My First Murder

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “What else did you practice aside from the Toivo Kuula piece?”

  “We spent most of our time on that, since the second soprano wasn’t up to snuff—yet again—and Riku learns his parts so appallingly slowly. Then we worked on some Piae Cantiones and some easy Finnish folk songs.”

  “Who is the second soprano?”

  “Well Pia, of course,” Mira said with a snort, as though it should be obvious. I remembered that Jaana had been a second soprano as well. She had described herself as a second-class soprano, who couldn’t sing high enough to be a real soprano or low enough to be an alto.

  “And after the practice ended?”

  “Tuulia and I made food—as always, some do the work and some lie about—and then I washed the dishes before we went off to the sauna. Everything was just like normal. Riku was trying to sweet-talk Tuulia, which was maybe a little odd, but otherwise everything was more or less the same as any other night together after practice: sauna, talking, drinking. I don’t usually drink more than two glasses, and I wasn’t in a very social mood, so I went out to the boat dock for a little while and tried a few casts with a fishing pole that was out there. I caught a four-pound pike...if you can believe it. No one else could.” Mira was clearly proud of her skill with a fishing pole. It was difficult for me to imagine her casting, but I could easily picture her killing what she caught. “After cleaning the pike, I was tired, so I was the first one to go to sleep, sometime around twelve.”

  “You were awake later that night though, because you saw Riku sneaking downstairs, right?”

  “Tuulia was snoring to wake the dead, so Pia and I were up. Pia went to the bathroom, and then Riku appeared downstairs. I went to the bathroom as well and then tried to get Tuulia to turn onto her stomach so she would stop snoring, but I failed. Then I finally fell asleep.”

  “Where was Pia at that point? Had she come back?” I felt as though Mira was waiting for me to ask some truly stupid question. It was like I was sitting in front of a strict school teacher, one who knows that the upstanding-looking student before her is actually the class’s worst lavatory smoker.

  “I don’t really know. I guess I thought she had gone somewhere with Riku. It would be best to ask her yourself.

  “In the morning I was the first one to wake up, sometime after eight. I made coffee and went out to enjoy the beautiful summer morning. Around ten I put on some music to get the others up—we were supposed to be singing after all. Actually, I was a little surprised not to see Tommi anywhere, since it was his house. But you know how men are, always waiting for the women to make the coffee.”

  For once, Mira and I agreed.

  “When Riku came yelling that Tommi was lying in the water, you and Antti rushed to the scene. Why?”

  “What do you mean why? If somebody comes up to you yelling that somebody else is dead, then of course you go look. I guess the others were just sort of frozen in place, but in big groups, there are always a few people who know what to do.”

  “According to Antti, the two of you looked for a pulse and concluded from not finding one that Tommi was dead. Then you called the police before calling for an ambulance. Were you sure that Tommi was dead?”

  “I didn’t actually go very close to Tommi, and Antti acted almost like he didn’t...like he wanted to shield me from seeing him. So I didn’t see Tommi all that well, but I trusted what Antti said. As for who I called first, the number for the police happened to be listed before the one for the ambulance on the Peltonens’ emergency list by the phone.”

  “Did you go back down to the water after you called the police?”

  “No. Antti came back up, and then we just waited.”

  So Antti Sarkela would have had an opportunity to be alone with the body and destroy any evidence if necessary. Maybe it had been a traditional Finnish crime after all: two men in a drunken brawl. Over a bottle of vodka? Over a woman?

  “Do you have any idea who would have wanted to kill Tommi Peltonen or why?”

  “You’d be better off asking who wouldn’t have had a reason to kill Tommi.”

  “Well, who wouldn’t have, then?”

  “I didn’t have any reason to want him dead. I never had anything to do with him in that way. And I doubt Antti did either, since they were best friends. But the others...Sirkku had had a fling with Tommi in Germany, which ruined her relationship with her old boyfriend. Maybe Sirkku thought Tommi was serious about her—she’s childish enough for that...and Timo has always been jealous of Tommi.”

  This seemed to be a topic Mira could get excited about.

  “Pia may have gone further with Tommi than she wanted, and it was possible Tommi was threatening to tell Peter and break them up. And then we have Tuulia and Tommi. Now there’s a strange relationship. Sometimes they’re friends, sometimes they’re dating. No one knows what Tuulia really thinks about Tommi. As for Riku, he just admired Tommi a little more than was good for him. He was dependent on Tommi in a strange way. And besides, Riku is completely infatuated with Tuulia at the moment, and Tommi had been teasing Riku about it. Tuulia was blatantly flirting with the poor boy, even though she could never take him seriously. I think Tuulia is definitely the best candidate for a murderer—no one else’s nerves would have held out this long,” Mira concluded.

  No one else’s but yours, I thought, and then curtly asked Mira to send Tuulia in as she left. I wished that my own brain would classify data as systematically as Mira’s seemed to, but I just seemed to be getting more tangled up.

  It was going to be more difficult to interview Tuulia than Mira because I had always liked Tuulia. We ran into each other occasionally in the university café and chatted whenever we crossed paths. Tuulia was unsure about the direction of her life in the same way that I was. She studied communications and sociology with limited success and then switched to theater at one point. Her latest thing was studying cultural history in Turku. She’d had all sorts of odd jobs over the years, and never seemed to feel any need to graduate or settle down.

  “Hey, could Pia go next, after me? A bunch of us want to go back to our place to eat the leftovers from the villa and have a sort of memorial. Antti doesn’t want to join us, so could he go last? You’re going in alphabetical order, right?” Tuulia was obviously forcing herself to sound cheerful.

  “OK. Are all the others still sitting out there waiting?”

  “Yeah, no one really wants to go anywhere by themselves—or even with just one other person. Who knows who could be dangerous? Argh, it feels so strange. I’ve known Tommi for almost twenty years and now...We were in the same class with Antti all the way through high school.”

  “What are you up to these days?”

  “I’m studying cultural history in Turku and taking a summer course that meets once a week. And I work as a playground monitor at a park a couple of days a week. The rest of the time I drink. So no, I still haven’t turned respectable, even though I’m almost thirty.” Tuulia smirked.

  “What happened yesterday?” Though I wanted to, I couldn’t acknowledge her smirk.

  Tuulia’s version was the same as the others—relaxed socializing, singing, a beautiful summer night. Mira had gone to bed first, followed shortly by Riku. Tuulia had been happy when he headed upstairs and passed out, since she had not been in the mood for flirting. Then Timo and Sirkku and the others had all gone to bed around the same time.

  “I said good night to Tommi sometime after one, and that was it. In the morning I pounded on his door and told him coffee was ready, but he didn’t answer. I opened the door, but he was gone. I guess I thought he’d gone for a swim—or maybe I didn’t think anything of it.”

  “Why didn’t you go down to the water to see what had happened to Tommi?”

  “I don’t have any interest in dead bodies. And for some reason I let myself think Riku was exaggerating. The little pest was still drunk even in the morning. Of course Mira ran down there because she couldn’t contain her curiosity. She’s always sticking
her nose into everything. As for Antti...I wish he hadn’t had to see it; he really liked Tommi.” Tuulia buried her face in her hands for a moment, her blonde, bobbed hair falling over her forehead. I didn’t have time to indulge her tears and continued my questioning.

  “You’ve known Tommi for a pretty long time. Do you have any guesses about who might have hated him enough to kill him?”

  “How should I know? Of course I keep trying to figure it out, but it’s no use. There has to be a logical explanation though. The only person I can imagine doing anything that cold-blooded would be Mira, but I have no idea why she would do such a thing.”

  “Maybe she was secretly in love with Tommi?” I found it amusing that the women were blaming each other.

  “It wasn’t Tommi she was in love with! She’s been stalking Antti ever since he and Sarianna broke up a couple of years ago. As you can imagine, she never confided anything to me, but everyone knows anyway. If I’m remembering this right, she basically threw herself in Tommi’s lap at some party just to get Antti’s attention, but of course it didn’t work. Yesterday she waltzed in showing off that fish of hers—an interesting way to try to make an impression on a man, don’t you think? It was a real bummer. For Mira, I mean. Antti definitely needs someone with a little more fire than that iceberg.”

  “What was your own relationship with Tommi like?”

  “Oh, we had a great relationship. We were close and had a lot of fun together. We had a sort of mutually beneficial arrangement. We screwed when we felt like screwing and played each other’s dates at cocktail parties when we needed to, and loaned each other money and stuff. It all worked great until yesterday. I’m sorry this had to happen to such a good friendship...” Tuulia was about to dissolve into tears again, but then clearly decided that a police interview was not the appropriate place for that sort of thing and made a desperate effort to shift back to her state of false cheerfulness.

  “I really hope you can come up with some sort of motive for that bitch Mira. I wouldn’t want any of the rest of us to turn out to be the one who did it.” Tuulia tried to screw her face up into a smile, but didn’t quite succeed.

  “Why were you and Tommi still in EFSAS? Isn’t it more of a student choir?”

  “Well, I haven’t exactly graduated yet,” Tuulia said with a snort. “Maybe it’s kids’ stuff, but I like it, and besides, there’s always someone to drink with after practice. Last fall I tried joining Cantiamo, but everybody was middle-aged, and they all had kids. Totally boring. I admit that EFSAS is probably just a way of drawing out my youth, an excuse to keep hanging around with twenty-somethings. Tommi just wanted to be the big man. In EFSAS he got all the solos, but in a better choir he wouldn’t have stood out from the crowd so much. Antti is always trying to leave, but so far we’ve been able to lure him back every time.” Tuulia stood up. “Do you have anything more for me or should I ask Pia to come in?” Just as she was about to walk out, she turned and added, “We should go out for drinks sometime when this is all over.”

  Rane stared after Tuulia with disapproval. In Rane’s world a woman’s place was at home making babies, and he loathed Tuulia’s type. He remarked dryly that we were not allowed to be chummier with some people we were questioning than with others. At least that was what they had taught him twenty years ago at the academy.

  I was forced to swallow my inappropriate retort because Pia Wahlroos walked in at that moment without knocking. She appeared more agitated than sad. She fiddled with her glossy hair and nervously twisted her wedding ring, which looked too big for her narrow finger—signs that she subconsciously wanted to get rid of both the hair and the ring. I had read that in some women’s magazine. Of course, similar personality tests had said that I was warmhearted and maternal.

  Pia and Peter Wahlroos had been married for a little over a year and a half. Peter was currently away sailing for six months, and Pia wouldn’t see him for another three weeks, when she planned to travel to the States to meet him at the finish line. In contrast to all the terrible things that everyone else had said, it sounded to me as though she truly missed him.

  “I let Riku drive my car to Villa Maisetta because I was feeling kind of anxious. I haven’t heard anything from Peter in a few days, and there have been such terrible storms that there haven’t even been any rankings for this leg of the race for a long time.”

  It appeared that she was more worried about her spouse than Tommi’s death.

  “What was your relationship with Tommi Peltonen like?” Best to get straight to the point. Skirting around the issue wouldn’t do anyone any good. At first Pia blushed, but then she lashed out almost violently.

  “Oh, so the rumor mill has been hard at work! I’ve felt so lonely while Peter’s been away, and we don’t have enough money for me to be waiting in every port of call. Tommi is Peter’s old friend, and Tommi’s little brother, Henri, is also on the Marlboro. Of course Tommi and I have spent a lot of time together. Partly it’s because of the messages we get from the yacht, but we’ve also gone out to eat and to the movies. But that’s it! There hasn’t been anything else to it, though none of them seem to believe it no matter how many times I tell them. Sirkku even told our mother that I supposedly went to bed with Tommi, which I most certainly did not!”

  “Well, did Tommi try to get you to sleep with him? I’m sorry to have to ask, but this is part of the investigation, and I don’t know yet what might be important,” I said hurriedly and then immediately regretted apologizing for doing my job.

  “Yes, he did try. The last time was yesterday. But I didn’t want to.”

  “Do you think Tommi wanted to give the others the impression that there was more between you than there really was?”

  “I don’t know...Tommi wasn’t as one-dimensional as he might have seemed on the surface. Sometimes I almost believed him when he said he’d fallen in love with me. But since I knew his reputation, I couldn’t take him seriously. Yesterday was a little strange though. He said that he couldn’t stand being alone anymore and that he just wanted to have me close to him. Of course I didn’t believe that line—the last time he’d asked for that same ‘closeness,’ I ended up throwing him out of my house. But now...I don’t know. Maybe he would still be alive if I’d given in.”

  I watched spellbound as movie-star tears rolled down Pia’s cheeks. They did not smudge anything, did not make her nose run or her skin look mottled; somehow, they just belonged on her face.

  “Do you remember exactly what Tommi said to you and when he said it?”

  “We were on our way to bed. No one else was awake at that point except for Antti and Tuulia. Tommi asked me upstairs and, you know...we kissed and stuff, since I had been drinking more than normal, but Tommi got too intense, and I ended up saying something abrupt. Then it was weird because he started pleading with me. He whispered that he didn’t want to be alone tonight because he was nervous. I told him that Riku and Antti were just on the other side of the hall.”

  “And then?”

  “Tommi laughed a little strangely and said, ‘Riku and Antti, now that really makes me feel safe.’ I didn’t know what he meant, but at that point I was irritated and went back downstairs.”

  “Do you have any idea why Tommi was nervous? Did he explain at all?”

  “No. I just thought it was a new way of trying to get me in bed.”

  I let Pia leave and followed her out into the hallway for a moment. The entire group was still out there waiting; Timo and Sirkku sat wrapped around each other, and Riku lay with his head in Tuulia’s lap. I asked them to stay in town for the next few days in case we needed to interview them again. They stood up and prepared to leave, uttering variations on, “Hey, we haven’t been arrested yet” as they walked out. Only Antti Sarkela remained. Maybe Antti had actually had enough time to fully comprehend the situation, because his lean face was pale and lined, looking much older than thirty. As he sat down across from me in the interrogation room, I began to imagine that he intend
ed to admit to the murder. He looked that unhinged. However, he went on to answer my routine questions calmly enough. I still felt like I was plucking a bass with the top string tuned a third of an octave higher than normal though.

  Antti had known Tommi basically his entire life—the two boys had played together before even starting elementary school. They had always been in the same class, and both had started out in the math department during their first year of college. After the army, Tommi had decided to switch to engineering. Antti had done civilian service in Rovaniemi instead of joining the army. After getting out, he had moved with Tommi into an apartment downtown. When serious girlfriends entered the picture, Antti moved somewhere else with Sarianna, and Jaana began to spend half her time at Tommi’s place. I remembered quite well that she had never wanted to give up her own place though. Now Antti lived in a studio in Korso, out past the airport near the train line.

  Antti had investigated the body superficially. He had done his civilian service as a hospital orderly, so he was used to doing basic triage and could tell when someone was dead.

  “For the first time in a long time, we were really having fun. When we were driving out to the house on the East Highway, I thought Tommi was in a great mood. He was fooling around like when we were kids. On the news they said something about a drug bust, and he started playing mafia and racing with Riku, who he pretended had turned on the family, and Tuulia was right in on the game too. It felt like twenty years had suddenly fallen away. Tommi always liked playing pirates and that sort of thing when we went sailing as kids. Then we got to the house and started practicing. I thought it went really well. It was nice to be singing the same part with Tommi because he was so precise. He was the most musical one in the whole group.”

  Antti seemed to hesitate for a moment.

  “Then, when we went to heat the sauna, I noticed that something was wrong. I thought it was because of Pia. I really couldn’t tell you what Tommi truly wanted out of that relationship. We all go way back with Peter, and he’s Tommi’s little brother’s best friend. I didn’t approve of Tommi fooling around with Pia, and I told him so. But now, in retrospect, I don’t think that was all Tommi was worried about.”