Dead of Night (27 page)

‘So he
is
still a player in this city.’

‘Of course he is!’ Sam had always despaired of what he took to be his brother’s slowness, his stupidity. ‘What do you think
happens to people like him? They don’t just go away, do they!’

‘People like him, people who makes others’ lives a misery, who kill people . . .’

‘Oh get real, Zeke!’ Sam said. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of the expression “holding hands with the devil”?’

Ezekiel Goins looked over at his brother with what he felt were fresh eyes. What kind of business could Sam possibly be doing
with Grant T. Miller on behalf of the city in the middle of the night?

‘So, you holding hands with this Miller devil, then?’ he asked. He couldn’t wipe the disgust off his face and he was well
aware that his brother could see it.

Sam turned in his soft leather seat and looked squarely at Zeke. ‘You know what the score is, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Look around
you. The city’s fucked.’

They could both remember when Brush Park had been a district that people aspired to live in. Zeke could easily recall when
the local women had employed nannies and some of the men chauffeurs. Now there were junkies’ syringes in the bushes, and great
open pits were all that remained of people’s once well-stocked cellars.

‘I know that what Martha and all her workers do is marvellous,’ Sam said. ‘But Zeke, that is small-scale. To bring Detroit
properly back to life, we need big money.’

‘From Grant T. Miller?’

‘He’s just one of a number of possible investors,’ Sam replied. ‘He’s got no heirs. If I can get him to give at least some
of what
he’s made from this city back to it, then that will be something, won’t it?’

‘Dirty money!’

‘Who cares!’

Zeke looked at his brother with what Sam interpreted as suspicion.

‘What?’

‘What?’ You say “what”, Sam?’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t make no sense.’

‘What doesn’t?’

‘That they send you to do business with Grant T. Miller! You, being what you are. There’s white people on the city council;
why didn’t they send one of them? And why you do this at night? Why?’

Samuel Goins was tired. After being in with Miller for an hour in the middle of the night, the last thing he’d needed was
an argument with his brother. Uncharacteristically, he lost his temper.

‘You know what, Zeke?’ he said as he leaned in closer to the smell of old tobacco and soil that was his brother. ‘It’s none
of your fucking business! I work for the city authorities and what they ask me to do, I generally do. And don’t give me any
of that Melungeon shit either! Completely alone I have raised awareness of our illiterate, superstitious, thoughtless people
to a level where at least we are listened to now. Although why, I don’t know! I had a woman in my office yesterday, one of
our people, who’d got herself arrested for threatening her previous employer. Illiterate and stupid, she couldn’t understand
why her employer had replaced her as a nanny with a highly educated European girl!’

‘Well that’s just plain wrong!’

‘What? Replacing the stupid woman with a bright one, or threatening an employer?’

For a moment Zeke looked confused, and then he said, ‘Well, both.’

Sam, now spent after his outburst, put his head down on the steering
wheel and shut his eyes. For a moment there was complete silence, then Zeke said, ‘So did I get that wrong, Sam, or what?’

For a few seconds Sam Goins didn’t answer. When he did, he lifted his head slowly from the steering wheel and said, ‘Let me
drive you home. We’re both tired now.’

Zeke looked back at him and said, ‘Sam, I’m just worried that if you’re doing business with Miller, he’s gonna cheat you.’

Sam started the ignition. ‘Don’t worry about that, Zeke,’ he said. ‘No one’s going to cheat either me or the city of Detroit.
Not even Grant T. Miller.’

Lieutenant Devine hadn’t told him that he was moving out of the Lakeland Plaza until they had returned to the hotel at the
end of the day. He’d been even more surprised when Devine had told him that rather than moving to another hotel, he was for
the time being going to be staying with the lieutenant at his apartment in Greektown. The irony of a Turk staying in that
particular district was not lost upon him. And neither was the motive behind the move. Two officers who had been involved
in the investigation or possible tracing of a significant weapon had been attacked; one had died. İkmen alone in the US was
the one person who could and would swear that the gun that had fired at him had been a Beretta that had belonged to Grant
T. Miller.

İkmen turned over in the vast and very comfortable bed Devine had shown him to and tried not to think about home. In reality,
Süleyman could just as easily have stayed on instead of him. But then not only had the younger man not wanted to, he didn’t
have the same investment with regard to Ezekiel Goins as İkmen had. He thought that all Melungeons were delusional nuts and
was also, İkmen felt, rather offended at the idea of a load of uneducated Americans calling themselves Turks. To İkmen, although
he’d used the ‘helping a fellow Turk’ line of reasoning with Ardıç, it didn’t really matter either way. If Goins was a Turk,
then fine; if he wasn’t,
that was OK too. That he was a grieving father was the only thing that meant anything.

He’d had a pleasant evening with the lieutenant. Devine’s wife was away visiting her family in Georgia, and so Ed, as he insisted
İkmen call him when they were off duty, had cooked a very nice meatball and pasta dish. After that they’d had ice cream and
had then settled down to watch TV with a couple of beers. It had all been very civilised, and İkmen had even been able to
smoke indoors, provided he stood by an open window. But in spite of all that, he couldn’t sleep. As well as seeing Fatma’s
disappointed face over and over in his mind, he also couldn’t get Ezekiel Goins and his son out of his head either. Then he
started wondering why he’d never seen a photograph of Elvis Goins, and began creating a picture of what he might have looked
like in his head.

The more he thought about it, the more he began to realise that Zeke, as well as so many other people he’d met in Detroit,
was hiding something from him. True, he clearly had absolutely no idea about why he hadn’t been prosecuted for his attack
on Grant Miller, but he did know who had paid for Elvis’s funeral. What was more, İkmen knew to his marrow that whoever had
paid for the boy’s funeral knew who had killed him, and why.

The receptionist at the Lakeland Plaza hadn’t noticed two white men wearing hoods and white trainers exiting the building
any time during the night when Rita Addison had been attacked. Just like Diaz’s neighbours over in Corktown, she was deaf,
dumb and blind. That said, if the two men had had accomplices in the hotel, they could have got out via the service entrance.
Since none of the hotel CCTV cameras worked, there was nothing to stop them doing that completely undetected. Apparently the
cameras hadn’t worked for months.

What was clear, however, was that somehow the men who had attacked Rita had either been following her or had been tipped off
about her whereabouts. Zevets couldn’t sleep for thinking about it.

He got out of bed as quietly as he could so as not to disturb his partner and went down the corridor to the kitchen. Even
though what he really, really wanted was a cigarette, he made himself a cup of coffee instead and stood at the breakfast bar
to drink it. There had been just one thing that the receptionist at the Lakeland Plaza had said that had been interesting,
and that was about the old woman he’d interviewed on the eighth floor, Winnie McGrath. While he’d been with her, Winnie had
become very upset about having lost her home some time before she’d come to live in the Plaza. But when he’d asked her where
her home was, she hadn’t been able to tell him. She couldn’t remember. But the receptionist had known. ‘Oh, Winnie lived in
a big house in Brush Park for years,’ she’d said.

Remembering Winnie’s story about devils coming and taking her home from her, Zevets had asked the receptionist whether she
knew how the old woman had lost her home.

‘I think from the sound of it it was one of those companies who come in and offer you money, you know. Sort of like a cheap
way to buy property. She was confused and took it and it was virtually nothing,’ she’d said.

‘When was this?’

‘About five years ago.’

‘Do you know which company?’

She hadn’t. But when he’d got back to headquarters, Zevets had done some research into who had bought property up in Brush
Park over the past few years. There were basically three commercial companies involved. Two had already started on programmes
of redevelopment, while the third, an organisation with the unlikely name of Gül, owned all of the wrecked and blasted land
that surrounded Grant T. Miller’s house – with the very glaring exception of the Windmill itself.

‘Martha!’

‘What?’ She had been vacuuming the living-room carpet. Now she’d switched the carpet sweeper off and was looking across the
room at Zeke. His face was grey and he was troubled. She went over to him. ‘What is it? You feel sick or something?’

‘No.’ He sat down on one of her large orange sofas.

‘Then what is it?’ It was like having another child, which was probably why Martha Bell put up with it. She missed her sons,
both the living one and the dead.

‘You know when Inspector İkmen come and he ask me to tell him everything I could remember about Elvis’s death?’

‘Yes. You did that,’ Martha said. ‘I heard you.’

Zeke took a deep breath in. ‘’Cept what I left out.’ He lowered his head in shame.

Martha looked confused. ‘What’s that?’ she said.

‘About my payin’ for my boy’s funeral,’ Zeke said. ‘I never had that kinda money.’

‘Then who did pay for it?’ Martha sat down next to him and took one of his hands. Silly old fool, he was probably just rambling
in his mind, like he did sometimes.

‘I don’t know,’ the old man said.

‘You don’t know?’

‘The cops took my boy’s body for some time to look at it for evidence,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t arrange no funeral until they
gave me him back. Before that happened, I had a visit from Mr Stefan Voss from the funeral home.’

‘Mmm, mmm!’ Martha shook her head wearily. ‘Don’t the vultures always gather!’

‘Oh, he didn’t want my business, not as such,’ Zeke said. ‘No, he come to tell me that if I went with his company, then anything
that I wanted would be paid for.’

‘By who?’

‘He wouldn’t say.’

‘Did you ask?’

‘Course I did! But he just clammed up! Said it was a “well-wisher”. Someone heard about Elvis and wanted to do what he could.
First off, I didn’t know what to do! Me and Sheila had just about enough for burying the boy, but nothing fancy. If I went
with Voss, I could have him buried with respect out at Woodlawn, big memorial, everything!’

‘Without knowing who was paying, or why?’

‘Old man Voss wouldn’t say. What could I do? Over the years I’ve thought all sorts. Maybe it was someone with money in our
community . . .’

‘Back then your people didn’t
have
money!’ Martha said. ‘Even now, beyond your Sam, how many mountain people you know with that kind of cash?’

He shrugged.

‘Why didn’t you say anything about this before, Zeke?’ she said.

He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, ‘Because I was ashamed. There’s only so much failure a person can stand. I couldn’t
hold down my job after that, couldn’t stay and try to keep my wife, couldn’t even bury my own son with some kind of dignity.’

Martha walked over to the stereo and put a Stevie Wonder CD on. She always thought better with Motown in the background. ‘Maybe
you should ask this Mr Voss about it now,’ she said.

But Zeke just shrugged. ‘Lord, he was about a hundred then. He must be dead and gone by now.’

Donna Ferrari didn’t know whether or not she should speak in front of the Turk. That he was still hanging around the department
was not something she could really understand. So old Grant T. Miller had shot at him and his colleague! Why Detroit PD couldn’t
just take a statement off him and send him home, she didn’t know.

Seeing her reticence in İkmen’s presence, Ed Devine said to her, ‘It’s OK. If you’ve got something to say to me, you can say
it in front of Inspector İkmen.’

She eyed the Turk a little nervously. Unlike his colleague, he was battered, skinny and in no way easy on the eye. His teeth
were yellow! But she ploughed on. ‘Lieutenant,’ she said, ‘the car wreckers up on Eight Mile. It seems that an old Chrysler
was crushed not long before Kyle Redmond met his death. Forensics are pulling it apart to take a look.’

‘Mmm. Radical, but if there’s nothing else . . .’

‘The wreckers’ lot is isolated,’ she said. ‘Redmond had cameras just for show.’

‘Like so many,’ sighed Devine. ‘You have these security cameras in Turkey, Inspector?’

‘Increasingly,’ İkmen said.

‘Mmm.’ It wasn’t easy for Devine to work with his own team as well as trying to pick up where Rita Addison had left off. ‘OK,
Sergeant,’ he said to Ferrari. ‘Keep me posted about what, if anything, forensics find.’

‘Yes, Lieutenant.’ She moved away.

‘So you and me, Inspector, up to Brush Park,’ Devine said as he stood up and put his suit jacket on.

‘We’re still looking for the bullet?’

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘We’re going to go and meet an Officer Zevets up at a place called the Royden Holmes House.’

When they’d left the squad room to make their way down to Devine’s car, John Shalhoub came out of his office and took Donna
Ferrari to one side. ‘Where are they going?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Lieutenant’s working two cases now; he’s all over the place.’

‘I have no idea whether any of this means anything, Lieutenant,’ Mark Zevets said as he walked over to Ed Devine’s car and
got inside. ‘If the receptionist at the Lakeland Plaza hadn’t confirmed what the old lady had said, I would have thought it
was just crazy rambling.’ It was only then that he noticed İkmen. ‘Oh . . .’