Dead of Night (17 page)

Once the Chrysler was crushed, Kyle got out of the machine and walked across the yard to where the man stood. Although it
was dark by this time, he didn’t want to receive money out in the open, and so he told the man to come to the small Portakabin
that was his office. Kyle wasn’t a small man, and he had to squeeze his gut in to get behind his desk. As he did so, the man
put one hand on his shoulder while he stabbed him with a knife held in his other hand. No one was due to come to the yard
that night, and so the man had all the time in the world to wait and watch while Kyle bled to death on his little office floor.
Afterwards, he put Kyle’s body into his own crusher and squashed it down quite flat. Then he set fire to the Portakabin.

The final day of the conference was, in effect, one big plenary session albeit subdued due to Diaz’s death. It was a case
of reviewing what had been presented and what had been learned. To İkmen, the most valuable part of the course had been the
visit out to Antoine Cadillac Project. That, if nothing else, had inspired him. Official police engagement with community
organisations was a new concept to him. Of course he’d always had his informants, his little networks of people he knew he
could always call on to give him information. But this was different; this was by way of being a partnership between police
and public. How the concept would transfer to the booming, ancient city of İstanbul, he didn’t know, but he could certainly
vouch for its utility in one of the USA’s most troubled cities.

The previous evening he had agreed to give a statement to the Detroit PD about the missing Beretta. If what Officer Addison
believed was true, Grant T. Miller might well have killed a young black boy, although quite why he would have done so was
very unclear. The old man was a known racist, but that didn’t necessarily mean he killed people who were different from himself.
On the other hand, did this now mean that Gerald Diaz’s text made sense? Although ‘Got him’ still referred to Grant T. Miller,
did it relate not to Elvis Goins but to this dead child Aaron Spencer? The ballistics evidence certainly pointed in that direction,
but without the Beretta itself, there was as yet no concrete proof. However, İkmen knew that if what he’d suggested to Rita
Addison went to plan, there could be another way to catch Mr Grant T. Miller that did not directly involve the weapon itself.

The Chief of Detroit PD was due to officially close the conference at four p.m., but İkmen noticed that he also attended the
final luncheon too. That was useful. A powerful-looking black man, probably, İkmen thought, in his forties, the Chief was
surrounded by city dignitaries as well as by a coterie of his senior officers.

‘This food is terrible again,’ Süleyman said as he laid his knife and fork on the side of his very full lunch plate.

İkmen looked over at him. ‘Not much longer now.’ He’d thought that his friend and colleague would have been more curious and
excited about visiting an unknown American city. But he’d been by turns alarmed and bored by Detroit ever since they’d landed.
İkmen imagined that in reality he’d been in the wrong frame of mind to go anywhere. Recently ejected from what had been his
marital home, he was back with his parents and his widowed brother. It wasn’t easy. Although Süleyman rarely talked about
it, his father was clearly becoming confused, while his mother, a lifelong social climber, was still refusing to accept that
her family could not financially support her excessive clothes and accessories habit.

‘I’m going out for a cigarette,’ Süleyman said. ‘Are you coming?’

İkmen wanted to, but as the senior Turkish officer at the lunch, he felt he was duty-bound to stay and have yet another go
at a meal that was, apparently, some sort of roasted meat dish.

‘No, but you go.’ He smiled. Süleyman left, and İkmen looked back at the Chief of the Detroit PD once again. If he was not
very much mistaken, the Chief was talking very earnestly now to someone who certainly was not a senior officer. It was Rita
Addison. That was good.

It was completely and utterly irrational, but just the thought of İkmen’s return after the weekend made Ayşe Farsakoğlu feel
reassured. Whatever Ali Kuban and his fan club might be planning, just having İkmen back would, she knew, give her confidence.
Stupidly, she’d told this to İzzet, who had then looked a little bit crestfallen. He’d been thinking that just his presence
was not enough for her, and in that, in a way, he’d
been right. Over the years, Ayşe had come to appreciate İzzet much more than she had done when she’d first met him. Both he
and she had mellowed over time. But İkmen was in a different league altogether. Solid and utterly dependable, he was like
the father she’d lost only three months ago. Haluk Farsakoğlu had been devoted to two things during the course of his life:
his family, and his job as a guard on the railway. His death had affected both of his children enormously, but Ayşe was particularly
bereft. Her father had never earned much money, had never been out of Turkey and had hardly ever done anything that was just
specifically for his own pleasure. But he’d been a happy and generous man, and she missed him horribly.

Without her very sympathetic superior, it would, she knew, have been so much worse. İkmen had given her as much time off as
she felt she needed, and had made sure that she wasn’t over-taxing herself ever since. In a way, although he would never have
presumed to give voice to such a notion, he was a kind of surrogate father to her. In reality, he always had been.

Ayşe put her paperwork in the top drawer of her desk and locked it. She was taking one last look at the Ali Kuban fan site
when İzzet Melik knocked on her office door and she beckoned him in. ‘I’m going to the Black Sea pide place, if you’d like
to join me,’ he said. The Black Sea Pide Restaurant was where some officers liked to have lunch from time to time, but it
was also open in the evenings. ‘Pide, I find,’ he added, ‘is very warming now that the nights are drawing in.’

‘Yes, it is.’ She smiled.

‘And so . . .’

She’d had a very nice evening with him in the Kaktus earlier in the week, but her brother was back from Azerbaijan and so
she was expected to cook for both of them. İzzet, though disappointed, said that of course he understood. She smiled, bade
him good night and then looked back at her computer screen again.

İzzet Melik had just opened her office door when she called him back. ‘I want you to see this,’ she said as she led him back
to her
desk and sat him down in front of her screen. ‘Just in case I might be imagining it.’

İzzet read it out loud. ‘
An event for all of you to appreciate is happening Saturday midnight. Guess where
!’

There was nothing to indicate where the message had come from. As İzzet told Ayşe later when they were both sitting in the
Sultan Pub over half-litres of Efes Pilsen, it could have come from Kuban, or from one of his fans, or even from someone wanting
to taunt and tantalise visitors to the site.

‘Kuban and the people we’ve identified from the site so far are being monitored,’ İzzet said.

‘If it is Kuban, the “where” he speaks about could be Sulukule,’ Ayşe said. By now she’d called her brother and told him that
she’d had to work late and that he’d have to get his own supper. He hadn’t been pleased, but Ayşe didn’t care. ‘I wish I could
say that I didn’t feel as if something terrible were about to happen, but I can’t.’

‘You sound like your boss,’ İzzet said, referring to İkmen and his occasional and often very accurate feelings about situations
and people. ‘We don’t know that it’s Kuban. It could just be a sick joke. I’m sure that Vice will take care of it.’

‘Saturday is tomorrow,’ Ayşe said.

‘Yes, but if you know, then Vice . . .’

‘I’m calling the Commissioner,’Ayşe said. ‘If there’s going to be some sort of operation mounted tomorrow, then I want in
on it.’ She rummaged in her handbag for her phone.

‘I know that you feel strongly about this . . .’

‘If you were a woman, you would too,’ Ayşe said as she pulled the phone out of her bag and began to search through her directory
for the Commissioner’s office number. ‘İzzet, the fact that internet sites like this exist at all means that far too many
men get off on the notion of hurting women. And if women won’t do anything to try and change that, then who will?’

Çetin İkmen couldn’t remember exactly where he’d been when Grant T. Miller had shot at himself and Mehmet Süleyman.

‘We both hit the ground quickly,’ he said to Rita Addison and her companion, the ballistics expert Rob Weiss. ‘I think I may
have actually been in the middle of the road.’

With absolutely no regard for either his clothes or the fact that the ground was still covered with snow, İkmen lowered himself
until he was lying face down in the road. Turning his head to one side so that he was looking at Miller’s house, he said,
‘Yes, about here.’ He got up again. ‘It was good there was no traffic that day.’

‘There’s very rarely much traffic up here, Inspector,’ Rob Weiss said. ‘This part of northern Brush Park is a house graveyard.’
He looked sad. ‘Used to live here myself.’

Rita Addison looked surprised. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Back in the day, Brush Park was all lumber barons, auto bosses and Jewish doctors like my father,’ Weiss said.

‘Did you know Grant T. Miller, Dr Weiss?’

‘Oh yes.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘Everyone knew Grant and his mother, Rose. A regular Blanche DuBois that one, all southern
manners, big hats and church on a Sunday. Right up until the late seventies, Grant T. used to take her out in that massive
old Packard Pan American of his. Man, that car was like his child! All fussing over it and shining it like a mother hen! But
Gustav, Grant’s father, he was something else. Couldn’t read or write in any language, but he made great suits.’

‘For Henry Ford, I believe,’ İkmen said.

‘Weirdly, yes,’ Rob Weiss said. ‘And for my father, too. Gustav would come to our house sometimes and he and my dad would
speak Yiddish together. He was a lonely man. His wife didn’t love him and his son found him an embarrassment.’ He looked down
the road and pointed to an empty lot about two hundred metres away. ‘That was where our house used to be.’ It was a melancholy
moment, made all the more poignant by the fact that darkness was falling.

The conversation that Rita Addison had had with the Chief of the Detroit PD at the conference lunch had not been the first
one. As soon as she’d left İkmen’s hotel the previous night, she’d gone straight back to headquarters and requested to see
the Chief as soon as possible. She’d been offered all sorts of other officers higher up the chain than herself and lower than
the Chief, but she had insisted. If paper and computer records were missing from Diaz’s desk and his system, it was possible
that someone in the department was to blame. The Chief finally became free for a few moments in the early hours of the morning,
and it was then that Rita told him about the other bullet from the missing Beretta.

‘Grant T. Miller fired at the Turkish officers, İkmen and Süleyman,’ she said.

The Chief did, of course, ask what the hell the Turks had been doing out in Brush Park, so Rita told him what she knew about
that, including the foreign officers’ involvement with Ezekiel Goins. Although still at high school at the time, the Chief
remembered the murder of Elvis Goins.

‘As Inspector İkmen, the senior Turkish officer, put it, sir, if the bullet used to kill Aaron Spencer is from the same gun
as the bullet Miller shot over the heads of him and his colleague, our need to find the actual Beretta becomes less important,’
she said.

The Chief had concurred. But in that second conversation with Rita at the conference lunch he’d added, ‘But remember, Officer
Addison, whether we find this bullet or not, we need to know where that Beretta is, and if you’re right about missing paperwork
and computer records, we need to look at that situation too.’ She’d been just about to go when he’d called her back and said,
‘Oh, and that senior Turkish officer . . . If he’s been as involved as you say, he might need to stay with us here in Detroit
for a while longer. You should warn him. And I’ll need the name of his superior back in Turkey.’

They all knew that now that night had fallen, and because the
street lamps had all been knocked or shot out, there was no point in their looking for the bullet until the following morning.
Rob Weiss had just taken them out there so that İkmen could at least point him and any subsequent search teams in the right
direction.

‘I’ve no idea where the bullet went,’ İkmen said, ‘but . . .’ he looked over at the silhouette of a large rotting pile of real
estate directly across the road from the Windmill, ‘that house, if that’s what it is . . .’

Rob Weiss followed his gaze. ‘The old Johnson house,’ he said, and his face visibly fell. ‘Old man Johnson was a dentist back
in the fifties. He killed his wife and cut her body up with a kitchen knife. Then he went back to his surgery as if nothing
had happened.’

There were people outside the Johnson place. He couldn’t see who they were, because it was too dark, but Grant T. Miller didn’t
like them on principle. Only nuts and cruising gangsters came up to Brush Park these days, and he wasn’t keen on either of
those. Urban explorers, some of the youngsters who clambered in and out of the old wrecked buildings called themselves. What
did they want to do that for? Nice middle-class kids? It beat Grant T. Then there were the ghouls, any age they could be,
always looking for the house where the dentist cut his wife up with a kitchen knife and then buried bits of her all over the
garden. He remembered Hiram Johnson well. He’d quite liked him. But if asked, he always told the ghouls that the Johnson place
was miles away. For all he knew, they might start digging up the garden, looking for Mary Johnson’s left foot. That had been
the only part of her the cops had never found. There was so much the cops never found.