Dead of Night (9 page)

In spite of the cold, Süleyman smiled. ‘Just,’ he said. ‘Mainly Chevrolets, weren’t they?’

‘Many of them, yes,’ İkmen said. ‘Emissaries from the Motor City.’ He laughed, and it was at this moment that the door to
the Windmill
creaked open and a man in a pair of filthy pyjamas came out carrying a handgun.

‘Ah, what . . .’ İkmen and Süleyman both stepped back and raised their arms in the air. Received wisdom back home was that all
dealings with anyone with a gun in America necessitated absolute and total surrender. People shot first and then thought afterwards,
apparently. A bit like some parts of rural Anatolia.

‘I don’t know what you want,’ the old man said as he cocked the handgun and took aim. ‘But I’m telling you that this is no
place for spics. Get back to the barrio where you belong!’

Neither İkmen nor Süleyman knew what he was talking about. ‘Mr, er . . .’ İkmen began. ‘I apologise if we—’

‘You don’t need to apologise; just go!’ the old man said. And then he fired the gun so that the bullet flew over their heads.

Both İkmen and Süleyman dropped to the ground. Was this old lunatic going to kill them? İkmen saw Süleyman reach instinctively
inside his jacket for his gun. But of course it wasn’t there. He heard the younger man swear. He saw the old man advance upon
them, and although he wanted to say something to at least make him stop and think, he found that he couldn’t utter so much
as one English word. But fortunately he didn’t have to.

‘Miller!’ The voice came from behind where the Turkish officers had sunk to the ground. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Gerald
Diaz said.

İkmen saw the old man sneer. ‘Huh!’ he said. ‘Another fucking spic!’

Diaz walked forward and took the gun out of Grant T. Miller’s hands. ‘Give me that!’ he said. Then he looked around at the
two Turks. ‘You OK?’

Süleyman helped İkmen to rise to his feet and said, ‘Yes. I think so.’

Diaz turned to Miller. ‘Grant T., I am going to take you—’

‘What for?’ the old man said. ‘Shooting at a couple of your Latino—’

‘They’re not Latino!’ Diaz roared. His face was red and blotchy from the cold and his anger. ‘These are foreign police officers.
They’re from Turkey. They’re our guests!’

‘Oh.’ The old man didn’t look ashamed, but he was nevertheless taken aback.

Diaz turned back to the Turks again, and looking straight at Çetin İkmen, he said, ‘You, Inspector, have to leave this alone.’

‘My son Bekir left home when he was fifteen and went to live on the streets,’ Çetin İkmen said. They were back downtown in
an almost deserted café. Over behind the counter, two bored baristas looked out at the snow in the street with blank expressions
on their faces. ‘He got involved in drugs,’ İkmen continued. ‘With trafficking, with gangs and with some very dangerous criminals.
Before he was shot by one of our jandarmes, he killed an unarmed and wholly innocent man. He would have killed Inspector Süleyman,
who was at that time his hostage, had other officers not intervened.’

Lieutenant Diaz looked down into his coffee cup and sighed. ‘I can’t imagine what that must have been like,’ he said. ‘Your
own son . . .’

‘And bad as Bekir was, I still mourn him,’ İkmen said. ‘I miss him. It is why I can and do empathise with Mr Goins. I know
for certain who killed my son, and why. But to not know that . . . It must eat away at your soul.’

Süleyman drank his coffee in silence. He could remember all too easily that night back in the Anatolian town of Birecik, where
they had traced the drug-traffickers, including Bekir İkmen. When the jandarma officer had shot him, Süleyman had tried to
do what he could to save the boy. But nothing had worked.

‘It was wrong of me to seek to find Mr Miller,’ İkmen carried on. ‘As you say, Lieutenant, there is no real evidence against
him beyond the taunts he makes to Mr Goins.’

‘No,’ Diaz said. ‘You know you could still prosecute for attempted homicide. You’d have to stay in Detroit.’

For a moment, Süleyman looked horrified.

İkmen shrugged. ‘What would that achieve?’ he said. ‘Nothing for Mr Goins, certainly.’

Süleyman visibly relaxed.

‘You’re right.’ Gerald Diaz folded his arms across his chest and looked down at the floor. ‘Got a Beretta out of it. But then
Miller’s probably got a whole arsenal in that place.’ He looked up. ‘You know, most people think that Zeke Goins is crazy.’

‘That doesn’t make him wrong,’ İkmen said.

‘Inspector İkmen has a . . . an instinct for such things,’ Süleyman said. It was well known back in İstanbul that Çetin İkmen
possessed what some liked to call a supernatural tendency to be right about people. His mother, an Albanian woman who came
from a long line of seers and soothsayers, had been famous as a neighbourhood witch.

Gerald Diaz frowned. All cops had hunches from time to time, but to have a hunch about a thirty-year-old homicide in a country
not your own was stretching it. He looked up at İkmen. ‘So you feel that Grant T. Miller . . .’

‘Oh, I don’t know whether Mr Miller actually killed Mr Goins’ son or not,’ İkmen said. Then his face dropped. ‘But what I
do know is that I want to help Mr Goins. I feel that very strongly.’

Diaz drank some coffee. ‘But you can’t,’ he said. ‘You’ve no jurisdiction here. Goins may well want that, but . . . Inspector,
you go home at the end of the week.’

İkmen put his head down. ‘I know.’ Then he raised it again. ‘But what if I didn’t have to? What if I could stay?’

Süleyman was aghast. ‘You can’t stay here!’ he said in Turkish. ‘We go home on Saturday!’

‘What did he say?’ Diaz asked.

But İkmen didn’t answer. ‘Lieutenant Diaz,’ he said, ‘I have annual leave I must take.’

‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no! No, Inspector, you can’t do that!’

‘Çetin, this is madness,’ Süleyman said in Turkish. ‘Leave it!’

‘But Mr Goins is a Turk,’ İkmen said.

Both Süleyman and Diaz looked at him with shocked expressions on their faces.

‘Well, he and quite a few other people believe that the Melungeons are Turks,’ İkmen said. ‘We have a duty to help our fellow
countrymen.’

‘By upsetting the American police!’ Süleyman said in Turkish. ‘Çetin, you must not intimidate these people!’

‘What did he say?’ Diaz asked again.

‘Nothing.’ İkmen smiled. ‘Lieutenant Diaz, I do not wish to tell you your job or do anything to undermine or . . . You know, in
my country these Melungeon people are honoured.’ He knew that because Ardıç had told him about visits Melungeons had made
to Ankara. Not that Ardıç knew that İkmen actually wanted to stay in America and try to help one of their number. İkmen himself
had only just decided that that was what he wanted to do.

‘Prosecute Miller for firing at you and stay that way?’

İkmen shook his head. ‘No.’

‘OK.’ Diaz shrugged. ‘But you know that even if you were to stay, the chances of finding out who killed Elvis Goins after
all this time are slim, don’t you?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘It’ll be a waste of a vacation.’

‘Maybe.’ But İkmen had to know. Ever since he’d first seen Ezekiel Goins, he’d been intrigued. An old white man living with
a black woman engaged in social renewal. A man belonging to an ethnic mystery whose son had died at the hands of a person
unknown. Even before he’d heard the full story, İkmen had been struck by how vulnerable and yet at the same time how furious
Ezekiel had been. So much so that, İkmen felt, the old man would not be able to rest, let alone die, without knowing what
had happened to his son. And İkmen, as a man and as a father, could fully understand that.

‘The Elvis Goins case is closed,’ Diaz continued after a pause. ‘Been closed for years.’

‘But Lieutenant,’ İkmen said, ‘don’t you want to know who really killed that boy?’

‘Of course.’ He’d said as much to Zeke Goins when the old man had tried to speak to him, İkmen and Süleyman outside the Cobo
Center. He smiled. ‘But it’s gone. It was all a very, very long time ago.’

‘Yes, but . . .’ The look on Diaz’s face made İkmen stop what he was saying and descend into silence.

Diaz finished his coffee and got up from his chair. ‘If you want to stay on when the conference is over,’ he said to İkmen,
‘I can’t stop you. But I can’t and won’t help you with Zeke Goins. I have other work I need to do.’ And then, just briefly,
the hard-arsed facade dropped and he said, ‘Listen, Çetin, give me your cell-phone number and I promise I’ll let you know
if anything comes up about Elvis Goins. I’ll even call you in Turkey.’ He knew that he would never really do that.

But to İkmen, although it wasn’t much, it was something. He shrugged and gave him the number, which Diaz entered into his
telephone.

Then Diaz said, ‘Come on, I’d better take you guys back to the Cobo. You shouldn’t miss the programme. I’m sure you didn’t
come thousands of miles just to see some ruined mansions in old Brush Park.’

Çetin İkmen felt suddenly very lonely and very crushed.

Tayyar Bekdil had been sent to interview Councillor Samuel Goins shortly after he joined the staff of the
Detroit Spectator
. In an act of flagrant racial stereotyping, the paper had assumed that Tayyar, being a Turk, would want naturally to speak
to one of his own. But Samuel Goins wasn’t anything like his brother Ezekiel, who, according to Tayyar’s cousin’s colleague,
was utterly convinced he was a Turk. Sam Goins’ conception of his own ethnicity had been that he was most definitely mixed
race.

‘No one really knows where the Melungeons come from,’ he’d told Tayyar. ‘And it isn’t that important anyway, in my opinion.
What I’ve always directed my efforts towards has been counteracting the racism and the stereotyping that my people have suffered.
Getting Melungeons educated, into decent jobs and housing has been my passion for most of my life.’

And it had. When Sam Goins had worked in the motor trade, he’d spent time making sure that all his Melungeon brothers and
sisters knew their rights. With them, generally with himself in the lead, Sam had fought for what he believed his people needed
and deserved. For such a controversial firebrand, he’d got into politics comparatively easily. But then some of Tayyar’s colleagues
said that his rise had probably come about because certain other politicians of a liberal bent who’d been around at that time
had been reluctant to put their heads above the racial parapet themselves. The late sixties and early seventies had been dangerous
times.

Tayyar hadn’t known about the murder of Samuel Goins’ nephew
Elvis until Çetin İkmen had told him. It had piqued his interest, and now he was looking at old press cuttings from December
1978. Elvis Goins had been shot in the head sometime on the night of 1 December 1978. When police had found the body, outside
the old Unitarian Church in Brush Park, there had been heroin both on it and in it. Elvis Goins had been a minor godfather
and a user, and had almost certainly been killed because of the gang that he ran, the Delta Blues. The Deltas had had enemies.
Chief amongst these was a black gang known as the Purple Mobile Crew. Like the Deltas, the Mobiles had southern roots and
were therefore well versed in the reality of racial segregation. In spite of being north of the Mason-Dixon Line, these kids,
on all sides, kept that iniquitous separation alive. The Purples were black, other gangs were white and the Delta Blues were
neither. Elvis Goins could only have belonged to a federation of the outcasts, which was exactly what the Delta Blues had
been. Melungeons, Native Americans, kids that were half Chinese – Elvis, on behalf of the Deltas, welcomed them all provided
they would either run drugs, fight or kill, possibly all three. Tayyar, who would have been around about the same age as Elvis
Goins had he lived, couldn’t help but contrast the Melungeon’s upbringing with his own. The nearest the comfortable İstanbul
suburb of Bebek had had to a gang was probably the school chess club. Detroit had been a massive culture shock to a privileged
person like Tayyar. But that was why he liked it: it challenged him. And he liked the people. They had a lot of problems and
could really talk a tough game, but they were also resilient and warm, and he liked that.

Tayyar looked for reports pertaining to Elvis Goins’ funeral, which had taken place a month after his death. There was just
one, but it contained a surprising detail. Elvis Goins, a drug-user and dealer from a poor Melungeon family, had been buried,
with some pomp, in the very beautiful and historic Woodlawn Cemetery. Woodlawn was where the Ford family were interred, and
where Aretha Franklin’s father and siblings were buried. A Baptist minister called Dennis
Hamilton had officiated, so the report said. It also gave the names of some of the attendees, who included Ezekiel Goins and
his wife Sheila, Samuel Goins and representatives from the Detroit Police Department. It had been an elaborate funeral, which
Tayyar initially assumed had to have been paid for by Sam. But then Samuel Goins hadn’t been anyone special back in 1978.
He’d been just like all the other working Joes back then. In 1978, Sam Goins had yet to become ‘someone’.

‘Counselling, my friend, is for middle-class people with more money than they know what to do with,’ Çetin İkmen said to Mehmet
Süleyman. ‘If I want or need to talk about Bekir, I will go to a nargile salon with . . .’ there was a pause, ‘with someone and—’

‘Who?’ Süleyman asked. ‘Who will you take with you to the nargile salon to talk about Bekir? It certainly isn’t me, and as
far as I’m aware, it isn’t Dr Sarkissian either.’

Dr Arto Sarkissian, police pathologist, was Çetin İkmen’s oldest and dearest friend.

‘Well?’

İkmen lowered his head. Now back in their hotel suite, Süleyman had started on him the minute he had closed the door behind
them. İkmen’s apparent obsession with a delusional old American who had, coincidentally, also lost his son was embarrassing.

‘Lieutenant Diaz is going to think you’re mad,’ Süleyman continued. ‘Offering to investigate an old crime in a country you
don’t know anything about!’