My First Murder

by Leena Lehtolainen

  Tommi had settled the final payment on his mortgage in May, which I thought was astonishing. Over the past couple of years he had been making consistent early principal payments, in relatively large amounts. Maybe he had received an advance on his inheritance from his father. I made a note to call Heikki Peltonen to ask about his son’s finances again and to confirm the date and time of the funeral.

  Tommi had carefully saved all of his account statements, as well as his tax returns. He even had copies of all of his tax deduction receipts from the previous year. If only I were this meticulous with my own finances! I wondered how on earth this guy had been getting by, since virtually all of his salary income had been going toward paying off his apartment. Granted, that salary was twice as large as my own, but still, paying off a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-mark loan in three years was quite an achievement. I thought of his sleek car and noted that there wasn’t any mention of a car loan anywhere, not even a lease agreement. I found a copy of his car insurance policy, which listed the value of the vehicle at a little over twenty thousand.

  Beads of sweat formed on my forehead when I started inspecting Tommi’s bank statements. In addition to his regular salary payments, there were occasional, surprisingly large personal deposits to his checking account. One certificate of deposit for ten grand had matured the previous Christmas.

  I went to the restroom, washed my face, and fetched another cup of hot chocolate. The phone interrupted me a couple of times, but when I finally finished slogging through Tommi’s financials, I was both confused and satisfied.

  Based on the papers I had gone through, it was clear as day that Tommi had been receiving generous sums from a source other than his regular day job. I doubted he could have earned that kind of money just selling moonshine. Or, if he had, then he had been producing it on a truly colossal scale. Money, liquor, and women. Those were the marks left by Tommi’s life. The combination somehow felt familiar, like a rock song come to life.

  The bank card charges in the account statements indicated that Tommi had spent a lot of time eating and drinking in restaurants. It was clear that he had often footed the bill at the bar EFSAS frequented, but he had also visited pickup joints like the Hesperia Club, where most of the single girls were for sale, with surprising regularity. I hadn’t imagined that Tommi would need to buy companionship, but what did I know? Maybe he liked it that way.

  “Up and at ’em!” Koivu shouted from the door, waking me from my reverie.

  “Oh, hi. How was Kaarela?”

  “Boring. And now I’m supposed to go to Malmi to meet some gypsy dudes who got stabbed. Have they called you up there?” Koivu flopped down in the chair across from me, shoved three pieces of sugar-free gum in his mouth, then pushed the rest of the packet over to me.

  “Thanks. No, I didn’t get an invite to that particular party. Maybe it’s Miettinen’s thing.”

  “Anything interesting in Peltonen’s papers?”

  “Loads. Koivu, have you ever been to the meat market at the Hesperia?”

  “Nah, I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “Well, you’re going there tonight with Tommi’s picture. Or do you have something else going on? I’ll talk to the boss about the overtime. Ask around with the professional-looking girls whether they knew Tommi, and emphasize that it’s about a murder. You know, like on TV.”

  Koivu looked excited. Today was going to be one of those days he could tell his pals about at soccer practice later.

  “It’s better that you go than me,” I continued.

  “Yeah, since you probably don’t own any high heels or fishnet stockings.”

  “By the way, I think you still have those porn magazines...”

  “I need to get up to Malmi,” Koivu said suddenly, rushing to the door. “I’ll come through here on my way back, and we can talk about this evening,” he said from the door, blushing.

  Was Koivu the right man to go to the Hesperia Club after all? Poor kid might get his wallet emptied by one of the veterans there. I spent a moment being astonished at my maternal attitude toward Koivu, but then my phone rang, and I got the call to head up to Malmi too.

  7

  Which when it stops, ’tis time for death to reign

  On Wednesday morning, August felt like October. With the wind howling outside, I would have preferred not to get up at all. The previous night in Malmi had been complete chaos. Two Roma families had been settling scores the old-fashioned way, resulting in one corpse and three wounded. Koivu and I spent the whole evening driving back and forth between the Malmi and Meilahti clinics trying to figure out who had stabbed whom.

  I finally let an exhausted Koivu go home sometime after 9:00 p.m. I decided that it would be wiser to visit the nightclub after we investigated Tommi’s company. It was possible that the bank charges were just from corporate events, though if that were the case, would Tommi have paid with his own credit card?

  After arriving at work, I called the captain on the phone and told him what had transpired in Malmi. At ten, Koivu and I headed off toward Espoo. I had done my makeup more carefully than usual and wore a clean, loose-fitting blouse with my uniform skirt. Though I would have preferred to fall straight into bed in the company of Lord Peter Wimsey, I had heroically done laundry the previous night, wishing the entire time that I had my own Bunter to care for my clothing.

  Koivu drove the rattletrap Black Maria, which the motor pool had given us because all of the patrol cars were either out or being serviced. The van’s radio relayed intermittent, choppy messages as we chatted about the incident in Malmi. With too many cases to investigate at once and not enough time to do anything properly, it was easy to feel a bit schizophrenic in this job.

  I had arranged to meet with the head of Tommi’s department through a secretary. The secretary had simply referred to “Dr. Marjamäki,” and it seems that I’m not an enlightened enough feminist, because I automatically assumed that the head of the international joint projects division of a large mining and metallurgy company would be a man. It wasn’t until the division head stood up from behind her desk to greet us that I realized that Dr. Marjamäki was a woman, Doctor of Geological Engineering Marja Mäki.

  “Detective Kallio and Officer Koivu from the Helsinki PD Violent Crime Unit,” I said from the door in my most official tone of voice.

  In her nicely tailored black skirt suit, gray silk blouse, and high-quality flats, the trim Dr. Mäki was a professional woman straight from the pages of a women’s magazine. Subdued makeup and jewelry that matched her suit rounded out the overall impression. Her voice was cultured and low, almost masculine. I immediately felt like I hadn’t pressed my blouse well enough and remembered that I hadn’t polished my shoes.

  Mäki asked her secretary to bring coffee. She drank herbal tea herself and didn’t even touch the crisp-looking Danishes the secretary placed before us. I managed to crumble most of my own on my skirt.

  “Mr. Peltonen had a good handle on his field and was a pleasant coworker,” Mäki began. “He was with us for four years. We took him on during his thesis work and were so pleased with his work that we offered him a permanent position. He had exceptionally broad linguistic abilities—in addition to Finnish, he spoke English, French, Russian, Estonian, and German.”

  “Who did he usually work with?”

  “He generally handled relationships with our foreign joint ventures. It was rather independent work. I was his closest superior, and he shared a secretary with Mr. Roivas, one of our economists. Lately Peltonen had mostly been working on a joint Finnish-Estonian project. We’re trying to develop more environmentally friendly technology for Estonia’s oil shale mines,” Mäki explained, as though she thought for a moment that I was a reporter.

  “What sort of a person did he seem like to you?”

  “He was an extremely pleasant young man,” Mäki said firmly. “Charming. Funny.” Suddenly her voice faltered, and her controlled outer shell shattered. She buried her face in her hands
, and we heard stifled sobs from behind them. Koivu and I glanced at each other, disconcerted. Dr. Marja Mäki did not strike me as the sort of person I could go over and pat consolingly on the shoulder.

  When Mäki finally raised her face, I saw that her mascara had run, turning the thin lines under her eyes into dark furrows.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This has been a terrible shock for all of us. Tommi...It feels so horribly empty here without him.” She burst into tears again, no longer bothering to conceal them.

  “What if we were to go to Tommi’s office and go through his things?” I suggested tactfully.

  In the midst of her tears, Mäki called in her secretary, who led us to Tommi’s office and promised to send his secretary in to see us.

  Tommi’s office was small and surprisingly dull. The furnishings consisted of a desk with a connected computer table, a bookshelf, a chair, and an uncomfortable-looking sofa. Tommi must have handled consultations with groups larger than a few people elsewhere. One wall was decorated with an enormous world map, which was stuck with blue and red pins.

  “She sure was broken up,” Koivu said as he studied the map.

  “It’s about time someone was sad about Tommi’s death. I’ve been surprised that these choir people have been so calm. What do the pins mean?”

  “Joint Venture Status, June thirteen,” Koivu read from the edge of the map. “I wonder if it bothered him to handle Estonia, since they have mines in China and South America. I guess workers’ rights aren’t high on their priority list.”

  The binders and books on the shelves were all work related. The desk drawers were almost empty, and the top one was locked.

  “Koivu, do you still have those keys with you? Let’s see if one of them fits this lock.”

  As Koivu dug the keys out of his bag, I opened the unlocked roll-front cabinet on the other side of the desk.

  “Well, would you look at that! Recognize this?” I lifted the liter bottle of clear liquid onto the desk. About half of the contents remained. I sniffed carefully.

  “Same stuff?”

  I handed the bottle to Koivu, who took a taste and grinned. Had Tommi kept a bottle in his cabinet to cheer himself up when he had to work overtime? I also found two shot glasses in the cabinet—one of which had muted red lipstick on the rim—along with a white shirt that was still in the packaging and black socks, obviously for emergency situations.

  One of the keys did, in fact, fit the lock of the upper drawer. To our disappointment, all we found were the standard work-related letters, receipts, and bills. I collected them to go through later anyway. While I was shifting the stack of paper into my briefcase, a picture fell out. It was of Pia, smiling on the deck of a sailboat.

  I heard a knock at the door, and a frail-looking woman in her fifties walked in. She introduced herself as Tommi’s secretary, Mrs. Laakkonen. She too was deeply shocked by Tommi’s death, but she didn’t try to hide it. She just continued answering my questions as the tears rolled down her cheeks.

  Tommi had been a nice boss. Demanding and precise, but nice. Yes, he had been forced to do a lot of entertaining, going out to restaurants and nightclubs. He had several company credit cards for those occasions. He kept his papers in irreproachably good order, and all the receipts were certain to be in his files.

  “Did you ever have to organize Peltonen’s personal schedule, for example, arranging meetings with his friends?”

  Mrs. Laakkonen smiled.

  “Theoretically that wasn’t part of my job. But I suppose you could say that some of the people he asked me to arrange meetings with were more friends than business associates. That was quite rare though,” she rushed to add, as if afraid to speak ill of the dead.

  “Do you remember any of the names of those people? And please, don’t hold anything back—everything is important in a murder investigation.” The word murder brought on another torrent of tears, and I cursed my stupidity.

  “Tuulia Rajala...and someone named Mrs. Wahlgren.”

  “Wahlroos? Pia Wahlroos?”

  “Yes, I suppose it was Wahlroos. And he also called a Tiina quite often. There were a few other women as well who didn’t seem to have anything to do with work.”

  “Do you have this Tiina’s phone number?” I asked, remembering the message on Tommi’s machine.

  “I doubt it. It was understandable that girls would call Tommi. He was such a handsome young man...”

  Laakkonen had no information about whether Tommi had been involved with any of his colleagues outside of work time. Koivu and I interviewed a few more of Tommi’s coworkers and the building’s main receptionist. Everyone I spoke to was subdued. It was clear that Tommi’s death had been a shock to all of them—and I didn’t learn anything new from of any of them.

  Koivu, however, met a rather chatty economist.

  “This Jantunen made all sorts of insinuations. He claimed that Peltonen and Mäki had some sort of liaison going on and that Peltonen was always off in Estonia chasing tail.”

  “Mäki and Tommi? Wow! Well, of course. I should have guessed the minute I saw that Tommi’s boss was a woman. Was there someone in particular in Tallinn?”

  I requested that they put Jantunen on the intercom, but he wasn’t willing to say anything more. It seemed that the gab session with Koivu had been secret guy stuff. Again. Maybe Jantunen was just afraid of spreading rumors about his boss.

  We finally went back to talk to the division head again. Dr. Mäki had calmed down by then. She had wiped away the smeared mascara and applied some lipstick. It looked unpleasantly similar to the shade I’d seen on the shot glass in Tommi’s office cabinet. Was there something to Jantunen’s story? Had Tommi had a relationship with his boss too? How was I going to fish out the truth on this one?

  “You worked closely with Tommi, right? Is there anything you could tell us about Peltonen’s private life?”

  “Well, he had his choir hobby. Wasn’t he at a rehearsal retreat last weekend when he...when he...I gathered he spent a lot of time with the other choir members.”

  I remembered that EFSAS had been practicing for Tommi’s company’s summer party. What if Marja Mäki had known the practice schedule and come to check who Tommi was spending the weekend with out of jealousy?

  “Where were you last Saturday night?”

  Mäki stared at me, and I saw fear spread from her eyes to the rest of her face.

  “What do you mean? I was in Paris.”

  “Alone? With your husband?”

  “With my oldest daughter. My husband was here at home...in Vuosaari.” Mäki burst into tears again. Nevertheless, I continued to pepper her with questions, and her answers painted a clearer picture.

  Mäki and Peltonen had had a relationship, mostly on Tommi’s office sofa after late nights working overtime and in hotel rooms on work trips.

  “I don’t think we were in love though,” Mäki said with a sniffle. “It was more a mutually beneficial arrangement. We got along well.”

  Mutually beneficial arrangement. Tuulia had used the same words.

  “In what sense was it a mutually beneficial arrangement? Did you maybe give Tommi money?”

  Mäki flushed with rage.

  “You listen here, missy,” she hissed. “I may be a worn-out old hag in your eyes, but I didn’t have to pay a manwhore. Tommi wanted sex, and so did I. Neither of us was paying for it.”

  Mäki had been under the impression that her husband didn’t know about the affair. Just before she got home from Paris on Monday morning, a call had come in from the office. Her spouse had told her the terrible news when she walked in the door.

  “Martti said first thing, ‘That gigolo of yours is dead now.’ And the children were standing right there listening!”

  Apparently Martti Mäki had known about the relationship for some time. Marja Mäki clearly feared that her husband had killed Tommi. He claimed to have been home alone Saturday night, because the youngest of the two Mäki daughters had been
away at riding camp.

  “You understand, of course, that I’ll have to interview your husband. Where can I find him?”

  “That may be difficult...He left yesterday evening to go play golf in the Algarve in Portugal for a week.”

  My mind was swirling as we drove back toward Pasila. Koivu whistled thoughtfully next to me.

  “He was a pretty intense dude,” he observed to himself. “We haven’t met a single woman yet that he left in peace. Except maybe the secretary.”

  “You can bet he charmed her too. Damn it to hell! I wish Martti Mäki hadn’t snuck out of the country. If he’s the murderer, he sure isn’t ever coming back now. But how would he have known that Tommi was in Vuosaari too? I’m not going to be able to get an international arrest warrant with such flimsy evidence. I’m hungry. Should we go grab something vegetarian? Eating some rabbit food might help get my brain going.”

  I didn’t make it home until after eight. I verified Martti Mäki’s whereabouts and left him a message to call me back. I figured I didn’t have anything to lose.

  The thing that puzzled me most was why Dr. Mäki had so willingly told us about her relationship with Tommi and her suspicions regarding her husband. Despite her grief, she seemed like a person who kept everything under tight control. Did she hope that her husband had murdered Tommi? Or did she want something else? I sensed that perhaps Tommi’s death was being used as a pawn in a game of marital chess, something I definitely didn’t want to get mixed up in.

  I spent the rest of the night sorting out Tommi’s papers. He had kept his work and private calendars surprisingly well separated. His work calendar contained only work information: meetings, phone call reminders, airplane arrival times, and so forth. Lately there had been several discussions with a business called Mattinen Consulting, which seemed to have some connection to the Estonia project. I couldn’t find the company in the phone book, so I made a note to ask Dr. Mäki about it.