Snow Woman (27 page)

15

The mood in the police car was downright jolly. Puupponen drove without speaking, while Ström gingerly held his nose in the front seat. I was sitting in the back with Joona Kirstilä. Ström wanted to drag him straight to jail in Espoo.

Assaulting an officer in the line of duty was a crime, of course, but Puupponen and I thought Ström was making too much out of a little jab, especially since he had provoked Kirstilä. On the other hand, Kirstilä wasn’t much help—he was so drunk he passed out as soon as we got in the car.

Just as we were leaving Helsinki, he woke up: “You can’t take me to jail. I have to go feed Pentti.”

“Who the hell is Pentti?” Ström snapped.

“Pentti is a cat. Does Pentti have water?” I asked.

Kirstilä nodded.

Silence fell once again.

On the Turku Highway, Kirstilä started complaining about nausea. Puupponen flipped on the flashers and stopped at the side of the road. Kirstilä barely got the door open before he lost his dinner on the shoulder. The vomit smelled of beer and sausage. Suddenly I felt nauseated too. I tried not to breathe through my nose, but my stomach was doing somersaults when we arrived at the station.

I expected things to be quiet up in our unit, but it turned out to be anything but. As soon as the elevator doors opened, we could hear someone agitatedly speaking Somali and Taskinen raising his voice.

The hallway looked as if it held a whole extended Somali family. Most of them were men, but there were also a couple of women in full burkas and some small children.

“What the hell’s going on?” Ström asked Taskinen, who looked impatient.

“Arson. Somebody threw a Molotov cocktail through this family’s living room window. That’s what we’re trying to get to the bottom of here. Can any of you help? Or do you have an arrest?”

“You go, Puupponen,” Ström said before I could open my mouth. A wide-eyed little boy ran into my legs and tripped. Setting him back on his feet, I tried to comfort him, but one of the women in the black burkas snatched him away. I thought I heard a muffled apology through the fabric. The contrast between topless waitresses and fully veiled women was so stark that the Islamic dress didn’t bother me a bit, even though it usually felt threatening to me.

“Let’s get Kirstilä handled quickly. Jyrki needs our help,” I said to Ström.

The Somali men stared disapprovingly at Kirstilä, who stank of vomit. As our first order of business, I sent him to the men’s room to wash up.

“Should I go along and make sure he doesn’t hang himself with that red scarf of his?” Ström asked.

“That’s all we need! Right now all I want to do is get out of here,” I let slip without thinking.

“What?” Ström turned back from the restroom door, but then he noticed Kirstilä doing something more interesting. Ström rushed inside yelling, “What do you think you’re trying to stuff down that toilet?”

The sound following his question was clearly that of a person crashing against the commode. Ignoring the silhouette of a rooster on the door, I burst in after Ström. He had his arm around Kirstilä’s neck.

“Now I wonder what that could have been,” Ström said, jerking his head toward the toilet.

Lifting the lid, I cautiously peeked into the bowl. Fortunately the only thing floating in it was a clear plastic baggie about three inches square. There was something brown inside it.

“Looks like hash. Is this why you were trying to get away? Joona?” Kirstilä was squirming in Ström’s arms, still looking very inebriated.

Jackass
, I thought, not really knowing which of them I meant. If Joona Kirstilä had simply answered our questions at the club about what he was doing Tuesday night, we wouldn’t have nailed him for possession.

“Looks like our friend here is going for a full rap sheet,” Ström said spitefully as he released the smaller man. “Resisting arrest and possession of an illegal substance. How about that homicide charge? And then there’s the attempted murder of Aira Rosberg up for grabs.”

Instantly Kirstilä looked more sober. “What happened to Aira?”

“Yeah, yeah. Don’t even try. You hit her over the head on Tuesday night. Isn’t that right?” Ström said.

One of the Somali men opened the restroom door but quickly retreated when he caught sight of me. I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. The day had been too long and too full of bizarre crap. I didn’t have a single drop of willpower left to stop it.

“What’s so funny, Kallio? Get out of here,” Ström said, but his words just made me laugh harder. Kirstilä slumped against the wall with unseeing eyes.

Finally I calmed down enough to suggest that we go to my office for the questioning. Ström fetched coffee for himself and Kirstilä and cocoa for me while I set up the recorder. Kirstilä drooped on the sofa under my pinup collection, his long black overcoat pulled tight around him. The coffee seemed to rouse him a bit. My cocoa was lousy. I suspected Ström had only put half a pouch of powder in it.

I asked Kirstilä where he was on Tuesday night.

“Tuesday night?” Kirstilä said, bewildered. “You mean the night before last? How am I supposed to remember that? I was probably at a bar. Maybe Cosmo
s . . .
or Coron
a . . .
Yeah, first the Cosmos and later the bar at the Santa Fe. They threw me out around one, and I guess I went hom
e . . .
”

“Who were you with?” I asked.

Kirstilä mentioned the names of a couple of other famous poets who had been at the Cosmos. I asked if he was spending every night now sitting in a bar.

“The words won’t come,” he said sadly, tossing back the rest of his coffee and reaching for a cigarette. His hand stopped midmotion as he remembered the no smoking rule.

“And you think you’re going to find them at a titty bar?” Ström said cruelly. “Nothing there looked all that poetic to me.”

Kirstilä just shook his head. He wouldn’t talk about the hash either, other than to say he’d bought it from some guy the night before. “I don’t remember if it was at the Coron
a . . .
or maybe the Ruffe.”

If it were Puupponen with me instead of Ström, I would have suggested letting Kirstilä go, but I didn’t feel like arguing with Ström. Instead, I promised to try to be in right at eight the next morning to question Kirstilä again.

I could barely keep my eyes open as I drove slowly home through another snowstorm. A rabbit dashed across the road, and my headlights caught a skier out challenging the blizzard. At first I thought it might be Antti, but the skier was too short and stout. At home all the lights were on and the house smelled of fresh bread. Einstein ran to meet me in the entryway and Antti followed with a grin. I’d expected to find him discouraged after the Ring II freeway meeting, but he practically glowed.

“Hey, darling. Still alive after a long day?” Antti wrapped his arms around me. His long hair smelled like pine tar and the wind. His sweater was covered with flour.

“Barely. That bread smells great. I’m starving to death.”

“Kirsti called about an hour ago. She and Eva had a little girl, and everybody’s healthy.”

Such good news after such a hard day instantly made the tears flow. Ninny. I never used to cry when someone had a baby.

“Everything went well?” I asked as Antti led me toward the warm bread waiting in the kitchen.

“I guess, although they said it took almost twelve hours. They’re going to spend the weekend in Tammisaari. You remember they were going out there for the birth, right? If you have time, we could go see them on Saturday. I think we could use a break from the city.”

After four pieces of bread, all my body wanted was a hot shower. It was zero dark thirty when I finally collapsed in bed between Antti and Einstein. In my dreams, bare-chested girls nursed kittens.

The next morning, I tried to make up for the effects of so little sleep by dressing nicer and doing my makeup more carefully than usual. My abs were tender from the previous day’s hard training, and I felt sort of strange. My body wasn’t just my own anymore. Someone else was living in it. Someone who didn’t demand much space yet but still sent a bitter coffee burp back up my throat. Someone whose sense of smell had replaced my own and who could pick out gasoline or cigarette smoke anywhere. Someone who needed a lot of sleep to grow, which made me tired too. Someone who made me cry over the smallest emotional thing.

Soon that someone would start to grow in earnest, and then my waist would spread and I wouldn’t fit in my skin or my clothes. And finally, less than a year from now, that someone would come out of me and be a separate person but still completely dependent on me for years.

I looked at my powdered face in the mirror and saw that someone’s eyes behind my own—that someone I didn’t even know yet. Suddenly I felt a joy that almost made me ashamed. I quickly wiped a tear from the corner of my eye and left for the station anticipating another hard day. On the way, I dropped Antti off at a bus stop in Tapiola.

Old Mankkaa Road was in chaos. A semi with a trailer stood blocking the road. Apparently it had slid at great speed down the slippery hill and rammed into an oncoming van. I didn’t want to know what had happened to the driver of the van, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the light-green sheet metal crushed under the semi. The man who was being bundled into the ambulance was apparently the truck’s driver, not the van’s.

After sitting in gridlock for fifteen minutes, I tried to call Ström, but my stupid piece of junk phone wouldn’t work. Why the force couldn’t just buy decent cell phones for everybody was beyond me. It was already past nine when I finally reached a driveway where I could turn my little Fiat around to backtrack and go another way. When I made it to the station, Ström wasn’t around. Dispatch said he was with Haikala in interrogation room number three.

When I marched in, the room was empty. I finally found Ström in the break room.

“I thought you slept in. You need a lot of rest in your condition,” he said. “I handled the Kirstilä prelims with Haikala.”

“Where is he now?” I asked, intentionally ignoring Ström’s reference to my “condition.”

“I let him go. He was so wound up about getting two charges against him.”

“You’re effing kidding me!” I said. “I wasn’t done with him yet. At least you checked his alibi for Tuesday night?”

“Haikala’s calling right now.” Ström shoved the last piece of his Danish into his mouth and then stepped close to me and whispered into my ear with exaggerated intimacy, “So when are we going to lose you? When does your maternity leave start?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I snapped, pulling my arm out of Ström’s ostensibly solicitous grasp and striding off toward the elevator. Ström followed me, just getting a leg in before the doors closed.

“You probably won’t be coming back to this unit though,” he continued.

“And why not? The kid has a dad too,” I huffed, although I knew it was stupid to actually confirm Ström’s suspicion that I was pregnant.

“Taking care of a little kid doesn’t work with shifts like ours,” he said, strangely serious now. “Trust me, I know. Sometimes I went weeks without seeing Jani and Jenna other than at the breakfast table. It wasn’t exactly fun.”

The elevator came to a stop, and I made a beeline for my office, ignoring Ström, who strode after me but stopped when he saw that someone was waiting for me in the hall.

I’d been right. Tarja Kivimäki had shown up. It wasn’t quite ten yet, but there she was, standing in front of my door in a shiny red pantsuit that looked riotous against the pale-gray walls of the police station. Kivimäki had been to the salon since I’d seen her last: her boring brown bob was now shorter, blond, and curly.

“Good morning,” I said and opened the door. This was going to be a private conversation. I would only call in a witness and turn on the recorder sitting on my desk if I sensed she had something really important to say about Elina’s murder.

I hoped she would start talking. I knew I was wading in deep snow. I already had one reprimand hanging around my neck thanks to Tarja Kivimäki, although I really didn’t want to bring that up with her.

But that was exactly what she wanted to talk about.

“Martti didn’t call your boss, did he?” Kivimäki asked. Her concern seemed almost genuine.

“Martti?” I asked just as innocently. But I really didn’t feel like keeping up the charade. “If you mean Interior Minister Martti Sahala, then, yes, he did send his greetings. I would have thought such a high official would have other concerns than the behavior of a single police officer.”

“I was pretty upset that night.” Tarja Kivimäki tapped the surface of her briefcase with her red nails, which were so shiny she must have painted them that morning. “Actuall
y . . .
Actually, Elina’s death has been much harder for me than I’ve been willing to admit. I might have exaggerated your threats a bit. Martti takes everything so seriously.”

“So you’re in a relationship with the most respected member of the government? I have to say I’m a little surprised. What brought you two together?”

Maybe it would be better to play friends with Tarja Kivimäki. You tell me your secrets and I’ll tell you mine. We did share a similar background—the trauma of growing up in a one-horse eastern Finnish town.