Free Drawing Conclusions by Donna Leon Page A

careful to keep his words to a minimum. He reached over and took the doctor’s hand.
    Before he could speak, the doctor took his hand and pressed it to the point of pain and said, ‘Don’t say anything. Please.’ He released Brunetti’s hand and walked across the campo towards the hospital.

8
    Brunetti reached down and picked up one of the sandwiches on the plate. Embarrassed to be seen eating while standing, he sat down again and finished it, then went into the bar and had a glass of mineral water. He realized that he had failed to call Paola to tell her he would not be home for lunch. He paid and stepped outside to make the call. He dialled their home number and hoped she would understand that he had been, in a sense, hijacked by events.
    ‘Paola,’ he said when she answered with her name, ‘things got away from me.’
    ‘So did a rombo cooked in white wine with fennel.’
    Well, at least she was not angry. ‘And baby potatoes and carrots,’ she went on relentlessly, ‘and one of those bottles of Tokai your informer gave you.’
    ‘I wasn’t supposed to have told you that.’
    ‘Then pretend you didn’t hear me say I know who you got them from.’
    Perhaps he was not going to get off so lightly. ‘I had to meet the son of that woman who died last night.’
    ‘It wasn’t in the paper this morning, but it’s already in the online version.’
    Brunetti was not comfortable with the cyber age, still preferring to read his newspapers in paper form; the fact that a newspaper such as the Gazzettino now existed in cyberspace was to him a cause of great uneasiness. ‘What will become of people who are exposed to the Gazzettino twenty-four hours a day?’ he asked.
    Paola, who often took a longer and more measured view than did Brunetti, said, ‘It might help to think of it as toxic waste we don’t ship to Africa.’
    ‘Assuredly. I hadn’t considered that. I’m at peace with my conscience now,’ Brunetti said. Then, curious to learn how the story was being played, he asked, ‘What are they saying?’
    ‘That she was found in her apartment by a neighbour. Death was apparently caused by a heart attack.’
    ‘Good.’
    ‘Does that mean it wasn’t?’
    ‘Rizzardi’s being dodgier and more noncommittal than usual. I think he might have seen something, but he didn’t say anything to the woman’s son.’
    ‘What’s he like, the son?’
    ‘He seems a decent man,’ Brunetti said, which had certainly been his first impression. ‘But he couldn’t disguise his relief that the police aren’t showing any interest in his mother’s death.’
    ‘Is it you who isn’t doing the showing?’ she asked.
    ‘Yes. He seemed bothered that I wanted to speak to him, so I had to pass it off as a procedural formality because we were the ones who received the call.’
    ‘Why would he be nervous? He can’t have had anything to do with it.’ Hearing her speak so categorically, Brunetti realized that he too had dismissed this possibility a priori . The world offered a cornucopia of variations on the theme of homicide; wives and husbands killed one another withstaggering frequency, lovers and ex-lovers existed in a state of undeclared warfare; he had lost count of the women who had killed their children in recent years. But still his mind stopped short of this: men don’t kill their mothers.
    He let himself wander off in pursuit of these thoughts. Paola remained silent, waiting. Finally he admitted, ‘It could just as easily be nothing. After all, he’s had a terrible shock, and after I talked to him, he had to go back to the hospital to identify her.’
    ‘ Oddio ,’ she exclaimed. ‘Couldn’t they have found someone else?’
    ‘A relative has to do it,’ Brunetti said.
    For a few moments neither of them spoke, then he pulled them both away from these things and said, ‘I should be on time tonight.’
    ‘Good.’ And she was gone.
    The best way to get to the rest home was to walk past the Questura: the map