Authors: Leena Lehtolainen
“I came to get Tommi’s car keys. Would you give them to me?” Tuulia didn’t protest—she just disappeared for a moment into the other room and then returned with the familiar Vectra keys.
“Do the Peltonens intend to sell the car? I guess they need all the keys for that.”
“I don’t know if the car will make it to the lot now. The insurance may or may not pay for the damage to the interior now that we’ve turned the whole car inside out. Why did you have the keys?”
“I have copies of all of Tommi’s keys. He was afraid of losing his own and thought it would be good for one of his friends to have spares.”
“Your fingerprints were all over that car. I guess you drove it a lot?”
“Now and then, when I needed it.”
“Was Mauri Mattinen one of Tommi’s trusted friends too, since he had the third set of keys?”
I noticed how the hand holding Tuulia’s teacup shook as she said quickly, “Mauri who?”
I looked at Tuulia’s hands. She had on a long-sleeved T-shirt, whose sleeves had stretched some. Evidently she was in the habit of pulling them down to cover her hands when they were cold. On her right fourth finger was a ring that would have eaten at least a month’s worth of wages as a cop. I had thought it was high-quality kitsch, but apparently it was real.
“Don’t you know Mattinen? You must have met him on Mother’s Day in Tallinn when he turned over that shipment of cocaine to you and Tommi. And I imagine you took Tommi’s car to the door of Mattinen’s garage a few times when Tommi couldn’t take it himself. That must have been what the ‘No Tuulia Monday’ on Tommi’s notepad meant. You couldn’t take the car to Mattinen because he was afraid he was being watched.”
“Who told you that? Was it M, I mean Mattinen?” Tuulia noticed her slip too late.
“That’s for me to know. Though you had a good cover, quite a lot of people knew about different parts of this mess. Tommi just had to get his hands into everything. I don’t know where he first met Mattinen—maybe in some nightclub where Tommi was running girls. Mattinen had good contacts with the drug runners in Estonia and distribution channels ready here in Finland, but he needed someone clean to bring the merchandise through customs. I imagine Tommi brought a few deliveries of marijuana through over the winter. He was probably surprised by how easy it all was and started to think he could handle some bigger jobs. Around the same time, Mattinen learned there was a big load of coke available. Henri and Peter were planning their test run on the
Marlboro
, and it was easy for Tommi to talk them into going to Tallinn under the cover of listening to that choir concert. Everything went just as you had planned. You and Tommi probably just disappeared into the city together for a few
minutes, during which time you met Mattinen and took possession of the goods.”
Tuulia smiled at me the way one smiles at a small child who says they’ve seen monsters in the forest.
“Maybe Tommi was mixed up in all that. All I knew was that he sold a bit of black market vodka and arranged escorts for people now and then. Even if he did bring drugs home on the
Marlboro
, why would he have dragged me into that?”
“You were Tommi’s trusted sidekick. I’m guessing it probably all started a couple of years ago with Tommi’s prostitution business. You had a chronic shortage of cash, and you agreed when Tommi suggested going to bed for money. Not all of his women were from across the border—he also had normal Finnish student girls. Like you. But you had had enough pretty quickly. You know better than I do what it’s like. It’s not the most enriching way to make a living. But you still needed money. You told me yourself when we were together at the Elite what kind of life you want to live. Wild, free, not getting stuck in the usual ruts. And I envied you then. So when you told Tommi about your money problems, he offered you a different kind of work. You carried marijuana to Mattinen, and it looks like you sold it yourself a few times too. Then Tommi needed an assistant on the boat job since it isn’t safe to walk around alone at night in Tallinn anymore. The two of you probably also had some sort of plan for how to make it through if customs got too interested in you. Then I imagine that Tommi must have gotten greedy. Mattinen was taking too much frosting off the cake, so Tommi wouldn’t give him everything he had brought all at once, and instead parceled out small amounts at significant commissions. He wouldn’t even meet with Mattinen, so he made you drive his
car to and from Mattinen’s place. Mattinen agreed because he didn’t have any alternative.”
“And so Mattinen killed Tommi because he got so greedy?”
“No, Mattinen didn’t kill Tommi. Mattinen called Tommi’s answering machine on Sunday night. He was skipping the country. You killed Tommi. And for nothing. Mattinen didn’t get caught. No one could have burned you or Tommi.”
Tuulia suddenly looked tired. I wondered how long she was going to have the energy to resist. All I had against her was circumstantial evidence. If I wanted to charge her with Tommi’s murder, I would have to get her to confess. Did I want Tuulia to confess? I had to keep pushing myself, my own feelings, aside the entire time. I was a police officer investigating a murder. Nothing else mattered now. I took a swig of tea and continued my monologue, which seemed to glance off her without any effect. Tuulia was smiling sort of crookedly, as if she were watching a boring TV show and waiting for whatever idiotic thing the pathetic comedians were going to say next.
“Tommi had gotten wind of the arrests on Thursday, presumably from Mattinen, who figured it out when his dealer didn’t show up,” I continued. “He got worried and started arranging his affairs in order to leave the country. The news on Saturday exaggerated somewhat about a drug ring being rounded up, and Tommi probably panicked. He wasn’t a very good loser. You arranged to meet him that night. You had to talk. You knew that if Mattinen had been arrested, you were both in deep shit. While you were talking, you got into some sort of argument, and you hit Tommi with the ax. Maybe you thought Mattinen didn’t know your name. So with Tommi dead, there would be no one left to expose you.”
“I slept through the whole night. Everyone can tell you that. Remember how they all said I was snoring so loudly? I always do that when I’m a little drunk. And why didn’t the famous ax have my fingerprints on it if I used it to hit Tommi?”
“It was your snoring that did you in actually. According to Riku, you were sleeping comfortably on your back snoring. But Mira said she tried to turn you off your stomach to stop you snoring. Don’t people usually only snore in one position? Your act wasn’t quite flawless. And the fingerprints—your hands were cold while you were standing out there on the dock so early in the morning. You simply grabbed the ax with the sleeves of your shirt, which you’d already stretched out over them, and you carried it up to the sauna the same way. You showed me that last week too. But of course, you thought I wouldn’t catch on.” I couldn’t hide the indignation in my voice. “When we went to the Elite, you just wanted to find out what I knew. All your fun stories and everything you said about friendship and how alike we were—it was all just a game. And to think I took you seriously!”
“It wasn’t a game,” Tuulia said, looking out the window. “I really thought you understood me.”
“Did you think I would approve of you supporting yourself by dealing cocaine?”
“I didn’t know it was cocaine!” Her violet teacup clinked angrily against the saucer. Tuulia stood up to pour herself more tea and then slowly, weighing every word carefully, said, “I guess that’s it, then. It’s probably best that I tell you the whole story. Then at least you’ll be able to understand it a little better. Do you want more tea, by the way?” I nodded, and she poured some in my cup, then set the pot back on the counter and sat back down at the table. Her movements were heavy, like those of a wounded
animal, and her voice was quieter than usual. Tuulia stared out into the yard. A white wagtail landed on the windowsill, looking hopefully through the window for breadcrumbs, and then flew away. Tuulia finally began to tell her story.
“You were mostly right. It all started by accident,” Tuulia said, snorting at her own memories. “A couple of summers ago I was with Tommi at the Kaivohuone Club listening to a rock band. I was more dressed up than usual—a lot of makeup, my hair up, high heels, a miniskirt. Toward the end of the evening, this lost-looking middle-aged hick came up to me and asked me how much I cost. At first I didn’t get what he meant. Then I said—just joking, of course—that I was one grand, and that he had to pay up front. He practically started waving the money right under my nose. I barely had time to say ‘ciao’ to Tommi before we were in a cab to the guy’s room at the Meri Hotel.
“Of course I told Tommi about it, and a couple of weeks later, one of his work friends needed some company. Tommi set me up with him, for money again. We tried to make a business of it, just kind of playing around for a while. It was fun. Back then the market for girls wasn’t what it is now, and guys would pay anything. Tommi lured a few other girls in, because he’d started to develop a reputation in business circles as someone who could get you a good, clean one-night escort.”
“I did all that for a little over six months, but then I started to get sick of it. It wasn’t as easy as it looked; in fact, it was actually pretty damn hard, and how I felt about my own body had started to get weird. So I told Tommi I was quitting. He didn’t argue, because he had enough girls at that point even without me.
“For about a year, things went just fine, but then I ran out of money again, completely this time. I borrowed money from Tommi for a while, and then he told me that he now had all
sorts of different businesses going and that he was making even more than before. He’d met this guy Mattinen through a girl named Tiina, and they were smuggling weed into the country. I went and sold it in the clubs a few times, but it was a pretty risky business.
“Right after May Day, Tommi called to say he had a big load coming in over the Baltic. So we came up with the idea of that trip on the
Marlboro
. The only mistake we made was claiming that the reason we were going was to see the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir concert, which made Antti and Timo and Sirkku want to come along. We had a hard time shaking them, especially Antti.
“Though I was really nervous, our plan went off without a hitch. The others thought I was seasick, but I was really throwing up out of fear. Tommi was pretty nervous too. Once we got the stuff into the country, Tommi decided not give it all to Mattinen at once. He gave it to him in small batches, including his car in the deal, for a much higher price than they’d originally agreed. That scared me a little—I knew that Mattinen had all kinds of connections—but Tommi just laughed and said he was a whole lot smarter than Mattinen. I asked Tommi whether I could trust him since I could see that he was always cheating everyone else at everything. He pulled me close and said I was his best friend; I was a special case. He would never lie to me.
“I only knew what Tommi told me. And I really did think it was just marijuana! Then he called me Thursday night and said that I should be careful because one of his regular dealers had been nabbed. We all knew the name of the game: you cops are always ready to make a deal with the little guys to catch the bigger ones. And everybody always just tries to save their own skin. So now Tommi was trying to unload all the stuff on
Mattinen at a discount just to get rid of it. He was totally panicking on Thursday. By Friday he’d calmed down a bit. Mattinen had bought the stuff from him, so he had his money and things were good.
“Then on Saturday when we were on our way out to the villa, we heard on the news that several more members of the cocaine ring had been arrested. I just laughed, thinking that didn’t have anything to do with us. I mean,
we
hadn’t been selling cocaine. I didn’t get to exchange more than a few words with Tommi that afternoon, but I could see that he had tensed up and was avoiding me. I eventually managed to ask him if that news story was about the people we knew, and he admitted it. He told me that if Mattinen had been caught by the cops, we were up shit creek too.”
Tuulia poured the rest of her tea down her throat. Rage and anguish burned in her eyes, and I found myself wondering once again what her true feelings had been for Tommi.
“I finally got him to promise me that we would talk later that night when everyone else had gone to bed. I lay awake until four thinking about how Tommi had betrayed me. You don’t get it, I’m sure; to you weed and coke are probably both the same. But everybody’s smoked a few joints at Roskilde or in Amsterdam. Personally, I prefer a good binge. Cocaine is a different matter entirely though. I never wanted to get mixed up in anything like that. And I had trusted Tommi. I had known him my whole life, and he had never betrayed me before.
“I waited and waited. People were wandering all around the house. When Tommi went out to the dock, I started to get up, but then I heard Sirkku going out to talk to him. At first I thought Tommi had arranged that just to avoid me, and by the time Sirkku came back inside, I was beyond furious. I could barely keep from
screaming when I saw Tommi sitting there on the dock, dangling his feet in the water and admiring the sunrise, looking as though he didn’t have a care in the world. When I asked him why he hadn’t told me the truth, he just laughed at me. He said, ‘Did you really think we could get that kind of money from weed?’ How was I supposed to know? What did I know about the drug market! He had been bullshitting me too, just like he did everyone else, always. It turns out I wasn’t any kind of
special case
in his life after all. I tried to kick him, but then he caught me by the foot and tried to drag me down into the water. So I grabbed the ax and hit him on the head. I wasn’t thinking at all. I heard sort of a crunch, and then he fell in. I only saw a little blood coming out of his head.”
Tuulia was staring far beyond the landscape visible through the window, and I knew that she was seeing it all again, had seen it many times already, and would see it forever.