“I went to ask Meritta if she could let it be. I would’ve been able to get the missing money from somewhere. I tried to get her to understand Matti. Last winter things were so tight. First the car broke down, and then Matti had to spend thousands on dental work. Matti was panicking that he couldn’t work anymore. We just didn’t have money for canvases and paints. The art camp grant money came at the end of January, and Matti thought he would have plenty of time to pay it all back before the summer. Only Matti and Meritta could see the artists’ association accounts, so no one else would have ever needed to know.”
“So why did Meritta get uptight about it?”
“Because they actually needed the money at the end of April to rent class space and buy plane tickets for a teacher to come from Denmark, and when Meritta went to the bank, the account had fifteen thousand less than she expected. Meritta rushed over to our house and started yelling about how she knew city politics used to work like this but that she wasn’t going to be party to any more fraud. If the money didn’t show up in the account immediately, she was going to contact the police.”
In the previous municipal elections, Meritta had campaigned on the need to raise the level of integrity in local politics, to stop overlooking little infractions and open up every decision for public scrutiny. Irregularities in the finances of her own artists’ association would have been unbearable for her in more ways than one. I thought of the millions thrown to the wind in the Saastamoinen Construction bankruptcy scam and almost laughed. That was taxpayer money too.
“So what did Meritta say to you?”
“She said that Matti must be pretty pathetic to send his wife to clean up his mess. That he would have to handle it himself.”
I understood Meritta’s comment perfectly, since this situation was exactly the same thing. Ella had come to tell me about Matti’s blunder because he didn’t have the nerve.
“Did Matti go back to the Old Mine to talk to Meritta?”
“I don’t know…I haven’t dared ask him.”
Ella had never been the crying type; this was maybe only the second time I had ever seen tears in her eyes. The first was when one of our classmates had died in a car accident during our sophomore year. That time we had wailed together, but these tears were Ella’s alone. All I did was move the roll of paper towels a little closer to her.
“So I need to talk to Matti,” I said.
“He isn’t home today. He’s in Lieksa teaching a class. He won’t be home until tomorrow morning.”
“Tell him to call. I’ll notify Detective Sergeant Järvisalo that I’ve spoken to you. And don’t be so sad. If this is really just about the misappropriation of fifteen thousand marks, no one is going to be charged with anything.”
But I could see in Ella’s eyes that she was afraid there could be something more.
“By the way, I saw Johnny that night too, but I couldn’t tell you about it until now,” she said as she headed out the door.
After working for twelve days straight, not having to go into work felt unnatural. Saturday was market day in town, but I wanted to enjoy my solitude. So I fetched the papers, drank another cup of coffee, and decided to go walking in the forest. Mikko stayed to bask in the sun on the sauna steps.
Uncle Pena’s farm was located in the center of a thick evergreen forest. Behind a cow pasture now overgrown with trees rose a cliff several dozen feet high. Climbing to the top, I waved to the Tower gleaming on the horizon. From such a distance it looked like a forgotten toy in a sand box. Turning, I looked toward the fragrant swamp on the other side of the rocks, where during the best summers you could find cloudberries and later in the year, cranberries. We almost never saw moose in these parts, so I was surprised to spot an unusually large gray-brown bull rubbing his antlers on a pine tree at the edge of the bog. I sat down on the rock to watch it.
At his parents’ cabin in Inkoo, Antti and I had spent hours watching moose go about their business. There was always something calming about watching the controlled movements of such a large animal. Perhaps I wasn’t as urban as I imagined myself to be when I moved to Helsinki. Just living in Espoo had reminded me how much I missed hiking in the woods.
Where would I be living a year from now? I was getting tired of constantly moving. And finding a job was going to be an even bigger problem. If only Antti was here with me to assure me that we could figure out how to make everything in both of our lives fit together. And to help me forget about Johnny, who the police were searching for right at that very moment. I missed Antti so much. His face, his voice, his warm skin against mine…Only the knowledge that it was four thirty in the morning in Chicago prevented me from rushing to the phone.
The moose raised its head and looked toward me. The wind must have carried my scent to it. I felt like moving closer, but I didn’t want to spook it. Antti would have joked that if I met a bear in the woods, I probably would assume it was more afraid of me than I was of it.
And what if Antti and I did get married? Lately, I had seen more than enough examples of disastrous marriages. Weren’t Antti and I the same as Meritta and Mårten Flöjt? Wasn’t our work the most important thing to both of us? We’d at least have to think carefully about having children. We were sure to fight constantly over who had to watch them, just like the Virtanens. But Antti and I could always sense each other’s need for space, and we wanted the same things. What happened to Johnny and Tuija couldn’t happen to us, right? And at the very least our marriage would never turn into a business partnership like the Kivinens’.
But was I really ready for it?
On the way back to the house, I collected a bouquet of buttercups and bellflowers from the most open corner of the pasture for the living room table, putting my thoughts in order as I did so. In my mind I had created a sort of ranking of suspects, with Johnny unfortunately at the top. Matti was a strong second, and Kivinen had climbed into third.
After leaving a blank space in my list, I added Tuija’s name. Just out of spite. And then, to be honest, I added Ella too. She was extremely aggressive in the way she handled her husband’s business. If she had been mad enough, she could have pushed Meritta off the Tower to protect Matti. I wasn’t so sure about Jaska’s murder though.
And still the list wasn’t complete. I had to add Barbro Kivinen. Maybe she hadn’t been as unconcerned about her husband’s relationship with Meritta as she led us to believe. Somehow it was easy imagining her hitting a blackmailer like Jaska over the head with a wrench. Or would a silver-handled umbrella have been more her style?
Finally I also added Kaisa to the list, although I had previously ruled her out. She could have murdered Meritta out of jealously, but what about Jaska? Jaska could be pretty damn infuriating, and I had wanted to smack him upside the head plenty of times myself. And I could imagine the taunts he might have used about Kaisa’s infatuation with Meritta. I did decide to leave Aniliina off my list entirely. She just wasn’t strong enough to have pushed Meritta off the Tower, not to mention dragging Jaska’s body to the Sump.
So here I was again, suspecting every person I knew of murder. Putting the flowers in a vase, I noticed the atrocious state of the living room floor and decided to do some cleaning. At least I could easily put that in order.
Later I cycled slowly into the center of town. The streets had emptied after all the stores closed, and only a tattered banner in front of city hall remained of the bustling market that had filled the square. I wasn’t going to make it through the day without visiting work either. Since I was in the area, I dropped off my bike in the police station garage and stopped in to ask Timonen, who was manning the duty desk, whether there had been any sightings of Johnny. His answer was a baffled no.
When Koivu jumped off the bus from Joensuu, the first words out of his mouth were, “I need beer.” We strode the few hundred yards to the Copper Cup in silence. Only once his lager and my highball were on the way did he start to speak.
“I’m going to look at an apartmen
t tomorrow. It’s already vacant.”
“It’s looking like that?”
“You’re goddamn right it is! Guess what? Anita’s already seeing someone new.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said, even though I could tell from Koivu’s eyes he was serious.
The waitress brought the drinks, and Koivu paid for both as if by accident, but I knew I’d have my chance, guessing we’d have at least three rounds over the course of the night.
“And that’s not all. Guess who the dude is,” Koivu said after downing a quarter of his glass of beer. “Toni ‘the Commander’ Raiskio. The leader of that skinhead gang.”
“What? You’ve got to be shitting me. She seriously fell for the guy while he was lying in the hospital with a knife wound?”
“This isn’t Anita’s first time two-timing. When we started dating she was still seeing this guy named Sakari, and they started out exactly the same way. I knew all about it, but I thought it would be different with me.” Koivu took another sip of beer. “And with a complete asshat like that!”
“Was he the one who stabbed the Somali refugee?”
“No, that was another guy, but this Raiskio freak show definitely egged him on. And Anita thinks they’re in the right. I don’t care what kind of a dump that apartment is tomorrow, I’m moving in! I don’t want to see that head case ever again!”
Koivu had already emptied his first pint. He wasn’t a heavy drinker by any means, so I was already preparing myself for the pleasure of eventually lugging his entire two hundred pounds into a taxi and onto my couch out at the farm. In other words, I needed to take it easy on the booze.
“And now I’m sitting here in this crappy bar waiting for some stripper…” Koivu suddenly started laughing uncontrollably, almost hysterically, but I didn’t think the tears in his eyes were from joy.
I knew that Anita had been his first serious romance. He was twenty-six, good-looking, and had a steady job. And he was a genuinely nice guy. Plenty of women would fight for a chance to go out with him, but I guessed he probably wouldn’t believe me if I told him that right now. I ordered him another pint and let him continue wallowing in his misery.
Gradually, the bar began filling with people. Miss Miranda was going to perform twice, at nine thirty and eleven o’clock. The audience was even more male-dominated than usual, and I was glad to have Koivu with me. Otherwise I would’ve felt like a sitting duck for every come-on artist in the place. Then I realized how horrible the situation was. If a thick-skinned woman like me didn’t dare go to a strip bar without a male escort, then what about more sensitive girls? Arpikylä didn’t offer that many choices for a night out.
Shortly before nine thirty, I realized that I didn’t need to monitor the legality of the striptease after all, since the local police force was well represented without me. Antikainen and Hopponen were sitting at a table in the front row with glasses of beer and seemed taken aback when Koivu and I waved to them.
After his initial burst of speed downing the first two pints, Koivu had slowed down and was approaching the bottom of his third. I ordered anise Pernod and a pitcher of water. Antikainen came over to our table to sit for a while, clearly on a mission to see whether Koivu and I were getting romantic. We did our best to encourage his suspicions, with me explaining loudly that Koivu was coming to my place for the night and Koivu saying at least twice how much he had liked taking a sauna with me the time before. I was glad to see that his playfulness was returning, even though Monday was likely to be a difficult day at work. My understanding was that Antikainen had already concluded that I also had been in a relationship with Johnny.
It was easy to understand how Meritta could have earned a reputation as a wanton woman around here. That train of thought made something else flit through my mind briefly, but then I lost hold of it just as quickly when a female voice began whispering suggestively over the speakers. Antikainen suddenly disappeared back to his front-row seat. The lights dimmed. The restaurant owner, who had been watching the night’s events from behind the bar, took the stage.
“Alright, boys. Now we’re going to make Arpikylä history. I give you Miss Miranda!”
The husky female voice grew louder, and the restaurant lights dimmed even more. Then Miss Miranda herself stepped onstage in a pink sequined dress, boa, and tall boots. In the flesh, she looked younger and even more beautiful than in the blurry pictures on the flyer, and she was a nimble dancer. Rather early on in the show, her dress slipped off, revealing a sequined pink thong bikini. After prancing around for a while like that, Miss Miranda threw off her top, exposing regulation-size breasts. As the tempo of the music increased, she ran her feathered boa over her body lasciviously and then passed it between her legs, smiling in satisfaction, before stomping on it with her boots.
Something about the performance was so ludicrous that I almost laughed out loud. If Miranda had been a man, I definitely would have whistled and shouted to cheer him on. But this audience sat as rigid as if they were in church pews, with their eyes glossed over and their expressions focused. In the crowd I could pick out many of the town’s “failures to launch” and other men alone by circumstance. Some had stayed to till the family land while the girls moved away to educate themselves. Others were stuck on the unemployment rolls or tied to their mothers’ apron strings. Of course some of the prominent men of the city were also in attendance, including the vice chairman of the city council and a clutch of small-time entrepreneurs from the industrial park. One of them even had a mortified-looking wife in tow. A couple of my parents’ colleagues nodded to me, shamefaced, as if caught red-handed.
Someone who had clearly seen a stripper before slipped a twenty into the girl’s almost nonexistent panties, extracting a few hoots from the audience. When Miranda shoved her gyrating lap in Antikainen’s face, his jaw almost hit the floor.
Finally Miss Miranda ditched her G-string too and settled down on all fours to shake her hips to the beat of the music. At this the laughter building inside me became too much, and I had to cover my mouth with my shirtsleeve to stifle a guffaw. Koivu put a finger to his lips, but I could see the laughter in his eyes too. Finally the music accelerated to its climax, and then the stage went dark. When the lights came back on, Miranda was gone.
A moment passed before the applause began, and then some in the audience started calling for Miranda to come back on, at which point the owner announced that the next performance would be at eleven o’clock.
“What did you think?” I asked Koivu.
“She’s a pretty girl. A snake would have been more interesting than that feathery thing though.”
“You should go suggest that,” I said just before a vaguely familiar, moderately drunk man flopped down at our table.
“Hi, Maria! You remember me, don’t you? Maukka Härkönen. Is this your husband?” Without waiting for a reply, he stuck out his hand to Koivu and explained, “I played soccer on the same team with Maria when we were kids.”
Yes, I remembered Maukka, although the bloated man with the five-o’clock shadow in front of me didn’t bear much resemblance to the skinny, pimply-faced kid who had been in my junior-high class. Maukka had been one of the least pleasant boys on the team, one of the ones who was quickest to tackle me when he couldn’t get the ball any other way and then take every opportunity to feel me up. If I protested, he would proclaim that girls couldn’t play soccer because they always threw temper tantrums about getting tackled.
“I hear you’re a cop now and you’re working Jaska Korhonen’s murder case. Will you buy me a beer if I tell you what I know?”
“Tell me first,” I said skeptically, since the police had already interviewed the town drunks.
“You too good for us now or something? Well, OK,” Maukka continued, glancing worriedly at Koivu, “I’ll tell you anyway.”
When he patted my knee with his grubby hand, I felt the hair on my arms stand up.
“I don’t feel much like talking to the local cops. They
’d just drag me off to the slammer like they done last winter, even though all I did was take a dump in the bank’s ATM. Well, I was here last Saturday and just happened to be in the john at the same time as Jaska. We were talking about his sister’s murder and he said he was smarter than the pigs and knew who really did it. He said he’d outsmarted them one night by snatching something from his sister’s house that proved who murdered her. He even used gloves so the pigs couldn’t get his fingerprints. And guess what, Maria,” he said, pushing his stinking face right up to mine, “the murderer had promised Jaska a whole pile of money if he kept his mouth shut. Tens of thousands.”
Just as I had suspected. Oh, Jaska, you feckless idiot! He hadn’t even taken the key to the person he was blackmailing. He must have turned greedy, maybe thinking he could use it to double his take. Or was the important thing something other than the mysterious key?
“Did Jaska tell you anything about the murderer? He didn’t mention a name, did he?”
“No, he wouldn’t reveal the source of the money,” Maukka said bitterly. “He did say something though—that he wouldn’t have thought a wussy like that could have killed his sister.”
Wussy? There was a typical Jaska expression for you. It was also typical that he had underestimated his blackmailer. Maybe that meant it was a woman. Ella? Barbro Kivinen? Imagining Jaska calling Kaisa a “wussy” was difficult, but I could imagine plenty of other inappropriate words coming out of his mouth, especially if he had known about Kaisa’s sexual orientation. He couldn’t have meant Aniliina though.
Or maybe it was more likely he meant a man by using that particular word. Matti and Johnny definitely would have qualified as wussies in Jaska’s eyes, and he had spoken with disdain about Kivinen as well. So it could’ve been anyone.
“So is that enough for a beer?” Maukka asked hopefully.
After I ordered him his pint, I instructed him to come in to the station Monday morning to tell his story officially. Then I hoped he would leave. Instead he remained sitting next to me with his fleshy thigh touching my leg. Being pressed between him and the wall was revolting.
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