Dead of Night (14 page)

‘No.’ Ayşe, still frowning, looked across at him. ‘I suppose, sir, we have to remember that when Kuban was imprisoned back
in the 1970s, the internet didn’t exist. But now that everything you can imagine, as well as a lot of things you cannot, is
readily available on there, new people are maybe discovering these old monsters now.’

‘I accept it could be just hero-worship,’ Ardıç said. ‘Violent criminals all over the world attract weird and probably inadequate
people. But some of the men physically around Kuban now have police records. Not necessarily for attacks on women; some have
convictions for burglary or theft.’

‘Right.’

‘I’m telling you because it was from your initial intelligence that we became aware of what could be a dangerous phenomenon,’
he said. ‘I’m an old man; I don’t think to look at the internet too often. Either everyone on it is telling the world everything
about themselves, whether that is wanted or not, or it’s just full of subterfuge and deceit.’ He looked at her without smiling.
‘But yours was a good call.’

‘Yes, sir.’ She smiled at the compliment, just a little. Ardıç, she knew, would be appalled if she grinned.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it is unlikely we will know whether Kuban and/or these men possess malicious intent until they show
their hand.’

‘By attacking a woman?’

‘That is certainly what Kuban does, or rather did,’ Ardıç said. ‘All we can do at the moment is watch them. Luckily, due to
your efforts, we now have some idea about who, along with Kuban himself, we should be watching.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Ardıç dismissed Ayşe Farsakoğlu as quickly as he had asked her to come in. She left feeling partly proud of what she’d done,
but
uneasy too. What, if anything, were the one-time Beast of Edirnekapı and his fans planning?

‘I have to wonder whether the message was even meant for me,’ İkmen said as he handed his cell phone over to Rita Addison.
When Rosa Guzman had picked up the call from İkmen on Diaz’s phone, she’d told him that someone would be over to look at the
text message and take a statement from him. Addison had volunteered immediately. Now she sat in the Turks’ hotel suite opposite
İkmen and a very bleary-eyed Süleyman.

Rita made a note of the date, time and content of the message, as well as the make and serial number of İkmen’s phone. The
message had definitely come from Diaz, although it wasn’t addressed to İkmen or anyone else for that matter. The dead man
had, it seemed, fired it off very quickly as he left his house. ‘Lieutenant Diaz received a call just before he sent that
text to you,’ Rita continued.

‘From?’

‘From a guy who works in the ballistics lab,’ Rita said. ‘Lieutenant Shalhoub has gone around to his place to find out what
it was about.’

‘Do you have any idea?’

‘I imagine it was the results on the bullet we found in a house in Brush Park,’ she said. ‘A young boy was killed in what
we think was a drive-by shooting. Did the lieutenant ever talk to you about that?’

‘No,’ İkmen said. But of course Brush Park itself was not unknown to him, and so he told Rita Addison, a little shamefacedly,
about his involvement with Ezekiel Goins and his subsequent visit to the place.

‘Grant T. Miller shot at you?’ Rita Addison shook her head, not in disbelief – she could all too easily believe that Miller
had shot at complete strangers – but in sadness. Miller had thought the Turks were ‘spics’ or Hispanics. The fact that this
racial shit was still going on and on just made her furious.

‘Lieutenant Diaz took the pistol Miller shot at us with,’ Süleyman said.

‘Did he take it downtown, do you know?’

‘I imagine he did,’ İkmen replied. ‘But when or whether he gave it back to the old man, I don’t know. I believe that Mr Miller
had the correct papers to hold the gun.’

Rita frowned. ‘I’ll check it out.’

‘Do you think Miller could have killed Lieutenant Diaz?’ Süleyman asked.

‘We don’t know.’ Rita shrugged. She was still wearing the dress she’d selected for the dinner, and looked very glamorous,
if tired. ‘There’s a lot to check. Lieutenant Diaz didn’t always tell anyone what he was doing. I didn’t know about Miller
shooting at you.’

‘I know that Sergeant Ferrari knows about Ezekiel Goins,’ İkmen said. ‘She was at the Cadillac Project when Mr Goins originally
approached me.’ He explained how he’d come to the old man’s attention, and why it had piqued his interest and his sympathy.
Outside, through the blackness and the neon flickering of the Detroit night, sirens of all sorts punched holes in the sounds
of ordinary transport and human voices. ‘I was sorry for him and so I became a little involved,’ he continued. ‘It was not
a good thing to have done.’

‘Everyone knows Ezekiel Goins,’ Rita said. ‘A lot of people feel sympathy for him. I know that the lieutenant did.’ İkmen
saw her eyes fill with tears, which she very quickly brushed away. ‘He went out to help separate Goins and Miller years ago,
after the old man’s son died.’

‘Do you think that Miller killed Elvis Goins?’ İkmen asked her.

Rita sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t born when that happened. I know Miller is a racist. I heard he was in the
Black Legion years ago. That was a white power organisation like the Klan. He wouldn’t have any more time for Melungeons than
he would do for me. But whether he killed Elvis Goins or not is something else. As far as the department is concerned, that’s
a dead case.’

And yet İkmen felt that Diaz had intimated to him that he had it in mind to follow the old Goins case up. He’d even said that
if he
ever found anything out, he’d let him know. If that two-word text he’d received just before Diaz died had indeed been intended
for him, it could, surely, only refer to one person: Grant T. Miller. It just couldn’t be anyone else.

The man who’d run the tests on the bullet from the Royden Holmes scene was old. He’d been with the department since the mid-1960s
and had identified more bullets, as he put it, than Hollywood had put stars up on the silver screen. At seventy-three, Rob
Weiss was well beyond retirement age, and so he didn’t take too kindly to Shalhoub turning up on his doorstep in the early
hours of the morning.

‘Where the fuck’s the fire, cowboy?’ he asked a very wired and white-faced John Shalhoub. The lieutenant pushed past the old
man and went and stood in his living room. Shuffling in after him, Weiss muttered, ‘So don’t tell me!’

‘Did you speak on the phone to Gerald Diaz earlier this evening?’ Shalhoub said without preamble.

‘Diaz?’ Weiss ran his fingers through his thick grey hair and said, ‘Yeah, think I did.’

‘What was it about?’ Shalhoub asked.

Weiss sat down. ‘About? Well, about ballistics. It’s what I do. What’s this all about? Why can’t you ask Diaz?’

‘Because he’s dead,’ Shalhoub said baldly.

The old man cocked his head to one side as if trying to hear something. ‘Dead?’

‘Shot dead, yes,’ Shalhoub said. ‘Shortly after he received a call on his cell phone from you. I need to know what it was
about.’

‘The call?’

Shalhoub didn’t answer.

‘Diaz asked me to let him know the results on the slug recovered from the Royden Holmes place in Brush Park as soon as I could.
That’s what I did.’

‘Was that it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

‘About the slug?’ Weiss shrugged. ‘Nah.’ Then he frowned. ‘He was jazzed, though.’

‘What?’

‘Diaz isn’t . . . wasn’t a man given to a lot of emotion, as you know,’ Weiss said. ‘But this time . . .’

‘He was angry? Animated? What?’

Weiss smiled. ‘Like I said, he was jazzed. I told him that slug had come from the Beretta PX4 he’d asked me to take a look
at late yesterday evening, and he thanked me like I’d just saved his child’s life.’

Although Süleyman went back to bed after Rita Addison had left, İkmen stayed up. Watching what appeared to be a clear and
golden dawn come up over the snowy streets of Detroit, he stood by the window, smoking, for hours. Steam from the vents underneath
the road poured up into the lightening sky.

In spite of the fact that he’d only known him for just a few days, he couldn’t bear the idea that Gerald Diaz was dead. As
far as İkmen had been able to tell, Diaz had been a straight, thoughtful, proactive cop who didn’t just like to take the soft
shifts and easy ways out all the time. Like İkmen himself, he’d been both in love with and scarred by his city. Diaz had policed
a city that was unrecognisable from the place of his birth. That showed commitment and courage, and İkmen liked people who
had those qualities. He looked down at the message that Diaz had sent him via his cell phone, and yet again he thought about
what it meant.

If ‘Got him’ did indeed refer to Grant T. Miller’s alleged involvement in the death of Elvis Goins, he wondered what evidence
Diaz had uncovered that had led him to that conclusion. No doubt his colleagues would find that out as they unravelled the
details surrounding his last day alive. Not that it was any of İkmen’s business. The conference
would go on as before and his life would return to normal. But even so, he was glad that he’d managed to speak to Officer
Addison and bring up the subject of Ezekiel Goins and his dead son. If in some way Diaz’s death was connected to that old
crime, then the text message could prove to be key.

İkmen didn’t know what else Diaz had been working on when he died apart from the drive-by killing in Brush Park. A young boy
out exploring a derelict house had been gunned down for no apparent reason. Such things happened with, to İkmen, alarming
regularity in Detroit. Gangs fought gangs and also the police, and people either got in the way or they looked ‘wrong’. But
then the logical conclusion to every system or organisation was chaos. Turf wars never stayed turf wars; they spilled out
into other areas, involved other people and ultimately brought those who sought to propagate them down. The trouble was, that
sometimes took a while.

Çetin İkmen didn’t sleep at all that night. When he and Süleyman went over to the conference centre, he felt exhausted and
wired in equal measure. After a while, he left, telling Süleyman that he was going back to the hotel.

‘It was Diaz as told me to git,’ Ezekiel Goins said as he sat sadly on his old chair in the middle of the snow-covered garden.
Although still weak, the sun was out and it wasn’t as cold as it had been. ‘When I went up Brush Park to Miller when Elvis
died, it was Diaz as got me out of there.’

‘You were chewing on Miller’s arm, yes, I know.’ Martha Bell had heard this story a thousand times before. She brushed some
snow off the chair beside Zeke’s and sat down.

‘Diaz knew that what I done was ’cause of my grief and because Miller
did
kill Elvis. He told me to git. Him and Sosobowski knew as Miller wouldn’t bring no charges.’

Martha put a hand on the old man’s shoulder.

He sighed. ‘I know Diaz weren’t never going to do nothing about my boy now,’ he said. ‘But with him gone, it’s like everyone
who knew Elvis is dead.’

‘I know.’ Martha hugged him to her. Gerald Diaz’s death had been a big shock to everyone at Antoine Cadillac. The lieutenant
had supported the community work right from the start, and it was he who often smoothed things over for the tenants when they
had issues with Detroit PD. Everybody liked Diaz, even if he could be distant at times. Martha couldn’t think who’d want to
kill him.

‘Maybe it was a drive-by?’ she said out loud.

Zeke nodded in agreement. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘In spite of all you do, Martha, there still kids want to do that.’

‘I know.’

‘Diaz couldn’t do nothing about it either.’

‘No.’

They sat, in Martha’s case wrapped in fake fur, amongst the snowy gardens of Antoine Cadillac, listening to the sound of the
ice melting in the welcome winter sun. As it thawed, the ice creaked, reminding Zeke of the sound his old front door had made
when Elvis used to sneak out to peddle drugs back in the old days. Both of them felt like sleeping. They’d been woken early
that morning by one of the women down the corridor who called to say she’d heard that Gerald Diaz had been shot. She’d learned
it from the little white junkie, Belinda, who’d spent some of the previous night down at PD headquarters reporting her bag
stolen. She’d had all the money she needed for her next fix in the bag and so she’d been howling for justice. But even through
that she’d picked up about what had happened to Diaz.

‘I guess sometime you have to accept that a thing is at an end,’ Zeke said.

Martha, who had been trying to get the old man to do just that ever since she’d met him, said, ‘I guess.’

‘Elvis is dead, his mama too. John Sosobowski died years ago; now Diaz. Only Miller . . .’

‘You have to let Miller go, same as everything else,’ Martha said. ‘In fact you have to let Miller go more’n anything or anyone
else.’

But the old man didn’t appear to be listening to her any more. His attention had been caught by something way across the gardens.
For such an old man, he stood up quickly. ‘It’s him!’ he said, and then he laughed.

Martha, who had needed glasses for at least ten years, tried to peer through the fog of her short-sightedness. All she could
see was a blob. ‘Who?’

Ezekiel Goins looked down at her and smiled. ‘My Turkish cop,’ he said. ‘Now he’s here, everything’ll be all right.’

Martha Bell put her head in her hands and groaned. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ she said. ‘Not this again!’

There was nothing. Not on or in Gerald Diaz’s desk, not in his briefcase or even on his computer. Beyond his request for a
ballistics report from Rob Weiss, there was nothing in Diaz’s effects that linked him in any way to the gun he had supposedly
confiscated from Grant T. Miller. There wasn’t even a copy of the paperwork that had belonged to the weapon. And yet Rita
Addison knew for a fact that Miller had taken a shot at the two Turkish officers. They’d told her. There had been no reason
for them to lie.