Donna Leon - Friends in High Places

‘Where did you go?’

‘I went home. It was after lunchtime, and Loredana always worries if I’m late.’

‘Did you tell her?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Did I tell her what?’

‘What had happened?’

‘I didn’t want to. But she could tell. She saw it when I couldn’t eat. So I had to tell her what happened.’

‘And what did she say?’

‘She said she was very proud of me,’ he answered, his face radiant. ‘She said I had defended our honour and what had happened was an accident. He pushed me. I swear by God that’s the truth. He knocked me down.’

Giovanni cast a nervous look at the door and asked, ‘Does she know I’m here?’

When he saw Brunetti shake his head in response, Dolfin put one immense hand to his mouth and tapped the side of his clenched fingers repeatedly against his lower lip. ‘Oh, she’s going to be so angry. She told me not to go to the hospital. She said it was a trap. And she was right. I should have listened to her. She’s always right. She’s always been right about everything.’ He placed his hand gently on top of the place on his arm where he had received the injection but said nothing further. He ran his fingers lightly back and forth over the spot.

In the ensuing silence, Brunetti wondered how much truth there had been in what Loredana Dolfin had told her brother. Brunetti had no doubt now that Rossi had learned about the corruption in the Ufficio Catasto, but he doubted that it concerned the honour of the Dolfin family.

‘And when you went back?’ he asked. He was beginning to be concerned about the increasing restlessness of Dolfin’s movements.

‘That other one, the one who took drugs, he was there when it happened. He followed me home and asked people who I was. They knew me because of my name.’ Brunetti heard the pride with which he said that, and then the man went on. ‘He came back to the apartment, and when I came out to go to work, he told me he’d seen everything. He said he was my friend and wanted to help me keep out of trouble. I believed him, and we went back there together and started to clean the room upstairs. He said he would help me do that, and I believed him. And when we were there, the policemen came, but he said something to them, and they went away. When they were gone, he told me that if I didn’t give him money, he’d bring the policemen back and show them the room, and I’d be in a lot of trouble, and everyone would know what I did.’ Dolfin stopped speaking here as he considered what the consequences of this would have been.

‘And?’

‘I told him I didn’t have any money, that I always gave it to Loredana. She knew what to do with it.’

Dolfin pushed himself up to a half-standing position and turned his head from side to side, as if listening for some sound to emerge from the back of his neck.

‘And?’ Brunetti repeated in that same bland voice.

‘I told Loredana, of course. And then we went back.’

‘We?’ Brunetti asked instantly and immediately regretted both the question and the impulse that made him ask it.

Until Brunetti spoke, Dolfin had continued turning his head from side to side. Brunetti’s question, or his tone, however, stopped him. As Brunetti watched, Dolfin’s trust in him evaporated, and he saw the other man adjust to finding himself in the camp of the enemy.

After at least a minute had passed, Brunetti asked, ‘Signor Conte?’

Dolfin shook his head firmly.

‘Signor Conte, you said that you went back to the building with someone else. Will you tell me who that person was?’

Dolfin propped his elbows on the table and, lowering his head, covered his ears with the palms of his hands. As Brunetti began to speak to him again, Dolfin shook his head violently from side to side. Angry with himself for having pushed Dolfin into a place from which there was no retrieving him, Brunetti got to his feet and, knowing he had no choice, went to phone Conte Dolfin’s sister.

She answered with the name, ‘Cà Dolfin’, nothing else, and Brunetti was so surprised by the sound, like a trumpet voluntary containing nothing but discordant notes, that it took him a moment to identify himself and explain the purpose of his call. If she was at all disturbed to hear what he had to say, she disguised it well and said only that she would call her lawyer and be at the Questura in a short time. She asked no questions and demonstrated no curiosity whatsoever at the announcement that her brother was being questioned in connection with murder. It could have been an ordinary business call, some confusion about a line on a blueprint, for all the response she made. Not being a descendant, at least as far as he knew, of a Doge, Brunetti had no idea how such people dealt with murder in the family.

Brunetti never wasted an instant considering the possibility that Signorina Dolfin had had anything to do with something so vulgar as the enormous bribery system Rossi must have discovered washing in and out of the Ufficio Catasto: ‘Dolfins do not do things for money.’ Brunetti believed this absolutely. It had been dal Carlo, with his studied uncertainty about whether someone in the Ufficio Catasto would be able to take a bribe, who had set up the system of corruption Rossi had discovered.

What had poor, stupid, fatally honest Rossi done – confronted dal Carlo with his evidence, threatened to denounce him or report him to the police? And had he done it with the door left open to the office of that Cerberus in a twinset, both her hairstyle and her hopeless longing dating back twenty years? And Cappelli? Had his phone calls with Rossi hastened his own death?

He had no doubt that Loredana Dolfin had already coached her brother in what he was to say should he be questioned: after all, she had warned him against going to the hospital. She would not have called it a ‘trap’ unless she had known how he had got that telltale bite on his forearm. And he, poor creature, had been so driven by his fear of infection that he had ignored her warning and had fallen into Brunetti’s trap.

Dolfin had stopped talking just at the time when he began to use the plural. Brunetti was sure of the identity of the second part of that fatal ‘we’, but he knew that, once Loredana’s lawyer got to speak to Giovanni, all chance of filling in that blank would disappear.

Less than an hour later, his phone rang, and he was told that Signorina Dolfin and Awocato Contarini had arrived. He asked that they be shown up to his office.

She came first, led by one of the uniformed officers who stood guard at the front door of the Questura. Behind her trailed Contarini, overweight and always smiling, a man ever able to find the right loophole to ensure that his clients benefited from every technicality of the law.

Brunetti did not offer to shake hands with either of them but turned and led them back into the office. He retreated behind his desk.

Brunetti looked across at Signorina Dolfin, who sat, feet pressed together, back straight as an arrow but not touching the back of her chair, hands neatly folded on top of her purse. She returned his look but remained silent. She looked no different than when he had seen her in her office: efficient, ageing, interested in what was going on but not fully involved in whatever it might be.

‘And what is it you think you’ve discovered about my client?’ Contarini asked, smiling amiably.

‘In a recorded session made here in the Questura this afternoon, he has admitted killing Francesco Rossi, an employee of the Ufficio Catasto where,’ Brunetti said with a bow of his head in her direction, ‘Signorina Dolfin works as a secretary.’

Contarini seemed uninterested. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.

‘He also said that he later went back to the same place in the company of a man called Gino Zecchino, and together they destroyed the evidence of his crime. Further, he said that Zecchino subsequently attempted to blackmail him.’ So far nothing Brunetti said seemed to be of much interest to either of the two people across from him. ‘Zecchino was later found murdered in that same building, as was a young woman who still remains unidentified.’