The Nightingale Murder

by Leena Lehtolainen

  Pastor Pihlaja elicited smiles in the congregation as she described how irritated Allu was about the sensation caused by The Da Vinci Code. “Don’t people know D. H. Lawrence anymore! In its time, The Man Who Died was the great rebellion against the doctrines of the church, but I think it’s nice to imagine Jesus not being deprived of all earthly pleasures.” Apparently Pastor Pihlaja trusted that mourners gathered to see off Allu Viitanen wouldn’t complain to the diocese about her radical opinions. Tears welled in my eyes simply because this was just how Allu would have wanted herself to be talked about. The selection for the hymn, “Spirit of Truth, Show Us the Way,” was also very Allu. I hadn’t sung it in years, but now I realized how well the words applied to my own work too.

  Anna-Maija Mustajoki was there, and she laid flowers on the casket with three other women, who were all sobbing openly. Katri and I were more restrained. Leena was weepy but calm. She’d had time to accept what had happened. Allu would be cremated later, so after the presentation of the flowers, we left the church and migrated over to Leena’s house for the reception. In the line for the buffet, I ended up next to Anna-Maija Mustajoki again.

  “How did you know Allu?” Mustajoki asked, and I couldn’t avoid answering.

  “I’m her niece’s friend.”

  “Leena’s? She was like a daughter to Allu. I thought the police only went to the funerals of victims to monitor suspects, but I realize you have private lives too.” Mustajoki moved through the crowd to a table by a window, and I followed her. The others had questioned her, so I didn’t have much of a picture of her.

  “When will Lulu Nightingale be buried?” Mustajoki asked once we were in the corner of the room where our words would be drowned out by the general murmur.

  “I don’t know. As far as we’re concerned, she can be buried any time.”

  “I imagine I’ll read about it in the paper. There’s no way they’ll leave the poor woman in peace. I would have liked to have met her. It took me years before I recovered from that terrible encounter I had with that boy prostitute.” Mustajoki spooned a large piece of tuna fish cake into her mouth.

  “Did they succeed in keeping you all from knowing who the other guests would be?”

  Mustajoki laughed. “Yes and no. I’d watched the show enough to know Länsimies’s tricks. I was sure there would be a sex worker and a sex customer, and then someone else who wanted to criminalize it. But I expected some sort of Christian conservative, not an intelligent female priest. Instead of a police officer I thought Länsimies would invite some official from the Ministry of Justice, but maybe Nordström was a natural choice. I’m an inquisitive person, so I kept my eyes and ears open. When my taxi arrived in the parking lot, I saw an HVAC company van and wondered if it belonged to someone who was working in the building or a guest. I tried to suss out the situation.”

  I nodded and sipped my coffee.

  “Of course, I knew what role Länsimies had chosen for me: the old fat feminist who wants to deny men their physical pleasures. That was why I wouldn’t let them put my hair up in that bun. Länsimies had obviously given the makeup artist instructions. But I wanted to choose my own image.”

  “I read in your memoir that you had met Länsimies before. And you were in the same French conversation group as Riitta Saarnio.”

  “Yes, and Riitta was the one who asked me to come on the show.” Anna-Maija wiped tuna filling off her jaw. “I hadn’t seen Ilari in years. He’s irritating, mostly because you can’t help liking him once he turns on his charm.”

  I understood what Mustajoki meant. Länsimies was always present in the moment, and he enjoyed attention. That sort of self-confidence appealed to many women and reassured most men.

  “There was a tense mood in the makeup room. The makeup artist was clearly concerned about something. I guessed there were problems with the schedule. Riitta, who came to bring me into the studio, was nearly hysterical, and I didn’t think having one member of the staff missing was enough to explain it. I kept thinking something had gone wrong, like one of the guests had canceled or something. Länsimies was as self-absorbed as always.”

  Anna-Maija Mustajoki seemed like a woman who was used to making observations, so I simply let her talk. She described what she’d heard in the hallway before going on camera.

  “Someone was talking on a telephone. It was a woman’s voice but so quiet I couldn’t make out the actual words. Länsimies was going from door to door. He told me we were going to make this the best show of all time and asked me to be assertive and provocative. Someone went to the restroom. Someone knocked on a door and then went away.”

  That must have been Sulonen bringing Lulu the glass. Lulu’s dressing room had been next to Mustajoki’s, so these observations were important.

  “I’ve thought a lot,” she suddenly said, “and I’m not sure whether I’m imagining it or if I really heard Lulu fall. I did hear a strange thud from the neighboring dressing room, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. I was more focused on planning what I would say. I just thought that you never could know how each person prepared for something like this—maybe someone was doing push-ups to release their tension.”

  “When did you hear this thud?” As far as I knew, Mustajoki hadn’t mentioned this in her previous interview.

  “Just before Saarnio came to get me, about nine fifteen. Now my indifference haunts me. What if I’d mentioned the sound to Riitta and we’d gone to see what happened? Could we have saved Lulu? Don’t sugarcoat it. I can handle being responsible for another person’s death.”

  12

  All I could tell Mustajoki was that I didn’t know. Cyanide worked quickly. Did a time of death of 9:15 p.m. shut out any suspects? No.

  I went and exchanged a few words with Leena, and then decided to leave. Pastor Pihlaja stood outside in the yard, trying to call for a taxi.

  “I can take you. We’re going in the same direction,” I said.

  “Thank you! Sometimes not having my own car is a problem. I feel like in the second largest city in Finland I should be able to get by with public transportation.” I unlocked the car with the remote control, and Pihlaja took the passenger seat.

  “I liked your eulogy,” I said, even though I didn’t know if that was quite appropriate to say.

  “Thanks. This one was easy and hard at the same time. Easy because I knew Allu and could talk about her in more detail than if she were a stranger. Hard for the same reason. Back in seminary, we argued about whether a priest could cry at a funeral since she’s supposed to be there to comfort everyone else. But after the tsunami, even the bishops cried. I was afraid I’d start bawling there by Allu’s casket, but thankfully God gave me the power to control myself.”

  “I imagine you have counselors you work with since you see sick and dying people so much.”

  “Yes, of course. Although in the church there are still people who believe trusting in the power of God is enough. And maybe for some it is. But I need human support too.”

  I’d turned the heat up full blast because the windows had frosted over. Pastor Pihlaja took off her gloves and unbuttoned her coat. I wondered whether the white collar of her clerical clothing ever felt constricting or if it gave her strength to stay in character the same way my police uniform did, although I only wore it infrequently, mostly just when lecturing or attending formal events.

  “I’ve needed to call you. I read through my old diaries. It was brutal. You think you’ve grown up and learned so much, but then you just see yourself repeating the same mistakes and entertaining the same fantasies as you did in high school. My entries from that period are detailed. Apparently instead of listening in class, I just recorded by own thoughts.”

  “I was always thinking about bass lines for my bandmate Jaska’s terrible songs or daydreaming about boys instead of listening to the teacher,” I said.

  “I thought about boys too, but for me it never ended up turning into anything beyond my daydreams. But Lilli had the courage to a
ct. She quickly got a reputation for being easy, but also for being able to get anyone she wanted. By the end of high school, she had a real Helsinki boyfriend, an economics student who would come pick her up from school in his car. And not just in any car: a BMW. I was jealous of her, jealous of how easily she interacted with the opposite sex and how she looked, even though I wrote that she was a painted whore and that I’d rather be smart than look like her.”

  “You mentioned a woman named Niina Räsänen. Lulu’s friend. We’ve tried to reach her, but she lives in Basel nowadays. Did Lulu and Niina go to Switzerland together?” I asked.

  The pastor thought for a moment. “Yes, that’s just how it happened. Lilli went first, and then Nina followed. I heard about it from our common acquaintances, but I doubt they know much about where Niina’s ended up either,” Pastor Pihlaja said.

  “Is she involved in the sex industry too?”

  “No. She and her husband run a small farm, and they have three kids.”

  “Were you surprised when you learned what Lulu was doing before she died?” I asked.

  Pihlaja thought for a moment. I glanced at her and saw confusion in her eyes. I kept getting the sense that there was something she didn’t want to tell me.

  “I don’t know. I just hoped that she’d chosen it herself, not because she needed money for drugs.”

  “If it’s any consolation, our lab didn’t find any traces of drugs in her system. Just alcohol.”

  We sat in silence at a traffic light, and I had a chance to take a good look at her profile. At least at funerals she didn’t wear her normal red lipstick, and her makeup was generally inconspicuous. Her face was relaxed and plain but pleasant.

  “Lilli was ashamed of her parents. During the spring we graduated, her family bought a cabin in Barösund. We happened to be at the store at the same time, buying food for our graduation parties, Lilli with her mom and me with mine, and Mrs. Mäkinen started proudly telling us about the cabin. It had its own sauna and everything. But Lilli just complained: the cabin didn’t have electricity or running water, and the shore was half a kilometer away. Lilli told me that as soon as she got her graduation cap, she was gone. And leave she did. The very next day she jumped on a ferry to Sweden.”

  I merged onto the West Highway. Traffic was backed up in the opposite lane because of an accident, apparently a fender bender that set off a chain reaction. There were three cars off to the side, the middle one with the rear bumper and the hood crunched, the first one with the rear bumper bent, and the last one with the hood dented. Police and an ambulance crew were already on the scene. I looked to see who was on duty and recognized Officers Haikala and Suomalainen. The word “Police” on Suomalainen’s jumpsuit was so worn that only the L and the I were readable. Pastor Pihlaja muttered something to herself. Once we’d passed the scene of the accident, she asked whether I thought anyone had been hurt.

  “It depends on the speed. The people in the middle car got the worst of it, but likely no one died in a collision like that. Let’s hope for the best.”

  “Exactly. I was thinking yesterday about what kind of eulogy I would give for Lilli. I realized I couldn’t condemn her even though I don’t approve of prostitution. We can denounce phenomena, but with individual people it’s more difficult. Allu and I agreed that Mary Magdalene’s reputation doesn’t need rehabilitation. It doesn’t matter whether she was a prostitute or not. She loved Jesus, and he loved her. That’s the heart of everything, love. Maybe in her own way Lilli offered love to people who weren’t receiving it elsewhere. But who loved her?”

  I thought of the way Tero Sulonen worshipped her and the way she used him. Love could be cruel when “the one” thought you were nothing of the sort. And then there were the people who felt like they were meant for each other but didn’t nurture their love or let it become crushed under the impossibility of circumstance.

  “How do you define love? Doesn’t Lulu’s choice of stage name tell us what she thought of her profession?” I replied.

  “Sure. Love might have been part of it for her, but the fact of the matter is most prostitutes don’t voluntarily choose the profession. Luckily there are some things you can’t buy—like grace and mercy. Right after I graduated from seminary, I was a chaplain at the juvenile detention center in Kerava. There were a lot of kids there for whom the entire concept of grace and mercy was foreign. When I said that grace even applied to murderers, they were just confused.”

  I thought of a few killers I’d met who believed the only way to make amends for what they’d done was by dying. I didn’t agree, and I couldn’t even imagine supporting the death penalty. Maybe my belief in the possibility of redemption was akin to Pastor Pihlaja’s belief in grace.

  I dropped her off a couple of blocks from my own apartment. As I drove the rest of the way home, I promised myself that after we solved this case I’d make time to talk to her again.

  The smell of crepes wafted in the hallway outside our door. My kids were crazy for their grandmother’s crepes. Iida complained that I didn’t bake pulla or make crepes enough. I’d tried to teach her how, but it had required patience. My own mother had usually shooed us girls out of the kitchen because we were more of a hindrance than a help. I tried to remember that and do it differently, not always with success.

  Taneli had already eaten his fill and was playing with Legos on the living room floor. Iida was still at the table, and Marjatta was loading the dishwasher. I grabbed the last crepe and spread some strawberry jam on it. I enjoyed simple treats like this.

  “We had pea soup too, but the children finished it off,” Antti’s mother said. “Was the funeral nice?”

  “Yes, thank you. I’m glad you’re able to come again tomorrow. I have to take a quick trip up north.”

  Marjatta dried her hands and then took off her apron. Whenever she came she brought her own apron and slippers. During her husband’s illness and after his death, she’d lost several pounds and her hair had turned completely gray. Antti and Iida had inherited her hair type, so they would probably go gray as well.

  “Antti stopped by today, but he said he still couldn’t decide if he’s willing to accept the money. I asked him if I should give it to a pack of stray dogs instead. And I reminded him that after I die, you’ll get it all anyway. Maria, is everything alright with you and Antti?”

  I assured her it was, since my mother-in-law was the last person with whom I wanted to share my suspicions.

  After the kids fell asleep, I called Antti. He was outside walking, and in the background, I could hear the sounds of cars and people shouting. Our call was brief since neither of us had much to say. I didn’t ask whether he was alone or with someone. I didn’t want to know.

  We nearly missed the plane to Kuopio in the morning because a huge snow storm had blown in overnight and made a complete mess of traffic. The weather report had warned us, but apparently no one listened. Fortunately, the plane was a little late too for the same reason, and we made it to the airport just in time. At first the flight was bumpy, but the sky cleared as we traveled north, so I could track the ground beneath us as the sun came up. The route roughly followed Highway 5, and I was able to pick out the city of Mikkeli and the Juva Hotel below. That brought back warm memories of the previous summer and the ForestStock rock festival held behind the hotel. My parents had watched Iida and Taneli so that Antti and I could go out and dance like teenagers. Maybe we should go to another rock concert.

  Puupponen ate my muffin as well as his, because the very idea of a sweet snack on a plane made me feel nauseated. I was lucky and didn’t end up with the motion sickness that sometimes plagued me on morning flights. The Kuopio airport was next to a lake, and the ice was still so thick that I counted eight ice fishermen without turning my head. Puupponen was dozing, so I nudged him in the ribs as the plane descended.

  “Ville, we’re home.”

  A rental car was waiting at the airport. Puupponen wanted to drive, and he knew the local roads. We�
�d agreed to stop by and say hi to his parents in Kuopio if we had time. At the intersection outside the airport, Puupponen turned right. If he’d gone left, we would have ended up in Arpikylä, where I was from, but that wasn’t where we were going.

  The Puijo Observation Tower stood proudly on its hill and against the light-blue sky. The road wound through empty, endless forests, with only the occasional house. The price for this kind of natural beauty was that everything was a long way away. Puupponen’s uncle lived in the village of Tervo, which was along our route to Vesanto, so I got to hear about their fishing trips. I leaned back and enjoyed the sparkling of the snow in the trees. Even though we were driving along a main road, the snowbanks were clean, and they were three times bigger than those in Espoo.

  Puupponen had brought a map of Vesanto. Supposedly finding Hytönen’s business would be easy. We drove down a long, steep hill toward the main village, then passed a narrow lake. After the church, we turned left toward the lake. On the right, we passed a three-story school building that was now abandoned. It looked hospitable but sad. After another quarter of a mile we came to a relatively new warehouse building with “Hytönen HVAC” on the sign. When I saw the van in the parking lot, I remembered that the same one had been parked next to the door of West Man Productions last Friday.

  Puupponen had verified that Hytönen would be in the office. As we got out of the car, he came to meet us.

  “This is a great honor. It isn’t often we have visitors all the way from Espoo,” he said, extending his hand. His sweater and jeans looked like they’d been purchased at the local village clothing store; they looked comfortable and sensibly priced. Hytönen was an entrepreneur who clearly knew what was worth paying for and what wasn’t. How far away was his world from Arto Saarnio’s, once all was said and done? Small businessmen suffered from the cutbacks that people like Saarnio orchestrated, because they often resulted in a loss of subcontracting work.