Dressed for Death

by Donna Leon

  Brunetti went up the now-familiar stairway and knocked on the door to the office. “Avanti,” the secretary called out, and he went in.

  When she looked up from her computer and saw who it was, she couldn’t resist the impulse that brought her halfway out of her chair. “I’m sorry, Signorina,” Brunetti said, putting both hands up in what he hoped was an innocent gesture. “I’d like to speak to Avvocato Santomauro. It’s official police business.”

  She seemed not to hear him, looked at him with her mouth open in a widening O of either surprise or fear; Brunetti had no idea which. Very slowly, she reached forward and pressed a button on her desk, keeping her finger on it and getting to her feet but staying safely behind her desk. She stood there, finger still on the button, staring at Brunetti, silent.

  A few seconds later, the door was pulled open from inside, and Santomauro came into the outer office. He saw his secretary, silent and still as Lot’s wife, then saw Brunetti by the door.

  His rage was immediate and fulminant. “What are you doing here? I called the Vice-Questore and told him to keep you away from me. Get out, get out of my office.” At the sound of his voice, the secretary backed away from her desk and stood against the wall. “Get out,” Santomauro said again, almost shouting now. “I will not be subjected to this sort of persecution. I’ll have you ... “ he began but stopped as another man came into the office behind Brunetti, a man he didn’t recognize, a short man in a cheap cotton suit.

  “The two of you, get back to the Questura where you came from,” Santomauro shouted.

  “Do you recognize this man, Signor Gravi?” Brunetti asked. “Yes, I do.”

  Santomauro stopped at this, although he still didn’t recognize the little man in the cheap suit.

  “Could you tell me who he is, Signor Gravi?”

  “He’s the man who bought the shoes from me.”

  Brunetti turned away from Gravi and looked across the office at Santomauro, who seemed now to have recognized the little man in the cheap suit. “And what shoes were they, Signor Gravi?”

  “A pair of red women’s shoes. Size forty-one.”

  31

  Santomauro fell apart. Brunetti had observed the phenomenon often enough to recognize what was happening. The arrival of Gravi when Santomauro believed himself to have triumphed over all risk, when the police had not responded to the accusations in Malfatti’s confession, had fallen so suddenly, from the very heavens themselves, that Santomauro had neither the time nor the wit to create some sort of story to explain his purchase of the shoes.

  At first he had shouted at Gravi, telling him to get out of his office, but when the little man insisted that he would know Santomauro anywhere, knew that he was the man who had bought those shoes, Santomauro collapsed sideways against his secretary’s desk, arms wrapped around his chest, as if he could that way protect himself from Brunetti’s silent gaze and from the puzzled faces of the other two.

  “That’s the man, Commissario. I’m sure of it.”

  “Well, Avvocato Santomauro?” Brunetti asked and signaled with his hand for Gravi to remain silent.

  “It was Ravanello,” Santomauro said, his voice high and tight and close to tears. “It was his idea, all of it. About the apartments and the rents. He came to me with the idea. I didn’t want to do it, but he threatened me. He knew about the boys. He said he’d tell my wife and children. And then Mascari found out about the rents.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Records at the bank. Something in the computer. Ravanello told me. It was his idea to get rid of him.” None of this made any sense to two of the people in the room, but neither of them said anything, riveted by Santomauro’s terror.

  “I didn’t want to do anything. But Ravanello said we had no choice. We had to do it.” His voice had grown softer as he spoke, and then he stopped and looked up at Brunetti.

  “What did you have to do, Signor Santomauro?”

  Santomauro stared at Brunetti and then shook his head, as if to clear it after a heavy blow. Then he shook it again but this time in clear negation. Brunetti knew these signs, as well. “I am placing you under arrest, Signor Santomauro, for the murder of Leonardo Mascari.”

  At the mention of that name, both Gravi and the secretary stared at Santomauro as though seeing him for the first time. Brunetti leaned over the secretary’s desk and, using her phone, called the Questura and asked that three men be sent to Campo San Luca to pick up a suspect and escort him back to the Questura for questioning.

  Brunetti and Vianello questioned Santomauro for two hours, and gradually the story came out. It was likely that Santomauro was telling the truth about the details of the scheme to profit from the Lega apartments; it was unlikely that he was telling the truth about whose idea it was. He continued to maintain that it was all Ravanello’s doing, that the banker had approached him with all of the details worked out, that it was Ravanello who had introduced Malfatti to the scheme. All of the ideas, in fact, had been Ravanello’s: the original plan, the need to get rid of the honorable Mascari, running Brunetti’s car into the laguna. All of this had come from Ravanello, the product of his consuming greed.

  And Santomauro? He presented himself as a weak man, a man made prisoner to the evil designs of another because of the banker’s power to ruin his reputation, his family, his life. He insisted that he had not taken part in Mascari’s murder, had not known what was going to happen that fatal night in Crespo’s apartment. When he was reminded of the shoes, he said at first that he had bought them to wear during Carnevale, but when he was told that they had been identified as the shoes that were found with Mascari’s body, he said that he had bought them because Ravanello had told him to and that he had never known what the shoes were going to be used for.

  Yes, he had taken his share of the rents from the Lega apartments, but he had not wanted the money; he had wanted only to protect his good name. Yes, he had been in Crespo’s apartment the night that Mascari was killed, but it had been Malfatti who did the killing; he and Ravanello had then had no choice but to help in disposing of the body. The plan? Ravanello’s. Malfatti’s. As to Crespo’s murder, he knew nothing about it and insisted that the murderer must have been some dangerous client Crespo had taken back to his apartment with him.

  He unfailingly presented the picture of a man much like many others, led astray by his lusts, then dominated by fear. Who could fail to feel some sympathy or compassion for a man such as this?

  And so it went for two hours, Santomauro maintaining his innocent complicity in these crimes, insisting that his only motivation had been concern for his family and a desire to spare them from the shame and scandal of his secret life. As Brunetti listened, he heard Santomauro become more and more convinced of the truth of what he was saying. And at that, Brunetti called off the questioning, sickened by the man and his posturing.

  By the evening, Santomauro’s lawyer was with him, and the next morning bail was set and he was released, although Malfatti, a confessed killer, remained in jail. Santomauro resigned his presidency of the Lega delta Moralità that same day, and the remaining members of the board of directors called for a thorough investigation of his mismanagement and misconduct. So it was at a certain level of society, Brunetti mused: sodomy became misconduct, murder mismanagement.

  That afternoon Brunetti walked down to Via Garibaldi and rang the bell of the Mascari apartment. The widow asked who it was, and he gave his name and rank.

  The apartment was unchanged. The shutters still kept out the sun although they seemed to trap the heat inside. Signora Mascari was thinner, her attention more withdrawn.

  “It’s very kind of you to see me, Signora,” Brunetti began when they were seated, facing one another. “I’ve come to tell you that all suspicion has been removed from your husband. He was not involved in any wrongdoing; he was a blameless victim of a vicious crime.”

  “I knew that, Commissario. I knew that from the beginning.”

  “I’m sorry t
here had to exist even a minute’s suspicion about your husband.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Commissario. And I had no suspicions.”

  “I still regret it. But the men responsible for his death have been found.”

  “Yes, I know. I read it in the papers,” she said, paused, and then added, “I don’t think it makes any difference.”

  “They will be punished, Signora. I can promise you that.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not going to be of any help. Not to me and not to Leonardo.” When Brunetti began to object, she cut him off and said, “Commissario, the papers can print as much as they want about what really happened, but all people are ever going to remember about Leonardo is the story that appeared when his body was first discovered, that he was found wearing a dress and was believed to be a transvestite. And a whore.”

  “But it will become clear that that was not true, Signora.”

  “Once mud has been thrown, Commissario, it cannot ever be fully washed off. People like to think badly of other people; the worse it is, the happier it makes them. Years from now, when people hear Leonardo’s name, they will remember the dress, and they will think whatever dirty thoughts they want to think.”

  Brunetti knew she was right. “I’m sorry, Signora.” There was nothing else he could say.

  She leaned forward and touched the back of his hand. “No one can apologize for human nature, Commissario. But I thank you for your sympathy.” She took her hand away. “Is there anything else?”

  Knowing dismissal when he heard it, Brunetti said there was not and took his leave of her there, leaving her in the darkened house.

  That night a tremendous thunderstorm swept across the city, tearing off roof tiles, hurling pots of geraniums to the ground, uprooting trees in the Public Gardens. It rained down wildly for three solid hours, filling storm gutters and sweeping bags of garbage into the canals. When the rain stopped, a sudden chill swept behind it, creeping into bedrooms and forcing sleepers to huddle together for warmth. Brunetti, alone, was forced to get up at about four and pull a blanket from the closet. He slept until almost nine, decided then that he would not go to the Questura until after lunch, and forced himself to go back to sleep. He got up well after ten, made himself coffee, and took a long shower, glad of the hot water for the first time in months. He was standing on the terrace, dressed, hair still damp, with a second coffee in his hand when he heard a sound behind him coming from the apartment. He turned, cup to his lips, and saw Paola. And then Chiara, and then Raffaele.

  “Ciao, Papà,” Chiara cried with wild glee, hurling herself toward him.

  “What happened?” he asked, holding her close but seeing only her mother.

  Chiara pulled herself back and grinned up at him. “Look at my face, Papà.”

  He did, and had never seen a lovelier. He noticed that she had been out in the sun.

  “Oh, Papà, don’t you see?”

  “Don’t I see what, darling?”

  “I’ve got measles and they threw us out.”

  Although the chill of early autumn remained in the city, that night Brunetti needed no blanket.

  Death and Judgment

  Donna Leon

  1

  On the last Tuesday in September, snow fell for the first time in the mountains separating northern Italy from Austria, more than a month before it could ordinarily be expected. The storm arrived suddenly, carried by fat clouds that swept in from nowhere and with no warning. Within half an hour, the roads of the pass above Tarvisio were slick and deadly. No rain had fallen for a month, and so the first snow lay upon roads already covered with a glistening layer of oil and grease.

  The combination proved deadly to a sixteen-wheeled truck bearing Romanian license plates and carrying a cargo manifest for ninety cubic meters of pine boards. Just north of Tarvisio, on a curve that led down to the entrance to the autostrada and thus into the warmer, safer roads of Italy, the driver braked too hard on a curve and lost control of the immense vehicle, which plunged off the road moving at fifty kilometers an hour. The wheels gouged out huge trenches in the not yet frozen earth, while the body of the truck caromed off trees, snapping them and hurling them about in a long swath that led to the bottom of the gully, where the truck finally smacked into the rock face of a mountain, smashing open and scattering its cargo in a wide arc.

  The first men on the scene, drivers of other heavy-transport trucks who stopped without thinking to help one of their own, went first to the cabin of the truck; but there was no hope for the driver, who hung in his seat belt, half-suspended from the cabin, one side of his head battered in by the branch that had ripped off the driver’s door as the truck careened down the slope. The driver of a load of pigs being brought down to Italy for slaughter climbed over what remained of the hood of the truck, peering through the shattered windshield to see if there was another driver. The seat was empty, and so the searchers, who had by then gathered, began to look for the other driver, thrown free of the truck.

  Four drivers of trucks of varying sizes began to stumble down the hill, leaving a fifth up on the roadway to set out warning flares and use his radio to summon the polizia stradale. Snow still fell heavily, so it was some time before one of them spotted the twisted body that could be seen a third of the way down the slope. Two of them ran toward it, they too hoping that at least one of the drivers had survived the accident.

  Slipping, occasionally falling to their knees in their haste, the men struggled in the snow that the truck had crashed through so effortlessly. The first man knelt beside the motionless form and began to brush at the thin layer of white that covered the supine figure, hoping to find him still breathing. But then his fingers caught in the long hair, and when he brushed the snow away from the face, he exposed the unmistakably delicate bones of a woman.

  He heard another driver cry out from below him. Turning in the still falling snow, he looked back and saw the other man kneeling over something that lay a few meters to the left of the scar torn by the truck as it had plunged down the hill.

  “What is it?” he called, placing his fingers softly against her neck to feel for life in the oddly positioned figure.

  “It’s a woman,” the second one cried. And then, just as he felt the absolute stillness of the throat of the woman below him, the other called up to him, “She’s dead.”

  Later, the first driver to explore behind the truck said that he thought, when he first saw them, that the truck must have been carrying a cargo of mannequins, you know, those plastic women they dress up and put in the windows of shops. There they were, at least a half dozen of them, lying scattered over the snow behind the shattered rear doors of the truck. One even seemed to have gotten caught in the lumber that had been tossed about inside the truck and lay there, half-hanging from the back platform, legs pinned down by stacks of boards so securely wrapped that the impact of the truck against the mountain had not been sufficient to break them open. But why would mannequins be dressed in overcoats, he remembered wondering. And why that red in the snow all around them?

  2

  It took the polizia stradale more than half an hour to respond to the call, and when they finally arrived at the scene of the accident, they were forced to set out flares and deal with the kilometer-long rows of traffic that had backed up on both sides of the accident, as drivers, already made cautious by road conditions, slowed even more to gape down through the wide hole in the metal railing, down to where the body of the truck lay. Among the other bodies.

  As soon as the first officer, unable to understand what the truck drivers shouted to him, saw the broken forms around the wreckage of the truck, he climbed back up the hill and put in a radio call to the carabinieri station in Tarvisio. His call was answered quickly, and soon the traffic was worsened by the arrival of two cars carrying six black-uniformed carabinieri. They left their cars parked on the shoulder of the highway and lurched down the slope toward the truck. When they found that the woman whose legs were pinned under
the boards inside the truck was still alive, the carabinieri abandoned any interest they might have had in the traffic.

  There followed a scene so confused that it might have been comic had it not been so grotesque. The piles of lumber pinning the woman’s legs to the bottom of the truck were at least two meters high; they could easily be moved with a crane, but no crane could get down the slope. Men could shift them, surely, but to do so they would have to climb up and walk upon them, adding to the weight.

  The youngest of the officers crouched at the back of the truck, shivering in the bitter cold of the descending Alpine night. His regulation down parka lay tucked around the visible portion of the body of the woman pinned to the floor of the truck. Her legs disappeared at the thighs, straight into a solid pile of wood, as though the subject of a particularly whimsical Magritte.

  He could see that she was young and blond, but he could also see that she had grown visibly paler since his arrival. She lay on her side, cheek pressed down on the corrugated floor of the truck. Her eyes were closed, but she seemed still to breathe.

  From behind him, he heard the sharp sound of something heavy falling onto the floor of the truck. The other five, antlike, crawled up the sides of the pile, pulling, shoving at the neat packages of wooden beams, working them loose from the top. Each time they tossed one to the floor of the truck, they jumped down after it, picked it up, and heaved it out the open back, passing the girl and young Monelli as they did.

  Each time they walked past Monelli, they could see that the puddle of blood seeping out from under the boards was closer to his knees; still they tore at the beams, ripping their hands open on them, gone temporarily mad with the need to break the girl free. Even after Monelli had pulled his jacket over the girl’s face and gotten to his feet, two of them continued to rip boards from the pile and hurl them out into the growing darkness. They did this until their sergeant went to each of them in turn and placed his hands on their shoulders, telling their bodies that they could now stop. They grew calm then and returned to the routine investigation of the scene. By the time they finished that and called back down to Tarvisio for ambulances to carry the dead away, more snow had fallen, full night had come, and traffic was effectively tied up all the way back to the Austrian border.