Dead of Night (7 page)

‘Grant T. Miller was a foreman on the line,’ the old man said. ‘In actual fact he was
the
foreman on the line. Him and his boys, they called theirselves; they was like to the Ku Klux Klan. You know who they are,
son?’

İkmen did, but he had to explain it to Süleyman. ‘The Klan were . . . well, they saw themselves as sort of white Christian knights,’
he said. ‘They intimidated and killed black people in the south of America.’

‘Here they called theirselves the Black Legion. They didn’t like the Jews neither, nor the Hispanics nor us,’ Ezekiel Goins
said. ‘If anybody tells you that all stopped back in the 1930s here in Detroit, then they’re lying. Miller, in spite of having
a Jewish pa, was at the base of it. The blue-eyed boy whose daddy made suits for Henry Ford. Imagine! A Jew making clothes
for that Jew-hater! Everyone turned a blind eye, everyone. Them riots in ’67, they was about that kind of stuff. People’d
had enough.’

It was all very interesting in terms of Detroit history, but because İkmen knew that it was leading up to a request to find
out who had killed his son back in the seventies, Ezekiel Goins’ story was rather anxiety-provoking. The old man was clearly
obsessed, for obvious reasons: his son had been killed. But that didn’t make the Turkish side of it any easier for the two
officers. Ezekiel Goins had approached them with ‘You Turks, you kin, you gonna make it all right now.’

‘But then after ’67 and into the seventies, Miller went easy on the blacks. He had to. Mayor Young was black hisself and not
any understanding of white folk. No one was playing the white game, Miller’s game, no more, you understand?’ Goins said. ‘But
us? My boy couldn’t get no job, no one’d touch him. Blind prejudice, see. So he set up this gang, the Delta Mavi in your language;
the Delta Blues in ours. It all buying, selling, jacking up heroin. Kids do that when they ain’t got no future.’

It happened all over the world. Both İkmen and Süleyman had seen it or things like it before. One of the reasons why İkmen
was so bitter about his lost son Bekir was because the boy hadn’t had to get involved with drugs; he had had a future.

‘But Miller and his boys was running drugs too,’ Goins said. ‘My son got in the way. I know he did. The Delta Blues took some
of Miller’s business. Elvis was shot in the head over Brush Park at point-blank range. Miller done it! I know it was him!’

‘Zeke, you can’t go around making accusations.’ Gerald Diaz’s voice cut across what the old man had been saying with a firm
rebuke. ‘There’s no evidence to connect Grant T. to drug-running of any kind. If Miller finds out, he will—’

‘Miller taunts me with it himself!’ Zeke Goins said, his eyes beginning to water with the cold and his misery. ‘If I go up
there to the Windmill, he’s always hanging outta his window, laughing at me, telling me how his boys took my son away from
me!’

‘Don’t go up to Brush Park! There was never any evidence to connect Miller to either narcotic supply or Elvis’s death,’ Diaz
said.
‘And anyway, Zeke, you shouldn’t be bothering our guests from overseas with that.’

‘Oh, it really is quite all right . . .’ İkmen began.

‘No it isn’t,’ Gerald Diaz said. He looked at the two officers. ‘Zeke has a belief that because you’re both Turks, like he
believes he is, you can help him.’

‘They can!’

‘No they can’t,’ Diaz said. ‘They have no jurisdiction here, Zeke. They don’t know the city, the case, anything. It was a
long time ago; I was only a rookie when it happened myself!’ He put a hand on the old man’s shoulder and began to lead him
away. ‘But I remember it, and the lack of any solution still gets me. I’m not saying that you have to forget, that you must
move on or any shit like that. But Zeke, you gotta work with what you got, and that’s Martha and her family, the food garden
and Samuel. That’s a lot.’

The old man stopped, frowned, and then looked back at the Turks before he said, ‘You think so?’ His voice was bitter and broken,
and as he spoke, he threw what remained of the sandwich he had brought from Martha’s fridge on the ground. ‘How’d you like
it if someone had killed your child and was never brought to justice? How’d you like it to know that that person is out there,
every day, free?’

İkmen turned away. The old man had been speaking directly to him, he felt, and in that moment, he just couldn’t take it. His
own son had been killed and he knew exactly who had done it, and why, yet still it hurt like an open wound inside.

The food was familiar and comforting, and Tayyar Bekdil, Süleyman’s cousin, was a very convivial host. Reflecting what Lieutenant
Shalhoub had told İkmen and Süleyman, he said, ‘There’s a big Lebanese population in Detroit, mostly out at a suburb called
Hamtramck. Cafés and restaurants with names like the Cedars and Beirut all over that area. It’s easy to get foodstuffs. Tahini,
köfte, börek, baklava, you name it.’

Çetin İkmen put another square of baklava into his mouth and savoured both the sweetness of the dessert and the warm comfort
of Tayyar’s massive home. For a man who lived alone, a four-bedroom house with a double garage seemed, to İkmen, excessive.
But then apparently, if one was just reasonably well off, that was the American way. Property prices compared to Turkey, and
particularly when measured against western Europe, were cheap. And that especially applied to Detroit.

‘This place would probably sell for around three hundred thousand dollars,’ Tayyar had said when he’d showed them around his
home. ‘But this is a suburb. It’s clean, it’s bright, there’s no junkies. In areas like Brush Park, which is where a lot of
old auto-executive mansions sit mouldering in the street, you can’t give property away. I’ve heard of old houses with gardens
selling for a dollar.’

‘A dollar!’

‘These places are ruined,’ Tayyar had added. ‘Full of junkies, crackheads and rats. Who wants places like that, even if they
were the height of style back in the 1920s?’

He’d prepared them a fabulous meze featuring such dishes as pickled squid, Russian salad and warm home-made hummus. This had
been followed by a delicious roasted trout served with a pilaf, and then the scrumptious, glutinous baklava. All of this comfort
food had been washed down with a lot of Turkish rakı. Now they were drinking coffee, smoking and grazing on whatever was left
of the dessert.

‘This is a lovely house, Tayyar,’ Süleyman said. ‘But I don’t know how you could have swapped Bebek for Detroit.’

‘You don’t?’ Tayyar was a couple of years older than Süleyman, and quite a bit shorter and darker. The eldest son of one of
Süleyman’s father’s sisters, he was another one with royal blood in his veins. ‘But then I suppose, as cops, you wouldn’t,’
he continued. ‘This is a tough town. Makes İstanbul look like a crime backwater. A village like Bebek, well . . .’ He smiled.
‘For a journalist, Detroit is great. As a profession, we live off the pickings from the bones of the dead.’

‘What a gruesome analogy!’ İkmen said.

‘But it’s true!’

They drank, ate and smoked some more. Tayyar put a Bruce Springsteen CD on, and they all took their drinks and ashtrays to
comfortable chairs arranged around a blazing log fire. Once they’d settled down, İkmen talked about Ezekiel Goins and the
Melungeons. In spite of what Lieutenant Diaz had said about forgetting the whole thing, he was finding that he couldn’t.

‘If we think it’s bad now, there were some terrible things that went on in the sixties and seventies,’ Tayyar said. ‘Way beyond
’67 it was open race warfare in parts of the city. In those days, the drug of choice was heroin, and there were endless turf
wars between gangs of what were basically drug-dealers.’

‘This old Melungeon’s son got mixed up in it.’

‘If he was young and unemployed, it was almost inevitable,’ Tayyar said. ‘It still goes on, except now the main drug of choice
is crack cocaine. The difference these days is there’s a will to at least try and put the city back together again. In the
sixties and seventies, the
whole fabric of the place was just atomising. Corruption was endemic. Cops were, figuratively, getting into bed with gangsters;
so was City Hall. The big three car manufacturers wanted to move the plants to the suburbs. Black civil rights versus, in
some quarters, continuing white desire for segregation. It was chaos.’

‘And yet for Ezekiel Goins it was just yesterday,’ İkmen said. ‘But when your child dies, clocks stop.’

They all went quiet for a moment. Tayyar as well as Süleyman knew what had happened to İkmen’s son, and he didn’t know what
to say. In the end it was İkmen himself who was obliged to continue the conversation. ‘Mr Goins believes that a man called
Grant T. Miller killed his son,’ he said. ‘Have you heard of him, Tayyar?’

‘As far as I know, Grant T. Miller was a foreman in the old Ford plant,’ Tayyar said. ‘He’s well known because his father
was a tailor who used to make suits for Henry Ford. Why would he have killed this man’s son?’

‘Mr Goins seemed to think that he was some sort of white supremacist,’ İkmen said.

Tayyar shrugged. ‘I don’t know about that.’

They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes while Bruce Springsteen sang ‘Born in the USA’. When he had finished,
Tayyar said, ‘You know the Republican Party here in the US thought that song was some sort of patriotic anthem? Stupid George
W. Bush. It’s a protest song, the voice of unemployed blue-collar America. This country and especially this city are not what
people think they are.’

‘I know,’ Süleyman said as he lit up another cigarette and then breathed out smoke on a sigh. ‘I thought our hotel would be
pristine. Real American super-clean!’

Tayyar laughed. ‘What, the Lakeland Plaza? Are you serious?’

‘Yes. I’m appalled,’ Süleyman said. ‘The place is not filthy, but it certainly isn’t what I would call clean.’

‘Well no, it wouldn’t be,’ Tayyar said. ‘The Lakeland is only half a hotel.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Some of the floors are given over to people on welfare. The city put them in there.’

Süleyman and İkmen looked at each other. All of a sudden, old fridges in some of the corridors made sense.

‘Oh boy, did the İstanbul Police Department get you a cheap deal!’ Tayyar continued. ‘People have been mugged in the elevator
in the Lakeland. Watch yourselves!’

‘We will.’

Tayyar did make several offers to them to stay over. But, reluctantly, İkmen and Süleyman both declined. The Lakeland Plaza,
for all its drawbacks, was very close to the convention centre, and they did have an early start the next morning. A British
officer was down to talk about a method of riot control called ‘kettling’.

As ever the perfect host, Tayyar helped them to put on their coats and then walked with them out to the taxi he had called
to take them back downtown. As he was walking beside İkmen, he suddenly clicked his fingers and said, ‘Goins. I knew I knew
that name! Is this Ezekiel Goins anything to do with City Councillor Samuel Goins?’

Martha didn’t often call on Samuel, but this time she’d felt that she had to. Lieutenant Diaz had brought Zeke home midway
through the afternoon. As promised, the old man hadn’t gone to Brush Park to hassle Grant T. Miller. He really had gone down
to be by the river. While he was there, however, he’d hung out outside the Cobo Center and then rattled on to that Turkish
cop again about Elvis. By the time Keisha came home from school, he was agitated fit to burst, and so Martha had had no choice
but to call out Zeke’s little brother.

City Councillor Samuel Goins was fifteen years younger than Zeke. He was smart, rich, good-looking and successful. He had
also become, after years of hard work and campaigning, the poster boy for Melungeon achievement. His campaigning slogan, ‘Not
black, not white, not hillbilly – Detroiter!’ was delivered in an accent that was
very far from his brother’s deep southern patois. The youngest of eight Goins boys, Samuel had worked in the Ford plant for
a while, but he’d also gone and got himself an education.

‘Zeke, you really mustn’t hassle people like this,’ Samuel said as he took his brother’s hand gently across Martha’s kitchen
table.

‘But he’s a Turk, Sam! He understand
meraba
,
gül
,
mavi
,
kismet
, all the words I learned!’ Zeke said through tears of anger and frustration. How dared that Martha go and bother Sam with
all this! ‘Like us.’

‘Mmm.’ Samuel Goins nodded his large grey head and said, ‘Zeke, we may be kin to this man in one sense. But we aren’t like
him and he isn’t like us.’

‘But he’s a Turk!’

‘Yes, which means that he’s a Muslim,’ Samuel said. ‘That’s a long way from being a Baptist.’

‘I don’t mind he’s no Muslim, Sam,’ Zeke said. ‘We being Melungeon, we can’t be prejudiced who we talk to and who we don’t.’

‘No, and neither should we be,’ Samuel said. ‘But Zeke, the poor man’s only here for a conference. He knows nothing about
Elvis or Miller or any of the things that you talk to him about. You have to leave him be.’

‘But he’s a Turk. Türkiye! A Turk!’

‘Lieutenant Diaz—’

‘What Diaz know!’ Angry now, Zeke Goins’ eyes flashed with spite. ‘Motherfucking Detroit police! In Grant T. Miller’s pocket!
That’s why nothing never done to avenge our Elvis! Miller hates our kind. Miller ran drugs, and Elvis, one of us, he was like
a thorn in his side!’

‘Ssh!’ Samuel put his finger up to his lips and lowered his voice. ‘You don’t want young Keisha to hear you cussing, do you?’

Suddenly ashamed of his outburst, Zeke muttered that no, of course he didn’t want Keisha to hear him.

‘Zeke, your Elvis was not some sort of great gang godfather,’
Samuel said. ‘I know he started the Delta Blues. But they were all small-time players. And anyway, there’s only ever been
rumours about Grant T. Miller and drug-dealing. There’s never been any concrete evidence, has there?’

‘No.’

‘Richie McLennan, a black man, was Elvis’s enemy. Richie headed up the Purple Mobile Crew, the Delta Blues’ main enemies.
Zeke, it was a Purple Mobile who killed Elvis.’