Dead of Night (16 page)

‘Plans for more community organisations across the city?’ İkmen asked.

‘Yeah.’ She sat down and drank her coffee. ‘You get enough people involved, you teach them how what we do can benefit them,
you can start to tame the streets. Going around busting everyone all the time ain’t gonna get you nowhere.’

‘For some time, and certainly since my son Bekir died, I have been thinking that the problem of drug use is really a health
rather than a judicial problem,’ İkmen said.

‘Damn straight,’ Martha concurred. ‘Almighty God knows, if I could find who killed my boy I’d want to beat the life out of
him. But knowing that he was probably a kid and almost certainly an addict, part of me also wants to help him too.’

‘She’s a good, good person, Inspector,’ Ezekiel Goins said to İkmen. ‘I ain’t. All I wanna do is take revenge for my boy.’

‘You should know who killed your children, both of you,’ İkmen said. ‘The pain of my own loss is sometimes more than I feel
I can bear. But at the very least I have the knowledge of exactly how my son died, why and by whose hand. I would be lying
if I said that those facts were of comfort. But I do feel that Bekir can rest now, even if I cannot.’

They drank their coffee and smoked their cigarettes in silence for a few moments then, each one of them focused upon his or
her individual grief. But after a few moments, İkmen’s thoughts turned back to Zeke Goins again. With Diaz dead, the old man
had to be feeling that all his connections with the past, as well as the small amount of support that the lieutenant had given
him, had gone. Now he had to wonder whether anyone would ever get to the bottom of what had happened to Elvis.

The words ‘Got him’ came back into İkmen’s mind yet again. What worried at him was the notion that somehow Diaz had found
a connection between Grant T. Miller and the death of Elvis Goins. If that had indeed happened, then there was no way that
such information
should be allowed to die with the lieutenant. Detroit PD were dealing with Diaz’s death, but were they factoring in that text
İkmen had received?

‘So when you off back to Turkey?’ Martha asked as she poured some more coffee into İkmen’s cup.

‘At the weekend,’ he said.

‘Don’t give you too much time left here,’ she replied.

‘No.’

Silence washed in again. When it was finally broken, it was by the old man. ‘Can’t say I’m looking forward to that,’ he said.

İkmen didn’t reply. His mind was too busy trying to find some way whereby he might be able to stay. When he didn’t find one,
he resolved to speak to Officer Addison and ask for her help. He knew that it could very easily be a dead end.

Going back to the hotel to a no doubt recumbent İkmen was not Mehmet Süleyman’s idea of a good time. But there was no three
o’clock lecture as usual, and so delegates had what they called ‘free’ time in the city.

An officer from Mexico City and the British officers were going off to the Motown Museum and had invited him to go along with
them. But Süleyman had never really got into the Motown sound, and so the idea of spending a few hours looking at old recording
equipment and listening to the Supremes didn’t appeal.

What he had to do was get to some shops and find something uniquely American to take back home for his little boy, Yusuf.
Apart from wanting to buy something for him, he also didn’t need the disgust he’d no doubt get from his ex-wife should he
return empty-handed. But what he could buy apart from a baseball cap, a T-shirt or some sort of computer game, he didn’t know.
Unable to interest the lovely Donna Ferrari in any extracurricular activities, he eventually gave his cousin Tayyar Bekdil
a call. Tayyar was working on a rather complicated financial piece about some new
development money that was going to be awarded to the city from Washington, and needed a break. He came and picked Süleyman
up from the Cobo Center and took him to a restaurant in Greektown called Kleopatra.

‘I don’t know whether you’re going to be eating with Çetin later, but they do a fantastic meze here,’ Tayyar said, ‘and I
had no lunch.’

Süleyman had only really played around with the, to him, rather tasteless hamburgers they’d been given for lunch, and so he
was very pleased to have the opportunity to eat something more familiar. Greektown, as the name implied, was where immigrants
to Detroit from Greece had first settled. Both the menu and the surroundings, if not the bouzouki music, were familiar and
welcome things.

‘They make excellent falafel here,’ Tayyar said as they sat down at a table beneath a large picture of the Acropolis. He called
out his order to one of the waiters and poured a glass of water for his cousin. ‘I’ve been thinking about you, actually,’
he said to Süleyman. ‘Or rather, Çetin İkmen and his interest in the Goins family.’

Süleyman told Tayyar how Diaz had warned İkmen off, and also how Diaz himself was now dead. Tayyar frowned. ‘Gerald Diaz?’

‘Yes. Did you know him?’

‘No, but I knew of him,’ Tayyar said. ‘Very involved with community organisations. I heard something about an officer being
shot, but I didn’t know it was him. Was it a drive-by?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Mmm.’ Tayyar shook his head. ‘You know, after you and Çetin left the other evening, I looked up the Goins family in our archives.
I interviewed Sam Goins, Ezekiel’s big-wheel councillor brother, just after I came to Detroit. He doesn’t buy the whole Turkish
connection, or indeed any other supposed Melungeon ethnicity of origin. His whole thing is about achieving equality for his
people.’

‘That’s a very good aim.’

‘Of course, the Melungeons, just like the blacks, have had to put
up with discrimination in all areas of their lives since they came to this country. By rising to become a councillor, Sam
Goins has proved to his people that it can be done. I don’t know the story of how he pulled himself up out of the rank and
file, but it must have taken some guts.’

‘Absolutely.’

The waiter brought them long glasses of sherbet and told them that their meze would not be long. When he had gone, Tayyar
said, ‘How Sam got to where he did, I have no idea. He came to prominence, as far as I can tell, in the early 1980s. When
his nephew died, he was still just a grunt working the line.’

‘Oh well.’ Süleyman was not greatly interested in the Goins family, mainly because İkmen had gone on about Ezekiel and his
dead son so much. He had also, it had to be remembered, almost got them both shot in pursuit of Ezekiel Goins’ old adversary
Grant T. Miller.

‘Personally, and not detracting in any way from Sam’s achievement, I think that someone in that family must have had money,’
Tayyar said.

Süleyman looked doubtful. Ezekiel Goins was virtually a vagrant. ‘Really?’

‘Yes,’ Tayyar said.

‘How do you know?’

‘When Elvis Goins died, his funeral took place at Woodlawn Cemetery. It’s where the great and the good get buried,’ Tayyar
said. ‘Not the place you’d expect to find a backstreet hoodlum like Elvis Goins. A Mafia boss, yes, but much as Elvis may
have fancied himself one of those, he wasn’t. Very expensive funeral, very expensive monument, and Sam Goins, as far as I
can tell, was no one at the time. So where did the money come from?’

Süleyman looked blank. But then their food arrived, and for a while they talked of other, more pleasant things. Halfway through
their meal, however, Tayyar returned to the subject one more time. ‘Regarding Elvis Goins,’ he said, frowning again as he
spoke, ‘tell
Çetin about that elaborate funeral he had, won’t you? I know he’s supposed to leave all that alone now, but tell him anyway.’

Süleyman said that he would.

Officer Addison was in the hotel lobby, apparently waiting for Çetin İkmen. She looked tense, and as soon as she saw him,
she walked over to him and asked if she might come up to his suite. This caught İkmen unawares. He wasn’t accustomed to women
asking to come to his room. ‘Oh, well, er . . .’

Not that he thought for a minute that Addison had designs upon his body. He knew that he was no Mehmet Süleyman, or even,
for that matter, Gerald Diaz either. But Rita Addison put her head down close to his ear and said, ‘It’s about the gun that
Grant T. Miller shot at you with.’

It was nearly five o’clock, but Süleyman still wasn’t back, which was, İkmen felt, probably no bad thing. The younger man
was still a little touchy on the subject of their recent adventures outside Miller’s house in Brush Park. İkmen led Officer
Addison over to what counted as their living area and ushered her into one of the plastic armchairs.

‘Inspector İkmen,’ she said, ‘can you confirm to me that the weapon that Lieutenant Diaz took off Grant T. Miller was a Beretta
PX4?’

İkmen too sat down, and after asking Rita’s permission, he lit up a cigarette. ‘It was certainly a Beretta,’ he said. ‘Why?’

Even though she knew that the hotel suite was entirely private, Rita Addison looked about nervously. Once she was entirely
satisfied that they were alone, she told him all about the missing Beretta, and how it hadn’t turned up, as she had expected,
at Grant T. Miller’s home.

‘He had a little Glock 18,’ she said. ‘That was it!’

İkmen frowned. ‘The lieutenant said to me that he imagined that Mr Miller had a lot of weapons. I think it was because he
was once a man of substance, who lived quite alone.’

‘Diaz wouldn’t have held on to the Beretta for no reason,’ Rita
said, ploughing her own furrow of thought. ‘Miller called him after he confiscated the weapon. Asking for it back? Who knows?
The lieutenant sent it to ballistics, where it was checked out against our records by Dr Weiss.’

‘And?’

‘And at that time there was nothing wrong with the piece; it wasn’t on any wanted list.’

‘Was it old?’

‘Old?’

‘In light of the text that the lieutenant sent to me, I wonder if the Beretta was the weapon that could have killed Elvis
Goins. I imagine you still have evidence from that crime, including maybe the bullet that killed the boy?’

‘I don’t know,’ Rita said. ‘But that could make sense.’

‘It could.’

‘What doesn’t make sense, though, is that there are no records on the system of Miller ever having owned a Beretta. Now if
Diaz had discovered that Miller didn’t have the right documentation for the gun, he would never have given it back to him.’

‘But you said that Miller didn’t have it,’ İkmen said.

‘No, he didn’t. He just had the Glock,’ Rita said. ‘We’ve taken that in, but . . .’ She shrugged. ‘A Beretta PX4 certainly passed
through ballistics on Diaz’s orders. Now it’s disappeared. Diaz took it from Grant T. Miller and you witnessed him doing it.’

‘I did.’

‘And it was certainly a Beretta.’

‘The lieutenant said so, yes. I didn’t get a close look at it myself.’

‘But it existed!’ Rita said.

‘Of course.’

‘And yet if you look on Diaz’s computer records, there’s nothing about it. That gun is not registered centrally, there’s no
paperwork, apart from the Glock in the name of Grant T. Miller.’ She leaned forward. ‘Diaz would have confiscated an illegal
piece. The only way
that wouldn’t have happened would have been if he was in Grant T. Miller’s pocket, and that I don’t believe for a moment!
But that doesn’t mean that no one in the department is on the take. Erasing records on computer can be easy if you know what
you’re doing.’

İkmen, who knew absolutely nothing about that, kept his counsel.

‘Inspector İkmen, I don’t know what any of this means, but what I do know is that a slug we took out of an old house in Brush
Park that killed a kid called Aaron Spencer came from that Beretta. Our ballistics guy is a hundred per cent on that,’ Rita
said. ‘But if we’re not careful, all knowledge about the gun that fired it is going to disappear. Would you be willing to
sign a statement to the effect that the weapon existed?’

İkmen thought for a moment, then he said, ‘Officer Addison, of course I will. But there may be something else I can do as
well.’

It was going to be the easiest thousand dollars Kyle had ever earned. He’d put the gun on the front seat of the big old Chrysler
he was about to crush, and that was that. Problem over for his customer, a thousand big ones for him, everybody happy. It
wasn’t the first time Kyle had done something a little bit to the left-hand side of the law. Once, long ago, there’d even
been what he imagined from its size was a dead body, all wrapped up in plastic. Five hundred dollars had secured that crushed
inside an Oldsmobile. When you wrecked cars for a living, sometimes shit happened. He wasn’t a rich man, and so when opportunities
came along, he tended to take them.

At first, Kyle put the weapon on the front seat of the Chrysler, but then he took it out again. Guns, if used correctly, could
be worth a
lot
of money. If someone was willing to pay him a thousand bucks to get rid of this one, then it had to be in a way a sort of
embarrassment to them. They wouldn’t want it to resurface some time later. Crushing would avoid this.

What crushing wouldn’t do was make Kyle more money in the future. Only using the theory of insurance, in other words hanging
on to the gun, could do that. After all, if its owner really did want it gone that much, another thousand or so when Kyle’s
next alimony payment came up wouldn’t be here or there. Kyle went to pocket the gun when a voice behind him said, ‘What are
you doing?’

It was him. Suddenly afraid, Kyle turned and began very slowly to move the gun back through the Chrysler’s front window again.

‘You were going to keep it? As insurance?’

On reflection, blackmail had been a bad idea, but Kyle was now too terrified to say so. Christ, he’d been watching him! But
then Kyle might have guessed that he would. He told him to get inside the cab, start the crusher and get the Chrysler, and
the gun, destroyed immediately. Kyle didn’t need to be asked twice. He climbed into the machine and did the job while the
man looked on. Kyle was sweating. All he could hope was that the man didn’t go back on the deal and withhold his thousand
bucks.