Dressed for Death (7 page)

‘Almost as if the person who did
it didn’t want the face to be recognizable,’ Brunetti added.

Gallo shot him a quick glance
from under thick eyebrows and nodded again.

‘Do you have any friends in Rome
who could speed things up for us?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I’ve already tried that, sir,
but he’s on vacation. You?’

Brunetti shook his head in quick
negation. ‘The person I knew there has been transferred to Brussels to work
with Interpol.’

‘Then we’ll have to wait, I
suppose,’ Gallo said, making it clear from his tone that he was not at all
pleased with this.

‘Where is he?’

The dead man? In the morgue at
Umberto Primo. Why?’

’I’d like to see him.’

If Gallo thought this a strange
request, he gave no indication of it. ‘I’m sure your driver could take you over
there.’

‘It’s not very far, is it?’

‘No, only a few minutes,’ Gallo
answered. ‘Might be a bit longer, with the morning traffic.’

Brunetti wondered if these people
ever walked anywhere, but then he remembered the blanket of tropical heat that
lay like a shroud across the whole Veneto area. Perhaps it was wiser to travel
in air-conditioned cars to and from air-conditioned buildings, but he doubted
that it was a method with which he would ever feel comfortable. He said nothing
about this, however, but went downstairs and had his driver - he seemed to rate
his own driver and his own car - take him to the Hospital of Umberto Primo, the
major of the many hospitals of Mestre.

At the morgue, he found the
attendant at a low desk, with a copy of the
Gazzettino
spread out in
front of him. Brunetti showed his warrant card and asked to see the murdered
man who had been found in the field the day before.

The attendant, a short man with a
substantial paunch and bowed legs, folded his paper closed and got to his feet.
‘Ah, him, I’ve got him over on the other side, sir. No one’s been to see him
except that artist, and all he wanted to do was see the hair and eyes. Too much
flash on the pictures, so he couldn’t get them right. He just took a look at
him, peeled back the lid and had a look at the eye. Didn’t like looking at him,
I’d say, but, Jesus, he should have seen him before the autopsy, with all that
make-up on him, mixed in with the blood. It took forever to clean him up.
Looked like a clown before we did, I’ll tell you. He had that eye stuff all
over his face. Well, over what was left of his face. It’s funny how some of
that stuff is so hard to wash oft Must take women the devil’s own time to clean
themselves up, don’t you think?’

During all of this, he led
Brunetti across the chilly room, stopping occasionally to address Brunetti
directly. He finally stopped in front of one of the many metal doors that
formed the walls of the room, bent down and turned a metal handle, then pulled
out the low drawer in which the body lay. ‘Is he good enough for you here, sir,
or would you like me to raise him up for you? Nothing to it. Just take a
minute.’

‘No, this is good enough,’
Brunetti said, looking down. Unasked, the attendant pulled back the white sheet
that covered the face, then looked up at Brunetti to see if he should continue.
Brunetti nodded, and the attendant pulled the sheet from the body and folded it
quickly into a neat rectangle.

Though Brunetti had seen the
photos, nothing had prepared him for the wreckage in front of him. The
pathologist had been interested only in exploration and cared nothing for
restoration; if a family were ever found, they could pay someone to attend to
that.

No attempt had been made to
restore the man’s nose, and so Brunetti looked down at a concave surface with
four shallow indentations, as if a retarded child had made a human face with
clay but instead of a nose had simply punched a hole. Without the nose,
recognizable humanity had fled.

He looked at the body, seeing if
it could give him an idea of age or physical condition. Brunetti heard his own
intake of breath when he realized that the body looked frighteningly like his
own: the same general build, a slight thickening around the waist, and the scar
from a childhood appendectomy. The only difference seemed to be a general
hairlessness, and he leaned down closer to study the chest, brutally bisected
by the long incision of the autopsy. Instead of the wiry, grizzled hair that
grew on his own chest, he saw faint stubble. ‘Did the pathologist shave his
chest before the autopsy?’ Brunetti asked the attendant.

‘No, sir. It’s not heart surgery
he did on him, only an autopsy.’

‘But his chest has been shaved.’

‘His legs, too, if you look.’

Brunetti did. They were.

‘Did the pathologist say anything
about that?’

‘Not while he was working, sir.
Might be something in his report. You had enough?’

Brunetti nodded and stepped back
from the corpse. The attendant flung the sheet out in front of him, waved it in
the air as though it were a tablecloth, and floated it perfectly in place over
the body. He slid the body back inside, closed the door, and quietly turned the
handle.

As they started back towards the
desk, the attendant said, ‘He didn’t deserve that, whoever he was. The word
here is that he was on the street, one of those fellows who dress up as women.’

For a moment, Brunetti thought
the man was being sarcastic, but then he heard the tone under the words and
realized he was serious.

‘You the one who’s going to try
to find out who killed him, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I hope you do. I suppose I
can understand if you want to kill someone, but I can’t understand killing him
like that.’ He stopped and looked up inquisitively at Brunetti. ‘Can you, sir?’

‘No, I can’t.’

‘As I said, sir, I hope you get
the man who did it. Whore or no whore, no one deserves to die like that.’

* * * *

Chapter Six

‘You
saw him?’ Gallo asked when Brunetti returned to the Questura.

‘Yes.’

‘Not at all pretty, is it?’

‘You saw him, too?’

‘I always try to see them,’ Gallo
said, voice uninflected. ‘It makes me more willing to work to get the person
who killed them.’

‘What do you think, Sergeant?’
Brunetti asked, lowering himself into the chair at the side of the sergeant’s
desk and laying down the blue folder as if he meant it to serve as a physical
sign of the murder.

Gallo thought for almost a full
minute before he answered. ‘I think it could have been done in the midst of
tremendous rage.’ Brunetti nodded at this possibility. ‘Or, as you suggested
earlier, Dottore, in an attempt to disguise his identity.’ After a second,
Gallo amended this, perhaps recalling what he had seen in the morgue, ‘Or to
destroy it.’

‘That’s pretty impossible in
today’s world, wouldn’t you say, Sergeant?’

‘Impossible?’

‘Unless a person is entirely
alien to a place or lives without any family or friends, their disappearance
will be noticed in a few days - a few hours in most cases. Nobody manages to
disappear any more.’

‘Then perhaps rage makes more
sense,’ Gallo said. ‘He could have said something to a client, done something
that set him off. I don’t know much about the men in the file I gave you
yesterday. I’m not a psychologist or anything like that, so I don’t know what
drives them, but my guess is that the men who, ah, who pay them are far less
stable than the men they pay. So rage?’

‘What about carrying him out to a
part of the city where whores are known to work?’ Brunetti asked. ‘That
suggests intelligence and planning rather than rage.’

Gallo responded quickly to the
testing that was being given him by this new commissario. ‘Well, after he did
it, he could have come to his senses. Maybe he killed him in his own place or a
place where one of them was known, so he’d have to move the body. And if he’s
the sort of man - the killer, I mean - if he’s the sort of man who uses these
transvestites, then he’d know where the whores go. So maybe that would seem the
logical place to leave him, so other people who use them would be suspected.’

‘Yes ...’ Brunetti agreed slowly,
and Gallo waited for the ‘but’ that the commissario’s tone made inevitable. ‘But
that’s to suggest that whores are the same as whores.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir.’

‘That male whores are the same as
female whores, or that, at least, they work in the same place. From what I
heard and saw yesterday, it looks like that area out by the slaughterhouse is a
place the female whores use.’ Gallo considered this, and Brunetti added,
prodding, ‘But this is your city, so you’d know more about that than I would,
coming in as something of a foreigner.’ Complimenting, as well.

Gallo nodded. ‘It’s usually the
girls who work those fields out by the factories. But we’re getting more and
more boys - a lot of them are Slavs and North Africans - so maybe they’ve been
forced to move into new territory.’

‘Have you heard any rumours about
this?’

‘I haven’t personally, sir. But I
usually don’t have much to do with the whores, not unless they’re involved in
violent crimes.’

‘Does that happen very often?’

Gallo shook his head. ‘Usually,
if it does happen, the women are afraid to tell us about it, afraid they’ll end
up in jail, no matter who’s responsible for the violence. A lot of them are
illegals, so they’re afraid of coming to us, afraid of being deported if they
get in any sort of trouble. And there are a lot of men who like to beat them
up. I guess they learn how to spot those, or the other girls pass the word and
they try to avoid them.

‘I’d guess that the men are
better able to protect themselves. If you read that file, you saw how big some
of them are. Pretty, even beautiful, some of them, but they’re still men. I’d
imagine they’d have less of that sort of trouble. Or if they had it, they’d at
least know how to defend themselves.’

‘Have you got the autopsy report
yet?’ Brunetti asked.

Gallo picked up a few pieces of
paper and handed them to him. ‘It came in while you were at the hospital.’

Brunetti began to read through it
quickly, familiar with the jargon and technical terms. No puncture wounds on
the body, so the deceased wasn’t an intravenous drug user. Height, weight,
general physical condition: all those things that Brunetti had seen were listed
here, but in exact, measured detail. Mention was made of the make-up the
attendant had talked about but no more than to say that there had been
significant traces of lipstick and eyeliner. There was no evidence of recent
sexual activity, either active or passive. Examination of the hands suggested a
sedentary occupation; the nails were trimmed bluntly, and there was no
callousing on the palms. Patterns of bruising on the body confirmed the
supposition that he had been killed somewhere else and carried to the place
where he was found, but the intense heat in which he had lain made it
impossible to determine how much time had elapsed between his murder and his
discovery, more than to say it could have been anywhere from twelve to twenty
hours.

Brunetti looked up at Gallo and
asked, ‘Have you read this?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘We still have to decide between
rage and cunning, I suppose.’

‘But first we have to find out
who he is,’ Brunetti said. ‘How many men have been detailed to this?’

‘There’s Scarpa.’