My First Murder (14 page)

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.

The private calendars contained exclusively personal business: choir rehearsals and gigs, meetings with girls, squash times, and the like. The name Tiina appeared now and then, but no more often than any of the other women’s names. The other names that came up repeatedly were Helvi and Merike. Had Tommi been playing boy toy for other wealthy women as well? Was that why he had gone to that nightclub? The calendar was also teeming with strange abbreviations like T. 10:00 H. I wondered whether T. could be Tuulia, whether H. meant home. What had really been going on between them?

I was perplexed that I couldn’t find any sort of address book among Tommi’s belongings, neither in the bag at the villa where
we had found the calendar nor in Tommi’s apartment. There hadn’t been a list of numbers on the phone table in his apartment or in his office. Were we supposed to believe that he kept all of these different women’s phone numbers in his head? Could one of them have come to the summerhouse at night and killed Tommi out of jealousy? But then how would Tommi have known to meet her on the dock? And would she have come by boat? I could feel a headache creeping up the back of my skull. I had been thinking intently for half an hour with my shoulders hunched over.

I decided that a good jog would be a better headache cure than ibuprofen. I was just digging my running pants out from the bottom of the laundry bin—they still had one more run in them—when the doorbell rang. Probably Jehovah’s Witnesses or the TV license inspector. I could send the J Dubs on their way by explaining that I was Orthodox, which was a lie, but the television license inspector would be more of a problem. I had bought an ancient black-and-white TV with a screen about the size of a sheet of paper at a police auction a couple of years before, and for some reason I just hadn’t ever gotten around to paying the public broadcasting support tax. However, I also knew that I didn’t have any obligation to let a license inspector in.

I peeked through the peephole like an old lady and was delighted to see that it was Tuulia outside.

“What’s up, Master Detective? I was just one street away visiting my cousin and thought I’d come by and ask how the investigation is going.”

“Come on in,” I said, genuinely happy to see her. I decided to ignore whether Tuulia’s story was true. Maybe I didn’t need to go for a run so badly after all.

“Riku was foaming at the mouth on Monday, saying that you almost arrested him. Is he number one in the rankings?” Tuulia asked as she hung her denim jacket on a hook.

“Well, no. I had a couple of things I had to clear up with him. My rankings are still in flux at the moment, but I can’t really tell you anything more than that. I’ve interviewed others aside from Riku. Haven’t the rumors gotten around yet?”

“Well, yeah. Antti and Mira were there too. We went over to the student association to practice the songs for the funeral. Terrible rehearsal. Hopeless, I mean Hopponen, our choir director, was a wreck. It was like we—I mean the ones who were at the villa—and everybody else were two completely different groups. Sirkku lost it in the end and started screaming that she hadn’t killed anyone so stop staring.”

“Interesting.”

“The worst thing was we all lost it when Hopponen told us that Tommi’s mother wants to hear Sibelius’s ‘Song of My Heart.’ Nothing came of it since everyone went to pieces—except Mira, who just charged on with the alto part as if nothing had happened. Of course we want to sing whatever the family wants at our friend’s funeral, and as well as we can, but hell...even Hopponen fell apart.”

“Everyone who was at the villa is coming to sing?”

“If someone didn’t come, we’d just assume they were the murderer. Damn it, Mira pisses me off! She doesn’t even sing. She just shouts. Do you know what my cousin asked me after our spring concert? ‘Who was that soloist?’ She honestly thought that Mira was a soloist since her voice was so much louder than the rest of the group. I could almost kill her sometimes...I mean, figuratively speaking, you know,” Tuulia added uncomfortably.

I didn’t really feel like talking about work and changed the topic of conversation for a minute before turning to the matter of the calendar entries.

“Would you have had a date with Tommi the night before last if he had still been alive?” I asked suddenly. It was probably best to get through the official business first so that we could relax.

“How so?”

“Tommi wrote NO TUULIA MONDAY! in all caps on the notepad by his phone.”

Tuulia seemed to be thinking hard. “No, that was...We had arranged to go to Theater in the Park, but then I decided I wasn’t interested because everyone who had seen the show had totally ripped it to shreds, so I asked Tommi to cancel the tickets. I’d already forgotten the whole thing.”

“According to Tommi’s calendar, you two had quite a lot of dates. Were you playing squash or something?” I picked up the calendar, but Tuulia snatched it away from me, surprisingly covetous, and started to flip through it before I could stop her.

“Oh, you mean these Ts? Those don’t have anything to do with me. I wonder what
T
could mean. Tommi always had all kinds of crazy coding systems. In school a black square on his calendar meant that he had been drinking that day and a heart meant he had gotten...And you can bet he scattered more of both around than was really true. Sometimes he was a little childish. This is probably some woman.”

“Do you know anything about any of these other people? Who is Tiina? Or Merike?” I took the calendar from Tuulia and started to read the names aloud to her. Tuulia could explain who many of them were: choir members, relatives, coworkers. There were only a couple of names I mentioned that Tuulia couldn’t identify.

“Do you know anything about Tommi’s secondary income?”

Tuulia looked dumbfounded. She didn’t have a clue about any side jobs, but after thinking for a moment, she remembered something.

“I think they were some sort of temporary gigs. Sometimes he talked about some sort of consulting work, and he seemed to know a lot about certain specific laws. Maybe he was doing something off the books, dodging taxes.”

I mentioned that Tommi had been receiving additional income regularly.

“Do you know anything about a trust fund or anything like that?”

“Yeah! That must be it!” Tuulia said excitedly. “They’re all high-finance types, so they probably pay out their inheritances ahead of time to avoid the taxes. Tommi’s parents have so much money they don’t know what to do with it. I doubt that Heikki would admit it to you if you asked him though. Henri’s going to have money pouring down on him now. It’s a good thing he’s off in the States—aren’t people usually killed for money?” Tuulia paused for a moment. “Hey, I like your apartment just fine, but is there any beer here? I had a pretty intense squash match this morning and now I’m starting to feel it.”

My refrigerator contained the dregs of a liter carton of yogurt, a container of processed cheese spread, and that bottle of kiwi liqueur. The rest of my food reserves consisted of a package of coffee, half a loaf of rye bread, and three desiccated apples. Trips to the grocery store had been few and far between lately.

“Nothing? Really? Well, let’s head down to Elite, then. Or does some professional code of conduct say you can’t?”

I thought about my jog and remembered what they had taught us in the academy about cops staying neutral. I figured
a couple of beers would work as a neck relaxant just as well as running.