Her Enemy

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “Caring for others can create a kind of power,” I observed, not really knowing exactly what I meant.

  “You said it. I’ve always thought Armi specialized in gynecology because of my issues, and I don’t think purely out of a desire to help. Maybe it was a way to get control somehow.”

  “What does your mother do for work?”

  “She used to work for the Elanto food co-op, but now she’s on disability. Naturally, my family was never good enough for that Hänninen witch. If the police hadn’t arrested Kimmo, my first guess would have been that she strangled Armi to keep her from contaminating their bloodline. It wouldn’t surprise me if one of them was mixed up in Sanna’s death too. They couldn’t stand what a disgrace she was.”

  Mallu sensed my shocked stare and raised her eyes from her coffee cup.

  “You don’t believe me either.” She took a sarcastic tone. “Yeah, I just say whatever pops into my empty head. Everybody knows I’m unstable. Because of the miscarriage—I even go to therapy! And I’m out of work, so I have plenty of time to sit around and dream up crazy stories, right?” Mallu clearly meant her icy tone to echo someone else’s idea of her. I wondered who. And why was Sanna’s ghost constantly looming in the background whenever the subject of Armi’s murder came up?

  “Were you and Armi close?”

  “Close…If you have sisters, then you know how it is. Hate, jealousy, and love all rolled up into one—but probably that last one least of all. We did a lot together, especially lately. Armi seemed to think it was her duty to cheer me up, so she dragged me all over the place with her. Like to the Hänninens’ party the other night. Armi even took me to my appointments with my psychiatrist.”

  Caring is power, I thought again and then wondered what kind of power Armi would have liked to try to use on me. I was surer than ever that she wanted to talk to me about something more than sewing needles and wedding gossip.

  “How long were Armi and Kimmo dating?”

  “About four years. There was a party thrown by the nursing school and Helsinki Tech—they were assuming that nurses are all women and engineers are all men. Of course, they met there! Before Kimmo, Armi only ever had one boyfriend, and he lives in Lapland now, in Rovaniemi.”

  “Was there anything between Armi and Makke Ruosteenoja?”

  “I doubt there was anything on Makke’s side—I always thought he liked his women in a more intense flavor, like Sanna. Armi pitied Makke, so of course she wanted to take care of him. Makke is kind of like a lost puppy dog. Teemu and Makke were in the same class, which is why I know him.”

  Switching gears, I bluntly asked Mallu, “Did they figure out what caused your miscarriage?” Unfazed by my question, she simply lit another cigarette. “There wasn’t anything to figure out. One Saturday, Teemu and I were coming back from Kimmo and Armi’s. It was March, and the roads were slick. Teemu was a little drunk too, since he and Kimmo had been doing shots after their squash match. We were crossing the street in the middle of a block. Suddenly this car came speeding out of nowhere. I jumped out of the way and tripped and fell.”

  “Did the car stop?”

  “I’ll give you one guess. We didn’t think anything happened to me, that I’d only torn my tights and bruised my knees, so we just hobbled the rest of the way home. The bleeding started during the night. Early the next morning, Teemu called Dr. Hellström, and he made us call an ambulance. But there was nothing anyone could do. When I came to from the anesthetic, Dr. Hellström’s red eyes were the first thing I saw. At first I thought he had been crying for me, but he was just getting over the flu.”

  “My God.” I wished I had something else to say, but I couldn’t find the words.

  “You know what the strangest thing was? It happened so fast and it was dark—we couldn’t even tell the color of the car, let alone the make or license plate number, but Teemu swore up and down that Armi was the one driving it.”

  My breath caught. Did Mallu realize she was offering me a motive for Armi’s murder? A motive both for herself and for Teemu?

  “But it couldn’t have been Armi. She didn’t even have a driver’s license, let alone a car. And she and Kimmo were going to bed right after we left. I still can’t understand why Teemu would say something so stupid. Armi was floored when I told her.”

  A clicking sound came from the bathroom as the washing machine began the first rinse cycle. I was baffled. What if Armi had been behind the wheel of that car?

  “Where does your husband live now?”

  “With his parents, in Kirkkonummi. You’ll find the number in the phone book under Taisto Laaksonen. Hold on, let me check to make sure I remembered to put the washing machine hose in the tub so it doesn’t just drain onto the floor.”

  As I poured myself more coffee, I wondered how much I could trust Mallu. Perhaps I should look up Teemu Laaksonen and hear his version of the accident. High speed, Saturday night, and fleeing the scene. Sounded suspiciously like drunk driving.

  Mallu returned with a photo album.

  “I have some pictures of Armi when we were younger, if you want to see.” Mallu laid the album in front of me and began turning pages. “This is Armi when she was six, with our dog.”

  A slightly plump, owlish-looking little girl with braids hugged a decidedly nasty-looking German shepherd. On the facing page, the same little girl with braids and Mallu, much huskier than now, posed next to their bicycles. Unceremoniously skipping past whole pages, Mallu showed me Armi’s confirmation, high school graduation, and college commencement portraits. In a more recent-looking picture on the final page, Mallu weighed at least twenty pounds more than she did now and smiled happily under the arm of some man. A Christmas tree stood in the background. I heard Mallu’s breathing speed up. Without saying a word, she tore the picture from the album, crumpled it into a ball, and hurled it into the trash.

  “That was at Armi and Kimmo’s engagement party. Last Christmas,” Mallu said, pointing to another photograph.

  This picture had the same Christmas tree as the previous photo, with Kimmo and Armi hand-in-hand, showing off their engagement rings. I remembered Antti’s words: “Last November they finally managed to get a bun in the oven.” Last Christmas Mallu was also probably celebrating her pregnancy.

  “Do you know how soon we’ll be able to bury Armi?” Mallu asked, her breathing now steady again.

  “Two weeks from now, at the earliest. The final autopsy can take up to a week, and that’s once they actually start.”

  “I just want to get it over with as soon as possible. That’s the best kind of burial. I would have liked to see my baby too, but they didn’t bring it to me. They said it came apart because they had to scrape me out. They just threw her in the trash or something. Maybe they have some place they bury discarded children. I didn’t ask.”

  Mallu slapped the photo album shut, knocking over her empty coffee cup. It banged to the floor but didn’t break.

  “God, I just keep talking about myself. You wanted to know about Armi, not me,” Mallu said as she straightened up from retrieving the cup. “Did you still have something to ask? If that machine would just finish, I could get back to my parents’ house,” Mallu said tensely. Since this sounded like an invitation to leave, I did.

  When I reached the car, I realized that I hadn’t asked Mallu what she had been up to the previous morning. I would need to pose the same question to Risto, Marita, and Annamari. Makke had been partly at his store and partly at home. It was only a short trip from his apartment to Armi’s neighborhood, and he would pass there on his way to work.

  I decided to drive back to Armi’s house myself. As I could have guessed, blue-and-white police tape and yellow velcro closures blocked off Armi’s backyard, and the front door was sealed. However, no one was on guard.

  Standing outside the vine-covered fence, I looked toward the neighboring residences. To the east were a couple of apartment buildings, the windows of which almost certainly had views into Armi’s backyar
d. Hopefully Ström’s boys had realized this as well and were making the rounds questioning the residents. Although you would hope that if someone saw a strangling in progress, a call to the police would have been forthcoming. But you never know—as a police officer, I had picked up plenty of people passed out in the middle of the street, and even dealt with a few dead bodies, where someone had keeled over from a medical emergency and passersby just walked around them for hours without stopping to help.

  My conversation with Mallu had depressed me and made my conflict with Antti seem petty in comparison. After dropping off the car at the office, I headed toward the police station on my bike. Riding like a bat out of hell, I nearly got run down twice—both times while I was in a crosswalk. Perhaps the urge for self-annihilation was catching. I hadn’t done anything but talk to miserable people for the past two days.

  Ström wasn’t at the station yet, but Kimmo was finally awake. If I had been more on the ball, I would have brought a change of clothing with me. The jeans and shirt Kimmo was wearing looked grubby, and he could have used a shave and a shower. How could a blond man’s stubble be so dark?

  “Hard night?” I asked cautiously.

  “Yeah.” Kimmo shook his head groggily. “During the night it just sort of hit me all at once, knowing that Armi is really gone. And that I’m in jail. And they think I killed her. I never thought these things really happened, at least not in Finland, and definitely not to me. But during the night, I suddenly realized this was happening to me, just like in the movies.” Such helpless terror filled Kimmo’s eyes that I had to look away.

  “We can’t save Armi,” I said cruelly. We would all just have to live with her death. “But if you didn’t do it, we have to save you. We can get you free, probably as early as tomorrow.”

  “Oh, so he’ll be a free man by tomorrow, will he?” Detective Sergeant Ström said in a nasty tone as he entered the room. “Don’t count on it; I have new evidence. Hänninen, you claimed that you and your fiancée didn’t have a fight. Well, I just talked to one of the neighbors, who says differently. You claim you left the house at noon, but this neighbor heard you fighting at one fifteen. How do you explain a witness placing you there more than an hour after you told me you left?”

  I swallowed. This sounded bad. What reason did Kimmo have to lie? He looked utterly petrified.

  “But I know I left then. I had already been home for a while before I heard the one o’clock news on the radio.”

  “Do you have any witnesses? Was your mother home?” Ström asked dubiously.

  “Mom left a note on the table about going into the city with Matti and Mikko.”

  “Did you meet anyone you know along the way, a neighbor maybe?” I asked before Ström could continue his attack. I hoped to God that someone could verify Kimmo’s movements. Did Ström really have a reliable witness who could nail Kimmo to the wall like this, or was he just trying to bluff and make Kimmo contradict himself?

  Kimmo thought for a moment. “I don’t remember seeing anyone,” he said, sounding depressed.

  “You should probably send your boys around to interview the Hänninens’ neighbors in case any of them noticed Kimmo,” I suggested to Ström.

  That was a mistake.

  “Goddamn it, Maria, don’t you tell me how to do my job! I went to the same goddamn police academy you did. Keep your opinions to yourself, or I’ll have your ass thrown out of here!”

  I had been kind and empathetic enough for one day already.

  “No, you watch yourself, Detective Sergeant Pertti Ström, or you’re going to be up to your ears in shit. Is your closure rate down on your cases? Is that why you’re in such a hurry to pin this murder on Kimmo? Worried about hitting your numbers for that next promotion, are we?”

  Both on our feet now and clenching our fists, Ström and I stared at each other like two fighting cocks. If Ström said one more irritating word, he was going to get the Legal Code of Finland Volume III across the forehead. Kimmo and the officer recording the interview gaped at us in surprise.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Ström finally said.

  I tried to calm down, even though what I really wanted was to challenge him to duel. I knew I couldn’t best him at pistols, but what about swords? Our bad dynamic had been the same at the academy; we were constantly getting on each other’s nerves.

  Perhaps asking Eki to represent Kimmo would be a better idea after all.

  “I want to know what grounds this witness has for saying I was still at Armi’s place at one fifteen,” Kimmo demanded, surprisingly clearheadedly.

  “I don’t have to tell you that! And you keep quiet, Kallio! You know I’m right.”

  The recording officer grimaced at me apologetically behind Ström’s back. I felt better. Maybe we were three against one here.

  Ström went through Kimmo’s account repeatedly until we were all growing impatient. Finally, he changed the subject.

  “If your bride-to-be didn’t like this pervert stuff you were into, then why did you have the rubber suit with you at her house?”

  I had wondered the same thing. This one detail didn’t line up with Kimmo’s otherwise sensible story.

  “When I picked up Armi on Friday to take her to Risto’s house, I was coming from the city. I had the suit with me because I was looking for the right kind of product for it. You have to condition rubber, and I didn’t want to use silicone because it makes the surface so sticky. I was looking for something more like a furniture wax. When we left to go to Risto’s, I left my stuff at Armi’s because I was supposed to stay the night.”

  “Ah, so. Rubber suit polish…” I stalled. Christ, this guy was not helping me out. “Where did you buy it?”

  “Stockmann, in the home furnishings department.”

  “You went in there, asking for rubber-sex-suit polish?”

  “I didn’t ask anyone anything. I just discreetly tried a few on the suit and then paid for it at the register.”

  “Do you still have the bottle and receipt?” I asked quickly.

  “The bottle is probably in a bag in my room, and the receipt should be there too.”

  Ström mumbled something like, “We’ll check on that,” and changed the subject.

  “OK, so since you’re one of these perverts who gets off on wearing rubber, tell me: Are you a sadist or a masochist? What is it you want to do to women?”

  The recording officer grimaced at me again, and Kimmo blushed.

  “Ström, really? Kimmo, you can answer the first question and ignore the second,” I said.

  “Masochist,” Kimmo said quietly. “And I don’t want to do anything to anyone,” he continued, ignoring me. “I want things to be done…”

  “Such as…?” The curiosity in Ström’s voice was poorly concealed. Sexually repressed as he was, of course the tawdry aspects of the case would interest him. A lot of people consider police officers sadists; perhaps in Ström’s case, they were right.

  “Is this really relevant? We’ve already established that he’s a masochist,” I grumbled.

  Ström gave in surprisingly easily.

  “Can anyone confirm that you’re specifically a masochist? Some old girlfriend, a whore, whatever?”

  “Ström!” I yelled.

  “Well, I’ve talked a lot with people at my club, my S&M club,” Kimmo continued. “They could probably tell you.”

  “They who? We need specifics.”

  Kimmo was silent for a moment, then said, “I don’t want to get them mixed up with the police, especially if you’d treat them with as little respect as you have me.”

  Kimmo wouldn’t give names or say anything else about the club. I tried to express to him that gallantry was pointless, but Kimmo kept his mouth stubbornly shut.

  “If you don’t give me any names, I’m not going to believe a word you say about this masochism thing. I’m going to work from the assumption that whipping and strangling women is your thing, and that’s exactly what you did to your girlfrie
nd,” Ström said.

  Here I broke in again. “Markku Ruosteenoja. Makke. There’s your witness. Address Hakarinne 6, stairwell B. He can tell you that Kimmo is a masochist.”

  “And who is this Ruosteenoja? Hänninen’s boyfriend or something?”

  “No—his dead sister’s boyfriend.”

  “So was your sister the sadist then?” Ström asked Kimmo, and had the door not opened at that moment, Ström definitely would have gotten that book in the face. The person at the door was the duty officer, coming to tell Ström about a call he needed to take. After being gone for less than thirty seconds, Ström returned and declared the interview over, ordered Kimmo taken back to his cell, and left the room. I stuck my tongue out at Ström’s back, which made the other officer smirk. He looked like a grown-up Dennis the Menace.

  “Kimmo, tell me the name of at least one person from the club. I promise to treat them right.”

  “Elina Kataja, but she goes by ‘Angel.’ She’s one of the club’s organizers. I don’t remember her number, but it’s in the phone book.”

  “Let’s go, Hänninen,” Dennis the Menace said gently, throwing me a farewell smile. He nodded toward the table, where, for some reason, he had left his interview notes. As soon as the two men left, I flipped back a few pages, to a page from the day before, and there it was: the name and address of Ström’s key witness, which I quickly wrote down. Apparently, Ström’s methods had begun to aggravate more than just me.

  6

  When I arrived home, Antti’s parents’ car was in the driveway. Completely exhausted, I didn’t feel the slightest bit like socializing, but I had to go inside.

  “Hi, Maria,” Marjatta Sarkela yelled from the kitchen. “Is Kimmo out yet?”

  “No, unfortunately not. We’ll see tomorrow what the judge decides. I think he’ll get out,” I said as I entered the kitchen, where Antti sat with his parents over tea.

  “We brought Matti and Mikko home and thought we’d stay over tonight so we can run some errands tomorrow morning,” Tauno Sarkela explained. “Hopefully we won’t be in the way.”