Dead of Night (22 page)

Rita shivered, and not just because it was snowing again.

Devine walked over to John Shalhoub as he was getting into his car.

‘How’s it going?’ the older man asked.

Shalhoub closed his car door and leaned on the roof. ‘Diaz?’

‘Uhuh.’

‘One shot to the head killed him, straight between the eyes. Instant.’ He looked tired and drawn. It was always difficult
to work on the homicide of a colleague. So much was expected. ‘Only bright spot in the whole thing.’

‘He’d’ve felt nothing.’

‘No.’

‘Ideas about the perp?’

‘
Only
ideas at the moment,’ Shalhoub said. ‘Corktown’s not such a bad place these days, but people still don’t see much, say even
less.’

Ed Devine shrugged. ‘Detroit ain’t gonna stop being Detroit just because a few middle-class people decide to go and live on
the east side. But look, you need anything, you just ask. Diaz weren’t no life and soul, but he was one of us.’

‘I hear you.’ Shalhoub was just about to get back in his car when suddenly he stopped and said, ‘You working that car-wreck
case?’

‘Yeah.’ Devine shook his head. ‘Thought it was a straight insurance job until we found that . . . mush in the crusher.’

‘The owner.’

Devine nodded. ‘Kyle Redmond. Forty, divorced, in debt, was five eleven. It was nasty.’

‘Must’ve been.’ Shalhoub’s brow furrowed and he said, ‘I may be completely on the wrong track with this, but you know that
Diaz had some informant called Redmond.’

Devine leaned forward. ‘You sure?’

‘I don’t know whether it was Kyle Redmond,’ Shalhoub said. ‘I don’t even know what he used him for. Diaz was particular to
keep his informants close.’

Devine shook his head as if he were trying to recall something. ‘Because you know when I first heard about this Kyle Redmond,
I felt I’d known that name before.’

‘Maybe you heard Diaz talk about him?’

‘Maybe.’ He shrugged. ‘Now that Diaz is dead, it ain’t easy to ask. But maybe we should try, figuratively speaking. I mean,
first Diaz is shot dead, and then this Redmond rocks up in an auto crusher. There could be a connection.’

‘Or not.’

‘But then again, there might be,’ Devine said. Suddenly he laughed, and slapped the other man on the back. ‘Come on, Shalhoub,
man, don’t shoot down the only lead I got!’

Rıfat Özkök, the man who had tried with staggering lack of success to assault Ayşe Farsakoğlu, had been taken in for questioning
by İzzet Melik. Come the next morning, however, it was very obvious that he had had nothing to do with the death of Ali Kuban.
He did have a police record for groping women, as opposed to girls, but nothing more serious than that. There was no connection
with Ali Kuban, and Özkök was one of the few people in İstanbul who wasn’t on line.

‘I drive my taxi, and when my wife lets me, I go to the coffee house,’ he told İzzet Melik as he left the station. ‘When do
I get time to look at computers? When do I get time to have a life?’

‘You seem to make time to grope women,’ İzzet responded sharply. ‘Get out of here and give thanks to Allah your behaviour
didn’t get you in even more trouble!’

İzzet hadn’t slept. In the wake of the discovery of Ali Kuban’s body, the whole area had to be searched and any possible witnesses
questioned. No one had volunteered information and none of the men they had spoken to had admitted to being anywhere near
the city walls. Both time and exact cause of death were still elements that were being investigated by the pathologist. Ayşe
Farsakoğlu, he knew, had opted to accompany the body to the laboratory so that she could be the first to know. No one from
Vice had so much as made an appearance. But then they had, in effect, allowed this to happen. Not for the first time, İzzet
wondered why some of his fellow officers were in the job at all. Unfortunately people like Çetin İkmen, people like İzzet
himself, were not the norm. There were far too many officers who just drifted along doing only what they had to in order to
qualify for their pension. It had always been like this to some extent, but in the twenty-first century it really was no longer
acceptable. He wondered if people living in European Union countries had to put up with such sloppiness. But then he knew
they certainly did. Italy, his spiritual home, had one of the most chaotic law-enforcement systems in the world.

‘Sergeant Melik?’

He turned around and saw Ayşe Farsakoğlu, looking tired and drawn. But she smiled, and so he smiled back at her.

‘Dr Sarkissian is of the opinion that Ali Kuban killed himself,’ she said.

‘Ah.’

‘If he is right, which he must be, then it had to be Kuban himself who put that notice of an “event” up on the fan site. He’d
planned to be dead by midnight, when his fans would, hopefully, be in Sulukule; doctor reckons he died before eleven o’clock.’

‘But why kill himself?’ İzzet said. ‘And why in Sulukule? Why not in the comfort of his own apartment? It must have taken
at least some effort to give the Vice boys the slip.’

‘He was sick.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe in pain? But then Dr Sarkissian did suggest another motive.’

‘Which was?’

‘A final act of decency. He invited his fans to come and witness his dead, swinging body. He made sure he was dead by the
time of the “event”. Maybe it was his way of saying that his was not a life to be admired and copied.’

İzzet looked doubtful. ‘Dr Sarkissian said that?’

‘It was a theory we came up with together,’ Ayşe said. ‘When Çetin Bey gets back tomorrow, I’ll ask him what he thinks.’

‘Ah . . .’ İzzet had heard that İkmen wasn’t returning from Detroit just yet.

‘What?’

‘Çetin Bey,’ he took her arm and began to walk with her down the corridor towards their respective offices, ‘he isn’t coming
back just yet. Inspector Süleyman is on his way home, but Çetin Bey, apparently there are some things he needs to do in Detroit
. . .’

Ayşe looked both disappointed and appalled.

Getting properly, horribly drunk wasn’t something Çetin İkmen had done for many years. But then he was unaccustomed to American
bourbon, and so the two big shots of Jim Beam he had at the start of the session were enough to get him tipsy. His grief,
which had just kept on coming, albeit in a low-level fashion, since he’d first met Zeke Goins, made sure that he carried on
drinking.

The old man, matching him drink for drink, had to keep on going to the toilet. ‘Waterworks ain’t what they were,’ he said
on the third occasion he had to get up from the table and head for the bathroom.

While Ezekiel Goins was doing what he had to and while İkmen could still think straight, he called Tayyar Bekdil. ‘The funeral
home that buried Elvis Goins is called Voss,’ he told him. ‘Do you know it?’

‘No,’ Tayyar said, ‘but I can find it. Do you want me to get the address? Meet you there? We can see what kind of a place
it is.’

‘No.’ İkmen had just heard the front door shut, which meant that Martha had come back. ‘I’m with Ezekiel Goins. To be honest,
we’ve had a few drinks . . .’

He heard Tayyar laugh.

‘I’m going to try and get him to tell me some more, if I can.’ There were footsteps in the hall. ‘I have to go.’

He put his cell phone back in his pocket just as Martha Bell entered the room. She looked at the bottles and the glasses on
the kitchen table and said, ‘I see.’

İkmen put his head down like a naughty schoolboy.

According to the current owner of Voss Funeral Home Inc., death had become ‘funky’.

‘Look at that TV show
Six Feet Under
,’
he said to Tayyar Bekdil. ‘This industry is cool. If I had a nickel for everyone who wants to work here, I’d be a rich man.’

Richer
, Tayyar thought, as he wondered whether it was actually possible to find an undertaker who wasn’t rich. As for people wanting
to work at Voss, in a city with high unemployment men and women would do almost anything. But he didn’t say any of that, and
just smiled.

‘Only last week we buried a man who wanted to be interred in an Egyptian sarcophagus,’ Ricky Voss said. He was not much over
thirty, blond, with an LA smile, and although he sported a very conventional suit, he wore gold sneakers on his feet. ‘Not
only did we source the craftsmen who could make it, we also sourced the musicians who played at the ceremony too. Did you
know that Egyptian Christians still use musical instruments that were played in ancient Egypt?’

‘No, I didn’t.’ Tayyar took notes. His editor was fond of local wealth-creators, and so Tayyar’s suggestion that he should
contact one of the city’s most prominent funeral homes had gone down well. What he hadn’t expected was that Voss’s MD would
invite him over that very day. With the temperature so low, he had imagined that it would be a busy time for funeral homes.
But then Mr Voss obviously had employees to do the actual day-to-day work. From what Tayyar could gather, ‘Ricky’ spent a
lot of his time in his office, which was
a cross between a conventional wood-panelled affair, complete with employee photographs on the walls, and a gathering place
for numerous electronic gadgets. As far as he could tell, Voss had three cell phones, one laptop and one desktop computer,
some sort of games console, two iPods and a Dictaphone. All the time they talked, he sent texts to someone.

‘So what do you want to know, Tayyar?’ It was strictly first-name terms at Voss.

‘Stories, Ricky,’ Tayyar said. ‘The
Spectator
, as you know, likes to highlight local wealth-creators. We want to promote an image of Detroit as a city that is coming back
to life. Your organisation generates wealth and employment, and we’d like to tell your story.’

‘The history of Voss?’

‘And maybe some anecdotes about your family’s long association with Detroit and its people.’

Ricky smiled. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I think I can do that. But do you mind if I go get my great-uncle? He’s a Voss original, helped
my grandpa found this company back in the thirties.’

This great-uncle, Tayyar thought, could very possibly have been present at Elvis Goins’ funeral. If he was lucky, he’d get
a story for the paper and a lead on who had paid for Elvis’s funeral all in one hit. ‘I’d be delighted to meet your uncle,
yes,’ he said.

Rita had heard something about some guy’s body being disposed of in an auto crusher out on Eight Mile. But she hadn’t paid
it too much attention. Shit happened all the time, so quickly sometimes that people didn’t even get a moment to grieve. She
still hadn’t really cried for Diaz. Sometime soon she knew the flood barriers would burst, probably when she least expected
them to. In the meantime, although the search for the bullet had been called off for the time being, Grant T. Miller had far
from been forgotten. She’d finally got in to see the Chief at two p.m. and had told him about the one-sided conversation she’d
heard Miller have on his cell phone while he searched for the
bullet in the dark. She’d told no one else, she said to the Chief. No one.

Ed Devine was leaning on Diaz’s desk when she went back out. ‘Hey, Addison,’ he said when he saw her. ‘You worked with Diaz
more than most. You know anything about his informants?’

‘Why?’

All Diaz’s records had been taken by Shalhoub’s team, looking for some sort of clue to who might have killed him and why.

‘You ever hear him talk about an auto wrecker called Kyle Redmond?’ Devine asked.

‘That the guy crushed up on Eight Mile?’

‘You always gonna answer a question with a question? Yeah, it is,’ he said. ‘Lieutenant Shalhoub reckons he could’ve been
one of Diaz’s informants.’

Rita stopped and thought. Diaz had had quite a few informants, all of whom he guarded jealously. She didn’t remember him ever
using their names; he’d just referred to them in terms of what he thought they were like, or what they did. She remembered
a woman called ‘the book store girl’ and a man he called ‘Baron Samedi’ after the voodoo deity. Like Diaz himself, his system
had been obscure and arcane, and Rita had never even thought about asking him questions that related to it.

‘I don’t remember any Kyle Redmond, Lieutenant,’ she said. ‘But you know that Lieutenant Diaz never actually called his informants
by their real names.’

‘He use numbers? Initials?’

‘No, he used to make names up,’ Rita said. As she explained, she thought of something else. Diaz had been an obscure law unto
himself. He always did what he was supposed to with regard to official paperwork, but he sometimes had his own way of recording
other information, like the names of his informants. Maybe he’d done the same with the missing Beretta. It would have been
typical of him, as well as expedient in terms of who he was dealing with. Grant T. Miller
was still suspected of having eyes and ears everywhere, even inside PD. Diaz had never made a secret of his hatred for the
old man. Had he coded what he’d found out about him just in case someone in the department tried to take those details from
him and destroy them?

‘I’ve heard of couple of names he used in the past, although none of them ring any bells with Kyle Redmond or auto wreckers,’
she said. ‘But maybe if I worked alongside Lieutenant Shalhoub I could see if anything in Diaz’s files might relate to the
man.’

‘Mmm.’ Devine nodded his head. ‘Ain’t a bad idea.’ Then he frowned. ‘You finished out at Brush Park now?’

‘For the moment,’ Rita said.

‘Find anything?’

‘Nah.’

‘Shame.’

She smiled. ‘Yeah.’

Unlike with Donna Ferrari, he didn’t have to explain to Rita why he was sad that Grant T. wasn’t getting his.

‘So the man in the crusher,’ Rita said, ‘what do you know?’

‘The man had money issues. Looked like a straight insurance job, until we found him squashed flatter than a Frisbee.’ He chewed
on his gum and then cleared his throat. ‘No enemies beyond his ex-wife, but she was way out in Baltimore when Kyle bought
the farm. There’s so much over at that yard it could take weeks to sort through it all.’ He looked down at the floor and sighed.
Then he looked up at Rita and said, ‘If Shalhoub okays it, you all right looking through some of Diaz’s paperwork? See if
anything relates to a wrecker up by Eight Mile?’