Doctored Evidence

  He moved to stand beside her and saw at the top of both sheets the familiar letter heading of the city administration and below it thick paragraphs of dark type. She touched a key, and two more seemingly identical pages appeared. Another key made these vanish, replacing them with two more. Lacking the letterhead, these contained, on the left, a column of words or phrases and, opposite them, a matching column of numbers.

  ‘That’s the estimate, sir.’

  He looked at the last page and read some of the words, ran his eyes to the right and saw what the objects or services would cost. At sea in ignorance, he had no idea what many of them were and no idea what any of them should cost.

  ‘Have you compared this with the other bids?’ he asked, looking away from the contract and back at Signorina Elettra.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And his was cheaper,’ she said with audible disappointment. ‘Not only was it cheaper, but he guaranteed that the work would be done within the fixed period and offered to pay a penalty per day if it was not.’

  Brunetti looked back at the screen, as if certain that closer examination of the words and the numbers would reveal to him whatever ruse Fedi had used to win the contract. But no matter how long he studied the pages, they refused to make sense to him. Finally he turned away from the screen and asked, ‘And overruns?’

  ‘None,’ she said, tapping a few words into the computer and waiting while new documents appeared in place of the others. ‘The entire project was finished on time,’ she explained, pointing to what Brunetti assumed were the documents which proved this. ‘What’s more,’ she went on, ‘they were finished within the projected budget, and a civil engineer I phoned said the work was done well, far above the average quality of work performed for the city.’ She saw how he reacted to this, so showed some reluctance in adding, ‘The same is true of the two restorations they did to schools here in the city, sir.’

  Brunetti looked from the screen to her face, to Vianello’s face and then back at the screen. In the past he had often told himself to look at the evidence and not at what he wanted the evidence to be, yet here he was again, confronted with information which did not support what he wanted the truth to be, and his impulse was to assume that it did not really mean what it appeared to mean or to find other evidence that would discount it.

  He saw it then, the trail he had insisted they follow, the trail that had not only led to this dead end but had taken the wrong turning from the very start. ‘It’s all wrong,’ he said. ‘What we’ve been doing, it’s all wrong.’

  He recalled the title of a book he had read some years ago and said it out loud: ‘“The March of Folly”. That’s what we’ve been doing: lumbering around after big game when what we should have been doing was thinking about the money.’

  ‘And isn’t that the money?’ Vianello asked, pointing to the screen.

  ‘I mean the money in the accounts,’ Brunetti insisted. ‘We’ve been looking at the total, not the money.’

  Their expressions suggested they still didn’t follow, and Vianello’s indignant, ‘To some of us, thirty thousand Euro is money,’ confirmed it.

  ‘Of course it’s money,’ Brunetti agreed, ‘a lot of money, especially ten years ago. But it’s the total we’ve been looking at, not the actual monthly payments. Someone with a good salary could have paid it and not missed it. Even if you were still single and lived at home, you could have paid it,’ he surprised Vianello by saying.

  Vianello began a blustering negative, but then he considered the conditions Brunetti had imposed, paused, and said, though grudgingly, ‘Yes, if I still lived with my parents and had no interests, and never wanted to go out to dinner, and didn’t care what I wore, then I suppose I could have done it.’ Ungracious in defeat, he added, ‘But it still wouldn’t be easy. It was a lot of money.’

  ‘But not enough to pay someone to keep quiet about the way a contract was approved for the complete restoration of these buildings,’ Brunetti insisted. He jabbed his finger against the computer screen, where the final sum glowed in eerie enormity. ‘A job as big as this one would have earned them millions of Euros. No blackmailer,’ he said, finally naming the crime, ‘would ask for so little, not with a contract this large at stake.’

  He looked at both of them, waiting to see signs that they agreed with his interpretation. Vianello’s slow nod and Signorina Elettra’s answering smile showed him that they did. ‘We’ve,’ he began, then corrected himself and confessed, ‘no, I’ve been blinded into thinking it was a payment for something big, something important, like a contract. But what we’re after here is something small, something mean and personal and private.’

  ‘And probably nasty,’ Vianello added.

  Brunetti turned to Signorina Elettra. ‘I’ve no idea what sort of information you can get about the people who were working at the school board when the payments started,’ he said, judging it superfluous to add that he no longer cared how she got it, ‘and I’m not sure what sort of person we’re looking for. Avvocatessa Marieschi said Signora Battestini told her it was her son who took care of her old age,’ he began, then, raising his eyes in a parody of belief, added, ‘with the help of the Madonna.’ Both of them smiled at that, and he went on, ‘We’re looking for someone who worked there and who could pay a hundred thousand lire a month.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Vianello interrupted, ‘they were so rich the money didn’t matter to them.’

  Signorina Elettra turned to him and said, ‘I don’t think that’s the sort of person who works at the school board, Ispettore.’

  For a moment, Brunetti feared that Vianello would be offended by the apparent sarcasm of her remark, but he seemed not to be. In fact, after considering it, the inspector nodded and said, ‘What’s strange, if you think about it, is that the amount never changed. Salaries have gone up, everything’s become more expensive, yet the payments never changed.’

  Interested by what he said, Signorina Elettra slid into her chair and typed in a few words, then a few more, and the pages of print on the screen were replaced by the records of the vanished bank accounts. She scrolled them down to the month of the conversion to the Euro. After she’d checked those for January, she went on to February. Looking up at Brunetti, she said, ‘Look at this, Commissario. There’s a difference of five centesimi between January and February.’

  Brunetti bent to look at the screen and saw that, as she said, the payment for February was five centesimi more than that for January. She hit a key, and he saw March and April, both with the adjusted total. Signorina Elettra pulled a pocket calculator from her desk, the tiny one sent to every citizen in the country at the time of the Euro conversion. Quickly she did the sums, looked up, and said, ‘The February total is the right amount.’ She slipped the calculator back into her drawer and shut it. ‘Five centesimi,’ she said with awe, as in the face of the terrible.

  ‘Either the person realized the error . . .’ Vianello began, but Brunetti cut him off by finishing the sentence with the more likely explanation, ‘or Signora Battestini corrected him.’

  ‘For five centesimi,’ Signorina Elettra repeated in a soft voice, still in awe of the avarice capable of that precision.

  Brunetti remembered his conversation with Dottor Carlotti and blurted out, ‘Her phone. Her phone. Her phone.’ When he saw their looks of incomprehension, Brunetti said, ‘She hadn’t been out of the apartment for three years. The only way she could have told them to make the correction was by phone.’ He cursed himself for not having thought to get her phone records before, cursed himself for following the path he wanted to be the right one instead of looking at what was in front of them.

  ‘It will take a few hours,’ Signorina Elettra said. Before Brunetti could ask why there was no way to get the records more quickly, she explained, ‘Giorgio’s wife just had a baby, so he’s working only half-days and won’t be in until after lunch.’ Even before Brunetti could ask, she said, ‘No, I told him I wouldn’t try to g
et into the system by myself. If I make a mistake, they’ll be able to see who was helping me.’

  ‘A mistake?’ Vianello asked.

  A long silence followed his words, and just as it was beginning to become awkward, she said, ‘With computers, I mean. But I still gave my word. I can’t do it.’

  Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a glance of uneasy acquiescence, both thinking of the mistake Signorina Elettra had made some years before. ‘All right,’ Brunetti said. ‘Check incoming and outgoing calls, if you would.’ He remembered the time he had met her friend Giorgio, years ago. ‘Boy or girl?’ he asked.

  ‘Girl,’ she said then, with a smile just short of beatific, she added, ‘They named her Elettra.’

  ‘I’m surprised they didn’t call her Compaq,’ Vianello said, and at her laugh, ease was restored.

  As he walked back to his office, Brunetti tried to invent a scenario that would allow for blackmail, imagining all manner of secrets or vices, all manner of outrage that might have led to someone’s becoming Battestini’s victim. That word rang strangely out of tune in Brunetti’s mind, persuaded as he was that the person being blackmailed was the same person who had killed Signora Battestini. ‘Subject,’ then? And what was the line that separated one from the other, what the impulse that had driven her killer to cross it?

  He ran through a list of possible crimes and vices until he found himself faced with the truth of Paola’s claims: most of the Seven Deadly Sins were no longer so. Who would kill in order not to be exposed as having been guilty of gluttony, of sloth, of envy, or pride? Only lust remained or anger if it led to violence, and avarice, if it could be interpreted as meaning bribe-taking. For the rest, no one any longer cared. Paradise, he had been told as a child, was a sinless world, but this brave new, post-sinful, world in which he found himself was hardly to be confused with paradise.

  21

  BRUNETTI HAD PASSED into the phase of an investigation he hated most, when everything came to a halt while a new map was drawn. In the past, his frustration at the imposed immobility of this situation had provoked him to acts of rashness he had sometimes regretted. But now he resisted the impulse to act on impulse and hunted for something he could justify doing. He pulled out the phone book and made a note of the numbers and addresses for both the homes and the offices of Fedi and Sardelli, even as he told himself they were the least likely suspects: it didn’t have to be one of the directors; if it had been, Paolo Battestini would probably have asked for more.

  He pulled out the Battestini file and read through all the press clippings. And there it was, on the second day after the murder: La Nuova reported that the woman calling herself Florinda Ghiorghiu had worked for Signora Battestini for only five months before the crime and that the victim’s only son had died five years before. So it was not only the director of the school board who had this knowledge about Signora Battestini and her family.

  After an hour, Vianello came in, bringing the list Signorina Elettra had prepared – the inspector took special pains to point out that she had obtained the information by means of an official police request – of the people who had worked at the school board here in the city during the three months before the payments began. ‘She’s doing a cross-check on them through other records,’ Vianello said, ‘to see where they are now, if they’ve married, died, moved.’

  Brunetti looked at the list and saw that it contained twenty-two names. Experience, prejudice and intuition united in him, and he asked, ‘Shall we ignore the women?’

  ‘At least for now, I think we can,’ Vianello agreed. ‘I saw the photos of her body, too.’

  ‘That leaves eight,’ Brunetti said.

  Vianello said, ‘I know. I copied down the first four names for you. I’ll go back down and start calling around and see what I can find out about the other four.’

  Brunetti was already reaching for the phone when the inspector left the office. He had recognized three of the names on the list, though that was due to nothing more than the presence of a Costantini and two Scarpas, all of whose names had fallen to Vianello. From memory, he dialled the office of the union to which he belonged, to which, in fact, most civil servants belonged, gave his name, and asked for Daniele Masiero.

  The call was transferred, and while he waited, Brunetti was treated to one of the Four Seasons. When Masiero answered with, ‘Ciao, Guido, and the privacy of whose life do you want me to betray today?’ Brunetti continued humming the main theme of the second movement of the concerto.

  ‘I didn’t choose it,’ Masiero insisted. ‘And luckily I never have to call, so I never have to listen to it.’

  ‘Then how do you know about it?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘So many people say how sick they are of hearing it.’

  Ordinarily Brunetti would have observed the conventions and asked Masiero about his family and his job, but today he lacked the patience and so asked only, ‘I’ve got the names of four people who worked at the school board about ten years ago, and I’d like you to find out whatever you can about them.’

  ‘Things that have to do with my job or yours?’ Masiero asked.

  ‘Mine.’

  ‘As in?’

  ‘Something for which they could be blackmailed.’

  ‘Broad field.’

  Brunetti thought it wisest to spare Masiero his reflections on the Seven Deadly Sins and answered only, ‘Yes.’

  He heard scrabbling sounds on the other end, and then Masiero asked, ‘Tell me their names.’

  ‘Luigi D’Alessandro, Riccardo Ledda, Benedetto Nardi, and Gianmaria Poli.’

  Masiero grunted as Brunetti read off each of the names.

  ‘You know any of them?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Poli’s dead,’ Masiero said. ‘About two years ago. Heart attack. And Ledda was transferred to Rome six years ago. I’m not sure about the other two, what there might be to blackmail them about, but I can ask around.’

  ‘Could I ask you to do it without calling attention to what you’re doing?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Like going up to them and asking them if they’re being blackmailed for something?’ the other man answered shortly, making no attempt to disguise his irritation at Brunetti’s question. ‘I’m not an idiot, Guido. I’ll see what I can find out and call you back.’

  It came to Brunetti to apologize, but before he could say anything, Masiero was gone.

  Again he called his friend Lalli at his office and, after listening to the other man explain that he had been too busy to check into Battestini, Brunetti said he had two more names to give him, those of D’Alessandro and Nardi.

  ‘This time I’ll do it. I’ll find the time,’ Lalli promised, and was gone, leaving it to Brunetti to wonder if he were the only man in the city not driven to distraction by the pressure of work.

  Habit took him to the window, where he studied the long cloths which hung from the scaffolding on the façade of the Ospedale di San Lorenzo, site of another massive restoration project. A crane, perhaps the same one that had stood still over the church for so many years, now stood equally motionless over the old people’s home. There was no evidence that work was progressing. Brunetti tried, and failed, to recall ever having seen anyone on the scaffolding; he tried to remember when the scaffolding had gone up: months ago, at the very least. The sign in front of the church, he knew, said that the work there was begun according to the law of 1973, but he had not been at the Questura then and so had no idea if that was the year in which work was meant to begin or merely the date of its authorization. Was it only in this city, he wondered, that one measured things in terms of how long the work had not been going on?

  He went back to his desk and pulled out a diary from 1998 in which he kept phone numbers. He looked one up, dialled the offices of Arcigay in Marghera, where he asked to speak to Emilio Desideri, the Director. He was put on hold and learned that, straight or gay, Vivaldi was the man.

  ‘Desideri,’ a deep voice said.

  ‘It’s me, Emi
lio: Guido. I need to ask you a favour.’

  ‘A favour I can do with a clear conscience?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘No surprises there. What is it?’

  ‘I’ve got two names – well, four,’ he added, deciding to add Sardelli and Fedi, ‘and I’d like you to tell me if any of them might be open to blackmail.’

  ‘It’s not a crime to be gay any more, Guido, remember?’

  ‘It is to bash someone’s head in, Emilio,’ Brunetti shot back. ‘That’s why I’m calling.’ He waited for Desideri to say something. He didn’t, and so Brunetti went on. ‘I want only for you to tell me if you know that any one of these men is gay.’

  ‘And that will be enough to tell you that he was capable of bashing someone’s head in, as you so delicately put it?’

  ‘Emilio,’ Brunetti said with studied calm, ‘I’m not trying to harass you or anyone else who is gay. I don’t care that you are. I don’t care if the Pope is. I even like to think I wouldn’t care if my son were, though that’s probably a lie. I simply want to find a way to understand what might have happened to this old woman.’

  ‘The Battestini woman? Paolo’s mother?’

  ‘You knew her?’

  ‘I knew about her.’

  ‘Are you at liberty to say how you did?’

  ‘Paolo was involved with someone I knew, and he told me – but not until after Paolo had died – what sort of woman Paolo said she was.’

  ‘Would he talk to me, this man?’

  ‘If he were still alive, perhaps.’

  Brunetti greeted this news with a long silence and then asked, ‘Do you remember anything he told you?’

  ‘That Paolo always said how much he loved her, but to him it always sounded like it was really a case of how much he hated her.’

  ‘For any reason?’

  ‘Greed. She lived to put money in the bank, it seems. It was her greatest joy, and it sounded like it was her only joy.’

  ‘What was he like, Paolo?’

  ‘I never met him.’