Lucifer's Tears

by James Thompson

  I have to admit that, as Saar claims, it seems possible he was left alive in order to frame him. If Saar was convicted of Iisa’s murder, it would close the case and allow the true killer to avoid investigation and walk free. “Let’s go down to the lockup and talk to Saar,” I say.

  WE GO DOWNSTAIRS, walk along the long white corridor and stop at cell S408. Out of politeness, I knock before entering.

  “Might be nice if you showed your colleagues the same courtesy as you do your prisoners,” Milo says.

  Saar shouts for us to enter and I open the door.

  As jail accommodations go, ours are pretty good. The cell has a decent bed, a bench and a small writing table fixed to a wall decorated with creative inmate graffiti. Every cell has a few books in it for entertainment. The prisoners have a gym to work out in, and a canteen where they can buy snacks and smokes. They eat the same food as the staff.

  Saar is sitting on the edge of his bed. Washing the shower of blood off has done wonders for his appearance. “Mind if we have a little chat?” I ask.

  “Will it help me get out of here?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Then by all means, let’s chat.”

  “I’m going to ask you some personal questions. Would you rather talk here, off the record, or in the interrogation room and have your statement recorded?”

  “If we’re going to talk about my sex life,” he says, “let’s keep it between us for now.”

  I sit on the bed beside Saar. Milo sits on the bench. “Would you lift your shirt and let me see your back?”

  He does it, shows me a nasty burn just above his waist.

  “How did you get that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why didn’t you mention it before?”

  “To be honest, when we talked before, my head hurt so bad and I was so drunk that I didn’t even notice it. Hurts now, though.”

  He pulls his shirt down, sits forward with his elbows on his knees.

  “Mind if I smoke?” I ask.

  “Not if you give me one.”

  “You don’t have any?”

  “I don’t have any money on me to buy them.”

  I take a twenty out of my wallet and give it to him. “You can pay me back. Tell me about you and Iisa—in more detail than before—and about your affair.”

  He folds up the bill, unfolds it, puts it in his pocket, thinks how he’s going to spin this. “Iisa was wild,” he says, “loved to party. I wasn’t the only guy she fucked behind Filippov’s back. Just the only steady one. And I had other lovers, too. Like I told you, we had fun. We were comfortable together. Enough so that I gave her a key to my place.”

  “Did Iisa use drugs?”

  “Sometimes. Coke. Ecstasy. GHB.”

  “You think Ivan Filippov killed his wife and framed you. Lots of women fuck around on their husbands. Their husbands don’t usually turn murderous. Why him?”

  He ponders, stares at the wall. “Iisa didn’t like fucking her husband. Didn’t do it, in fact. She liked fucking me. I guess his bruised ego could have driven him to it.”

  Yes, it could have. “What did you give Iisa that Filippov didn’t?”

  “Iisa liked to play games.” He hesitates. “Maybe I shouldn’t have played them.”

  “Describe these games.”

  “Iisa liked to watch me fuck other women.”

  This explains the source of the videos in his computer. “She hid in your closet and shot videos through the hole in your closet door.”

  He nods. “I would fuck a girl, she would film it. I would get the girl out of my house, then fuck Iisa while we watched it on my laptop. It got her off.”

  This explains the stool in the closet and the camcorder in Iisa’s purse. His story rings true. “How did these games begin?”

  “I made a mistake giving her the key. She made a game out of coming to my house when I wasn’t home. She would hide under the bed or in the closet or in the shower. I might be there an hour or two before she jumped out and surprised me.”

  I give Saar another smoke and we light up. “Seems like that would piss you off.”

  “It did the first time, but it was hard to be mad at Iisa. She was like a little kid, just playing games and having fun. One day I brought a girl home and fucked her. Iisa came in the front door while we fucked. She did it quiet, so I didn’t hear her. She peeked through the door from the living room and masturbated while she watched. That’s how it started. Actually, the game was fun. Got us both excited. I stop interrogating him for a minute, take a break, smoke and think, try to sort all this out. Milo jumps in. “Do you know Ivan Filippov’s secretary, a woman named Linda Pohjola?”

  “Yeah. She was a friend of Iisa’s.”

  “They looked a hell of a lot alike. Was that a coincidence?”

  “No. They’d known each other since they were teenagers and worked at the look-alike thing. Sometimes they would go to parties dressed in identical clothes. It was another one of Iisa’s games. They tag-teamed me once. They even looked the same naked. That was fun, too.”

  “What else do you know about Linda?” Milo asks.

  “Not much. Iisa didn’t talk a lot about her personal life. Really, our relationship just revolved around fucking.”

  “Tell me more about Iisa’s games and other lovers,” Milo says.

  “I don’t know much more. She kept a diary, though. She kept it in her purse sometimes. Maybe you could find out something from there.”

  “You texted Iisa and asked her to meet you at seven thirty in the morning. Why?”

  “I hooked up with a girl. She was going to come home with me, but she got too drunk and tired and took a rain check. Iisa was going to watch us fuck.”

  “You lead an exciting life,” Milo says.

  Saar manages a wan grin. “I try.”

  He looks at me. “Are you going to charge me with murder?”

  I remember Jyri’s demand to that effect. “Not today,” I say.

  I set my pack of cigarettes on his table. We leave him in peace.

  BACK IN MY OFFICE, given the interview, I ask Milo what he thinks.

  “Same as I have since the beginning. That motherfucker Filippov killed his wife and framed Saar. I turned that apartment inside out, and there’s no taser in it. The killer took it with him.”

  “Exactly,” I say. “The taser burn lends veracity to his story, and the taser is conspicuous by its absence. It’s possible that Iisa tased him, he recovered enough to fight and was angry enough to torture her to death, then dumped the taser and called the police himself. But given his head wound, it’s too much of a stretch. A third party took the taser out of the apartment.”

  Milo starts to shake his head and laugh.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I just can’t picture one guy getting so much pussy. The only dates I’ve had lately are with Rosy Palm and Five Fingers.”

  This makes me laugh, too.

  Our boss, Arto, walks in behind Milo. “It always pleases me to see detectives enjoy their work,” Arto says. “Want to let me in on the joke?”

  “Sure,” Milo says. “What do you call epileptic lettuce?”

  “What?”

  “Seizure salad.”

  Milo howls at his own joke, which makes me laugh more than the joke. Arto giggles and says, “Jesus, that was awful.”

  When Milo stops cackling, Arto asks, “You two have time to investigate a death?”

  “No,” I say, “but we can make time.”

  “Head over to the Silver Dollar nightclub. The bouncers there killed some guy.”

  “Sounds good,” Milo says.

  The problem is that when Milo says it sounds good, I think he means it.

  17

  MILO AND I SIGN A CAR out of the police garage at seven thirty p.m. Today we get a 2007 Toyota Yaris. It’s dark out now. Snow still falls, and our headlights illuminate it. Helsinki is a lovely city in winter when it’s not hammered by sleet and covered in filth
y slush.

  I drive. Milo jabbers. “So you have an American wife,” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “What language do you speak at home?”

  “Mostly English. Kate has been here for going on three years. She’s learning, tries to at least use some Finnish words and phrases.”

  “Well,” he says, “Finnish is a tough language. It takes time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “English is a moronic language.”

  This seems to be my week to have strong and unsupported opinions thrust upon me. “And why might that be?”

  “The letter C is unnecessary. It makes the same sounds as K and S. That’s a lot of waste. They should get rid of it. They don’t need B either. P is almost the same, does just as well.”

  I make conversation, since I was so hard on him earlier. “Kate thinks A and O with the dots over them are pointless. English gets on just fine without them.”

  Milo takes a pack of unfiltered North State cigarettes out of his coat pocket, cracks the window and lights one. My dad smokes the same brand. Tough-guy cigarettes. “So during this car ride,” he says, “we’ve managed to take two letters out of the English language, and two out of Finnish. We changed the world.”

  Inane chatter. He’s trying to kiss and make up because he pissed me off earlier. “So you started smoking again,” I say.

  He takes a drag and nods. “You really are a good detective.”

  “How long did you stay off them?”

  “Four years.”

  His new job in murharyhmä must be getting to him. We sit in silence for a few moments.

  “Did you know Ilari and Inka are fucking?” he asks.

  “Is this deduction another product of your people-person skills and extreme powers of empathy?”

  “It’s the product of hearing them fuck in the bathroom after everybody got drunk at my ‘welcome to the new guy’ party.”

  They both have spouses and children, and even though they’re partners, act as if they hate each other. I thought their vicious invective toward each other seemed forced.

  At seven forty-five p.m., we pull up in front of the Silver Dollar and park next to an ambulance. To call the place a nightclub is a bit of a misnomer. It’s multifunctional, soaks up money in different ways. It opens at four p.m. to accommodate after-work drinkers. A couple nights a week, it offers line dancing. Finnish countrymusic fans don cowboy boots, hats, bolos and collar tips, and giddyup, pardner. Its biggest cash cow, though, is its four a.m. liquor license. Every other bar in the neighborhood closes at two, so when shit-drunk people get kicked out at closing time, they come here to this shithole to get shit-drunker for another couple hours. The place is packed most nights.

  Milo and I walk inside. Two uniform cops are here. I introduce myself. They explain the situation. I tell them Milo and I will take it from here.

  Music blares. People slurp beer. I look around. Plastic cups sit on beat-up dirty tables. The floor is filthy, the bar grimy. Dim blueand-red pseudo-nightclub lighting is intended to mask these things, but it doesn’t work. A prostrate body lies face-up in a corner. Two crime-scene techs and a pathologist crouch around it.

  The dead man isn’t fat, but maybe two hundred and sixty pounds, well over six feet tall. He’s a baby-faced corpse, not much more than a kid, and appears as if he’s sleeping. Two bouncers and two rent-a-cops in police-style coveralls and boots stand around the massive corpse, hands in their pockets, shift their weight back and forth on their feet like they’re guilty of something.

  I flash my police card. Milo pushes past the bouncers and rent-a-cops, bends down and talks to the pathologist.

  A bouncer starts to shout in my ear, over the sound system. I yell, too, and cut him off. “Shut down the music. Turn up the houselights. Close the bar. Lock the door. Nobody leaves. The club is closed for the night.”

  He tries to argue. The law doesn’t require that an establishment that serves alcohol be closed in the event of a death. His boss will be pissed off.

  I shake my head. “We’re operating under my law. Do it now.”

  Bouncer number one scurries off to follow instructions. Milo comes over. “Dead as a bag of hammers. Most likely because his hyoid bone is broken.”

  The music dies and the house goes quiet, except for a lone sobbing. A heavyset young guy, another giant, sits on a barstool, holds his face in his hands and cries. I ask Milo to take photos and witness statements from customers while I question the bouncers and rent-a-cops. Milo uses the camera in his cell phone to snap pics of the corpse and the club. Apparently, he doesn’t mind deferring to me in matters that don’t require his overwhelming intellectual prowess.

  Bouncer number two stands near me. He has big muscles encased in a layer of fat. He wears jeans and a tight black T-shirt.

  I take out a notepad and pen. “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Timo Sipilä.”

  “Address, telephone and social security numbers.”

  He gives them to me.

  “What happened?”

  “This guy and his brother,” he points at the boy giant in tears, “got into an argument. They started shoving each other. First we called Securitas—the rent-a-cops—then me and my partner, Joni Korjus, went over to calm them down.”

  Korjus is also huge. I’m in a bar full of mastodons.

  “The dead guy had an attitude, so we told him to leave,” Timo says. “He refused and started yelling at us to mind our own business. Securitas got here about the time we started to carry him out. They can back up my story.”

  The rent-a-cops nod agreement.

  I get to the meat of the issue. “Why is he dead?”

  “I got him in a headlock, and Joni grabbed his legs. We carried him outside like that and then dropped him outside the front door. He wasn’t breathing anymore.”

  “You held him suspended by the neck,” I say. “How long was he in that position?”

  “Ninety seconds, two minutes tops.”

  More than enough time to kill him. “You broke his hyoid and caused him to choke to death.”

  The bouncer says nothing.

  “Why so long, why was it necessary to remove him in that manner, and did his brother interfere?”

  Timo ignores the first two parts of the question. “No, his brother just followed us and screamed for us to stop.”

  Now I have a sense of the situation. Two brothers have a spat. Two bored bouncers overreact because they have nothing else to do. They have a bit of fun at the victim’s expense while they eject him. He dies.

  The rent-a-cops are a man and a woman. The man is in his late twenties. The woman, just out of her teens. He’s a skinhead, has an Iron Cross tattooed on the meat between his right thumb and forefinger. A tribal tattoo runs up his neck and curls around his ear. She looks like a mean-spirited, gum-chewing cow with bad acne.

  I take their personal information. “Did anyone try to revive him?” I ask.

  The skinhead says, “I did. I tried mouth-to-mouth and chest compression. They didn’t work.”

  “That much is apparent,” I say, and turn back to Timo. “You dropped him outside. Why is he inside?”

  “We carried him back in.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s warmer in here.”

  “He wasn’t breathing. I don’t think he cared.”

  Timo goes quiet, and I get it. It had nothing to do with the victim. He and his buddy were cold, since they just have on T-shirts. Bouncer number one comes back. I tell him to stand behind the bar and await further instructions. I don’t want him and his buddy to talk and mesh their stories together any more than they already have. I call for cruisers to take them and the rent-a-cops to the lockup. They’ll remain in custody while we sort this out.

  I go over to the victim’s brother and introduce myself. He’s sniffling. He has a big baby face, too. It’s glazed from shock.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Sulo Polvinen. My brothe
r’s name was Taisto.”

  Using the past tense makes him sob. The brothers’ names are old-fashioned, were popular during the Second World War. Sulo means “sweet.” Taisto means “battle.” Their family is patriotic.

  “Those bastards killed him,” he says.

  “Tell me why.”

  He blinks, shakes his head. “It didn’t make any sense. We were just squabbling, we argue all the time. It’s a brother thing. We pushed each other a little, just playing, and those guys started to manhandle us. I stopped moving so they wouldn’t hurt me, but Taisto struggled a little and yelled at them. They bent him over and the fat one got him by the head. The other got his knees and picked him up. I followed them and begged them to leave him alone, but they just laughed. And then they took him outside, tossed him up in the air, and when he hit the ground he wasn’t breathing.”

  “How much did you and Taisto have to drink?” I ask.

  “Four beers.”

  “Tell me the truth. Toxicology will measure the alcohol in your brother’s system.”

  “We weren’t drunk. I swear. We were drinking our fourth beer when it happened. Why did they kill my brother?” He starts to cry again.

  “I wish I knew. I’m sorry. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

  “The securitas, the one who tried CPR. When we were outside and he couldn’t bring Taisto back, he looked up at the bouncers and said, ‘Why did you have to kill one of us instead of one of those goddamned foreigners?’”

  I sigh. This situation makes me sad. The Silver Dollar has a reputation for foreigners showing up at last call. They try to score with blasted Finnish girls. A last-ditch end of the night effort to fuck some random drunk girl. When Finns witness this, especially if the foreigners are black, xenophobia often wells up. Goddamned foreigners come here and take our jobs. They steal our women. Run the cocksuckers out of the country.

  Securitas has become more prominent in the Helsinki law enforcement apparatus over time. The police department has no room for additional officers in its budget. As a result, many businesses, especially bars, and even the public sector, like our transportation system, use rent-a-cops. Some of them are pretty good, military-trained, have even studied to be cops but couldn’t get jobs.