Dressed for Death (4 page)

‘I’m sure they do, sir. Word
about something like that spreads quickly.’

‘And they’re still here?’
Brunetti asked, unable to conceal his surprise.

‘They’ve got to five, haven’t
they, sir? Besides, if it was a man who got killed, then there’s no risk to
them, or I suppose that’s the way they’d look at it.’ The driver slowed and
pulled to the side of the road. ‘This is it, sir.’

Brunetti opened his door and got
out. Heat and humidity slid up and embraced him. Before him stood a long low
building; on one side, four steep cement ramps led up to double metal doors. A
blue and white police sedan was parked at the bottom of one of the ramps. No
name was visible on the building, and no sign of any sort identified it. The
smell that surged towards them made that unnecessary.

‘I think it was at the back, sir,’
the driver volunteered.

Brunetti walked to the right of
the building, towards the open fields that he could see stretching out behind
it. When he came around to the back of the building, he saw yet another
lethargic fence, an acacia tree that had survived only by a miracle, and, in
its shade, a policeman asleep in a wooden chair, head nodding forward on his
chest.

‘Scarpa,’ the driver called out
before Brunetti could say anything. ‘Here’s a commissario.’

The policeman’s head shot up and
he was instantly awake, then as quickly on his feet. He looked at Brunetti and
saluted. ‘Good afternoon, sir.’

Brunetti saw that the man’s
jacket was draped over the back of the chair and that his shirt, plastered to
his body with sweat, seemed to be a faint pink, no longer white. ‘How long have
you been out here, Officer Scarpa?’ Brunetti asked when he approached the man.

‘Since the lab people left, sir.’

‘When was that?’

‘About three, sir.’

‘Why are you still here?’

‘The sergeant in charge told me
to stay here until a team came out to talk to the workers.’

‘What are you doing out here in
the sun?’

The man made no attempt to avoid
the question or to embellish his answer. ‘I couldn’t stand it inside, sir. The
smell. I came out here and was sick, and then I knew I couldn’t go back inside.
I tried standing for the first hour, but there’s only this little place where
there’s any shade, so I went back and got a chair.’

Instinctively, Brunetti and the
driver had crowded into that small patch of shade while the other man spoke. ‘Do
you know if the team has come out to question them?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes, sir. They got here about an
hour ago.’

‘Then what are you still doing
out here?’ Brunetti asked.

The officer gave Brunetti a stony
look. ‘I asked the sergeant if I could go back to town, but he wanted me to
help with the questioning. I told him I couldn’t, not unless the workers came
outside to talk to me. He didn’t like that, but I couldn’t go back inside.’

A playful breeze reminded
Brunetti of the truth of that.

‘So what are you doing out here?
Why aren’t you in the car?’

‘He told me to wait here, sir.’
The man’s face didn’t change when he spoke. ‘I asked if I could sit in the car
- it’s got air-conditioning - but he told me to stay out here if I wouldn’t
help with the questioning.’ As if anticipating Brunetti’s next question, he
said, ‘The next bus isn’t until quarter to eight, to take people back into the
city after work.’

Brunetti considered this and then
asked, ‘Where was he found?’

The policeman turned and pointed
to a long clump of grass on the other side of the fence. ‘He was under that,
sir.’

‘Who found him?’

‘One of the workers inside. He’d
come outside to have a cigarette, and he saw one of the guy’s shoes lying on
the ground - red, I think - so he went to have a closer look.’

‘Were you here when the lab team
was?’

‘Yes, sir. They went over it,
taking photos and picking up anything that was on the ground for about a
hundred metres around the bush.’

‘Footprints?’

‘I think so, sir, but I’m not
sure. The man who found him left some, but I think they found others.’ He
paused a moment, wiped some sweat from his forehead, and added, ‘And the first
police who were on the scene left some.’

‘Your sergeant?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Brunetti glanced off at the clump
of grass then back at the policeman’s sweat-soaked shirt. ‘Go on back to our
car, Officer Scarpa. It’s air-conditioned.’ Then to the driver, ‘Go with him.
You can both wait for me there.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ the policeman
said gratefully and reached down to pull his jacket from the back of the chair.

‘Don’t bother,’ Brunetti said
when he saw the man start to put one arm in a sleeve.

‘Thank you, sir,’ he repeated and
bent to pick up the chair. The two men walked back towards the building. The
policeman set the chair down on the cement outside the back door of the
building then joined the other man. They disappeared round the side of the
building, and Brunetti went towards the hole in the fence.

Ducking low, he passed through it
and walked over towards the bush. The signs left by the lab team were all
around: holes in the earth where they had driven rods into the earth to measure
distance, dirt scuffed into small piles by pivoting footsteps, and, nearer to
the clump, a small pile of clipped grass placed neatly to the side: apparently,
they’d had to cut down the grass to get to the body and remove it without
scratching it on the sharp edges of the leaves.

Behind Brunetti, a door slammed
shut, and then a man’s voice called, ‘Hey, you, what are you doing? Get the
hell away from there.’

Brunetti turned and, as he knew
he would, saw a man in police uniform coming quickly towards him from the back
of the building. As Brunetti watched but didn’t move away from the bush, the
man drew his revolver from his holster and shouted at Brunetti, ‘Put your hands
in the air and come over to the fence.’

Brunetti turned and walked back
towards the fence; he moved like a man on a rocky surface, hands held out at
his sides to maintain balance.

‘I told you to put them in the
air,’ the policeman snarled as Brunetti reached the fence.

He had a gun in his hand, so
Brunetti did not try to tell him that his hands were in the air; they just
weren’t over his head. Instead, he said, ‘Good afternoon, Sergeant. I’m
Commissario Brunetti from Venice. Have you been taking the statements of the
people inside?’

The man’s eyes were small, and
there wasn’t much in the way of intelligence to be read in them, but there was
enough there for Brunetti to realize that the man saw the trap opening at his
feet. He could ask to see proof, ask a commissario of police for his warrant
card, or he could allow a stranger claiming to be a police official to go
unquestioned.

‘Sorry, Commissario, I didn’t
recognize you with the sun in my eyes,’ the sergeant said, though the sun shone
over his left shoulder. He could have got away with it, earning Brunetti’s
grudging respect, had he not added, ‘It’s hard, coming out into the sun like
this, from the darkness inside. Besides, I wasn’t expecting anyone else to come
out here.’

The name tag on his chest read ‘Buffo’.

‘It seems that Mestre is out of
police commissari for the next few weeks, so I was sent out to handle the
investigation.’ Brunetti bent down and walked through the hole in the fence. By
the time he stood up on the other side, Buffo’s revolver was back in its
holster, the flap snapped securely closed.

Brunetti started towards the back
door of the slaughterhouse, Buffo walking beside him. ‘What did you learn from
the people inside?’

‘Nothing more than what I got
when I answered the first call this morning, sir. A butcher, Bettino Cola,
found the body at a little past eleven this morning. He had gone outside to
have a cigarette, and he went over to the bush to have a look at some shoes he
said he saw lying on the ground.’

‘Weren’t there any shoes?’
Brunetti asked.

‘Yes. They were there when we got
here.’ From the way he spoke, anyone hearing him would believe that Cola had
placed them there to divert suspicion from himself. As much as any civilian or
criminal, Brunetti hated Tough Cops. ‘The call we got said there was a whore in
a field out here, a woman. I answered the call and took a look, but it was a
man.’ Buffo spat.

‘The report I received said he’s
a prostitute,’ Brunetti said in a level voice. ‘Has he been identified?’

‘No, not yet. We’re having the
morgue people take pictures, though he was beat up pretty badly, and then we’ll
have an artist make a sketch of what he must have looked like before. We’ll
show that around, and sooner or later someone will recognize him. They’re
pretty well known, those boys,’ Buffo said with something between a grin and a
grimace, then continued, ‘If he’s one of the locals, we’ll have an ID on him
pretty soon.’

‘And if not?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Then it will take longer, I
guess. Or maybe we won’t find out who he is. Small loss, in either case.’

‘And why is that, Sergeant Buffo?’
Brunetti asked softly, but Buffo heard only the words and not the tone.

‘Who needs them? Perverts. They’re
all full of AIDS, and they think nothing about passing it on to decent working men.’
He spat again.

Brunetti stopped, turned, and
faced the sergeant. ‘As I understand it, Sergeant Buffo, these decent working
men about whom you are so concerned get AIDS passed on to them because they pay
these “perverts” to let them ram their cocks up their asses. Let us try not to
forget that. And let us try not to forget that, whoever the dead man is, he’s
been murdered, and it is our duty to find the murderer. Even if it was a decent
working man.’ Saying that, Brunetti opened the door and went into the
slaughterhouse, preferring the stench there to the one he left outside.

* * * *

Chapter Four

Inside,
he learned little more: Cola repeated his story, and the foreman verified it.
Sullenly, Buffo told him that none of the men who worked in the factory had
seen anything strange, not that morning and not the day before. The whores were
so much a part of the landscape that no one now paid any real attention to them
or to what they did. No one could remember that particular area behind the
slaughterhouse ever being used by the whores: the smell alone would explain
that. But had one of them been seen in that area, no one was likely to have
noticed.

After learning all of this,
Brunetti went back to his car and asked the driver to take him to the Questura in
Mestre. Officer Scarpa, who had put his jacket back on, got out of the car and
joined Sergeant Buffo in the other. As the two cars headed back towards Mestre,
Brunetti opened his window half-way to let some air, however hot, into the car
and dilute the smell of the slaughterhouse that still clung to his clothing.
Like most Italians, Brunetti had always scoffed at the idea of vegetarianism,
scorning it as yet another of the many self-indulgences of the well-fed, but
today the idea made complete sense to him.

At the Questura, his driver took
him to the first floor and introduced him to Sergeant Gallo, a cadaverous man
with sunken eyes who looked like the years spent in pursuit of the criminal had
eaten into his flesh from the inside.

When Brunetti was seated at the
side of Gallo’s desk, the sergeant told him there was little else to add to
what Brunetti had been told, though he did have the initial, verbal report from
the pathologist: death had resulted from a series of blows to the head and face
and had taken place from twelve to eighteen hours before the body was found.
The heat made it difficult to tell. From pieces of rust found in some of the
wounds and from their shape, the pathologist guessed that the murder weapon had
been a piece of metal, most probably a length of pipe, but surely something
cylindrical. The lab analysis of stomach contents and blood wouldn’t be back
until Wednesday morning at the earliest, so it was impossible to say yet
whether he had been under the influence of drugs or alcohol when he was killed.
Since many of the prostitutes in the city and almost all of the transvestites
were confirmed drug users, this was likely, though there seemed to be no sign
on the body of intravenous drug use. The stomach was empty, though there were signs
that he had eaten a meal within the twenty-four hours before he was killed.