Before I Go

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “Where should we take this?” Officer Haikala asked.

  “Keep him company for a little while in Interrogation Room 4. My detectives will come have a chat with him after our morning meeting. Give him some coffee to get his brain working.”

  “What the fuck did I do now?” Väinölä asked me, but he had to make do without a reply. The patrol officers didn’t need to know why we had wanted Väinölä picked up. Stories traveled fast enough as it was, rising like steam from the holding cells downstairs all the way to the muckety-mucks’ sauna upstairs.

  “You want to come with us to the interrogation?” Koivu asked as I was making assignments for the day. “Didn’t we already check Väinölä’s alibi when we were working Ilveskivi’s murder?”

  “Only up to six o’clock. Can you and Wang handle it?”

  “Yes,” Wang said, “but Väinölä won’t talk to me. We’ll have a better chance if a lieutenant is in the room. It’ll make him feel important.” She had a point. I promised to come for the beginning of the interrogation, but at eleven I had to leave to take Iida to the dentist. Antti had thought that my sudden eagerness to interrupt my workday was brought on by my chronic bad-mother guilt syndrome, and I didn’t bother correcting him. He didn’t need to hear about my sudden attack of bad-cop guilt syndrome.

  Eija Hirvonen had amassed pages of information about Reijo Rahnasto and RISS Inc. I quickly glanced at the list of shareholders. Eriikka Rahnasto owned 20 percent of the company, and her father owned fifty-five. There were twenty or so smaller shareholders. Revenues had seen strong growth over the past few years. New international information technology companies had been especially eager to buy RISS security services.

  Väinölä was helping himself to our coffee and donuts in the interrogation room while Officer Haikala impatiently tapped his fingers on the tabletop. He practically ran out of the room when we showed up. I had printed out a copy of the report from Väinölä’s previous interview, and now I started by asking what he had done on the night of April twenty-second after he was finished shopping in the city.

  “How the hell am I supposed to remember? That was almost three weeks ago! If I already had my booze and cigarettes, I probably went to find a chick. I think maybe I paid Miia a visit.”

  “Is Miia your girlfriend?” Koivu asked.

  “She isn’t a girl or a friend. She’s a thirty-year-old chick who likes a good screw sometimes, and she knows she can get one from me,” Väinölä proudly declared.

  “Name, address, and phone number?” Wang asked and typed in the answers. We then spent a while confirming whether Väinölä really was at Miia’s apartment on the night in question. Then I asked about Marko Seppälä. Väinölä admitted knowing him, and that Jarkola had told him about Seppälä’s dreams of becoming a torpedo.

  “Do you think I hired him? Why would I have hired a fucking incompetent like that? I can take any fag any day. I don’t need nobody’s help!”

  Koivu glanced at me with a look that said he had thought the same thing.

  Our questioning led nowhere, but when it was time for me to leave, I asked Koivu to step outside with me for a second and then ordered him to keep pushing Väinölä about Seppälä. Maybe some other team of interrogators would have been better for Väinölä, say Mela and Lähde, who could have at least created a connection with Väinölä by cracking some of their off-color jokes. I hadn’t been any help with that.

  Iida was over the moon to be going for a drive with mommy in the middle of the day. Her chattering put me in a better mood, because she thought the fire truck that drove by and the cranes at the construction sites were miracles. As she lay in the dentist’s chair with her mouth as wide as she could make it, I felt a flash of fear. Iida was so trusting, but soon I would have to smash her naive belief in the goodness of humanity and start warning her about drug needles and strangers who might try to lure her away.

  Iida’s teeth were in great shape except for a little plaque on her upper back teeth. Again the guilty conscience: I didn’t always have the patience to brush carefully. I felt like going home with Iida, to escape into the worlds of Pettson and Findus or Pippy Longstocking, but the time for that wouldn’t be until evening. Iida fell asleep in her car seat. I left her on a cot at Helvi’s to continue her nap.

  I ate quickly and alone in the cafeteria. While I was gone more paperwork had appeared on my desk. One was the order to close the preliminary investigation into Petri Ilveskivi’s homicide. Another was less formal, in Taskinen’s handwriting: I gave the order to release Jani Väinölä. We don’t have any basis to detain him. I asked Narcotics to investigate Seppälä, so you can let that go for now. JT.

  The disappointment was like a physical pain, as if Taskinen had punched me in the gut. I was useful as the token female moving up the career ladder on the force. But apparently now that I was a unit commander, my bosses thought that I would be content to dance to whatever tune they played.

  I had shoved my head through the glass ceiling, but I was caught on my breasts. Now the shards were slicing my sides, and a small voice inside me reminded me that I should have stayed down below. Then I wouldn’t have been hurt.

  16

  I charged on, tasting blood in my mouth. No one was going to catch me, I told myself. I was going to win. But it didn’t help. The other team’s defender, Sanna Saarniaho, made a perfectly legal tackle, sending me thudding to the ground on my bottom and gaining control of the ball. Saarniaho had been on the women’s national youth team a few years before. Losing the ball to her wasn’t any big embarrassment, but still it bothered me.

  I returned to the game, playing even more fiercely and aggressively than before. The days since closing the preliminary investigation into Petri Ilveskivi’s killing had been frustrating. In the morning I had talked with the prosecutor, Ari Aho, and his thinking had been the same as my superiors’. Time to close the investigation completely. If only Katri Reponen had been at the head of the rotation for the next case. Her I could have negotiated with.

  “Maria!” Anu Wang yelled to me and then lobbed the ball past midfield. I succeeded in faking out the goalie and launched the ball into the upper-left corner of the net. I screamed in triumph, but in the end my goal didn’t matter all that much. Our team lost one to three.

  Playing did me good. I was on the sideline toweling off when Liisa Rasilainen walked over.

  “Who taught you to kick people in the shins like that?” she asked with a smirk, then took a swig from her sports drink. “I think maybe you forgot you were playing against me and not our bosses.”

  “I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”

  “No big deal. By the way, I have the day off tomorrow. I was thinking about going to Café Escale for some karaoke in the evening. Want to come?”

  I didn’t have the day off. Actually, I had another Helsinki-Espoo-Vantaa police coordination meeting in the afternoon, but the thought of karaoke and a few beers sounded nice. If I could leave after Iida fell asleep, I wouldn’t be neglecting my maternal duties either.

  So I agreed to meet Liisa at nine thirty at the bus station. The next afternoon, I rode home as fast as I could. The weather was warm, and nature seemed to be making up for those long, cold weeks. The birch leaves were already the size of my thumbnail, and dandelions bloomed along the walls of the houses. But as far as my mood was concerned, it could have been November. It was almost as though the sun was taunting me.

  Taskinen had been acting as a cushion between me and the higher-ups for the whole time I’d been in Espoo. I didn’t know what he really thought about ending the preliminary investigation. And he probably wasn’t going to tell my anytime soon why he had decided to do it.

  I knew going to a bar in a bad mood wasn’t a particularly smart idea, but I didn’t feel like being smart. Iida and I splashed around in the shower together, and then I read her a long bedtime story. I didn’t take a stiff drink to start warming up for the evening until after she fell asleep.

  Antti see
med amused by my enthusiasm for gay karaoke.

  “Are you sure Rasilainen isn’t into you, inviting you out like this?” he asked teasingly and mussed my hair, which I had just finished lacquering into the style I wanted it.

  “Idiot. Of course not. She lives with a flutist, and Marjaana can’t stand drunk people singing. Even Liisa only gets to sing in the shower, and she has a great voice.” Rasilainen had performed as the lead singer in a band put together for our work Christmas party, and their act was so good they had even gotten Taskinen on his feet.

  “And you’re going to this karaoke bar to have a good time, not to, say, investigate Petri Ilveskivi?” Antti continued, and I blushed. Of course I hadn’t forgotten that Café Escale had been Ilveskivi’s regular hangout. Even though I was leaving my work clothes home, I was still a cop no matter where I went.

  I dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, and a T-shirt, with a flannel over the top. Let people read whatever messages they wanted to into my outfit. I didn’t care. I put on a little mascara, feeling carefree and comfortable. On the one hand, it would have been fun to dress to the nines, but that would have required proper makeup, which I didn’t have time for. I intended to ride partway and then jump on the bus.

  Liisa was waiting at the station with a drunk who was trying to bum a smoke off her and refused to believe her when she said she didn’t smoke. We left him hurling curses after us as we walked the block to the restaurant, where the show was already in full swing. A man in a leather getup that made him look like he’d just climbed off his Harley was singing a sentimental love ballad in a delicate, flat tenor. I wasn’t sure whether he was serious.

  We grabbed drinks from the bar, me a gin and tonic and Liisa a dry cider. The tables were full, but we managed to insinuate ourselves into a corner spot with two men. Based on their body language, they were not lovers. The slender blond one was eagerly flipping through the playlist and the larger dark-haired one was making fun of his suggestions. Only the best of friends usually endured such abuse. Liisa grabbed the song list from the second one and started reading it to me. I would need another gin before I would be ready to sing. When I walked to the bar, I noticed Lauri Jensen come in through the front door. I tried to shout his name, but it was impossible to be heard over the clamor. Our blond tablemate got up. He sang Mamba’s “Don’t Leave Me” in such a perfect imitation of Tero Vaara’s crooning that everyone was cheering like mad. Even the phrasing was spot on.

  The bartender took my order, and I wove my way through the crowd toward Lauri Jensen, who was talking to a serious-looking man in his sixties. For a second Lauri looked surprised to see me, but then he rushed to give me a hug.

  “Hi, Maria! I heard you solved Petri’s murder. Good work!” Lauri said and slapped me on the shoulder.

  “Thanks,” I replied glumly, but Lauri misinterpreted my tone.

  “I’m sorry. It was stupid of me to talk about your work when you’re off.”

  “Oh, go ahead. I won’t sulk.” I couldn’t tell Lauri anything about how the investigation had been cut short, so I joined in the applause as the song ended.

  “Are you alone? You can join me and Mara.”

  “I’m here with someone from work. Liisa’s pressuring me to sing.”

  “That’s why we’re here. Do you know what song was Petri’s trademark? Kaj Chydenius’s ‘You, You’re the One I Love.’ He sang it every time. The progression is difficult with all the half steps, but Petri had a good voice. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t have a clue.”

  The majority of patrons in the bar were male—there were only about ten of us females. That didn’t seem to bother anyone, though. At our small table we had no choice but to interact with our tablemates, but fortunately they were pleasant even if they did have sharp tongues. The blond one was just about to complete seminary, and soon we got to the topic of the church’s opposition to marriage equality.

  “How can you be part of an institution that doesn’t accept you as you are?” an overwrought Liisa asked. “I mean, I belong to the church too, but at this point I’m only a nominal Christian. I probably would have given it up entirely if they hadn’t allowed female priests.”

  “The only way to change systems like that is from the inside,” the blond man replied. “I believe in God, and I want to be a priest.”

  Usually I pushed religious questions out of my mind. I had never been able to decide what I believed in, but I also couldn’t stand the vague mush of religiosity that people spewed all over the place these days. Priests blessed shopping malls, and people labeled themselves as “Jesus fans” in letters to the editors of religious magazines. Religious conviction seemed to be a possession that every successful person was supposed to own, like a car and the newest model of cell phone. But I didn’t have any intention of getting into an argument with a theologian.

  Then I saw Kim Kajanus standing in the doorway.

  “Who is that?” asked the dark-haired man, who seemed to know all of the bar’s regulars. “Looks like a curious hetero.”

  Kajanus attracted the attention of other customers as well, but he was able to walk to the bar and order a beer in peace. He looked at the walls, not the people, and retreated to stand in the farthest corner of the bar. I glanced at Lauri Jensen, who had clearly recognized Kim. I wanted to scram, but Liisa Rasilainen announced to the table that she was going to sing “Mombasa,” and I couldn’t not stay and listen. I scanned the playlist, hoping to find something just as tasteless. My gin was disappearing quickly, and I tried to tell myself that I was just thirsty after soccer and biking. Liisa sipped her cider and hummed along with the other singers to get her voice warmed up.

  Lauri Jensen stood up from his table, and at first I thought he was going to sing, but then the MC announced that someone named Mika was up next. Instead Lauri came over and crouched next to me.

  “Petri’s photographer friend is here.”

  I nodded. The noise was reaching another crescendo because a short fifty-year-old guy was crooning Paula Koivuniemi’s “I’m a Woman,” and the whole room was singing along.

  “I’m going to go talk to him. Little hunk looks lonely,” Lauri said with a grin as the song ended.

  “Fresh meat,” Liisa said. “Nice not to have to trawl for companionship anymore. Sometimes I watch single’s shows—you know, like Ally McBeal, but I can’t see what’s supposed to be funny about them. I remember exactly how desperate it all was.”

  “Lauri is married,” I said just as Liisa’s turn came up. Her whole demeanor changed when she climbed onstage. She began to sway, and a dangerous glow sparked in her eyes. Liisa was a charismatic woman who wore her few gray strands and laugh lines with style. She sang half an octave lower than normal and flirted shamelessly with the audience as she sang. Imagining what the chauvinist pigs at the station would say wasn’t difficult.

  “I think I’ve earned another cider!” Liisa exclaimed as she made her way back to the table, accepting pats on the back and suggestive winks. “Can I get you anything?”

  “Sure, one more gin and tonic,” I replied as I dug a twenty out my wallet. I turned to see how Kim and Lauri’s discussion was going. Lauri seemed to be talking excitedly, and Kim seemed to be focusing his attention on the playlist so he wouldn’t have to look at him.

  “Well, Maria, have you picked a song?” Liisa asked, setting my drink down with a thud. When I said I hadn’t, she and the two men began pressuring me.

  “I can’t. The table standard is too high,” I said, trying to wriggle my way out of it.

  “Only until he sings,” the theology student said, indicating his friend, who stuck his tongue out like a five-year-old. I flipped through the list of songs and found the disco section at the back. “I Will Survive” seemed like good medicine for my work blues. I could dedicate it to all my bosses. I went to give my slip to the MC and then headed to the toilet. Café Escale didn’t have separate men’s and women’s facilities, but that was nothing new for me.
I had gotten used to going with the boys when I was in school, playing on my soccer team, and in my band. I was starting to get tired of being “one of the guys,” though.

  When I came out of the restroom, Kim Kajanus walked past me to hand his request to the MC. Our eyes met. Looking embarrassed, he said hello and then made for the bar. His all-black clothing accentuated the paleness of his skin and the blazing red of his hair. I wondered where Eriikka Rahnasto was.

  Back at our table, the current activity was telling rude jokes about the Minister of the Interior, Kari Häkämies. My turn to sing came all too soon. The shaking hit me as soon as I reached the stage, my legs trembling so violently I was sure it was visible all the way to the door. Why the hell had I agreed to something this stupid? I hadn’t sung in public since the last performance of my high school band, Rat Poison. But the opening notes of the song were already eliciting shouts from the crowd.

  Of course my voice trembled and went off key occasionally, but I performed with enough bravado to earn enthusiastic applause. At the end I bowed and spread my arms like the finest prima donna. Maybe I should have worn high heels and gold eye shadow after all. Three minutes of stardom was just about right, but then my buzz started to wear off, even though I hadn’t realized I was drunk in the first place.

  “You sang beautifully,” Lauri Jensen said, wrapping his arms around my shoulders from behind. “That redhead is a bit of a toad. He claimed he hadn’t really known Petri and only came to the funeral on a whim. Is he even gay?”

  “What, you didn’t ask?” I said teasingly.

  “No. Well, I’m headed home now. I’m ringleader of the family circus tomorrow night, since Jukka will be at work and the women are going to the theater. I won’t be able to cope if I’m tired. Say hi to Antti!”

  My tablemates had moved on to sharing insane rumors about all the current celebrities, and Liisa and I giggled like two teenagers. Gradually the world began to feel less hopeless. Spring was really here, and I had plenty of gin. We kept up the ruckus until Kim Kajanus was called to the stage. He sang Kaj Chydenius’s “Song for a Dead Love” very seriously. He had a dark, slightly rough baritone, and from the rapid movement of his Adam’s apple, it was safe to say he was nervous. What kind of ritual was he performing by singing such a dramatic song in Petri’s favorite bar?