Dead of Night (20 page)

‘Elvis was Sheila’s son too. His momma cared.’

‘Not as much as my brother,’ Sam said. His face was white now, haunted by the recollection of old and painful events. ‘Elvis
was driving her crazy, selling drugs, taking them, leading that gang that everyone used to call “the rejects”.’

‘The Delta Blues.’

‘Melungeons, Native Americans, gypsies, all the rejects of society! Boy, was he and his buddies giving us a bad rep!’ He sighed.
‘But they’re all dead now, and so . . . You know, Martha, in a way I think Sheila was relieved when Elvis was shot.’

‘Ah, now, Sam . . .’

‘I know it sounds wicked, but that woman was at the end of her wits.’ Now he just looked sad. ‘All the stress of never knowing
where the boy was, it was over. If only Zeke could have accepted what happened and settled in to a life with Sheila again
afterwards.’

‘He was too hurt.’

‘Which is so, so bitter for me. My poor brother, who I love.’ Sam’s eyes had filled with tears. ‘When Sheila died, I tried
to have her buried next to Elvis in Woodlawn, but her family insisted on taking her body back to Alabama to their family plot.
Zeke was who knew where. I would’ve paid for it myself.’

‘And that ain’t no cheap gig up there amongst Aretha Franklin’s kin and all,’ Martha said. ‘I always thought what a great
thing that was for a poor man like Zeke to do for his boy.’

Sam didn’t answer.

The man with the big black beard hadn’t even had a chance to speak to Ayşe Farsakoğlu when he felt the muzzle of a pistol
against his head.

‘What are you doing?’ İzzet Melik hissed into his ear.

The man, struck dumb by the rapidity of what had just happened, said nothing. That he had one hand on Ayşe’s breast spoke
volumes.

‘Were you planning to assault this lady?’

Ayşe couldn’t imagine where İzzet had come from. She was grateful that he had come at all, but how?

Eventually the man spoke. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘Who are
you
?’ I don’t have to tell you . . .’

‘Police, and so yes, you do have to tell me who you are,’ İzzet said.

The man’s identity card gave his name as Rıfat Özkök. He was forty-two. ‘The woman was walking alone; what was I to think?’
he said. ‘This is a rough part of town where men have always come to . . . well, to seek . . .’ He shrugged. ‘I made an assumption
that . . .’

‘I too am a police officer,’ Ayşe said, ‘and you, Mr Özkök, are going to have to come with us to answer some questions.’

‘Oh, no.’ Rıfat put his head down in frustration and misery while İzzet Melik cuffed his hands behind his back.

‘What are you doing here?’ Ayşe mouthed to İzzet. ‘What?’

But he didn’t reply.

Rıfat began, ‘I was just—’

‘Sssh!’ İzzet, still holding on to the big man’s wrists, was now looking behind him. He shook Özkök quiet.

Ayşe, who was trying to see what İzzet might be looking at, peered into the darkness. ‘What is it?’ she whispered.

‘Over there!’ he whispered back. ‘That shack at the bottom of the wall, something moved!’

It had been quite impossible to even take a guess at who the human soup inside the car crusher had once been. But Ed Devine
was pretty convinced that it was the owner of the yard, Kyle Redmond. He was, after all, nowhere to be found, and as Devine
pointed out, the soup in the crusher was very intimately connected to what looked like a great deal of old, oil-stained denim.

‘Simplistic, I know,’ he said to Donna Ferrari once he’d had the remains photographed and arranged transport to the lab, ‘but
wrecker men always wear the same things. Jean dungarees, just like freaking hillbillies. It’s a kind of uniform.’

Ferrari slipped into the passenger seat of his car. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why would someone kill Redmond and torch his
yard?’

‘That’s what we have to find out,’ Devine replied. ‘Maybe his financial worries led him to take out a loan with the wrong
people. And if he didn’t pay . . .’ He started up the engine and put the gear lever into drive.

As they headed out of the yard, Ferrari said, ‘Bad week.’

‘Anything new on the Diaz hit?’ Devine asked.

‘Not that I know,’ she answered. ‘Shalhoub’s pretty tight with his team when he’s working a case.’

‘You mean he don’t blab like an old woman like me!’ Devine laughed.

But of all the assets that Donna Ferrari possessed, humour was not amongst their number. As they turned into the road outside
the yard, she said, ‘I imagine Diaz was a drive-by hit. Maybe an ex-con with a grudge.’

‘Some people are saying that maybe there’s a connection with that old horror Grant T. Miller.’

‘There’s some possible connection between Miller and a drive-by in Brush Park,’ Ferrari said. ‘But not to Diaz. Why would
Miller kill Diaz? He wouldn’t. That won’t fly.’

‘Pity.’

She looked over at Devine and frowned. ‘Why?’

He laughed. ‘I’m a black man, Miller’s a racist. It’s in my genes to hate that man, Sergeant Ferrari.’

‘I guess.’

She turned back to look at the road once again, and for a couple of minutes neither of them said anything. When Devine did
speak again, this time it was he who had a troubled tone to his voice. ‘You know, I’m still sure I’ve come across something
about Kyle Redmond somewhere before,’ he said. ‘You heard of him before today?’

She shook her head. ‘No. He’d no record.’

‘Mmm.’ Devine shook his head impatiently. ‘Wish I could remember where I know him from! Old age! It drives me crazy!’

Because İzzet was holding on to Rıfat Özkök, and because Ayşe didn’t get to them quickly enough, the two figures standing
at the entrance to the shack beneath the city wall ran off into the darkness before anyone could stop them. As she walked
up to the battered open door, Ayşe took her gun out of its holster. As far as she could see, there was only one entrance to
the shack, and the whole structure backed on to solid Byzantine wall.

‘Police!’ she shouted as she moved into the wreck, her weapon held out in front of her.

Nothing moved. The shack was deserted save for a few old packing crates and some empty bottles of rakı. It smelt of mould
and mice and piss.

‘What’s in there?’ asked İzzet, still restraining Rıfat Özkök.

‘Nothing much,’ Ayşe said as she began to move forward into the narrow but tall space in front of her.

‘Be careful!’

İzzet must have guessed what she was going to do and either had followed her to Sulukule or had been waiting for her to appear
in the district. Knowing how he felt about her, it was creepy, but it was comforting too. Neither of them knew what Rıfat
Özkök would have done had he been able to grab Ayşe with impunity. Given the size of him, it was not certain whether she would
have been able to get to her pistol before he did.

Outside, she heard İzzet say to him, ‘What do you know about this place?’

‘Nothing! I swear!’

There was another smell now, and it was like old sewers in hot weather. Warm human waste. It was strong, too! Ayşe put her
free hand up to her mouth as she felt herself begin to gag. Those characters who’d run off when she approached them must have
been using the place as a toilet.

İzzet called out to her again: ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’ But then she felt something touch her face. It was heavy, and it tapped against her cheek twice before she managed
to get her torch out of her pocket and shine some light on to it. It turned out to be a shoe, on a foot that was attached
to the figure of what looked like a man hanging by his neck from a beam across the ceiling.

Çetin İkmen was about to get into the lift and go back to his suite when he heard a voice call his name. He looked around,
and across the vast wastes of marble that graced the lobby of the Lakeland Plaza Hotel, there was Tayyar Bekdil.

‘I thought you were seeing Mehmet Süleyman off at the airport,’ İkmen said as he walked towards him.

Tayyar took İkmen’s hand and smiled. ‘I’ve just got back. Mehmet
told me that you were staying on in Detroit. I thought I’d come and take you for a drink.’

İkmen had had a long and fruitless day. They’d found a few bullets out at Brush Park, but according to Dr Weiss, none of them
was the right one. The snow hadn’t helped. Working on through it had been hard going. Now it was nearly eleven o’clock and
he was exhausted. ‘I’m really tired,’ he said, ‘but if you want to come up and join me in something from the minibar . . .’

They got into the lift together, and only had to stop once on the way to floor fourteen. On floor eight, the doors opened
to reveal a young woman quickly putting her knickers into her handbag. When they arrived at İkmen’s suite, Tayyar said, ‘Now
the conference is over, there’s no need for you to stay here. There’s a clean bed, TV, DVD, a full refrigerator, your own
bathroom and a garden at your disposal at Grosse Pointe.’

‘That’s very kind.’ İkmen lit up a cigarette and then took two miniature whisky bottles and a couple of glasses out of the
minibar. ‘But I don’t really know what’s happening yet. I’ve been asked by Detroit PD to stay on, and this room is paid for
tonight. What will happen tomorrow, I don’t know.’ He handed Tayyar a bottle and a glass. ‘Doesn’t appear to be any ice. Sorry.’

Tayyar sat down. ‘Mehmet told me that PD have kept you because Grant T. Miller shot at the both of you. Some connection to
that supposed drive-by up in Brush Park.’

‘Yes,’ İkmen said. But he was tired and didn’t want to go into it. Besides, for all his friendliness, Tayyar was still a journalist,
and so İkmen didn’t want to tell him too much. But when Tayyar launched into his story about Elvis Goins’ elaborate funeral,
he began to feel rather more alert once again.

‘It was reported,’ Tayyar said. ‘There are even photographs. Colleagues of mine I’ve spoken to about it reckon it must have
cost a fortune. Like a Mafia don’s send-off!’

‘Maybe the gang that he was with paid for it,’ İkmen said. ‘Some of these gangs have a lot of money.’

‘Not the Delta Blues, by all accounts,’ Tayyar said. ‘They were like a ragbag of the dispossessed. The big white and black
drug gangs at the time wiped them out. It’s believed Elvis Goins was a victim of that conflict. Others came later. Now they’re
all dead.’

‘Are they?’

‘So everyone says.’

‘Mmm. What about the boy’s uncle? He’s prominent, isn’t he?’

‘He wasn’t back then,’ Tayyar said. ‘Just a grunt like everyone else in 1978. The father, Ezekiel Goins, was working, but
it was well known he had some serious debts. Intriguing, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ İkmen offered a cigarette to Tayyar, who declined. He lit one up for himself. ‘I will try to help Mr Goins as much
as I can while I’m here. So I will be seeing him again. I’ll ask him.’

‘About Elvis’s funeral?’

‘Why not? He wants me to get to the bottom of what happened to his son. In order to do that, I have to have as much information
as I can. I will ask him when I see him.’

Tayyar only stayed for the one drink. He too was tired and wanted to get home. As he left, he said, ‘Çetin, if you need anything,
anything at all, you will let me know, won’t you?’

Çetin İkmen smiled. ‘I see that your cousin has asked you to look out for me.’

‘Well . . .’

İkmen put a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ve worked with Mehmet for many years. I know
what goes on.’

Tayyar smiled.

‘The best thing you can do for me is to find out which – what do the Americans call it? Funeral home? – performed the funeral.
Find out if they’re still in business. A big funeral like the one you describe will not be an event easily forgotten, even
after thirty years have
passed.’ He smiled. ‘And of course there is someone else I could ask too,’ he said.

Dr Sarkissian the pathologist declared that life was extinct and also definitively identified the corpse. Ayşe had thought
it was Ali Kuban; she’d hoped. Now she was rewarded.

‘One never forgets a face like that,’ Dr Sarkissian said as he pushed the head up slightly in order to see the rope burns
that circled the neck. ‘Of course I remember seeing Kuban on the television when he was arrested, but I also saw him in person
too. My predecessor Dr Koksal was acquainting me with the intricacies of police headquarters when they brought Kuban through.
A lot younger then, of course, but he looked a mess. I think that perhaps he’d been given a rather enthusiastic reception
down in the cells.’

He didn’t say by whom, but Ayşe knew. Some officers remained overzealous in their interrogation of prisoners, but back in
the 1970s, police violence had been endemic. Few had stood out against it. One of those who had had been Ayşe’s boss, Çetin
İkmen. Not that the young İkmen had had anything to do with Ali Kuban. Back in the early seventies, he’d been out pounding
the streets, running after kids trying to steal sweets from grocers’ shops.

Sarkissian, focused again on the face, said, ‘I think it’s probably suicide, but I won’t be able to say with any degree of
certainty until I’ve examined the body and the scene has been investigated.’

‘Some people, men I think, fled the scene just before I gained entry,’ Ayşe said. ‘Maybe they strung him up. This is where
he raped his last victim.’

‘Mmm.’ The doctor frowned. ‘I don’t know. Nearly all the gypsies have gone.’

‘And yet the fact if not the details of his release was publicised,’ Ayşe said. ‘People knew he was out. Maybe the gypsies
didn’t kill him; maybe it was just people who thought he’d be better off dead, that the world would be safer without him.’

‘Maybe.’

They both looked down into a face that was bloated and mottled and which looked sightlessly back at them with bulging, bloodshot
eyes.

‘Looks like he struggled,’ the doctor said.

‘Good.’

‘Maybe if it was suicide, he changed his mind.’

Ayşe shook her head. ‘On the Facebook site his fans dedicated to him, an unspecified event was advertised. I surmised it would
or could happen here. I imagined it was going to be some sort of replay of his most notorious crime.’