Dressed for Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

sharp edges of the leaves.
     
    Behind Brunetti, a door slammed
shut, and then a man’s voice called, ‘Hey, you, what are you doing? Get the
hell away from there.’
     
    Brunetti turned and, as he knew
he would, saw a man in police uniform coming quickly towards him from the back
of the building. As Brunetti watched but didn’t move away from the bush, the
man drew his revolver from his holster and shouted at Brunetti, ‘Put your hands
in the air and come over to the fence.’
     
    Brunetti turned and walked back
towards the fence; he moved like a man on a rocky surface, hands held out at
his sides to maintain balance.
     
    ‘I told you to put them in the
air,’ the policeman snarled as Brunetti reached the fence.
     
    He had a gun in his hand, so
Brunetti did not try to tell him that his hands were in the air; they just
weren’t over his head. Instead, he said, ‘Good afternoon, Sergeant. I’m
Commissario Brunetti from Venice. Have you been taking the statements of the
people inside?’
     
    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