Doctored Evidence - Brunetti 13

by Donna Leon

  Interested by what he said, Signorina Elettra slid into her chair and typed in a few words, then a few more, and the pages of print on the screen were replaced by the records of the vanished bank accounts. She scrolled them down to the month of the conversion to the Euro. After she'd checked those for January, she went on to February. Looking up at Brunetti, she said, 'Look at this, Commissario. There's a difference of five centesimi between January and February.'

  Brunetti bent to look at the screen and saw that, as she said, the payment for February was five centesimi more than that for January. She hit a key, and he saw March and April, both with the adjusted total. Signorina Elettra pulled a pocket calculator from her desk, the tiny one sent to every citizen in the country at the time of the Euro conversion. Quickly she did the sums, looked up, and said, 'The February total is the right amount.' She slipped the calculator back into her drawer and shut it. 'Five centesimi’ she said with awe, as in the face of the terrible.

  'Either the person realized the error . . .' Vianello began, but Brunetti cut him off by finishing the sentence with the more likely explanation, 'or Signora Battestini corrected him.'

  'For five centesimi’ Signorina Elettra repeated in a soft voice, still in awe of the avarice capable of that precision.

  Brunetti remembered his conversation with Dottor Carlotti and blurted out, 'Her phone. Her phone. Her phone.' When he saw their looks of incomprehension, Brunetti said, 'She hadn't been out of the apartment for three years. The only way she could have told them to make the correction was by phone.' He cursed himself for not having thought to get her phone records before, cursed himself for following the path he wanted to be the right one instead of looking at what was in front of them.

  It will take a few hours’ Signorina Elettra said. Before Brunetti could ask why there was no way to get the records more quickly, she explained, 'Giorgio's wife just had a baby, so he's working only half-days and won't be in until after lunch.' Even before Brunetti could ask, she said, 'No, I told him I wouldn't try to get into the system by myself. If I make a mistake, they'll be able to see who was helping me.'

  'A mistake?' Vianello asked.

  A long silence followed his words, and just as it was beginning to become awkward, she said, 'With computers, I mean. But I still gave my word. I can't do it.'

  Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a glance of uneasy acquiescence, both thinking of the mistake Signorina Elettra had made some years before. 'All right,' Brunetti said. 'Check incoming and outgoing calls, if you would.' He remembered the time he had met her friend Giorgio, years ago. 'Boy or girl?' he asked.

  'Girl,' she said then, with a smile just short of beatific, she added, 'They named her Elettra.'

  'I'm surprised they didn't call her Compaq’ Vianello said, and at her laugh, ease was restored.

  As he walked back to his office, Brunetti tried to invent a scenario that would allow for blackmail, imagining all manner of secrets or vices, all manner of outrage that might have led to someone's becoming Battestini's victim. That word rang strangely out of tune in Brunetti's mind, persuaded as he was that the person being blackmailed was the same person who had killed Signora Battestini. 'Subject’ then? And what was the line that separated one from the other, what the impulse that had driven her killer to cross it?

  He ran through a list of possible crimes and vices until he found himself faced with the truth of Paola's claims: most of the Seven Deadly Sins were no longer so. Who would kill in order not to be exposed as having been guilty of gluttony, of sloth, of envy, or pride? Only lust remained or anger if it led to violence, and avarice, if it could be interpreted as meaning bribe-taking. For the rest, no one any longer cared. Paradise, he had been told as a child, was a sinless world, but this brave new, post-sinful, world in which he found himself was hardly to be confused with paradise.

  21

  Brunetti had passed into the phase of an investigation he hated most, when everything came to a halt while a new map was drawn. In the past, his frustration at the imposed immobility of this situation had provoked him to acts of rashness he had sometimes regretted. But now he resisted the impulse to act on impulse and hunted for something he could justify doing. He pulled out the phone book and made a note of the numbers and addresses for both the homes and the offices of Fedi and Sardelli, even as he told himself they were the least likely suspects: it didn't have to be one of the directors; if it had been, Paolo Battestini would probably have asked for more.

  He pulled out the Battestini file and read through all the press clippings. And there it was, on the second day after the murder: La Nuova reported that the woman calling herself Florinda Ghiorghiu had worked for Signora Battestini for only five months before the crime and that the victim's only son had died five years before. So it was not only the director of the school board who had this knowledge about Signora Battestini and her family.

  After an hour, Vianello came in, bringing the list Signorina Elettra had prepared - the inspector took special pains to point out that she had obtained the information by means of an official police request - of the people who had worked at the school board here in the city during the three months before the payments began. 'She's doing a cross-check on them through other records,' Vianello said, 'to see where they are now, if they've married, died, moved.'

  Brunetti looked at the list and saw that it contained twenty-two names. Experience, prejudice and intuition united in him, and he asked, 'Shall we ignore the women?'

  'At least for now, I think we can,' Vianello agreed. ‘I saw the photos of her body, too.'

  'That leaves eight,' Brunetti said.

  Vianello said, ‘I know. I copied down the first four names for you. I'll go back down and start calling around and see what I can find out about the other four’

  Brunetti was already reaching for the phone when the inspector left the office. He had recognized three of the names on the list, though that was due to nothing more than the presence of a Costantini and two Scarpas, all of whose names had fallen to Vianello. From memory, he dialled the office of the union to which he belonged, to which, in fact, most civil servants belonged, gave his name, and asked for Daniele Masiero.

  The call was transferred, and while he waited, Brunetti was treated to one of the Four Seasons. When Masiero answered with, 'Ciao, Guido, and the privacy of whose life do you want me to betray today?' Brunetti continued humming the main theme of the second movement of the concerto.

  'I didn't choose it,' Masiero insisted. 'And luckily I never have to call, so I never have to listen to it.'

  'Then how do you know about it?' Brunetti asked.

  'So many people say how sick they are of hearing it.'

  Ordinarily Brunetti would have observed the conventions and asked Masiero about his family and his job, but today he lacked the patience and so asked only, 'I've got the names of four people who worked at the school board about ten years ago, and I'd like you to find out whatever you can about them.'

  'Things that have to do with my job or yours?' Masiero asked.

  'Mine.'

  'As in?'

  'Something for which they could be blackmailed.'

  'Broad field.'

  Brunetti thought it wisest to spare Masiero his reflections on the Seven Deadly Sins and answered only, 'Yes.'

  He heard scrabbling sounds on the other end, and then Masiero asked, 'Tell me their names.'

  'Luigi D'Alessandro, Riccardo Ledda, Benedetto Nardi, and Gianmaria Poli.'

  Masiero grunted as Brunetti read off each of the names.

  'You know any of them?' Brunetti asked.

  'Poli's dead,' Masiero said. 'About two years ago. Heart attack. And Ledda was transferred to Rome six years ago. I'm not sure about the other two, what there might be to blackmail them about, but I can ask around.'

  'Could I ask you to do it without calling attention to what you're doing?' Brunetti asked.

  'Like going up to them and asking them if they're being blackmailed for something?' th
e other man answered shortly, making no attempt to disguise his irritation at Brunetti's question. 'I'm not an idiot, Guido. I'll see what I can find out and call you back.'

  It came to Brunetti to apologize, but before he could say anything, Masiero was gone.

  Again he called his friend Lalli at his office and, after listening to the other man explain that he had been too busy to check into Battestini, Brunetti said he had two more names to give' him, those of D'Alessandro and Nardi.

  'This time I'll do it. I'll find the time’ Lalli promised, and was gone, leaving it to Brunetti to wonder if he were the only man in the city not driven to distraction by the pressure of work.

  Habit took him to the window, where he studied the long cloths which hung from the scaffolding on the facade of the Ospedale di San Lorenzo, site of another massive restoration project. A crane, perhaps the same one that had stood still over the church for so many years, now stood equally motionless over the old people's home. There was no evidence that work was progressing. Brunetti tried, and failed, to recall ever having seen anyone on the scaffolding; he tried to remember when the scaffolding had gone up: months ago, at the very least. The sign in front of the church, he knew, said that the work there was begun according to the law of 1973, but he had not been at the Questura then and so had no idea if that was the year in which work was meant to begin or merely the date of its authorization. Was it only in this city, he wondered, that one measured things in terms of how long the work had not been going on?

  He went back to his desk and pulled out a diary from 1998 in which he kept phone numbers. He looked one up, dialled the offices of Arcigay in Marghera, where he asked to speak to Emilio Desideri, the Director. He was put on hold and learned that, straight or gay, Vivaldi was the man.

  'Desideri,' a deep voice said. 'It's me, Emilio: Guido. I need to ask you a favour.'

  'A favour I can do with a clear conscience?' 'Probably not.'

  'No surprises there. What is it?'

  'I've got two names - well, four,' he added, deciding to add Sardelli and Fedi, 'and I'd like you to tell me if any of them might be open to blackmail.'

  'It's not a crime to be gay any more, Guido, remember?'

  'It is to bash someone's head in, Emilio,' Brunetti shot back. 'That's why I'm calling.' He waited for Desideri to say something. He didn't, and so Brunetti went on. ‘I want only for you to tell me if you know that any one of these men is gay-'

  'And that will be enough to tell you that he was capable of bashing someone's head in, as you so delicately put it?'

  'Emilio,' Brunetti said with studied calm, 'I'm not trying to harass you or anyone else who is gay. I don't care that you are. I don't care if the Pope is. I even like to think I wouldn't care if my son were, though that's probably a lie. I simply want to find a way to understand what might have happened to this old woman.'

  'The Battestini woman? Paolo's mother?'

  'You knew her?'

  ‘I knew about her.'

  'Are you at liberty to say how you did?' 'Paolo was involved with someone I knew, and he told me - but not until after Paolo had died - what sort of woman Paolo said she was’

  'Would he talk to me, this man?'

  Tf he were still alive, perhaps’

  Brunetti greeted this news with a long silence and then asked, 'Do you remember anything he told you?'

  'That Paolo always said how much he loved her, but to him it always sounded like it was really a case of how much he hated her.'

  'For any reason?'

  'Greed. She lived to put money in the bank, it seems. It was her greatest joy, and it sounded like it was her only joy.'

  'What was he like, Paolo?'

  'I never met him.'

  'What did your friend say about him?'

  'He wasn't a friend. He was a patient. He was in analysis with me for three years.'

  'Sorry. What did he say about him?'

  'That he had acquired more than a little of her disease but that his greatest joy was in giving her money because it seemed to make her happy to get it. I always took that to mean that it stopped her nagging him, but I could be wrong. It might genuinely have made him happy to give it to her. There was little enough happiness in his life, otherwise.'

  'He died of AIDS, didn't he?'

  'Yes, so did his friend.'

  'I'm sorry for that, too.'

  'You sound like you really mean it, Guido’ Desideri said, but with no surprise.

  ‘I am. No one deserves that.'

  'All right. Give me the names.'

  Brunetti read out the names of D'Alessandro and Nardi, and when Desideri said nothing, added those of Fedi and Sardelli.

  For a long time, Desideri still said nothing, but the tension in his silence was so palpable that Brunetti held his breath. Finally Desideri asked, 'And you think Paolo might have been blackmailing this person?'

  'The evidence we have suggests that he was,' Brunetti temporized.

  He heard the rasp as Desideri pulled in an enormous breath, then he heard only, ‘I can't do this,' and Desideri was gone.

  Brunetti had a vague memory of hearing Paola once quote some English writer who said he would sooner betray his country than his friends. She had thought it a Jesuitical idea, and Brunetti was forced to agree, however expert the English were at making the vile sound noble. So one of the four was gay and was sufficiently a friend, or perhaps a patient, of Desideri that he could not give his name to the police, even in a murder investigation, perhaps because it was a murder investigation. The list had been narrowed, unless Vianello found someone else who was gay. Or, Brunetti reflected, unless there were some other reason for blackmail.

  Twenty minutes later, Vianello came into Brunetti's office, the list of names still in his hand. He took his usual place on the other side of the desk, slid the sheet on to it, and said, 'Nothing’

  Brunetti's question was in his glance.

  'One's dead,' he said, pointing to a name. 'He retired the year after the payments started and died three years ago’ He moved his finger down the list. 'This one got religion and is living in some sort of commune or something, down near Bologna; has been for three years.' He pushed the paper a few centimetres in Brunetti's direction and sat back in the chair. 'And of the two who are still there, one's become the head of school inspections, Giorgio Costantini: he's married and seems like a decent man.'

  Brunetti named two former heads of government and remarked that the same two things might be said of them.

  Spurred on to the defensive, Vianello said, 'I've got a cousin who plays rugby with him at weekends. He says he's all right, and I believe him.'

  Brunetti let this pass without further observation. Instead, he asked, 'And the other?' 'He's in a wheelchair.' 'What?'

  'He's the guy who got polio when he went to India. You read about him, didn't you?'

  The story rang a faint bell, though Brunetti had long forgotten the details. 'Yes, I remember something. How long ago did it happen, about five years?'

  'Six. He got sick while he was there, and by the time they managed to diagnose it, it was too late to evacuate him, so he was treated there, and now he's in a wheelchair.' Vianello, in a tone that suggested he was still smarting from Brunetti's refusal to believe his cousin's assessment of Giorgio Costantini, said, "That might not be enough for you to exclude him, but I think a man might have other things to think about after landing in a wheelchair than continuing to pay blackmail.' He paused again. ‘I could be wrong, of course.'

  Brunetti gave Vianello a long glance but instead of rising to the bait, said, 'I'm still hoping Lalli will tell me something.'

  'Betray a fellow gay?' Vianello asked in a tone Brunetti didn't like.

  'He has three grandchildren.'

  'Who?'

  'Lalli.'

  Vianello shook his head at this, Brunetti couldn't tell if in disbelief or disapproval.

  'He's been my friend for a long time,' Brunetti said with steady calm. 'He's a decent man.' />
  Vianello knew a reprimand when he heard it and chose not to respond.

  Brunetti was about to say something, when Vianello glanced away from him. It could have been his refusal to concede the point of Lalli's decency, or it could have been no more than his refusal to look at Brunetti, but whatever it was, Brunetti took it in his turn to be offended and was provoked into saying, ‘I think I'd like to talk to the one who's not in a wheelchair. The rugby player’

  'As you wish, sir,' Vianello said. He got to his feet and, saying nothing else, left the office.

  22

  As the door closed behind Vianello, Brunetti came to his senses. 'Where'd all that come from?' he muttered. Was this the way drunks woke up, he asked himself, or the intemperately wrathful? Did they experience this feeling of having watched from the sidelines as someone disguised as themselves spoke their way through a bad script? He reflected on his conversation with Vianello, trying to pinpoint the moment when a simple exchange of information between friends had spun out of control and turned into a testosterone-charged battle over territory between rivals. To make matters worse, the territory over which they had fought was nothing more than Brunetti's refusal to accept an opinion because it had come from a man who chose to play rugby.