Dead of Night (30 page)

İzzet, all clumsiness, nylon suit and coarse face, had ordered the house speciality, the Ottoman degustation menu, for both
of them. Twelve small, exquisite courses each matched to an expensive and delicious wine. Knowledgeable about both the food
and the wine, he had nevertheless not bored her about either. They’d talked of many things, including the job, and he had
even made her laugh on several occasions. Nothing had been too much trouble, too expensive or too gracious. Whenever she got
up from the table, he stood too and pulled her chair out for her. When she returned, he made sure that she was seated comfortably
before he sat down himself once again. Only at the end of the meal did he go outside for a cigarette, even though she knew
he had to be absolutely desperate by that time.

He had, of course, escorted her back to her apartment, where they had parted with a handshake and he had just very lightly
kissed her once on the cheek. There and then he’d said that they really had to do that again, even though she knew that his
bank account would probably not be able to take such punishment a second time that year. What he had meant, of course, had
been that it would be nice to go out together again. And she had agreed.

It had been very pleasant to spend an evening with a man who was not either her brother or some Neanderthal who just wanted
to get her into bed as quickly as possible. But then as Ayşe knew only too well, İzzet loved her. As he left her putting her
key into her door, he even called out, ‘I like this courting, it’s nice.’

Courting, as in the chivalrous wooing of a lady by an admirer, was such an archaic concept, like something from a fairy tale.
Courting was asexual, at least it was in fairy tales, but also electric with passionate potential. İzzet was such a strange
person to court anyone, and yet Ayşe was finding that in spite of herself she was flattered. He loved her. He was kind, considerate,
solvent and intelligent, and he loved her. For a very brief moment, Mehmet Süleyman’s handsome features swam into her mind,
but she dismissed them. She was getting far too old to play the sort of games he wanted to play.

‘Dr Harris tracked down the owner of the New Yorker,’ Rob Weiss said as he placed his own report into Ed Devine’s hands. ‘Some
grocery store owner from Dearborn. Licensed for a firearm but not a Beretta PX4.’

‘It’s definitely the Beretta that Diaz gave you just before he died?’

‘The serial numbers are incomplete on this weapon,’ Weiss said. ‘Automobile crushers take no prisoners; it’s a miracle any
of it survived. But from what I can decipher, it would seem to be the same piece that Diaz brought to me, the one we think
came from Grant T. Miller.’

‘So this was in an automobile crushed by a man who’s now dead
who could’ve been one of Diaz’s informants.’ Ed Devine shook his head and then looked behind him at Çetin İkmen. ‘Connections,
huh?’

‘But Lieutenant, do such connections exist between the crushed man and Mr Miller?’ İkmen asked. ‘Because if not, then why
would Grant Miller’s gun be in a car that belonged to a grocery shop owner? Did the grocery shop man know Mr Miller?’

‘It’s doubtful,’ Weiss said. ‘The grocery store man is black.’

‘So where’s the connection?’

‘Through Diaz, possibly,’ Devine said. ‘Diaz was always obscure about who worked for him in the community.’

‘But why would Diaz dispose of Mr Miller’s gun, unless . . .’

‘He was bent as a horseshoe,’ Devine said.

There was a moment of both embarrassment and horror at what had just been said.

Dr Weiss cleared his throat. ‘I always found Gerald Diaz reserved and a bit odd, but not rogue, I don’t think,’ he said. ‘He
loved this city and always wanted to protect it from people like Miller – or that was the impression he gave me, and that
was over a long period of time, thirty years.’

Silence rolled in again, and then İkmen said, ‘Officer Addison was concerned that maybe someone in your department, not Lieutenant
Diaz, could have not only disposed of the Beretta but also wiped all records of it from your systems. Rita Addison was attacked,
and we still don’t know why.’

‘Except that Shalhoub now has his white-sneakered suicide,’ Devine said.

‘If Kercheval did in fact kill the lieutenant and attack Rita,’ İkmen said.

‘Addison didn’t positively ID the photograph Zevets showed her.’

‘Even if she had, the man is dead,’ İkmen said. ‘Such a person was probably only a hired thug. Who sent the white-sneaker
man, and why did he kill himself? If indeed he did.’

Weiss and Devine looked at him, both fostering their own feelings of growing disquiet.

‘Your Chief of Police,’ İkmen said, ‘has not just kept me in the city because I am a witness to Mr Miller handing the Beretta
over to Lieutenant Diaz. I am also here because, like Officer Addison, I think your Chief feels that not everyone in your
department is to be trusted. As an outsider, with no knowledge of this city and its people, he knows that I can if necessary
come to dispassionate conclusions. At home in my own city,’ he smiled, ‘that would be very difficult for me indeed. I know
this must be hard to hear, and I am sorry.’

There were no real set hours for working in a funeral home. Richard Voss was accustomed to people calling after dark. He was
even inured to the sight of a bunch of police officers at his door. Often when death came calling the police were involved.
What he hadn’t been expecting, however, was a warrant to search his records.

‘If you ask me what you’re looking for, then maybe I can help,’ he said. He was very clearly panicking.

‘Mr Voss, we need to know who paid for a particular funeral back on January third 1979,’ Ed Devine said.

‘I was just a—’

‘Yeah, you were a kid,’ Devine said. ‘But that’s what I need to see, Mr Voss. Funeral of one Elvis Lorne Goins, buried up
in Woodlawn. A fancy funeral for a boy whose folks were dirt-poor mountain folk from the south. Funeral, I heard, fit for
a senator.’

Richard Voss, now rather less full of bonhomie than he had been when Tayyar Bekdil visited him, said, ‘What’s this about?’

‘I can’t tell you that, sir,’ Devine said. At his back were İkmen, Zevets and a female officer called Diana Birdy.

‘Only we had a reporter here,’ Voss said, ‘a foreign guy. He asked about what I think must’ve been the same funeral. Mixed-race
drug-dealer, a gang boy.’

Devine didn’t answer. Then he said, ‘Mr Voss, I need to see your financial records from 1978 and 1979.’

‘That’ll take a bit of organising. We don’t keep records that old here.’

‘Where do you keep them?’

‘All the old records are in my basement,’ an elderly, time-cracked voice said. Stefan Voss had come into his great-nephew’s
office quietly and completely unnoticed. But now all eyes turned to him.

Ed Devine smiled. ‘Mr Stefan Voss?’

‘Yes?’ The old man viewed him with what looked like amusement.

‘We need to see your financial records,’ Devine said, ‘relating to one Elvis Goins’ funeral on January third 1979.’

‘Why?’

‘Need to find out who paid for his funeral,’ Devine said.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Can’t tell you, sir.’ The old man looked down at the floor. Devine said, ‘You know who paid for Elvis Goins’ funeral, Mr
Voss?’

Stefan Voss looked up again and smiled. ‘I’m an old man. My memory isn’t what it was.’

Tayyar had told İkmen that old man Voss had given him the creeps. He could now see why. Even if he didn’t actually know anything
about Elvis Goins’ funeral, Stefan Voss was taking far too much delight in gently goading Devine.

‘Well, sir, your memory doesn’t have to be,’ Devine said with a smile, ‘provided you’ve kept all the records you should. Now
I believe that the antebellum-style house down the way is yours, isn’t it.’

‘You want to go and look now?’

‘As I told your great-nephew,’ Devine said, ‘we have a warrant, Mr Voss. It allows us to search all properties that house
Voss financial records, which, as you said, includes your home.’

For a moment, Stefan Voss didn’t say a word. He appeared to be thinking very hard about something. Then he said, ‘OK then,
gentlemen. Shall we go?’ He stretched one thin arm out towards the office door.

‘Thank you,’ Devine said. ‘After you.’

The old man led the way. As he walked past Richard Voss, İkmen saw that the younger man was sweating very heavily.

It was just a short walk to the vast mock-antebellum mansion where Stefan Voss lived alone. An elderly black man in a very
smart morning suit opened the door to them and looked at Stefan Voss questioningly. ‘Sir?’

His accent came from way down south, and he bowed just a little as he spoke. To Devine it was like looking at an old photograph
of an ancestor. To İkmen, the man was just another rich man’s servant.

‘Nothing to worry about, Nathaniel,’ Stefan Voss said. ‘These officers just need to look at some of our records.’

The servant let them in while Stefan Voss offered coffee, tea or brandy.

‘I’d rather just get to work so that we can move out of your hair for the night, Mr Voss,’ Devine said.

The old man looked a little disappointed that his attempt to stall proceedings had failed, but he smiled anyway and led them
all down through a small door underneath his wide marble staircase.

Beneath the modern house was a large, poorly lit chamber that was much, much older. Clearly there had been a structure of
some sort on the site way before any Voss had ever set foot in the New World. As the smell of damp hit his nostrils, Devine
turned to İkmen and whispered, ‘If he’s keeping paper down here, I sure hope he’s covered it in plastic or some such.’

But İkmen doubted that. Had he been hiding something it was possible to find, the old man would have been much more nervous
than he was. Only a short pause before he’d agreed to take them to his house made him doubt that a little. Then, for a moment,
Voss had looked concerned.

The cardboard files that comprised the Voss Funeral Home’s audited financial records were housed on racks constructed on row
upon row of free-standing wooden shelves. Each shelf was labelled with a number that corresponded to the year the paperwork
related to. Behind Officer Birdy, İkmen could see Richard Voss’s face, which was white with what could have been fear.

‘As you can see, I like to keep tidy records,’ Stefan Voss said.

‘Yeah.’

Without really pausing to look, he took them straight to the racks that related to the year 1978/9. ‘It’s all chronological,’
he said. ‘The records for January third will be quite far on.’

Ed Devine opened up a large cardboard file and watched as dust puffed up from it and then subsided on to the floor. İkmen,
looking over the lieutenant’s shoulder, saw piles of yellowing invoices and correspondence, some of which bore the Voss yew
tree logo. Devine shuffled quickly through the paperwork until he came to something that interested him and bent down low
in order to look at a document more closely. In that moment, İkmen’s view was completely obscured. Then Devine stood upright
again and looked at Stefan Voss with a smile on his face. ‘Mr Voss,’ he said, ‘do you have any idea who R. Lacroix might be?’

‘R. Lacroix? No. Why?’

Devine held up an invoice that had apparently accompanied a large amount of cash. It had been signed, in a very unsure and
rather spidery hand, by someone called R. Lacroix.

‘Mr Voss, you ever heard of a property company called Gül Inc.?’

Stefan Voss frowned. ‘No. Why?’ he repeated.

Devine looked at the paper in his hand and said, ‘Because someone called R. Lacroix is involved with them.’

‘Really?’ Now it was Stefan Voss’s turn to smile. ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘But then if you look at the paperwork closely,
Lieutenant, you will see that none of it is signed S. Voss. It’s all R. Voss, which means it must have been dealt with by
my brother Rudolf.’

Only İkmen, or so he thought, heard Richard Voss almost choke at this point.

‘Sadly Rudi died in 1989,’ Stefan said. ‘So unfortunately we can no longer ask him.’

‘Mr Voss, we have a witness who claims you actually organised this funeral,’ Devine said.

Stefan Voss smiled. ‘Well, he or she is mistaken,’ he said. ‘It was definitely my brother Rudolf.’

Mark Zevets had what he felt was an investment in finding out who had attacked Rita Addison. Not only did he like her, she
was one of the few people who knew that he was gay. She was the only officer in the department he’d told. Rita was discreet
and sympathetic, and he could always talk to her. So Mark wanted to know a bit more about the man, Clifford Kercheval, who
had supposedly attacked her. Rita hadn’t, after all, definitely identified Kercheval, and his death was rather too convenient
from Mark Zevets’ point of view.

Shalhoub, who was still working on Diaz’s murder, for which Kercheval was in the frame, was of another opinion. ‘The stuff
he had on Diaz in that hovel he called home!’ Shalhoub had said. ‘He hated cops!’

‘Then why target Diaz? Addison?’

Shalhoub had said that he didn’t know but that he was certain they’d find out. Zevets wasn’t so sure, and so he went to Kercheval’s
apartment building and made a few of his own enquiries. The block was uniformly poor and white, and several of the outside
walls were covered with artless graffiti.

Mark, in his skinny jeans and leather jacket, looked far too prosperous to be a resident, and so as soon as he arrived, even
at such a late hour, people were looking at him. But he didn’t hide who or what he was.

‘Detroit PD,’ he said as he held his badge up to the face of a young boy he found leaning against the wall outside Kercheval’s
apartment.

The boy said nothing.

‘Want to find out about Clifford Kercheval,’ Zevets said.

The boy shrugged. ‘You and all them other cops.’

‘Other cops say that Clifford was a cop-killer,’ Zevets said, ‘but I’m not so sure. You think he was a cop-killer? What was
he like?’

The boy shrugged again, but this time he said nothing.