Anonymous Venetian aka Dressed for Death

Chapter Six

‘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 sergeant’s desk and laying down the blue folder 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 any more.’

‘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.’ Complimenting, as well.

Gallo 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 rumours 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 make-up 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 bluntly, 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, more than to say 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 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 again. ‘And get your people working on the clothing and shoes he was wearing.’ Gallo made another note.

Brunetti flipped open the blue file that 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 are 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.