The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove (8 page)

Siiri would have liked to ask about Reino as well, whether Olavi knew where he’d ended up. But it was hard for Olavi to answer any of their questions. He said he had been sent to the
dementia section of the Group Home and that he was glad that he was at the hospital now. He didn’t remember anything about the Group Home and wouldn’t even know he’d been there if
his son hadn’t told him.

‘The hospital examined me thoroughly and found out all kinds of things,’ he said almost proudly, as if he were talking about his accomplishments. He started boasting about his
numerous cysts, hernias and blockages, and Anna-Liisa got impatient and demanded that he tell them how the criminal investigation was progressing.

‘We didn’t come here to listen to your medical history,’ she explained. Olavi looked frightened.

Then he started to cry. He had a different way of crying to Reino. He didn’t bark or curse. He wept silently, holding it in and letting it out. Like something had grabbed him deep at the
pit of his stomach. The alcoholic townie thought it best to go out on the balcony for a cigarette. It was hard to tell if the room’s other occupants were alive or not. So Olavi was able to
tell them what had happened.

‘I had asked for a male nurse to help with my bathing and showering,’ he began. ‘Because it bothered me having a young woman assisting an ugly old man like me. I thought it was
more natural to have a man do it. It never occurred to me that a male nurse would . . . somehow . . . think that he could . . .’

He started to cry again. Irma patted his shoulder, Siiri held his hand, and Anna-Liisa straightened out his blanket.

‘We understand, Olavi,’ she said, as if she were an expert in such things. ‘And there’s such a serious shortage of male nurses, too.’

Olavi said it was a new nurse named Jere, whose last name he couldn’t remember, but his son had promised to find out. Since Jere was new, the social worker had to come with him.

‘There’s your witness!’ Siiri exclaimed.

‘No. He was the one who was . . . I was crying, asking them to let me out of the shower, and he just laughed . . . It was . . . terribly unpleasant . . . Do you believe me?’ He spoke
quietly and looked at them and they could see the tremendous shame and embarrassment in his eyes. Irma dug her lace handkerchief out of her handbag and handed it to him.

‘Perhaps they are homosexuals,’ Anna-Liisa said.

‘Not necessarily,’ Irma said. ‘Certainly not normal homosexuals, anyway.’ She blew her nose loudly.

‘I’m never going back to Sunset Grove,’ Olavi sighed. ‘But my son can’t take me in and I’m not sick enough to stay here in the hospital. Friends, where am I
going to go?’

His voice nearly faded away completely and he was left staring out of the window. They didn’t know what to say, they just stood in shock for what felt like an eternity while the silence
grew heavier.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll think of something,’ Siiri said, not quite knowing what she meant, and fluffed his pillow.

‘Pasi was fired at the same time that Tero died. Or was it after he died? Does anybody know Pasi’s last name?’ Anna-Liisa said, making an effort to change the subject. Before
anyone could respond, a heavy-set nurse wheeled a food trolley in with a terrible racket.

‘Maybe this isn’t such a high-quality place,’ Irma said when she saw the limp porridge.

The nurse was sweaty and cross-looking. They felt like they ought to leave quickly, and were in such a hurry that they didn’t give Olavi a proper goodbye.

On the tram Siiri realized she’d left her cane at the hospital and decided to go there first thing in the morning to get it. She always took care of unpleasant tasks sooner rather than
later. It was easier than letting things pile up. Her son who died of alcoholism had always suffered less for what he’d done than for what he’d left undone. It was hard to understand
how she could have raised him so badly. All her children, really, because it wasn’t quite healthy the way her daughter had taken up teaching yoga and then become a nun.

Siiri didn’t really need her cane, but it was an expensive model and a gallant companion, as Irma put it.

‘My Carl the Cane always finds his way home,’ Irma said the next morning at coffee, as Siiri was getting ready to go and pick hers up.

Siiri asked about her cane at the hospital reception desk but the girl there didn’t know how to help her. Siiri thought she’d left the cane in Olavi’s room with a view, so she
decided to check there, if she could remember the way. She had some memory of it, but it was a vague kind of memory that she couldn’t swear to as fact. That must be what Irma was talking
about when she said she’d ‘finessed’ something.

Olavi Raudanheimo was happy when Siiri surprised him at his lunch. They served lunch very early in hospitals, which was probably good, since they woke the patients up so early in the morning.
They had, in fact, poked Olavi awake an hour before breakfast that morning at half past five to take his temperature. He didn’t know why they did it since he couldn’t remember the last
time he’d had a fever. But it was a compulsory procedure and there was no getting out of it. There was a white plate on his tray and on the plate was one potato and something grey.

‘Pork gravy, I think,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t see any meat in it.’

‘Maybe it’s to give you something to hope for,’ Siiri said, and Olavi laughed in his normal voice, but didn’t touch his food.

They had such a pleasant time sitting and chatting that Siiri forgot why she had come and thought that she must have come to ask about Reino, since she’d forgotten to ask the day before.
Olavi said that Reino had been sent to the closed unit’s severe dementia ward – Olavi’s son had found that out, too.

‘A healthy man, not even that old,’ Olavi said soberly. ‘Reino’s only eighty-seven, isn’t he?’

Olavi was well-informed about everything. Siiri couldn’t understand how such a person could be mistaken for a halfwit. Even Alzheimer’s wouldn’t strike someone like a bolt of
lightning. But Olavi said that anyone would seem demented if they were given enough medication.

‘That’s what my son said. There Reino sat tied to a wheelchair, unable to even remember his own name, a Russian nurse changing his nappy once a day and feeding him gruel with a
spoon. What a fate for a veteran of the war.’

Olavi’s son had rescued him from the closed unit by telling them that his father needed to go to the hospital for some tests, and once Olavi was out he’d recovered from his
‘dementia’ immediately.

‘It was a truly miraculous recovery! They won’t do anything here until they’ve peeled you off your medication. But Reino doesn’t have any children to help him. His only
son died a couple of years ago from a heart attack while jogging. He’d suddenly taken up exercise, the lunatic.’

When Olavi’s gravy had cooled and solidified, he moved it aside and picked up the newspaper. It was fun reading the news together. There was an article about an integrated retirement home
built in combination with a children’s nursery. It sounded like a good idea to Siiri and Olavi. The children would brighten up the retirement home and the old people could help the overworked
nursery staff with the babysitting. They could eat together, draw, sing, read, and they wouldn’t need to make up any activity busywork. But the paper said that they’d had to give up the
experiment because there had been so many complaints from the children’s parents that the old people were a danger to the children because they were confused and unpredictable and taking
strong medication.

Siiri and Olavi laughed at that until the tears flowed. Then Siiri went away, without her cane. Although they couldn’t say ‘went away’ any more because it meant
‘died’. At Sunset Grove there’d been a nice woman who had moved into her own apartment on Solnantie because, as she put it, all the people at Sunset Grove were old and toothless.
For a long time everyone thought she had died, until one day she appeared on the same tram as Siiri.

‘Oh, you aren’t dead, then,’ Siiri had said, thoughtlessly, and then she had hastened to explain, ‘They said you went away.’

Irma had marked on her calendar that it was her turn to reserve a restaurant table for her next class reunion. She asked Siiri to come with her to reserve it because
she’d decided that this time they would have the meeting in a real restaurant instead of Cafe Ekberg.

‘Come with you? Can’t you just call and reserve a table?’ Siiri said. She didn’t know Helsinki restaurants and wasn’t sure how she could help.

‘I’m not calling somewhere. I’m going in person. It’s more fun that way. And I have to try out the restaurant so I won’t embarrass myself by choosing a place with
bad food. We can take a taxi.’ She was enthused at the idea.

‘Don’t you think a taxi’s too expensive?’ Siiri said, since Irma didn’t have any of the Ambassador’s taxi coupons. But Irma’s daughter had told her that
now that she didn’t have a car she could afford to take a taxi every day. Siiri wasn’t used to calling a cab just like that. It made her feel a little guilty. But Irma was more carefree
than Siiri was in many ways. She liked all kinds of little vices, like whisky and cigarettes.

They went to the Sunset Grove information desk to ask them to call a taxi and were happy to see that for once there was someone at the counter.

‘Two euros,’ the woman said before picking up the phone.

‘I see. So it costs the same as one emptying of the rubbish,’ Irma said, and cheerfully handed her a fifty-euro note.

‘Don’t you have anything smaller?’ Siiri said in horror, and Irma said that when you get money out of the wall it only dispenses large bills. There was nothing she could do
about it.

They got a taxi, but a problem arrived with it. There was a large-breasted, naked woman painted on the side of the car with a phone number for sex services. Siiri felt that they couldn’t
take such a porn-mobile, but Irma told her to stop being silly; no one was going to mistake them for sex workers.

‘Or customers!’ Irma said with a hearty laugh and sat down on a large stain in the back seat of the taxi.

The next problem was where to go. Irma asked the driver if he could recommend a nice restaurant for students from the class of 1940, but the man clearly wasn’t from Helsinki. Then Irma
remembered the Lehtovaara.

‘What’s the address?’ the driver asked. He gripped the steering wheel with both hands and stared straight ahead.

‘Well, it’s on Mechelininkatu. On the corner of Mechelin and something, right near the Töölö library,’ Irma said as she put on her lipstick. With that
information you would have thought that the taxi would get moving, but the driver demanded the address again. He had a little gadget on the dashboard where apparently he had to type in the exact
address before he could start driving.

‘Goodness,’ Irma said, snapping her compact mirror shut. ‘Type in “Mechelininkatu eight”. That’s with a C H.’

‘Is it eight C or eight H?’

‘Not the address, the spelling. Try eight A.’

And so the taxi started off, but the address she’d given him was wrong, of course. She gave a shout when they passed the furniture store on Mechelininkatu and told the driver to stop. But
the man said that he couldn’t turn left until he got to Mechelininkatu 8, and stubbornly continued driving.

‘So this is what it’s like to go by taxi,’ Siiri said triumphantly. If she’d had her way, they would have taken the tram.

‘It’s not usually like this. This fellow isn’t quite qualified for the job,’ Irma said in a low voice. She glanced out of the window and waved her arm with its rattling
bracelets in front of Siiri’s face. ‘Look! Quick! See how the Sibelius monument is gleaming in the sunshine? What a marvellous sculpture! You’d never see this riding the scram.
And it won’t take you anywhere near Restaurant Lehtovaara.’

The scram was one of Irma’s joke words, something one of her darlings had made up when they were little, along with calling a housefly a flouse-lie. But she was right. It was something
Siiri had thought about ever since the mentally ill lab assistant had mentioned it in her sermon on rats and Prime Minister Lipponen. Why didn’t the trams go to Töölö? All the
trams took the same route straight down Mannerheimintie. Why didn’t some of them go down Mechelininkatu or Topeliuksenkatu?

‘You’re not from Helsinki, are you?’ Irma asked the driver while she searched her handbag for her wallet. Her pill counter, lace handkerchief, wristwatch, spare tights, two
pairs of glasses and a small bottle of whisky were already lying on the back seat.

‘No.’

‘Where are you from? Vaasa?’

Now Irma’s blood-sugar meter, wallet and the sticky note with 7245 written on it in large numbers were also on the seat.

‘I’m from Azerbaijan,’ the man answered.

Irma paid with a fifty-euro note, but the driver refused to take it because he had no change and no way to check that the bill was genuine. He tried to get her to pay with a credit card but then
her strange intuition reminded her that she’d been given change at the Sunset Grove info desk when they’d called the taxi. She handed the driver a bill and told him to bite it to make
sure it wasn’t counterfeit. Siiri was starting to feel weak from the bad air and the peculiar mood in the car.

‘Why did you think he was from Vaasa?’ Siiri asked when they’d got out of the cab and were standing in front of the Lehtovaara breathing the fresh air.

‘His Finnish was as bad as it is in Vaasa. But where on God’s green earth is Azerbaijan? And how can someone from there pass a Helsinki taxi driver’s test?’ Irma
wondered, just as the two of them noticed that the Lehtovaara was closed.

Now they were really in a pickle. There were no taxi stands nearby, and no tram stops. How were they going to get off Mechelininkatu? Siiri was afraid they might have to resort to using
Irma’s mobile phone.

‘Wait! I’ve just finessed it! We’ll go to the library!’

It was a wonderful idea. They both loved the Töölö library, Aarne Ervi’s most beautiful building, which made the modernist utopia of Tapiola look like a concrete suburb by
comparison. The Töölö library was one of those rare buildings that were beautiful both inside and out. Some buildings are only beautiful on the inside, like the Opera House –
which was an awful pile of tiles until you took the time to go inside. Siiri and Irma walked through the library and admired the railings, the stairs, the windows, the light and the view. Finally a
friendly librarian came up to them and asked if she could help them.