My First Murder (12 page)

“Well, have you solved Peltonen’s son’s case yet?” the captain asked, glancing at my breasts in my slightly too tight blouse. It had been the only one of my shirts that was clean and relatively unwrinkled, so I had had to wear it even though the third button was always on the verge of popping open.

“Did Daddy Peltonen call to lean on you?” I asked before I had a chance to consider my words. The captain snorted, and cigar smoke wafted threateningly toward my cluttered desk.

Before he had a chance to answer, I continued, “I’m just leaving with Koivu now to go search Tommi Peltonen’s apartment. Maybe we’ll turn something up. And listen, could you please not smoke in my office? I can’t stand cigar smoke.”

Now the captain’s superficial temporal vein started throbbing, but he nevertheless backed out the door with his cigar. As he was leaving, he turned back to look at me and said, “When you
women are given a chance to do demanding jobs, you also have to show that you’re capable of something other than bellyaching about extraneous details.” With that, he slammed the door.

The door opened again almost immediately, and Koivu made his way in. “What did the old man just say to you?” Koivu asked, eyes wide. “Did I hear that right?”

“Yeah. The little shit got angry when I asked him not to smoke in my office.”

“You didn’t!” Koivu burst out laughing.

“You bet your ass I did!”

“You have no idea how many people have wanted to say that to him. Do I dare go anywhere with you when you’ve got your hackles up like this? By the way, he told me to tell you that the Mustikkamaa case can wait for now until this one is solved.”

Before Tommi’s murder, I had been working on two stabbings that had taken place during the Midsummer’s Eve parties on Mustikkamaa Island. One of them was already more or less cleared up—the same night, we had picked up the victim’s drinking buddy, who, once he had recovered from the worst of his intoxication, had, to his dismay, remembered killing his friend at the end of an argument over a bottle of vodka that had run dry. We would probably never solve the other case, because the other party to this second midnight knife fight had been the famous “anonymous assailant.” All of the eyewitnesses to the incident had been so drunk that the descriptions of the man varied significantly. The victim in the case, whom we had been calling Mustikkamaa Number Two, had lived but lost one of his kidneys in the scuffle. After Tommi’s murder, there would undoubtedly be something else the boss considered more important. Wino showdowns were an all-too-common occurrence in our unit.

I was happy to have Koivu’s help. He was the best cutup in my section and the sharpest as well. It sickened me to invade Tommi’s home, but I felt no need to justify my reactions to Koivu.

“Nice-looking place,” Koivu said as we stepped into the living room of Tommi’s one-bedroom apartment. Situated at the end of Iso Roobertinkatu, the building commanded prime views of Sinebrychoff Park. The main room was sparsely decorated, furnished with only a lounging sofa, a piano, and a good number of books and records. The bedroom had a wide double bed, with a handsome seven-branched candelabra on the nightstand. Making love by its light must have been romantic. I wondered whether the candelabra had been in the apartment back when Jaana had spent her nights here.

On the small entry table was a telephone. A red message light blinked on the answering machine. My heart skipped a beat—there might be something on the tape. Luckily, it was a familiar model.

There were two messages. The first had obviously been from a pay phone because the clink of coins dropping in interrupted the message periodically. “It’s Tiina. The plans are ruined now. You’re a cheap man. I can’t trust you. Come to my place on Sunday.” Cheap man? I thought in confusion. The second message was even stranger. “M here. Sunday night. I’m taking off tomorrow. Call me now.” The caller was a man, his voice hoarse and withering. I removed the answering machine cassette to take with me. Tommi obviously wouldn’t be needing it anymore.

The notepad on the phone table was the kind you tore pages out of, so there was only one message on it: “
No Tuulia Monday!
” In addition to the exclamation point, it was underlined. Have to remember to ask Tuulia what that meant, though
it probably referred to something trivial like a canceled squash match.

Koivu had started inspecting the music shelf. “Almost all classical,” he said, disappointed. “There’s a little Beatles and some Queen, but a whole bunch from some guy named Bach. Isn’t that a white wine? Really good stereo too—there’s gotta be twenty thousand marks of gear sitting here. And this TV and video setup looks pretty new too. What did this guy do for a living?”

“Geological engineer. We’ll go drop in on his work tomorrow.”

“I guess they pay pretty well then, wherever he works. He wasn’t just a techie either. Look how many books the guy had.”

“Yeah...and not just book club garbage either,” I said, scanning the collection. Instead of mainstream hardcover bestsellers, the shelves were filled with classics in English and French: Joyce, Proust, T.S. Eliot, Baudelaire. It was hard imagining Tommi reading
Odysseus
, but maybe there had been more to him that I had thought.

Tommi’s kitchenette was decorated in neutral colors and very clean. In the refrigerator, I found milk, cheese, a few Beck’s Dark, and a bowl of fruit. A dry loaf of bread sat on the table. Spices and baking supplies were in short supply: Tommi evidently hadn’t been much of a chef. The upper cupboard was full of the classic Arabia and Iittala dishware found in so many Finnish homes. The contents of the lower cupboard confused me though: It was filled to capacity with clear, unlabeled bottles. Each was filled to the top with clear liquid, with an herb sprig resting in the bottom. I opened one, took a sniff, and then took a tentative taste. It was some kind of strong, burning liquor with a hint of anise.

“Koivu, come over here. I have an official assignment for you.” I extended the bottle to him. Koivu took a more generous swig than I had and then grinned in astonishment.

“Moonshine,” he said. “And some weird flavoring. A little like anise. Strong as all hell. Is there much of it?”

“There must be thirty liters at least. Does this apartment have a cellar or attic storage locker? Will you call the super and ask? We might find a still.”

Koivu went to look for the building superintendent’s number, and I moved on to riffling through Tommi’s desk. The upper drawer contained a pile of old bankbooks, account statements, stock certificates, and other financial papers, which I decided to take back to the station. The next drawer was full of old pocket calendars and some letters. Those would go also. The bottom drawer held a copy of Tommi’s master’s thesis in engineering geology and a couple of photo albums.

“There’s no basement in this building, but there is an attic. I’m going to go see if any of Peltonen’s keys fit the door.” Koivu was clearly eager to find the distilling equipment.

I opened one of the photo albums at random, and the first picture I saw was of Jaana, grinning at the camera with a carrot in her hand, in the narrow kitchen of our old student apartment. I flipped through the album, which was filled with the usual family snapshots: Tommi as a child, sailing in a dinghy. Tommi casting a fishing line from the same dock where he had just died. Tommi and his brother climbing up to a tree house. Elementary school class pictures, in which I recognized Antti and Tuulia. The three of them always seemed to wear the same expressions: Tommi grinned comically at the camera, Tuulia smiled sensually, and Antti looked thin and sullen. Pictures of a school hike in Lapland, pictures of Tommi with a graduation cap on his head
and a bouquet of roses in his hand. The same pictures all of us had.

The newer album contained mostly choir pictures and photos from a few friends’ weddings. Tommi must not have been a particularly enthusiastic photographer, or else he had used slides more than prints. There weren’t any slide boxes on the shelves though. Just then, Koivu came hustling back. He was panting.

“Guess what. Up in that attic storage cage there must be at least a hundred liters of that same hooch. I didn’t see any still equipment anywhere though, so he must have kept that somewhere else. But Peltonen was running a regular moonshine factory!”

“Wow. We’ll have to put a good lock on that storage door. Would you mind checking the bedroom for anything interesting?”

“We could confiscate a couple of bottles for ourselves. No one would ever notice,” Koivu said with a wink. “It’s lucky Kinnunen isn’t here. He’d probably go totally off his rocker.” Then he went off to attack Tommi’s clothes closet. “Some awfully nice-looking silk shirts in here. I think I could handle having a couple of these. They look a little small though.” Koivu rummaged through the pockets of Tommi’s clothes with an amusing eagerness. What did he think he was looking for? Weapons? Drugs? Meanwhile, I was thinking about where the distilling setup might be and why Tommi had been making all that alcohol. And who were Tiina and M?

“There isn’t anything fun here but a decent collection of porn magazines,” Koivu said, emerging from the bedroom dangling open a
Playboy
centerfold. “Why aren’t women who look like this interested in me? Why do I always just get good girls with brown hair?”

“Because you’re blond and you look like a nice guy. If you tried to look like a tiger instead of a teddy bear, then maybe you’d have better luck. Should we maybe take possession of those porn magazines? It probably wouldn’t do Tommi’s mother any good to see them here.” With any of my other colleagues, looking at pornographic magazines would have felt like sexual harassment, but Koivu had always treated me like a big sister, someone with whom he could honestly wonder at the facts of life.

We knocked on walls and furniture, looking for any possible hiding places, though I felt ridiculous even as we did it. We didn’t find anything of interest aside from the financial documents, letters, and calendars. And of course the moonshine.

On the way home, Koivu bought a copy of one of the afternoon tabloids. The domestic news contained a brief mention of a death in Vuosaari, but they called it an accident and simply stated that the police were continuing their investigation. Maybe the board of Neste Oil had handed down an order to the captain to keep a low profile. If so, that was fine by me.

We stopped by a local fast-food joint for burgers, and I bought a chocolate milkshake as a pick-me-up, which Koivu looked at with an expression that said “women,” as if men didn’t like chocolate too. He intended to continue on to Kaarela to work an assault case he and Savukoski were on. I planned to head back to the office to go through Tommi’s papers. I mulled over what we should do with the moonshine. Impound it as evidence? But of what? Obviously Tommi had been selling bootleg liquor. Could that have given rise to some disagreement that led to his death? I could already see the headlines:
BOOTLEGGER BUTCHERED AT VUOSAARI VILLA
.

A pile of messages lay on my desk. After making it through those, I dove into Tommi’s papers. The room still reeked of
cigar smoke, so I opened the window and stared for a moment at the cement wall of the building across the way. I was tired and didn’t feel like starting anything. But I forced myself back into my chair, put my feet up on the desk, and tried to pretend I was Philip Marlowe.

The postcards Tommi had kept consisted entirely of innocent messages from friends and relatives. Many of them were from Henri and Peter on yachting trips, the newest from only a couple of weeks earlier. I found myself wondering why Tommi had decided to save these cards in particular. I usually tossed all of mine in the garbage.

Reading the few letters Tommi had saved felt like voyeurism. Henri and Peter had written wonderful descriptions of their sailing journey around the world a couple of years before. I got so absorbed in them that I momentarily forgot what I was supposed to be doing. Tuulia’s letters were also travelogues, from a trip to the United States she had taken a few years back. They were warm, funny, and personal, and I laughed out loud at Tuulia’s accounts of her mishaps. I wished that someone would write me letters like this. Tuulia and Tommi had clearly trusted each other a great deal.

Antti had written several letters from Lapland over the course of a couple of summers. They revealed that Antti’s ex-girlfriend Sarianna had been a veterinary intern in Lapland, and that Antti had been up there, once to do forestry work (I recalled his biceps again) and once on leave to write his thesis. He had written fastidious descriptions of the landscapes, the books he had been reading, and his ideas for his thesis, which were Greek to me—category theory had never been my strongest subject.

Only two of the letters were of real interest. One of them was from Pia, dated about two months earlier.

“Tommi,” it began simply. “Since you never believe what I say, I hope you will believe my words when I write them. I have told you over and over that I don’t want to be anything more than friends with you. I don’t love you. I love Peter.” I got the impression from the letter that Tommi had truly fallen in love with Pia and tried to lure her into some sort of affair with him, but that Pia hadn’t wanted to betray Peter. Something had happened between them though, because Pia wrote: “I know you know how to make the truth look ugly. I believe you will tell Peter if you think it will benefit you.”

Blackmail? Sounded interesting. I would have to question Pia more closely about that. Or maybe her gossipy sister could shed more light on Pia and Tommi’s relationship.

Reading Antti’s most recent letter almost nauseated me. Why the hell had I chosen a profession in which I had to dig around in other people’s business? But that was precisely what I had wanted when I was a kid—to intercede in others’ affairs, to help them—even the ones who didn’t want my help.

“Tommi. Sometimes I have to put my thoughts down on paper to work them out. It helps me to try to formulate them in a way that other people can understand them too. Sometimes it feels like you know me better than I know myself, so that’s why I’m writing to you.”