Dead of Night (11 page)

‘You know, I heard that the subject of that old bigot Grant T. Miller came up when Diaz was out at Antoine Cadillac with his
foreign guests,’ Addison said as she pushed a small bush to one side and looked at the soil around the plant.

‘The old fuck who lives in that house with the ruined tower?’ Zevets asked.

‘That’s him,’ Rita Addison replied. ‘Only resident left in this part of north Brush Park. Anyway, over at Cadillac, Crazy
Zeke Goins was making a commotion about how he still believes that Miller killed his son back in the seventies.’

Zevets straightened up and breathed deeply for a moment. It was tough work rooting through rough garden, bent over double.
‘Diaz worked that case, I heard.’

‘When he was a rookie, yeah,’ Rita said. He had told her all about it some years back. She was, she suspected, one of the
very few people he did communicate with. Somewhere deep inside, she suspected, Diaz believed that Miller had killed Elvis
Goins. ‘Old Zeke Goins got himself all excited about a couple of Turkish cops Diaz took out to Antoine Cadillac. Reckoned
his “kin” could prove Miller’s guilt.’

Zevets shook his head and laughed. ‘Some of those hillbillies, man, they are nuts.’

‘We all know that we can’t actually do anything to change the behaviour of our drug-addicted informants,’ Süleyman said to
İkmen as they stood outside the conference centre, smoking in the snow.

‘Yes, but what I think Lieutenant Diaz is saying,’ İkmen replied, ‘is that if you want to build a proper working relationship
with an addict, you must make him feel safe. You must avoid judging his behaviour or threatening him with prosecution because
of his habit.’

The bad feeling between them over Ezekiel Goins had evaporated, as Süleyman had known it would. Now, apparently, İkmen was
focused only on the conference.

‘But we don’t stop them using,’ Süleyman said. ‘We ignore what they do.’

‘Yes, but as a last resort, to force an informant to give us what we want, we can threaten to prosecute,’ İkmen said.

‘Of course!’

İkmen frowned. ‘You say that,’ he said, ‘but what Diaz is proposing is a more co-operative and yet at the same time more business-orientated
relationship. Trust and money are the keys. The addict is an employee; we, the police, facilitate his habit, but we get a
return on our investment in the form of reliable intelligence. Our addicts trust us, they may even like us, and also we provide
them with very badly needed money. Everyone is happy.’

This time it was Süleyman’s turn to frown. ‘And yet isn’t there a
danger here of overstepping the line?’ he said. ‘If we make friends with addicts, if we, as you say, actively facilitate their
habits, then aren’t we laying ourselves open to charges of collusion? Could we not be manipulated by those we seek to use?’

‘Those are very real risks, as Diaz outlined,’ İkmen said. ‘But if the payoff is a closer view of criminal gangs, increased
rates of solution in murder cases, more access to the criminal classes, then that is a price that might be worth paying. It
appears to be a model that Diaz has some belief in, as well as some evidence of small-scale success.’

‘But this city still appears to me to be out of control!’

İkmen threw his cigarette butt down on the ground and then lit up another smoke. ‘They’re taking small steps,’ he said. ‘Diaz
I believe works like this. I don’t know if many of his officers follow suit. I think that most of them use the Zero Tolerance
approach. But then even they seem to be behind these community projects, which are unconventional but which seem to be having
some effect in Detroit.’

‘Mmm.’ Süleyman pulled a face. ‘But Çetin, this place is like Tarlabaşı, don’t you think? Falling down, full of users, thieves
and madmen.’

İkmen smiled. His friend could be so precious at times! ‘The other day you thought that Detroit was like Ümraniye used to
be,’ he said. ‘Which is it?’

‘Oh, you know what I mean!’ Süleyman threw a hand petulantly into the air. ‘It’s like any broken-down İstanbul district. It’s
shabby and full of jobless people, criminal gangs, drugs . . .’

‘Who are all fascinating individuals who often need help,’ İkmen said. He had most definitely joined the police to protect
his city and help his people. In some ways it was all about him as well, and his need to understand desperate or divergent
behaviour, working on the ‘why’ behind the crime. Süleyman, on the other hand, had, he felt, other motivations. True, he wanted
to protect the city, but he didn’t always seem as interested as İkmen was in the reasons behind people’s
actions. There were times, İkmen felt, when policing for Süleyman – the guns, the danger, the women – was just one big adrenalin
rush. But he didn’t say anything about that to him, and once they’d finished their latest cigarettes, the two men went back
into the building to have lunch.

Miller, smirking, told Diaz that he would invite him in but his place was in a bit of a state. That was putting it mildly.
Behind the old man’s head, all Diaz could see was a yellow-lit chaos. Apparently random pieces of furniture were stacked up
everywhere, refugees, in all likelihood, from the now collapsed tower on the east side of the building. In that regard, as
well as in so many others, the Windmill was not unlike the Royden Holmes place, where, apparently, his officers were still
searching for that missing bullet.

‘I have to be downtown as soon as I’ve finished here,’ Diaz said. Snow had entered under Miller’s front door and was covering
the old man’s sagging slippers.

‘You bring my gun, did you? My paperwork?’

Diaz didn’t answer. ‘How did you know that Rita Addison was with me out at the Royden Holmes place?’ he said.

‘Because she’s your partner, isn’t she?’ Miller said. ‘I mean professionally, not . . .’

‘She could’ve been sick that day. Could’ve been in court.’

Miller looked down at the snow on his slippers, then looked up again and smiled. ‘But she weren’t. She was with you.’

Miller was well known for his mind games, the type he played whenever he could with poor old Zeke Goins.

‘You can’t see Royden Holmes from here.’

‘I went out.’ He smiled again.

‘Out?’

‘Into the great outdoors, yes,’ Miller said. ‘Felt like a stroll that day.’

‘Felt like a stroll?’

‘Yeah. Out in the snow in my jimmy-jams for a morning constitutional.’

‘I never saw you.’

Miller’s pale-blue eyes widened. ‘Oh, you too busy with a dead nigger kid to look at some old white man.’

‘I would have noticed you,’ Diaz said as he moved a little closer to the crack in the door in front of which Grant T. Miller
stood.

Miller shrugged.

‘Anyone else see you?’ Diaz asked. ‘Because my officers certainly didn’t. They would have told me.’

‘No one lives around here any more,’ Miller said. ‘You should know that. Now do you have my property for me, Officer?’

For a few moments Diaz held the old man’s gaze. Miller was clearly amused, very obviously playing one of his games. But there
had to be some truth in what he was saying, because clearly he had seen Rita Addison with Diaz on the first day of the investigation.
That or he’d just made a lucky guess. Either way, Gerald Diaz didn’t trust him, and was therefore very reluctant to hand the
Beretta back to him, even though he knew that he had to.

Diaz put his hand in his pocket, took the pistol out and pointed it at Miller. Even then the old man laughed. ‘Oh, you gonna
kill me, are you, Pancho Villa?’ His voice cracked with age and with the damp that seeped into everything around him. ‘Bet
you’d love to,’ he whispered. ‘I saw how you looked at me all them years ago when Zeke Goins come here and bit me like a rabid
dog. It was what attracted me, as it were, to you. All your heart was with him, weren’t it? All your soul crying out to his
in sympathy for his stupid dead junkie son!’

‘If you—’

‘Oh, boy, you will never know for sure who killed Elvis Goins any more’n anybody will,’ Miller said. ‘Now stop pointing my
gun at me, give it over and make nice. Remember just who and what you are. Weapon was clean, I take it?’

Diaz slapped the pistol into the old man’s outstretched hand and gave him his paperwork back. ‘Ballistics told me it’d been
fired,’ he said.

‘At?’

‘The Turks.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s not wanted for any other crime.’

As Diaz walked down what remained of the garden path, Miller pointed the Beretta at him and said, ‘I got my eye on you, Diaz.’

Diaz turned briefly, looked the old man hard in the eyes, and then continued on down the broken, litter-strewn path.

‘Decriminalising cannabis, prescribing it only for conditions like multiple sclerosis, is not enough. All, at present illegal,
narcotics should be decriminalised, up to and including heroin. The more you criminalise, the more young people turn to other
things that may be even more dangerous. I have seen people little more than children in my clinic who had poured neat vodka
into their eyes in order to get high.’

The speaker, an elderly female addiction specialist from Italy, was making some very radical statements. The war against drugs,
she was saying, was not being won on any level. More and more people were becoming addicted to an ever-increasing range of
products, some of which, like alcohol in the eyes, were immensely hazardous.

‘Many of these young people become temporarily blind,’ she said. ‘In order to get high without being arrested, they are putting
themselves at what could be even greater risk. Decriminalisation of cannabis, particularly, would allow people to get high
without fear. It could also, more cynically, provide another revenue stream for governments. At the moment, criminals are
the only ones benefiting from this trade. Drugs also feed into their other activities, like prostitution, extortion and people-trafficking.
The war on drugs makes no sense.’

Çetin İkmen looked across at Gerald Diaz and saw that he was smiling. Opinions like this were totally in line with his philosophy
of social understanding and engagement. What the Italian said also struck a chord with İkmen himself. Although there was no
way the Turkish government, just like the US administration, would ever decriminalise narcotics, as an officer on the street
he could see that it did make sense. Billions of lire were poured into the war on drugs every year, and every year the problem
grew still bigger and more intractable.

In Mehmet Süleyman’s opinion, education was the key. Young people needed proper information about drugs in order to make informed
decisions about whether to use or not. But there were more radical solutions too. In so far short conversations with Sergeant
Donna Ferrari, İkmen had learned that in her opinion, religion was the answer. If kids could just find God, then everything
would be fine and they wouldn’t need drugs. How that would play out with uneducated youngsters with no prospects, İkmen didn’t
know. But he was aware that it wasn’t just a Christian perspective. Some of his colleagues back in Turkey had similar beliefs
about the efficacious employment of Islam in the war against drugs.

Discovering that Sergeant Ferrari was what she called a ‘born-again’ Christian was interesting on another level too. Much
as she might flirt and flutter her eyelashes at Süleyman, actual sex with him, unless İkmen was very much mistaken, had to
be out of bounds. Delayed or even sometimes completely frustrated pleasure was something that İkmen automatically associated
with fanatically religious people of almost all stripes. In the same way that he couldn’t understand promiscuity, he couldn’t
get his mind around painful self-denial either. Sergeant Ferrari was an attractive woman who was aware of her own allure,
and yet apparently she did not act on the effect she clearly had upon men. Süleyman, as far as he knew, had so far failed
to so much as take Ferrari for a coffee.

He looked across again at Diaz, who was, rather hurriedly, getting up from his seat and pushing past Donna Ferrari. He had
his mobile phone, which must have been in silent mode, pressed to his ear and
was obviously listening to something. From the expression on his face, what he was hearing was both important and rather grave.

A line had been crossed and Ayşe didn’t know what to do. It was almost twelve hours since İzzet Melik had crept out of her
apartment without a word. Like her, he’d gone into work and they had spoken, if a little stiltedly, about matters relating
to their jobs when they’d met outside their respective offices. He had said nothing at all about the events of the previous
night, and when she’d left the station to come home, he hadn’t attempted to stop her or ask her to go elsewhere with him.
Since she had arrived at her apartment, he hadn’t called her. And yet he had spent the previous night if not in her bed, in
her place alone with her. If any of her neighbours had seen him either arrive or leave, they could, at that moment, be gossiping
about her. Even in rather upmarket, modern Gümüşsüyü, people could be judgemental about such things.

Not that Ayşe was any kind of innocent. In the past, she’d had affairs with two of her male colleagues, as well as with a
lawyer she’d once met at a meyhane
²
in Beyoğlu. However, that had been some years ago, and besides would she really want anyone to even imagine that she was
‘with’ İzzet Melik? But then, in a way, that was the whole point. She wouldn’t want anyone to think she was with İzzet even
if in her heart of hearts she didn’t seem to have a problem with that any more.

In recent days she had come to rather enjoy İzzet’s company. She still didn’t respond to him romantically or find him actually
physically attractive. But he was bright, he could be funny and he had been very kind and yet at the same time very respectful
to her. It was obvious as well as widely known that he had feelings for her. She had thought she had no feelings at all for
him. Now she knew that she was wrong in that assumption. She liked İzzet a lot. Without
Süleyman around to distract her, she’d actually taken the time to listen and pay attention to the sergeant. He was a good
man.