Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [33]
‘I’ll check. They will have listed everything,’ Brunetti said, though that was never a sure thing. ‘Anything else?’
‘No. Aside from the heart, she was healthy for a woman in her mid-sixties.’ Rizzardi paused for a long time. ‘But it was a ticking bomb, so maybe it didn’t matter how healthy she was.’ Brunetti heard a click, and the doctor’s voice was gone.
Brunetti switched off his phone and put it in his pocket. Turning to Vianello, he said, ‘She died of a heart attack. But he found signs that someone might have shaken her. That might have caused it.’
Vianello gave him an appreciative look. ‘You got Rizzardi to say that?’
Ignoring him, Brunetti said, ‘So we take a closer look at her life.’
Sounding almost angry, Vianello said, ‘She sounds like a decent person, not the sort who’d get threatened or shaken. Or killed. Good people shouldn’t be killed like that.’
Brunetti thought about this for some time, and then said, ‘Would that that were true.’
10
When he got to his office, Brunetti found nothing. That is, he found nothing from the crime squad: no photos of Signora Altavilla, no photos of the apartment or list of the objects found in it. He sat at his desk and thought about some of those objects, trying to find a way to see them as reflective of her life.
The apartment and the things in it had given no clue to her financial status. There had been a time, decades ago, when a mere address might resolve any doubt. San Marco and the palazzi on the Canal Grande bespoke prosperity, while to live in Castello was to confess to poverty. But vast amounts of money had migrated to the city; thus any building and any address could now be the newly restored home of luxury and excess, while the former owners or tenants reversed the path of generations and moved to the mainland, leaving the city to those who could afford it.
Brunetti ran his memory through the rooms. The furniture had been of good quality, all of it from some epoch between the old and the antique. There had been few books, few decorative objects: he could not remember a single painting. The whole place spoke of simplicity and of a pared-down life. What lingered most strongly in his memory was the placement of the sofa and the table: what sort of person would turn away from the view of the church and the mountains? Not only for herself but for guests who came to the apartment? He knew not everyone was addicted to beauty, but to choose to look at that boring room instead of both man-made and natural beauty made no sense to Brunetti and made him uneasy about a person who would make such a choice.
What to make of the unopened packets of cheap underwear in the drawers of the spare bedroom? A woman who bought cashmere sweaters of the quality of the ones in her drawers, regardless of her age, would not wear cotton underwear like that, or else his ideas about women were more mistaken than Paola occasionally said they were.
And why the three different sizes? Niccolini’s daughter, should she visit her grandmother, could hardly be old enough to wear even the smallest size; besides, parents were usually careful to send along the proper clothes when their children spent the night away from home. It might be that friends came to visit or perhaps sent their daughters to stay for a time in Venice. And the unopened toiletries in the bathroom? A person did not prepare for unexpected visits with that kind of thoroughness. It was her home, after all, not a hotel or lodging house.
He left his desk and went downstairs. Over the course of the years, he had discussed many topics with Signorina Elettra, though female lingerie was not among them. She was standing at her window when he came in, arms folded, looking across the canal at the same view that greeted him from his own windows: the façade of San Lorenzo looked no less decrepit from one floor below.
She turned and smiled. ‘Can I be of help, Commissario?