Copper Heart (22 page)

“I have to ask you to leave now, Matti. I need to search the premises, and you’re in my way.”

“Do you have some sort of warrant?”

“No, but it will only take one phone call to get one,” I lied.

“Wait ten minutes and I’ll be done cleaning up.”

So I sat down at a drawing desk and looked around. The room we were in had once been a spacious kitchen, and the sink was surrounded by cabinets with no locks on the drawers. At least in this room I couldn’t see anywhere that would have fit Meritta’s key.

I’d have to check the local banks in case Meritta had a safety-deposit box. The key didn’t look like a safety-deposit box key,
but it could belong to a smaller container that Meritta might have hidden inside of one. And, of course, I would have to visit Jaska’s house. Maybe Meritta gave him more than just the key for safekeeping. I wondered a little about the likelihood of Meritta trusting Jaska with anything important to her. But maybe she hadn’t trusted him. Maybe the key was stolen from Meritta’s purse, and for some reason or another Jaska had known it was important. Why hadn’t he left any clues in the envelope? He must have known something about the key because he appeared to have tried to use it for blackmail.

Matti was finished washing and drying and was now wiping his round eyeglasses with a checkered handkerchief. He opened his mouth a couple of times as if to say something before deciding against it. Finally he made up his mind to speak up.

“I’ll admit that I know Ella and Meritta were having some sort of disagreement. I imagine it had something to do with the grant money for the art camp. Ella thought Meritta was using it for things other than what it was intended for, which was paying for materials and hiring instructors. Eventually the city auditors were going to end up getting involved, and then Ella would be in trouble.”

“Who was organizing the art camp, officially?”

“The Aprikylä Artists’ Association. The same group that runs this school. I’m the board president, and Meritta was the treasurer. The city has been quite generous in funding us, and Ella administers the grant. But she wouldn’t have murdered anyone over that!”

“So you haven’t talked to Ella about this?”

“No. This is the first I’m hearing about the brooch.” I could tell from Matti’s voice that he was lying, and I remembered Ella’s bitter words about Matti hanging around in bars with Meritta. Had Ella been jealous?

“What was your relationship with Meritta?”

“Coworker. Colleague. Yes, we spent a lot of time together. Finding kindred spirits isn’t easy in this town, and we’d known each other for twenty years after all. There was never anything romantic between us though. If you believe all the gossip and newspaper stories, you probably have completely the wrong idea about Meritta. She might have liked sex, but she didn’t try to seduce every man she met walking down the street. Just being friends with her felt completely natural.”

This time I believed Matti was telling the truth. But had Ella thought the same way?

“So will you inherit Meritta’s city council seat?”

Staring at me in puzzlement, Matti shook his head. “More like it’s being forced on me. The third member of our party list has already moved away, so I have to take it. But you can’t think I’d kill my friend for that. I don’t even want to be on the city council!”

“Of course I don’t think that.”

But Matti continued as if he hadn’t heard me. “City politics around here is absurd. They spend hours fighting over dog-license fees, but big land deals go through without comment. Or they would have if it hadn’t been for Meritta. But one person can’t accomplish anything there since everything is arranged behind closed doors. And I don’t have the energy to bang my head against the wall like Meritta.” Matti’s tone left no doubt what a waste of time he thought being on the city council was going to be.

I considered asking Matti about Meritta’s mine paintings but decided to let it be. Best to talk to Ella first. Without prying anymore, I refrained from asking any more questions and Matti obediently exited the building. From the window I watched as he walked toward the center of town in the rain without an
umbrella. Only then did I realize he hadn’t asked about Jaska. Was he a broken link in the Arpikylä rumor chain?

Before moving on to the other rooms, I checked the kitchen once more thoroughly. The art school was out for summer break, so the whole place was filled with finished works from the previous spring: vernal watercolors, plaster sculptures, photographs…The most daring pieces were usually made by children. The school also had classes for adults, but their work seemed boxed in, as if evidence of how successful the public school art teachers had been administering low grades for anything with originality. Since everyone knows dogs don’t have green tails. For a while I looked at the drawings, enjoying the stacks of rocks collected from the Sump that lay on the floor of one room, marveling at an excellent series of pictures of a field of fireweed in various stages of flowering. In my day there hadn’t been anything like this for kids in Arpikylä. The sports clubs and marching band were the only games in town back then.

Good Lord…I was supposed to be looking for a lock that matched Meritta’s key.

The house was a good two thousand square feet, and I rummaged through every cabinet and drawer in the place, peering behind rolls of paper and pots of paint, even opening a medicine cabinet that turned out to be empty. Nothing. Finally in the old bedroom that apparently now served as the teachers’ lounge, I found a cabinet labeled M. Flöjt. In it hung a towel and a couple of frocks, but at the base of the cabinet was a locked container about the size of a shoebox. With an exclamation, I picked it up.

The box was already open, and nothing was inside. Had the burglar beat me to it after all? Just in case, I pushed the key into the lock. It didn’t fit.

Then for good measure I searched the pockets of the frocks, but all I found were soiled handkerchiefs. Why couldn’t people keep diaries anymore? Then I could just read all of Meritta’s secrets.

I felt miserable. This was already the second dead-end of the day, and I still had to go talk to Ella. Back at the police station, I called all the banks in town. Meritta didn’t have a safety-deposit box at any of them. The same bank manager whose slack lending practices had amazed me in the Saastamoinen Construction bankruptcy fraud case began voluntarily opening up to me about Meritta’s financial matters and even seemed offended when I told him I didn’t need to know any more.

“With your predecessor I was just in the habit of cooperating and not being too uptight about privacy, since Jussi is a relative and all…”

“What? You’re related?”

“Sure. Our wives are sisters.”

As the handset clicked into place, I completely forgot about Meritta. No wonder Sheriff Jussi wanted out of town while the indictments were being filed for the Saastamoinen fraud case. Jussi’s wife was the bank manager’s sister-in-law. And Saastamoinen’s wife was the bank manager’s sister. No doubt Jussi and Saastamoinen had spent many a pleasant evening at the bank’s corporate cabin retreat. And I wondered which building company Jussi had hired to build his new house last year. That rat bastard!

And now I was left to clean up their mess. Or had Jussi thought I was just a dewy-eyed little girl who probably wouldn’t figure it out? Or perhaps an old townie who would understand this was how business got done in small towns and would leave well enough alone. I kicked the trash can, which,
of course, was full, and sent its contents flying across the carpet in my office.

Getting down on all fours, I started cleaning up my mess. Jussi’s idiocy wasn’t the cleaner’s fault, after all. I stuck my tongue out at President Ahtisaari, but he didn’t look amused.

Then I read white-collar crime laws until I had calmed down enough to call Ella. I caught her as she was just leaving work.

“Drop by here on the way for some coffee,” I said. “I have some ice cream hidden in the back of the freezer too.”

Ella sounded reluctant but promised to come. I figured she would be here by car in five minutes. In the meantime I dished up servings of mint chocolate chip ice cream to let soften a little before she arrived and then sat down in an armchair next to my coffee table to wait. This was just going to be two friends getting together for a gab session, even though we were in my office.

When she arrived, Ella looked stressed and somehow heavier than normal. Eventually I realized the reason: usually she wore loose-fitting, colorful clothing, but now she was dressed in a black velvet jacket two sizes too small, which looked like it was from Matti’s wardrobe.

I poured her coffee before asking if she had heard about Jaska.

“No. What? Did Jaska kill Meritta?”

“Probably not, because last night someone killed him too.”

Ella’s spoonful of ice cream clattered to the table, her mouth twisting into an amused expression that reminded me of when we were children. Once Ella had explained to me in horror that whenever she heard something truly shocking, her first reaction was always to laugh. Together we had tried to work on controlling her odd reactions, with me conjuring up the most horrible things I could think of, such as, “An atomic bomb just hit Joensuu.” But that had only caused even wilder fits of laughter.

“Killed? How?”

“The investigation is ongoing.” I didn’t know how to beat around the bush any longer, so I got to the point. “Ella, about your Kalevala brooch. The one we found on the Tower after Meritta’s death was yours, wasn’t it? It wasn’t in the washing machine at all.”

“I don’t know where it is. I lost it somewhere that night.”

“We found three sets of fingerprints on it. One set was Meritta’s and another was Matti’s. The third set, the most prominent, must be yours.”

“Have you been talking with Matti?” Ella’s face was redder than usual and she was fidgeting with the buttons of her black coat. Unbuttoned it revealed an oddly cutesy slate-blue flowery blouse.

“I did see Matti a couple of hours ago at the art school.”

“What did he say?”

“That you and Meritta had been fighting about the grant for the art camp. Apparently Meritta had misappropriated some of the funds.”

Ella took a long sip of her coffee and then another. The look on her face was the same expression she wore back in high school Swedish class when our teacher had asked her to conjugate an irregular verb: she seemed to be thinking very hard. I let her ponder in peace because I remembered that hurrying her was never a way to get a sensible answer. Of course, I was hoping that she would laugh and say it had just been some trivial thing.

“So Matti told you that,” she finally said slowly. “He’s right. Meritta had inadvertently spent part of the materials budget on her own supplies. But arts and culture organizations don’t have room to make mistakes like that. The city leadership watches our money like hawks, more than any other area. And it would
have looked even uglier with Meritta on the city council. She was one of the people who authorized the money she misused. I can’t believe Matti would tell you, that he would be willing to sully Meritta’s reputation…”

Ella didn’t seem to approve of what Matti had done. She was one of those people who never talked behind someone else’s back; she was more likely to read you the riot act to your face. Perhaps talking about the peccadillos of the dead felt like betrayal to her.

“We’ll be able to fix it though. We’ll find the money somewhere,” Ella said, more to herself than to me.

“So you didn’t go back to the Old Mine that night to meet Meritta or look for your brooch?”

Ella fixed me far too firmly in her gaze. “I did not go back to the Old Mine that night to meet Meritta or look for my brooch,” she repeated. Breaking eye contact, she went on. “Maybe Meritta found the brooch somewhere, remembered that it was mine, and picked it up. Maybe it slipped out of her pocket when she…fell.”

“That may be,” I said soothingly and poured us more coffee. The ice cream had melted in our bowls into green-and-brown puddles, which no longer looked particularly appetizing. Something was clearly wrong with Ella and Matti. I wanted to see the grant files for the art camp. Was Meritta planning to dump the blame on Ella if her malfeasance came out? How much money were we talking about?

“You said yourself you got your job when you finally had the sense to join the right political party. You said so yourself. Are you going to have trouble now that Matti is representing the Greens on the city council?”

“Some eyebrows did go up when Matti ran on the Green ticket. Maybe because he was in a different party than me, they
wondered why he couldn’t keep his ball and chain in line. But Matti is about as Green as a mink farmer. Meritta talked him into running.”

Now Ella was starting to sound like herself again. I did what I could to turn the conversation in a lighter direction as well. Only when Ella said she needed to head home to make dinner for the kids did I finally dare to ask the critical question.

“You and Matti spent last night at home in bed together, right?”

For a second Ella looked at me in confusion, and then her mouth fell open. “Yes, we did. But we don’t have any witnesses. Our kids were fast asleep!”

She slammed the door hard as she left.

Going to the break room to rinse our dishes, I found Lasarov and Hopponen gossiping. Lasarov was saying that Jaska’s mother was at home with a nurse and that both she and her daughter had needed sedatives. I felt like a heel for thinking about going to their house to rummage through their closets. But I had to. When I returned to my office to straighten up before leaving, the phone rang.

“Hey, it’s Koivu. I’m on my way back to Joensuu. There’s a suicide I need to check out. Hanging, apparently.”

Koivu’s voice was pained, and I wondered how long he was going to be able to stay on his feet with no sleep and a broken heart. Still, we talked shop for a few minutes.

“The Virtanens admit that the brooch is theirs. But don’t tell Järvisalo yet. And where are you sleeping?”

“We do have hotels in Joensuu.”

Seldom had I heard such obvious bitterness in Koivu’s voice.