Dressed for Death (15 page)

‘A week? She let a week go before
she called us?’

‘I didn’t speak to her,’ Gallo
said, almost as if Brunetti had been accusing him of negligence.

‘Who did?’

‘I don’t know. All I have is a
piece of paper that was put on my desk, telling me that she’s going to Umberto
Primo this morning to take a look at him and hoped to get there by nine.’

The men exchanged a look; Gallo
pushed up his sleeve and glanced at his watch.

‘Yes,’ Brunetti said. ‘Let’s go.’

There ensued a muddle that was
almost cinematic in its idiocy. Their car found itself in heavy early-morning
traffic; the driver decided to cut round it and come at the hospital from the
rear, only to meet even heavier traffic, which got them to the hospital after
Signora Mascari had not only identified the body as that of her husband,
Leonardo, but had left in the same taxi that had brought her out from Venice,
heading towards the Mestre Questura, where, she was told, the police would
answer her questions.

All of this meant that Brunetti
and Gallo got back to the Questura to find that Signora Mascari had been
waiting for them for more than quarter of an hour. She sat, upright and
entirely alone, on a wooden bench in the corridor outside Gallo’s office. She
was a woman whose dress and manner suggested, not that her youth had fled, but
that it had never existed. Her suit, a midnight-blue raw silk, was conservative
in cut, the skirt a bit longer than was then fashionable. The colour of the
cloth contrasted sharply with her pallid skin.

She looked up as the two men
approached, and Brunetti noticed that her hair was that standard red so popular
to women of Paola’s age. She wore little makeup, and so he was able to see the
small lines at the corners of the eyes and mouth, lines brought on either by
age or worry, Brunetti couldn’t tell which. She stood and took a step towards
them. Brunetti stopped in front of her and held out his hand. ‘Signora Mascari,
I’m Commissario Brunetti from the Venice police.’

She took his hand and gave it no
more than the quickest of light touches. He noticed that her eyes seemed very
bright, but he couldn’t tell if this was caused by unshed tears or the
reflection from the glasses she wore.

‘I extend my condolences, Signora
Mascari,’ he said. ‘I understand how painful and shocking this must be for you.’
She still made no acknowledgement that he had spoken. ‘Is there someone you
would like us to call and have come here to be with you?’

She shook her head at this. ‘Tell
me what happened,’ she said.

‘Perhaps we could step into
Sergeant Gallo’s office,’ Brunetti said, reaching down to open the door. He
allowed the woman to pass in front of him. He glanced backwards at Gallo, who
raised his eyebrows in interrogation; Brunetti nodded, and the sergeant came
into the office with them. Brunetti held a chair for Signora Mascari, who sat
and looked up at him.

‘Is there something we could get
you, Signora? A glass of water? Tea?’

‘No. Nothing. Tell me what
happened.’

Sergeant Gallo took his place
quietly behind his desk; Brunetti sat in a chair not far from Signora Mascari.

‘Your husband’s body was found in
Mestre on Monday morning. If you’ve spoken to the people at the hospital, you
know that the cause of death was a blow to the head.’

She interrupted him. ‘There were
blows to the face, as well.’ After she said this, she looked away and stared
down at her hands.

‘Do you know of anyone who might
have wanted to harm your husband, Signora? Can you think of anyone who has ever
menaced him or with whom he had a serious argument?’

She shook her head in immediate
negation. ‘Leonardo had no enemies,’ she said.

Brunetti’s experience suggested
that a man did not get to be the director of a bank without making enemies, but
he said nothing.

‘Did your husband ever mention
difficulties at his work? Perhaps an employee he had to fire? Someone who was
turned down for a loan and who held him responsible?’

Again, she shook her head. ‘No,
nothing like that. There’s never been any trouble.’

‘And your family, Signora? Has
your husband ever had difficulties with anyone in your family?’

‘What is this?’ she demanded. ‘Why
are you asking me these questions?’

‘Signora,’ Brunetti began, making
what he hoped was a calming gesture with his hands. ‘The manner of your husband’s
death, the very violence of it, suggests that whoever did it had reason to hate
your husband a great deal, and so, before we can begin to look for that person,
we have to have some idea of why he might have done what he did. So it is
necessary that these questions be asked, painful as I know them to be.’

‘But I can’t tell you anything.
Leonardo had no enemies.’ After repeating this, she looked across at Gallo, as
if to ask him to verify what she said or to help her persuade Brunetti to
believe her.

‘When your husband left the house
last Sunday, he was on his way to Messina?’ Brunetti asked. She nodded. ‘Do you
know the purpose of his trip, Signora?’

‘He told me it was for the bank
and that he would be back on Friday. Yesterday.’

‘But he didn’t mention what the
trip was about?’

‘No, he never did. He always said
his work wasn’t very interesting, and he seldom discussed it with me.’

‘Did you hear anything from him
after he left, Signora?’

‘No. He left for the airport on
Sunday afternoon. He had a flight to Rome, where he had to change planes.’

‘Did your husband call you after
that, Signora? Did he call you from Rome or from Messina?’

‘No, but he never did. Whenever
he went on a business trip, he’d simply go wherever he was going and then come
home, or he’d call me from his office in the bank if he went directly there
when he got back to Venice.’

‘Was this usual, Signora?’

‘Was what usual?’

‘That he would go away on
business and not get in touch with you?’

‘I just told you,’ she said, her
voice going a bit sharp. ‘He travelled a bit for the bank, six or seven times a
year. Sometimes he would send me a postcard or bring me a gift, but he never
called.’

‘When did you begin to become
alarmed, Signora?’

‘Last night. I thought he would
go to the bank in the afternoon, when he got back, and then come home. But when
he wasn’t home by seven, I called the bank, but it was closed. I tried to call
two of the men he worked with, but they weren’t home.’ She paused here, took a
deep breath, and then continued, ‘I told myself I’d got the day wrong or the
time, but by this morning, I couldn’t fool myself any more, so I called one of
the men who works at the bank, and he called a colleague in Messina, and then
he called me back.’ She stopped talking here.

‘What did he tell you, Signora?’
Brunetti asked in a low voice.

She put one knuckle to her mouth,
hoping, perhaps, to keep the words from coming out, but she had seen the body
in the morgue, and so there was no use in that. ‘He told me that Leonardo had
never been to Messina. And so I called the police. Called you. They told me ...
when I gave them a description of Leonardo ... they told me that I should come
out here. So I did.’ Her voice had grown increasingly ragged as she explained
all of this, and when she finished, her hands were clutched desperately
together in her lap.

‘Signora, are you sure there’s no
one you’d like to call or have us call to come here to be with you? Perhaps you
shouldn’t be alone at this time,’ Brunetti said.

‘No. No, there’s no one I want to
see.’ Abruptly, she stood. ‘I don’t have to stay here, do I? Am I free to
leave?’

‘Of course, Signora. You’ve been
more than kind to answer these questions.’

She ignored this.

Brunetti made a small gesture to
Gallo as he stood and followed Signora Mascari to the door. ‘We’ll have a car
take you back to Venice, Signora.’

‘I don’t want anyone to see me
arrive in a police car,’ she said.

‘It will be an unmarked car,
Signora, and the driver won’t be in uniform.’

She made no acknowledgement to
this, and the fact that she didn’t object probably meant that she would accept
the ride to Piazzale Roma.

Brunetti opened the door and
accompanied her to the stairs at the end of the corridor. He noticed that her
right hand had a death grip on her purse, and the left was jammed into the
pocket of her jacket.

Downstairs, Brunetti went out on
to the steps of the Questura with her, out into the heat that he had forgotten.
A dark blue sedan waited at the foot of the steps, motor running. Brunetti bent
down and opened the door for her, held her arm as she stepped into the car.
Once seated, she turned away from him and looked out of the window on the other
side, though all she saw was traffic and the bleak fa
ç
ade of office buildings. Brunetti closed the door softly
and told the driver to take Signora Mascari back to Piazzale Roma.

When the car disappeared into the
flow of traffic, Brunetti went back to Gallo’s office. As he went in, he asked
the sergeant, ‘Well, what did you think?’

‘I don’t believe in people who
have no enemies.’

‘Especially middle-aged bank
managers,’ Brunetti added.

‘And so?’ Gallo asked.

‘I’ll go back to Venice and see
if there’s anything I can find out there, from my people. Now that we’ve got a
name, we at least have a place to begin to look.’

‘For what?’ Gallo asked.

Brunetti’s answer was immediate. ‘First,
we’ve got to do what we should have been doing from the beginning, find out
where the clothing and the shoes he was wearing came from.’

Gallo took this as a reproach and
answered just as quickly, ‘Nothing on the dress yet, but we’ve got the name of
the manufacturer of the shoes and should have a list by this afternoon of the
stores that sold them.’

Brunetti had not intended his
remark as a criticism of the Mestre branch, but he let it stand. It could do no
harm to spur Gallo and his men into finding out where Mascari’s clothing had
come from, for surely those shoes and that dress were not the sort of thing a
middle-aged banker wore to the office.

* * * *

Chapter Thirteen

If
Brunetti thought he was going to find people working on a Saturday morning in
August, the staff of the Questura thought otherwise: there were guards at the
door, even a cleaning woman on the stairs, but the offices were empty, and he
knew there was no hope of getting anything done until Monday morning. For a
moment, he thought of getting on a train to Bolzano, but he knew it would be
after dinner before he got there, just as he knew he would spend all the next day
eager to be back in the city.

He let himself into his office
and opened the windows, though he was aware there was no good to be done by
that. The room became more humid, perhaps even minimally hotter. No new papers
lay on his desk, no report from Signorina Elettra.

He reached down into his bottom
drawer and pulled out the telephone book. He flipped it open and turned to the
L’s, but there was no listing for Lega della Moralità, though that didn’t
surprise him. Under the S’s, he found Santomauro, Giancarlo,
aw.
and an
address in S. Marco. The late Leonardo Mascari, he learned by using the same
system, lived in Castello. This surprised him: Castello was the least
prestigious
sestiere
of the city, a zone primarily inhabited by solid
working-class families, an area where children could still grow up speaking
nothing but dialect and remain entirely ignorant of Italian until they began
elementary school. Perhaps it was the Mascari family home. Or perhaps he had
made a lucky deal on an apartment or house. Apartments in Venice were so hard
to find, and those found so outrageously priced, either to buy or to rent, that
even Castello was becoming fashionable. Spending enough money on restoration
could perhaps provide respectability, if not for the entire
quartiere,
then at least for the individual address.