Dead of Night (29 page)

Donna’s cell phone rang, and she took the call while walking over to the far side of the lot. It was Lieutenant Shalhoub.

‘Thought you’d like to know we’ve had a break in the Diaz investigation,’ he said.

She hadn’t agreed with Gerald Diaz about much, but she had always admired him and had been quietly distressed when he was
murdered.

‘A white guy called Clifford Kercheval,’ he said. ‘A record for small-time misdemeanours going back to when he was a juvenile.’

‘He killed Diaz?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Why?’

‘Same gun, couple of pictures of Diaz obviously taken without his knowledge. Also a pair of bright white sneakers. Addison
was hit by a young white guy wearing bright white sneakers. Remember?’

‘Yeah, but Addison was just beat up,’ Ferrari said. Rita Addison had been savagely attacked by people whose motives were unknown.
Diaz, on the other hand, had been a prominent local detective with any number of potential enemies.

‘So what’s this Kercheval’s connection to Diaz?’ Ferrari asked.

‘Don’t know, as yet,’ Shalhoub replied. ‘But we’ll find it.’

‘You gonna make him talk?’

‘Unlikely,’ Shalhoub said.

Ferrari didn’t understand. ‘Why?’

‘Because he blew his own brains out,’ Shalhoub said. ‘A neighbour called in the shot a couple of hours ago.’

‘Hey, you.’

‘Hey.’ Rita Addison spoke with difficulty, her words spilling out of her mouth on a froth of saliva. Eight of her front teeth
had been completely destroyed, while all her side and back teeth just hurt like hell.

Mark Zevets, with Çetin İkmen in tow, walked over to her hospital bed. He took one of her bruised hands and squeezed it. ‘How
you doing?’

‘I guess I’m OK for a toothless hag.’ She smiled, but kept her lips closed as she did so. In spite of the damage to her mouth
and the bruising and swelling on her face, she was still a lovely young woman. She also realised, along with everyone else,
that she was very lucky to be both alive and out of the coma she had been in just twelve
hours before. ‘You still with us, Inspector?’ she said to Çetin İkmen.

İkmen smiled.

‘Fortunately he is,’ Zevets said. ‘This Rosebud thing you saw on Diaz’s computer system? Inspector İkmen found what could
be a connection to a property company name of Gül, which is Turkish for rosebud.’

Rita looked up at İkmen. ‘Diaz was involved with Turkish people?’

‘We don’t know,’ İkmen said. ‘Maybe I am wrong about Gül, maybe I am right. Lieutenant Devine is trying to find out more details
about this company now. Perhaps it is a coincidence.’

‘Gül owns all the land around Grant T. Miller’s place,’ Zevets said. ‘Block after derelict block.’

Rita raised her eyebrows.

‘Even if he’s not involved with Gül, Miller has to know about them,’ Zevets said. ‘They’re his neighbours. But he denied all
knowledge.’

‘That’s Grant T.’

‘And there’s something else too,’ Zevets said as he put a hand inside his jacket and took out a photograph. ‘Can you look
at this and see if you recognise this guy?’

‘Sure.’

A photograph of the man who might have killed Diaz, Clifford Kercheval, was handed over. Rita frowned. ‘You have him in custody?’

‘Kind of,’ Zevets said.

Rita looked up.

‘Kercheval is dead,’ İkmen said. ‘It was apparently suicide.’

‘Do you recognise him?’

Rita stared at the photograph for another few moments, then said, ‘Sort of. But I couldn’t swear to it. There’s something
about him, but . . . Why’d he commit suicide? Not over me, I don’t imagine.’

‘We don’t know,’ Zevets said. ‘But Lieutenant Shalhoub has recovered some evidence that could suggest he may have had something
to do with Diaz’s death.’

‘You think?’

‘I don’t know. We just found out,’ Zevets said.

‘A lot has happened,’ İkmen said. ‘Many things that may or may not be connected.’

‘But if connections do exist, it’s up to us to find them,’ Zevets said. ‘At the moment we have a dead kid called Clifford
Kercheval and a real-estate company with a Turkish name, but there’s still no sign of Grant T. Miller’s Beretta. What it all
might mean is anyone’s guess.’

Gül Inc. was registered in the state of Georgia under the name of someone called R. Lacroix. There were apparently two R.
Lacroix in Savannah, Georgia. One, Ronald Lacroix, was eighty years old and in a care home, while the other one, Renee, was
a child of five. That said, the name was well known in Savannah. From a once influential French family, they had owned vast
lands in Georgia upon which they built a huge antebellum mansion and employed thousands of African slaves.

Detective Katz, who had been investigating the profile of Gül Inc., told Ed Devine that the family had hit hard times just
after the turn of the twentieth century. ‘The Lacroix clan split up,’ he said. ‘The family that remains in Georgia aren’t
rich. Current head, Laurent Lacroix, grandson of Ronald and father of Renee, teaches high school. No one in the city has even
heard of Gül, apart from the landlord of the building where the mail gets delivered.’

‘What’s he or she say?’

Katz rubbed his eyes wearily. He’d been on this Gül thing since early that morning. Now it was dark.

‘Once a month, some smart-looking man with a northern accent comes and collects the mail. Once a year, this same man pays
the landlord rent for twelve months in cash.’

‘He’s no idea who the man is?’

‘The guy pays in cash,’ Katz said. ‘What’s not to like? Savannah
PD say that the address is in a part of town where most men drink Bud all day long and a lot of women earn their bread dancing
around poles.’

‘Classy. What else?’

Katz looked down at the notes he’d taken. ‘It’s definitely Gül of Savannah that owns the lots up in Brush Park,’ he said.
‘There’s a business account with the Bank of America that contains just under a million dollars.’

‘Not rich for these days,’ Devine commented.

‘No, sir. But as far as we can tell, it all belongs to this R. Lacroix, who would appear to be a northern guy somewhere in
his middle years.’

Devine laced his fingers underneath his chin and frowned. ‘What about Lacroix in Detroit?’

‘I’m on it, but it’ll take time,’ Katz said. ‘Lieutenant, is this about wrongful appropriation of land up in Brush Park?’

The financial guys didn’t need to get mixed up in homicide cases, or indeed in the investigation into the death of a fallen
homicide officer. Devine had decided to keep much of the reason he wanted to know about Gül to just himself and his own team
for the time being.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Found out about it when Officer Addison was beaten up in the Lakeland Plaza. One of the residents alleged
certain things about this company Gül.’

‘Including homicide?’

Devine smiled. Katz was no fool; he knew that there was more to Gül than just some harassment complaint.

‘Maybe,’ Devine said. ‘Thanks.’

‘I’ll keep digging on this Lacroix thing,’ Katz said as he rose from his chair to leave. ‘Most of the old south came up here
for work at the beginning of the twentieth century. I’d not be surprised if the odd Lacroix was somewhere in town.’

Dr Steve Harris, known to his friends on Facebook as ‘the Docster’, found the remains of a small firearm in the very deepest
part of the New Yorker in the early hours of the morning. He couldn’t even begin to make a guess as to what kind of gun it
was. Firearms were not his thing. But he bagged up the twisted, tortured object and put it to one side with all the other
detritus from the crushed car. Then he updated his Facebook status from ‘overworked but happy’ to ‘totally jazzed’.

To begin with, Çetin İkmen wondered why and how someone with such a strong southern American accent had got hold of his mobile
phone number. Then, as his brain began to emerge from the fog of sleep, he remembered: of course, this was Ezekiel Goins.

‘I apologise for calling so early, but I had to talk to you, Inspector,’ Goins said.

İkmen looked at his watch. It was just six a.m. He wondered if the old man had been awake all night waiting to call him when
the time arrived at a ‘reasonable’ hour.

‘What do you want, Mr Goins?’ İkmen heard Devine stir in the next bedroom. He lit a cigarette and leaned back on his pillows.

‘Martha said I should tell you,’ Goins said.

‘Tell me what?’

‘That I never paid for my Elvis’s funeral,’ Zeke said.

This was, of course, no surprise. ‘Oh?’

‘When Elvis got shot, Mr Stefan Voss of Voss Funeral Home come to see me and he telled me as how there was money at his company
for my boy’s funeral.’

Dragging hard on his cigarette, İkmen asked, ‘You mean Voss paid?’

The old man cleared his throat. ‘No!’ he said. ‘They way too close to do that!’

‘So who did pay, then?’

‘Can’t tell you,’ Zeke said. ‘Don’t know to this day who done it.’

‘You have no idea?’

‘No!’

‘But how could you do that?’ İkmen asked. ‘How could you not know? It could have put you in debt to someone unpredictable
or dangerous.’

‘I don’t know,’ the old man said. ‘Whoever done it never come back to ask me for nothing. Stefan Voss, he said it were an
anonymous donor. Some rich person felt sorry for my boy in all likelihood.’

‘But I still don’t know how you could take it.’

‘It ain’t my concern you never been too poor to not take no handouts!’ Zeke Goins sounded angry now. ‘Some of us don’t have
the luxury of questioning where things comes from and what folks do and why!’

The old man slammed the receiver down and İkmen quickly moved his phone away from his ear. A knock on the door immediately
following the call had him up and in his dressing gown to answer it.

‘Problems?’ Ed Devine stood at the door with cups of coffee for both of them. ‘Heard you on the phone.’

‘It was Ezekiel Goins,’ İkmen said. He told Devine what had passed between them.

‘A friend, a relative of my colleague Inspector Süleyman, is a journalist here in the city,’ İkmen said. ‘He’s called Tayyar
Bekdil. Partly for his newspaper, but I admit, partly for me, he went out to see the Voss Funeral Home.’

Ed Devine, who was now sitting on a chair beside İkmen’s bed, said, ‘Right.’ He knew full well that the Turk had been sniffing
around on his own ever since he’d met Zeke Goins. It was part of the reason why the department was keeping him close.

‘Richard Voss, the present owner, led Tayyar to believe that the money for Elvis Goins’ funeral had come from drug deals,’
İkmen said. ‘Richard Voss was just a child at the time and so could not possibly remember such a thing. But his great-uncle,
Stefan, was also in the room, and he said nothing. Whose story is the truth?’

Devine frowned. ‘I can get a warrant to force the Vosses or their
accountants to divulge their financial records,’ he said. ‘That is, if they still exist. It’s real financial mining, but PD
has the resources, if necessary. Problem is, though,
is
it necessary?’

‘I think so, yes,’ İkmen said. ‘Ever since I met Ezekiel Goins, things have been happening. The reason I am here at all, to
attest to the fact that Grant Miller did shoot at myself and my colleague with a Beretta that was then confiscated by Lieutenant
Diaz, is connected to all of that . . . that past.’

‘Inspector, we have to solve homicides that are happening now,’ Devine said. ‘With respect, we ain’t got time for the past,
if you know what I mean.’

İkmen, beginning to feel agitated, lit another cigarette and said, ‘But the past is always relevant. In my city, I have worked
on crimes that have their origins not just a few years ago, but over a hundred years in the past.’

‘You come from a very ancient country, Inspector.’

‘And I believe that the deaths of the young boy, Aaron Spencer, Lieutenant Diaz and Elvis Goins are all connected.’

‘If you’re fingering Grant T. Miller, then that is dangerous . . .’

‘Miller is the common factor,’ İkmen said. ‘But I don’t know whether he killed any of those people. He’s only a link at the
moment. A link who for some reason is lying to you about a mysterious property company that he must know about.’

Ed Devine sat in silence and chewed hard on his nicotine gum. He hadn’t even had a shower yet, but the gum was already in.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. He thought some more. Miller, for all his quirky ways and rotting mansion, had a lot of money and
a lot of powerful friends. Taking him on on any level was going to be difficult, and if so much as a foot was put wrong, Devine
would find himself in a world of attorney-laced shit.

‘What if Grant Miller paid for Elvis Goins’ funeral?’ İkmen said.

‘What? Why would he do that?’ Devine said. ‘That old racist paying for some mixed-race kid’s funeral don’t make no sense at
all!’

‘No, it doesn’t,’ İkmen said. ‘I agree. But someone with a lot of power and a lot of money did pay for it, and that person
would probably have been known to Mr Miller. We spend all our time looking at little people and what they may or may not know
when so often it is the big people who do know.’

‘It’s the big people who have the power to come and get you!’

‘The same is true in my country, too,’ İkmen said. ‘But occasionally we just have to close our minds to that.’

The two men looked at each other through the strengthening light of the morning for a few moments. Then Devine rose to his
feet, and İkmen thought that he was going to leave the room without further comment. But then he said, ‘I’ll get a warrant
for the Voss Funeral Home, and after that maybe I’ll think about what to do with Grant T. Miller. In this city, Inspector,
railing against old racists is one thing; bringing them in is quite another.’

Intellectually, Ayşe Farsakoğlu knew exactly what had been going on. İzzet had taken her to a new, very smart restaurant called
Topaz, which was very near to her apartment in Gümüşsüyü. Not only did its vast windows give diners a wonderful panoramic
view of the Bosphorus; the food had been excellent too.