“What?” I ask.
“I just can’t picture one guy getting so much *. The only dates I’ve had lately are with Rosy Palm and Five Fingers.”
This makes me laugh, too.
Our boss, Arto, walks in behind Milo. “It always pleases me to see detectives enjoy their work,” Arto says. “Want to let me in on the joke?”
“Sure,” Milo says. “What do you call epileptic lettuce?”
“What?”
“Seizure salad.”
Milo howls at his own joke, which makes me laugh more than the joke. Arto giggles and says, “Jesus, that was awful.”
When Milo stops cackling, Arto asks, “You two have time to investigate a death?”
“No,” I say, “but we can make time.”
“Head over to the Silver Dollar nightclub. The bouncers there killed some guy.”
“Sounds good,” Milo says.
The problem is that when Milo says it sounds good, I think he means it.
17
Milo and I sign a car out of the police garage at seven thirty p.m. Today we get a 2007 Toyota Yaris. It’s dark out now. Snow still falls, and our headlights illuminate it. Helsinki is a lovely city in winter when it’s not hammered by sleet and covered in filthy slush.
I drive. Milo jabbers. “So you have an American wife,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“What language do you speak at home?”
“Mostly English. Kate has been here for going on three years. She’s learning, tries to at least use some Finnish words and phrases.”
“Well,” he says, “Finnish is a tough language. It takes time.”
“Yeah.”
“English is a moronic language.”
This seems to be my week to have strong and unsupported opinions thrust upon me. “And why might that be?”
“The letter C is unnecessary. It makes the same sounds as K and S. That’s a lot of waste. They should get rid of it. They don’t need B either. P is almost the same, does just as well.”
I make conversation, since I was so hard on him earlier. “Kate thinks A and O with the dots over them are pointless. English gets on just fine without them.”
Milo takes a pack of unfiltered North State cigarettes out of his coat pocket, cracks the window and lights one. My dad smokes the same brand. Tough-guy cigarettes. “So during this car ride,” he says, “we’ve managed to take two letters out of the English language, and two out of Finnish. We changed the world.”
Inane chatter. He’s trying to kiss and make up because he pissed me off earlier. “So you started smoking again,” I say.
He takes a drag and nods. “You really are a good detective.”
“How long did you stay off them?”
“Four years.”
His new job in murharyhma must be getting to him. We sit in silence for a few moments.
“Did you know Ilari and Inka are fucking?” he asks.
“Is this deduction another product of your people-person skills and extreme powers of empathy?”
“It’s the product of hearing them fuck in the bathroom after everybody got drunk at my ‘welcome to the new guy’ party.”
They both have spouses and children, and even though they’re partners, act as if they hate each other. I thought their vicious invective toward each other seemed forced.
At seven forty-five p.m., we pull up in front of the Silver Dollar and park next to an ambulance. To call the place a nightclub is a bit of a misnomer. It’s multifunctional, soaks up money in different ways. It opens at four p.m. to accommodate after-work drinkers. A couple nights a week, it offers line dancing. Finnish countrymusic fans don cowboy boots, hats, bolos and collar tips, and giddyup, pardner. Its biggest cash cow, though, is its four a.m. liquor license. Every other bar in the neighborhood closes at two, so when shit-drunk people get kicked out at closing time, they come here to this shithole to get shit-drunker for another couple hours. The place is packed most nights.