Fatal Remedies

12

It ended in front of the Questura, the door of which was blocked by a triple row of reporters. In the front line stood the men and women with their notebooks. At their backs were those with microphones and behind them, closest to the door, the ranks of the video cameras, two of which were mounted on tripods, arc lamps set up behind them.

One of the men saw Brunetti approach and turned the blank eye of his camera in his direction. Brunetti ignored it and also the people who crowded around him. Strangely enough, none of them asked him a question or spoke to him; they did nothing more than turn their microphones in his direction and watch silently as, like Moses, he passed undisturbed between the parted waters of their curiosity and into the Questura.

Inside, Alvise and Riverre saluted him as he came in, Alvise unable to disguise his surprise at seeing him.

‘Buon di, Commissario,’ Riverre said, a greeting echoed by his partner.

Brunetti nodded to them, knowing it was a waste of time to ask Alvise anything, and started up the steps towards Patta’s office. Outside it, at her desk, Signorina Elettra was speaking on the phone when he came in. She nodded in his direction, not at all surprised to see him here, and held up a restraining hand. ‘I’d like it by the afternoon,’ she said, waited until the other person answered, then said goodbye and hung up. ‘Welcome back, Commissario,’ she said.

‘Am I?’

She gave him a quizzical glance.

‘Welcomed?’ he explained.

‘By me, certainly. I don’t know about the Vice-Questore, but he did ask earlier if you’d come in.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘That I expected you shortly.’

‘And?’

‘He seemed relieved.’

‘Good.’ Brunetti was equally relieved. ‘What about Lieutenant Scarpa?’

‘He’s been with the Vice-Questore since he got back from the murder scene.’

‘What time was that?’

‘The call from Signora Mitri was logged at ten twenty-seven. Corvi called in at eleven-o-three.’ She glanced down at a piece of paper on her desk. ‘Lieutenant Scarpa called in at quarter past eleven and went to the Mitris’ immediately. He didn’t get back here until one.’

‘And he’s been there?’ Brunetti said, indicating the door to Patta’s office with a jerk of his chin.

‘Since eight thirty this morning,’ Signorina Elettra answered.

‘No use waiting,’ Brunetti said, as much to himself as to her, and turned to the door. He knocked; Patta’s voice called out instantly.

Brunetti pushed open the door and entered. As usual, Patta posed behind his desk, the light streaming in from behind him, reflecting up off the surface and into the eyes of anyone who sat in front of him.

Lieutenant Scarpa stood beside his commander, his posture so straight and his uniform ironed to such perfection that he looked frighteningly like Maximilian Schell in one of his good-Nazi roles.

Patta greeted Brunetti with a nod and gestured to the chair in front of his desk. Brunetti pulled it a bit to the side so that the shadow cast by Scarpa’s body blocked some of the light bouncing up from the polished wood. The lieutenant shifted his weight from one foot to the other and moved a small step to his right. Brunetti countered this by shifting to his left and turning a bit more to that side.

‘Good-morning, Vice-Questore,’ Brunetti said and nodded to Scarpa.

‘You’ve heard, then?’ Patta said.

‘I heard only that he was killed. Beyond that, I know nothing.’

Patta looked up at Scarpa. ‘Tell him about it, Lieutenant.’

Scarpa looked at Brunetti, then back at Patta before he spoke. When he did so, it was with a small bow of his head in Patta’s direction. ‘With all respect, Vice-Questore, I thought the commissario was on administrative leave.’ Patta said nothing, so he went on, ‘I didn’t know he was going to be brought back to this investigation. And, if I might suggest, the press might find it strange that he is being assigned to it.’

Brunetti found it interesting that, at least in Scarpa’s mind, it was all being treated as one investigation. He wondered if this reflected the lieutenant’s belief that Paola must somehow be involved in the murder.

‘I’ll decide who gets assigned to what, Lieutenant,’ Patta said in a level voice. ‘Tell the commissario what happened. Its his problem now.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Scarpa answered neutrally. He stood up a bit straighter and began to explain. ‘Corvi called me a bit after eleven and I went immediately to the Mitris’ home. When I got there, I found his body on the floor of the kitchen. From what I could see of his neck, he appeared to have been strangled, though there was no sign of the murder weapon.’ He paused and looked at Brunetti, but when the commissario said nothing, Scarpa continued, ‘I examined the body, then called for Dottor Rizzardi, who arrived after about half an hour. He confirmed my opinion about the cause of death.’

‘Did he have any suggestion or idea about what could have been used to strangle him?’ Brunetti interrupted.

‘No.’ Brunetti noticed that Scarpa did not address him by his title, but he let that go. He had no need to wonder how the lieutenant must have treated Dr Rizzardi, a man known to be friendly with Brunetti, so he wasn’t surprised to learn that Rizzardi hadn’t been willing to hazard a guess about what was used to strangle Mitri.

‘And the autopsy?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Today, if it’s possible.’

Brunetti would call Rizzardi after this meeting. It would be possible.

‘May I continue, sir?’ Scarpa asked Patta.

Patta gave Brunetti a long look, as if to ask if he had any other obstructive questions, but when Brunetti ignored the look he turned to Scarpa and said, ‘Of course.’

‘He was alone in the apartment that evening. His wife was at dinner with friends.’

‘Why didn’t Mitri go?’ Brunetti asked.

Scarpa looked at Patta, as if to ask him if he should answer the commissario’s question. When Patta nodded, Scarpa explained, ‘His wife said they were old friends of hers, from before she married, and Mitri seldom went out with them when they went to dinner.’

‘Children?’ Brunetti asked.

‘There’s a daughter, but she lives in Rome.’

‘Servants?’

‘All this is in the report,’ Scarpa said petulantly, looking at Patta and not at Brunetti.

‘Servants?’ Brunetti repeated.

Scarpa paused, but then he answered, ‘No. At least no live-in help. There’s a woman who comes to clean twice a week.’

Brunetti got to his feet. ‘Where’s the wife?’ he asked Scarpa.

‘She was still there when I left.’

‘Thank you, Lieutenant,’ Brunetti said. ‘I’d like to see a copy of your report.’

Scarpa nodded but did not speak.

‘I’ll have to see the wife,’ Brunetti said to Patta and, before the Vice-Questore could say it, he added, ‘I’ll be very careful with her.’

‘And your own?’ Patta asked.

This could mean many things, but Brunetti chose to answer the most obvious form the question could take. ‘She was home all last evening, with me and our children. None of us left after seven thirty, when my son came home from studying at a friend’s house.’ He paused here to see if Patta would add another question, and, when he chose not to, Brunetti let himself out of the office without saying or asking anything further.

Signorina Elettra looked up from some papers on her desk and, making no attempt to disguise her curiosity, asked, ‘Well?’

‘It’s mine,’ Brunetti said.

‘But that’s crazy.’ Signorina Elettra spoke before she could stop herself. Hastily, she added, ‘I mean, the press will go wild when they learn.’

Brunetti shrugged. There was little he could do to curb the enthusiasms of the press. Ignoring her remark he asked, ‘Have you got those papers I told you not to get?’

He watched while she followed this question to the places it could lead: charges of disobedience and insubordination, failure to obey a direct order from a superior, grounds for dismissal, destruction of her career. ‘Of course, sir,’ she answered.

‘Can you give me a copy?’

‘It will take a few minutes. I’ve got them hidden in here,’ she explained, waving a hand at her computer screen.

‘Where?’

‘In a file I think no one else could find.’

‘No one?’

‘Oh,’ she said loftily, ‘if they were as good as I, perhaps.’

‘Is that likely?’

‘No, not here.’

‘Good. Bring them up when you’ve printed them out, would you?’

‘Of course, sir.’

He waved a hand in her direction and went back upstairs.

He called Rizzardi immediately and found the pathologist in his office at the hospital. ‘You had time yet?’ Brunetti asked as soon as he’d identified himself to the other man.

‘No, I’ll start in about an hour. I’ve got a suicide first. Young girl, only sixteen. Her boyfriend left her, so she took all her mother’s sleeping pills.’

Brunetti remembered that Rizzardi had married late and had teenaged children. Two daughters, he thought. ‘Poor girl,’ Brunetti said.

‘Yes.’ Rizzardi allowed a pause to establish itself, then went on, ‘I don’t think there’s any doubt. It could have been a thin wire, probably plastic-covered.’

‘Like electrical cord?’

‘That’s the most likely. I’ll know once I take a closer look. It might even have been that double wire they use to hook up stereo speakers. There were faint traces of a second impression, parallel to the other, but it might just be that the killer loosened it for a moment to get a better grip. I’ll know more once I take a look under the microscope.’

‘Man or woman?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Either, I’d say. That is, either could have done it. If you come from behind with a cord, they don’t have a chance; your strength doesn’t matter. But it’s usually men who strangle: I don’t think women are sure they’re strong enough.’

‘Thank God for that at least,’ Brunetti said.

‘And it looks like there might be something under the nails of his left hand.’

‘Something?’

‘If we’re lucky, skin. Or material from what the killer was wearing. I’ll know after I have a closer look.’

‘Would that be enough to identify someone?’

‘If you find the someone, yes.’

Brunetti considered that, then asked, ‘Time?’

‘I won’t know until I have a look inside. But his wife saw him at seven thirty when she went out and found him a little after ten when she got back. So there’s little doubt and there’s nothing I could find that would make it any more certain than that.’ Rizzardi stopped for a moment, covered the phone with his hand and spoke to someone in the room with him. ‘I’ve got to go now. They’ve got her on the table.’ Even before Brunetti could thank him, Rizzardi said, ‘I’ll send it over to you tomorrow,’ and hung up.

Though impatient to go and speak to Signora Mitri, Brunetti forced himself to stay at his desk until Signorina Elettra brought him the information about Mitri and Zambino, which she did after about five minutes.

She came in after knocking and placed two folders on his desk, saying nothing. ‘How much of this is common knowledge?’ Brunetti asked, glancing down at the files.

‘Most of it comes from the newspapers,’ she answered. ‘But some comes from their banks and from incorporation papers held by the various companies.’

Brunetti couldn’t contain himself. ‘How do you know this?’

Hearing only curiosity, not praise, in his voice she didn’t smile. ‘I have a number of friends who work in city offices and in banks. I can occasionally ask them to answer queries for me.’

‘And what do you do for them in return?’ Brunetti asked, finally voicing the question that had teased at him for years.

‘Most of the information we have here, Commissario, soon becomes common knowledge or, at least, public knowledge.’

‘That’s not an answer, Signorina.’

‘I’ve never given police information to anyone without a right to know it.’

‘Legal or moral?’ Brunetti asked.

She studied his face for a long time, then answered, ‘Legal.’

Brunetti knew that the only price high enough for certain information was other information, so he persisted, ‘Then how do you get all of this?’

She considered that for a moment. ‘I also advise my friends on more efficient methods of information retrieval.’

‘What does that mean in real language?’

‘I teach them how to snoop and where to look.’ Before Brunetti could respond, she continued, ‘But I have never, sir, never given any unauthorized information of any sort, not to my friends, not to people who are not my friends but with whom I exchange information. I’d like you to believe that.’

He nodded to show that he did, resisting the temptation to ask if she had ever explained to anyone how to get information from the police. Instead, he tapped the folders again. ‘Will there be more?’

‘Perhaps a longer client list for Zambino, but I don’t think there’s anything more to learn about Mitri.’

Of course there was, Brunetti told himself: there was the reason someone would put a wire round his throat and pull it tight until he or she choked the life out of him. ‘I’ll have a look, then,’ he said.

‘I think it’s all clear, but if you have questions, please ask me.’

‘Does anyone else know you’ve given me this?’

‘No, of course not,’ she said and left the office.

He chose the thinner file first: Zambino. From Modena originally, the lawyer had studied at Cà Foscari and begun to practise in Venice about twenty years ago. He specialized in corporate law and had built a reputation for himself in the city. Signorina Elettra had attached a list of some of his better-known clients; Brunetti recognized more than a few of them. There was no apparent pattern, and certainly Zambino did not work only for the wealthy: the list held as many waiters and salesmen as it did doctors and bankers. Though he accepted a certain number of criminal cases, his chief source of income was the corporate work Vianello had told Brunetti about. Married for twenty-five years to a teacher, he had four children, none of whom had ever been in trouble with the police. Nor, Brunetti observed, was he a wealthy man; at least whatever wealth he might have was not held in Italy.

The fatal travel agency in Campo Manin had belonged to Mitri for six years, though, ironically, he had nothing whatsoever to do with the day-to-day running of the business. A manager who rented the agency licence from him took care of all practical matters; apparently it was he who had decided to handle the tours that had provoked Paola’s action and appeared to have led to Mini’s murder. Brunetti made a note of the manager’s name and read on.

Mitri’s wife was also Venetian, two years younger than he. Though there had been only one child, she had never had a career, and Brunetti did not recognize her name as being involved in any of the charitable institutions of the city. Mitri was survived by a brother, a sister and a cousin. The brother, also a chemist, lived near Padova, the sister in Verona, and the cousin in Argentina.

There followed the numbers of three accounts in different banks in the city, a list of government bonds, and stock holdings, all for a total of more than a billion lire. And that was all. Mitri had never been accused of a crime and had never, not once in more than half a century, come to the attention of the police in any way.

Instead, Brunetti reflected, he had probably come to the attention of a person who thought – though he tried to shy away from this, Brunetti could not – as Paola did and who had, like her, decided to use violent means to express his opposition to the tours conducted by the travel agency. Brunetti knew that history was filled with examples of the wrong people dying. Kaiser Wilhelm’s good son, Friedrich, had survived his father by only a few months, leaving the path of succession open to his own son, Wilhelm II, and thus leaving the same path open to the first truly global war. And Germanicus’s death had put the succession at risk and, ultimately, had led to Nero. But those were cases where fate, or history, had intervened; there had been no figure with a wire to drag the victim down to death; there had been no deliberate selection.

Brunetti called down to Vianello, who answered on the second ring. ‘The lab through with the note yet?’ he asked him without preamble.

‘Probably. Want me to go down and ask them?’

‘Yes. And bring it up if you can.’

While he waited for Vianello, Brunetti read again through the short list of Zambino’s criminal clients, trying to recall whatever he could about the names he recognized. There was one case of homicide and, though the man was convicted, the sentence had been reduced to only seven years when Zambino brought in a number of women who lived in the same building to testify that the victim had, for years, been abusive to them in the elevator and the halls of the building. Zambino had proceeded to convince the judges that his client had been defending his wife’s honour when an argument broke out between them in a bar. Two robbery suspects had been released for lack of evidence: Zambino arguing that they had been arrested only because they were Albanians.

Brunetti was interrupted by a knock at the door and Vianello’s entrance. He carried a large transparent plastic envelope in his right hand and held it up as he came in. ‘They’d just finished. Nothing at all. Lavata con Perlana,’ Vianello concluded, using the most successful television slogan of the decade. Nothing could be cleaner than something washed with Perlana. Except, Brunetti thought, a note left at a murder scene that was sure to be found and examined by the police.

Vianello came across the room and placed the envelope on Brunetti’s desk. He propped his weight on his hands and leaned over it, studying it again, along with Brunetti.

It looked to Brunetti as if the words had been cut from La Nuova, the most sensational and often most vulgar newspaper of the city. He wasn’t sure: the technicians would be. They were pasted to half a sheet of lined writing paper. ‘Filthy pederasts and baby pornographers. You’ll all die like this.’

Brunetti picked up the envelope by a corner and turned it over. All he could see were the same lines and some small patches where the glue had seeped through the paper, staining it grey. He turned it back over and read it again. ‘There seem to be some crossed wires, don’t there?’ he asked.

‘To say the least,’ Vianello agreed.

Though Paola had told the police who arrested her why she broke the window, she had never spoken to any of the reporters, except briefly and under duress, so whatever stories they carried about her motivation had come from some other source; Lieutenant Scarpa was a good guess. The stories Brunetti had read had done little more than suggest that her motivating force was ‘feminism’, though the term was never defined. Mention had been made of the tours arranged by the agency, but the accusation that they were sex-tours had been heatedly denied by the manager, who insisted that most of the men who bought tickets to Bangkok at his agency took their wives along. The Gazzettino, Brunetti recalled, had carried a long interview with him in which he expressed his shock and disgust at sex-tourism, carefully and repeatedly pointing out that it was illegal in Italy and hence unthinkable for any legitimate agency to play a part in the organizing of it.

Thus the weight of opinion and authority was lined up against Paola, a hysterical ‘feminist’, and in favour of the law-respecting manager and, behind him, the murdered Dottor Mitri. Whoever had got the idea of ‘baby pornographer’ had got things wildly wrong.

‘I think it’s time we talked to a few people,’ Brunetti said, getting to his feet. ‘Starting with the manager of the agency. I’d like to hear what he has to say about all these married women who want to go to Bangkok.’

Brunetti looked at his watch and saw that it was almost two. ‘Is Signorina Elettra still here?’ he asked Vianello.

‘Yes, sir. She was when I came up.’

‘Good. I’d like to have a word with her, then perhaps we could go and get something to eat.’

Confused, Vianello nodded and followed his superior down to Signorina Elettra’s office. From the door, he watched Brunetti lean down and speak to her, saw and heard Signorina Elettra’s laugh. She nodded and turned towards her computer, then Brunetti joined him and they went down to the bar by Ponte dei Grechi and had wine and tramezzini, talking of this and that. Brunetti seemed in no hurry to leave, so they had more sandwiches and another glass of wine.

After another half hour Signorina Elettra came in, managing to capture a smile from the barman and the offer of coffee from two men who stood at the bar. Though it was less than a block from the office, she had put on a quilted black silk coat that came to her ankles. She shook her head in polite refusal of coffee and came towards the two policemen. She pulled a few sheets of paper from her pocket and held them up. ‘Child’s play.’ She shook her head in false exasperation. ‘It’s just too easy.’

‘Of course.’ Brunetti smiled and paid for what had passed as lunch.