Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [4]
She looked down at the motionless woman, at the hand, the arm, the head. And she realized she would never get to ask her now.
2
Guido Brunetti, Commissario di Polizia of the city of Venice, sat at dinner across from his immediate superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, and prayed for the end of the world. He would have settled for being abducted by aliens or perhaps for the violent irruption of bearded terrorists, shooting their way into the restaurant, bloodlust in their eyes. The resulting chaos would have permitted Brunetti, who was, as usual, not wearing his own gun, to wrest one from a passing terrorist and use it to shoot and kill both the Vice-Questore and his assistant, Lieutenant Scarpa, who, seated to the left of the Vice-Questore, was at this very moment passing his measured – negative – judgement on the grappa that had been offered at the end of the meal.
‘You people in the North,’ the Lieutenant said with a condescending nod in Brunetti’s direction, ‘don’t understand what it is to make wine, so why should you know about making anything else?’ He drank the rest of his grappa, made a small moue of distaste – the gesture so carefully manufactured as to allow Brunetti to distinguish easily between distaste and disgust – and set his glass on the table. He gave Brunetti an open-faced glance, as if inviting him to make a contribution to oenological frankness, but Brunetti refused to play and contented himself with finishing his own grappa. However much this dinner with Patta and Scarpa might have driven Brunetti to long for a second grappa – or the second coming – the realization that acceptance would prolong the meal led him to resist the waiter’s offer, just as good sense led him to resist the bait offered to him by Scarpa.
Brunetti’s refusal to engage spurred the Lieutenant, or perhaps it was the grappa – his second – for he began, ‘I don’t understand why Friuli wines are …’ but Brunetti’s attention was called away from whatever deficiency the Lieutenant was about to reveal by the sound of his telefonino. Whenever he was forced into social occasions he could not avoid – as with Patta’s invitation to dinner to discuss candidates for promotion – Brunetti was careful to carry his telefonino and was often saved by a generous Paola, calling with an invented urgent reason for him to leave immediately.
‘Sì,’ he answered, disappointed at having seen it was the central number of the Questura.
‘Good evening, Commissario,’ said a voice he thought must be Ruffolo’s. ‘We just had a call from a woman in Santa Croce. She’s found a dead woman in her apartment. There was blood, so she called us.’
‘Whose apartment?’ Brunetti asked, not that it mattered that he know this now, but because he disliked lack of clarity.
‘She said she was in her own apartment. The dead woman, that is. It’s downstairs from hers.’
‘Where in Santa Croce?’
‘Giacomo dell’Orio, sir. She lives just opposite the church. One seven two six.’
‘Who’s gone?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No one, sir. I called you first.’
Brunetti looked at his watch. It was almost eleven, long after he had thought and hoped this dinner would end. ‘See if you can find Rizzardi and have him go. And call Vianello – he should be at home. Send a boat to pick him up and take him there. And get a crime scene team together.’
‘What about you, sir?’
Brunetti had already consulted the map of the city imprinted in his genes. ‘It’s faster for me to walk. I’ll meet them there.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘If there’s a patrol anywhere near, call them and tell them to go over. And call the woman and tell her not to touch anything in the apartment.’
‘She went back to her own, sir, to make the call. I told her to stay there.’
‘Good. What’s her name?’
‘Giusti, sir.’
‘If you speak to the patrol, tell them I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
‘Yes, sir,’ the officer said and hung up.
Vice-Questore Patta looked across at Brunetti with