“Hi,” Lind said in a friendly tone. “I’m Nea Lind. Was it you who called me?”
The girl nodded timidly, pulled the door in to undo the safety chain, and opened it again.
“I’m not sure about this after all,” the girl said.
Too late for that, Lind thought and stepped in. The apartment was sparsely decorated. Jackets on a coat rack and shoes all over the floor filled the entryway.
The girl wore jeans and a gray New York sweatshirt. Her hair was in a ponytail and her skinny face lacked makeup.
“I don’t want any trouble…”
“You won’t be in trouble,” Lind assured her. “On the contrary.”
The attorney slid past the girl. Two doors on the right led to the bedrooms. One had a queen bed, the other a twin. The latter was decorated for a teenage girl. Lind took off her coat, and the girl walked into the living room on the left and turned off the TV.
The first thing Lind noticed was a psychedelic Frank Zappa poster. A coffee table from Ikea sat in front of the sofa, and the TV was tucked in a Lundia shelf unit on the opposite wall. In front of the window in the back of the room was a worn-out black armchair. Lind couldn’t see behind the TV shelf, but she assumed the kitchen was there.
“Where’s your mother?” Lind asked.
“She went to the bar,” the girl said. “She won’t be home before midnight,” she added and sat down on the couch. She bent her long legs and wrapped her arms around her knees.
Lind grabbed her notebook and sat in the armchair. It squeaked when she sat down.
“It’s pretty ancient,” the girl giggled.
Lind tried to laugh, but was just relieved that the chair hadn’t collapsed under her. Sini Rentola-Lammi had called her when she was talking with Detective Takamäki in Restaurant Sevilla in Hotel Pasila.
In the absence of a tape recorder, her written notes would have to do.
“Let’s start from the beginning, okay?” Lind suggested. That way she could see if the girl would tell the same story.
The girl nodded.
“Why did you call me?”
“I saw your TV interview. That’s why I called.”
“That was a while ago. Why’d you wait until now to call?”
“I wasn’t going to call at all. Then I changed my mind—I wanted to help Jorma.”
“Why me and not the police?”
“I haven’t exactly gotten along with the cops,” the girl said with a small laugh.
The feeling is mutual, Lind thought, and went on with her questions.
“What do you mean you want to help Jorma?”
“He’s a suspect for Laura’s murder…”
“Killing,” Lind corrected quickly.
“Whatever. But I don’t think Jorma could’ve done it that morning.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I told you on the phone. He was here, with me.”
“Last Wednesday morning?”
“Yes,” Sini said. “He got here around nine thirty and left when he got a phone call.”
Lind wanted to ask what Jorma was doing here in the apartment, but she was afraid that then the girl wouldn’t want to tell her everything. They’d get back to that.
“How do you remember the time of day?”
“I was supposed to leave for school then. School started at ten. But I didn’t go.”
“Didn’t Jorma call you beforehand?”
“He didn’t call much, he just rang the doorbell. Sometimes he’d come in using his key. That’s why I always keep the safety chain on when I’m here alone.”
“Did he know you were home alone?”
“He probably saw my mother leave. She gets on the bus right outside his window.”
Lind was making notes.
“Jorma came here when you were supposed to leave for school. And then what?”
“Then what?” Sini repeated, irritated. “We drank coffee and talked, and then he wanted to do it.”
“Did you do it?” Lind asked, embarrassed by the direct language.
“Yeah.”
“Were you in love with him, or infatuated or something?”
“I don’t know,” Sini said, shaking her head. “I guess there’s something macho about him. But he gave me money sometimes, and presents.”
“What presents?”
“Well, all kinds of stuff. You know.”
“I don’t know.”
“Sometimes it was clothes and things, other times something else.”
“What else?”
“You know,” the girl said, evading the question. “Wine and stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“Are you some kind of cop, pressing me like this?” Sini asked, annoyed.
Lind looked at the girl intently and said, “No. I’m an attorney trying to find out what happened and why, so I can help Jorma.”
“Sometimes he’d bring hash and speed.”
“Did you use it together?”
“Sometimes. And if there was enough, I’d sell to my friends at school.”
Lind looked at the girl.
“You may want to keep that from the cops.”
“Do I have to talk to them, too?”
“If you want to help Jorma,” Lind said, nodding, “you need to tell them all this.”
“Do I have to?”
“If you want to help,” Lind said. “One more thing about the phone call Jorma got.”
“Yeah?”
“Who called?”
“I’m not sure, but it had something to do with his job. Someone wanted him to go unlock a door. But he got another phone call, too. Maybe, I’m not sure.”
“Okay. And he didn’t go anywhere in between?”
“No, he was here the whole time.”
Lind kept her eyes on the girl, who stared back at her.
“Jorma’s fingerprints were found on the power button of Laura Vatanen’s coffeemaker, which was left on. Laura’s mother had been there to clean the apartment before Laura was killed. How is that possible if Jorma was here the whole time?”
“On Laura’s coffeemaker? Ha, that’s simple.”
“What do you mean? Lind asked.
“Laura had CP or something, right?”
“Yeah,” Lind said.
“I’d go there sometimes for some wine, and she always wanted to make sure nobody turned the coffeemaker on or off by the switch. It had to be plugged in and then unplugged, for fire safety. Same thing with the dishwasher. She was so scared she might burn to death in her own apartment.”
“So nobody used the switch on the coffeemaker?”
“Right,” Sini said, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. “Everyone who went there knew they had to use the plug.”
“Jorma knew it, too?”
“Well, he’d go there to have sex with her, so he absolutely knew,” Sini said in a huff.
It crossed the attorney’s mind that the girl might be the killer. She had an obvious motive.
“How did you take it?”
“I didn’t plan my life around Jorma. He brought me gifts and that extra stuff. I didn’t care about him.”
“One more thing,” Lind added. “You said Jorma was here. Is there anything here that would prove it?”
“You mean like a camera?”
“Yeah, or something.”
“I dunno. Guess his fingerprints would be here. And he made himself a sandwich and cut his finger. I cleaned up the blood, but I’ve seen on CSI how they can find prints even if the place has been cleaned spotless. I gave him a towel that I borrowed from Laura one time.”
CHAPTER 23
SATURDAY, 8:15 P.M.
KANNELMÄKI, HELSINKI
A dark-haired guitarist in a hoodie with eagles on it played a three-chord blues piece in the corner of the bar. From the skinny-faced singer’s raspy voice, Suhonen could make out the words “full moon…déjà vu…what would it be.”
The acoustic guitar resonated through the loudspeake
rs, and a few patrons danced to the melancholy songs. It was as if the Saturday night crowd longed to bring back the good old days of lost dreams and better times with swigs of beer and ciders. The objective was to make everything seem better.
Suhonen didn’t recognize the song; it sounded like it might’ve been an original, or maybe something from Crosby, Stills & Nash. The place was bigger than a bar, but smaller than a restaurant. The menu on the chalkboard promised microwaved herring casserole for eight euros.
Opposite the bar was a window that would’ve looked out into the mall parking lot, if it hadn’t been covered with ad posters. The musician sat in the back corner.
The song ended, and the singer started another. Suhonen recognized the tune and the harmonica; it was Bruce Springsteen’s “The River,” but he couldn’t make out the whiny, mumbled words. Suhonen glanced at the singer just to be sure, and it wasn’t Keith Richards.
Suhonen walked straight to the bar, his eyes nonchalantly sweeping the place. He saw that his entrance had been noticed, which was exactly what Suikkanen, his alias, wanted. Suikkanen never came into the bar for his own pleasure, but only to clear things up or maybe mess them up even more.
Suhonen saw four empty seats at the bar and picked one on the end—the one Suikkanen would’ve chosen. He paid for his coffee with a two-euro coin, and the bartender told him the price included milk and a refill.
Closest to him were two bloated women in their forties—a blonde and a brunette—with beer mugs in front of them. They reminded Suhonen of two girls in his high school in Lahti: Tuija and Elle. This is what they’d look like now, he imagined, though at the time all the boys had crushes on them and the other girls envied them. With a chuckle, Suhonen reminisced about his crush on Tuija. He sipped his coffee, which tasted as bitter as the memory, and that was not unlike the present.
The crooner began a new number, which Suhonen recognized immediately by the intro and words he could even understand: The Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” It, too, brought back days of his youth in Lahti, and memories of Salmela. Eero had been better on the guitar, so Suhonen was stuck singing for their garage band. It hadn’t sounded great, but they tried, and dreamed of singing at the Tavastia Bar in downtown Helsinki, and even at a packed Wembley.
Suhonen wiped his face with his hand and let his eyes wander. The place was gloomy. The man on the barstool in a leather jacket wasn’t looking for anyone anymore. Maybe I do belong here, after all, Suhonen thought. While his work was different from the people around him, he really didn’t have any more of a past or a future. He hung around the likes of Salmela, Rautis, and Saarnikangas, buddies he tried to take care of, and wondered if they even were friends. He was sure of Salmela, but to the others he was just a nice cop who looked the other way occasionally. He wouldn’t play whack-a-mole on them. And there were the Elle and Tuija types; Suhonen had no qualms using them, if it meant solving a serious crime. He wasn’t interested in their backgrounds, their present, or their future, only in knowing if they could be useful to him as a police officer.
Be useful to him as a police officer… Suhonen mulled over the phrase that seemed to describe his whole life. Not long after Takamäki had lost his wife, Kaarina, in a car accident, he and Suhonen sat in Takamӓki’s sauna and talked long about what it meant to be a cop.
Takamäki had a garbage collector theory—how some people had to clean up after others. Garbage collectors picked up people’s trash and policemen picked up trashy people. It was a fine theory, but Suhonen wanted to know why it had to be him and Takamäki who picked up the trashy people.
“Why us?” he had asked. He wanted to know why he couldn’t be a salesman driving a Nissan, selling stuff to people whether they needed it or not. Why the hell was he the one who drove a piece of junk with license plates smashed beyond recognition, seeking, nursing, and snatching up crooks?
Takamäki had wondered why Suhonen had chosen the police academy in the first place.
“I didn’t have anything better to do,” Suhonen had replied lazily and turned the same question around to his boss. Takamäki didn’t take the bait, but kept pressing Suhonen, bolstered by half a dozen beers.
“Why the police academy?”
“I dunno,” Suhonen said.
“You don’t know? You must have had a reason.”
“Maybe I wanted to help people.”
“But you’re not helping them—you’re sending them to prison. Accident victims go to the hospital where doctors, not the police, help them. And the ones who end up in the cemetery don’t care.”
“Then I make criminals pay for their actions,” Suhonen had said.
“The hell you do,” Takamäki grunted. “What do you mean, pay? Let’s take manslaughter for example. A person kills someone and they sit in prison for five years—just five—for taking away the rest of someone’s life. And part of the sentence is spent in a low security facility or on parole. I think it’s horrifying.”
“So I couldn’t have gone into the academy wanting to help people or just because?” Suhonen had asked, cracking open another can of beer. “And wanting to hurt people isn’t a good enough reason, either?”
“Nope, it isn’t,” Takamäki had said. “In that case you would’ve gone into the military.”
“I had to pay my bills?” Suhonen tried.
“On this salary?” Takamäki had pointed out with a laugh. “And it couldn’t have been the women because there weren’t any in the academy at the time.”
Suhonen had given up. “So tell me why.”
“I don’t know. I really don’t,” Takamäki had said, rubbing his face with both hands.
After a minute’s silence Suhonen had asked, “Did you and your friends ever play cops and robbers?”
“Of course, all kids play that.”
“Who were the cops and who were the robbers?” Suhonen had asked.
“Jape and Eki were usually robbers,” Takamäki recalled. “Pauli and Pete were cops. There were others, but those four are the ones I remember.”
“Why was that?”
“Jape and Eki could run the fastest. It wouldn’t have been that fun to have the fastest kids be the cops—they would’ve caught everyone right away.”
“There’s your answer to why we’re cops,” Suhonen had said with a smirk.
Suhonen’s thoughts jumped back to the present when a familiar face walked into the bar. The bar singer crooned Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond.” He only sang two-minute pieces, either because that’s all he knew or because it was the attention span of the audience.
The familiar face was that of Sergei Makarov. His blond hair looked neither like a hockey player’s long mane nor the crew cut of a Spetnaz officer from St. Petersburg. It had an odd-looking part in the middle and didn’t quite reach his ears. The man was of medium height and well-proportioned—skinnier than the average Finn.
Makarov wasn’t likely to remember Suhonen, and probably hadn’t met Suikkanen. Suhonen had seen plenty of action, but he always avoided situations where people could recognize him as a cop. Over the years the Corner Pub, his old hangout, had turned into a place where he was starting to get recognized, and for an undercover detective that was a bad idea.
Makarov slid between tables back to the musician’s corner where two men were sitting. Suhonen didn’t recognize the man facing him. The other man looked familiar from the back, but Suhonen didn’t know why.
Suhonen’s thoughts returned to the sauna night discussion at Takamӓki’s house. Takamäki’s questions were clumsy, but he was relentless. These days the persistent detective lieutenant could definitely outrun Suhonen in any distance over four hundred yards.
Takamäki had accepted Suhonen’s cops and robbers explanation, but Suhonen wasn’t satisfied with it himself—he had always been the robber in the game. He was the fastest kid in the complex; a friend’s father had once clocked him running sixty meters in less than nine seconds. Salmela had run it in eleven. Why,
then, was Suhonen the cop in real life, and Salmela the robber? But Suhonen decided he really didn’t care; he was a police officer and his job was to enforce the law. In any case, he was pleased he had solved Takamӓki’s conundrum.
The singer belted a Guns N’ Roses ballad from twenty years ago. Suhonen thought all of Axl Rose’s self-absorbed songs sounded the same, and he couldn’t make out enough of the lyrics to figure out which one it was.
Suhonen finished his cold coffee and the bartender glanced at him to see if he wanted a refill. Shaking his head, he got up, still wondering why he had chosen this career.
Then he dove into the role he’d prepared for from the minute he stepped into the bar. He was Suikkanen from Lahti, a gangster void of a conscience. Not an old-time romantic, nor a modern maniac, but something in between. He was here to take care of things for a buddy in trouble.
Suhonen kept an eye on the three men talking in the corner. It was obvious they weren’t here for a Kannelmӓki Neighborhood Association meeting. Makarov was a hardened criminal, and the others had the same look.
He had several options for approaching the table. The best one would’ve been to walk up carrying a pump-action shotgun, but that wasn’t feasible now. Apologetic wouldn’t work either, so he decided to take the middle road.
Suhonen was ten feet away when Makarov noticed him and looked up. The men immediately stopped talking, and the other two turned to stare at Suhonen. He recognized the third guy as Jaakko Niskala, and saw that Niskala recognized him as Suikkanen. At least Suhonen hoped so. He had left the scene in the Alamo Bar well before the police had showed up to arrest Korpivaara, Niskala, and two others.
Makarov had a quizzical look on his face.
“Hey,” Suhonen said with a nod. “Can I join you?”
“Do I know you?” Makarov asked, suspiciously.
“I know this guy. His name is Suikkanen,” Niskala said, in an attempt to gain credibility, as he was clearly the lowest-ranked in the group.
Suhonen smiled at Niskala. It was extremely helpful to be recognized as one of the criminals and not have to convince the group.
“Good memory. You still have some brain cells left.”
The wisecrack startled Niskala but he didn’t say anything. Suhonen quickly estimated the level of threat. He wouldn’t be in immediate danger from Makarov and Niskala, but he wasn’t sure about the older guy wearing a parka.
Darling Page 17