Dead of Night (32 page)

Although Misty hadn’t told him much, Zevets had learned from her that Clifford Kercheval’s old friend Artie Bowen had a bit
of a rock habit. As well as buying dope for the others, his little blow-job enterprise probably funded quite a few crack pipes,
and word was that some kid had been forced to go down on a group of gangsters in a crack shack somewhere in this area. Some
folk liked sex when they were high. A lot of them didn’t give too much thought to who they did it with or details such as
issues of consent. That said, a willing participant had to be a lot easier than some terrified kid who could fight and scream
and make trouble. A white boy who’d do the business for the price of a couple of rocks would have some sort of appeal, if
only that inherent in apparently degrading a person who belonged to a race who had been oppressors in the past. And Bowen,
according to the mug shot Zevets had got off the computer for him, wasn’t a bad-looking man. The Chene/Ferry crews would not,
he felt, say no to a bit of Artie.

Ignoring the desperate addict women on the corner, Mark Zevets made his way to the only Chene/Ferry crack shack he knew he
stood some small chance of getting out alive from. If the place was full, he wouldn’t have a prayer, but it was midday, and
so with luck, most of the inhabitants would be downtown hustling. That, hopefully, would just leave old Mel.

The so-called shack had originally been quite a nice house. It was a detached wooden place that had once had windows and doors.
Now it just had flaps of chipboard that could be pulled across in bad weather, opened in good – if of course anyone even noticed
what the temperature was. Mark banged on what passed for a front door while looking down at the bodies of several baby mice
as they oozed through the remnants of the floorboards. ‘Mel? Mel, you in there? Mel!’

For a while, nothing happened at all. But then Mark didn’t expect it to. If Mel was in, which was almost certain, he was probably
dealing with a comedown, which meant that he was probably on smack. A lot if not all of the crackheads Mark had come across
used heroin to help calm down after a crack binge.

‘Mel!’ He hammered on the door again. Only after just shy of five minutes had passed were his efforts rewarded.

‘Where the fuck’s the fire, boy?’

The tiny gap between the chipboard slab and the door frame revealed a small black man wearing nothing but a hat and a string
vest. He had grizzled grey hair and a small but unkempt beard, and could have been almost any age from forty-five up to eighty.
Ageing a crack addict was a difficult task, as Mark knew only too well. Mel Cooper, however, was a person whose age, due to
his many previous arrests for possession, Mark was well aware of.

‘You know seventy is not a good number to still be living in a shit
shack at, Mel,’ Zevets said as he entered the vaguely smoky interior of the frigidly cold building.

‘You think?’ The old man laughed, then coughed, then spat out a load of phlegm on to the floor. ‘So what you think I should
do about that then, Jew-boy?’

Zevets shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Mel,’ he said. ‘Maybe move in with Zita?’

The old man pulled a face.

‘She’s clean now,’ Zevets said as he followed Mel into what passed for a living room. It stank of piss and damp and semen.

‘I know,’ the old man said. ‘Last thing she needs is a junkie in her life.’

‘You’re still her dad.’

‘I’m a junkie,’ Mel said as he sat down and pulled a filthy sheet from the floor over his withered penis and balls. ‘Anyway,
what do you want, Jew-boy? I’m on a date with some smack.’

‘I appreciate that.’ Zevets bent down and gave Mel the printout of Artie Bowen’s mug shot. ‘Just want to know if you’ve seen
this dude.’

The old man held on to the picture with shaking hands, moving it up and down in his field of vision in an attempt to focus.
Eventually he just said, ‘Nah.’

‘His name’s Artie Bowen,’ Zevets said. ‘Lives in a nice apartment over by Lafayette Park that belongs to his brother.’

‘So why you looking for him up here?’ Mel asked. ‘In case you ain’t noticed, we don’t have too many rich white boys here.’

‘Artie Bowen, who his brother hasn’t heard from in he thinks about two weeks now, wasn’t at home when I called,’ Zevets said.
‘But then he mixes with the wrong crowd. A couple of dope kids over on Cass. A girl, and a boy called Cliff Kercheval who
we think might have killed himself. We need to talk to Artie about it. They were close.’

The old man shrugged. ‘Nothing to me, boy. Why you here with this shit?’

Zevets picked up the photograph and pushed it back into the old man’s lap. ‘Because Artie has a bit of a rock habit,’ he said.
‘The kid doesn’t have a job, and so he funds himself by sucking dick.’

‘Who don’t!’ The old man pushed the print out to one side and stared vacantly into space.

Zevets pushed it back and made him look at it. ‘To this kid, sucking dick is a business,’ he said. ‘Look again, old man, and
tell me whether this white boy ever been up here offering head for rocks.’

With a sigh, Mel looked again. He shook his head and looked up at Zevets. ‘We don’t get anything like that down here. Class
like that . . .’ He shrugged.

Mark Zevets hardly saw Artie Bowen as ‘class’, but in terms of the lower depths that was the Chene and Ferry intersection,
he probably looked like Johnny Depp.

‘OK.’ Zevets leaned forward and took the photograph out of the old man’s clawed hands. He was just pulling it away when he
felt Mel’s long, filthy fingernails suddenly bite into the flesh around his wrist. ‘Ow!’

‘Why don’t you ask your rich white buddies about your dick-sucking boy?’ he said fiercely. ‘Boys like that, they don’t have
to come down here. Lots of rich white folks pay good money.’ He smiled, showing blackened, snaggled teeth. ‘I know. Many years
ago now, young man, black as my ass is, I had more’n my share of white dick in exchange for rocks.’ He laughed. ‘The great
and the good, so they say! The great and the good!’

The old man’s eyes rolled. There’d be no more getting anything out of him for hours. Zevets, feeling both cold and bleak,
put a twenty-dollar bill into one of Mel’s clawed hands and left.

It was the smell that hit them first. It wasn’t like the usual old man/damp smell that Devine and Weiss at least associated
with Grant T. Miller’s home; rather it was a far more ripe and meaty aroma.

‘It’s sweet,’ Çetin İkmen said as he waded through the oceans of newspaper, unfinished meals and broken furniture that lay
all over the floor of the main reception room. ‘Rather like . . .’ He stopped himself from going any further. If he was wrong,
he would have caused unnecessary anxiety; if he was right, they’d find it soon anyway. The smell was strong.

Dr Weiss looked closely at a broken baby grand piano and said, ‘Rose Miller used to play the harmonium mainly. You could always
hear it going past this house.’

Devine, agitated, scratched his head. ‘Miller never goes out,’ he said. ‘Only to the end of the block. Where can he be?’

İkmen, still tuned into the smell, thought that it was unlikely that Miller would have died and begun to decompose so quickly.
The weather was, after all, still very cold.

‘Maybe Lieutenant Shalhoub will discover more up at the Voss place,’ Weiss said. ‘If Rose Miller did indeed pay for Elvis
Goins’ funeral, she must have trusted the Vosses on some level. Not that I’ve ever heard anything white supremacist about
them.’

Devine, casting around the shattered room, almost in despair, said, ‘Neither me. But that doesn’t mean that old Mr Stefan
won’t deny everything and just pin whatever happened on his dead brother.’

‘He was the one who signed the paperwork for the funeral,’ İkmen said.

‘True. But that don’t get Stefan off the hook,’ Devine said. ‘It’s a family business, meaning they should all know about everything
to do with it, Stefan included.’ He shrugged. ‘Where is this old fool?’

It had been a shock to discover that Grant T. Miller was out. As far as anyone knew, he never went beyond the end of his block.
A store out in Royal Oak delivered all his groceries. But when the police officers had knocked on his front door, it had swung
open and they’d found themselves in what appeared to be a completely empty house. It wasn’t easy to tell, because the place
was so full of junk, but it felt uninhabited.

‘I’m gonna go check upstairs,’ Devine said. ‘I don’t know whether the old man still sleeps up there or not.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Çetin İkmen said. It was pure curiosity that led him on. There was no need for him to follow Devine
up that broad, rickety staircase to possibly a world of broken and hazardous floors up above. But he was compelled.

As he put a foot on the first step, he heard Dr Weiss exclaim from the kitchen, ‘Oh God, there’s something vile on these curtains!’

İkmen followed Devine, and as he did so, the sweet smell of death and decay grew stronger and stronger. At the top of the
stairs, Devine sniffed and pointed in the direction of a closed wooden door in front of him. ‘Just in case,’ he said to İkmen,
‘I’d cover your mouth. I find it helps a bit to prevent vomiting when we find the stiff.’

There was no question but that he was coming on to her. She sat in front of his desk, in the chair he had led her to, while
he perched on the edge of the desk, casually and very close to her body. He smiled an awful lot, which was not at all like
the man he had become in recent years.

‘Sergeant Melik will be absent on vacation as from this Saturday,’ Süleyman said to Ayşe Farsakoğlu.

This was nothing she didn’t know. İzzet himself had told her that he was going back to İzmir for a few days to see his mother
and visit his children.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So for a few days, at least, we’ll both be alone,’ he said. Again, and unnervingly, he smiled. ‘It is therefore expedient
that when Sergeant Melik goes on leave, should the need arise, you and I will work as a team.’

Quite who had decided that this was ‘expedient’, Ayşe didn’t know. No one else had mentioned anything to her. But he was her
superior, and so how could she argue?

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good.’

She saw that he was looking at her legs and had to resist the temptation to pull her skirt down further towards her knees.
She was fully aware of the dichotomy between her earlier and her present feelings about him. It was truly strange to feel
creeped out by a man she had once fantasised about marrying. What a disaster that would have been! He had cheated on his wife
not only with the gypsy Gonca, but also, it was rumoured, with any other woman who casually took his fancy! That he was clearly
so sexually insatiable used to be, she had to admit, rather exciting. His appeal had always been that he didn’t appear to
have a clue as to how attractive to women he really was. But all that had gone. Since Ayşe’s brief affair with him years before,
Mehmet Süleyman had acquired a large dose of self-knowledge. Now he was a sensual, cocksure, if charming, playboy. True, he
was still good at his job, but unlike İkmen, it was not his life, and so his many women could, and did, sometimes, come first.

Unwilling to get up out of her chair with him so close to her, Ayşe stayed where she was. She hoped he couldn’t see that she
was sweating – such a thing made her look star-struck and weak. But then he got up, moved around to the other side of his
desk and sat down.

She stood up. ‘If that’s all, sir . . .’

‘Yes.’ He looked down at the papers on his desk and Ayşe began to walk towards his office door. İzzet, she knew, was waiting
for her downstairs in the car park. All she’d have to do was tidy up her office, switch off her computer and leave.

But then Süleyman’s voice brought her to a standstill. ‘And I would really use Sergeant Melik’s absence to think about whether
or not a liaison with him is a wise course of action,’ he said. ‘Affairs of the heart in the workplace can be problematic,
as I know you are aware.’

Stung and appalled, she wheeled around quickly to see that he was still looking down at the papers on his desk.

‘If my recollection is correct,’ he said, without looking up, ‘the last time you engaged in an affair in this station, it
all ended rather badly.’

He wasn’t lying. The last time she’d had an affair at work it had been with an officer called Orhan Tepe, and it had indeed
ended badly. Prior to that, she’d been with this stranger who now sat in front of her, this judgemental man who was making
her feel angry and dirty.

‘But nothing has happened between İzzet and myself!’ she blurted. To her horror, it was as if she needed him to know that
fact, as if she were still, somehow, under his spell. Every bone in her body seemed to squirm away from the idea, but still
she couldn’t entirely prise herself from it.

‘Well make sure that it stays that way,’ Süleyman continued. Then he looked up into what she knew was her red and maybe even
puffy face. ‘It would be most unprofessional.’

She was so tempted to say something! But she didn’t. She just stood there for a moment, feeling appalled at how, quite suddenly
and maddeningly, she desired him once again. Then she left to keep her date with her new, very courteous beau, İzzet Melik.

Quite who the corpse in Grant T. Miller’s bed had been was impossible to tell. The only things that were certain were that
it was male, and it definitely wasn’t Miller.

‘Thirty-five at the outside,’ Ed Devine said as he looked carefully at the smooth, if greying, torso. Not that actual identification
was possible at this stage, the man’s head having been almost totally destroyed.

Dr Weiss, who had now joined İkmen and Devine in Grant T. Miller’s cold and reeking bedroom, said, ‘I don’t want to cast aspersions,
but you know, years ago I wasn’t the only one around here who reckoned that Grant T. had a fancy for his own gender.’

Ed Devine, who had never heard such a thing in his life, narrowed his eyes. ‘You think Miller’s gay?’

‘Well and truly closeted,’ Weiss replied. ‘But think about it, Lieutenant, can you ever recall Grant T. Miller with any woman
apart from his mother? I can’t.’