Dressed for Death

by Donna Leon

  “I’ll go 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 bottoms of its six pages on his desk, aligning them neatly.

  “I’ve just read this,” Patta said. He glanced across at Brunetti and lay 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 toward 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, although he had already worked out what that would have to have been.

  “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.”

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

  “I see,” Patta said, uncrossing his legs and leaning 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 behavior 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 overcome 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 both for a few seconds, and then rubbed them 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.

  30

  Brunetti slept twelve hours, deep and dreamless sleep that left him refreshed and alert when he woke. The sheets were sodden, although he had not been aware of sweating during the night. In the kitchen, as he filled the coffeepot, 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 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 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 as soon as he could.

  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 honored 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. 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; 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.

  He was still considering this when Vianello tapped at his door and came in followed by a short, deeply tanned man in a wrinkled cotton suit. “Commissario,” the sergeant began in the formal tones he adopted when addressing Brunetti in front of civilians. “I’d like to present Luciano Gravi.”

  Brunetti approached Gravi and extended his hand. “I’m pleased to meet you, Signor Gravi. In what way may I be of help to you?” He led the man over to his desk and pointed to a chair in front of it. Gravi looked around the office and then took the chair. Vianello sat in the chair beside him, paused a moment to see if Gravi would speak and, when he did not, began to explain.

  “Commissario, Signor Gravi is the owner of a shoe store in Chioggia.”

  Brunetti looked at the man with renewed interest. A shoe store.

  Vianello turned to Gravi and waved a hand, inviting him to speak. “I just got back from vacation,” Gravi began, speaking to Vianello but then, when Vianello turned to face Brunetti, turning his attention toward him. “I was down in Puglia for two weeks. There’s no sense in keeping the store open during Ferragosto. No one wants to shop for shoes. It’s too hot. So we close up every year for three weeks, and my wife and I go on vacation.”

  “And you just got back?”

  “Well, I got back two days ago, but I didn’t go to the store until yesterday. That’s when I found the postcard.”

  “Postcard, Signor Gravi?” Brunetti asked.

  “From the girl who works in my shop. She’s on vacation in Norway, with her fiance. He works for you, I think, Giorgio Miotti.” Brunetti nodded; he knew Miotti. “Well, they’re in Norway, as I said, and she wrote to tell me that the police were curious about a pair of red shoes.” He turned back to Vianello. “I have no idea what they must have been talking about for them to think of that, but she wrote on the bottom of the card that Giorgio said you were looking for someone who might have bought a pair of women’s shoes, red satin, in a large size.”

  Brunetti found that he was holding his breath and forced himself to relax and breathe it out. “And did you sell those shoes, Signor Gravi?”

  “Yes, I sold a pair of them, about a month ago. To a man.” He paused here, waiting for the policemen to remark on how strange it was that a man would buy those shoes.

  “A man?” Brunetti asked obligingly.

  “Yes, he said he wanted them for Carnevale. But Carnevale isn’t until next year. I thought it strange at the time, but I wanted to sell the shoes because the satin was torn away from the heel on one of them. The left one, I think. Anyway, they were on sale, and he bought them. Fifty-nine thousand lire, reduced from a hundred twenty. Really a bargain.”

  “I’m sure it was, Signor Gravi,” Brunetti agreed. “Do you think you’d recognize the shoes if you saw them again?”

  “I think so. I wrote the sale price on the sole of one of them. It might be there.”

  Turning to Vianello, Brunetti said, “Sergeant, could you go and get those shoes back from the lab for me? I’d like Signor Gravi to take a look at them.”

  Vianello nodded and left the room. While he was gone, Gravi talked about his vacation, describing how clean the water in the Adriatic was, so long as you went far enough south. Brunetti listened, smiling when he thought it required, keeping himself from asking Gravi to describe the man who bought the shoes until Gravi had identified them.

  A few minutes later Vianello was back, carrying the shoes in their clear plastic evidence bag. He handed the bag to Gravi, who made no attempt to open it. He moved the shoes around inside the bag, turning first one and then the other upside down and peering at the sole. He held them closer, smiled, and held the bag out to Brunetti. “See, there it is. The sale price. I wrote it in pencil so whoever bought it could erase it if they wanted to. But you can still see it, right there.” He pointed to faint pencil markings on the sole.

  At last Brunetti permitted himself the question. “Could you describe the man who bought these shoes, Signor Gravi?”

  Gravi paused for only a moment and then asked, voice respectful in the face of authority, “Commissario, could you tell me why you’re interested in this man?”

  “We believe he can provide us with important information about an ongoing investigation,” Brunetti answered, telling him nothing.

  “Yes, I see,” Gravi answered. Like all Italians, he was accustomed not to understand what he was told by the authorities. “Younger than you, I’d say, but not all that much. Dark hair. No mustache.” Perhaps it was hearing himself say it that made Gravi realize how vague his description was. “I’d say he looked pretty much like anyone else, a man in a suit. Not very tall and not short either.”

  “Would you be willing to look at some photos, Signor Gravi?” Brunetti asked. “Perhaps that would help you recognize the man?”

  Gravi smiled broadly, relieved to find it all so much like television. “Of course.”

  Brunetti nodded to Vianello, who went downstairs and was quickly back with two folders of police photos, among which, Brunetti knew, was Malfatti’s.

  Gravi accepted the first folder from Vianello and lay it on top of Brunetti’s desk. One by one, he leafed through the photos, placing them face down on a separate pile after he had looked at them. As Vianello and Brunetti watched, he placed Malfatti’s picture face down with the others and continued until he reached the bottom of the pile. He looked up. “He’s not here, not even someone who looks vaguely like him.”

  “Perhaps you could give us a clearer idea of what he looked like, Signore.”

  “I told you, Commissario, a man in a suit. All these men,” he said, pointing to the pile of photos that lay before him, “well, they all look like criminals.” Vianello stole a look at Brunetti. There had been three photos of police officers mixed in with the others, one of them of Officer Alvise. “I told you, he wore a suit,” Gravi repeated. “He looked like one of us. You know, someone who goes to work every day. In an office. And he spoke like an educated man, not a criminal.”

  The political naivete of that remark caused Brunetti to wonder, for a moment, if Signor Gravi was really an Italian. He nodded to Vianello, who picked up the second folder from where he had set it on the desk and handed it to Gravi.

  As the two policemen watched, Gravi leafed through a smaller stack of photos. When he got to Ravanello’s, he paused and looked up at Brunetti. “That’s the banker who was killed yesterday, isn’t it?” he asked, pointing down at the photo.

  “He’s not the man who bought the shoes, Signor Gravi?” Brunetti asked.

  “No, of course not,” Gravi answered. “If it had been, I would have told you when I came in.” He looked at the photo again, a studio portrait that had appeared in a brochure which carried photos of all of the officers of the bank. “It’s not the man, but it’s the type.”

  “The type, Signor Gravi?”

  “You know, suit and tie and polished shoes
. Clean white shirt, good haircut. A real banker.”

  For an instant, Brunetti was seven years old, kneeling beside his mother in front of the main altar of Santa Maria Formosa, their parish church. His mother looked up at the altar, crossed herself, and said, voice palpitant with pleading and belief, “Maria, Mother of God, for the love of your Son who gave His life for all of us unworthy sinners, grant me this one request, and I will never ask a special grace of you in prayer for as long as I may live.” It was a promise he was to hear repeated countless times in his youth, for, like all Venetians, Signora Brunetti always placed her trust in the influence of friends in high places. Not for the first time in his life, Brunetti regretted his own lack of faith, but it didn’t stop him from praying that Gravi would recognize the man who bought the shoes if he saw him.

  He returned his attention to Gravi. “Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of the other man who might have bought these shoes from you, but if you could come with me, perhaps you could help us by taking a look at him in the place where he works.”

  “You mean literally take part in the investigation?” Gravi’s enthusiasm was childlike.

  “Yes, if you’d be willing.”

  “Certainly, Commissario. I’d be glad to help you in any way I can.”

  Brunetti stood, and Gravi jumped to his feet. As they walked toward the center of the city, Brunetti explained to Gravi what he wanted him to do. Gravi asked no questions, content only to do as he was told, a good citizen helping the police in their investigation of a serious crime.

  When they got to Campo San Luca, Brunetti pointed out the doorway that led up to Santomauro’s office and suggested to Signor Gravi that he have a drink in Rosa Salva and allow Brunetti five minutes before he came upstairs.