The Nightingale Murder

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “You feel better now?” Koivu asked Sulonen, who grunted in pain. “What the hell were you thinking? We’re going to have to get a damn stretcher and an ambulance. Is it broken?”

  Sulonen shook his head. “I’m a good jumper.”

  When I looked at his eyes more carefully, I realized he’d had something more than alcohol.

  A crowd gathered to watch as Sulonen was carried on a stretcher to an ambulance, with the Helsinki officers accompanying him. I said we would interrogate him later and warned them to keep an eye on him.

  Our ride home was glum. We’d caught Sulonen, and that was good, but it had turned into a clown show. There was no reason for him to have been injured, and that just added another complication. There was sure to be a long wait at the emergency room in Töölö, and that would be a huge waste of Montonen and Konkola’s time. And we wouldn’t be able to question him until the next day at the earliest.

  “Was he trying to kill himself?” Koivu asked as I merged onto the Turku Highway.

  “I don’t know. It would be nice to know where he’s been sleeping and who’s been helping him. And see the contents of his wallet. We’ll have to call and ask Montonen to take a look. With any luck, Sulonen’s injuries won’t be serious.”

  I’d let the rest of the unit know we’d be late for the morning meeting. When we arrived, I found Puupponen with a swollen cheek. Apparently one of his teeth had started oozing pus during the night, and he had an appointment with a dentist in the afternoon. Puustjärvi had already read through the lab results for the cyanide bottle.

  “It was found in the middle of the spare tire in the trunk of Lulu Nightingale’s car. Whoever hid the bottle there was careful. There weren’t any fingerprints on it, and they only found Lulu’s and Sulonen’s prints in the trunk.”

  “And the glass had the same fingerprints. Sulonen’s smart enough that he would have known we’d wonder if his prints weren’t on the glass since he took it to Lulu’s room.” Koivu looked contemplative. “But why did Sulonen take the glass to Lulu at all? If Lulu brought the alcohol, to keep herself calm or something, why didn’t she ask for a glass immediately? And why did she ask Sulonen for it instead of Länsimies?”

  “How could anyone from outside have known that Lulu had the bottle of Fernet Branca with her? Or turn it around: If someone brought the bottle for Lulu, how could they be sure Lulu would take a drink? I just keep coming back to the same two people—besides Sulonen—who had the opportunity to kill Lulu: Riitta Saarnio and Ilari Länsimies.” I squeezed my pencil so hard it snapped.

  “Keep it together, Maria,” Koivu said.

  Puupponen hummed “Somebody Put Something in My Drink” by the Ramones, and I scowled at him. After making assignments for the day, I went to my office to prepare my remarks on rape investigation for the Women’s Police Day event happening next week. If things kept going this badly, I might have to cancel my appearance. I wondered why rape was considered a women’s police issue, since all cops had to investigate them, but I realized that if I were a victim, I’d probably want to talk to someone of my own gender instead of a man. On the other hand, some had suggested that in rape cases female police officers were actually harder on women and more likely to blame them than male officers were. Maybe we knew better than men how defenseless a drunk woman on a dark street was, but that still didn’t give anyone the right to attack anyone else or blame the victim when it happened.

  After working for half an hour, I went to get some coffee, even though I could still taste Nordström’s tar in my mouth. Someone had left a tabloid on the table in the break room, so I quickly leafed through it. There was only one mention of Lulu’s murder investigation, buried on an interior page.

  Someone had also left one of the celebrity rumor rags on the table. On its garish, patchwork cover was a picture of Mauri Hytönen. The interview filled two pages, and in one of the pictures Hytönen was posing with a blond bombshell. The woman had more makeup than clothing. Hytönen repeated everything he’d said on TV and added, “Modern women demand too much from men. Even in sex men are just supposed to focus on pleasing women and forget their own pleasure. And feminists know exactly how to exploit the pressure society puts on men. I’m happy to pay to be able to think about my own pleasure and determine how I get it.”

  The next page picked apart the details of the latest celebrity divorce. This time it was the woman who’d cheated and the man who was dishing. Did publicly rehashing divorces and infidelity make them easier to deal with? Did it insulate the person from the pain of their own experience? Maybe Mauri Hytönen was being honest when he bought sex since he didn’t want commitment. Wouldn’t that be easy: no unnecessary emotion, no unnecessary entanglements. There was no space for children and families in that world, though.

  I’d just sat down at my desk again when the phone rang. The display said “Unknown Number.” I answered, and a familiar voice came from the receiver.

  “Hello, it’s Arto Saarnio. Is there any chance you have a free moment, Detective? I’m leaving a meeting and happen to be just around the corner, and I’d like to discuss something with you.”

  “Right now?”

  “If it isn’t too much trouble. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “I assume this has something to do with Lulu Nightingale’s death?”

  Saarnio sighed. “Yes . . . or, well . . . I’ll tell you when I get there. I assume you have someplace we can talk without being overheard.”

  “Sure. We can meet in my office.” As I tidied up the worst of my piles of papers, I wondered if Arto Saarnio suspected his wife. Jogging down the stairs to meet Saarnio in the lobby, I realized my muscles were tense with anticipation.

  “Hatchetman” Saarnio’s camel-hair overcoat was unbuttoned, and underneath he wore a perfectly fitted dark-gray suit. The shade of the red stripes on his white shirt repeated in his matte red tie, and his black shoes were so shiny I could practically see my reflection. The only deviation from his meticulously conservative appearance was the gray two-day stubble, obviously professionally maintained. An eighth of an inch more and it would have looked unkempt.

  Saarnio attracted attention in the police station lobby. The people picking up their passports and renewing their driver’s licenses stared openly, and I saw an old man clench his fists.

  He shook my hand, but his smile didn’t reach his eyes. After exiting the elevator he walked down the hallway with his gaze fixed forward as if wanting to avoid eye contact. He didn’t speak again until my office door was closed.

  “I assume you understand, Detective Kallio, that what I intend to tell you is absolutely confidential?”

  “Mr. Saarnio, I assume you also understand that that depends on what you say. Please, sit.” I motioned for him to take a seat on the couch. He gave a strained laugh at my retort and rubbed his stubble for a moment before he began to speak.

  “I didn’t come here to confess to murder. I . . . believe it or not, I’ve been forced to have a lot of painful conversations with crying people in my life, but nothing has been worse than this.”

  “I think I might know something about those conversations. My brother-in-law was the CIO at Copperwood.” The words slipped out of my mouth before I had a chance to think them through.

  “I remember him. Jarmo Vesterinen is a good man. I’m sure he’ll find new work in his field if he’s willing to leave Joensuu for Helsinki or go abroad. Of course, you have every reason to be disgusted with me for his sake, and what you’re about to hear isn’t likely to change that attitude. You see, I was one of her clients.”

  “Lulu Nightingale’s?” I was already groping for my tape recorder. This would now have to be an official interview. But Saarnio shook his head.

  “No, not her, the other one you’re looking for. Oksana Petrenko. It’s so banal that I don’t know how to tell you . . . Although I assume that, as a police officer, you hear all sorts of strange stories.” Saarnio tried to smile again. I didn’t smile back. He st
ood up and took off his coat, which he set carefully next to him on the couch. I caught the forest scent of his aftershave, with a slight hint of salt.

  “Well, my wife and I haven’t had a sex life for years. Riitta has made it clear that I can meet my needs however I see fit just so long as it doesn’t attract publicity or become a nuisance for her. The only problem was that I didn’t want to. A man in my position has to choose his mistresses carefully, and I’ve always thought prostitutes were somehow pathetic. I didn’t want to get involved in anything like that.” Saarnio interrupted his story and asked if he could have a glass of water. I grabbed a water bottle from the cabinet and poured it into a mug, although I didn’t know how fresh the water was. At least it was wet.

  “I met Oksana last August. We were hosting guests from a Swiss subsidiary, and they assumed that we would arrange female companionship for them after dinner. I knew this from previous experience. Usually our executive vice president has handled these matters since he has more interest in that industry. It isn’t anything out of the ordinary. People still think that the more important the man, the more women he has to have.” Saarnio smiled at his own thoughts and sipped more water. A bead of sweat had stopped in a furrow on his forehead, and he wiped it away.

  “We spent the evening in the company’s sauna suite, although only a couple of the Finns actually used the sauna. Oksana was one of the girls who had been invited to attend. Her English was quite poor, so the Swiss were more interested in the other girls. One of my subordinates was seriously drunk—he was fired soon after when he refused to go to AA—and he hit Oksana. I intervened and made it clear the girl belonged to me, and of course my employee had to acquiesce. I know Russian, because I’m from the generation during the Kekkonen era who handled business in the East—it was safer to do business without interpreters listening in. And that’s how it started, even though nothing happened that night. I just talked with her on the balcony and then took her home.”

  “Where did she live?”

  “The girls shared an apartment in Punavuori, then they moved near the center of Espoo, but they met clients all over the place. The suppliers arranged several short-term leases, supposedly for contract workers. But Oksana and I met at hotels. It felt so stupid slinking around the hallways, afraid of getting caught!”

  “Hatchetman” Saarnio and a beautiful young woman—the headlines were easy to imagine. It was a titillating topic: Finland’s most hated man buying sex and cheating on his wife, who was also a public figure because she directed Ilari Länsimies’s show. But Arto Saarnio had decided to take the risk, apparently caught up in a late midlife crisis.

  “But I’m not one of these men who can buy sex just as sex. Oksana was an intelligent girl. She’d studied economics at the University of Kiev.”

  “So she was Ukrainian?”

  “Her family was transferred there in the seventies from the St. Petersburg suburbs. The father was a party official and a raging drunk. Oksana has four younger siblings who needed clothes and shoes. When she was offered the opportunity to go to Finland to work as a waitress, she thought it would only be temporary. She’d been here nearly a year before we met. Turned out the work wasn’t just waitressing.”

  “Did she have a visa?”

  “No, she was here illegally, which is the beauty of human trafficking—for the traders, that is. Who can an illegal immigrant turn to when she’s beaten and her money is stolen? Oksana had forged papers.”

  It felt absurd having the Hatchetman lecturing me about human trafficking. I’d imagined that for him people were just line items that only mattered if they could be used to reduce expenses or produce increased revenues for shareholders.

  “Oksana knew how to listen. These past few years have been demanding, and I’ve had to make a lot of decisions that weigh heavy on me. I haven’t been able to talk about them to anyone, not even Riitta. Oksana was removed enough from the situation but understood how the economy works. She still remembered the socialist era and how difficult it is to build democratic capitalism. Maybe that’s why I fell for her like an idiot. She was so understanding.”

  “So you had a relationship?”

  “A relationship . . . that doesn’t seem like the right word. Of course, I paid her, and I gave her gifts, jewelry and clothes. And she had other clients, although . . .” Saarnio thought for a moment and then didn’t finish the sentence.

  “Was Oksana’s garnet ring from you?”

  “If it has the inscription Nad Oksanu, A. I bought it in Amsterdam. I thought no one knew me there so it would be safe to have it personalized. Was she wearing it, then? Of course I didn’t have any big plans, but I wanted to help her. Oksana wanted to stop selling herself. I promised to help her get a visa and a residence permit, and I made it clear my company could arrange an honest job and an apartment. But Oksana said she couldn’t take any risks. The girls were all being blackmailed, and their families were in danger. The situation was impossible: she would have had to return to Ukraine to apply for a legal visa. Meanwhile, the men she worked for had threatened to kill her.”

  “What men? Do you know any names?”

  Saarnio shook his head. “Oksana didn’t tell me. She wanted to protect me—I would have been too tempting a target for extortion by the mafia.”

  I suspected Saarnio hadn’t wanted to know. “When did you last see Oksana?”

  “Wednesday a week ago. I tried to convince her to leave, but she said her pimps wouldn’t let her get out of the country alive. Do you know what happened to her? Who cut her like that?”

  I looked at Saarnio and tried to figure out whether he was telling the truth. What if he was the one who’d attacked Oksana and knew that now she was dead? But then why would he have come here to tell me he knew her?

  “Did your wife know that you were a regular client of Oksana Petrenko?”

  Saarnio looked me straight in the eyes. “I’ve wondered that myself. What if Riitta was confused? What if she thought I was Lulu’s client . . . Maybe she noticed me being more distant than usual but also, sometimes, as happy as a schoolboy. I’m sure it seemed strange. I don’t know what she knows . . . Poor Riitta.”

  Saarnio sighed, leaning back and crossing his hands behind his neck. The stubble was a clever trick, almost entirely covering up the slack skin beginning to form below his jaw. I poured myself more water and asked again about Oksana Petrenko’s pimps. Finally, he mentioned one name.

  “Sometimes Oksana talked about a Mishin. She said it wasn’t a good idea to make trouble for Mishin.”

  “How did the executive vice president you mentioned arrange for the girls that first night?”

  “Apparently one of Oksana’s roommates, Svetlana, was an old acquaintance. Of course, I can ask, although . . . He can’t know anything about any of this. And I can give you all the addresses I know Oksana lived at. At first, I thought I’d hire a private detective to track her down, but then it seemed best to turn to the police, especially after what happened on Surprise Guests. Riitta and I don’t sleep in the same room anymore, but I hear her screaming in her sleep. She has nightmares about finding Lulu Nightingale that night. Could that be a sign of a guilty conscience?”

  “Has she seen her doctor again?”

  “Riitta? No. Soila, our daughter, tried to get her to go, but she wouldn’t. To think, my daughter is eight years older than Oksana: What did I think I was doing?”

  I remembered Oksana’s injuries. It wasn’t out of the question that she’d done it to herself. Thinking about the way her genitals had been mutilated made me shudder. The poor girl. Maybe she’d thought the pimps wouldn’t want her anymore. But where was she now?

  I asked Saarnio a few more questions about his wife. Previously we’d thought that Riitta Saarnio only had an opportunity, but now she also had a motive, even if it might have been based on a mistake.

  “Did you ever talk with your wife about Lulu Nightingale?”

  Saarnio took a sip of water before answering. He d
ug a pill out of his coat pocket, put it in his mouth and swallowed, then wiped his brow with a red checked handkerchief, which matched his shirt and tie. It was hard to believe that the man sitting before me was the same one I’d seen on television looking so calm and cool.

  “Riitta told me early last week what the topic of the show would be. She said she didn’t like it. She and Ilari had argued about it. Riitta didn’t want Lulu Nightingale on the show because she thought it was offensive to present prostitution as an acceptable profession. She asked what I thought, and when I didn’t agree with her quickly enough, she stormed out of the room shouting that she knew what I’d been up to. We didn’t talk about it anymore after that, but . . . Detective Kallio, tell me: What do I do if my wife murdered Lulu Nightingale because of me? And what if those mafia thugs murdered Oksana because I wanted to give her a new life? What the hell do I do?”

  10

  I had to use the authority of my office to convince Saarnio to agree to retell what he knew about the pimps for the official record. I told him we would also have to question his wife again. Saarnio looked like a sick old man when he heard that, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He’d made his choice when he’d come to see me. I also wrung Oksana’s last address out of him. It wasn’t far from the place she’d been found.