Death in a Strange Country (32 page)

‘Yes. But I don’t
remember what her cargo was,’ Brunetti said.

‘We’ve never had a case
of it out here,’ Ambrogiani said, not feeling it necessary to explain that ‘we’
were the Carabinieri and ‘it’ illegal dumping. ‘I don’t even know if it’s our
job to look for it or arrest for it.’

Neither of them wanted to
be the first to break the silence that thought led to. Finally, Brunetti said,
‘Interesting, isn’t it?’

‘That no one seems
responsible to enforce the law? If there are laws?’ Ambrogiani asked.

‘Yes,’

Before they could follow
this up, the front door
 
on the left side of the
house they were watching opened and a man stepped out onto the porch. He walked
down the steps, pulled open the garage door, then bent to move both bicycles to
the grass at the side of the driveway. When he disappeared back into the
garage, both Brunetti and Ambrogiani got out of the car and started to walk towards
the house.

Just as they got to the
gate in the fence, a
car came backing slowly out of the garage. It
backed towards the gate, and the man got out, leaving the
engine
running, and moved to the gate to open it. Either he didn’t see the two men
there or he chose to ignore them. He unlatched the gate, shoved it open, and
then headed back towards the open door of his car.
         
                     
                     
       

‘Sergeant Kayman?’
Brunetti called over the sound of the engine.
         
                     
                     

At the sound of his name,
the man turned and looked at them. Both policemen stepped forward but stopped
at the gate, careful not to pass onto the man’s property uninvited. Seeing
this, the man waved them ahead with his hand and bent into the car to switch
off the engine.
 
                     
                 

He was a tall blond man
with a slight stoop that might once have been intended to disguise his height
but which had now become habitual. He
 
moved
with that loose-limbed ease so common to Americans, the ease that made them
look so good in casual clothing, so awkward in formal
 
dress. He walked towards them, face
open and
 
quizzical, not smiling
but certainly not suspicious.

‘Yes?’ he asked in
English. ‘You guys looking for me?’

‘Sergeant Edward Kayman?’
Ambrogiani asked.

‘Yeah. What can I do for
you? Sort of early, isn’t it?’

Brunetti stepped forward
and extended his hand. ‘Good morning, Sergeant. I’m Guido Brunetti, from the
Venice police.’

The American shook
Brunetti’s hand, his grasp firm and strong. ‘Long way from home, aren’t you, Mr
Brunetti?’ he asked, turning the last two consonants into ’D’s.

It was meant as a
pleasantry, so Brunetti smiled at him. ‘I suppose I am. But there are a few
things I wanted to ask you, Sergeant.’ Ambrogiani smiled and nodded but made no
attempt to introduce himself, leaving the conversation to Brunetti.

‘Well, ask away,’ said
the American, then added, ‘sorry I can’t invite you gentlemen into the house
for a cup of coffee, but the wife’s still asleep, and she’d kill me if I woke
the kids up. Saturday’s her only morning to sleep in.’

‘I understand,’ Brunetti
said. ‘Same thing at my house. I had to sneak out like a burglar myself this
morning.’ They shared a grin at the unreasonable tyranny of sleeping women, and
Brunetti began, ‘I’d like to ask you about your son.’

‘Daniel?’ the American
asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I thought so.’

‘You don’t seem surprised,’
Brunetti remarked.

Before he answered, the
soldier moved over and leaned back against his car, bracing his weight against
it. Brunetti took this opportunity to turn to Ambrogiani and asked in Italian, ‘Are
you following what we say?’ The Carabiniere nodded.

The American crossed his
feet at the ankles and pulled a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket He
held the pack towards the Italians, but both shook their heads. He lit a
cigarette with a lighter, careful to cup it between both hands from the
nonexistent breeze, then slipped both packet and lighter back into his pocket.

‘It’s about this doctor
business, isn’t it?’ he asked, putting his head back and blowing a stream of
smoke up into the air.

‘What makes you say that,
Sergeant?’

‘Doesn’t take much
figuring, does it? She was Danny’s doctor, and she sure as heck was all upset
when his arm got so bad. Kept asking him what happened, and then that boyfriend
of hers, the one that got himself killed in Venice, then he started bein’ all
over me with questions.’

‘You knew he was her
boyfriend?’ Brunetti asked, honestly surprised.

‘Well, it wasn’t until
after he was killed that anyone said anything, but I suspect a fair number of
people must have known before. I didn’t, for one, but I didn’t work with them.
Heck, there aren’t but a few thousand of us, all living and working cheek by
jowl. Nobody gets to keep any secrets, leastways not for very long.’

‘What sort of questions
did he ask you?’

‘About where it was that
Danny had been walking that day. And what else we saw there. Stuff like that.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I told him I didn’t
know.’

‘You didn’t know?’

‘Well, not exactly. We
were up above Aviano that day, up near Lake Barcis, but we stopped at another
place on the way back down from the mountains; that’s where we had our picnic.
Danny went off for a while into the woods by himself, but he couldn’t remember
where it was he fell down, which place it was. I told Foster, tried to describe
where it was, but I couldn’t remember real clear where we parked the car that
day. With three kids and a dog to keep an eye on, you don’t pay much attention
to things like that.’

‘What did he do when you
said you couldn’t remember?’

‘Heck, he wanted me to go
up there with him, drive all the way up there with him some Saturday and look
for the place, see if I could remember where it was we parked the car.’

‘And did you go back with
him.’

‘Not on your life. I’ve
got three kids, a wife, and, if I’m lucky, one day off a week. I’m not going to
go spend one of them running around the mountains, looking for some place I
once had a picnic in. Besides, that was the time when Danny was in the
hospital, and I wasn’t about to leave my wife alone all day, just to go on some
wild-goose chase.’

‘How did he behave when
you told him?’

‘Well, I could see that
he was pretty angry, but I just told him I couldn’t do it, and he seemed to
quiet down He stopped asking me to go with him, but I think he went up there,
looking, by himself, or maybe with Doctor Peters.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well, he went and talked
to a friend of mine who works in the dental clinic. He’s the X-ray technician,
and he told me that, one Friday afternoon, Foster went into the lab and asked
him to lend him his tab for the weekend.’

‘His what?’

‘His tab. At least that’s
what he calls it. You know, that little card thing they all have to wear, the
people who work with X-rays. You get overexposed, it turns a different colour.
I don’t know what you call it.’ Brunetti nodded his head, knowing what it was. ‘Well,
this guy lent it to him for the weekend, and he had it back to him on Monday
morning, in time for work. Good as his word.’

‘And the sensor?’

‘Wasn’t changed at all.
Same colour it was when he gave it to him.’

‘Why do you think that
was why he borrowed it?’

‘You didn’t know him, did
you?’ he asked Brunetti, who shook his head. ‘He was a funny guy. Real serious.
Real serious about his work, well, about just about everything. I think he was
religious, too, but not like those crazy born-agains. When he decided that
something was right, there was no stopping him from doing it. And he had it in
his head that...’ He paused here. ‘I’m not sure what he had in his head, but he
wanted to find out where it was Danny touched that stuff he’s allergic to.’

‘Is that what it was? An
allergy?’

‘That’s what they told me
when he came down from Germany. His arm’s an awful mess, but the doctors up
there said it would heal up pretty good. Might take a year or so, but the scar’ll
go away, or at least it’ll fade a fair bit.’

Ambrogiani spoke for the
first time. ‘Did they tell you what he was allergic to?’

‘No, they couldn’t find
out. Said it was probably sap from some sort of tree that grows up in those
mountains. They did all sorts of tests on the boy.’ Here his face softened and
his eyes lit up with real pride. ‘Never complained, not once, that boy. Got the
makings of a real man. I’m not half proud of him.’

‘But they didn’t tell you
what he was allergic to?’ the Carabiniere repeated.

‘Nope. And then the dang
fools went and lost Danny’s medical records, leastwise the records from
Germany.’

At this, Brunetti and
Ambrogiani exchanged a look, and Brunetti asked, ‘Do you know if Foster ever
found the place?’

‘Couldn’t say. He got
killed two weeks after he borrowed that sensor thing, and I never had occasion
to talk to him again. So I don’t know. I’m sorry that happened to him. He was
an OK guy, and I’m sorry his doctor friend had to take it so hard. I didn’t
know they were that. . .’ Here he failed to find the right word, so he stopped.

‘Is that what people here
believe, that Doctor Peters gave herself that overdose because of Foster?’

This time, it was the
soldier who was surprised. ‘Doesn’t make sense any other way, does it? She was
a doctor, wasn’t she? If anybody knew how much of that stuff to put in a
needle, it should have been her.’
               
                     
         

‘Yes, I suppose so,’
Brunetti said, feeling his disloyalty even as he spoke.

‘Funny thing, though,’
began the American. ‘If I hadn’t ’ve been so bothered with worryin’ about
Danny, I maybe would have thought of something to tell Foster. Might have
helped him find the place he was looking for.’

‘What’s that?’ Brunetti
asked, making the question casual.

‘While we were up there that
day, I saw two of the trucks that come here, saw them turning into a dirt road
off down the hill a ways from where we were. Just didn’t think of it when
Foster asked me. Wish I had. Could have saved him a lot of trouble. All he’d
have to do is go ask Mr Gamberetto where his trucks were that day, and he would
have found the place.’

‘Mr Gamberetto?’ Brunetti
inquired politely.

‘Yeah, he’s the fellow’s
got the haulage contract from the post. His trucks pull in, here twice a week
and take away the restricted stuff. You know, the medical waste from the hospital,
and from the dental clinic. I think he picks up stuff from the motor pool, too.
The oil they take out of the transformers and from the oil changes they do. The
trucks don’t have his name on them or anything, but they have this red stripe
down the side, and that’s the kind of trucks I saw up by Lake Barcis that day.’
He paused and grew reflective. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of it that day,
when Foster asked me. But Danny had just gone up to Germany, and I guess I wasn’t
thinking all that clear.’

‘You work in the
contracting office, don’t you, Sergeant?’ Ambrogiani asked.

If the American found it
strange that Ambrogiani would know this, he gave no sign of it. ‘Yes, I do.’