Dead of Night (8 page)

‘We don’t know that!’ Zeke said. He’d had this conversation with his brother before. ‘All them gangs dead now!’

‘Exactly! They all ended up killing each other or dying from their addiction to heroin. Elvis just died early on in all that.
I don’t know why! Nobody does!’

There was silence. Just for a moment, Samuel actually thought that he might have got through to his brother. But then Zeke
said, ‘No, Miller killed him! He killed him, because when I tell the other men on the line that Elvis died, he laughed.’

‘Miller is a monster,’ Samuel said. ‘But that doesn’t mean that he killed Elvis.’

‘He dealed drugs all that time.’

‘Maybe, but we can’t really say that—’

‘Then why he don’t have me arrested when I go up Brush Park that first time and sink my teeth into his flesh? Eh? Diaz and
Sosobowski pull me off him, throw me outta the house, and then Miller, he does nothing! Why he always run out after me when
I goes up there? Like a crazy man he is shouting out he killed my boy.’

‘Zeke, you shouldn’t be going up to Brush Park,’ Samuel said. ‘Miller could have you arrested.’

‘Let him try!’

‘He may well do that,’ Samuel said. He ran an agitated hand through his thick grey hair. ‘Zeke, Miller taunts you because
you attacked him, and because you’re a Melungeon. You have to leave him alone.’

‘You just worried about your job!’ Zeke Goins said bitterly. But then just as quickly as his anger had arisen, so it subsided,
and he took one of Samuel’s hands in his. ‘I’m sorry, Sam. I didn’t mean that,’ he said.

‘It doesn’t matter what you say to me,’ Samuel Goins said as he looked at his brother’s bowed head with tenderness. ‘And contrary
to what you sometimes think, I’m not worried about my job. Grant T. Miller has no power over me. But he can make life unpleasant
for you, Zeke, if you keep going on with these accusations. He can have you arrested. You have to keep away from him, and
you have to stop trying to drag other people in too. Promise me you’ll do that, Zeke. Promise me.’

The younger of the two Turkish officers was just like him, in some ways. Divorced, not happy about it, paying for a kid. Gerald
Diaz put a carton of Chinese noodles in the microwave and pressed the button for it to cook. He sat down at the kitchen table
and lit up a cigarette while he waited. More fucking plastic food!

The older Turk, İkmen, would smoke all the time if he could. Like Gerald, he was quite open about that. But unlike Gerald,
he was also, in part at least, happy. Married with a huge number of kids by all accounts, he was a respected man back in his
own country, at the top of his profession. But he’d lost a child. Something to do with a drugs raid. His kid, like Zeke Goins’
boy, had died by a bullet.

It had to be hard to take. Gerald thought about his own son, Ernesto, and his stomach tightened. Carmen, his ex-wife, had
taken the boy back to her native Mexico when they got divorced. Ernesto was seventeen in a country that was torn apart every
day by drug-gang warfare. Luckily his son had a very clear and certain goal. He wanted to be a doctor. But that didn’t magically
make him invulnerable to harm. Anyone could get caught in crossfire. Anyone. Narcotic supply wars did so much harm! If only
narc addiction really were a public-health issue. Then, if the state controlled the addicts’ supply, as they
did for those who needed the drug medicinally, the men with the guns would be put out of business. Simplistic maybe, a dream
maybe, but . . .

The microwave pinged, telling Gerald that his noodles were ready. But he didn’t get up immediately. He just sat and smoked
and looked down at the table with blank eyes. He could understand why Zeke Goins wanted the Turks to help him. Not that he
would or could tell the old man that. Everybody needed something or someone to believe in, and with Zeke that was Turks, or
rather his notion of them. Those Melungeons who identified with the old Turkish sailors story were completely convinced of
its authenticity. Those among them of a more intellectual nature pointed at how similar some of their words were to Turkish;
some even claimed actual DNA evidence. People like Zeke believed all that completely. Not so his brother. While Zeke was all
about history, heritage and arcane connections, Sam was concerned only with the future of his people and with their integration
into the mainstream, their little corner of the American Dream. But then unlike Zeke, Sam had not lost a child, his wife and,
some would say, his mind. In a way, Gerald was sorry that İkmen and Süleyman couldn’t help Zeke to find out who had killed
his son. If they, as Turks, found out, Zeke would believe them, whatever they discovered. As it was, if Gerald himself or
any other Detroit cop came up with anything, the old man wouldn’t believe it on principle. If the Turks had a shot at the
‘who killed Elvis Goins?’ story and discovered a solution, they could actually put it to bed and give Zeke some peace. But
that wasn’t possible. They only had four more days in the city and then they had to go home. Besides, who actually had killed
Elvis Goins wasn’t that hard to work out, not really. Making anything stick was, however, quite another matter and also quite
impossible.

‘What do you mean, Kuban has got a Facebook page?’ Commissioner Ardıç said.

Ayşe Farsakoğlu, standing to attention in front of his vast wooden desk, said, ‘It’s not his, sir. It’s a fan site. It’s where
people who admire Ali Kuban and his “work” go to talk about his crimes and, well, fantasise and—’

‘It’s everything I hate about the internet!’ her superior roared. His large jowly face wobbled with indignation. ‘Criminals
having “followers”. It’s appalling! Should be shut down!’

‘It’s difficult to control, sir.’

And that, if she was honest, made Ayşe sad too. She’d found the rapist Ali Kuban’s admiration site easily. It was full of
accounts of his acts and suggestions for further action. In reality, those involved in it were probably bored kids who did
it for a laugh. But in common with a lot of internet material, the legality surrounding the expressing of such sentiments
was tenuous. Ayşe had not liked what she had seen on that site, and so she’d brought it to the boss of her boss. The Commissioner
could, in theory, act upon such information. Although quite what he might do was open to question. The Ali Kuban fan site
wasn’t even written in Turkish. Constructed in poor English, it was in all likelihood the brainchild of some rich kid.

‘The world gets madder every day,’ Ardıç said gloomily as he chewed upon the end of an unlit cigar. ‘Inspector İkmen travels
thousands of miles over to America, and there he finds a man of
Turkish ancestry who claims he has been waiting for İkmen to arrive to help him gain justice.’

Ayşe frowned. ‘Sir?’

‘Something about this man’s son getting killed in a gang dispute.’ Ardıç shrugged. İkmen had told him about the crime over
the telephone, but he couldn’t remember anything about it. All he could really recall was that the American in question had
been a Melungeon. A deputation of those people had turned up once when he was in Ankara. They had met with council officials
and had been greeted by them as long-lost brothers. An odd and at times almost incomprehensible artefact, the visit of the
Melungeons had nevertheless been a touching affair. They all believed with a passion that they were Turks. The Turkish government,
for their part, apparently concurred. Ardıç didn’t know.

‘I’ll get the cyber-crime boffins to monitor Kuban’s fan site,’ he told Ayşe after a pause. ‘See what they can find.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’m glad you brought it to my attention.’

Ayşe left Ardıç’s office. Before the smoking ban, it had always smelled of rather sweet cigar tobacco. Now it just simply
stank of the Commissioner’s feet. Mercifully out in the corridor once again, she breathed in deeply and began to make her
way back to her own office. As she walked past Süleyman’s office, she looked in and saw İzzet Melik. They smiled at each other,
but neither one of them spoke. They’d talked for hours the previous evening in the Kaktus. For the first time in a long time,
Ayşe had actually enjoyed herself.

Çetin İkmen was completely partisan, and he knew it.

‘I’m only interested in programmes and solutions that include the criminal or the criminalised addict,’ he told Süleyman as
they both slipped out of the morning session. It was being led by another advocate of Zero Tolerance, this time from the UK.
‘I think we’ve both just about finished with Zero Tolerance for now, don’t you?’

When they got outside the Cobo Center, they lit up cigarettes and only then considered what they might do for the rest of
the morning. Or rather Süleyman did. İkmen knew exactly what he wanted to do.

‘I think we should get a taxi to that place that Mr Goins spoke about, Brush Park,’ he said.

Süleyman frowned. ‘You can’t get involved, Çetin,’ he said.

‘I’m not. I just want to see the place. Now, are you coming or are you staying here?’

Gerald Diaz had spotted the two Turkish officers leaving the auditorium and had followed them when they went outside. He had
meant to just go out and have a cigarette with them. But when he heard İkmen use the words ‘Brush Park’, he changed his mind
and decided to follow them.

The small amount of snow that had melted the previous day had hardened into ice overnight. As it insinuated in around the
frame of his bedroom window, Grant T. Miller was reminded of the thin, chilly fingers of Jack Frost. Another mythical being
from his childhood who lived in the stories that his mother told him and in his subsequent dreams.

His mother hadn’t even known who Jack Frost was until she moved to Detroit. In her home town there was never any snow, and
people chilled to tales of voodoo queens and zombies and the ghosts that haunted Spanish Creeper-encrusted cemeteries. In
her head, Rose Miller had never left the Deep South, and so all the stories she told with a northern theme were as new to
her as they had been to him. Downtown, his illiterate father had sewed in his basement shop and had never come home until
the early hours of the morning. To him, not to work was to be dead, and to be dead was something to be feared. Grant T. could
understand that. Although why the old man had always had to do everything for himself, always play by the rules, always be
the big man’s bitch was beyond him. Had he wanted, Gustav Miller could have really fleeced boss Henry Ford. But he
hadn’t. Like a fool, he had only ever taken what was offered. He’d been too frightened to go for any more. A whipped Jew from
Europe! Grant T. turned his nose up at the thought of his father, and shook the ice from off his counterpane. Snow from the
hole in the ceiling had dripped down on to the bed. It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last. The house was falling
in on him, folding up like a picture in a pop-up book. Eventually it would entomb him and he’d become like an Edgar Allan
Poe character, a premature burial.

He swung his thin white legs over the side of the bed and slid his feet into his damp, slimy slippers. Everything was rotting,
and that included him. He’d been left to rot. One day, he’d just stopped, and everybody else had waved him goodbye as they
headed blithely off into the future. He didn’t know why – or rather he did, but he just wouldn’t see it. That was far more
dangerous than some disintegrating old roof. He put on the robe that had acted as an extra blanket on his bed and forced his
curved spine to straighten. Stiff he undoubtedly was, but considering how he lived, he was very well for his age. There weren’t
many men of eighty-five who could survive in an unheated barn of a house with holes all over it. That was something to be
proud of.

Grant T. picked his false teeth out of the glass beside his bed and put them into his mouth. If only his teeth had been like
his hair! That, long and grey and thick as a horse’s tail, hung down to the middle of his back. Like Samson, he felt that
his strength was in that hair, and also in common with the Biblical character he hated the thought of having it cut – even
if it did make him look a little girlie. He knew he was a man; that was all that really mattered.

But then suddenly the peace of Grant T. Miller’s morning regime was broken. Unusually, there were voices outside. He didn’t
like that at all.

Neither İkmen nor Süleyman was shocked by what they saw. That a man lived in a house that was falling down around him was
not
something out of the ordinary. New migrants into İstanbul often ended up squatting in semi-derelict houses. But for an apparently
wealthy person to do such a thing was strange.

‘If this man did kill that old Melungeon’s son, then maybe he punishes himself by living here,’ Süleyman said as he shivered
on the pavement.

‘Maybe,’ İkmen said. The taxi-driver hadn’t wanted to bring them to Brush Park, much less to the house of Grant T. Miller.
He’d suggested some apparently pretty island somewhere, but İkmen had been adamant. If the place was indeed crawling with
junkies and crackheads, they would, he told the man, deal with it. As it was, Brush Park was eerily silent. İkmen looked up
at the house in front of them and frowned. At one end, what looked like the remnants of an old balcony melted into the snow
that covered the extensive garden. On the other side, what seemed to have been a tower had collapsed. The roof of the tower,
a pointed cone of tiles, lay in front of the house like a casually discarded hat. All around, other houses languished in similar
states of disrepair and neglect. In some cases, whole blocks had disappeared completely, the houses bulldozed, replaced by
empty, litter-strewn lots. It was, İkmen felt, almost as if the district had been bombed. He went up to the front gate that
hung limply between two almost uprooted posts and stared.

‘This city was almost another place when the man who owns this house worked in the car industry,’ he said. ‘When I was a child,
you know, Detroit was the absolute centre of the car world. Can you remember when the dolmuşes
¹
were all old American cars?’