Anonymous Venetian by Donna Leon

be something in his report. You had enough?’
     
    Brunetti nodded and stepped back
from the corpse. The attendant flung the sheet out in front of him, waved it in
the air as though it were a tablecloth, and floated it perfectly in place over
the body. He slid the body back inside, closed the door, and quietly turned the
handle.
     
    As they started back towards the
desk, the attendant said, ‘He didn’t deserve that, whoever he was. The word
here is that he was on the street, one of those fellows who dress up as women.’
     
    For a moment, Brunetti thought
the man was being sarcastic, but then he heard the tone under the words and
realized he was serious.
     
    ‘You the one who’s going to try
to find out who killed him, sir?’
     
    ‘Yes.’
     
    ‘Well, I hope you do. I suppose I
can understand if you want to kill someone, but I can’t understand killing him
like that.’ He stopped and looked up inquisitively at Brunetti. ‘Can you, sir?’
     
    ‘No, I can’t.’
     
    ‘As I said, sir, I hope you get
the man who did it. Whore or no whore, no one deserves to die like that.’
     
    * * * *
     
    Chapter Six
     
     
    ‘You
saw him?’ Gallo asked when Brunetti returned to the Questura.
     
    ‘Yes.’
     
    ‘Not at all pretty, is it?’
     
    ‘You saw him, too?’
     
    ‘I always try to see them,’ Gallo
said, voice uninflected. ‘It makes me more willing to work to get the person
who killed them.’
     
    ‘What do you think, Sergeant?’
Brunetti asked, lowering himself into the chair at the side of the sergeant’s
desk and laying down the blue folder as if he meant it to serve as a physical
sign of the murder.
     
    Gallo thought for almost a full
minute before he answered. ‘I think it could have been done in the midst of
tremendous rage.’ Brunetti nodded at this possibility. ‘Or, as you suggested
earlier, Dottore, in an attempt to disguise his identity.’ After a second,
Gallo amended this, perhaps recalling what he had seen in the morgue, ‘Or to
destroy it.’
     
    ‘That’s pretty impossible in
today’s world, wouldn’t you say, Sergeant?’
     
    ‘Impossible?’
     
    ‘Unless a person is entirely
alien to a place or lives without any family or friends, their disappearance
will be noticed in a few days - a few hours in most cases. Nobody manages to
disappear any more.’
     
    ‘Then perhaps rage makes more
sense,’ Gallo said. ‘He could have said something to a client, done something
that set him off. I don’t know much about the men in the file I gave you
yesterday. I’m not a psychologist or anything like that, so I don’t know what
drives them, but my guess is that the men who, ah, who pay them are far less
stable than the men they pay. So rage?’
     
    ‘What about carrying him out to a
part of the city where whores are known to work?’ Brunetti asked. ‘That
suggests intelligence and planning rather than rage.’
     
    Gallo responded quickly to the
testing that was being given him by this new commissario. ‘Well, after he did
it, he could have come to his senses. Maybe he killed him in his own place or a
place where one of them was known, so he’d have to move the body. And if he’s
the sort of man - the killer, I mean - if he’s the sort of man who uses these
transvestites, then he’d know where the whores go. So maybe that would seem the
logical place to leave him, so other people who use them would be suspected.’
     
    ‘Yes ...’ Brunetti agreed slowly,
and Gallo waited for the ‘but’ that the commissario’s tone made inevitable. ‘But
that’s to suggest that whores are the same as whores.’
     
    ‘I beg your pardon, sir.’
     
    ‘That male whores are the same as
female whores, or that, at least, they work in the same place. From what I
heard and saw yesterday, it looks like that area out by the slaughterhouse is a
place the female whores use.’ Gallo considered this, and Brunetti added,
prodding, ‘But this is your city, so you’d know more