who could see Malfatti as the person behind this. And
the judge who would see Santomauro as having any part in this couldn’t even be
imagined.

‘Does that mean you’re going to
do nothing about that?’ Brunetti asked, nodding his chin at the papers that lay
on Patta’s desk.

‘Not unless you can think of
something to do,’ Patta said, and Brunetti listened in vain for sarcasm in his
voice.

‘No, I can’t,’ Brunetti said.

‘We can’t touch him,’ Patta said.
‘I know the man. He’s too cautious ever to have been seen by any of the people
involved in this.’

‘Not even the boys in Via
Cappuccina?’

Patta’s mouth tightened in
distaste. ‘His involvement with those creatures is entirely circumstantial. No
judge would listen to evidence presented about that. However distasteful his
behaviour is, it’s his private business.’

Brunetti began considering
possibilities: if enough of the prostitutes, those who rented apartments from
the Lega, could be found to testify that Santomauro had used their services; if
he could find the man who was in Crespo’s apartment when he went to see him; if
evidence could be found that Santomauro had interviewed any of the people who
were paying the double rent.

Patta cut all this short. ‘There’s
no proof, Brunetti. Everything rests on the word of a confessed murderer.’
Patta tapped the papers. ‘He talks about these murders as though he were going
out to get a pack of cigarettes. No one is going to believe him when he accuses
Santomauro, no one.’

Brunetti suddenly felt himself
swept by exhaustion. His eyes watered, and he had to fight to keep them open.
He brought one hand to his right eye and made as if to remove a speck of dust,
closed them for a few seconds, and then rubbed them both with one hand. When he
opened them again, he saw that Patta was looking at him strangely. ‘I think you
ought to go home, Brunetti. There’s nothing more to be done about this.’

Brunetti pushed himself to his
feet, nodded to Patta, and left the office. From there, he went directly home,
bypassing his own office. Inside the apartment, he pulled the phone jack from
the wall, took a long hot shower, ate a kilo of peaches, and went to bed.

* * * *

Chapter Thirty

Brunetti
slept twelve hours, a deep and dreamless sleep that left him refreshed and alert
when he woke. The sheets were sodden, though he had not been aware of sweating
through the night. In the kitchen, as he filled the coffee pot, he noticed that
three of the peaches he had left in the bowl the night before were covered with
soft green fuzz. He tossed them into the garbage under the sink, washed his
hands, and put the coffee on to the stove.

Whenever he found his mind
turning to Santomauro or to Malfatti’s confession, he pulled away and thought,
instead, of the approaching weekend, vowing to go up to the mountains to join
Paola. He wondered why she hadn’t called last night, and with that thought
struck a resonant chord of self-pity: he sweltered in this fetid heat while she
romped in the hills like that moron in
The Sound of Music.
But then he
remembered disconnecting the phone and was jabbed by shame. He missed her. He
missed them all. He’d go up Saturday. Friday night, if there was a late train.

Spirits buoyed by this resolve,
he went to the Questura, where he read his way through the newspaper accounts
of Malfatti’s arrest, all of which mentioned Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta as
their chief source of information. The Vice-Questore was variously quoted as
having ‘overseen the arrest’ and having ‘obtained Malfatti’s confession’. The
papers placed the blame for the Banca di Verona scandal at the feet of its most
recent director, Ravanello, and left no doubt in the readers’ minds that he had
been responsible for the murder of his predecessor before becoming himself the
victim of his vicious accomplice, Malfatti. Santomauro was named only in the
Corriere della Sera
, which quoted him as expressing shock and sorrow at the
abuse which had been made of the lofty goals and high principles of the
organization he felt himself so honoured to serve.

Brunetti called Paola and, even
though he knew the answer would be no, asked if she had read the papers. When
she asked what was in them, he told her only that the case was finished and
that he would tell her about it when he got there Friday night. As he knew she
would, she asked him to tell her more, but he said it could wait. When she
allowed the subject to drop, he felt a flash of anger at her lack of
perseverance; hadn’t this case almost cost him his life?

Brunetti spent the rest of the
morning preparing a five-page statement in which he set forth his belief that
Malfatti was telling the truth in his confession, and he went on to present his
own exhaustively detailed and closely reasoned account of everything that had
happened from the time Mascari’s body was found until the time Malfatti was
arrested. After lunch, he read it through twice and was forced to see how all
of it rested on no more than his own suspicions: there was not a shred of
physical evidence linking Santomauro to any of the crimes, nor was it likely
that anyone else would believe that a man like Santomauro, who looked down upon
the world from the empyrean moral heights of the Lega, could be involved in
anything as base as greed or lust or violence. But still he typed it out on the
Olivetti standard typewriter that stood on a small table in a corner of his
room. Looking at the finished pages, the whited-out corrections, he wondered if
he should put in a requisition slip for a computer for his office. He found
himself caught up in this, planning where it could go, wondering if he could
get his own printer or if everything he typed would have to be printed out down
in the secretaries’ office, a thought he didn’t like.