Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [89]
Vianello smiled and could not resist saying, ‘I’m always cheered by your uplifting view of human nature, Guido.’
Was rhetorical style contagious? Brunetti wondered. A decade ago, Vianello would not have been capable of a verbal flourish such as this. Brunetti was pleased at the thought.
‘So he’s selling something,’ Brunetti went on as though the Ispettore had not spoken. ‘And if that’s so, and if he’s not stealing things from the docks any more, then it might be something they gave him when they signed the will or when he got the apartment from them.’
‘Or something he stole,’ Vianello added, as though he too had something to contribute to the view of human nature.
This possibility left Brunetti uncomfortable. ‘He met her when he went to work at the hospital, and he had no more trouble with us after that.’
‘Or he didn’t get caught.’
‘He’s not very bright, so he would have been caught,’ Brunetti insisted. ‘Look how many times he was arrested before that.’
‘But he always got out of it. He could have threatened his way out.’
‘If he was really violent, or dangerous, it would be in the files,’ Brunetti said. ‘We’d know.’
Vianello considered this and finally nodded in agreement. ‘It’s possible. I’ve known love to do stranger things to people than to make them careful.’
‘Or make them better,’ Brunetti amended.
‘You make him sound like Saint Paul,’ Vianello said, sounding amused at the unlikelihood. ‘He’s riding along on his way to steal an X-ray machine from the hospital, sees Signorina Sartori in her white nurse’s uniform; he falls to the ground at the sight of her, and when he gets to his feet, he’s a man transformed?’
Perhaps he had had enough of Vianello’s rhetorical flights. ‘Are you a better man since you married Nadia?’ he surprised Vianello by asking.
Vianello uncrossed his legs, then crossed them the other way. He looked so uncomfortable that Brunetti almost expected him to cry ‘foul’ and refuse to answer. Instead, the Inspector nodded, smiled, and said, ‘I see your point.’ Then, after another moment of consideration, he said, ‘It’s possible.’
‘Maybe the request that they witness the will was too big a temptation to resist,’ Brunetti suggested. ‘A house in exchange for two signatures.’ It occurred to Brunetti to add that Paris was worth a Mass, but he feared that Vianello might not understand and so he said nothing further.
Vianello smiled and added, ‘Who was that saint who said, “Make me chaste, but not yet.”?’
‘Augustine, I think.’
Vianello smiled.
‘But it doesn’t tell us where the money’s still coming from, does it?’ Brunetti asked.
They tossed the subject back and forth for some time, trying to find an explanation for the recurring deposits. ‘And why put the money in the bank?’ Vianello asked. ‘Only a fool would leave traces like that.’
‘Or a person with no idea of how easy it is to check on a money trail.’ Hearing himself speak, Brunetti decided to take another look at the list of deposits. He pulled the folder with Morandi’s bank records from his drawer and found the statements. Running his finger down the column of deposits, he found that the first two had been paid by cheque.
He dialled Signorina Elettra’s number and while he waited for her to answer, he heard Vianello muttering to himself, ‘No one could be this stupid.’
He explained what it was he wanted her to find, to which she answered, ‘Oh, wonderful, and I can do it legally this time,’ as delighted as if he had told her to take the rest of the day off and go home.
Uncertain how much she was baiting him, he said, ‘It’s always helpful for us to have new experiences,’ and hung up.
25
Though Signorina Elettra managed to find the complete records of all of Morandi’s bank transactions in less than twenty minutes, Brunetti did not for an instant believe that the ease with which