Snow Angels (16 page)

“Why didn’t you mention it to me?”

“I don’t like to bring up your ex-wife, it’s not my place.” He pauses. “You don’t think Heli could have had anything to do with it.”

“She’s gone for years. Then she shows back up, and her common-law husband’s mistress is murdered. She had keys to his car, she had motive. It’s a natural line of questioning.”

“Maybe you’re not taking the possibility that Peter and his friends killed Sufia seriously enough,” he says. “He and Seppo have nearly identical vehicles and they were both in the parking lot. They smoke the same brand of cigarettes, even have the same shoe size.”

“I’m taking it seriously. If Jussi finds blood in his car, it will provide sufficient grounds to seize his house and treat it as a secondary crime scene.”

“Arresting Seppo has already caused you a lot of trouble. If you accuse Heli, it might cost you your job.”

“I’m not accusing her. It’s a line of inquiry we have to pursue, because it’s our duty. And I’m not investigating her, I’m asking you to do it.”

“How could Heli have done it? I mean physically. She’s a woman. She can’t commit rape.”

“We haven’t proven that Sufia was raped.”

“Heli is so small, how could she have forced Sufia into the car? Don’t you remember how Sufia looked? I can’t imagine Heli inflicting those kinds of injuries.”

“Just nose around,” I say. “Find out what Heli’s been doing and who she’s been associating with. Discreet questioning. That’s all I ask.”

“This is going to lead to no good end,” Valtteri concludes, and walks out.

I WRITE A PRESS RELEASE, but not the way the chief wanted it. I don’t mention my previous marriage to Heli, or that she left me for Seppo, and I don’t write anything to tarnish his image. I keep it simple, say he provided an alibi and was released. I e-mail it to all the major Finnish newspapers, STT and Reuters.

The photocopy of Sufia’s address book is on the desk in front of me. I start making phone calls again. After an hour, I get a hit.

“That bitch fucked my boyfriend. She sucked his cock in my own goddamned house. I’m glad she’s dead.”

“Who’s your boyfriend?” I ask.

“You mean, who was my boyfriend. That bitch wrecked everything.”

“Yes, that’s what I mean.”

She gives me the name of a Finnish television star. I call him.

“Fuck,” he says. “What did you hear?”

I play him. “Never mind that. Just give me your version of events.”

“Maybe it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead, but the blackmailing bitch said she was gonna get me.”

“How did she say she was going to get you?”

“She was never anything to me. I had a girlfriend and Sufia was a side thing. Excuse me for being blunt, but Sufia was an incredible fuck. The girl could suck an egg through a straw. And gorgeous, Jesus, just looking at her could almost make me come. My girlfriend caught us. Sufia was happy about it because she said we could see each other out in the open, but I wanted to get rid of Sufia so I could patch things up. Sufia got angry. She said she’d claim I raped her and told me I had to give her money.”

“Did you?”

“I told her to go fuck herself.”

“Have you been to Levi lately?”

“Not for two years. Am I a suspect?”

“Not at present. Thank you for your cooperation. One last thing, what kind of car do you drive?”

“A BMW. Why?”

I ignore the question and hang up. I can understand Sufia’s attraction to rich and famous men, but I’m left wondering about her obsession with BMWs. I’ve talked to around thirty people about Sufia. No one knew her, not even the men she’d had affairs with. It seems no one cared enough to bother, but I want to. I decide to watch her movies.

I PRINT OUT SEPPO’S arrest photo and one of Peter from the sex offender database, then go to the BMW website, download and print pictures of star-spoked and double-spoked wheels and drive to Marjakylä. I decide to get the worst over with and go to my parents’ house first. I knock, and Dad yells for me to come in. He’s sitting in his armchair smoking an unfiltered North State. A glass of
piimä
, buttermilk, sits on the end table beside him. I take this to mean he’s not drunk. I’m relieved.

“Hello son,” he says.

The television is turned off, the curtains are drawn. The only light spills out from the kitchen. He’s sitting in the dark and what would be silence, except for the incessant ticking of clocks.

Mom’s dentures are in a water glass beside Dad’s
piimä
. She got them as a present when she was confirmed into the Lutheran church at the age of fifteen. Years ago, dentures were the traditional confirmation gift. There was little or no dental care then, and most people’s teeth rotted out of their heads not long after they reached puberty.

“Where’s Mom?” I ask.

“Upstairs taking a nap.”

Despite his drinking, Dad’s health is good. Among other ailments, Mom is overweight and has high blood pressure. She tires easily. I sit across from him, in her chair.

“I’m not trying to piss you off,” I say, “but I have to ask you where you were at two P.M. on Tuesday, when Sufia Elmi was killed.”

He takes a drag off his cigarette. “That girl was killed across the road,” he says. “You think I did it, then came back here and talked to you and your mother?”

I’ve never figured out why my father is such an argumentative, aggressive jerk. He has four sons, and we all left home as soon as we were old enough. He drove us away with his drunken rages and beatings. My three brothers did pretty well for themselves though.

When Finland’s economy collapsed in 1989, my oldest brother, Juha, went to Norway to look for work and got a job in a fish canning factory. Now he’s married and makes good money working in the Norwegian oil fields. After Timo’s short stint in jail for bootlegging, he settled in Pietarsaari, on the West Coast, and works in a paper factory. Jari got into medical school, and now he’s a neurologist in Helsinki.

Dad is always putting Jari down, says he thinks he’s better than everybody else. Dad is just jealous of him. Jari is one of the nicest people I know. My brothers are all nice guys, but we’re not close. Maybe because we shared so many bad experiences, it’s easier to limit contact so we don’t have to think about our childhoods.

Mom has put up with Dad going on fifty years. I don’t know how she’s managed it. Then again, she had no money, no education. I suppose after she got married and figured out what she’d gotten herself into, she didn’t have many options. Still, I wish she had tried to do more to defend us kids from him.

“I know you weren’t at work,” I say. “If I don’t know where you were and somebody asks later, it’ll look like I’m hiding something. I’m trying to protect you.”

“It’s not your business where I was.”

“If you were drunk somewhere, I don’t care.” It occurs to me that maybe he’s having an affair. “If it’s something you don’t want Mom to find out about, I won’t tell her.”

He finishes the
piimä
in a long gulp. “I was fishing,” he says.

Now I get it. It was the anniversary of my sister Suvi’s death. He spent the afternoon sitting on the frozen lake, visiting the spot where she died. Dad and I look at each other. I feel embarrassed because I intruded on something so private to him, and the sadness I always feel when I think of Suvi wells up.

I stand and put a hand on his shoulder. “Thanks for telling me.”

I head toward the front door.

“You gonna come by on Christmas?” he asks.

“Yeah. Kate and I will come over.”

I realize I haven’t told him Kate broke her leg or that she’s pregnant. “Kate took a bad fall skiing,” I say. “She fractured her femur.”

“Her thigh bone?”

“Yeah.”

“She gonna be okay?”

“The cast is awkward for her, but she’s okay. And she’s pregnant. We’re going to have twins.”

He laughs to himself. “Twins huh?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re gonna have your hands full.”

He doesn’t seem to have anything more to add, so I leave.

I SHOW THE PHOTOS of Seppo and Peter around the neighborhood. No one recognizes them. I visit Eero and Martta. Eero invites me in and I accept. The scents of cardamom, melted butter and sugar waft out of the kitchen. The Christmas tree is lit. A fire burns in the hearth. Martta comes out from the kitchen and greets me, then brings coffee and warm pulla, sweet coffee rolls, for all of us. I sit in a recliner, while they sit together on a love seat and hold hands. I ask Eero if the car he saw pulling out from Aslak’s reindeer farm was graphite or black.

“Too dark, too dark,” he says. “Besides, I was busy talking on the phone, so I wasn’t paying attention.”

I lay pictures of star-spoked and double-spoked wheels on the coffee table between us. “Do you happen to remember,” I ask, “what kind of wheels were mounted on the car?”

He points at the star-spoked wheels. “This kind.”

“It must have been hard to tell,” I say. “Wasn’t the car moving?”

“It stopped at the top of Aslak’s driveway,” he says, “before it pulled out onto the road. Even in the dark, they were shiny.”

Martta’s
pulla
is delicious. I help myself to another. Sulo, their Jack Russell terrier, hops into my lap. I pet him, and we gossip about the neighbors.

ON THE WAY HOME, I stop at the video store and rent Sufia’s movies, then go to the grocery and pick up potatoes and a couple steaks. I catch Kate up on events while I cook. She sits at the kitchen table, her broken leg propped up on a chair.

“Eero sounds like a real character,” she says, “but if he’s schizophrenic and talks to imaginary people, he’s probably not medicated. Isn’t he a danger to himself?”

“Martta keeps him out of trouble, and besides, we’re a small community. Everybody is used to him. People tend to think of him as more eccentric than sick.”

She laughs a little. “In the States, they have TV commercials for Viagra, cosmetic surgery, antidepressants. They ask, ‘Are you tired in the morning, stressed at work, have trouble sleeping at night?’ By the time they run through the list of symptoms, they’ve included everybody. People believe they’re depressed and go running to the doctor begging for drugs. Here, you’ve got a guy talking to imaginary friends on a pay phone, and they not only don’t treat him, they disconnect the line but leave the phone booth so he can be happy. That’s real community and I like it.”

“Northern Finland has its good points,” I say.

“About the case,” she says, “what do you think about this Peter Eklund guy?”

“I think I hate him,” I say. “His family has been rich for centuries, since Finland was a province of Sweden, and it gives him a feeling of entitlement he’s done nothing to earn. It’s because of the same mind-set that I had to learn Swedish in school, even though only five percent of Finns are part of the Swedish-speaking minority. I’ve got nothing against Swedish-speaking Finns in general, but a lot of the rich Helsinki ones in particular believe the rest of us are supposed to cater to their whims. As they say in Swedish, Peter thinks he’s
bättre folk
, and he can do anything he wants without regard for others.”

“You’re right about Heli,” Kate says. “She had a motive, but do you really think she could have committed such a brutal murder?”

“I can’t imagine anyone doing it, but like I told Valtteri, somebody did. Let’s see what he turns up. Besides motive, she needed opportunity. It would have been hard for her without an accomplice.”

“Valtteri is right too,” she says. “If investigating Seppo caused you so much trouble, investigating Heli might get you fired.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to. You could hand over the evidence to another detective. Like the chief said, cite conflict of interest.”

The steaks sizzle and I flip them. “If it goes far enough, I’ll consider it.”

I put in
Unexpected
, the first movie of Sufia’s trilogy, in the DVD player. We eat in front of the TV and watch it.

Sufia plays a sexy but innocent young woman, adrift in Helsinki’s nightlife. She becomes involved in an affair with a young, successful and attractive-but morally arid-man who uses her. Ultimately, she ends up with a young, successful and attractive man who values her. In addition to love, she finds herself and happiness. Sufia’s acting is good. She’s a bright spot in a bad film.

Kate falls asleep before the end of the movie. I carry her to bed and put in Unexpected II. It’s much the same as the first one. It poses as a multiplot story that exposes the social mores of young, single professionals in Helsinki. This thin veneer masks a soft-core porn flick in which seven people have a revolving sexual relationship. Some of them find happiness, some don’t.

In
Unexpected III
, Sufia’s romantic and sexual desires conflict with her studies. She intends to become a Lutheran minister. I fast-forward through it and watch only the scenes in which Sufia appears. In the majority of them, her flawless dark skin is set off by see-through white lingerie. Her great love from the second film winds up in prison, but in the final scene, Sufia marries yet another suitor and finds even greater love and deeper self-fulfillment. The happy couple drives away in a BMW 330i.

The movies aren’t low budget, but the producer didn’t spend a fortune on them either. Many of the sets and props are reused throughout the trilogy. I take another look at
Unexpected
and Unexpected II. In all three movies, happiness is marked by a couple in a BMW 330i. I’m guessing it belongs to the producer or director.

Now the recent events of Sufia’s life seem clear. I think she had been trying to make reality out of the fiction of her movies, even to the extent that she searched out men who drive BMWs. I wonder if she was even aware that she did it. The car seems-perhaps unconsciously-to have symbolized wealth, success and happiness for her. No one knew her, maybe she didn’t even know herself. Sufia the snow angel, whoever she was, is lost forever.