Dead of Night (12 page)

Not that his goodness was the point. The fact remained that somewhere, somehow, a line had been crossed, and Ayşe was confused.
The thought of sleeping with İzzet still made her cringe, but the notion of spending a lot of time with him was beginning
to appeal to her. As her late mother most probably would have said had she ever met İzzet Melik, ‘you could do worse, girl’.
And at her age, Ayşe Farsakoğlu had to admit that that was probably true.

Officer Mark Zevets found the bullet that had killed Aaron Spencer embedded in the back of an old chest of drawers. He’d had
to clear out literally hundreds of used junkie needles in order to get at the back of the chest, but once there, he’d seen
the bullet easily. Rita Addison, right behind him, had rung to let Diaz know immediately. Then they’d called over the forensic
team and Lieutenant Shalhoub. Everyone had whooped with delight as forensics examined the site and bagged up the slug. It
had been an unusually long haul, and everyone was buoyed up by the success. When Gerald Diaz arrived later, he found the officers
on the scene in almost celebratory mood.

‘Now maybe we’ll get somewhere,’ Rita Addison said as she took her plastic gloves off and threw them on to the passenger seat
of her car.

‘Where’s the slug?’ Diaz asked as he lit up a cigarette.

‘On its way to the lab,’ Addison replied.

‘Good.’ Although he would have liked to have taken a look at it first himself. ‘Lieutenant Shalhoub see it?’

‘Yeah.’

Mark Zevets joined them and, as was his custom, took a couple of quick drags from Diaz’s cigarette.

‘Do either of you remember seeing any civilians about the place the day we found Aaron Spencer’s body?’ Diaz asked.

The two younger officers shrugged. ‘Like who?’ Addison asked.

‘There was the usual obligatory one white kid and one black kid
came out of nowhere, as they do in places like Brush Park,’ Zevets said. ‘I questioned the both of them.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Lieutenant, I would’ve told you if I’d thought there was anything going on,’ Zevets said. ‘Kids were eight years old at most,
and although I know that shit happens at all ages here in the Big D, these boys were obviously freaked. But if you want to
have them in and talk to them yourself . . .’

Diaz shrugged. ‘We’ll see.’

‘We’ll see what?’ A voice smoke-scarred in a similar way to Diaz’s own came from behind.

‘John.’

Shalhoub smiled. ‘See what?’ he asked again.

‘Oh, Zevets interviewed a couple of kids hanging out around here the day Aaron Spencer’s body was found. I think it’s probably
a dead end, but . . .’ He shrugged.

Shalhoub had only recently been assigned to the Spencer case, while Diaz was down at the Cobo Center, and so he hadn’t been
in attendance on that first day.

‘Why?’ Diaz looked over at Addison, who was frowning. ‘You hear anything about something?’ she asked. ‘Other folk come forward
about the boy, maybe?’

‘No.’ Diaz smiled. If no one had spotted Grant T. Miller near the crime scene at the time, then he didn’t want to lead their
trains of thought in case anything significant occurred to someone spontaneously sometime later. Besides, Miller was so well
known that if any of Detroit’s finest had seen him that morning, they would have mentioned it. ‘No, I just want to make sure
that all the bases are covered,’ he said. He walked back towards his car. He had to be at the Cobo Center for two thirty,
and it was already almost two.

When Diaz had gone, Addison said, ‘He’s just dying to get back to doing some real work.’

Like Zevets and Shalhoub, Rita Addison knew that Gerald Diaz
was a workaholic. She knew how frustrated his attendance at this conference business was making him. As well as being colleagues,
they were loosely friends too. They spoke most days on the phone. His absence wasn’t doing her much good either. John Shalhoub
had just as many years of experience as Diaz and was nothing if not a very knowledgeable and respected officer, but Rita was
comfortable with Diaz, and she liked him. Also, for an old guy, Diaz, unlike Shalhoub, was hot.

Even though the city was still covered with thick snow, making walking outside sometimes hazardous, Martha knew that to be
indoors all day long was not good. It was also very unlike Zeke Goins.

‘You should go out and get some fresh air,’ she said to the old man as she attempted to dust the coffee table at his elbow.
A half-rolled cigarette as well as an overflowing ashtray needed some dealing with, and although Martha smoked herself from
time to time, she found this disgusting. ‘What you doing indoors all day anyway watching
Sally, Jerry Springer
and
Ricki
?’
Martha asked, listing the hysterical chat shows that old Zeke usually avoided. ‘We usually listen to Motown together. You
depressed or something, Ezekiel?’

‘Even when Turks come, nothing don’t happen,’ he said as he looked down at the floor. ‘Maybe it’s kismet.’

Martha turned the TV down and sat beside him on the sofa. ‘About Elvis?’ she asked. He didn’t reply. But Martha knew what
the score was anyway. She sighed. ‘Zeke, man, you gonna have to let your boy go sometime,’ she said.

Ezekiel Goins looked up. Suddenly his face was hard, angry almost. ‘Like you’ve let go of Luther?’ he said. ‘I heard you,
Martha Bell, crying into the night, even now.’

Martha shook her head impatiently. ‘So what if I weep now and again?’

‘All the time.’

She threw her hands up in the air. Her eyes were beginning to
mist, and she wanted to make sure the old man was distracted from that. ‘So what if I weep all the time!’ she said. ‘That’s
my business. I also still work, I garden my patch and I watch out for you and for Keisha all the time! I don’t sit in no chair
watching big fat girls shout at their boyfriends on
Ricki
!’

Suddenly angered, Zeke said, ‘Neither do I!’ Then he put his head down again and added softly, ‘Usually.’

Martha put her duster down on the floor and took her cigarettes out of the pocket of her apron. ‘Come on,’ she said as she
opened the packet and offered it to him. ‘Forget about that sad thing you made there. Have a Winston.’

He took a cigarette from her packet and they both lit up. Martha and Zeke very rarely disagreed about anything, with the exception
of the subject of his dead son. Turks or no Turks, Martha just couldn’t see how anything could be done to bring whoever had
killed Elvis Goins to justice. Not now.

‘If I just thought that Grant T. Miller would get his one of these fine days . . .’ Zeke said.

Martha dragged on her Winston. She’d heard all this many times before. ‘But you don’t know for a fact that Miller killed Elvis,’
she said.

‘Yes I do.’

‘No you don’t, Zeke! Miller taunts you with it all the time, but you think if he was really guilty he’d keep doing that? No,
he’d be afraid some time, some day someone might take him seriously.’

‘He’s protected by everyone!’ The old man was close to tears. Martha reached over and took one of his hands in hers.

‘No he ain’t, not now,’ she said soothingly. ‘Miller’s nothing now.’

‘Miller was in the Legion,’Zeke said, fear in his eyes at the mention of the white supremacist organisation the Black Legion,
which had once blighted race relations in the Detroit auto industry.

Martha smiled. ‘Lord above, old man, the Legion was put down back in the 1930s! I’m not saying we don’t have problems, even
now,
but the Legion ain’t one of them. Anyway, how old was Miller when he was part of all that? Six? Seven?’ She laughed. ‘Grant
T. Miller would like to have been in the Legion is the truth. But not even he so old he could’ve been.’

She had a point, of course. Grant T. Miller, even at eighty-five, would have been just a kid when the Legion was terrifying
black workers on the various auto production lines across the city. But Miller had told Zeke about his old Legion days so
many times . . .

‘Miller’s full of shit,’ Martha said. ‘He says these things to rattle your cage.’ She picked up the television remote control
and switched the TV off completely. Gently she laid the old man’s head on her shoulder. ‘Miller is a badass, but I don’t believe
he killed your son,’ she said. ‘He’s an evil old bastard, but I don’t think he ever killed no one.’

‘You don’t think so?’

‘No.’ She stroked the side of his head and Zeke closed his eyes.

‘Martha,’ he said, after a moment, ‘why you think it is that God allows bad people to run free all the time like this?’

Martha shrugged. ‘I don’t have the answer to that any more than anyone else,’ she said. ‘I guess the sons of bitches just
have to wait to go to hell before they get what’s coming to them.’

They were only halfway through the conference, and Süleyman was already talking about going home. İkmen had always imagined
that his younger colleague would enjoy the USA more than he would. But in fact the reverse was true. Even out at lovely Grosse
Pointe in company with his cousin Tayyar, Süleyman had been a fish out of water. Rather uncharitably, İkmen wondered whether
it was because, so far, no young woman had actually succumbed to his charms.

That evening they were to be the guests of the Detroit Police at a dinner given by the department in honour of their out-of-town
and foreign guests. For İkmen, it meant putting on a half-decent suit and ironing a shirt, while for Süleyman it was a full-on
style and
personal-grooming mission. Even if the dinner had been for men only, he would have done exactly the same. Women being also
present just added an extra frisson of excitement.

Thoughts about women brought İkmen’s own wife, Fatma, to mind. He’d called her a couple of times since he’d arrived in the
US, but because neither of them ever really knew what to say to each other on the phone, they had been short conversations.
Everything back home was, apparently, fine. His daughter Çiçek was relieved that her father hadn’t as yet succumbed to deep-vein
thrombosis, and his son who worked over in England was apparently marrying someone called Penny Stevenson. Sınan and Penny
were, it seemed, going to live in a town called Clitheroe. According to Fatma, it was somewhere up near the border with Scotland.

İkmen looked at the three ties he’d brought with him and wondered which one might be appropriate for a semi-formal cops’ dinner.
There was the blue one that was tattered at one end, which he wore every day and which had belonged to his father. Then there
was a rather feminine-looking one his son Bülent had bought him for his last birthday, and finally there was the awful beige
thing he kept because it had been the tie he’d worn on his wedding day. Realistically he could only wear the effete, highly
coloured thing that Bülent had bought him. But that was nevertheless irritating. Although he would never have told his son
in a million years, the tie was horribly loud in colour and he found even being in the same room with it an embarrassment.
That said, the fact that he had no choice but to wear it was clearly kismet, and so there was nothing he or anyone else could
do.

İkmen tucked the tie underneath his collar and then began to knot it. Although he had now stopped talking about the old Melungeon,
Ezekiel Goins, he had far from forgotten him. He knew that he couldn’t get involved in any investigation into the death of
the man’s son, even if such an investigation did exist. But that didn’t mean that he didn’t still feel the man’s pain and
disappointment acutely. Delusional though it was, there was no denying that Goins had waited
patiently for many years for a Turkish policeman to arrive. And now that one had, he had let him down. Although İkmen knew
that Lieutenant Diaz would roll his eyes as soon as he so much as mentioned Ezekiel Goins again, he would talk about him one
last time. If he could at least get Diaz, who was sympathetic to the old man’s plight, to look at the case again, then he
would have done something.

İkmen looked down at his watch and wondered how much longer Süleyman was going to spend in the bathroom.

Gerald Diaz had no appetite for dinner. Making small talk with a load of other cops wasn’t really his style. Most of the official
conversation would be about the orthodoxy of Zero Tolerance as applied in conjunction with the community projects and the
junkies’ needle exchanges that he championed. Not a huge number of US cops were on his wavelength, even if some of the foreign
officers were. His superiors used projects like Antoine Cadillac as a kind of window-dressing: ‘Look how liberal we are here!’
Diaz, by contrast, saw Martha Bell and her work as solutions in themselves.

He looked at himself in the hall mirror and decided that he didn’t scrub up too badly. His hair was more grey than black now,
and his face was thin and heavily lined. But he knew full well that women still got hot for him. The British, he knew, called
older men who still had their mojo ‘distinguished’. He could live with that. Gerald Diaz put his car keys into his jacket
pocket and was just about to pick up his cell phone when it rang.

He propped it between his shoulder and his ear as he lit a cigarette. It was always best to get one in before a long-winded
function. There was nowhere anyone could smoke indoors except in their own home these days. ‘Diaz,’ he said, and then he smiled
when he heard who was on the other end. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Thanks for calling so soon. I appreciate it.’

But as the person on the other end of the phone carried on speaking,
so Diaz’s smile faded and he felt his face and his body go very cold. When the party at the other end of the line finished,
Gerald Diaz said, ‘Very interesting. Thanks. I’ll . . . I’ll get back to you.’ And then he tapped the key to terminate the call.
Phone in hand still, he stood in his hall, smoking and wondering what the hell he should do next. The implications were huge.
For a moment it made him feel quite sick. And then it came to him: first of all, send a text. Make sure that word was out
even before he was. One thing was for certain, however, and that was that going to some dinner in these circumstances was
not going to be possible. He’d have to make his apologies, hopefully pick up Addison and then get on with it.