Dead of Night (23 page)

‘Yeah, I can do that,’ Rita said. ‘No problem.’

Mr Stefan Voss had been born in Vienna, Austria, in 1920. When he was nine years old, he’d emigrated to America with his parents
and his older brother Rudolf, Ricky Voss’s grandfather.

‘My father worked for an undertaking business in Vienna,’ the old
man said. ‘But the director was a gambler and the business died. My father couldn’t get another job. So we came to America,
and my father, and later on myself too, worked for Ford for a while until he got enough money to start Voss Funeral Home with
my brother Rudi.’

Tayyar nodded. ‘Was it hard? At first?’

‘It wasn’t easy,’ Stefan said.

‘Because of competition from established funeral homes?’

He smiled. ‘In part.’

Tayyar cocked his head as if inviting the old man to say more, but he didn’t. He just sat in a small, crooked heap in front
of him, smiling with his watery blue eyes.

Tayyar looked over at the modern face of American undertaking, who smiled back brilliantly, and said, ‘Ricky has told me stories
about some of the more unusual services you’ve provided . . .’

‘The sarcophagus, those Goths from Grosse Pointe who wanted their mother to have that escape mechanism in the coffin, the
guy with the Lynda Carter fixation,’ Ricky reminded his great-uncle.

‘Americans are so self-consciously eccentric,’ the old man said as he looked at Ricky with affection. ‘Everything is some
Hollywood musical. Your brains have been quite turned by such things.’ He glanced back at Tayyar. ‘You too are a foreigner
in this country, Mr Bekdil; what do you think?’

‘About elaborate funerals? I’m a Muslim, Mr Voss. We don’t do them.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No.’

An awkward moment followed. The old man seemed to be indicating that he didn’t know anything about Muslim funerals. Did Voss
not offer a service to Muslims?

‘What about high-profile funerals?’ Tayyar said. He was very aware of the fact that with the old man he was pushing against
the grain. Stefan Voss was an intensely measured, almost unknowable individual.

Two of Ricky Voss’s cell phones went off at the same time, and he picked them up and walked outside his office with them pressed
against the sides of his head. ‘Hi.’

When he’d gone, the old man said, ‘We’ve laid a few prominent people to rest over the years. But you understand that I can’t
tell you who. That would breach our clients’ confidentiality.’

‘Sure.’

Silence crashed in as Tayyar tried to think about where he might go with this conversation now. If the old man wouldn’t tell
him about any famous funerals they had conducted, he would certainly baulk at any sort of allusion to who might have paid
for Elvis Goins’ service and interment. But as a good reporter, he knew that there were ways and ways of getting information.

‘What about notorious funerals?’ he said. ‘Detroit was once the murder capital of America.’

‘You mean gangs?’

‘Gangsters, bank robbers, murderers . . .’

‘The black people don’t use this funeral home as a general rule,’ the old man said. ‘There are black funeral homes.’

Even given the history of segregation in America, as well as the bitter race conflicts that had taken place in the 1960s,
the old man’s bald equation of black people with crime caught Tayyar off guard. He’d been around such things as equality
training and positive discrimination for a long time. Also, he lived in nice, wealthy Grosse Pointe, where people just didn’t
talk about race, at least not to him.

‘White people commit crimes too.’

The old man didn’t answer. He just kept on with that infuriating smile.

Ricky Voss returned, sat down behind his desk and said, ‘So, where are we?’

Tayyar didn’t know what to say.

‘Mr Bekdil was asking about whether we’ve ever buried any famous gangsters,’ the old man said.

‘Gangsters? Not many,’ Ricky said. ‘Not really our vibe.’

‘But some?’

‘Oh, sure,’ Ricky said. ‘Especially during the 1970s, when all the drug turf wars were going on. Before my time, of course.’

‘We buried no one prominent, though,’ the old man put in. ‘A few street soldiers is all I remember.’

‘Right.’

‘Oh, but there was, so Dad told me, one gang boss,’ Ricky said. ‘Some mixed-race—’

‘Mixed-race?’ The old man shook his head. ‘No, Richard, that’s not possible.’

A look passed between them that Tayyar found unsettling. For the first time since they’d met, Ricky Voss wasn’t smiling. Tayyar
looked away and found himself contemplating the photographs of Voss employees on the wall. They were all white.

‘Tayyar, we operate a fully racially integrated ship here at Voss,’ Ricky said, now smiling broadly once again. ‘If black
people don’t choose us, then that is their right, you know. The funeral I was talking about, the mixed-race affair back in
the seventies, was for the leader of a gang who used to call themselves the Delta Blues.’

Tayyar looked out of the corner of his eye at the old man’s face. It was bright with what looked like rage.

‘A lot of allusions to the old Deep South here in Detroit,’ Ricky said. ‘But then so many of the auto workers came from places
like the Mississippi Delta, Alabama and the like. I remember my father telling me what an elaborate funeral that Delta Blues
affair was. Dad was always open to all kinds of different people. He said those mixed-race types who set up that funeral wanted
every service we offered to the very highest degree. Best casket, best plot, everything. At the time, he said, he couldn’t
imagine where poor people like that had got so much money. Later, of course, folk realised it had to have come from drugs.’

Lieutenant Diaz had been less than tidy both on and off his computer system. Sifting through his paper and virtual files,
Rita Addison could only cope with looking for Diaz’s informants by writing down any names she didn’t understand. It was neither
scientific nor even particularly practical, but it made her feel as if she was doing something. Everyone else in the department
had always shared information to some extent; why hadn’t he?

His ex-wife and his son had come in to see the Chief earlier on in the day, and it was said that they had both been in tears.
The rumour mill had it that Carmen Diaz had been heard to say that she still loved Gerald, always had. She just hadn’t been
able to carry on living with him. Rita could so relate to that. For the past eight months, Diaz had supposedly been her partner.
But he’d never really let her in. He’d liked her, she was sure, but he’d used every opportunity he got to do things on his
own.

‘OK?’ Shalhoub’s voice broke through her thoughts.

She looked up. ‘Yes, Lieutenant.’ Then she said, ‘Lieutenant, did Lieutenant Diaz ever talk to you about Kyle Redmond by name?’

Shalhoub frowned. ‘I can’t really say,’ he said. ‘All I know is that I know that name, and I know that it’s connected to Diaz.’

He smiled down at her and then moved away. Rita turned back to the screen. It was then, for the first time, that she saw the
word
Rosebud
appear in the text. Apparently Rosebud was, to quote Gerald Diaz, ‘a pernicious pain in the ass’. Who or what Rosebud was
was unclear. But there was venom behind Diaz’s allusions, and so she performed
a search for other references. There weren’t many, but they were all negative. She still couldn’t work out whether Rosebud
was a person or an organisation, but whoever or whatever it was, Diaz had had his eye on it. Rosebud was something that obviously
gave him grief, that bugged him. At one point he even referred to it as ‘evil’.

Rita thought about bringing this to Lieutenant Shalhoub’s attention, and then thought again. In reality, Shalhoub knew less
about Diaz than she did, and besides, as she’d told the Chief, even assuming that the missing Beretta documents had gone back
to Grant T. Miller, the fact that Diaz’s record of them had disappeared was worrying. The Chief hadn’t wanted to accept that
anyone in the department could be protecting Miller, but he admitted that it had to be a possibility. Even allowing for Diaz’s
sloppy paperwork, he’d always had issues with Miller, and so he would have noted anything that could have possibly incriminated
him. Deletion had to be a possibility, and she knew that the tech nerds were booked to come and look at the system some time
soon. But if Diaz had deleted any references to Grant T.’s gun on his system, why had he sent İkmen that text that could only
refer to Miller? ‘Got him’ had been celebratory, and implied that Miller would soon be behind bars. Why destroy evidence that
backed that up?

Now that it was almost dark, he knew the police wouldn’t be back. The weather had worked in his favour. Not that he had anything
to worry about anyway. Not any more. Grant T. Miller moved back from his rotten front door and shuffled to the kitchen. Time
for a cup of coffee and maybe even a cigar if he could find one. Then he’d call the bank. If there was one thing that never
failed to bring a smile to his face, it was moving money around. He had a lot of it. He knew that people talked about ‘Grant
T. Miller’s
reduced
fortune’, but what did they know? Shit all! He laughed. All those years his father had spent building up the Windmill into
a mansion worthy of a European Jewish industrialist. His mother had always known that it was an exercise in bad taste. To
deliberately let it rot gave Grant T. pleasure.
It also served to give the impression that he, like his father had been, was something he was not. Poor. Poor and eccentric
and needy, an old man not worth punishing or robbing because he was nothing and had even less. Not everybody had always been
fooled, of course. Not everybody had needed to be.

Çetin İkmen hadn’t been required to sober up quickly for years. It was well over a decade since he’d been what anyone could
reasonably describe as a drinker. But with Ezekiel Goins, another man who had lost his son, he’d disappeared into a couple
of bottles of bourbon. How he’d got back to his hotel suite, he had no idea. But since returning, he’d been sick twice, drunk
well over a litre of water and taken a lot of aspirin. He’d just been drifting off into a sleep he hoped might sort his symptoms
out when first Tayyar Bekdil had called, and then Officer Addison. The latter had wanted to come over and see him, and had
refused to take no for an answer. Sitting on his bed, looking and feeling like death, he was waiting for her now.

Tayyar had spent much of that afternoon at the funeral home that had arranged Elvis Goins’ burial. He hadn’t managed to find
out who exactly had paid for the service; apparently undertakers worked to codes of ethics like doctors and lawyers. But he
had found the owners of Voss, or rather Stefan Voss, unsettling. It had been clear that whatever Ricky Voss said, the funeral
home preferred, at the very least, to cater for white clients only. Although there was some indication that the younger man
was not entirely comfortable with that, the older one had been quite clear on it. He’d also been visibly furious when his
great-nephew had talked about Elvis Goins’ funeral.

‘Ricky Voss said that he believed the money for the funeral came from the sale of heroin,’ Tayyar said. ‘He said his late
father, who had organised the funeral, had been surprised that a family like the Goinses could afford such an elaborate affair.
Then, apparently, he’d realised just who Elvis Goins had been, and surmised that the money must have come from narcotics.’

‘But the Goins family actually paid?’

‘As far as I could tell, yes,’ Tayyar said. ‘Ricky Voss gave the impression that he was of that opinion, and I’ve no real
reason to doubt him. It was the old man who really didn’t want to talk about Elvis, who pulled all the confidentiality stuff.’

‘You think the old man knows something different about who paid for Elvis’s funeral?’

‘I think it’s possible, yes. He certainly creeped me out.’

‘And this Ricky?’

‘I don’t know. He appeared to be very nice, very liberal. But he didn’t actually answer any of my questions relating to the
Goins family in a direct or concrete way.’

Rita Addison arrived later.

As he let her in, İkmen said, ‘Have you found the bullet from the Beretta yet?’

‘No.’ She took her coat, hat and gloves off and sat down in one of the plastic chairs. ‘Inspector,’ she said, ‘the Chief of
Detroit PD is very keen to nail Grant T. Miller if he can. That’s why you’re still here. But with all references that Diaz
must have had to the ownership of the Beretta gone, I’m in a real fix as to who I can trust. I just don’t know!’ She put her
hands up to her head in frustration. İkmen sat down next to her. ‘The only person I know I can definitely be sure of is you,’
she said. ‘Can I run all this by you again?’

İkmen reiterated how keen he was to help, and so they talked about Diaz’s computer records, about Tayyar Bekdil’s interview
with the Vosses and, of course, about Grant T. Miller.

‘Years ago, he had this city pretty much sewn up the way he wanted it,’ Rita said. ‘Some people believe he still has. Diaz,
I think, was one of them. I think he sent you, specifically, that text because he knew that since you were outside of the
situation, he could trust you. Without that text to you, I wonder whether the whole thing about Miller shooting the kid Aaron
Spencer would have just disappeared.’

‘But why would Miller shoot a child?’ İkmen asked.

‘Because the boy was black?’

‘But that’s ridiculous,’ İkmen said. ‘I know he is a racist, but surely to kill and put one’s own freedom at risk for a dislike
. . .’

‘Prejudice goes deep here,’ Rita said. ‘In all directions. But I take your point that to kill Aaron was excessive. And yet
Diaz thought he did, and Diaz was no fool! If we had the bullet Miller shot at you, or better still the gun itself, we could
prove it.’

Rather unsteadily at first, İkmen got to his feet, went over to his suitcase and took out a pen and a notebook. ‘We need to
write things down,’ he said.

Rita looked confused. ‘You don’t have a laptop, a BlackBerry?’