Copper Heart

by Leena Lehtolainen

  I considered asking Matti about Meritta’s mine paintings but decided to let it be. Best to talk to Ella first. Without prying anymore, I refrained from asking any more questions and Matti obediently exited the building. From the window I watched as he walked toward the center of town in the rain without an umbrella. Only then did I realize he hadn’t asked about Jaska. Was he a broken link in the Arpikylä rumor chain?

  Before moving on to the other rooms, I checked the kitchen once more thoroughly. The art school was out for summer break, so the whole place was filled with finished works from the previous spring: vernal watercolors, plaster sculptures, photographs…The most daring pieces were usually made by children. The school also had classes for adults, but their work seemed boxed in, as if evidence of how successful the public school art teachers had been administering low grades for anything with originality. Since everyone knows dogs don’t have green tails. For a while I looked at the drawings, enjoying the stacks of rocks collected from the Sump that lay on the floor of one room, marveling at an excellent series of pictures of a field of fireweed in various stages of flowering. In my day there hadn’t been anything like this for kids in Arpikylä. The sports clubs and marching band were the only games in town back then.

  Good Lord…I was supposed to be looking for a lock that matched Meritta’s key.

  The house was a good two thousand square feet, and I rummaged through every cabinet and drawer in the place, peering behind rolls of paper and pots of paint, even opening a medicine cabinet that turned out to be empty. Nothing. Finally in the old bedroom that apparently now served as the teachers’ lounge, I found a cabinet labeled M. Flöjt. In it hung a towel and a couple of frocks, but at the base of the cabinet was a locked container about the size of a shoebox. With an exclamation, I picked it up.

  The box was already open, and nothing was inside. Had the burglar beat me to it after all? Just in case, I pushed the key into the lock. It didn’t fit.

  Then for good measure I searched the pockets of the frocks, but all I found were soiled handkerchiefs. Why couldn’t people keep diaries anymore? Then I could just read all of Meritta’s secrets.

  I felt miserable. This was already the second dead-end of the day, and I still had to go talk to Ella. Back at the police station, I called all the banks in town. Meritta didn’t have a safety-deposit box at any of them. The same bank manager whose slack lending practices had amazed me in the Saastamoinen Construction bankruptcy fraud case began voluntarily opening up to me about Meritta’s financial matters and even seemed offended when I told him I didn’t need to know any more.

  “With your predecessor I was just in the habit of cooperating and not being too uptight about privacy, since Jussi is a relative and all…”

  “What? You’re related?”

  “Sure. Our wives are sisters.”

  As the handset clicked into place, I completely forgot about Meritta. No wonder Sheriff Jussi wanted out of town while the indictments were being filed for the Saastamoinen fraud case. Jussi’s wife was the bank manager’s sister-in-law. And Saastamoinen’s wife was the bank manager’s sister. No doubt Jussi and Saastamoinen had spent many a pleasant evening at the bank’s corporate cabin retreat. And I wondered which building company Jussi had hired to build his new house last year. That rat bastard!

  And now I was left to clean up their mess. Or had Jussi thought I was just a dewy-eyed little girl who probably wouldn’t figure it out? Or perhaps an old townie who would understand this was how business got done in small towns and would leave well enough alone. I kicked the trash can, which, of course, was full, and sent its contents flying across the carpet in my office.

  Getting down on all fours, I started cleaning up my mess. Jussi’s idiocy wasn’t the cleaner’s fault, after all. I stuck my tongue out at President Ahtisaari, but he didn’t look amused.

  Then I read white-collar crime laws until I had calmed down enough to call Ella. I caught her as she was just leaving work.

  “Drop by here on the way for some coffee,” I said. “I have some ice cream hidden in the back of the freezer too.”

  Ella sounded reluctant but promised to come. I figured she would be here by car in five minutes. In the meantime I dished up servings of mint chocolate chip ice cream to let soften a little before she arrived and then sat down in an armchair next to my coffee table to wait. This was just going to be two friends getting together for a gab session, even though we were in my office.

  When she arrived, Ella looked stressed and somehow heavier than normal. Eventually I realized the reason: usually she wore loose-fitting, colorful clothing, but now she was dressed in a black velvet jacket two sizes too small, which looked like it was from Matti’s wardrobe.

  I poured her coffee before asking if she had heard about Jaska.

  “No. What? Did Jaska kill Meritta?”

  “Probably not, because last night someone killed him too.”

  Ella’s spoonful of ice cream clattered to the table, her mouth twisting into an amused expression that reminded me of when we were children. Once Ella had explained to me in horror that whenever she heard something truly shocking, her first reaction was always to laugh. Together we had tried to work on controlling her odd reactions, with me conjuring up the most horrible things I could think of, such as, “An atomic bomb just hit Joensuu.” But that had only caused even wilder fits of laughter.

  “Killed? How?”

  “The investigation is ongoing.” I didn’t know how to beat around the bush any longer, so I got to the point. “Ella, about your Kalevala brooch. The one we found on the Tower after Meritta’s death was yours, wasn’t it? It wasn’t in the washing machine at all.”

  “I don’t know where it is. I lost it somewhere that night.”

  “We found three sets of fingerprints on it. One set was Meritta’s and another was Matti’s. The third set, the most prominent, must be yours.”

  “Have you been talking with Matti?” Ella’s face was redder than usual and she was fidgeting with the buttons of her black coat. Unbuttoned it revealed an oddly cutesy slate-blue flowery blouse.

  “I did see Matti a couple of hours ago at the art school.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That you and Meritta had been fighting about the grant for the art camp. Apparently Meritta had misappropriated some of the funds.”

  Ella took a long sip of her coffee and then another. The look on her face was the same expression she wore back in high school Swedish class when our teacher had asked her to conjugate an irregular verb: she seemed to be thinking very hard. I let her ponder in peace because I remembered that hurrying her was never a way to get a sensible answer. Of course, I was hoping that she would laugh and say it had just been some trivial thing.

  “So Matti told you that,” she finally said slowly. “He’s right. Meritta had inadvertently spent part of the materials budget on her own supplies. But arts and culture organizations don’t have room to make mistakes like that. The city leadership watches our money like hawks, more than any other area. And it would have looked even uglier with Meritta on the city council. She was one of the people who authorized the money she misused. I can’t believe Matti would tell you, that he would be willing to sully Meritta’s reputation…”

  Ella didn’t seem to approve of what Matti had done. She was one of those people who never talked behind someone else’s back; she was more likely to read you the riot act to your face. Perhaps talking about the peccadillos of the dead felt like betrayal to her.

  “We’ll be able to fix it though. We’ll find the money somewhere,” Ella said, more to herself than to me.

  “So you didn’t go back to the Old Mine that night to meet Meritta or look for your brooch?”

  Ella fixed me far too firmly in her gaze. “I did not go back to the Old Mine that night to meet Meritta or look for my brooch,” she repeated. Breaking eye contact, she went on. “Maybe Meritta found the brooch somewhere, remembered that it was mine, and picked it up. Maybe
it slipped out of her pocket when she…fell.”

  “That may be,” I said soothingly and poured us more coffee. The ice cream had melted in our bowls into green-and-brown puddles, which no longer looked particularly appetizing. Something was clearly wrong with Ella and Matti. I wanted to see the grant files for the art camp. Was Meritta planning to dump the blame on Ella if her malfeasance came out? How much money were we talking about?

  “You said yourself you got your job when you finally had the sense to join the right political party. You said so yourself. Are you going to have trouble now that Matti is representing the Greens on the city council?”

  “Some eyebrows did go up when Matti ran on the Green ticket. Maybe because he was in a different party than me, they wondered why he couldn’t keep his ball and chain in line. But Matti is about as Green as a mink farmer. Meritta talked him into running.”

  Now Ella was starting to sound like herself again. I did what I could to turn the conversation in a lighter direction as well. Only when Ella said she needed to head home to make dinner for the kids did I finally dare to ask the critical question.

  “You and Matti spent last night at home in bed together, right?”

  For a second Ella looked at me in confusion, and then her mouth fell open. “Yes, we did. But we don’t have any witnesses. Our kids were fast asleep!”

  She slammed the door hard as she left.

  Going to the break room to rinse our dishes, I found Lasarov and Hopponen gossiping. Lasarov was saying that Jaska’s mother was at home with a nurse and that both she and her daughter had needed sedatives. I felt like a heel for thinking about going to their house to rummage through their closets. But I had to. When I returned to my office to straighten up before leaving, the phone rang.

  “Hey, it’s Koivu. I’m on my way back to Joensuu. There’s a suicide I need to check out. Hanging, apparently.”

  Koivu’s voice was pained, and I wondered how long he was going to be able to stay on his feet with no sleep and a broken heart. Still, we talked shop for a few minutes.

  “The Virtanens admit that the brooch is theirs. But don’t tell Järvisalo yet. And where are you sleeping?”

  “We do have hotels in Joensuu.”

  Seldom had I heard such obvious bitterness in Koivu’s voice.

  Earlier in the morning, I had parked my car out in the rain. Now when I turned the ignition key, it wouldn’t even click. I swore. Old Soviet cars had a habit of acting up in rainy weather, and I knew I wasn’t going to get it started until the moisture that had penetrated the electrical system dried out. I felt like kicking the miserable piece of junk. There was nothing to do but get my keys to the sheriff’s Saab from inside and haul it out of the back of the station’s garage.

  As I drove down the hill to Jaska’s mother’s house, I remembered how a mere two days before I’d gone down this same road looking for Jaska himself. Why had I let the sentimental human side of me push aside the police officer that night? I shouldn’t have let Jaska off the hook. Even though self-recrimination wasn’t going to bring him back to life, I indulged it. Maybe next time I wouldn’t make the same mistake.

  Jaana came to the door, her speech unnaturally calm and slightly unclear. Probably the sedatives. “Mom is sleeping. Did you want to talk to her?”

  “No, I just want to look around Jaska’s room a bit. I don’t have a warrant, but will you give me permission?”

  “You can do whatever you want if it will stop all this dying. It’s there, on the left.”

  Jaska and his mother lived in a cramped two-bedroom apartment. The larger bedroom, next to the bathroom, was his. The door beyond the kitchen was shut, and the living room was overflowing with flowers.

  A concert poster from his previous band hung on his door. In it Jaska glared angrily at the world, ever the defiant metalhead. Opening the door, I stepped into the stuffy stench of years of cigarette smoke. Was this really the bedroom of a thirty-year-old man? If I hadn’t known, I would have guessed the occupant was about fifteen.

  The walls were plastered with posters of rock bands, motorcycles, and, especially, half-naked women—there were several posters of voluptuous blondes with their butts sticking out smiling on sandy beaches, and one of Madonna groping her crotch. Someone had obviously cleaned recently, but the stench of old ashtrays lingered. Jaska’s lesser electric guitar rested on the bed, his better one leaned against the wall in its case. The amplifier was stuffed between the chair and the desk. The bookshelf was crammed full of pornographic magazines, Jerry Cottons, and Stephen King. In contrast, all of the sheet music was neatly arranged in binders. On the spines Jaska had written in wide capital letters their contents: RAINBOW, RAMONES, ROLLING STONES…The best-kept binder said JASKA.

  I opened it, finding dozens of handwritten songs, some on staffs drawn in pencil on graph paper and some just words and chords. Mostly three-chord songs utilizing a twenty-word English vocabulary. Rock, baby, fuck. Tears started dripping from my eyes onto Jaska’s papers, one drop smearing the words in the second verse of a song called “Avenger.” For the first two years of high school, Jaska had sat behind me, mostly sleeping but sometimes working on his music. Whenever he finished a song, he would tap me on the shoulder enthusiastically and ask me to give him feedback. If the song was bad, I talked it up and just corrected the spelling. If the song was even a little good, I made suggestions for improvements. I don’t think my help made Jaska’s work much better, since I knew even less about writing music than he did.

  On the shelf was also an old box that said BAND PHOTOS. I grabbed a few at random. And there we were, Rat Poison fifteen years before, all of us wearing black leather jackets and white T-shirts, with our hair done up. Jaska was trying to look as if he knew how to play the guitar and jump a hurdle at the same time, and I was pretending to vomit. I had heard the drummer, who was also in our class, now worked as the principal of an elementary school in Kuopio and that our backup guitarist was an unemployed electrician in Tampere.

  Jaska’s stereo adorned the desk. I had to restrain myself from rummaging through his record collection. Instead I examined the dresser and closets. In the dresser drawers I found some hardercore porn and various articles of clothing. Running my hand between them, I didn’t find any boxes or other containers the key could have fit.

  In the closet hung two pairs of jeans, two dress shirts, and the dark-blue suit purchased in honor of his graduation, which he clearly had not worn since. On the top shelf was a pair of soccer cleats. I peeked behind them. Nothing but dust bunnies. There wasn’t anything under the bed either.

  I sat down on Jaska’s bed to think. Why had he left me a key but no idea what to do with it? I reread the note that came with it searching for a hidden message, but there was none. Neither the first, second, nor third letters spelled anything significant. I could have easily imagined Jaska doing something like that. He hadn’t used the old lemon juice trick from The Famous Five had he? Grabbing a lighter from the desk, I held the flame carefully under the paper. No brown letters appeared. And the envelope? Was it a hint about the employment center? Why would Meritta have hidden something there?

  Bah. My mind was running in circles. Why wasn’t I Lord Peter Wimsey? The riddle of the key would be clear as day to a detective like him. Shoving the cursed letter back in my pocket, I decided to leave this mausoleum to my dead friend’s shattered dreams before I started bawling again.

  I didn’t want to go home and be sad and alone yet though. And I wasn’t going to be able to deal with my parents or their questions about the progress of the investigation right now. Glancing at the weight room schedule I had in my purse, I noticed that every Thursday night from seven to nine was ladies’ night. That was perfect. Maybe enough sweat would wash some of my grief and guilt away.

  12

  The weight room was empty except for two women who were apparently trying to figure out a new core-strengthening routine from a piece of paper. I spent about ten minutes jumping rope to get my mu
scles warmed up. In Arpikylä we didn’t bother with froufrou things like stationary bikes or stair-steppers. Lacking proper air circulation, the low-ceilinged basement room was dogged by the stench of wet sneakers and an occasional sickeningly sweet puff of perfume from one of the Abs of Steel ladies. The room had no windows to open, and the only light came from bulbs in metal cages.

  So not a very pleasant environment for self-therapy, but I knew I just needed to exert some energy. Loading a bar with a moderate amount of weight, I started a bench press set.

  If our original plans held, Antti would be returning to Finland in seven weeks. My job would finish at the end of October, and Antti had promised to stay with me at the farm until then. His teaching semester at Helsinki University wouldn’t start until early November.

  Grimacing, I pushed out five more reps than usual. I probably needed to start actively looking for work now during the summer. Antti still had a couple of years left on his assistantship at the university, so presumably I needed to find a job somewhere in the metro area.

  Then a strange thought crept into my mind, and for the first time in my life I managed to think it all the way through: What if I got pregnant? The bar almost fell out of my hands when I realized what I had just considered.

  A baby? Back in my twenties I was absolutely sure I would never get married and have kids. I was also just as sure that I would never own a suit or listen to classical music. Well, just so long as I didn’t own a set of curlers, at least some of my principles remained intact.

  From the bench press I moved to the rowing machine. I couldn’t deny a little curiosity about how it would feel being pregnant and giving birth. But it would be a lifelong commitment. I could always get away from a spouse or a job, but a child would be mine for the rest of my life. Stupider people had survived it though, so why not Antti and me?