The man’s eyes were small, and there wasn’t much in the way of intelligence to be read in them, but there was enough there for Brunetti to realize that the man saw the trap opening at his feet. He could ask to see proof, ask a commissario of police for his warrant card, or he could allow a stranger claiming to be a police official to go unquestioned.
‘Sorry, Commissario, I didn’t recognize you with the sun in my eyes,’ the sergeant said, though the sun shone over his left shoulder. He could have got away with it, earning Brunetti’s grudging respect, had he not added, ‘It’s hard, coming out into the sun like this, from the darkness inside. Besides, I wasn’t expecting anyone else to come out here.’
The name tag on his chest read ‘Buffo’.
‘It seems that Mestre is out of police commissari for the next few weeks, so I was sent out to handle the investigation.’ Brunetti bent down and walked through the hole in the fence. By the time he stood up on the other side, Buffo’s revolver was back in its holster, the flap snapped securely closed.
Brunetti started towards the back door of the slaughterhouse, Buffo walking beside him. ‘What did you learn from the people inside?’
‘Nothing more than what I got when I answered the first call this morning, sir. A butcher, Bettino Cola, found the body at a little past eleven this morning. He had gone outside to have a cigarette, and he went over to the bush to have a look at some shoes he said he saw lying on the ground.’
‘Weren’t there any shoes?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes. They were there when we got here.’ From the way he spoke, anyone hearing him would believe that Cola had placed them there to divert suspicion from himself. As much as any civilian or criminal, Brunetti hated Tough Cops. ‘The call we got said there was a whore in a field out here, a woman. I answered the call and took a look, but it was a man.’ Buffo spat.
‘The report I received said he’s a prostitute,’ Brunetti said in a level voice. ‘Has he been identified?’
‘No, not yet. We’re having the morgue people take pictures, though he was beat up pretty badly, and then we’ll have an artist make a sketch of what he must have looked like before. We’ll show that around, and sooner or later someone will recognize him. They’re pretty well known, those boys,’ Buffo said with something between a grin and a grimace, then continued, ‘If he’s one of the locals, we’ll have an ID on him pretty soon.’
‘And if not?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Then it will take longer, I guess. Or maybe we won’t find out who he is. Small loss, in either case.’
‘And why is that, Sergeant Buffo?’ Brunetti asked softly, but Buffo heard only the words and not the tone.
‘Who needs them? Perverts. They’re all full of AIDS, and they think nothing about passing it on to decent working men.’ He spat again.
Brunetti stopped, turned, and faced the sergeant. ‘As I understand it, Sergeant Buffo, these decent working men about whom you are so concerned get AIDS passed on to them because they pay these “perverts” to let them ram their cocks up their asses. Let us try not to forget that. And let us try not to forget that, whoever the dead man is, he’s been murdered, and it is our duty to find the murderer. Even if it was a decent working man.’ Saying that, Brunetti opened the door and went into the slaughterhouse, preferring the stench there to the one he left outside.
Chapter Four
Inside, he learned little more: Cola repeated his story, and the foreman verified it. Sullenly, Buffo told him that none of the men who worked in the factory had seen anything strange, not that morning and not the day before. The whores were so much a part of the landscape that no one now paid any real attention to them or to what they did. No one could remember that particular area behind the slaughterhouse ever being used by the whores: the smell alone would explain that. But had one of them been seen in that area, no one was likely to have noticed.
After learning all of this, Brunetti went back to his car and asked the driver to take him to the Questura in Mestre. Officer Scarpa, who had put his jacket back on, got out of the car and joined Sergeant Buffo in the other. As the two cars headed back towards Mestre, Brunetti opened his window half-way to let some air, however hot, into the car and dilute the smell of the slaughterhouse that still clung to his clothing. Like most Italians, Brunetti had always scoffed at the idea of vegetarianism, scorning it as yet another of the many self-indulgences of the well-fed, but today the idea made complete sense to him.
At the Questura, his driver took him to the first floor and introduced him to Sergeant Gallo, a cadaverous man with sunken eyes who looked like the years spent in pursuit of the criminal had eaten into his flesh from the inside.
When Brunetti was seated at the side of Gallo’s desk, the sergeant told him there was little else to add to what Brunetti had been told, though he did have the initial, verbal report from the pathologist: death had resulted from a series of blows to the head and face and had taken place from twelve to eighteen hours before the body was found. The heat made it difficult to tell. From pieces of rust found in some of the wounds and from their shape, the pathologist guessed that the murder weapon had been a piece of metal, most probably a length of pipe, but surely something cylindrical. The lab analysis of stomach contents and blood wouldn’t be back until Wednesday morning at the earliest, so it was impossible to say yet whether he had been under the influence of drugs or alcohol when he was killed. Since many of the prostitutes in the city and almost all of the transvestites were confirmed drug users, this was likely, though there seemed to be no sign on the body of intravenous drug use. The stomach was empty, though there were signs that he had eaten a meal within the twenty-four hours before he was killed.
‘What about his clothing?’ he asked Gallo.
‘Red dress, some sort of cheap synthetic material. Red shoes, barely worn, size forty-one. I’ll have them checked to see if we can find the manufacturers.’
‘Are there any photos?’ Brunetti asked.
‘They won’t be ready until tomorrow morning, sir, but from the reports of the men who brought him in, you might not want to see them.’
‘That bad, eh?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Whoever did it to him must really have hated him or been out of his mind when he did it. There’s no nose left.’
‘Will you get an artist to make a sketch?’
‘Yes, sir. But most of it’s going to be guesswork. All he’ll have is the shape of the face, the eye colour. And the hair.’ Gallo paused for a moment and added, ‘It’s very thin, and he’s got a large bald spot, so I’d guess he wore a wig when, ah, when he worked.’
‘Was a wig found?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No, sir, there wasn’t. And it looks like he was killed somewhere else and carried there.’
‘Footprints?’
‘Yes. The technical team said they found a set of them going towards the clump of grass and coming away from it.’
‘Deeper when going?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So he was carried out there and dumped under that clump of grass. Where did the footprints come from?’
‘There’s a narrow paved road that runs along the back of the field behind the slaughterhouse. It looks like he came from there.’
‘And on the road?’
‘Nothing, sir. It hasn’t rained in weeks, so a car, or even a truck, could have stopped there, and there’d be no sign of it. There’s just those footprints. A man’s. Size forty-three.’ Brunetti’s size.
‘Do you have a list of the transvestite prostitutes?’
‘Only those who have been in trouble, sir.’
‘What sort of trouble do they get into?’
‘The usual. Drugs. Fights among themselves. Occasionally, one of them will get into a fight with a client. Usually over money. But none of them has ever been mixed up in anything serious.’