Dead of Night (31 page)

‘We know he’d been charged with misdemeanours. He a player or just a small fish?’

‘No player.’ The boy smirked.

‘So a small fish?’

‘Who ain’t round here?’ The boy looked at him with straight, accusing pale blue eyes. ‘You see any made men around these parts,
Officer?’

Zevets didn’t reply, on the grounds that the answer was self-evident. The boy began to move away and Zevets let him go. Kids
like that were hardened to most things. He was seventeen at most, but had the eyes of a forty-year-old who’d been in prison
at least twice. There was no point pursuing anything with him. The door to Kercheval’s apartment, still taped over, was black
and grimy and pitted with what looked like pellets from a BB gun. According to Shalhoub, Kercheval had lived an idle life,
sitting around taking welfare payments, smoking joints and occasionally ranting about white supremacy. The latter activity,
in this particular building, Zevets knew, was a very common pursuit. Just like back in the sixties, to these people everything
was the ‘niggers’ fault’ – the fact that they were poor, the fact that they couldn’t get jobs, the fact that so many of them
were on drugs. It was so much easier than blaming economics they didn’t understand, or City Hall, or their own legacy of white,
usually southern, poverty. They were blind to the black poor, just as the black poor were often blind to them. So little had
changed, and yet so much had too. That Mark Zevets, a rich Jewish boy from a good family, should be walking Detroit’s streets
as a
police officer – and a gay one at that – was certainly some kind of progress. But with people like these, still so needy and
hostile, was it enough?

‘Hey.’

Zevets looked round and saw a tiny girl standing behind him. At first he thought, through the gloom, that she was a child,
but then he realised that she was actually a red-headed dwarf. Looking at him with such open hostility it almost made him
flinch, the girl said, ‘You all about Cliff again?’

Her use of Kercheval’s shortened name made Zevets wonder if she had known him well. If she had, then possibly she had liked
him too. He decided to change tack very slightly. ‘I’m not convinced that Clifford killed my colleague,’ he said.

‘The Latino?’ the girl said. ‘Nah.’ Then she laughed. ‘Woulda beat up on the nigger, though.’

Zevets sucked down on his disgust at this reference to Rita’s attack and the girl’s dismissal of her as a ‘nigger’.

‘Cliff was a clean boy,’ the girl said. ‘Only liked clean girls.’

By that he imagined she had to mean white girls. She’d taken more than a shine to Cliff herself, he suspected. ‘You knew Clifford
well?’

She looked at the ground in a coy way. ‘Maybe.’

‘How?’ Zevets leaned down so that his head was on the same level as hers and smiled. ‘How you know Cliff?’ He saw that she
had a bag with a name very roughly scrawled on it in silver paint. He took a punt on it being her own. ‘Misty?’

She giggled. Then, as quickly as the laughter started, so it stopped. ‘We used to hang,’ she said.

‘Here?’

She shrugged.

‘Here?’ Zevets asked again.

‘Sometimes.’

‘Anywhere else?’

For some reason she was hostile again. He couldn’t fathom why,
and when she began to move off and away from him, he felt his heart sink.

But then, just before she went out of sight, she said, ‘We’d go round old Brush Park sometimes, with Artie.’

Zevets ran over to her and just stopped short of grabbing one of her arms. ‘Artie? A friend of Clifford’s?’

She looked at him with contempt. ‘Yeah.’

‘Artie who?’

‘Artie Bowen,’ she said, as if everyone would and indeed should know who that was.

But Mark Zevets didn’t have a clue. ‘A friend of Clifford’s?’ he repeated.

‘Went off somewhere when Cliff disappeared,’ Misty said.

No one as far as Zevets knew had mentioned this friend Artie Bowen before, or Misty for that matter. ‘Do you know where?’
he asked.

She sighed. ‘Probably making money just for hisself now,’ she said.

Zevets frowned. ‘Did he used to make money for other people?’

‘He give it to me and Cliff. Cliff used to score for him sometimes.’

‘Dope?’

‘Mainly.’

‘So what sort of work does Artie Bowen do?’

‘What Cliff wouldn’t never do.’ She smiled. ‘Cliff weren’t like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like a man who sucks another man’s dick for money,’ Misty said.

Only a very distant cousin was prepared to come and claim Ali Kuban’s dead body for burial. Even he would only do that provided
the staff at the mortuary listened to his rants about how much he had despised his relative.

‘The only reason I’m doing this at all is to make sure that he at least has a decent Muslim funeral,’ the man said as he watched
the orderlies load Kuban’s body into an unmarked van. ‘Pity he couldn’t have led a decent life too, but there it is. Kismet.’

Ayşe Farsakoğlu had listened to Dr Sarkissian’s account of the cousin’s visit with interest if with little real attention.
Mehmet Süleyman was in her office, and his presence was distracting her. She was unhappy that it could still do that.

‘And so Kuban’s last, probably most sensible, act in terms of the safety of the city pulls the curtain down on a miserable
and seemingly worthless life,’ the Armenian said. ‘I imagine he’ll be safely in the ground by the end of the day.’

‘Thank you for letting me know, Doctor,’ Ayşe said as she watched Süleyman pick up items from İkmen’s desk, smile, and put
them down again. Though thinner than he had been, he was still a stunning man, and she wished that he would leave.

‘Thank you for telling me, Doctor,’ she repeated into the phone.

‘Pleasure.’ He laughed a little. ‘If you know what I mean!’

‘Yes. I hope you have a good day, Doctor.’

‘And you.’

Ayşe put the phone back on its cradle and said to Süleyman, ‘Yes, sir?’

He looked up and smiled. How he managed to keep his teeth so white when he smoked so heavily, Ayşe couldn’t imagine. Maybe
he had cosmetic dentistry.

‘Sergeant, I need to speak to you about some practical procedural issues,’ he said. ‘Because Inspector İkmen is going to be
in the US for an as yet unspecified length of time, your duties as his professional partner will need to be temporarily reassigned.’

She’d known that this was bound to happen, but had thought that notification would come from higher up. But then she didn’t
know what discussions Süleyman had had with his superiors since his return. ‘Sir.’

‘I’d like to fix a meeting with you at four-thirty this afternoon,’ he said. ‘Is that convenient for you?’

She was, it had to be said, engaged in nothing beyond some non-urgent paperwork. ‘That will be fine, sir,’ she said.

It was still odd that, even when they were alone, she called him ‘sir’. In the past she’d slept with him, they had kissed
each other, seen each other naked, made love.

‘Good.’ With yet another smile he took his leave of her and left. Ayşe was due to go for a drink with İzzet Melik after her
shift finished at five. What, she wondered, would he be doing while she talked to his boss?

Americans had the weirdest things for breakfast. Ed Devine had made up a great stack of thick rounds he called pancakes. As
far as İkmen was concerned, these bore no relation to the pancakes he had back in Turkey. There they were thin and could have
either sweet or savoury fillings. Here they seemed to be simply drowned in maple syrup. Great big doughy discs covered in
stuff that had only to make contact with a tooth to dissolve it. But he was nothing if not a trier, and so, between puffs
on his cigarette, he managed to get one of the pancakes down. Devine, a contented expression on his face as he sat down to
his breakfast, made short work of five.

After a few moments of silent chewing, the American said, ‘So about what we were saying last night . . . how you know you can
trust me. I mean, if Diaz was bent . . .’

‘I don’t,’ İkmen replied. ‘I just have to take the word of your Chief, who seems to think that you are trustworthy. Also,
er, Ed, you are, er, well, you are black . . .’

‘You think that Grant T. Miller hasn’t never bribed a black man?’ Devine said. He laughed. ‘Where big money is involved, anyone
can be in the frame. And Miller, for all his white-power craziness, will use anyone to further his aims. White, black, grey,
green – he don’t care. Use friggin’ men from Mars if he had to.’

‘So are you saying, Ed, that I can’t trust you?’

Devine laughed again. ‘No. And yes,’ he said. ‘One’s fact, one’s theory. In fact, I could never do anything for that old vulture,
money or no money. In theory? Well, like most folks I have a mortgage to pay, a wife to support, kids going through college.
I’m vulnerable as anyone else.’

‘As Diaz?’

‘Maybe more,’ he said. ‘Diaz, as far as I know, didn’t have debts. He was pissed about his marriage breaking down, but then
that’s just part of the American condition. We like to commit, you know? Then we get bored. Even I’ve been married twice,
and I been with my wife for over twenty years. The Chief been married twice too, Diaz once, but divorced, Shalhoub three times
. . .’

The doorbell rang. Devine got up and said, ‘Who can that be?’

While he was gone, İkmen shovelled half of his second pancake into Devine’s cat’s bowl underneath the table. Very soon afterwards
he heard the sound of heavy purring. Meanwhile there were voices out in Devine’s hall, and a few moments later the lieutenant
came back in with Dr Weiss the ballistics expert in tow.

‘Good morning, Inspector İkmen,’ Weiss said as he leaned across the table and shook the Turk by the hand.

‘Good morning, Doctor. Have you come to join us for breakfast?’

He smiled. ‘I know Ed makes a mean pancake,’ he said, ‘but no. I came because I worked very late last night and bumped into
someone who got me thinking.’

Devine first offered Weiss some coffee, which he declined, and then sat down to his breakfast again. ‘Who?’

‘Lionel Katz,’ he said.

‘The fraud guy?’

‘Yes. Through connections I won’t bore you with, I was at his bar mitzvah twenty or so years ago,’ Weiss said. ‘The diminishing
Jews of old downtown Detroit.’ He smiled again. ‘You know that synagogue in Griswold Street does get a fair congregation on
high holy days,
but . . . beside the by. Katz said he was working for you, Ed; something about a property company buying up from vulnerable people
in Brush Park.’

‘Called Gül,’ Devine said. ‘What about it?’

Weiss cleared his throat. ‘Katz told me he was having trouble finding out who owned this company. Registered, he said, sometime
in the 1990s in Savannah of all places. I thought nothing of it until he dropped a name at me.’

‘A name?’

‘Lacroix,’ Weiss said.

‘R. Lacroix,’ Devine elaborated. ‘You know an R. Lacroix?’

‘Sort of,’ Weiss said. ‘But she died sometime in the nineties.’

‘Oh.’ Devine was momentarily deflated. Then he said, ‘She?’

‘Rose Lacroix,’ Weiss said, ‘was Grant T. Miller’s southern belle mom, and she came from the beautiful city of Savannah.’

‘Why would Grant T. Miller buy up all the housing and land around his place? At the moment, it’s worth squat,’ Devine said.
Now in his office in police headquarters, he was addressing İkmen, Weiss, Shalhoub and Katz.

‘In the southern part of Brush Park, developers have been buying up old houses and empty lots for some years,’ Katz said.
‘There’s a level of redevelopment there. You can make money.’

‘But not a lot?’ Devine asked.

Katz shrugged. ‘Depends whether you’ve got confidence,’ he said. ‘If the D takes off one of these fine days, then prime sites
like that could be worth a bundle. If it doesn’t . . .’

Devine looked briefly at his computer screen. ‘Says here Rose Lacroix Miller died August eighth 1999, aged ninety-eight,’
he said. ‘This Gül company started . . .’

‘Ninety-one,’ Katz said.

‘So old Rosie was still alive when it was formed, maybe cognisant of its purpose . . . You know, I didn’t realise that Rose was
still alive
then. I mean, that place of Grant T.’s was in a helluva state years before that.’

‘If I remember correctly,’ İkmen interjected, ‘there was also the issue of someone called R. Lacroix paying for Elvis Goins’
funeral.’

Devine frowned. ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ he said. ‘Think that was old Rosie too?’

‘The handwriting looked as if it could have come from an old person,’ İkmen said. ‘Maybe if her son had killed Elvis Goins,
she felt some guilt about that which manifested as a desire to pay for the boy’s funeral?’

Dr Weiss looked very doubtful. ‘Unlikely, I would say,’ he said. ‘To my recollection, Rose was not a woman easily given to
sentiment, unless it was over her son.’

‘Whatever may be the truth, we need to speak to Grant T. anyway,’ Devine said. ‘Apart from anything else, I think he probably
needs to know that a weapon has been found that belongs to him.’

‘Possibly,’ Dr Weiss interjected. ‘It possibly belongs to him.’

‘Does it?’ Devine stood up from his desk and winked at Weiss. ‘Oh, and there’s me thinking it was all cut and dried and everything.
What a shame!’

‘So what do we do now?’ Shalhoub asked.

‘I think that someone needs to visit Mr Miller. And someone else should visit the Voss Funeral Home.’

Mark Zevets wasn’t afraid of east side Detroit. OK, it had a bad reputation for drug-dealing, drug-taking, prostitution and
all sorts and varieties of crime, but he was a realist, he knew that wasn’t the whole picture. Most people, whatever their
addiction, their status, their race, religion or whatever, were just trying to do what people everywhere did and get by. It
wasn’t easy, and Mark had a lot of sympathy for their plight. That said, there were spots that did make his skin creep. One
of the worst ones was on the corner of Chene and Ferry. Even as he approached, he could see the rocks of crack passing between
the windows of cruising cars. Some black women stood in slippers in the snowy slush, completely inured to the cold, totally
wrapped up in their need.