Doctored Evidence

10

His appointment with Avvocatessa Roberta Marieschi was set for ten the next morning. Because her office was in Castello, just at the beginning of Via Garibaldi, Brunetti took the Number One and got off at Giardini. The trees in the public gardens looked tired and dusty and greatly in need of rain. Truth to tell, much the same could be said of most of the people in the city. He found the office with no difficulty, next door to what had once been a very good pizzeria, now transformed into a shop selling fake Murano glass. He rang the bell and went into the building, then up the stairs to the first-floor office.

The secretary with whom he had spoken the previous day looked up when he came in, smiled and asked if he were Signor Brunetti. When he said that he was, she asked him if he would mind waiting a few minutes because the Dottoressa was still with another client. Brunetti took a seat on a comfortable grey sofa and studied the covers of the magazines on the table to his left. He chose Oggi because he seldom got to read it, refusing to buy it and embarrassed to be seen reading it. He was deep into an account of the nuptials of a minor Scandinavian princeling when the door to the left of the secretary opened and an elderly man came into the waiting room. He had a black leather briefcase in one hand, a silver-headed walking stick in the other.

The secretary got to her feet and smiled. 'Would you like to make another appointment, Cavaliere?'

'Thank you, Signorina,' he said with a gracious smile. 'I'll read through these papers first and then call about making one.'

They exchanged polite goodbyes, and then the secretary approached Brunetti, who rose to his feet. 'I'll take you in, Signore,' she said and went to the door the old man had closed behind him. She knocked once and went in, Brunetti a step or two behind her.

The desk stood on the far side of the room, between two windows. No one sat there, but Brunetti's eye was automatically drawn to a sudden movement on the floor. As he looked, something flashed from under the desk, then instantly disappeared: light brown, it could have been a mouse or perhaps a dormouse, though he thought they lived in the country, not the city. He pretended not to have seen anything and turned at the sound of his name spoken by a woman's voice.

Roberta Marieschi was about thirty-five, tall, erect, and very pretty; she stood at a bookcase that covered one wall of the office, slipping a thick volume back into its place. 'Excuse me, Signor Brunetti,' she said. 'I'm sorry to have kept you waiting.' She came over to him, hand extended, and greeted his own outstretched hand with a firm grasp. Turning to the desk, she said, 'Please, have a seat.' The secretary left.

He studied the lawyer as she walked behind the desk and sat down. She was a bit shorter than he, but her athletic slimness made her look taller than she was. Her suit was dark grey raw silk, the skirt coming to just below the knee. She wore simple black leather shoes with a low heel, shoes for the office or shoes for walking. Her skin was lightly tanned, just enough to give a glow of health but not so much as to suggest that the next step would be leather. No single feature of her face called for special attention, but the composite did: brown eyes, thick lashes, lips full and soft.

'You said you had some questions about inheritance, Signor Brunetti?' she said, but before he could confirm this, she surprised him by saying, her voice filled with patient exasperation, 'Oh, stop that.'

He had been looking at the papers on her desk, and when he glanced up at her, she had disappeared, or at least her head had disappeared. At the same moment, the light brown thing appeared from under the desk, something between a frond and a fan, and began to move slowly from side to side.

‘Toppi, I told you to stop that’ the lawyer's voice came from under the desk.

Uncertain what to do, Brunetti remained where he was and watched the dog's tail wag back and forth. After what seemed a long time, Avvocatessa Marieschi's head, her dark hair ruffled, re-emerged, and she said, 'I'm sorry. I usually don't bring her to the office, but I just got back from vacation, and she's angry with me for having left her alone.' She pushed her chair back and spoke to the dog. 'Isn't that right, Poppi? You're sulking and punishing me by trying to eat my shoe?'

The dog shifted around under the desk, and after Brunetti heard it flop on to the floor, a considerably greater length of tail emerged. The lawyer looked at him, smiled, perhaps even blushed, and said, ‘I hope you don't mind dogs.'

'No, not at all. I like them quite a lot.'

A low growl sounded in response to his voice, and she bent down again and said, 'Come out of there, you fake. Come out and see there's nothing to be jealous about.' She reached under the desk, then lower, and then leaned back in her chair. Slowly there emerged from beneath the desk the head and then the body of the most beautiful dog Brunetti had ever seen. Poppi was a golden retriever, and even though he knew this was the current fashionable dog, nothing could prevent his admiration. Tongue lolling from her mouth, Poppi had broad-spaced eyes that had only to turn their gaze on Brunetti to conquer him. She stood as high as the lawyer's chair, and as he watched, she laid her head in her owner's lap and gazed up at her with adoration.

‘I hope you really do like dogs, Signor Brunetti, because if you don't, this is a very embarrassing situation,' the lawyer said. Unable to resist the automatic response, she put a hand on the dog's head and began to pull gently at her left ear.

'She's beautiful,' Brunetti said.

'Yes, she is,' Avvocatessa Marieschi said. 'And she's just as sweet tempered as she is beautiful.' Still busy with the dog's ear, she said, looking at Brunetti, 'But you didn't come here to listen to me talk about my dog, I know. Could you tell me what I can help you with?'

'Actually, I'm not sure your secretary understood me properly yesterday, Avvocatessa. I'm not a client, though there is something you can help me with.'

Smiling, her hand still busy with Poppi's ear, she said, 'I'm afraid I don't understand.'

'I'm a commissario of police, and I'm here to ask you some questions about one of your clients, Signora Maria Battestini.'

Poppi's lips pulled back and, turning to look at Brunetti, she made a deep rumbling noise, but her owner's voice drowned out the growl as she bent down over the dog's head and said, 'Did I pull your ear too hard, angel?' Briskly, she moved the dog's head aside with her hand and said, 'All right, back down you go. I've got to work.'

With no resistance at all, the dog disappeared under the desk, moved around a bit, and then flopped down, presenting Brunetti with another view of her tail.

'Maria Battestini,' the lawyer said. 'Terrible, terrible. I found that woman for her. I interviewed her and took her over and introduced her to Maria. Ever since I heard, I've felt responsible.' Her lips disappeared as she pulled them tight from inside, a gesture Brunetti recognized as one that often preceded tears.

Hoping to avert that, he said, 'You're hardly responsible, Avvocatessa. The police let her into the country, and the Ufficio Stranieri gave her a permesso di soggiorno. It would seem to me that, if anyone is responsible, it is the officials, not you.'

'But I'd known Maria so long, almost all my life.'

'How is that, Dottoressa?'

'My father was her lawyer, her and her husband's lawyer, and so I knew her ever since I was a little girl, and then when I finished university and came to work for my father, she asked if I could be her lawyer. I think she was my first client, that is, the first one who was willing to trust me as a lawyer.'

'And what did that entail, Dottoressa?' Brunetti asked.

'I'm afraid I don't understand’ she said, but she was talking now and not getting ready to cry.

'With what sort of things did she trust you?'

'Oh, nothing really, not then. A cousin had left her husband an apartment on the Lido, and some years after his death, when she wanted to sell it, there was a dispute about ownership of the garden.'

'Disputed ownership of property’ he said, rolling his eyes towards heaven, as if he could think of no crueller fate. 'Was that the only problem she had?'

She started to speak but stopped herself. 'Before I answer any more questions, Commissario, could you tell me why you're asking them?'

'Of course’ he agreed with an easy smile, recalling that she was a lawyer. 'It would seem that the crime has been solved, and we want to close the case formally, but before we do that we would like to exclude any other possibility.'

'What does that mean, "other possibility"?'

'That there might have been someone else responsible for the crime.'

'But I thought the Romanian woman…' she began, and then sighed. ‘I honestly don't know whether to be happy or sad at the idea’ she finally admitted. 'If she didn't do it, then I can stop feeling so guilty about it.' She tried to smile, failed, and went on, 'But is there any reason why you, that is, the police, think that it might have been someone else?'

'No,' he said with the facility of the accomplished liar, 'not really.' Then, using Patta's favourite argument, he added, 'But in this climate of press suspicion of the police, we need to be as sure as we can be before we declare a case closed. The stronger the evidence, the less likely it is that the press will call our decisions into question.'

She nodded, understanding this. 'Yes, I see. Of course I'd like to help, but I don't really see any way I can.'

'You said you helped her with other problems. Could you tell me what they were?' When he saw her hesitation, he said, ‘I think her death and the circumstances surrounding it, Dottoressa, allow you to speak to me without worrying about your responsibility to your client.'

She accepted his argument. 'There was her son, Paolo. He died five years ago, after a long illness. Maria was… she almost died from grief, I think, and she was incapable of doing anything for a long time afterwards. So I took care of the funeral for her and then of his estate, though that was all straightforward: everything went to her.'

Hearing her use the expression, 'a long illness', Brunetti realized how seldom he had ever heard anyone say that another person had died of cancer. It was always 'a long illness', 'a tumour', 'a terrible disease', or simply 'that disease'.

'How old was he when he died?' 'Forty, I think.'

The fact that his estate passed to his mother presumably meant he was not married, so Brunetti asked only, 'Did he live with her?'

'Yes. He was devoted to her.'

Brunetti's language receptors filed that one in with 'a long illness', and he made no comment.

'Are you at liberty to reveal the contents of her will?' he asked, changing the subject.

'It was all completely standard,' she said. 'Her only living relative is a niece, Graziella Simionato: she inherited everything.'

'Was it a large estate?' he asked.

'Not particularly. There was the house in Cannaregio, another one on the Lido, and some money Maria had invested at the Uni Credit’

'Have you any idea how much?'

'I'm not sure of the exact amount, but it's about ten million,' she said, then immediately corrected herself, 'old lire, that is. I still think in lire and have to translate.'

‘I suppose we all still do,' Brunetti confessed, then added, 'One final thing, about this matter of the television. Can you tell me anything about that?'

She smiled and shook her head. ‘I know, I know. I received a number of letters from people in the neighbourhood, complaining about the volume. Every time I'd get one, I'd go by and talk to Maria and she'd promise to keep the volume down, but she was old and she'd forget, or she'd fall asleep with it on.' She raised her shoulders in a sigh of resignation. 'I don't think there was any solution, not really.'

'Someone told us the Romanian woman kept the volume turned down,' he said.

'She also murdered her’ the lawyer shot back with real anger.

Brunetti nodded in acknowledgement and acceptance of the reprimand. 'I'm sorry’ he said, 'my remark was thoughtless.' Then, 'Could you give me the address of the niece?'

'My secretary has it’ Marieschi said in a voice that had suddenly grown cooler. 'I'll come with you and ask her to give it to you.'

That seemed to leave Brunetti no option but to leave, so he got to his feet and leaned towards the desk. 'Thank you for your time, Dottoressa. I hope none of my questions has disturbed you.'

She tried to smile and said in a lighter voice, 'If you had, Poppi would know it and wouldn't be asleep like a baby down there.' A sweep of the tail possibly belied the statement that Poppi was asleep, and Brunetti found himself distracted by the question of whether Chiara, if he told her about this scene, would ask if this were a sleeping-dog-lie.

He held the door open for the lawyer, waited while the secretary wrote down the address of Signora Battestini's niece, thanked them both, shook hands with the lawyer, and left.