Dead of Night (25 page)

‘Mr Addison, Rita was visiting a colleague who was staying at the Plaza,’ Devine said.

Frannie shook his head. ‘What? You got cops on welfare now?’

‘No, sir, he’s a foreign officer. He was at a conference at the Cobo. But while he was in the city—’

‘What? He having a thing with my sister? What’s this? Some Italian stallion?’

‘No, I am Turkish.’

The two men turned around. Ed Devine had seen İkmen before, but Frannie Addison had not. He looked shocked. ‘Did someone send
for Columbo?’ he said. He stared at Devine. ‘Did you send for Columbo?’

‘My name is not Columbo, it is Çetin İkmen,’ İkmen said. He nodded at Marie, ‘Madam,’ and then walked towards the men. ‘Officer
Addison came to the Lakeland Plaza to see me. It was police business. Nothing of a romantic nature took place.’

Frannie Addison had a look on his face that seemed to suggest that anything in the slightest bit romantic between İkmen and
his sister was impossible. Rita could sometimes be unpredictable in her
choice of boyfriends, but he felt she probably drew the line at middle-aged Turks who looked like scruffy TV detectives.

‘I am a police inspector in İstanbul, Turkey,’ İkmen said. ‘I came to the conference here in Detroit and . . .’ He didn’t know
how to even begin to tell the story of why he’d stayed on in the city. ‘I have come to see Officer Addison if I can, and also
you, Lieutenant Devine.’

‘Me?’

‘I was told by your Chief that I would find you here,’ İkmen said. ‘He suggested that we talk.’

The Chief hadn’t known anything about the mysterious Rosebud, but he had told İkmen the name of the one senior officer he
felt he could trust completely. Devine had just months left in the job, and if for no other reason, he had an investment in
being clean because of his police pension. After thirty-five years of service to Detroit PD, he had a lot to lose.

‘Talk about what?’ Devine asked.

İkmen shook his head. ‘I need to speak with you alone,’ he said. ‘How is Officer Addison?’

‘She’s alive,’ Devine said.

‘Just,’ Frannie Addison added.

‘You are her family?’

Marie stood up. ‘I’m her mother,’ she said. ‘That’s Francis, her brother. You didn’t see . . .’

‘No, no,’ İkmen said. ‘If I had been with Rita, Mrs Addison, maybe things would have been different. I am ashamed to say that
I allowed her to take the elevator on her own. I should not have done that.’

‘No, you shouldn’t,’ Frannie said.

‘Ah, hold on now.’ Ed Devine tapped Frannie’s chest with one long finger. ‘How do you think Rita would’ve taken to a man,
any man, offering to protect her in an elevator?’ he said. ‘Think about it, Frannie, and ask yourself whether she would or
would not have laughed at such an idea. Man or woman, Detroit’s finest pride themselves on being able to take care of themselves.’

‘And yet clearly that failed in this case,’ Frannie said. ‘I know that Rita spoke before she lost consciousness, Lieutenant.
Tell me, did she say anything about her attacker, whether he was old or young, white or black?’

‘Oh, and how does that matter, Francis?’ said Marie, suddenly roused to anger. ‘White? Black? What’s that matter? Too much
of all that in this city. People are people!’

‘Momma, you know—’

‘Somebody tried to kill my daughter for some reason,’ Marie said. ‘Don’t care what or who done it, I just want him caught!’

‘I can’t tell you any details yet anyhow,’ Devine said. ‘I’m sorry, that’s just the way it has to be.’ He turned to İkmen.
‘So . . .’

‘Çetin.’

‘So, Çetin,’ he said, ‘you want to go in and see Officer Addison? I think the doctor should be finished with her in a little
while. Afraid she ain’t conscious right now.’

It had been a sadly familiar and characteristically ugly little story. It was one that Samuel Goins seemed to have been listening
to for the whole of his life.

‘Mrs Jay . . .’

‘Your employer?’

‘Yes,’ the woman said. ‘She said that she wanted to take care of William herself.’

‘William is the baby you were engaged to look after?’ Sam asked.

‘Yeah.’ The woman, Tabernacle Piper, was the very image of what people thought of as a typical Melungeon. Short, dark, dressed
in cheap clothes, a slight look of reserve tinged with nervousness in her eyes. Not one of life’s winners.

‘Then she tells me I have to go, and so I go,’ Tabernacle said. ‘Said she wanted to look after William herself. I said fine.’

‘So what is your complaint, Mrs Piper?’

‘Councillor, that woman, Mrs Jay, she didn’t look after William herself after I went.’

‘Who did?’

‘Some foreign woman!’ she said. ‘She took on some blonde girl from Europe!’

‘How do you know this?’

‘Because I went up there,’ Tabernacle said.

‘To Palmer Woods.’

‘Mrs Jay said I could always come back and see William if I wanted!’

But as Sam knew, Mrs Jay hadn’t really wanted her old nanny to come back at all.

‘No other job’d come along, and so I went to see how they was getting on,’ she said. ‘Saw this girl with William in the garden.
I said, “Hi, who are you?” and she said, “Oh, hi, I’m little William’s nanny!” Not her fault, the girl. I never said nothing
bad to her.’

‘You saved that for Mrs Jay.’

‘When she drove back in there, I followed her and asked her straight why she got rid of me,’ Tabernacle said. ‘She give me
a lot of stuff about how she’d treated me so well, how she didn’t owe me nothing and all that. I said that yes she’d always
been good to me but why did she take my job away? First off, she didn’t answer, so I run around to stop her getting in the
house and I ask her again.’

Sam Goins could imagine the look on Mrs Jay’s face, the expression of disgust at this hillbilly, this gypsy woman confronting
her in front of her own million-dollar mansion.

‘Well, she says that’s her business, and if I don’t go away she’ll call the cops. I told her I was unemployed now and how
would she like to try and raise three kids on welfare? Then she just takes her phone out of her purse—’

‘Which you grab from her hand.’

‘I didn’t want her calling the cops! I would’ve give it back! But
then she’s “dirty hillbilly” this, “half-breed” that! I said, how come I was good enough to look after William when he was
a real tiny baby? Then she says, “Oh, when babies are real tiny, they only need love and comfort, it don’t matter where that
come from.” Mr Goins, William was getting older, starting to talk. She didn’t want him to know me because of what I am!’

Back in the sixties and seventies, prejudice had been vicious and obvious and there for all the world to see. A lot of things
had changed in the intervening years. Sam’s people had, in some cases, moved out into wider society, become educated, sometimes
even got good jobs. But what was behind who they were, the sneaking taint of black or Native American, Middle Eastern or gypsy
blood in their veins, still meant that those who lived in the fancy burghs and boroughs sometimes openly discriminated against
them. Melungeons always had been and remained cheap labour.

It was at times like this that Sam Goins wondered what his own struggle had actually been about. If attitudes had changed
so little, why had he put himself through night classes, the hell of competing with his ‘betters’, in order to put in place
an apparatus that felt like a straitjacket to keep him where he was. Tabernacle Piper was as uneducated and stupid as any
of Sam’s illiterate grandparents. In order to try to get her old job back, she’d abused and frightened her employer, giving
the woman a hundred different reasons for not changing her attitude towards Melungeons.

‘So you got arrested.’

‘Because she give my job to some fancy foreign woman, yeah!’ Tabernacle said. ‘That ain’t right! I told everyone! I said,
“It ain’t right, but if there’s any man as can fix it, then that man has to be Councillor Goins.”’ She smiled.

Samuel Goins frowned. He’d had thirty years of this, almost without let-up. Complaints and prejudice, discrimination and violence.
Would it ever end? Would Melungeons ever be anything more than half-breed trash? Had his Martin Luther King Jr style
mission to free his brothers and sisters just been a total pointless fantasy? It wasn’t even as if there were millions of
them, especially not in Detroit. Sam suddenly felt desolate and weary, and when he spotted a letterhead with a familiar floral
pattern on the top of his in-tray, he had to ask Mrs Piper to leave just in case he threw up over his desk.

‘I’ve no idea about any Rosebud,’ Ed Devine said to Çetin İkmen. ‘Only as the sledge in
Citizen Kane
.’

‘Officer Addison found references to Rosebud on Lieutenant Diaz’s computer system,’ İkmen said. ‘She told me that Rosebud,
whatever it is, was something that Diaz found frightening and sinister.’

‘Don’t know why?’

‘No,’ İkmen said. ‘Even your Chief of Police didn’t know anything about it.’

‘Diaz, you know, he kept himself to himself.’

They stood outside police headquarters, in the snow, while İkmen smoked and Devine chewed on nicotine gum.

‘Lieutenant Diaz, I think, had many secrets,’ İkmen said.

‘I don’t know about many . . .’

‘He had secrets.’

‘Sure. Who doesn’t?’

Devine was being defensive; maybe he felt loyal to his fallen colleague. İkmen could understand that. Police officers everywhere
felt a kinship with those also in the job. But in this instance, such loyalty wasn’t helping. Even now that Devine had spoken
to the Chief of Police himself and he knew full well what İkmen was doing, he remained protective.

‘Lieutenant Devine, Lieutenant Diaz is dead,’ İkmen said. ‘To find out who might have killed him, we need to uncover some
of these secrets, I believe. I think we have to do this as soon as we can before anyone else gets hurt.’

‘You think whoever was behind Diaz’s murder attacked Rita Addison?’

‘I don’t know,’ İkmen said. ‘What I do know is that a young boy was killed in Brush Park just as my colleague and I arrived
in Detroit. Then I met Ezekiel Goins, who asked me, as a fellow Turk, to solve his son’s murder, which took place back in
the 1970s. Through Goins, Grant T. Miller came to my attention, and when my colleague and I went to see where he lived, he
shot at us. It appears that Lieutenant Diaz managed to get the bullet that killed the boy matched to the gun that Miller used
to shoot at me. Then he was killed. At some point, records relating to Miller’s gun seem, according to Officer Addison, to
have gone missing. To me this implies that someone in your department may have taken those records. Then Officer Addison was
attacked.’

He stopped, looked up at Devine and shrugged.

‘Seems that Grant T. Miller is quite a prominent feature in all this,’ Devine said. ‘Cool with me.’

‘But not a done deal exactly,’ İkmen said. ‘Why would Miller kill the child? He wasn’t trying to break into his house. Also,
we don’t know that Grant T. Miller killed Elvis Goins. Ezekiel thinks he did, but as far as I know, there is no actual evidence
to prove that. If Grant T. Miller didn’t kill Elvis Goins or the child, then why would he kill or get someone else to kill
Lieutenant Diaz? Why has Officer Addison been attacked; was it in connection with these events?’

‘Who knows?’ Devine said. ‘I been working on a case involving a man got murdered by his own car crusher.’

‘Officer Addison told me about that,’ İkmen said. ‘The victim was one of Lieutenant Diaz’s informants, wasn’t he?’

‘Could’ve been,’ Devine replied. ‘Still not sure. Diaz always disguised his informants behind nicknames only he ever knew.’

İkmen frowned. ‘What happened when Lieutenant Diaz went on leave?’

‘Vacation? He didn’t take vacation,’ Devine said. ‘You know that just days after Elvis Goins was shot, Diaz and an old cop
called John Sosobowski were called out to Grant T. Miller’s house because Zeke Goins was trying to bite Miller’s arm off.’

‘I’ve heard that, yes,’ İkmen said. ‘Officer Addison suggested that we try to find out some more about that by visiting Officer
Sosobowski’s widow.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because she may know how and why the two officers managed to persuade Grant T. Miller not to press charges against Mr Goins.’

‘Well can’t you ask old Zeke about that?’

‘Martha Bell, the lady who cares for him, said that once Diaz and Sosobowski had pulled Ezekiel away from Miller, they just
threw him out into the street. He’d know nothing. Would Lieutenant Diaz’s wife know anything about it?’

‘He weren’t married to Carmen back then,’ Devine said. ‘No, Addison was right. If anyone, it would have to be Marta Sosobowski.’
He shook his head and whistled. ‘She is a scary woman.’

‘In what way?’

‘You and me’ll take a trip over to Harbourtown and you’ll find out,’ he said. ‘Marta and John, when he was alive, were not
exactly easy people.’

The whole city was alive with the news that a second police officer had been attacked and, if not killed, then gravely injured.
Some officers who had been working on the investigation into Gerald Diaz’s death were seconded over to work with a Detective
Ryan, who had been assigned to Rita Addison’s case. The whole eighth floor of the Lakeland Plaza Hotel was alive with cops
and forensic teams looking for clues to the identities of two young white men wearing very white trainers. Unfortunately there
wasn’t any CCTV evidence on account of the fact that none of the hotel’s cameras worked.

The eighth floor was one of those allocated to people on welfare, and so officers made visits door to door. But as usual in
these situations, no one had heard or seen anything. Even the woman who lived closest to the elevator and who admitted she
must have been at home when Addison was attacked claimed not to have noticed anything. But someone had to have called the
emergency services and therefore saved Rita’s life.

‘They had a double bill of old
Cheers
shows on the TV,’ the woman said, and then she smiled. ‘I loved them old things. But I have to have the TV up loud now on
account of being old and deaf.’