My First Murder

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “I just want to take a shower and go to bed,” Marianna said listlessly. I hoped her older sister would be sensible. I was about to leave when the doorbell rang. I recognized the woman who entered before she even introduced herself. Sarianna Palola. Antti’s ex-girlfriend. I had seen several pictures of her in Tommi’s photo albums. She didn’t seem to recognize me, however.

  After Marianna went to shower, I briefly explained the situation to her. Sarianna was shocked and furious on her sister’s behalf, but she seemed like a levelheaded person and I felt that Marianna would be safe with her.

  When I got back to the station, I started interrogating Pasi Arhela, Marianna’s rapist. Though he had practically been caught in the act, he tried to be cavalier and deny the whole thing. He was an engineer, just like Tommi, and tried his best to shield himself from my accusations. I could easily imagine how such a smooth operator had succeeded in walking away so easily after his prior convictions. All he needed were good lawyers. When I didn’t accept his claim that Marianna had lured him from the hot dog stand, he started to lose his composure. It was his word against Marianna’s. The hot dog stand operator might be able to convince the judge, and there was no way that Arhela would be able to deny the sperm and cell samples. It riled him that I wouldn’t let him smoke in the interrogation room. He hadn’t slept all night either, but I didn’t feel the least bit sorry for him.

  “All those fucking little whores ever do is beg for it,” he finally snapped. “This one was walking around with her skirt above the water line and her face all painted like a working girl. They should put them all in a goddamn cage. Seeing a little piece like that would get anybody up, you know?” Arhela winked at Virrankoski, who had come in to act as recorder. Arhela had been directing most of his outburst to him in an “us boys” sort of spirit. Virrankoski did not conceal his smile, which irritated me.

  “So you admit to raping her?” I asked, wanting to get rid of Arhela as quickly as possible.

  “The hell I raped her. It was just a little quickie. She should be happy with what she got.”

  “You admit that you forced Marianna Palola to have sexual intercourse with you?”

  “Yes, yes...Fuck, when was the last time you got some, baby? You wouldn’t bitch so much if you got laid a little more often. Or are you some kind of fucking lesbian, since you have to do men’s work and try to defend every little whore who sashays by?”

  I haven’t been forced to use violence often in my work. I’ve used my weapon only once; people who are being arrested are generally calmer around a woman. I’ve had to hit someone only a few times. But right now, I felt like beating Pasi Arhela’s balls to a bloody pulp. If the other person in the room had been, say, Koivu instead of Virrankoski, I probably would have. I imagined what it would feel like to smash my fist into his face and hear the cartilage in his nose snap or to kick him in the testicles so that they swelled up like balloons. I realized I was shaking.

  “Take him out for a smoke and then back to his cell,” I said to Virrankoski, and then retreated to the ladies’ room one floor up. I felt like vomiting. If it were up to me, Arhela would sit in that holding cell for every last second the law allowed.

  Why did he upset me so much? I tried to pretend it was some noble impulse, that I was angry on behalf of Marianna and all of Arhela’s other victims. But I was also angry on my own behalf. Did everyone have the right to come in and slander me just because I was a woman and a cop?

  What if I became an attorney or legal aid counsel, as I had planned to do after graduating? What would I do if I had to defend guys like Pasi Arhela?

  Virrankoski and Arhela were still in the corridor when I returned to my office. I tried to keep my face neutral.

  “This dude says he knows the Peltonen kid who was murdered last week. Aren’t you on that case? He says he fixed him up with women sometimes,” Virrankoski explained.

  “Arhela got women for Peltonen?” I said without looking at the rapist.

  “No, Peltonen did for me,” Arhela said. “He was, like, an old army buddy. We ran into each other around town every now and then, and a couple of times he introduced me to some really nice Estonian whores. They were good, but expensive.”

  There was nothing to be done but to ask Arhela back into the interrogation room. Once inside, he immediately tried to strike a deal with me: if he told me anything that helped with my murder investigation, we wouldn’t charge him with rape. When I refused the exchange, he showered me with more abuse. I forced myself to stay calm and was already starting to order him back to his cell when he started to talk. He was clearly the type who enjoyed feeling important.

  According to Arhela, Tommi had been an intermediary for the Estonian girls. Though he was not an actual pimp, he had taken some commission from the girls and served as some sort of go-between for these high-class private entrepreneurs.

  “They weren’t any thirty-mark train station whores either. They were totally clean, healthy girls.”

  “There were several of them?”

  “Well, I saw two, and I screwed one of them a couple of times.”

  “Names?”

  But Arhela said he couldn’t remember because he’d been so drunk at the time. He did, however, tell me that he’d found Tommi with his girls at the Hesperia. I sent him back to his holding cell to work on coming up with the names, though I didn’t actually believe I would get anything more out of him. I could always send him to the Hesperia Club with Koivu and Virrankoski to refresh his memory if necessary.

  Koivu’s report from the Kaivohuone Club confirmed the prostitute angle. He had managed to talk to a couple of girls who were obviously professionals, and they had recognized Tommi, who had evidently hung around by the bar occasionally at the end of the night. According to one of the women, Tommi had definitely been a pimp and had tried to lure her into his racket once too, but, as she explained to Koivu, she didn’t give it up for money. Which was, of course, exactly what she would say to a cop. Not that there was necessarily anything reprehensible about a woman who went out with a different companion every night. So far, the independent girls were still doing fine in the metro area, but the position of prostitutes could easily worsen if the eastern mafia were to start tightening their grip on the market. That would mean the end of occasional tricks for college students.

  One acquaintance of mine, a bisexual guy, preferred to turn the odd trick instead of getting a regular job. Evidently, both aging men and women paid well. Maybe it would be worth asking Janne if he had known Tommi, though he might be less forthcoming now that he knew I was a cop again.

  Alcohol and Estonian prostitutes. Tommi had been quite an enterprising young man. What would we discover next? The prostitution business opened up a whole new angle on the murder. Could his death have been the work of the Russian mafia? That idea wasn’t all that farfetched, given that crime in the city had grown much more international in scope in recent years. And Tommi had been working on that joint Finnish–Estonian project...Could it be that the murderer wasn’t someone from the choir after all?

  At the end of his message, Koivu had scrawled by hand, “They knew Martti Mäki. He meets a ‘pretty’ boy they call Tomppa pretty regularly. No sign of them this time though.”

  I immediately dialed the Mäkis’ number, but no one answered. Tomppa, eh? This painted an even rosier picture of the Mäkis’ marriage. Did Marja Mäki know anything about her husband’s sexual proclivities?

  Hunger was starting to gnaw at my stomach and the lack of coffee made my temples ache. I ran down the stairs to the café because I could get better coffee there than from the vending machine. The menu looked appalling—liver casserole or vegetable soup in milk broth—so I settled for a soggy Karelian pie, rice filling baked in a rye crust.

  After paying the clerk, I found my old police academy classmate Tapsa Helminen sitting at the window table. He had applied to work Narcotics as soon as he could. He teased me relentlessly early on, but he’d stopped when I nearly br
oke his elbow during self-defense practice. I did it intentionally, though now I was embarrassed to think about it. To be fair, I had teased him right back—he had a fairly sizable nose, and I told him more than once that they wouldn’t need dogs in Narcotics anymore once they had him to do the sniffing. He was an OK guy but a little overzealous—he didn’t see a difference between a joint and a hundred grams of meth.

  “I hear you’ve got a real mess over in Drugs,” I said, sitting down at his table. “They asked us for help, but we can’t spare anybody.”

  “Yeah, well.” Helminen sighed. The shadows beneath his eyes told me he had slept as little as I had the past few nights. “It’s a real shame. These new rings keep cropping up, and all we got was one dealer and a couple of street runners, but that was it. Some of the stuff has been coming in over the eastern border, or I guess I should say the southern border, since Estonia is independent now. We jumped the gun on some arrests—if we had just waited a bit longer, we could have netted a couple of the bigger fish. The street sellers claim they don’t know where it was from, and the dealer doesn’t dare open his mouth. It feels like there’s a pretty big organization behind all this though.”

  “Sounds like the big leagues.”

  “Yeah, this racket seems to be getting more serious all the time. It isn’t college kids sneaking weed home on InterRail anymore—this is something completely different. We definitely need more men, I mean...uh...officers in our division, but there doesn’t seem to be the money for them. How’s the VCU?”

  “Same thing. Overtime budget always in the red. By the way, do you know anything about Russian girl-runners?”

  “Well, of course they’re more Vice’s area of expertise, but I guess some of them are on the drug side too. You can never touch them. They even talk about each other in code names. X and M and shit like that.”

  Something clicked in my head.

  “M? In what context?”

  “He was some guy who was calling his dealer’s answering machine and asking where they could meet to make a swap. Why?”

  “There’s this murder I’m working on. Somebody named M also made an appearance on my victim’s answering machine. Any chance we could compare tapes?”

  “Mine is in the lab. Should be back tomorrow. I’ll let you know when I get it. You have any leads about your M’s identity?”

  Then it clicked.

  “Wait, what did you say? Em! Of course. Not Emma, just M. Sorry, Tapsa, but I’ve got to go. I may have just figured something out.”

  Although I couldn’t get in touch with Anu from the choir right away, the coffee and the new information from Tapsa made the day more bearable. It seemed that the line from that rock song was complete now: “Money, liquor, women, and drugs...” Maybe it was time to focus on that last subject.

  Riku wasn’t home, so I called his work, and they gave me his car phone number.

  “Maria Kallio here. Drop by Pasila once you’ve finished your deliveries. Yes, your boss knows. And you’d better come if you don’t want me to arrest you.”

  Riku arrived at my office a little over half an hour later. People must order anchovy and mettwurst pizzas to raise their spirits on Sunday mornings, because those were the smells that wafted in with him. Or maybe he had just raised my own spirits with them. I was hungry again.

  “You don’t happen to have any extra pizza in your car, do you?” I asked hopefully. Riku shook his head. He looked hungover and nervous.

  “Did the rest of the funeral last long?” I asked.

  I indicated that he should sit across from me, so that he couldn’t fail to notice the EFSAS account ledgers spread out on my desk. Luckily, I had the sense to bring them in to work with me despite all the commotion that morning.

  “Me and Tuulia were at the Roba until at least two last night,” Riku explained feebly. Was he even fit to drive? Would it be irresponsible of me not to breathalyze him? I picked up the ledger and explained why I’d brought him in.

  “I’ve been reading through these accounts pretty carefully and comparing receipts and bank statements. You didn’t tell me the whole truth about your debts to Tommi. I could charge you with embezzlement and fraud. Tommi discovered the scam when he was checking the books, but promised to loan you the money to cover it up and hide it from Antti, the other auditor. Why would he do something like that?”

  Riku’s pale face had turned blotchy.

  “He was my friend. He knew I would put the money back eventually. But then the annual meeting was coming up, and we had to get the accounts cleaned up, and I didn’t have any money...So he promised to loan me what I needed.”

  “And made himself an accomplice by writing up a falsified audit report? Why on earth would he do that? And why did he start demanding his money back?”

  “It sounded like he was leaving for somewhere,” Riku said, clearly pained. “What I told you about that Thursday was mostly true. But he also threatened to tell the cops I’d been siphoning off choir money. He said you could get probation for that; he knew a guy who had for less.”

  “When were you supposed to give him the money?”

  “He gave me till Monday.”

  “How were you going to get the money together?”

  “I was supposed to pawn everything I could. My stereo, my TV, even my leather jacket...” Riku explained, sounding depressed.

  “But Tommi died on Saturday, and so you were in the clear. If you whacked him because you were drunk and angry, then you’d better confess right now! You’ll get off easier if you confess voluntarily.”

  Riku buried his head in his hands. I almost felt sorry for him. Murderer or no, I should probably hand over the cooked books to the White-collar Division to deal with. Maybe the shame would teach Riku a thing or two. A few grand was small potatoes compared to everything you heard was happening in banking circles all the time. But that was how it was: you could lose billions, and even get caught, and at most you’d lose your job but still get full retirement. Nicking a few thousand, however, could land you on probation. And poor Antti had also unsuspectingly put his name on the audit report that Tommi had manipulated, thus unwittingly participating in the fraud. Did I really have to sic the prosecutors on Riku? Did I have a right not to?

  “I didn’t kill Tommi,” Riku said, his voice teary. “I was just so damn disappointed when he started being so difficult all of a sudden. But I would have gone and pawned all my stuff on Monday. I would have gotten the money from somewhere...And Tuulia promised to loan me some.”

  “Did Tuulia know about this?”

  “I just told her that Tommi wanted his money back.”

  “Listen, Riku. The duty officer has an Breathalyzer. Let’s go have you blow in it, and if it registers anything, you call work and tell them you can’t come back in today. Then you get in touch with Antti and work out this mess. He already knows all about it. You and EFSAS can decide how you want to handle it. But one more time: if you killed Tommi, admit it right now. You might still get off with manslaughter. We’re going to find out sooner or later. Fraud and murder are a nasty combination.”

  I knew how hollow my own words sounded.

  The duty officer’s Breathalyzer registered zero, so Riku went back to work.

  I decided to try reaching the Mäki family again. Martti Mäki was home this time. I told him what we had found out, and he didn’t even bother trying to deny it.

  “We spent that night at the Vaakuna Hotel. I imagine you can find our names in the hotel register.”

  “It would be best for you to give me this Tomppa’s full name and address so we can check your alibi.”

  “Oh hell...Is that really necessary? Tomppa isn’t going to get in any trouble over this, is he? He’s such a nice boy.”

  “I don’t suppose he’s done anything criminal,” I said dryly. I didn’t want to start snooping into whether Mäki had paid Tomppa. Mäki gave me Tomppa’s contact information.

  “Um...you don’t have to tell my wife about this, do
you?” Mäki asked me as I was about to hang up.

  “You can work out your relationship problems on your own,” I said, more angrily than was strictly necessary, and hung up the phone. The Mäkis must have a ball together.

  I tried to reach Sirkku and Timo, to no avail, then switched over to finishing up the rapist’s statement and worked on some other paperwork. Actually I was free to do as I pleased—I was only on call—but since I had time to spare I figured I might as well catch up on a few things. My next commitment wasn’t until that evening.

  I left work just after three and walked through Central Park in the fog, around Töölö Bay, and then made my way home from there. In the interim, I had had to go look at a middle-aged woman who had hanged herself from the carpet beating rack on her balcony, after which I needed some fresh air. Along the way, I bought a large ice-cream cone from a kiosk.

  At home I changed my clothes and then ran over to the women-only gym where I had a membership. Wrestling with weights usually energized me, and my muscles had had time to recover from the other day. The run had been a good warm-up, so I just stretched my arms for a few minutes before getting down to business. It was arms and back day because I’d already tortured my legs and abs the previous Friday. As always on Sunday afternoons, the gym was almost empty.

  As I did my lat pull-downs, I thought about Tommi: charming, talented, and generous, but also selfish, power hungry, and narcissistic. Criminal? Bootlegger? Pimp? Drug dealer? Had he suggested that Riku turn a couple of tricks with some aging gay men to pay his debts, and made Riku so angry that he killed him? Or had Pia done it out of fear of unpleasant revelations? And which of Tommi’s businesses had Tuulia gotten mixed up in? Certainly something. It was hard for me to imagine her being taken advantage of in any way or selling her beautiful body. There was no way she would have agreed to become a prostitute. What about Sirkku? And could Antti have gotten so angry over being taken advantage of that he struck Tommi in a blind rage? Yes. Even though he looked like the stereotypical pacifist: he’d skipped the military for civilian service, had a ponytail and everything. Could Antti have connections to the drug trade? And I couldn’t rule Mira out either.