Donna Leon - Doctored Evidence

'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 get 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.

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 facade 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?