Doctored Evidence

14

Brunetti was at the ufficio postale at seven-thirty the next morning, located the person in charge of the postmen, showed his warrant card, and explained that he wanted to speak to the postino who delivered mail to the area in Cannaregio near the Palazzo del Cammello. She told him to go to the first floor and ask in the second room on the left, where the Cannaregio postini sorted their mail. The room was high-ceilinged, the entire space filled with long counters with sorting racks behind them. Ten or twelve people stood around, putting letters into slots or pulling them out and packing them into leather satchels.

He asked the first person he encountered, a long-haired woman with a strangely reddened complexion, where he could find the person who delivered the mail to the Canale della Misericordia area. She looked at him with open curiosity, then pointed to a man halfway along her table and called out, 'Mario, someone wants to talk to you’

The man called Mario looked at them, then down at the letters in his hands. One by one, merely glancing at the names and addresses, he slipped them quickly into the slots in front of him then walked over to Brunetti. He was in his late thirties, Brunetti guessed, his own height but thinner, with light brown hair that fell in a thick wedge across his forehead.

Brunetti introduced himself and started to take his warrant card out again, but the postino stopped him with a gesture and suggested they talk over a coffee. They walked down to the bar, where Mario ordered two coffees and asked Brunetti what he could do for him.

'Did you deliver mail to Maria Battestini at Cannaregio…'

Mario cut him off by reciting the number of the house, then raised his hands as if in fake surrender. ‘I wanted to, but I didn't do it. Believe me.'

The coffees came, and both men spooned sugar into them. While he stirred his, Brunetti asked, 'Was she that bad?'

Mario took a sip, put the cup down and stirred in a further half-spoonful of sugar, and said, still stirring, 'Yes.' He finished the coffee and set the cup back on the saucer. ‘I delivered her mail for three years. I must have taken her, in that time, thirty or forty raccomandate, had to climb all those steps to get her to sign for them’

Brunetti anticipated his anger at never having been tipped and waited for him to give voice to it, but the man simply said, 'I don't expect to be tipped, especially by old people, but she never even said thank you.'

'Isn't that a lot of registered mail?' Brunetti asked. 'How often did they come?'

'Once a month’ the postman answered. 'Regular as a Swiss watch. And it wasn't letters, but those padded envelopes, you know, the sort you send photos or CDs in.'

Or money, thought Brunetti, and asked, 'Do you remember who they came from?'

'There were a couple of addresses, I think’ Mario answered. 'They sounded like charity things, you know, Care and Share, and Child Aid. That sort of thing.'

'Can you remember any of them exactly?'

'I deliver mail to almost four hundred people’ he said by way of answer.

'Do you remember when they started?'

'Oh, she was getting them already when I started on that route.'

'Who had the route before you?' Brunetti asked.

'Nicolo Matucci, but he retired and went back to Sicily.'

Brunetti left the subject of the registered packages and asked, 'Did you bring her bank statements?'

'Yes, every month,' he said, and recited the names of the banks. 'Those and the bills were the only things she ever got, except for some other raccomandate.'

'Do you remember who those were from?'

'Most of them came from people in the neighbourhood, complaining about the television.' Before Brunetti could ask him how he knew this, Mario said, 'They all told me about them, wanted to be sure that the letters were delivered. Everyone heard it, that noise, but there was nothing they could do. She's old. That is, she was old, and the police wouldn't do anything. They're useless.' He looked up suddenly at Brunetti and said, 'Excuse me.'

Brunetti smiled and waved it away with an easy smile. 'No, you're right,' Brunetti went on, 'there's nothing we can do, not really. The person who complains can bring a case, but that means that people from some department – I don't know what its name is, but it takes care of complaints about noise – have to go in to measure the decibels of the noise to see if it's really something called "aural aggression", but they don't work at night, or if they get called at night, they don't come until the next morning, by which time whatever it was has been turned down.' Like all policemen in the city, he was familiar with the situation, and like them, he knew it had no solution.

'Did you ever bring her anything else?' Brunetti went on.

'At Christmas, some cards; occasionally – but I mean only once or twice a year – a letter, as well as the letters about the noise. But, aside from them, only bills and the statements from the banks’ Before Brunetti could comment, Mario said, ‘It's pretty much like that for all old people. Their friends have died, and because they've always lived here, their family and friends are here, too, so there's never any reason to write. I bet some of the people I bring mail to are illiterate, anyway, and have their children take care of the bills for them. No, she wasn't much different from the other old people.'

'You pretended to think I thought you'd killed her,' Brunetti said as they drifted towards the door of the bar.

'No reason, really,' the postino said in response to Brunetti's unasked question, 'except that there were so many people who couldn't stand her.'

'But that's a stronger reaction than for her just not saying thank you,' Brunetti said.

‘I didn't like the way she treated the women who worked for her, especially the one who killed her’ he said. 'She treated them like slaves, really, seemed happy if she could make one of them cry; I saw her manage that more than once.' Mario stopped at the entrance to the sorting room and put out his hand. Brunetti thanked him for his help, shook his hand, and went downstairs and out towards Rialto. He was almost at the front entrance when he heard his name called from behind and, turning, saw Mario walking towards him, his leather bag pulling heavily on his left shoulder, the young woman with the red face close behind him.

'Commissario’ he said, coming up to Brunetti and reaching behind to take the young woman by the arm and all but pull her forward. 'This is Cinzia Foresti. She had that route before Nicolo did, up until about five years ago. I thought maybe you'd like to talk to her, too.'

The young woman gave a nervous half-smile, and her face, if possible, grew even redder.

'You delivered to Signora Battestini?' Brunetti asked.

'And to the son’ answered Mario. He patted the young woman on the shoulder and said, 'I've got to get to work’ then continued walking towards the front door.

'As your colleague told you, Signorina’ Brunetti said, 'I'm curious about the mail that was delivered to Signora Battestini.' Seeing that she was reluctant to talk, perhaps from shyness, perhaps from fear, he added, 'Particularly about the bank statements that came every month.'

'About them?' she asked with what seemed like nervous relief.

Brunetti smiled. 'Yes, and about the raccomandate that used to come from the neighbours.'

Suddenly she asked, 'Am I allowed to talk to you about this? I mean, the mail is supposed to be private.'

He pulled out his warrant card and held it out for her to examine. 'Yes, Signorina, it is, but in a case like this, where the person is dead, you may speak about it.' He didn't want to overplay his hand and suggest that she was obliged to; besides, he wasn't sure if he could force her to speak to him without a court order.

She chose to believe him. 'Yes, I took her the things from the banks, every month. And I was on that route for three years.'

'Did you deliver anything else?'

'To her? No, not really. Occasionally a letter or a card. And the bills.'

Prompted by her question, he asked, 'And to the son?'

She shot him a nervous glance but said nothing. Brunetti waited. Finally she said, 'Bills, mainly. And sometimes letters.' After a very long pause, she added, 'And magazines.'

Sensing her growing uneasiness, he asked, 'Was there anything unusual about the magazines, Signorina? Or about the letters?'

She glanced around the vast open hall, moved a bit to the left to take them farther away from a man who was making a telephone call from the pay phone near the entrance, and said, ‘I think they were about boys.'

This time there was no mistaking her nervousness: the blush set her face aflame.

'Boys? Do you mean little boys?'

She started to speak but then looked at her feet. From his greater height, he saw the top of her head shake in slow negation. He decided to wait for her to explain but then realized it would be easier for her to answer while she was not looking at him.

'Young boys, Signorina?'

This time her head nodded up and down in affirmation.

He wanted to be sure. 'Adolescents?' 'Yes.'

'May I ask how you know this, Signorina?'

At first he thought she wouldn't answer but finally she said, 'One day it rained, and my bag wasn't completely under my slicker, so when I got to the house their mail was wet: the things on the top, that is. When I pulled it out of the bag, the cover came off the magazine and it fell on to the ground. I picked it up, and when I did, it opened and I saw a photo of a boy.' She looked firmly at the ground between their feet, refusing to look at him when she spoke. ‘I have a little brother who was fourteen men, and that's what he looked like.' She stopped, and he knew there was no sense in asking her to describe the picture further.

'What did you do, Signorina?'

‘I put the magazine in the garbage. He never asked about it.'

'And the next month, when it came again?'

'I put that in the garbage, too, and the next one. And then they stopped coming, so I guess he knew what I was doing.'

'Was there only the one magazine, Signorina?'

'Yes, but there were envelopes, too. The kind with "Photo" on the outside, telling you not to bend them.'

'What did you do with them?'

'After I saw the magazine, I always bent them before I pushed them into the letterbox’ she said, anger mingled with pride.

He could think of no more questions, but she said, Then he died, and after a while the mail stopped coming.'

Brunetti put out his hand. She took it. He said, speaking as a policeman, 'Thank you for talking to me, Signorina’ and then couldn't help but add, ‘I understand.'

She smiled nervously, and again her face grew red.

At the Questura, he left a note on Vianello's desk, asking him to come up as soon as he got in. It was Wednesday, and Signorina Elettra seldom reached the office before noon on Wednesdays during the summer, a fact which the entire Questura had come to accept without " expression of curiosity or disapproval. During the summer, her skin grew no darker, so she was not on the beach; she sent no postcards, so she was not away from the city. No one had ever come across her in the city on Wednesday morning; had this happened, the entire Questura would certainly have heard. Perhaps she simply stayed at home and ironed her linen shirts, Brunetti decided.

His thoughts kept returning to Signora Battestini's son. Even though he knew the man's name was Paolo, Brunetti kept thinking of him as Signora Battestini's son. He had been forty when he died, had worked for a city office for more than a decade, yet everyone Brunetti spoke to referred to him as his mother's son, as if his only existence were through her or by means of her. Brunetti disliked psychobabble and the quick, easy solutions it tried to provide to complex human tangles, but here he thought he detected a pattern so obvious it had to be mistaken: take a domineering mother, put her in a closed and conservative society, and then add a father who liked to spend his time in the bar with the guys, having a drink, and homosexuality in the only son is not the most unlikely result. Instantly Brunetti thought of gay friends of his who had had mothers so passive as almost to be invisible, married to men capable of eating a lion for lunch, and he blushed almost as red as had the woman from the post office.

Wishing to learn if Paolo Battestini had indeed been gay, Brunetti dialled the office number of Domenico Lalli, owner of one of the chemical companies currently under investigation by Judge Galvani. He gave his name, and when Lalli's secretary proved reluctant to pass on the call, said it was a police matter and suggested she ask Lalli if he wanted to speak to him.

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.