Dead of night, p.18
Dead of Night, page 18
part #14 of Inspector Ikmen Series
Tayyar nodded. ‘Was it hard? At first?’
‘It wasn’t easy,’ Stefan said.
‘Because of competition from established funeral homes?’
He smiled. ‘In part.’
Tayyar cocked his head as if inviting the old man to say more, but he didn’t. He just sat in a small, crooked heap in front of him, smiling with his watery blue eyes.
Tayyar looked over at the modern face of American undertaking, who smiled back brilliantly, and said, ‘Ricky has told me stories about some of the more unusual services you’ve provided . . .’
‘The sarcophagus, those Goths from Grosse Pointe who wanted their mother to have that escape mechanism in the coffin, the guy with the Lynda Carter fixation,’ Ricky reminded his great-uncle.
‘Americans are so self-consciously eccentric,’ the old man said as he looked at Ricky with affection. ‘Everything is some Hollywood musical. Your brains have been quite turned by such things.’ He glanced back at Tayyar. ‘You too are a foreigner in this country, Mr Bekdil; what do you think?’
‘About elaborate funerals? I’m a Muslim, Mr Voss. We don’t do them.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘No.’
An awkward moment followed. The old man seemed to be indicating that he didn’t know anything about Muslim funerals. Did Voss not offer a service to Muslims?
‘What about high-profile funerals?’ Tayyar said. He was very aware of the fact that with the old man he was pushing against the grain. Stefan Voss was an intensely measured, almost unknowable individual.
Two of Ricky Voss’s cell phones went off at the same time, and he picked them up and walked outside his office with them pressed against the sides of his head. ‘Hi.’
When he’d gone, the old man said, ‘We’ve laid a few prominent people to rest over the years. But you understand that I can’t tell you who. That would breach our clients’ confidentiality.’
‘Sure.’
Silence crashed in as Tayyar tried to think about where he might go with this conversation now. If the old man wouldn’t tell him about any famous funerals they had conducted, he would certainly baulk at any sort of allusion to who might have paid for Elvis Goins’ service and interment. But as a good reporter, he knew that there were ways and ways of getting information.
‘What about notorious funerals?’ he said. ‘Detroit was once the murder capital of America.’
‘You mean gangs?’
‘Gangsters, bank robbers, murderers . . .’
‘The black people don’t use this funeral home as a general rule,’ the old man said. ‘There are black funeral homes.’
Even given the history of segregation in America, as well as the bitter race conflicts that had taken place in the 1960s, the old man’s bald equation of black people with crime caught Tayyar off guard. He’d been around such things as equality training and positive discrimination for a long time. Also, he lived in nice, wealthy Grosse Pointe, where people just didn’t talk about race, at least not to him.
‘White people commit crimes too.’
The old man didn’t answer. He just kept on with that infuriating smile.
Ricky Voss returned, sat down behind his desk and said, ‘So, where are we?’
Tayyar didn’t know what to say.
‘Mr Bekdil was asking about whether we’ve ever buried any famous gangsters,’ the old man said.
‘Gangsters? Not many,’ Ricky said. ‘Not really our vibe.’
‘But some?’
‘Oh, sure,’ Ricky said. ‘Especially during the 1970s, when all the drug turf wars were going on. Before my time, of course.’
‘We buried no one prominent, though,’ the old man put in. ‘A few street soldiers is all I remember.’
‘Right.’
‘Oh, but there was, so Dad told me, one gang boss,’ Ricky said. ‘Some mixed-race—’
‘Mixed-race?’ The old man shook his head. ‘No, Richard, that’s not possible.’
A look passed between them that Tayyar found unsettling. For the first time since they’d met, Ricky Voss wasn’t smiling. Tayyar looked away and found himself contemplating the photographs of Voss employees on the wall. They were all white.
‘Tayyar, we operate a fully racially integrated ship here at Voss,’ Ricky said, now smiling broadly once again. ‘If black people don’t choose us, then that is their right, you know. The funeral I was talking about, the mixed-race affair back in the seventies, was for the leader of a gang who used to call themselves the Delta Blues.’
Tayyar looked out of the corner of his eye at the old man’s face. It was bright with what looked like rage.
‘A lot of allusions to the old Deep South here in Detroit,’ Ricky said. ‘But then so many of the auto workers came from places like the Mississippi Delta, Alabama and the like. I remember my father telling me what an elaborate funeral that Delta Blues affair was. Dad was always open to all kinds of different people. He said those mixed-race types who set up that funeral wanted every service we offered to the very highest degree. Best casket, best plot, everything. At the time, he said, he couldn’t imagine where poor people like that had got so much money. Later, of course, folk realised it had to have come from drugs.’
Chapter 21
Lieutenant Diaz had been less than tidy both on and off his computer system. Sifting through his paper and virtual files, Rita Addison could only cope with looking for Diaz’s informants by writing down any names she didn’t understand. It was neither scientific nor even particularly practical, but it made her feel as if she was doing something. Everyone else in the department had always shared information to some extent; why hadn’t he?
His ex-wife and his son had come in to see the Chief earlier on in the day, and it was said that they had both been in tears. The rumour mill had it that Carmen Diaz had been heard to say that she still loved Gerald, always had. She just hadn’t been able to carry on living with him. Rita could so relate to that. For the past eight months, Diaz had supposedly been her partner. But he’d never really let her in. He’d liked her, she was sure, but he’d used every opportunity he got to do things on his own.
‘OK?’ Shalhoub’s voice broke through her thoughts.
She looked up. ‘Yes, Lieutenant.’ Then she said, ‘Lieutenant, did Lieutenant Diaz ever talk to you about Kyle Redmond by name?’
Shalhoub frowned. ‘I can’t really say,’ he said. ‘All I know is that I know that name, and I know that it’s connected to Diaz.’
He smiled down at her and then moved away. Rita turned back to the screen. It was then, for the first time, that she saw the word Rosebud appear in the text. Apparently Rosebud was, to quote Gerald Diaz, ‘a pernicious pain in the ass’. Who or what Rosebud was was unclear. But there was venom behind Diaz’s allusions, and so she performed a search for other references. There weren’t many, but they were all negative. She still couldn’t work out whether Rosebud was a person or an organisation, but whoever or whatever it was, Diaz had had his eye on it. Rosebud was something that obviously gave him grief, that bugged him. At one point he even referred to it as ‘evil’.
Rita thought about bringing this to Lieutenant Shalhoub’s attention, and then thought again. In reality, Shalhoub knew less about Diaz than she did, and besides, as she’d told the Chief, even assuming that the missing Beretta documents had gone back to Grant T. Miller, the fact that Diaz’s record of them had disappeared was worrying. The Chief hadn’t wanted to accept that anyone in the department could be protecting Miller, but he admitted that it had to be a possibility. Even allowing for Diaz’s sloppy paperwork, he’d always had issues with Miller, and so he would have noted anything that could have possibly incriminated him. Deletion had to be a possibility, and she knew that the tech nerds were booked to come and look at the system some time soon. But if Diaz had deleted any references to Grant T.’s gun on his system, why had he sent İkmen that text that could only refer to Miller? ‘Got him’ had been celebratory, and implied that Miller would soon be behind bars. Why destroy evidence that backed that up?
Now that it was almost dark, he knew the police wouldn’t be back. The weather had worked in his favour. Not that he had anything to worry about anyway. Not any more. Grant T. Miller moved back from his rotten front door and shuffled to the kitchen. Time for a cup of coffee and maybe even a cigar if he could find one. Then he’d call the bank. If there was one thing that never failed to bring a smile to his face, it was moving money around. He had a lot of it. He knew that people talked about ‘Grant T. Miller’s reduced fortune’, but what did they know? Shit all! He laughed. All those years his father had spent building up the Windmill into a mansion worthy of a European Jewish industrialist. His mother had always known that it was an exercise in bad taste. To deliberately let it rot gave Grant T. pleasure. It also served to give the impression that he, like his father had been, was something he was not. Poor. Poor and eccentric and needy, an old man not worth punishing or robbing because he was nothing and had even less. Not everybody had always been fooled, of course. Not everybody had needed to be.
Çetin İkmen hadn’t been required to sober up quickly for years. It was well over a decade since he’d been what anyone could reasonably describe as a drinker. But with Ezekiel Goins, another man who had lost his son, he’d disappeared into a couple of bottles of bourbon. How he’d got back to his hotel suite, he had no idea. But since returning, he’d been sick twice, drunk well over a litre of water and taken a lot of aspirin. He’d just been drifting off into a sleep he hoped might sort his symptoms out when first Tayyar Bekdil had called, and then Officer Addison. The latter had wanted to come over and see him, and had refused to take no for an answer. Sitting on his bed, looking and feeling like death, he was waiting for her now.
Tayyar had spent much of that afternoon at the funeral home that had arranged Elvis Goins’ burial. He hadn’t managed to find out who exactly had paid for the service; apparently undertakers worked to codes of ethics like doctors and lawyers. But he had found the owners of Voss, or rather Stefan Voss, unsettling. It had been clear that whatever Ricky Voss said, the funeral home preferred, at the very least, to cater for white clients only. Although there was some indication that the younger man was not entirely comfortable with that, the older one had been quite clear on it. He’d also been visibly furious when his great-nephew had talked about Elvis Goins’ funeral.
‘Ricky Voss said that he believed the money for the funeral came from the sale of heroin,’ Tayyar said. ‘He said his late father, who had organised the funeral, had been surprised that a family like the Goinses could afford such an elaborate affair. Then, apparently, he’d realised just who Elvis Goins had been, and surmised that the money must have come from narcotics.’
‘But the Goins family actually paid?’
‘As far as I could tell, yes,’ Tayyar said. ‘Ricky Voss gave the impression that he was of that opinion, and I’ve no real reason to doubt him. It was the old man who really didn’t want to talk about Elvis, who pulled all the confidentiality stuff.’
‘You think the old man knows something different about who paid for Elvis’s funeral?’
‘I think it’s possible, yes. He certainly creeped me out.’
‘And this Ricky?’
‘I don’t know. He appeared to be very nice, very liberal. But he didn’t actually answer any of my questions relating to the Goins family in a direct or concrete way.’
Rita Addison arrived later.
As he let her in, İkmen said, ‘Have you found the bullet from the Beretta yet?’
‘No.’ She took her coat, hat and gloves off and sat down in one of the plastic chairs. ‘Inspector,’ she said, ‘the Chief of Detroit PD is very keen to nail Grant T. Miller if he can. That’s why you’re still here. But with all references that Diaz must have had to the ownership of the Beretta gone, I’m in a real fix as to who I can trust. I just don’t know!’ She put her hands up to her head in frustration. İkmen sat down next to her. ‘The only person I know I can definitely be sure of is you,’ she said. ‘Can I run all this by you again?’
İkmen reiterated how keen he was to help, and so they talked about Diaz’s computer records, about Tayyar Bekdil’s interview with the Vosses and, of course, about Grant T. Miller.
‘Years ago, he had this city pretty much sewn up the way he wanted it,’ Rita said. ‘Some people believe he still has. Diaz, I think, was one of them. I think he sent you, specifically, that text because he knew that since you were outside of the situation, he could trust you. Without that text to you, I wonder whether the whole thing about Miller shooting the kid Aaron Spencer would have just disappeared.’
‘But why would Miller shoot a child?’ İkmen asked.
‘Because the boy was black?’
‘But that’s ridiculous,’ İkmen said. ‘I know he is a racist, but surely to kill and put one’s own freedom at risk for a dislike . . .’
‘Prejudice goes deep here,’ Rita said. ‘In all directions. But I take your point that to kill Aaron was excessive. And yet Diaz thought he did, and Diaz was no fool! If we had the bullet Miller shot at you, or better still the gun itself, we could prove it.’
Rather unsteadily at first, İkmen got to his feet, went over to his suitcase and took out a pen and a notebook. ‘We need to write things down,’ he said.
Rita looked confused. ‘You don’t have a laptop, a BlackBerry?’
‘I have a computer in my office in İstanbul and a mobile telephone that isn’t a BlackBerry,’ İkmen said. ‘I’m an old man, Officer Addison; there is a limit to the amount of technological information I can absorb. Now, let us consider, step by step, everything we know about Elvis Goins’ death, about Grant T. Miller and about Lieutenant Diaz.’
As Rita spoke, İkmen wrote down salient points, as well as adding some of his own.
‘As far as I can tell,’ he said, ‘the fact that Elvis Goins was a gang leader and a drug-dealer has to be significant. Whoever killed him probably did so as part of a drugs war. Other gangs? Other dealers?’
‘At the time, there were rival drug gangs, yes,’ Rita said. ‘Black gangs, white gangs, Hispanics. I think the Delta Blues were the only mixed-race, Melungeon crew.’
‘Melungeons who, as I understand it,’ İkmen said, ‘were derided by everyone.’
‘They were just making a play for some sort of recognition back then,’ she said. ‘Mayor Coleman Young was doing his best to get black people a fairer deal. Other groups were hopeful too. Eventually Sam Goins came out of all that and really shook things up. But back in the seventies, the Melungeons were still nowhere.’
İkmen wrote it down. ‘Also, Miller was involved in drugs, was he not?’
‘So it’s said. But there’s no proof. Diaz, I think, believed it. Zeke Goins of course does. The basis of his belief that Miller killed his son rests on the idea that Elvis and Grant T. were rival dealers. The Delta Blues were small-time, just started out.’
‘So you wouldn’t expect the money Elvis had then made from drugs to pay for an elaborate funeral?’
‘No.’
İkmen told her about Tayyar Bekdil’s experiences with the owners of the Voss Funeral Home.
‘Sadly and stupidly, I got quite drunk with Mr Goins earlier today.’
‘Oh.’
İkmen shrugged. ‘Sometimes the death of my own son is difficult to bear. When bereaved people talk, such things can happen. But what I do remember him saying is that part of his guilt revolves around the fact that when he left his wife, after Elvis’s death, he left her without any money.’
‘Could’ve spent it all on Elvis’s funeral,’ Rita said.
‘Maybe. When I have asked him about it, he always intimates that he paid for it himself. But he never actually says that he did.’
‘So . . .’
‘So maybe whoever did pay was protecting himself or someone else,’ İkmen said.
‘Hush money?’
‘In a way.’
‘But if that was the case, and maybe Miller paid for Elvis’s funeral, then it didn’t work,’ Rita said. ‘Zeke Goins attacked Miller . . .’
‘Who didn’t press charges.’
‘And then he hit the road. After he came back, he has been accusing Miller of Elvis’s death ever since,’ Rita said.
‘Diaz met both Miller and Ezekiel Goins when Goins attacked Miller, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, with his then partner, John Sosobowski.’
‘Do you know anything about him?’ İkmen asked.
‘I know that he’s dead,’ Rita replied. ‘The two of them went out to Brush Park in response to a call from Miller saying he was being attacked by Goins. They broke it up and then took Miller to the hospital. He didn’t want to press charges.’
‘Do you know why?’
‘No. Maybe like you he didn’t want the trouble of it.’
‘Mmm. But perhaps we should ask him,’ İkmen said.
Then they talked about Diaz and how, so far, no one was definitively in the frame for his murder.
‘I was looking on his computer system just this afternoon,’ Rita said. ‘A guy who could have been one of Diaz’s informants was found dead in a car crusher out on Eight Mile. Lieutenant Devine, who’s working that case, asked me to look on Diaz’s system to see whether there were any references to the dead man, Kyle Redmond.’
‘And were there?’
‘Not obviously,’ she said. ‘Diaz was very cautious, as you know; he used pseudonyms for his informants. Nothing jumped out that seemed to suggest a car wrecker from Eight Mile.’ She frowned. ‘What I did find, though, were some references to something or someone called Rosebud.’
‘Rosebud? Like the sledge in the film Citizen Kane?’
Rita nodded. ‘Hadn’t thought of that, but yes.’
‘What about Rosebud, then?’ İkmen asked.
