Dressed for Death

by Donna Leon

  Paola slept peacefully beside him, a curved lump in which rested his heart’s delight. He placed the file on the table beside the bed, turned off the light, wrapped his arm around Paola’s shoulder and kissed her neck. Still salty. He was soon asleep.

  When Brunetti arrived at the Mestre Questura the following morning, he found Sergeant Gallo at his desk, another blue folder in his hand. As Brunetti sat, the policeman passed the folder to him, and Brunetti saw for the first time the face of the murdered man. On top lay the artists reconstruction of what he might have looked like, and, below that, he saw the photos of the shattered reality from which the artist had made his sketch.

  There was no way of estimating the number of blows the face had suffered. As Gallo had said the night before, the nose was gone, driven into the skull by one especially ferocious blow. One cheekbone was entirely crushed, leaving a shallow indentation on that side of the face. The photos of the back of the head showed a similar violence, but these would have been blows that killed rather than disfigured.

  Brunetti closed the file and handed it back to Gallo. “Have you had copies of the sketch made?”

  “Yes, sir, we’ve got a stack of them, but we didn’t get the sketch until about a half hour ago, so none of the men have been out on the street with it.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “We took a perfect set and sent them down to Rome and to Interpol in Geneva, but you know what they’re like.” Brunetti did know. Rome could take weeks; Interpol was usually a bit faster.

  Brunetti tapped on the cover of the folder with the tip of his finger. “There’s an awful lot of damage to the face, isn’t there?”

  Gallo nodded but said nothing. In the past, he had dealt with Vice-Questore Patta, if only telephonically so he was wary of whoever might come his way from Venice.

  “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?”

  “Yes.”

  “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 eyes. Didn’t like looking at him, I’d say, but, Jesus, he should have seen him before the autopsy, with all that makeup 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 off. 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.

  Although Brunetti had seen the photos, nothing had prepared him for the wreckage before him. The pathologist had been interested only in exploration and cared nothing for restoration; if a family was 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 toward 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. Poor devil, he couldn’t have had much luck at fooling anyone, because he sure didn’t have an idea about what to do with makeup, at least from what I saw when they brought him in.”

  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.”

  6

  “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 sergeants desk and laying the blue folder on the desk 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 anymore.”

  “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.”

  Gallo gave a small grin at the compliment and 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 rumors 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 makeup 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 off blunt, 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; the most that could be said was that 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.”

  “The man who was out in the sun yesterday?”

  Gallo’s calm “Yes, sir” told Brunetti that he had heard about the incident, and the way he said it suggested that he didn’t like it. “He’s the only officer who’s been assigned. The death of a prostitute isn’t a high priority, especially during the summer when we’re short-staffed.”

  “No one else?” Brunetti asked.

  “I was assigned the case provisorily because I was here when the call came in, so I sent the Squadra Mobile to the scene. The vice-questore here in Mestre has suggested that it be handed over to Sergeant Buffo, since he’s the one who answered the original call.”

  “I see,” Brunetti said, considering this. “Is there an alternative?”

  “Do you mean is there an alternative to Sergeant Buffo?”

  “Yes.”

  “You could request that, as your original contact was with me, and we have discussed the case at great length ... “ Here Gallo paused, as if to make that length even greater, then continued, “It might save time if I were to continue to be assigned to the case.”

  “Who is the vice-questore in charge of this?”

  “Nasci.”

  “Is she liable to ... I mean, will she think this a good idea?”

  “I’m sure that if the request came from a commissario, she’d agree, sir. Especially as you’re coming out here to give us a hand.”

  “Good. Get someone to write up a request, and I’ll sign it before lunch.” Gallo nodded, made a note on a piece of paper in front of him, then looked up at Brunetti and nodded. “And get your people working on the clothing and shoes he was wearing.” Gallo nodded and made another note.

  Brunetti flipped open the blue file he had studied the night before and pointed to the list of names and addresses stapled to the inside cover. “I think the best thing we can do is to begin asking these men questions about the victim, if they know who he is or if they recognize him or know anyone who might have known him. The pathologist said he must be in his early forties. None of the men in the file is that old, few of them are even in their thirties, so if he’s a local, he’d stand out because of his age, and people would certainly know about him.”

  “How do you want to do this, sir?”

  “I think we should divide the list into three, and then you and I and Scarpa can start showing them the picture and asking them what they know.”

  “They aren’t the sort of people who are willing to talk to the police, sir.”

  “Then I suggest we take along a second picture, one of the photos of what he looked like when we found him out in the field. I think if we convince these men that the same thing could happen to
them, they might be less reluctant to talk to us.”

  “I’ll get Scarpa up here,” Gallo said and reached for the phone.

  7

  They decided, even though it was still morning— probably more like the middle of the night to the men on the list—to talk to them now. Brunetti asked the other men, because they were familiar with Mestre, to arrange the addresses into some sort of geographic order so they wouldn’t have to traverse the city repeatedly as they went through the names.

  When this was done, Brunetti took the list he was given and went downstairs to find his driver. He doubted the wisdom of arriving to question the men on this particular list in a blue and white police car with a uniformed policeman at the wheel, but he had only to step out into the mid-morning air of Mestre to decide that mere survival overrode any consideration of caution.

  The heat wrapped itself around him, and the air seemed to nibble at his eyes. There was no breeze, not the slightest current; the day lay like a filthy blanket upon the city. Cars snaked past the Questura, their horns bleating in futile protest against changing lights or crossing pedestrians. Whirls of dirt and cigarette packages flying back and forth across the street marked their passing. Brunetti, seeing it, hearing it, and breathing it, felt as though someone had come from behind and wrapped tight arms around his chest. How did human beings live like this?

  Brunetti fled into the cool cocoon of the police car and emerged from it a quarter of an hour later in front of an eight-story apartment building on the western edge of the city. He looked up and saw that lines of washing hung extended between it and the building on the opposite side of the street. A faint breeze blew here, so the parti-colored strata of sheets, towels, and underwear undulated above him and, for a moment, raised his spirits.

  Inside, the portiere sat in his cagelike office, arranging papers and envelopes on a desk, sorting the mail that must just have been delivered for the inhabitants of the building. He was an old man with a thin beard and silver-framed reading glasses hovering on the end of his nose. He raised his eyes over the tops of the lenses and said good morning. The humidity intensified the sour smell of the room, and a fan on the floor, blowing across the old man’s legs, did no more than shove the smell around the room.