Anonymous Venetian aka Dressed for Death

‘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.

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 towards 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, anyway. 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