My First Murder (24 page)

“But Tommi didn’t have your money,” I said, egging her on. “And he didn’t even tell you that he hadn’t sold the liquor yet.”

“No. He just laughed and said we shouldn’t be so gullible. Then I lost my temper and hit him.”

“Hit him?” I asked, dumbfounded. “With what?”

“My hand. Or my fist. I don’t remember. In the face. Tommi swore at me, and I ran away. I didn’t stick around to see if I’d hurt him or not. But then in the morning...He couldn’t have died from my hitting him, could he?” Sirkku asked frantically.

“Don’t worry. He was hit on the head with an ax before he died,” I said to console her.

“But Sirkku and I thought that maybe Tommi somehow fell on the ax and hit his head and then fell in the water,” Timo said, miserable.

I thought about the reports from the lab and the pathologist. Was it possible? I didn’t really believe that Sirkku could
hit anyone hard enough to make him fall over. But what did I know? I was a lot stronger than I looked. It would explain the lack of fingerprints of course. Salo had said that one of the facial bruises had obviously been inflicted prior to death. That supported the theory that Sirkku’s blow didn’t knock Tommi down. But it was also true that he had been drunk. So was it that simple? Sirkku had killed him by accident? Should I arrest her now? I felt downright sorry for the poor girl.

“Come here,” I said, standing up. Sirkku obeyed submissively. I raised my hand like I was taking an oath, tensed my arm muscles, and said, “Hit that. Hit my hand the same way you hit Tommi, as hard as you possibly can.”

Sirkku punched my hand. The force of the blow was nonexistent. My arm didn’t even budge. Sirkku could simply be faking it though.

“Sit down. I don’t really believe you could have hit Tommi hard enough to lay him out. We’ll still have to check whether it was even possible for him to have died that way. You saw the ax on the dock?”

“Yeah...It was there, with the blade sunk into one of the posts.”

Of course it was possible that Sirkku was still lying, that she had used the ax and then still had the presence of mind to hide the weapon and wipe her fingerprints off it. But why wouldn’t that have wiped the other prints off too? No, Tommi’s killer had been wearing gloves.

“Did Tommi say what he was doing outside?”

“He didn’t have time because I started ripping him a new one right off.”

I dug the rest of the contents out of the packet from the lab and laid them all out on my desk.

“Are you sure that you’ve told me absolutely everything you know about the bootlegging? Tommi told you he was selling it to his friends?”

They nodded.

“When our lab tested your moonshine, the chemists discovered that exactly the same stuff, flavored with fennel, has been showing up on the street.”

I picked up the other bottle from the package. The bottle itself was exactly like the one from Tommi’s apartment, but it had a different cork and a Russian label, which claimed it was Siberian anise vodka, 94 proof.

“Do you have any idea where these labels are from?”

Both of them looked flabbergasted. Timo recovered first and asked, surprisingly quickly, “Someone’s been selling this on the street? Who?”

“An Estonian dealer. He swore up and down that he’d brought it in from Russia. He had several bottles of it.”

“What price was he asking?”

“Seventy per half.”

“What the hell! Tommi was paying us twenty for half a liter. So he was skimming. He told us there was so much Russian vodka around that it had driven the price down.”

“That’s true.” I was starting to believe that Timo and Sirkku hadn’t known anything about where their product was ending up. After asking them a few more follow-up questions, I asked Koivu to take them back to work. Then I ordered them forcefully not to leave the city without telling me.

“Are we going to get charged with anything?” Timo asked nervously on their way out. “I just mean...I wouldn’t want my dad and Muuriala to get mixed up in this.”

I considered the fate of the still. If Sirkku and Timo had the least bit of sense, they destroyed it as soon as they heard about Tommi’s death. We would have to interrogate the dealer again to see whether there was any possible connection to Tommi. Then it would be time to decide what charges to press.

“Oh, you’ll probably just get off with a fine,” I said encouragingly. We might even be able to overlook the whole thing, but I couldn’t promise them that.

My phone rang just as Koivu was stepping out with the lovebirds. I thought it would be Tapsa about the tapes, but it turned out to be Tuulia.

“Listen, Maria, you have Jaana’s address, right? I was just thinking I’d go visit her since I’m going to be bumming around Europe on the train later this fall.”

“Yeah, wait a sec while I look it up.” I dug my address book out from under the stacks of paper cresting on my desk. I was sure there was something I wanted to ask Tuulia, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I gave her Jaana’s address in Germany.

“So how’s it going? I gather the memorial service was pretty awful,” I said sympathetically.

“Luckily that’s over now. It hadn’t sunk in that Tommi was really dead until the funeral.” Tuulia swallowed. “Anything new in the investigation?”

“I think we’re getting there. It’s slow going though.” Though I wanted to reassure Tuulia, I didn’t dare say any more than that.

“Let’s go out for beers again sometime, OK?” Tuulia said with a hopeful note in her voice and then hung up before I had a chance to agree. Sometime. Sometime when the case was solved. Sometime when the suspects have permission to start living normal lives again.

Tapsa didn’t answer my call. I listened to Tommi’s answering machine tape one more time. “It’s Tiina. The plans are ruined now. You’re a cheap man. I can’t trust you. Come to my place on Sunday.” “M here. Sunday night. I’m taking off tomorrow. Call me now.”

Finally it dawned on me that the word I had been interpreting as “cheap” translated as “bad” in Estonian. Well, well, the mysterious Tiina might just be one of Tommi’s Estonian girls.

The members of that drug ring and the Estonian prostitute had been arrested only a couple of days before Tommi’s death. How much did these three events have in common? Sirkku had been awake in the early morning, so she would surely have heard if someone had come ashore on a boat or driven up in a car. And we hadn’t yet found any sign of someone having been on the dock who wasn’t supposed to be there—a waste of expensive fiber analysis. But we had to put the possibility of an outside murderer back on the table.

Or maybe...I had already discovered plenty of surprising things about my suspects lurking just beneath the surface. If Tommi was mixed up in the drug trade and pimping, then why couldn’t one of his other friends have been too?

Tapsa Helminen knocked on my door while I was still lost in thought. In his hand was an envelope containing an answering machine tape fresh from the lab.

We listened to the messages in succession, starting with the one for Tommi: “M here. Sunday night. I’m taking off tomorrow. Call me now.” The voice on Tapsa’s tape was clearly the same: “M here. I’ll have another car full of merchandise on Thursday. Name the place.” Though the phone and the recording altered the voice somewhat, the intonation at the beginning of the message was exactly the same.

“You think maybe it’s M for Murderer?” Tapsa asked excitedly.

“Not really, but this has to tell us something. At the very least I want Tommi’s car inspected again; they only checked it superficially before. I want a full workup this time around.” I told Tapsa that Koivu had gone to interview the Estonian prostitute and that Tommi might be a link between the two worlds.

“You try to squeeze your drug dealers about how Tommi was involved in all this. Here’s his picture. And I want to know who M is. Give them the third degree if you have to. Knowing that is going to help us both out.”

I realized I was giving orders to Tapsa, though I didn’t have any authority to do so. He seemed a bit confused for a moment too. I had met Tapsa’s wife once and doubted she ordered her husband to do anything more than to occasionally run down to the laundry room to get the clothes out of the dryer. But Tapsa had known me a long time, and he had the good sense not to turn this into a turf war.

We arranged to meet later that night. I made the necessary calls to get Tommi’s car back in for a more thorough inspection—Tommi’s father was less than pleased—and then continued to catch up on the previous day’s paperwork. The weekend had been surprisingly quiet, just a couple of routine assaults in addition to the rape and suicide. The phone rang while I was still mired in paperwork. My esteemed immediate superior, Kalevi Kinnunen, from two doors down was requesting an audience. Oh joy.

Kinnunen had clearly been sober for at least a day. There was still an obvious tremor in his hands though, and his eyes resembled half-ripe strawberries. Beet-red blood vessels crisscrossed his puffy face. The stench of his Boss aftershave barely masked the underlying reek of a body poisoned by years of boozing.

I reported on my activities of the previous week. Kinnunen wasn’t any more interested in the Peltonen case than in any of the others—i.e., not at all—and he perked up only when I mentioned the word liquor. I wondered what it would feel like to realize that your subordinates got along better without you.

I went to the corner store to buy some rye bread and coleslaw, and munched on them while basking in the sunshine on a bench alongside the path leading to Central Park. Then I stopped at an ice-cream stand to buy a double fudge chocolate cone and was just savoring my first licks when I ran into Mira. We greeted each other awkwardly. Mira was never going to forgive me for knowing things about her life that she herself wanted to forget. Seeing her made me remember what I was supposed to have asked Tuulia.

“Listen, I’m glad I ran into you,” I said with feigned good grace. “Do you remember whether Tommi got any calls out at the villa? Or did Tommi call anyone from there?”

Maybe the mysterious drug dealer had arranged a meeting. That might explain why Tommi had been so tense that night, sensing what was going to happen.

“Calls?” Mira’s eyebrows went up. “All I remember is Tommi’s parents calling when we were in the sauna. Tommi heard the phone they have installed outside and went up to the house to answer it.”

“Who else was with you in the sauna? Was anyone up at the house who could have heard what Tommi said?” I was a little surprised about the coed sauna, though a mixed sauna packed with people was an extremely chaste place. I thought naked men mostly just looked stupid with their flaccid Johnsons flapping around like inedible mushrooms pushing through moss. A mixed sauna had never inspired in me the least temptation to sin. Two people alone in the sauna was a different matter.

“Antti was with Tommi when he came back to the sauna. Timo and Sirkku didn’t show up until everyone else had left.”

“So Timo, Sirkku, or Antti could have heard Tommi’s call?” The ice cream was dripping onto the front of my blouse, and I hurriedly licked the edge of the cone.

“I wouldn’t be so sure about Timo and Sirkku. They went out in the rowboat at some point. I think Antti was the only one in the house at that point.”

I made a mental note to myself to call Antti and said goodbye to Mira. My ice cream had begun to melt more rapidly and was dripping everywhere, so I shoved the remaining half of the cone into my mouth all at once. I was quite a sight with my pants covered in bicycle grease and my ice cream–stained shirt. Back in my office, I was just dialing Antti’s number and debating whether to dig my uniform skirt out of the cabinet when Koivu came bouncing in like an eager blond dog. His expression told me that he had made another breakthrough. I hung up the phone again. Antti could wait.

“Well?”

“Yes,” Koivu said with a grin. “The Estonian chick knew Peltonen. Her name is Tiiu Välbe—no relation to Jelena. The cross-country skier,” Koivu explained when he saw the confusion on my face. “In fact, sometimes she worked for him, for Peltonen I mean. One night at the Kaivohuone Club, he roped her into a romp with some of his French guests, and after that he had Välbe work in his company’s sauna a couple of times, helping with the...uh...bathing. Peltonen fixed her up with odd tricks from time to time, apparently for company guests again, but she didn’t really know.”

“When did this happen?”

“It started sometime last summer. The last gig was in May.”

“But Tommi wasn’t her actual pimp?”

“No...More like a middleman. He wasn’t so much taking her money as lining her up with good jobs.”

“Strange form of charity,” I said. It didn’t really fit with my picture of Tommi’s character. But on the other hand, I was beginning to discern a pattern. At first, he had just been helping Riku out as a friend, and he helped Sirkku and Timo turn a profit bootlegging. And Tommi had paid for Mira’s abortion without complaint. Was Tommi really more or less a “good guy”?

“This Tiiu thought that one of her colleagues, name of Tiina, was also one of Tommi’s regular girls. Didn’t a Tiina leave a message on his answering machine? Tiiu claimed that Tiina also had some connection to the drug trade.”

“So where do we find Tiina? Do you have an address?”

“No, but apparently on Monday nights in the summer she works the Little Parliament. I got a description.”

“Can you handle another long day? Try to find this Tiina.”

“Is she the murderer, then?”

“I doubt it. But she might hold the key to this case. Call me at home right away if you find her, and arrest her if you have to. I’ll come down to the station to talk to her. Call me either way when the bar closes. I think we can go ahead and use the overtime the boss has been promising on this case.”

After Koivu left I tried to reach Antti at the university again, but all I got was the department answering machine. I called Antti’s direct line—no answer—and the library number, where a guy who was half asleep told me he didn’t think Antti had been in the building all day. Though my reason for calling wasn’t terribly important, I was still annoyed. Maybe university researchers got to go to the beach on beautiful days like this. Or perhaps
Antti had gone to visit his parents and Einstein at their cabin—without notifying me.