Doctored Evidence

by Donna Leon

  A minute later he was put through. ‘What now, Guido?’ Lalli asked, having served Brunetti in the past as a source of information about the gay population of Mestre and Venice. There was no anger in the voice, simply the impatience of a man who had a large company to run.

  ‘Paolo Battestini, worked for the school board until five years ago, when he died of AIDS.’

  ‘All right,’ Lalli said. ‘What, specifically, do you want to know?’

  ‘Whether he was gay, whether he liked adolescent boys, and whether there was anyone else he might have shared this taste with.’

  Lalli made a disapproving noise and then asked, ‘He the one whose mother was murdered a few weeks ago?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘These things connected?’

  ‘Maybe. That’s why I’m asking you to see what you can find out.’

  ‘Five years ago?’

  ‘Yes. It seems he subscribed to a magazine that had photos of boys in it.’

  ‘Unpleasant,’ came Lalli’s unsolicited comment. ‘And stupid. They can get all they want on the Internet now, though they still all ought to be locked up.’

  Lalli, Brunetti knew, had been married as a young man and now had three grandchildren in whom he took inordinate pride. Fearing that he would now have to listen to an account of their latest triumphs, Brunetti said, ‘I’d be grateful for anything you could tell me.’

  ‘Hummm. I’ll ask around. The school board, huh?’

  ‘Yes. You know someone there.’

  ‘I know someone everywhere, Guido,’ Lalli said tersely and without the least hint of boasting. ‘I’ll call you if I learn anything,’ he said and, not bothering to say goodbye, hung up.

  Brunetti tried to think of anyone else he could ask about this, but the two men who might have been able to help were on vacation, he knew. He decided to wait to see what information Lalli could provide before trying to get in touch with the others. That decision made, he went downstairs to see if there were any sign of Vianello.

  15

  VIANELLO HAD NOT yet come in. And as he was leaving the officers’ room, Brunetti found himself face to face with Lieutenant Scarpa. After a significant pause, during which his body effectively blocked the doorway, the lieutenant stepped back and said, ‘I wonder if I might have a word with you, Commissario.’

  ‘Of course,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘Perhaps in my office?’ Scarpa suggested.

  ‘I have to get back to my own office, I’m afraid,’ Brunetti said, unwilling to concede the territorial advantage.

  ‘I think it’s important, sir. It’s about the Battestini murder.’

  Brunetti manufactured a noncommittal expression and asked, ‘Really? What about it?’

  ‘The Gismondi woman,’ the lieutenant said and then refused to say more.

  Though the mention of her name stirred Brunetti’s curiosity, he said nothing. After a long time, his silence won, and Scarpa went on, ‘I’ve checked the recordings of phone calls made to us, and I’ve found two calls in which she threatens her.’

  ‘Who threatens whom, Lieutenant?’ inquired Brunetti.

  ‘Signora Gismondi threatens Signora Battestini.’

  ‘In a phone call to the police, Lieutenant? Wouldn’t you say that was a bit rash of her?’

  He watched Scarpa maintain control of himself, saw the way his mouth tightened at the corners and how he rose a few millimetres on the balls of his feet. He thought of what it would be like to be the weaker person in any exchange with Scarpa and didn’t like the thought.

  ‘If you could spare the time to listen to the tapes, sir, you might understand what I mean,’ Scarpa said.

  ‘Can’t this wait?’ Brunetti asked, making no attempt to disguise his own irritation.

  As if the sight of Brunetti’s impatience were enough to satisfy him, a more relaxed Scarpa said, ‘If you’d prefer not to listen to the person who admits that she was probably the last one to see the victim alive threaten her, sir, that is entirely your own affair. I had, however, thought it would warrant closer attention.’

  ‘Where are they?’ Brunetti asked.

  Feigning incomprehension, Scarpa asked, ‘Where are what, sir?’

  As he resisted the impulse to hit Scarpa, Brunetti realized how frequently this desire overtook him. He considered Patta a complacent time-server, a man capable of almost anything to protect his job. But it was the existence of the human weakness implicit in that ‘almost’ that kept Brunetti from disliking Patta in any but a superficial sense. But he hated Scarpa, shied away from him as he would from entering a dark room from which emerged a strange smell. Most rooms had lights, but he feared there existed no way to illuminate the interior of Scarpa, nor any certainty that what lay inside, if it could be seen, would provoke anything other than fear.

  Brunetti’s unwillingness to respond was so evident that Scarpa turned, muttering, ‘In the lab,’ and started towards the back stairway.

  Bocchese was nowhere evident in the laboratory, though the prevailing odour of cigarette smoke suggested that he was not long gone. Scarpa went over to the back wall, where a large cassette player sat on a long wooden counter. Beside it lay two ninety-minute tapes, each bearing dates and signatures.

  Scarpa picked one up, glanced at the writing, and slipped it into the machine. He picked up a pair of headphones and placed them over his ears, then pressed the PLAY button, listened for a few seconds, pushed STOP, fast-forwarded the tape and played it again. After three more attempts to find the right spot, he stopped the tape, rewound it a little, then handed the headphones to Brunetti.

  Strangely reluctant to have anything that had been in such intimate contact with Scarpa’s body touch his own, Brunetti said, ‘Can’t you just play it?’

  Scarpa yanked the headphones from the socket and pressed PLAY.

  ‘This is Signora Gismondi, in Cannaregio. I called before.’ Brunetti recognized her voice, but not the tone, tight with anger.

  ‘Yes, Signora. What now?’

  ‘I told you an hour and a half ago. She’s got the television on so loud you can hear it from here. Listen,’ she said. The voices of two people who sounded as if they were having an argument drew close, then moved away. ‘Can you hear that? Her window is ten metres away, and I can hear it like it’s in my own house.’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do, Signora. The patrol is out on another call.’

  ‘Has the call lasted an hour and a half?’ she asked angrily.

  ‘I can’t give you that information, Signora.’

  ‘It’s four o’clock in the morning,’ she said, her voice moving close to hysteria or tears. ‘She’s had that thing on since one o’clock. I want to get some sleep.’

  ‘I told you the last time you called, Signora. The patrol’s been given your address and they’ll come when they can.’

  ‘This is the third night in a row this has happened, and I haven’t seen any sign of them,’ she said, her voice shriller.

  ‘I don’t know anything about that, Signora.’

  ‘What do you expect me to do, go over there and kill her?’ Signora Gismondi shouted down the phone.

  ‘I told you, Signora,’ came the dispassionate voice of the police operator, ‘the patrol will come when it can.’ One of them hung up the phone and the tape wound on with a soft hiss.

  An equally dispassionate Scarpa turned to Brunetti and said, ‘In the next one, she actually threatens to go over and kill her.’

  ‘What does she say?’

  ‘“If you don’t stop her, I’ll go over there and kill her.”’

  ‘Let me hear it,’ Brunetti said.

  Scarpa inserted the other tape and fast-forwarded it to the middle, hunted around until he found the right place, and played the call for Brunetti. He had quoted Signora Gismondi exactly, and Brunetti shivered when he heard her, voice almost hysterical with rage, say, ‘If you don’t stop her, I’ll go over there and kill her.’

  The fact that the call was made at thre
e-thirty in the morning and was the fourth she had made in the same night suggested clearly to Brunetti that it was rage, not calculation, animating her voice, though a judge might not see it quite like that.

  ‘There is also her history of violence,’ added Scarpa casually. ‘When that is added to these threats, I think it makes a strong case for us to question her again about her movements that morning.’

  ‘What history of violence?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Eight years ago, while she was still married, she attacked her husband and threatened to kill him.’

  ‘Attacked him how?’

  ‘The police report says she threw boiling water at him.’

  ‘What else does the report say?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘It’s in my office if you care to read it, sir.’

  ‘What else does it say, Scarpa?’

  The surprise in Scarpa’s eyes was evident, as was his instinctive step back from Brunetti. ‘They were in the kitchen, having an argument, and she threw the water at him.’

  ‘Was he hurt?’

  ‘Not badly. It landed on his shoes and trousers.’

  ‘Were charges pressed?’

  ‘No, sir, but a report was filed.’

  Suddenly suspicious, Brunetti asked, ‘Who decided not to press charges?’

  ‘That’s hardly important, sir.’

  ‘Who?’ Brunetti’s voice was so tight it sounded almost like a bark.

  ‘She did,’ Scarpa said after a pause he deliberately made as lengthy as possible.

  ‘What charges didn’t she press?’

  Brunetti watched as Scarpa considered mentioning the report again and made note of the instant when he decided not to bother. ‘Assault,’ the lieutenant finally said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘He broke her wrist, or she said he did.’

  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, ‘It’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 hi
m.’

  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 that the last five years he was there were already in the system, so she printed out a copy for me.’