Dead of Night (28 page)

‘This is the Turkish officer that Miller shot at,’ Devine explained. ‘He was staying at the Lakeland Plaza until yesterday.’

Zevets leaned across the back of İkmen’s seat and took his hand. ‘Sir. Officer Addison talked about you.’

İkmen asked after Rita Addison and was told that her condition was slowly improving. But it was not because of Rita, or even
because of the missing bullet, that Zevets had suggested meeting outside the house where Aaron Spencer had been killed. ‘I
did some research last night,’ he said, ‘and what I discovered was that all this property round here, with the exception of
Grant T. Miller’s place, is owned by one property development company.’

‘Uhuh.’

‘If what old Mrs McGrath and the Lakeland receptionist told me is true, then they’re the kind of organisation who march into
old folk’s places, offer them a few dollars for their damp, rotting property and then promptly ditch them out on the street,’
Zevets said.

‘Unfortunately there’s no law against the practice of buying and selling property, unless duress can be proven,’ Devine said.
‘And as you know as well as I, Officer, that is no mean task to accomplish.’

‘No, Lieutenant, except that Mrs McGrath was apparently turned out of this part of northern Brush Park five years ago. Now
do you see any property development going on around here?’

The view outside the car consisted of potholed roads, empty, litter-strewn lots and houses in either moderate or advanced
states of decay.

‘In the streets where this company doesn’t own property, to the south, regeneration has been taking place for some time. But
these people . . . Not a thing.’

‘Maybe they’re waiting to get old Grant T.’s place before they flatten the whole burgh,’ Devine said.

‘They must’ve tried.’

‘Yeah, or not.’ Devine smiled. ‘Can you imagine anyone forcing Grant T. to do anything he didn’t want? Chances are they were
more afraid of him than he was of them.’

‘Perhaps they’re waiting for him to die.’

‘Wait a long time,’ Devine sighed. ‘What’s that saying about the devil looking after his own?’

They all laughed. Then for a moment they stopped and looked at the desolation around them. What remained of mansions in styles
that ranged from the classical to the gothic poked out like sinking ships from ground littered with old furniture and the
detritus of drug use. Even the litter was old; even the junkies had moved out years before.

‘Lieutenant, I think we should go talk to Miller, see what he knows about these people.’

‘Why’s that? Company’s buying old property, badly, but legit as far as anyone knows,’ Devine said. ‘If they’ve been hassling
Miller, then he’s enough money and influence to look after himself.’

‘Maybe,’ Zevets said. ‘But there’s something else.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know, but I think that Lieutenant Diaz had some sort of notion that there was a witness to the murder of Aaron Spencer.’

‘How you know that?’

Zevets cleared his throat. ‘Because when Officer Addison and I were looking for the bullet that killed the boy in the Royden
Holmes place, Diaz asked us if we’d seen anyone around apart from the couple of kids we’d interviewed on the day of Spencer’s
death.’

‘He didn’t say exactly why?’

‘No.’

‘No idea who he might have been talking about? Who he had in mind?’

‘No.’

‘And had you seen anyone?’

‘No,’ Zevets replied. ‘No one. He asked Addison, Lieutenant Shalhoub, who wasn’t there that day anyway, and me. We saw nothing.
Don’t know who or what could have given him that notion. But so few people come up here now, when I heard about this property
company I wondered if maybe it was one or more of them. I’m not saying I believe that they’re involved or anything, but . . .’

‘You think maybe they were viewing their real estate that day?’

‘It’s not impossible,’ Zevets said. ‘And there’s something else too, Lieutenant. This company, Gül Inc. . ..’

‘Gül?’ For the first time İkmen spoke. ‘How do you spell that word, Officer?’

‘G, U, L,’ Zevets said. ‘Based down south, Savannah.’

‘Stylish.’

‘Turkish, if I am not mistaken,’ İkmen said. ‘You know, gentlemen, that
gül
in Turkish means rose.’

Ayşe looked at her own reflection in her bedroom mirror. She was still good for a woman in her thirties. Not exactly beautiful
any more, but very striking. She moved her head closer to the glass and looked at herself in more detail. Twenty years of
smoking and the strong İstanbul summer sun had put some lines on her face, but they weren’t deep. She’d used moisturising
cream since she was in her early twenties and so her skin was still supple.

At one time she had considered having Botox injections, but had then decided against it. Not only were they expensive, she
wasn’t sure that she liked the frozen-faced look it gave some people. Besides, it didn’t seem appropriate somehow for a police
officer. A lot of the rich women in places like Nişantaşı did it, and they had plastic surgery
too. But she wasn’t one of them. She didn’t fit with the covered religious women who would consider such vanities sinful either.
When she felt the time had come to have some physical ‘augmentation’, she’d have it, provided she could afford it. Not that
that was a real possibility. She was a single woman who earned a no-frills living wage; there was just about enough money
for clothes, perfume and make-up.

Ayşe threaded a pair of gold and turquoise earrings through the piercings in her lobes and sprayed her throat with Prada perfume.
It was clearly fake; she’d bought it from a rough little man with lots of similar bottles in a suitcase in the street. His
brown countryman’s face had reminded her of her father. She missed him so much! She was a modern, independent woman, but the
warm feel of the presence of a man in her life was now missing, and she hated it. There was her brother, but he had a new
girlfriend with whom he was besotted and so he really didn’t count, Çetin İkmen was thousands of miles away in America, and
Mehmet Süleyman was now entirely off her radar. Some men, however fascinating, were just too complicated and difficult.

Apart from a few acquaintances, that left only one man of any significance in her life, and he looked for all the world like
a
maganda
, a brainless macho man. Except that he wasn’t. İzzet Melik, appreciator of art and speaker of Italian, only looked like a
maganda
on the outside. But that, sadly, was a problem.

He’d asked her out and Ayşe had agreed to go. Dinner at a new and apparently exciting international restaurant in Beyoğlu.
She loved to go to places like that! İzzet was very knowledgeable about food and would not do or say anything that would in
the least way embarrass her. But with that awful moustache and those terrible man-made-fibre shirts he bought from the cheap
market stalls down by the Yeni Cami . . .

Ayşe looked in the mirror again and asked herself seriously who she was fooling. İzzet clearly adored her. He was intelligent,
cultured,
kind and honest. He wasn’t hideous, and although he still smoked heavily and ate too much, he was far from being gross. She
could do worse, especially for a woman of a certain age with lines on her face. And yet as she finished getting herself ready
for her date, she found she couldn’t, not even to preserve her carefully applied makeup, stop just one tear from sliding down
her cheek and on to her lip gloss.

Details regarding Gül Inc. were few and far between. Based in Savannah, Georgia, their offices appeared to be not much more
than a post pick-up point. The company had no direct internet presence, and all telephone calls went straight to answerphone.

‘Outside Turkey and the Turkic nations, few people speak Turkish,’ Çetin İkmen said once they’d returned to PD headquarters
and were sitting around Ed Devine’s desk.

‘Yeah, but Inspector,’ Devine said, ‘Grant T. don’t have to know what the word means to know that a company with that name
has bought up all the property around his house. Whatever he is, Miller ain’t no fool, and so he was lying when he said he’d
never heard of Gül.’

They’d been to visit Miller while they were in Brush Park, and he had admitted to no knowledge about anything, least of all
a property company called Gül Inc.

Zevets, who at İkmen’s suggestion had been looking at Diaz’s computer, came back into Devine’s office and shut the door behind
him.

‘I can see what Addison meant,’ he said as he sat down beside the Turk. ‘There are references to going to visit Rosebud, to
the increasing influence that they are having, but then there’s some stuff about Rosebud ultimately “playing ball”, whatever
that means.’

Devine raised his eyebrows.

‘The last thing I’d ever say is that Lieutenant Diaz was on the take or anything like that.’

‘But not saying don’t mean you ain’t thinking it,’ Devine said.

Zevets said nothing.

‘I knew Lieutenant Diaz only a little,’ İkmen said, ‘but he seemed in no way corrupt to me.’

‘No.’ Devine, if not Zevets, was, İkmen felt, dead set against the idea of Diaz being caught up with anything he shouldn’t
have been. İkmen himself was not, in reality, so sure.

‘Unless it can be proved that Gül is in fact a Turkish company, then whoever named it did so either because they know what
it means, rose or rosebud, or because it means something quite different to them, maybe in another language,’ he said. ‘If
we assume that it is Turkish and that the Rosebud that Lieutenant Diaz talks about in his records is one and the same thing,
then we have to look at not just local Turkish people, but also some of these Melungeons who believe they are descended from
Turks.’

‘Some of ’em speak Turkish?’

‘According to my superior in İstanbul, some of those who have visited our capital, Ankara, have taken it upon themselves to
learn,’ İkmen replied. ‘Maybe Mr Ezekiel Goins’ brother would know of any such people in Detroit.’

‘Sam Goins? Maybe.’ Devine leaned heavily on his desk and chewed his nicotine gum thoughtfully. ‘But rather than go to Sam
yet, I think I want to get as full a financial work-up on this Gül company as I can. I don’t like it when property developers
turn people out of their homes, however bad those homes might be. Where things like that happen, you also find things like
tax evasion and money-laundering too, in my experience.’ He picked up his landline telephone and punched in a number that
he obviously knew by heart. ‘Let me talk to some people, get a view.’

İkmen looked out at the squad room, where members of John Shalhoub’s team were eyeing Devine’s office with looks of anxiety
on their faces. No one ever liked even the vague suspicion that a fellow officer was corrupt, and Gerald Diaz, for all his
maverick awkwardness, had been liked.

Once he’d made a few telephone calls, Grant T. Miller felt better. Everything had been taken care of; the cops were just poking
around in response to a few facts they’d come across that wouldn’t make any sense to them. Everything that needed to be in
place was in place, and so nothing, for him, was going to change.

He sat down in front of some crazy talk show on the TV, but he couldn’t get into it. His mind went back to Elvis Goins. Sometimes
it just did. Little punk had thought he was king of the world when he’d formed his gang of misfits and got his hands on some
gear from immigrants over in Greektown. One bunch of foreigners going into business with another bunch of foreigners. It had
disgusted him! And the kid had been good at it too! Grant T. put a hand up to his chest and tried to control his breathing.
Even though all of that had happened over thirty years ago, it still rankled. Elvis Goins had been so full of himself in his
new, big drug-dealer persona!

Grant T. shuffled around amongst the boxes of pills on his coffee table until he found those things the doctor had given him
for his blood pressure. He didn’t generally take them, but now he could feel his heart pounding and so he swallowed one. After
that he necked a shot from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and then tried to forget about Elvis and his dad and John Sosobowski
and Gerald Diaz and all the shit. But it wasn’t easy, mainly because he couldn’t get away from the idea that all this police
sniffing around was something he’d brought upon himself. Because it was.

The car had been a Chrysler New Yorker from sometime back in the 1980s. How the forensics people could tell that from an almost
completely square hunk of mangled metal, Donna Ferrari didn’t know. But then a lot of them were nerds, and she knew that at
least one was a crazy automobile nut.

They’d taken the New Yorker to a lot they used to test cars just up beyond Six Mile. Donna Ferrari watched as three investigators
began to gently remove any pieces of metal or fabric sticking out from the periphery of the block.

‘What are you looking for exactly?’ she asked.

No one said a thing. It was always the same with these nerdy, academic types. In their own worlds, up their own asses.

‘Hello?’

A guy who was somewhere in his thirties but looked about twelve glanced up. ‘Can I help you?’

‘What you looking for?’ Donna Ferrari asked.

‘Don’t know,’ he said. He was called, she remembered, Dr Harris. Doctor!

‘So . . .’

‘This vehicle was beside the crusher when we found Redmond’s body in the machine,’ Dr Harris said. ‘It could be that it was
the last automobile Redmond ever wrecked. Maybe if we can find out who it belonged to, we might be able to get some kind of
lead on this.’

‘You think the owner of this car could have killed Kyle Redmond?’

‘It’s a possibility,’ he said.

The two other investigators were almost gleefully beginning to tease the cube apart.

‘As far as I know, you’ve no other lines of inquiry on this case, have you?’ Dr Harris said as he looked away from Ferrari
and attended to the block once again.

‘No.’

He pulled a strip of metal forwards with one plastic-gloved hand. ‘Then let’s see what she gives us, shall we?’