Doctored Evidence - Brunetti 13

by Donna Leon

Brunetti waited for Scarpa to elaborate. When he failed to do so, Brunetti asked, 'She managed to throw a pot of boiling water with a broken wrist?'

  It was as if he had not spoken. Scarpa said, 'Whatever the reason, it establishes a history of violence.'

  Brunetti turned and left the laboratory.

  His heart was pounding with unexpressed rage as he walked up to his office. He understood the what, that Scarpa wanted to rearrange things to make Signora Gismondi look like the murderer: however clumsily he went about it, that was what he was trying to do. What Brunetti didn't understand was the why. Scarpa had nothing to gain from making it look as if Signora Gismondi was the killer.

  His step faltered as he suddenly saw it and his foot came down heavily on the next step, causing him to lurch towards the wall. It wasn't that Scarpa wanted her specifically or individually to appear to be the killer. He wanted someone else not to. But as Brunetti continued up the staircase, good sense intervened and offered him a less outrageous explanation: Scarpa wanted nothing more than to obstruct Brunetti and his investigation, which he could do best by creating a false trail that led to Signora Gismondi.

  So troubling was this thought that Brunetti found it impossible to sit still in his office. He waited a few minutes, giving Scarpa enough time to remove himself to somewhere other than the staircase, and then he went down to Signorina Elettra's office, but she still wasn't in. Had she walked in at that moment, he would have demanded, to the point of shouting, where she had been and by what right she absented herself half the day on Wednesday when there was work that needed to be done. On the way back to his office, he found himself continuing his tirade against her, dredging up past incidents, oversights, excesses that he could hurl at her.

  Inside, he yanked off his jacket and hurled it on to his desk, but he threw it with such force that it slid across the top and landed on the floor, taking with it a pile of loose papers that he had spent the previous afternoon arranging in chronological order. His mind tight with anger, Brunetti gave voice to serious doubts as to the virtue of the Madonna.

  Vianello chose this moment to arrive. Brunetti heard him at the door, turned, and gave a grumpy 'Come in.'

  Vianello looked at the jacket and the papers and passed silently in front of Brunetti to take a seat.

  Brunetti studied the back of Vianello's head, the shoulders, the unwarrantedly stiff posture, and his mood lightened. 'It's Scarpa,' he said, walking to his desk. He bent and picked up the jacket and hung it on the back of his chair, then gathered up the papers and tossed them on the desk and sat down. 'He's trying to make it look as though Signora Gismondi killed her.' 'How?'

  'He's got the tapes of two calls she made to us, complaining about the television. In both of them, she threatens to kill the old woman.'

  'Threatens how?' Vianello asked. 'Seriously or out of anger?'

  'You think they're different?'

  'You ever yell at your kids, Commissario?' Vianello asked. 'That's anger. Serious is when you hit them.'

  ‘I never have,' Brunetti said instantly, as though he had been accused.

  ‘I did,' Vianello said. 'Once. About five years ago.' Brunetti waited for the inspector to explain, but he did not. Instead, he said, 'If you talk about it, it means you're just talking.' Vianello turned his attention from the theoretical to the practical and asked, 'Besides, how would she get in?' Brunetti watched Vianello consider and exclude the various ways this might have been done. He finally said, 'No, it doesn't make any sense.'

  'Then why's he doing it?' Brunetti asked, waiting to see if Vianello would come up with the same explanation he had.

  'May I speak frankly, sir?' Vianello asked.

  'Of course.'

  The inspector looked at his knees, brushed away an invisible speck of something, and said,

  'It's because he hates you. I'm not important enough for him to hate, but he would if he thought I was. And he's afraid of Elettra.'

  Brunetti's first impulse was to object to this interpretation, but he forced himself to think it through. He realized that he found it unsatisfactory because it made Scarpa out to be less of a villain than he wanted him to be: guilty only of spite, not of conspiracy. He pulled the papers towards him and once again began to arrange them in chronological order.

  'Should I go, sir?' Vianello asked.

  'No. I'm thinking about what you just said.'

  Whatever satisfied the criteria of possibility most simply was probably the correct explanation: how many times had he invoked this rule? Malice only, and not complicity. Even though he believed this was more likely, he could not deny the satisfaction he would derive were Vianello also to believe Scarpa might be guilty of some baser, more criminal motive.

  He looked at Vianello. 'All right,' he finally said. 'It's possible.' For a moment, he considered the consequences: Scarpa would plant the idea of Signora Gismondi's guilt in Patta's mind; this meant Brunetti would have to pretend to go along with it so as not to alarm Patta and be removed from the case; more time would be spent examining Signora Gismondi's life, no doubt with sufficient heavy-handedness to turn her into a reluctant witness; and once she had been badgered into altering or retracting her statement about Flori Ghiorghiu, Patta would return to his now-confirmed conviction that the Romanian woman had been the murderer, and the case could once again be considered as solved.

  ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons’ Brunetti said in English. Vianello gave him such a strange look that Brunetti immediately said, Tt's something my wife says’

  'Mine says we should look at the son’ said Vianello.

  Brunetti decided to hear what Vianello had to say about Paolo Battestini before telling him about his conversation in the post office and so contented himself with a mere, 'Why?'

  'Nadia says she doesn't like the feel of him or at least the feel of the way people talk about him. She thinks it's strange that so many people knew him for so long, lived near him, watched him grow up, and still had almost nothing to say about him.'

  Brunetti, who was of much the same opinion, asked, 'Did she say what she thought this might mean?'

  Vianello shook his head. 'No, just that it wasn't normal that no one wanted to talk about him.'

  Brunetti saw the expression on Vianello's face, a low-level satisfaction, and interpreted it to mean that the inspector had learned something that confirmed his wife's analysis. In order to urge him towards the pleasure of revelation, Brunetti asked, 'What happened at the school board offices?'

  'Same old thing’ Vianello said.

  'Same old what?' Brunetti inquired.

  'Same old office of a city bureaucracy. I phoned and explained that I wanted to speak to the Director in connection with a criminal investigation. I thought it would be better not to explain which. But he was in Treviso for a meeting, as was his assistant, and the person I eventually spoke to had been there only three weeks and said he couldn't be of any help.' Vianello grimaced and added, 'Probably won't be of any help after three years.'

  Brunetti waited, familiar with the inspector's style. Vianello flicked away another invisibility from his trousers and went on, 'So I finally agreed to speak to the head of personnel and went to their offices to see her. They've modernized everything and now they've all got new computers and desks.

  'The woman I spoke to is the head of a department that is now called Human Resources’ Vianello began. Brunetti was struck by how cannibalistic the term sounded but said nothing. ‘I asked her if she could provide records of the employment of Paolo Battestini, and she asked when he worked there. When I told her, she said it would be difficult to find records for certain periods because they were now in the midst of the process of transferring some employment information on to their computer system.' Seeing Brunetti's expression, Vianello said, 'No, I didn't even bother to ask how long it would take, but I did ask her which years were affected.' He looked up in search of Brunetti's approval, and when he saw it, he went on. 'She looked him up on the computer and said tha
t the last five years he was there were already in the system, so she printed out a copy for me.'

  'What sort of information was it?'

  'Reports from his superiors on his work performance, dates of his holidays, sick-days, things like that.'

  'And did you get it?'

  'Yes. I gave it to Signorina Elettra when I came in.' Brunetti registered that she had finally arrived as Vianello said, 'There were long periods of sick-leave towards the end, and she's checking the hospital records to see if he was there and, if so, why.'

  . 'I'll save her the trouble,' Brunetti said. 'He died of AIDS.' When he saw Vianello's surprise, he summarized his conversation with Dottor Carlotti the previous afternoon and half apologized for not having called Vianello to tell him this before he went to the school board offices. But he made no mention of his conversation with the postino.

  'Better to have it confirmed by two sources,' Vianello said.

  Brunetti felt a flash of anger at the suggestion that what he had discovered needed confirmation but controlled the feeling and asked, 'Did you manage to talk to anyone who worked with him?'

  'Yes. After I got the print-out, I hung around in the corridor until about ten, when two of the men who worked there - I figured they might have worked with him - said they were going to the bar across the street for a coffee. I folded the papers so that their letterhead showed and followed them over’

  Brunetti marvelled at how this man, taller and larger than he, so easily rendered himself invisible once he started to talk to people. 'And?' he prompted.

  ‘I said I was from the Mestre office, and they believed me, had no reason not to. They'd seen me there in their office, and they'd seen the woman give me the print-out, so they'd figure I had some reason to be there.

  'I'd had a look over the woman's shoulder when she called up the personnel files and seen the names of a few people who still worked there, so I ordered a coffee and asked these two guys about one of them, said how long it was since I'd seen him. And then I asked about Battestini, if it was his mother who had been killed, and how he'd taken it because he'd always seemed so devoted to her.'

  No wonder Vianello had seemed proud of what he had done. 'The cunning of the snake, Vianello,' Brunetti said in open praise.

  'That's when things changed, though. It was very strange, sir. It was as if I'd taken that same cunning snake and tossed it on the floor at their feet. One of them even stepped back and put his money on the counter and left. There was a long silence, then the other one finally said he thought it was, but that Battestini didn't work there any more. Didn't even mention that he was dead. And then he just sort of disappeared. That is, I asked to pay for our coffees, and when I turned back, the guy wasn't there - not where he'd been beside me and not in the bar.' He shook his head at the memory.

  'Did you get a sense of what it was about him, about Battestini?' Brunetti asked.

  'Twenty years ago, it would have been because he was gay, but no one really cares about that now,' Vianello said. 'And most people feel pity for anyone who dies of AIDS, so I'd say it was something else, and the something else would probably have to do with the office. But whichever it was, they didn't like it that someone they didn't know was asking questions about him.' He smiled and added, 'At least that's the way it looked to me.'

  'He subscribed to a magazine with photos of boys’ Brunetti said and watched this information register on Vianello's face. Then, for clarity's sake, he added, 'Adolescents, not little boys.'

  After a moment, the inspector said, 'I'm not sure that's the sort of information people at his office would have had.'

  Brunetti had to admit that this was true. 'Then it probably was something to do with his job at the school board.'

  'Looks like’ Vianello said.

  16

  Brunetti and Vianello were on their way down to Signorina Elettra's office to save her the effort of - Brunetti didn't know whether to say 'accessing' or 'breaking into' the hospital patient files - when he realized he no longer cared how she got the information she gave him. That in its turn provoked a flash of shame at the moment's rage he'd felt at her absence. Like Otello, he had a lieutenant who could corrupt his best feelings.

  As though forewarned that today she was to play Desdemona, Signorina Elettra wore a long dress of gossamer white linen, her hair hanging loose down her back. She greeted their arrival with a smile, but before she could say anything, Vianello asked, 'Any luck yet?'

  'No,' she apologized. ‘I had a phone call from the Vice-Questore.' As if that were not sufficient justification, she explained, 'He wanted me to write a letter for him, and he was very particular about the wording.' She paused, waiting to see which one of them would be the first to ask.

  It was Vianello. 'Are you at liberty to reveal the nature of the letter?'

  'Good heavens, no. If I did, people here would know that he's applying for a job with Interpol.'

  Brunetti recovered first and said, 'Of course, of course. It had to be.' Vianello failed to find words with which to do justice to his feelings. 'Are you at liberty, perhaps, to tell us to whom the letter is addressed?' Brunetti asked.

  'My loyalty to the Vice-Questore would not permit that, sir,' she said, voice rich with the sort of pious sincerity Brunetti associated with politicians and priests. Then, thrusting her forefinger towards a sheet of paper which lay on her desk, she asked idly, 'Do you think a request to the Mayor for a letter of recommendation should go through the internal post?'

  ‘It might be faster to email it, Signorina,' Brunetti suggested.

  Vianello interrupted them. 'The Vice-Questore is a traditionalist, sir. I think he'd like to sign the letter himself.'

  Signorina Elettra nodded in agreement and said, turning their attention back to Vianello's original question, ‘I thought I might have a look at his medical records.'

  Brunetti said, ‘It's not necessary. Battestini died of AIDS.'

  'Ah, the poor man,' Signorina Elettra said.

  'He also subscribed to magazines with photos of boys,' Vianello interrupted, his tone savage.

  'He still died of AIDS, Inspector,' she said, 'and no one deserves that.'

  After a very long pause, Vianello gave a grudging, 'Perhaps,' reminding them that he had two children who were barely into their teens.

  An uncomfortable silence fell. Before it could do some sort of damage, Brunetti said, 'Vianello spoke to people in the neighbourhood and people where he worked, and everyone responded the same way: as soon as his name was mentioned, no one knew anything about him. There's general agreement that the mother was a nasty piece of work, that the father was "una brava persona" who liked a drink, but when Paolo's name is mentioned, everyone goes mute.' He gave her a moment to consider this and then asked, 'What would you make of that?'

  She sat and pushed a button on her computer that darkened the screen. Then she propped her elbow on the desk and cupped her chin in her palm. Sitting like that for some time, she seemed almost to disappear from the room or at least to leave her white-clothed body there while her attention went elsewhere.

  Finally she looked at Vianello and said, 'The silence could be respect. His mother's just been the victim of a horrible crime, and he died what was probably a horrible death, so no one will say anything bad about him, probably never will.' She raised the other hand to her forehead and scratched idly at it. 'As to the people where he worked, if he's been dead five years, they've probably forgotten about him.'

  Vianello interrupted her. 'No. It was much stronger than that. They didn't want to talk about him at all.'

  'Talk about him or answer questions about him?' Brunetti asked.

  ‘I didn't have a pistol to their heads’ said an affronted Vianello. 'They did not want to talk about him.'

  'How many people work there?' Brunetti asked.

  'In the whole place?'

  'Yes.'

  'I've no idea’ Vianello said. 'The office is on two floors, so perhaps thirty people. In his section it looke
d as though there were only five or six.'

  ‘I could easily find out, sir’ Signorina Elettra offered, but Brunetti, intrigued by the general reluctance to discuss Signora Battestini's son, thought he might stop by the office himself in the afternoon.

  He told them then about his call to Lalli and said that he'd let them know as soon as he had an answer. 'Until then, Signorina, I'd like you to take a look at Luca Sardelli and Renato Fedi. They're the only living former heads of the school board.' He did not confess to them that he suggested this because it was the only possibility he could think of.

  'Do you want to question them, sir?' Vianello asked.

  Glancing at Signorina Elettra, Brunetti asked, 'Would you have a look first?' When she nodded, he said, 'I'm pretty sure Sardelli's at the Assessorato dello Sport, and Fedi runs a construction company in Mestre. He's also a Eurodeputato, though I don't know for which party.' She had not heard of either man, so she took notes of what he said about them and told them she would have a look immediately and should have something for them after lunch.

  Because he thought it would be quicker not to go all the way home if he planned to show up at the school board after lunch, Brunetti asked Vianello if he had plans for lunch and, after only a moment's hesitation, the inspector said he had none. They agreed to meet at the front entrance in ten minutes. Brunetti picked up the phone and called Paola to tell her he would not be home.