Copper Heart (28 page)

And still the list wasn’t complete. I had to add Barbro Kivinen. Maybe she hadn’t been as unconcerned about her husband’s relationship with Meritta as she led us to believe. Somehow it was easy imagining her hitting a blackmailer like Jaska over the head with a wrench. Or would a silver-handled umbrella have been more her style?

Finally I also added Kaisa to the list, although I had previously ruled her out. She could have murdered Meritta out of jealously, but what about Jaska? Jaska could be pretty damn infuriating, and I had wanted to smack him upside the head plenty of times myself. And I could imagine the taunts he might have used about Kaisa’s infatuation with Meritta. I did decide to leave Aniliina off my list entirely. She just wasn’t strong enough to have pushed Meritta off the Tower, not to mention dragging Jaska’s body to the Sump.

So here I was again, suspecting every person I knew of murder. Putting the flowers in a vase, I noticed the atrocious state of the living room floor and decided to do some cleaning. At least I could easily put that in order.

Later I cycled slowly into the center of town. The streets had emptied after all the stores closed, and only a tattered banner in front of city hall remained of the bustling market that had filled the square. I wasn’t going to make it through the day without visiting work either. Since I was in the area, I dropped off my bike in the police station garage and stopped in to ask Timonen, who was manning the duty desk, whether there had been any sightings of Johnny. His answer was a baffled no.

When Koivu jumped off the bus from Joensuu, the first words out of his mouth were, “I need beer.” We strode the few
hundred yards to the Copper Cup in silence. Only once his lager and my highball were on the way did he start to speak.

“I’m going to look at an apartment tomorrow. It’s already vacant.”

“It’s looking like that?”

“You’re goddamn right it is! Guess what? Anita’s already seeing someone new.”

“You’re kidding me,” I said, even though I could tell from Koivu’s eyes he was serious.

The waitress brought the drinks, and Koivu paid for both as if by accident, but I knew I’d have my chance, guessing we’d have at least three rounds over the course of the night.

“And that’s not all. Guess who the dude is,” Koivu said after downing a quarter of his glass of beer. “Toni ‘the Commander’ Raiskio. The leader of that skinhead gang.”

“What? You’ve got to be shitting me. She seriously fell for the guy while he was lying in the hospital with a knife wound?”

“This isn’t Anita’s first time two-timing. When we started dating she was still seeing this guy named Sakari, and they started out exactly the same way. I knew all about it, but I thought it would be different with me.” Koivu took another sip of beer. “And with a complete asshat like that!”

“Was he the one who stabbed the Somali refugee?”

“No, that was another guy, but this Raiskio freak show definitely egged him on. And Anita thinks they’re in the right. I don’t care what kind of a dump that apartment is tomorrow, I’m moving in! I don’t want to see that head case ever again!”

Koivu had already emptied his first pint. He wasn’t a heavy drinker by any means, so I was already preparing myself for the pleasure of eventually lugging his entire two hundred pounds
into a taxi and onto my couch out at the farm. In other words, I needed to take it easy on the booze.

“And now I’m sitting here in this crappy bar waiting for some stripper…” Koivu suddenly started laughing uncontrollably, almost hysterically, but I didn’t think the tears in his eyes were from joy.

I knew that Anita had been his first serious romance. He was twenty-six, good-looking, and had a steady job. And he was a genuinely nice guy. Plenty of women would fight for a chance to go out with him, but I guessed he probably wouldn’t believe me if I told him that right now. I ordered him another pint and let him continue wallowing in his misery.

Gradually, the bar began filling with people. Miss Miranda was going to perform twice, at nine thirty and eleven o’clock. The audience was even more male-dominated than usual, and I was glad to have Koivu with me. Otherwise I would’ve felt like a sitting duck for every come-on artist in the place. Then I realized how horrible the situation was. If a thick-skinned woman like me didn’t dare go to a strip bar without a male escort, then what about more sensitive girls? Arpikylä didn’t offer that many choices for a night out.

Shortly before nine thirty, I realized that I didn’t need to monitor the legality of the striptease after all, since the local police force was well represented without me. Antikainen and Hopponen were sitting at a table in the front row with glasses of beer and seemed taken aback when Koivu and I waved to them.

After his initial burst of speed downing the first two pints, Koivu had slowed down and was approaching the bottom of his third. I ordered anise Pernod and a pitcher of water. Antikainen came over to our table to sit for a while, clearly on a mission
to see whether Koivu and I were getting romantic. We did our best to encourage his suspicions, with me explaining loudly that Koivu was coming to my place for the night and Koivu saying at least twice how much he had liked taking a sauna with me the time before. I was glad to see that his playfulness was returning, even though Monday was likely to be a difficult day at work. My understanding was that Antikainen had already concluded that I also had been in a relationship with Johnny.

It was easy to understand how Meritta could have earned a reputation as a wanton woman around here. That train of thought made something else flit through my mind briefly, but then I lost hold of it just as quickly when a female voice began whispering suggestively over the speakers. Antikainen suddenly disappeared back to his front-row seat. The lights dimmed. The restaurant owner, who had been watching the night’s events from behind the bar, took the stage.

“Alright, boys. Now we’re going to make Arpikylä history. I give you Miss Miranda!”

The husky female voice grew louder, and the restaurant lights dimmed even more. Then Miss Miranda herself stepped onstage in a pink sequined dress, boa, and tall boots. In the flesh, she looked younger and even more beautiful than in the blurry pictures on the flyer, and she was a nimble dancer. Rather early on in the show, her dress slipped off, revealing a sequined pink thong bikini. After prancing around for a while like that, Miss Miranda threw off her top, exposing regulation-size breasts. As the tempo of the music increased, she ran her feathered boa over her body lasciviously and then passed it between her legs, smiling in satisfaction, before stomping on it with her boots.

Something about the performance was so ludicrous that I almost laughed out loud. If Miranda had been a man, I definitely
would have whistled and shouted to cheer him on. But this audience sat as rigid as if they were in church pews, with their eyes glossed over and their expressions focused. In the crowd I could pick out many of the town’s “failures to launch” and other men alone by circumstance. Some had stayed to till the family land while the girls moved away to educate themselves. Others were stuck on the unemployment rolls or tied to their mothers’ apron strings. Of course some of the prominent men of the city were also in attendance, including the vice chairman of the city council and a clutch of small-time entrepreneurs from the industrial park. One of them even had a mortified-looking wife in tow. A couple of my parents’ colleagues nodded to me, shamefaced, as if caught red-handed.

Someone who had clearly seen a stripper before slipped a twenty into the girl’s almost nonexistent panties, extracting a few hoots from the audience. When Miranda shoved her gyrating lap in Antikainen’s face, his jaw almost hit the floor.

Finally Miss Miranda ditched her G-string too and settled down on all fours to shake her hips to the beat of the music. At this the laughter building inside me became too much, and I had to cover my mouth with my shirtsleeve to stifle a guffaw. Koivu put a finger to his lips, but I could see the laughter in his eyes too. Finally the music accelerated to its climax, and then the stage went dark. When the lights came back on, Miranda was gone.

A moment passed before the applause began, and then some in the audience started calling for Miranda to come back on, at which point the owner announced that the next performance would be at eleven o’clock.

“What did you think?” I asked Koivu.

“She’s a pretty girl. A snake would have been more interesting than that feathery thing though.”

“You should go suggest that,” I said just before a vaguely familiar, moderately drunk man flopped down at our table.

“Hi, Maria! You remember me, don’t you? Maukka Härkönen. Is this your husband?” Without waiting for a reply, he stuck out his hand to Koivu and explained, “I played soccer on the same team with Maria when we were kids.”

Yes, I remembered Maukka, although the bloated man with the five-o’clock shadow in front of me didn’t bear much resemblance to the skinny, pimply-faced kid who had been in my junior-high class. Maukka had been one of the least pleasant boys on the team, one of the ones who was quickest to tackle me when he couldn’t get the ball any other way and then take every opportunity to feel me up. If I protested, he would proclaim that girls couldn’t play soccer because they always threw temper tantrums about getting tackled.

“I hear you’re a cop now and you’re working Jaska Korhonen’s murder case. Will you buy me a beer if I tell you what I know?”

“Tell me first,” I said skeptically, since the police had already interviewed the town drunks.

“You too good for us now or something? Well, OK,” Maukka continued, glancing worriedly at Koivu, “I’ll tell you anyway.”

When he patted my knee with his grubby hand, I felt the hair on my arms stand up.

“I don’t feel much like talking to the local cops. They’d just drag me off to the slammer like they done last winter, even though all I did was take a dump in the bank’s ATM. Well, I was here last Saturday and just happened to be in the john at the same time as Jaska. We were talking about his sister’s murder and he said he was smarter than the pigs and knew who really did it. He said he’d outsmarted them one night by snatching something from his sister’s house that proved who murdered
her. He even used gloves so the pigs couldn’t get his fingerprints. And guess what, Maria,” he said, pushing his stinking face right up to mine, “the murderer had promised Jaska a whole pile of money if he kept his mouth shut. Tens of thousands.”

Just as I had suspected. Oh, Jaska, you feckless idiot! He hadn’t even taken the key to the person he was blackmailing. He must have turned greedy, maybe thinking he could use it to double his take. Or was the important thing something other than the mysterious key?

“Did Jaska tell you anything about the murderer? He didn’t mention a name, did he?”

“No, he wouldn’t reveal the source of the money,” Maukka said bitterly. “He did say something though—that he wouldn’t have thought a wussy like that could have killed his sister.”

Wussy? There was a typical Jaska expression for you. It was also typical that he had underestimated his blackmailer. Maybe that meant it was a woman. Ella? Barbro Kivinen? Imagining Jaska calling Kaisa a “wussy” was difficult, but I could imagine plenty of other inappropriate words coming out of his mouth, especially if he had known about Kaisa’s sexual orientation. He couldn’t have meant Aniliina though.

Or maybe it was more likely he meant a man by using that particular word. Matti and Johnny definitely would have qualified as wussies in Jaska’s eyes, and he had spoken with disdain about Kivinen as well. So it could’ve been anyone.

“So is that enough for a beer?” Maukka asked hopefully.

After I ordered him his pint, I instructed him to come in to the station Monday morning to tell his story officially. Then I hoped he would leave. Instead he remained sitting next to me with his fleshy thigh touching my leg. Being pressed between him and the wall was revolting.

“You’re a lot cuter now than you were during school,” he said, wrapping his arm around my neck. Angrily I pushed it off.

“Beat it, douchebag!” Koivu had jumped to his feet before I could open my mouth. Maukka glanced at him in dismay and obeyed, assuming Koivu was defending his territory.

I downed the rest of my anise liqueur. Guys just like that had defined my value as a woman when I was in school. Assuming the right to judge my looks or the way I lived my life, leaving me feeling for years as if I wasn’t good enough for anyone. Scar Town indeed.

“Thanks,” I said to Koivu. “He wouldn’t have taken me seriously, at least not the first time.”

“I thought I should intervene before you clocked him and I had to arrest you,” Koivu said with a grin.

Once at the Old Student House in Helsinki, he and Antti had witnessed me sock a guy in the nose for patting my rear end at the bar.

We stayed at the Copper Cup for one more round.

Miss Miranda’s second performance got the audience a little more excited, and one man even jumped on stage with her. Always at the ready, Antikainen and Hopponen pulled him off, for which Miss Miranda rewarded them with sensuous kisses. I’d have to check whether kissing violated the bar’s entertainment permit, but what would my police colleagues say about that? The performance wasn’t as amusing the second time, and I was bored by the time she took off her thong.

“Should we go? I have half a case of beer at home,” I said once the crowd finished trying to get Miranda back onstage.

A waitress came to bus the empty glasses, and I overheard the party at the next table ask her, “Are you up next, Maija? I don’t know though, your boobs might hang too low.”

I would have slapped them in the face with my washcloth if I were her, but the waitress simply turned to our table without a word. I could see that she was on the verge of tears though.

Smacking a twenty-mark tip down on the table, I decided to read the disorderly conduct and entertainment license statues first thing Monday morning. Maybe there was still something I could do to ban stripping here. How would that be? I could have a reputation for being a floozy and a tight-ass all at the same time.