Dead of Night (21 page)

‘Somewhat obvious, don’t you think?’

Ayşe felt a little offended by this. What did he know about detection?

‘As I understand it,’ the doctor continued, ‘Kuban’s apartment was being monitored by officers from Vice. But somehow he got
out undetected and came or was brought here. Why?’

Ayşe, still looking down at the battered, bloated face of Ali Kuban, said, ‘It’s where he committed his most brutal crime.’

‘Yes, when this area was teeming with girls. Did you see any pretty young ladies in swirling skirts dancing in the streets
of Sulukule when you arrived, Sergeant?’

Of course she hadn’t; Sulukule wasn’t like that any more. ‘But someone posted details about an event,’ she said.

‘If it was Kuban himself who posted it, maybe it was notice, as it were, of his own demise.’

‘But there were people, other men, looking into . . .’

‘Well maybe I’m wrong and they killed him,’ Sarkissian said. ‘Sulukule is not a safe place to be at night. But . . .’

‘What?’ She looked up at him.

‘If Kuban did die here by his own hand, maybe, given the possibility that he issued a statement in advance that something
was going to happen . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, maybe suicide, as a sort of warning to others, if you will, was always his intention. Perhaps by attracting like-minded
people to a place where they thought an assault was about to take place, he was showing them how a life like his ended. With
constant surveillance by the police, with a prison sentence only curtailed by ill health, and with suicide.’

Ayşe frowned. ‘Sort of a last decent act on his part?’

Arto Sarkissian shrugged. ‘Maybe. Maybe.’

What she was doing took guts, patience and some very efficient winter clothing. Luckily Rita Addison had all three in abundance.
When Dr Weiss and his team and İkmen left the scene, Rita, her car parked way back in the part of Brush Park that was being
redeveloped, stayed behind.

The old Johnson house was all shades of black inside. The night, it seemed, got in there and just intensified itself, distilling
its darkness to a treacly essence. Walking in through what had once been the back door was hazardous. The floorboards had
rotted, leaving holes wide enough for a big guy like Ed Devine to rocket through. Rita moved slowly and with her flashlight
held low to prevent its beam from being seen from outside. There was a smell like compost, undercut by what could be the reek
of human faeces. Rita thought about what had happened in that house back in the 1950s, and tried not to picture the dentist’s
dismembered wife. Local legend had it that everything had been found except the woman’s left foot. That had to be just a load
of bones by this time, but it would still, Rita felt, be a very unpleasant surprise should she inadvertently put her hand
on it. Not that such a thing was likely.

Slowly Rita found her way to what had been the Johnsons’ front parlour.

Across waves of heavy snow outside she could see the light from Grant T. Miller’s house shining in tiny points through the
branches
of the thick bushes that surrounded his garden. She sat down on what felt like a paving slab and switched her flashlight off.
Now it was just a waiting game, a fight with herself to stay awake and alert. She put one gloved hand into the pocket of her
puffa jacket and pulled out a plastic flask. Hot black coffee with plenty of sugar. She drank about half and was pleased with
the results. The hot, thick caffeine hit both warmed her up and made her feel very alive, if a little bit weird. Some of those
high-strength South American blends were like speed.

Rita hadn’t told anyone about what she was going to do. Officially the Johnson house and its environs were not even a crime
scene. But if she was right that Grant T. Miller had owned the Beretta that had killed Aaron Spencer, then he would be keen
to recover the bullet that he’d fired from the same gun at the Turks. He might not have been worried about that bullet before;
now, if she was right, he had to be. They’d been twice to the Johnson house looking for it, and Miller would have to have
been both blind and stupid not to have noticed that. He was neither. As Lieutenant Diaz had once told her when she’d asked
him about Miller, ‘He knows everything and everyone. Never, ever underestimate him.’

She’d taken that to heart. His words had especially come back to haunt her since all of his records linked to the Beretta
seemed to have disappeared. Miller had to be at the least concerned. But in spite of that, he made her wait, and it wasn’t
until almost two hours later that he finally made an appearance. Wearing his customary tattered dressing gown, his thin bare
legs flashing purple-white below, he trudged with difficulty through the snow towards the Johnson house. A cell phone at his
ear, she heard him yell, ‘Of course no one can hear me! Nobody but me lives in any direction for three blocks. You should
know that!’

Rita sank down closer towards the floor and pulled her hood over her head.

‘Who comes through here except the odd punk in a Hummer!’ the
old man said. ‘Crack-dealers! What are they gonna do? Call you?’ There was a pause while he listened for the reply, then he
said, ‘Yeah, well it has to be here somewhere, doesn’t it!’ Another pause. Rita heard him rattle what remained of the window
frame right next to her head. Then he got angry. ‘Oh well, you come and look see yourself!’ he shouted into the cell phone.
‘I’m up to my nuts in snow here! Oh, you won’t? Well that’s what I’ve come to expect from you, isn’t it! And don’t try to
get on my good side or any shit like that. You should know by now I don’t have one!’

Miller terminated the call after that. As he moved about outside, puffing and panting, his slippered feet shuffling into and
out of the thick snow, the phone rang one more time, but he switched it off without answering.

With the temperature well below zero, there was a limit to the amount of time Grant T. Miller could spend out of doors, and
within twenty minutes he was back inside the Windmill once again. Rita gave it another half-hour before she moved, just in
case the old man came back wearing more snow-friendly clothes. But he didn’t.

When she eventually got back to her car and put the heater on full blast, Rita thought about the things she’d seen and heard
up at the Johnson house. Principal amongst these was what Miller had said about crack-dealers. He had said to the person on
the other end of the phone that crack-dealers wouldn’t ‘call you’. Call who? To Rita, the logical response to that was ‘the
police’.

In spite of the heavy overnight snowfall, the following day was bright and the sky was blue. Çetin İkmen knew that Dr Weiss,
Officer Addison and the team would be out in Brush Park searching for the missing bullet again, and part of him wanted to
be with them. But he was not required to attend, and so instead he fulfilled his promise to Zeke Goins and went over to Antoine
Cadillac to see him. There was an ulterior motive too, but he knew that he’d have to approach that most cautiously.

Martha Bell was out when he arrived, taking her daughter to dance class and doing some shopping, and so the two men spent
some time alone. They naturally talked about their boys.

‘Bekir was a delightful boy until he reached puberty,’ İkmen said. ‘Then, it seemed like overnight he became a problem. All
teenagers, of course, want to be grown up and respected as adults, but this went beyond that.’

‘With Elvis, it was the dope as came first,’ Zeke said. ‘Caught him smoking at eleven, and then it was just way on downhill
all the way.’ He shook his head. ‘Me and Sheila, we done what we could short of having him arrested, but it weren’t no good.
Some kids just born to go bad.’

İkmen disagreed. ‘I can’t believe that anyone is born bad,’ he said. ‘I think that sometimes circumstances make a person behave
badly. My son was one of so many. Nine children. All the others, they . . . well, they blended in together, you know. But Bekir
was different. Bekir needed more individual attention, which I did not give him.’

He hadn’t wanted to dig so deeply down into Bekir’s life and death when he came to Antoine Cadillac. But somehow that had
happened as Zeke Goins too shared his sorrow.

‘We only had the one child, Sheila and me,’ he said, ‘but I was working the line all time just to keep us fed. Lot of people
didn’t feel good about working with our kind, not whites nor blacks. I had to keep my head down and my nose clean to hold
on to my job. Folk like Grant T. Miller always on your case! Then when things had to get better for the blacks, the white
bosses misused us all the more. I worked like a dog every day of my life until the day that Elvis was laid in the ground.’

The subject of Elvis’s funeral was now just a sniff away. But for the moment İkmen felt too sad and also a little too ashamed
to do what he knew he had to. He waited in silence for the old man to speak again.

Zeke Goins finished rolling the cigarette he’d started making when İkmen had arrived, and said, ‘I think, in a sense, when
I took off after Elvis died, it wasn’t just because of the grief. I think I was tired, too, of working the line, of automobiles,
of the trouble that being what I am always brings. The only proud thing I have is the notion that my brother Sam has made
things so much better for our kind now.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Folk don’t have to hide being Melungeon no more,’ the old man said. ‘If other folk don’t like it, then they can have the
problem and not us.’

He didn’t say exactly how Samuel Goins had achieved this miracle, but İkmen imagined that because he was a city councillor,
he had drafted and pushed through legislation aimed at protecting his community. But now they were a long way from Elvis’s
funeral again, and it took quite some time for their conversation to move back in that direction. When it did, there was no
prompting from İkmen required.

‘There was flowers everywhere for my boy,’ Zeke said. ‘Back at
our old home by Eight Mile, in the chapel, took to the graveside itself. Had Minister Hamilton to lay him to rest. Best preacher
in the state. Voss Funeral Home, they put on some show.’ He smiled. ‘That was a day. That was some day.’

İkmen made a mental note of the name Voss, and though he wanted to push the old man for further details, he decided on a gentler
approach instead.

‘In my culture, bodies are usually buried within twenty-four hours of death,’ he said. ‘Arabia, where the first Muslims came
from, is a hot place, and so for reasons of hygiene the dead have to be interred quickly. But of course because Bekir had
died violently, there had to be an investigation, and so we could not bury him for some time.’

Zeke looked pained. ‘That must’ve hurt you and your family.’

‘It was not good.’

‘So you have a big send-off for him when the time come?’

İkmen smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Big funerals are not really approved of in Islam. The dead return to the earth. That’s it. I
think in your religion more of a . . . a show is required?’

Zeke shrugged. ‘Sometimes. I think we done all right by the boy for his funeral,’ he said. And then suddenly he changed the
subject. ‘Do you like a drink, Inspector İkmen?’

‘A drink?’

They had coffee. Did he mean an alcoholic drink? It wasn’t much past eleven a.m. The old man, smiling now, went over to the
kitchen sink and rooted about in the cupboard underneath. When he stood up again, he was holding on to two bourbon bottles.
‘What’s your poison, Inspector, Jack or Jim?’

Rita had already decided that she wouldn’t tell anyone except the Chief about what Miller had said. But when she went to find
out whether she could get in to see him, she was told that he was unavailable for the rest of the morning. Apparently he was
in a meeting with the Mayor, and there was no way he could be disturbed for anything
less than a national emergency. Temporarily deflated, Rita went back up to Brush Park to join the search again.

‘There’s a limit to the amount of time we can spend on this,’ Dr Weiss said when she saw him. ‘This is a city, not some backwater
where nothing ever happens. We all have other things to do.’

‘I know.’ The existing snow was very thick, and just after she’d arrived, it had started snowing again. ‘But the Chief ordered
it himself.’ At her request, she failed to add.

‘I’m aware of that,’ Dr Weiss said tartly as he pulled his coat tight around his body. ‘But he isn’t out here looking for
a needle in a haystack, in the snow!’

Rita didn’t reply.

Dr Weiss sighed. ‘But I suppose if we must get on with this fool’s errand . . .’

He walked back towards the Johnson house and went up the steps to the empty front door. ‘Does anyone actually own this place
now?’ he asked no one in particular as he stood and looked up at the once elegant facade.

He wasn’t actually expecting an answer, but some woman forensic investigator piped up and said, ‘Think it’s some real-estate
company, Doctor.’

‘Real estate?’ Weiss shook his head in what looked like despair. ‘When we sold our old house here back in the sixties, it
was to the family of a successful haberdasher.’ He threw his arms in the air. ‘Real-estate company! These houses were built
for families!’

Rita, still tired from her stakeout the previous night, went around the side of the house to begin to shift snow from the
garden. As she walked, she glanced over the road at the Windmill, where she saw that Grant T. Miller was standing outside
his front door looking right at her. On reflex, she turned away immediately. Heart thumping and mouth as dry as death, she
wondered whether he’d seen her the night before. In his own search for the bullet, he’d come very close, and if it hadn’t
been dark at the time, he would most certainly have spotted her.

Maybe he had. Miller, she knew, had a reputation as a prankster, a player of games. It would be well within his abilities
to know that she had been in the Johnson house the night before and keep it to himself. It was said that one of the ways that
he had been able to retain his freedom, his money and his independence for so long was because he fully understood the adage
knowledge is power
.