Donna Leon - Fatal Remedies

‘No. I’d also like to ask Signor Bonaventura what he knows about the murder of his brother-in-law.’

At this, Bonaventura’s expression progressed to something akin to astonishment, but still he didn’t speak.

‘Why?’ Candiani’s head was bent once more over his notebook.

‘Because we’ve begun to examine the possibility that he might somehow be implicated in Signor Mitri’s death.’

‘Implicated how?’

‘That’s exactly what I’d like Signor Bonaventura to tell me,’ Brunetti replied.

Candiani looked up and across at his client. ‘Would you like to answer the Commissario’s questions?’

‘I’m not sure I could,’ Bonaventura said, ‘but certainly I’m perfectly willing to give him any help I can.’

Candiani turned towards Brunetti. ‘If you’d like to question my client, then, Commissario, I suggest you do it.’

‘I’d like to know’, Brunetti began, addressing Bonaventura directly, ‘what involvement you had with Ruggiero Palmieri or, as he was known when he worked for your company, Michele de Luca.’

‘The driver?’

‘Yes.’

‘As I told you before, Commissario, I saw him occasionally around the factory. But he was only a driver. I might have spoken to him once or twice, but nothing more than that.’ Bonaventura did not inquire why Brunetti had asked.

‘So you didn’t have any dealings with him beyond the occasional contact you had there at work?’

‘No,’ Bonaventura said. ‘I told you: he was a driver.’

‘You never gave him any money?’ Brunetti asked, hoping that Bonaventura’s fingerprints would turn up on the bills in Palmieri’s wallet.

‘Of course not.’

‘So the only time you saw him or spoke to him was when you met him in the factory?’

‘That’s what I just told you.’ Bonaventura made no attempt to disguise his irritation.

Brunetti turned his attention to Candiani. ‘I think that’s all I want from your client for the moment.’

Both men were obviously surprised by this, but Candiani reacted first, got to his feet and flipped his notebook closed. ‘Then may we leave?’ he asked, reaching across the table and pulling the briefcase towards him.

Gucci, Brunetti noted. ‘I think not.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ Candiani said, putting decades of courtroom astonishment into the words. ‘And why not?’

‘I imagine the Castelfranco police are going to have a number of charges to place against Signor Bonaventura.’

‘Such as?’ Candiani demanded.

‘Fleeing from arrest, conspiracy to obstruct a police investigation, vehicular homicide, to name a few.’

‘I wasn’t driving,’ Bonaventura broke in, his outrage audible in both words and tone.

Brunetti was looking at Candiani when the other man spoke, and he saw the flesh under the lawyer’s eyes contract minimally, either in surprise or something harsher, he wasn’t sure.

Candiani pushed the notebook into the briefcase and flipped it closed. ‘I’d like to be sure that the Castelfranco police have decided this, Commissario.’ Then, as if to remove any lack of faith those words might imply, he added, ‘As a mere formality, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Brunetti repeated, also getting to his feet.

Brunetti knocked on the glass of the window to summon the officer who waited in the hall. Leaving Bonaventura inside, the two men left the interview room and went to speak to Bonino, who confirmed Brunetti’s judgement that the Castelfranco police would indeed be pressing various serious charges against Bonaventura.

An officer accompanied Candiani back to the interview room to inform and say farewell to his client, leaving Brunetti with Bonino.

‘Did you get it all?’ Brunetti asked.

Bonino nodded. ‘It’s all new, the sound equipment. It’ll pick up the smallest whisper, even heavy breathing. So yes, we’ve got it all.’

‘And before I got there?’

‘No. We can’t turn it on until there’s a police officer in the room. Lawyer-client privilege.’

‘Really?’ Brunetti asked, unable to mask his amazement.

‘Really,’ Bonino repeated. ‘We lost a case last year because the defence could prove we listened to what the suspect said to his lawyer. So the Questore has ordered that there will be no exceptions. Nothing gets turned on until there’s an officer in the room.’

Brunetti nodded at this, then asked, ‘As soon as his lawyer’s gone, can you fingerprint him?’

‘For the money?’

Brunetti nodded.

‘It’s already done,’ Bonino said with a small smile. ‘Completely unofficially. He had a glass of mineral water earlier this morning and we lifted three good prints from it when he was finished.’

‘And?’ Brunetti asked.

‘And our lab man says it’s a fit, that at least two of the prints appear on some of the bills in Palmieri’s wallet.’

‘I’ll check his bank, too,’ Brunetti said. ‘Those five-hundred-thousand-lire notes are still new. Most people won’t even take them: too hard to change. I don’t know if they keep a record of the numbers, but if they do…’

‘He’s got Candiani, remember,’ Bonino said.

‘You know him?’

‘Everyone in the Veneto knows him.’

‘But we’ve got the phone calls to a man he denies knowing well and we’ve got the prints,’ Brunetti insisted.

‘He’s still got Candiani.’

And never had prophecy proven more true. The bank in Venice had a record of the numbers of the five-hundred-thousand-lire notes distributed on the day that Bonaventura withdrew fifteen million in cash from the bank, and the numbers of the notes found in Palmieri’s wallet were among them. Any doubt that they were the same notes was removed by the presence of Bonaventura’s fingerprints.

Candiani, speaking for Bonaventura, insisted that there was nothing at all strange in this. His client had withdrawn the money in order to pay back a personal loan his brother-in-law, Paolo Mitri, had made to him and had done so in cash, handing the money to Mitri the day after he made the withdrawal, the day he was murdered. The fragments of Palmieri’s skin under Mitri’s nails made it all perfectly clear: Palmieri had robbed Mitri and had prepared the note in advance in order to pull suspicion away from himself. He had killed Mitri, either by accident or by design, in the course of the robbery.

As to the phone calls, Candiani made short work of them by pointing out that the Interfar factory had a central number, so calls made from any extension would register as having come from that central number. Hence anyone, anywhere in the factory, could have made the calls to Palmieri’s telefonino, just as he could have been calling the factory to do no more than report a delay in shipment.

Told of the phone call made to his number from Mitri’s apartment on the night of the murder, Bonaventura remembered that Mitri had called that evening to invite him and his wife to dinner the following week. When it was pointed out that the call had lasted only fifteen seconds, Bonaventura recalled that Mitri had cut it short, saying someone had just rung the doorbell. He expressed horror at the realization that it must have been Mitri’s killer.

Each man had had time to construct a story to explain their flight from the Interfar factory. Sandi said he’d taken Bonaventura’s sudden warning that the police were there as a command to flee and that Bonaventura had run ahead of him to the truck. Bonaventura, for his part, insisted that Sandi had pointed the pistol at him and thus forced him into the truck. The third man said he’d seen nothing.

In the matter of the shipments of drugs, Candiani proved far less able to turn away the suspicions of the forces of justice. Sandi repeated and expanded his testimony and provided the names and addresses of the night-time crew that was brought in to fill and pack the false medicines. Because they were paid in cash, there were no bank records of their salaries, but Sandi produced time sheets with their names and signatures. He also gave the police an extensive list of past shipments: dates, contents, and destinations.