Dressed for Death Read Online Free PDF

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