Dead of Night (38 page)

As Süleyman had shut the door behind her, he had looked very grave and she had felt her face flush with blood. But once he’d
sat down with her, everything had changed. He’d smiled, asked her how she was and then, although he hadn’t actually used the
word ‘sorry’, he had apologised to her for attempting to interfere in her personal life. He’d said that, even as her superior,
it had not been his place to do so and that she was to forget everything he had said to her the previous evening. He had offered
no excuse in mitigation and had then simply left her office with a polite bow.

Ayşe had been stunned and upset. And in the evening, when İzzet Melik took her out to dinner and then proposed marriage to
her, she had been even more distressed. Of course she had been flattered, and she told İzzet so, but she also told him that
she would need to think about it for a while before she gave him her answer. At the back of her mind she could hear her late
mother’s voice urging her to accept
immediately, ‘while you still can!’ But she just couldn’t. She liked İzzet, she even found his company amusing and of interest,
but did she love him? She didn’t know. All she did know was that when Mehmet Süleyman had apologised for interfering in her
life, she’d felt crushed. Finally and at last, or so it seemed, he had managed to flush her out of his system. There was now
no hope for any sort of relationship with him ever again. Hard as she tried, Ayşe could not help the tears that ran down her
face and on to the bedclothes.

With her mass of red hair and her tiny misshapen body, the girl looked like the Nain Rouge, the legendary harbinger of doom
for the city of Detroit. It was said that the Nain or Red Dwarf had first appeared to the city’s founder, Antoine Cadillac,
just before he lost his fortune and became bankrupt.

‘I heard Officer Zevets is dead,’ Misty Rodgers told Lieutenant Fortune. ‘I thought I’d better come in.’

She explained how and why Zevets had come to see her.

‘Cliff Kercheval and Artie Bowen were friends of mine,’ she said. ‘But Artie weren’t really a friend, not really.’

‘Why not?’ Fortune asked.

She shrugged. ‘Too much crack,’ she said. ‘Artie had a big habit and it made him crazy. Sometimes the two of them, they’d
do jobs for people, together.’

‘Criminal jobs?’

‘I guess.’ She looked down at the floor. Then she looked up again, and this time she said with more certainty, ‘Yes. Yes,
just lately the boys had money.’

‘Do you know where from or why?’

‘No. Although Artie sometimes got other jobs from men he . . . guys he did the dirty with, you know.’

‘Men he charged for sex?’

‘Yeah.’

Artie Bowen had definitely had sex with Grant T. Miller.

‘Did he ever mention the names of any of these men?’ ‘No.’ She swallowed hard. ‘But one thing I do know is that Cliff wouldn’t
never have killed hisself.’

They knew that Kercheval had not committed suicide, but who in fact had killed him was still unclear. Maybe this girl had
a view on that.

‘Why do you think Cliff wouldn’t have killed himself, Misty?’

‘Because he applied to Wayne State University and he got in,’ she said. ‘Art. He was studying art. “Start again, Misty,” he
told me. “I get my place and start my life over.” Then some job come along. “Just one more job with Artie, Misty, and then
I’m out.” Then he was dead.’

Her eyes began to look wet.

‘You’ve no idea what the job was, do you, Misty?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘But I know it come from Artie and I know it frightened Cliff. I begged and begged him to tell me what it
was!’ She began to cry. ‘But he wouldn’t. He said he didn’t want me to know nothing so I couldn’t get in no trouble! It’s
my belief that Artie killed Cliff. I reckon he wanted his share and Cliff’s too. He was always greedy, God rest his soul!’

Grant T. Miller had started talking to his mother Rose once again. Some of the prison guards reckoned he’d finally lost it,
but Lieutenant Ed Devine disagreed. The old man was just trying to convince the world that he was crazy in order to enter
a plea of insanity. Ed was not fooled. But then neither was Miller.

‘Grant, dear,’ Rose said as she sat on his prison cot and applied her trademark thick red lipstick, ‘you know I am very distressed
at how you have allowed the Packard to get into such a terrible state of disrepair.’

Grant T. lowered his head in shame. ‘I’m sorry, Momma,’ he said.

‘How we going to go out touring if you allow that automobile to rust into the ground?’

‘I don’t know, Momma.’

Rose put some blue powder on top of her eyelids and said, ‘I recoil from saying that you’re just like your father, but ignorance
is as ignorance does, and it is ignorant and disrespectful to cut off your own mother’s only form of transport.’

‘I know.’

Ed Devine, his shoulder still strapped up and painful, looked through the bars at Miller talking to his dead mother. ‘Hey,
Miller, motherfucker!’ he said. ‘Stop trying to pull a crazy stunt, man!’

But Miller neither replied nor even seemed to hear him.

‘You know you should tell these folks about how you got those two boys to kill that Hispanic cop,’ Rose said. ‘That was spiteful,
Grant, but I can understand it. I would have been disappointed if you’d had relations with a spic, but you didn’t and so I’m
content.’ Her eyes glittered with malice. ‘Spiteful, though. You should tell them about that, Grant.’

He turned away from her. ‘No . . . Wasn’t spite, Mother, I had to do it.’

‘Did you?’ Rose sprayed perfume, Californian Poppy, on her wrists and underneath her ears. ‘Did you also have to kill Artie
too? All he wanted was more money. You could’ve given him that, couldn’t you? You have it.’

‘Artie killed the other boy, his buddy,’ Grant said.

‘Oh, don’t you go getting all moral on me now, Grant T. Miller,’ Rose said. ‘You didn’t give a damn about—’

‘All right! All right!’ He dragged a shaking hand through his hair. ‘All right, I killed Artie because, because the sex, it
all got . . .’

‘Your little sex game ended in poor Artie being suffocated to death,’ Rose said. ‘That’s the truth, isn’t it, Grant. Your
little tryst went wrong and then you lost your temper and smashed his head in. I blame your father. He had no control over
his emotions either. Crying it was with him. You know, Grant, you should really tell these people that you got those boys
to kill Gerald Diaz.’

And then he lost his temper. ‘No, Momma!’ he shouted. ‘I won’t do it! My attorney says that if I keep quiet, everything’ll
be all right. You just want to get me into trouble, Momma! You always did!’

Rose’s eyes hardened. ‘Now that is a lie, Grant Titus Miller, and you know it.’

‘No it isn’t!’ Miller yelled. ‘Buying all that real estate around the house to stop the niggers getting nearby was your idea,
Momma! You made Sam Goins set that up, you started Gül, you!’

And then, just like his father, Grant T. Miller began to cry.

Ed Devine turned to the prison guard behind him and said, ‘He strike you as genuinely crazy?’

The guard shrugged. ‘Who’s to know. He talks to someone in there.’

‘When did it start?’

‘Soon as he arrived. Started yelling first when they cut that girlie old ponytail off of his head.’

Miller had been in prison awaiting trial for three days. It seemed very convenient that he began to break down as soon as
he was incarcerated. It was not, however, a phenomenon that was unknown. And if it was genuine, then he seemed to be talking
to Rose about killing the rent boy Artie Bowen. This only strengthened John Shalhoub’s evidence about how Miller had accidentally
killed Bowen and then continued to have sex with his body. Shalhoub had also told his interrogators that Miller had paid Bowen
and Kercheval to kill Diaz and disable Rita Addison. Bowen, in order to feed his crack habit, had then killed Kercheval for
his share of Miller’s money. That had of course, at the time, been a gift to Shalhoub.

‘Well I don’t know about your momma,’ Devine said as he began to move away from Miller’s cell. ‘But I’ll still see you in
court, Grant T.’

Miller glanced up just as his mother, a vicious pair of eyebrow tweezers in one hand, looked at Devine with reptile eyes and
said, ‘You keep your opinions to yourself, nigger!’

Çetin İkmen’s flight to Frankfurt wasn’t due to leave Detroit until nearly eight in the evening, and so when Martha Bell invited
him over to Antoine Cadillac for lunch, he was happy to accept. It also, of course, gave him a little more time with old Zeke
Goins.

Martha had laid on quite a spread. The really cold weather had let up for a few days and so most of the snow had melted. This
had revealed the famous vegetable patch, and now that the sun was out, Martha had put out a table laden with food right in
the middle of the garden. When Çetin İkmen arrived, she kissed him on the cheek and pointed at the table. ‘Now there’s Coney
dogs and French fries, my own coleslaw, corn bread and home-made chilli,’ she said as she pushed a plate into his hands. ‘You
just get involved.’

İkmen looked at the vast, groaning banquet before him and said, ‘That looks wonderful.’

‘You want coffee?’ Martha asked.

He sat down beside Zeke, who was slumped contentedly in his chair, and said, ‘Yes please.’

‘OK. I’ll just go inside and bring a fresh jug.’ Martha sashayed off back to the apartment block, her great tiger-print coat
swinging in the gentle breeze behind her.

İkmen took a local version of the famous American hot dog, the Detroit Coney dog, and said, ‘How are you, Zeke?’

The funeral of his brother Sam had only taken place the day before.

‘I miss Sam,’ the old man said. ‘What do you think he was doing up at that old Packard plant, Çetin?’

The Chief of Police had decided not to reopen the Elvis Goins murder. Samuel had been at the site of the incident with Grant
T. Miller and John Shalhoub and had shot himself, but quite why he’d done so remained uncertain – at least as far as Zeke
was concerned.

‘I think he was probably trying to get Miller to give that land back to the city,’ İkmen said.

Zeke Goins frowned. ‘Don’t know how Sam, much as I loved him, could have done business with that old Black Legionnaire!’ he
said. ‘You reckon he killed hisself because of that?’

‘I don’t know.’ İkmen bit into the Coney dog and found it, unlike most hot dogs he’d tried in the past, spicy and interesting.
‘We cannot know what pressures people have put upon them. Your brother did a lot of good work for your people in his life.’

In fact there had been some evidence amongst his papers that Sam was becoming increasingly frustrated with the Melungeons
and the rate of their progress into mainstream life. He still railed at what he saw as their sometimes wilful rejection of
education. Although whether they even now had the same opportunities as other groups, İkmen didn’t feel qualified to say.

‘I am proud of Sam, yes,’ Zeke Goins said.

‘And Grant T. Miller is behind bars,’ İkmen said.

‘But not for killing my boy.’

‘No.’ İkmen put what remained of his Coney dog down and lit up a cigarette. ‘In that I am afraid that your Turk failed you,
Zeke.’

‘And Detroit PD.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Fancy that Shalhoub giving out information to Miller about the department all the
time! An Arab too! Miller can’t have liked that! Hey, is it right that Miller gone crazy in prison?’

‘So some seem to think,’ İkmen said. ‘I can understand it. He wanted to spend his final years alone in his house, away from
people he felt were inferior. Now he’s surrounded by them.’

The old man turned towards him. ‘You know it’s OK that you never found who killed Elvis.’

İkmen frowned. ‘Is it?’ Surely that couldn’t be so? If not to find out, ultimately, who had killed Elvis Goins, why had he
stayed on in Detroit? Except of course that he did know who had killed Elvis Goins, and why.

‘You know, Diaz said something to me just before he died,’ Zeke said. ‘He said that I was a lucky man.’

‘Did he?’

‘Yeah. He said that because of Sam and Martha, young Keisha and this garden, I had a lot. I had a sight more’n a load of other
folks who just got the booze bottle, or crack, or some hole in the ground for a home.’

‘Lieutenant Diaz was a very perceptive man,’ İkmen said. ‘And very right.’

Zeke Goins raised a couple of French fries in salute. ‘Yes, he was. I guess that what I have is just my kismet, as you my
Turkish brothers say. Took me many years to really understand that. Took me a lost marriage and a lot of bumming around and
drinking to understand that.’

‘But now you do? Understand fate?’

Someone was singing what sounded like the old Supremes hit ‘Baby Love’ somewhere. The old man looked over his shoulder and
smiled. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But it don’t matter none. Here comes Martha Bell singing Motown hits and carrying coffee and cigarettes.’

İkmen leaned across and saw her too, resplendent in her crazy tiger-print fake-fur coat.

‘Motown is the heartbeat of this city, Inspector,’ the old man said. ‘Don’t matter too much really who lives or who dies,
Detroit keeps on going just like she always has. We used to make automobiles and sing songs here in the Motor City. Now we
work the land instead. But we still sing songs. We still do that good.’

Detroit is the largest city in the US state of Michigan and is a major port on the Detroit River, which marks the border between
America and Canada. Founded in 1701 by a French officer called Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, Detroit was owned first by France,
then Britain and then in 1796 under the terms of the Jay Treaty it passed into US hands. In modern times Detroit has been
famous mainly as the centre of the mighty US motor industry – it remains the home of Ford and General Motors – and also of
Motown Records. During the Second World War, Detroiters made weapons to fight the Nazis and the city was known as the Arsenal
of Democracy. But after the Second World War and with the coming of competition from motor industries abroad, the city began
to decline. In 1967 rioting on the streets of Detroit signalled that black workers in the car plants were sick of being treated
as second class. But in the eyes of many people the city’s reputation was tainted and the decline accelerated.