Dead of Night (5 page)

Gerald Diaz had a Lucky Strike hanging out of the corner of his mouth, and he smiled broadly at the Turk.

‘Lieutenant Diaz,’ İkmen said. ‘I didn’t know you . . .’

‘You think all Americans are health freaks?’ He shrugged. ‘This isn’t California, Inspector. Motor City folk make up their
own minds.’

He moved across to stand next to İkmen. ‘You got some attention in there,’ he said as he nodded his head back towards the
community centre.

‘The old man,’ İkmen said. ‘I think he’s one of those people who really likes Elvis Presley.’

Gerald Diaz drew on his Lucky and let the smoke out on a long, low sigh. ‘Not Elvis Presley, no,’ he said.

‘No? But I heard him . . .’

‘Elvis is, or was, the name of Ezekiel’s son,’ Diaz said. ‘He died back in the 1970s. Shot in the head.’

‘Oh.’ Another child lost to a gunshot. Like Martha Bell’s boy, like his own dead son, Bekir. The only İkmen child to go ‘bad’,
Bekir had been a drug trafficker. He’d been shot dead by jandarmes in the eastern Turkish town of Birecik less than eighteen
months before. He’d been trying to escape into Syria. In spite of what Bekir had been, every part of İkmen still mourned him.

‘Poor old Zeke never got over it,’ Diaz continued. ‘Left his wife shortly afterwards. Spent years on the street until Martha
took him in. Went crazy.’

‘The death of a child is not something that one can get over,’ İkmen said.

Diaz clearly saw at least some of the pain in the Turk’s eyes, and he looked away until the other man had composed himself.
Then he said, ‘You being Turkish brought a smile to Zeke’s face.’

‘Yes. He tried to say “hello” in my language.’

Diaz laughed. ‘Oh, Zeke does try out Turkish! God knows! Whacked-out people from the south, you know, Inspector! Ezekiel Goins
comes originally from Georgia, Virginia, some place like that,
I don’t know exactly. But they have some racial types down there, I can tell you.’ He put one cigarette out and then immediately
lit another. İkmen was impressed. ‘You ever heard of the Melungeons?’

İkmen hadn’t.

‘Dark folk, but not Hispanic, not like me,’ Diaz said. ‘Mainly Protestant; they’re mountain people, hillbillies, some would
say. But unlike most hillbillies, they don’t claim origin in Scotland or Germany or England. Some say they’re gypsies, some
Native Americans; some even claim to come from Portugal. And there are some say they’re actually Turks.’

Lighting up a second cigarette too now, İkmen frowned.

‘Reckon they’re descended from the crew of a Turkish ship that got wrecked off the eastern seaboard,’ Diaz said. ‘Back in
the sixteenth, seventeenth century. Zeke Goins’ family, according to him, was one of them. He believes it. And even if you
and I think it’s so much bullshit, it has to count for something, even if it is only in old Zeke’s head.’

It was rather extraordinary and strange, but İkmen said, ‘Yes.’

‘He saw you as kin,’ Diaz said, ‘family.’

‘Yes.’ But then İkmen recalled something else that Ezekiel Goins had said to him, about a criminal being brought to justice.

Diaz sighed. ‘Ah, well, you see, he doesn’t trust the Detroit Police Department with regard to that,’ he said.

‘With regard to what?’

The snow, if anything, was coming down still harder, and İkmen, at least, was shivering with cold. But what Diaz was saying
was fascinating. Also, rightly or wrongly, he felt that the American would not be so forthcoming about the old man if he were
with his colleagues back inside.

‘There’s an old white guy, lives in one of the rotten mansions over in Brush Park. Zeke reckons he killed Elvis.’

‘Is there any evidence for that?’ İkmen asked.

‘No. Not that I know of.’ He sighed again. ‘What you have to
understand is there was a lot of unrest here back in the sixties and seventies. Racial stuff. And being a Melungeon . . .’

‘Being a Melungeon?’

Diaz smiled. ‘It’s a bit like being Hispanic; it depends on who you talk to,’ he said. ‘To the Anglos, Melungeons, like Hispanics,
are just short of being black. Not black, but definitely not white, mixed race. And to blacks, it’s the same. Melungeons aren’t
black but they aren’t white either. It means a double dose of prejudice and without the backing of the numbers that we Hispanics
have. I feel sorry for them. They’re a real minority in this country, and they’re a minority without even one consistent identity.’

‘But if Melungeons come from the south, what is Mr Goins doing all the way up in the north here?’ İkmen asked.

‘Oh, he came, like all the southerners did, for work,’ Diaz replied. ‘Goins’ family, and Martha’s, and my own people all came
to the Motor City a long time ago, for work.’

The internet was a wonderful thing. İkmen didn’t have any idea about how it worked or why it had come into being, but he approved
of the instant access it could afford to information, even if his views on social networking were somewhat jaded. His younger
children spent far too much time communicating on line about basically, in his opinion, not very much.

As soon as they’d returned to their hotel suite, Süleyman had wanted to go straight to bed. Jet-lagged and exhausted, he’d
nevertheless got it together enough to clean the bathroom, and had then had a shower. In the meantime, İkmen had availed himself
of his colleague’s laptop computer.

Lieutenant Diaz had told him something about how Detroit had come to be home to so many migrants from the southern states.
Almost as soon as the motor plants were first built at the beginning of the twentieth century, they had needed more workers
than the local area could provide. To make up the shortfall, labour was recruited
from the poor southern states, where segregation of whites and blacks was still harshly enforced. And so white ‘hillbillies’
and the black descendants of slaves came north to work in factories that were not strictly segregated and which paid more
money than anyone from south of the old Mason-Dixon Line could ever have dreamed of earning. But money wasn’t always everything
to everyone, and some of the new arrivals from the south were loath to work with each other. White and black, the ‘hillbillies’
and the ‘niggers’, began to clash. Acts of cruelty and discrimination and riots ensued. And yet still the ‘Big Three’ motor
companies – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – kept on recruiting from the south well into the 1960s, when Ezekiel Goins
and his family had arrived.

İkmen looked up the word ‘Melungeon’. To his surprise, there were lots of entries. One of these told him about a delegation
of Melungeons who had visited Ankara. Another told him about some genetic research that ‘proved’ that the Melungeons were
in fact Turks. It was a whole new world to him, and, what was more, it seemed to be one based upon few facts and a lot of
speculation. Of course the story about the shipwrecked Ottoman sailors could be true. İkmen knew that because he was aware
that anything was possible. But he doubted it. Melungeons, as far as he could tell, were or generally had been illiterate
mountain people. Originally centred around the Appalachian Mountains, their communities claimed many and various heritages,
as Diaz had indicated. The only thing they had in common was their status as Melungeons, which made them all outcasts. And
as İkmen ploughed through the available literature, he discovered that things hadn’t improved when they’d moved north. If
anything, racial differences had become even more important, even more visible, in the factories of Detroit.

Süleyman came out of the bathroom with a towel on his head and told İkmen that he was going to bed.

‘Have you ever heard of a people called the Melungeons?’ İkmen asked as his colleague began to make his way to his room.

Süleyman turned. ‘The crazy Americans who think they’re Turks?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘The old man who embraced me at Antoine Cadillac Project is a Melungeon,’ İkmen said. ‘You think they’re crazy?’

‘Of course,’ Süleyman said. ‘It’s a total fiction. Had Ottoman sailors ever been shipwrecked on this godforsaken coast, they
would have taken their own lives rather than live alongside Spaniards and pagans.’

So spoke a descendant of the Ottomans. But İkmen the decidedly un-Ottoman wasn’t so sure. That Melungeons were actual Turks
was virtually impossible. But those sailors could have been shipwrecked all those centuries ago and people like Ezekiel Goins
could be their distant descendants. He searched the web for more and more Melungeon facts long after Süleyman had gone to
sleep and long after he too should have gone to his bed.

Grant T. Miller. It was a little while since Gerald Diaz had thought about him. In general he tried not to, even though he’d
known him for ever. Even though Miller was part of his world.

Diaz had been a rookie back when all that business with Elvis Goins had gone down. Seeing Elvis’s dad on the same day that
he’d had to look at that kid’s dead body in Brush Park had brought it all back. Not that it was ever really far away. Young
Aaron Spencer had been killed in front of the Royden Holmes House, which was just two blocks down from the house that Miller
still lived in. A great big redbrick pile with a tower at one end and a rickety Gothic-style veranda at the other. Miller
called it the Windmill – in honour, he said, of his ancestors’ noble profession of flour-making. But as Diaz recalled only
too well, he had said that, as he said everything, with a note of cynicism as well as self-mockery in his voice. Miller’s
father had been a poor, illiterate German Jew, and Grant T. had hated everything about him, his people and their way of life.

‘I’m exactly like my mother,’ he was wont to say to even kid cops like Diaz, ‘a WASP to my marrow.’

It was midnight by the time Diaz parked his car and walked over to the gate that led to what remained of the Windmill. The
tower had fallen in on itself years before and the veranda, even by moonlight, was obviously in very many pieces. Miller’s
mother had been a white Cajun lady, a faded southern belle in the Tennessee Williams mould. But it had been his illiterate
father, a tailor to America’s most famous anti-Semite, Henry Ford himself, who had kept her in the style to which her parents
had hoped some man might one day make her accustomed. Grant T. had been virtually born in the Ford plant, a child of the automobile,
with gasoline for blood and a heart of toughened steel. A man of action rather than intellect, he had run production lines
and the men who worked them with the precision of a clockwork martinet and the cruelty of a Nazi stormtrooper.

Gerald Diaz remembered the day he’d been called to Miller’s house as if it were yesterday. That was unfortunate. Miller had
dialled 911 because, he said, he was being assaulted. Diaz, then just twenty-one years old, had answered the call along with
his partner, John Sosobowski. Forty then, John was now long dead, but neither he nor Gerald himself, for very different reasons,
had ever forgotten what had gone on in that house. Grant T. Miller screaming in agony as Ezekiel Goins attempted to bite his
way through his arm. Blood everywhere. As they pulled Goins off, he screamed, ‘You killed Elvis! You killed my boy, you filthy
bastard!’ And although Grant T. was howling in pain as they dragged Goins away, all of Diaz’s sympathies had been with the
Melungeon. Everyone knew that Miller hated the Goins family; he hated all the ‘blacks’. Everyone had thought it was possible
that Grant T., or one of his ‘boys’, had killed Elvis. And when Miller didn’t press charges against Ezekiel Goins, it seemed
to bear that contention out.

There had been no proof. Zeke lost his mind, left his wife and hit the road because he just couldn’t bear it. Miller, meanwhile,
when
he wasn’t at work, stayed in his house, which was where he was now if the light in the top right-hand window was anything
to go by. It was said that Zeke occasionally came to Brush Park and stood outside the Windmill, like a malignant statue. People
said that Miller would occasionally appear too – a vision in filthy pyjamas and stinking carpet slippers – and hurl abuse
at Goins. Gerald had seen it with his own eyes a couple of times, when circumstances had taken him, always reluctantly, up
to Grant T.’s fiefdom.

But even his anger at Grant T. was nothing to the crazy way Zeke had reacted when he’d heard Inspector İkmen say he was from
Turkey. Zeke had had that whole Turkish thing going ever since Gerald could remember. But after Elvis had been shot, and especially
since he’d been living with Martha, it had intensified. If only he could either get to Turkey or find someone from Turkey,
everything would be OK. Miller would be found out and punished and the people he felt had let him down back in the seventies,
the Detroit Police, would be made to look like fools. In a way, Zeke deserved just that.

Gerald couldn’t put himself in Zeke’s shoes. Melungeons, wherever they came from originally, were a people apart from mainstream
life. Back in the old days, when Detroit automobiles were conquering the world, life on the production lines had been difficult
for them. Separated from their mountains and their own people, they were welcome nowhere and with no one. Even in the twenty-first
century, some people still criticised Martha Bell for taking such a person into her home. Zeke Goins, quite apart from the
still unsolved murder of his son, was a bit of an unfinished Detroit story, a remnant of a time of plenty that was nevertheless
racist and ugly. It wasn’t something Gerald wanted their foreign visitors to have too much exposure to. He didn’t want to
have any more than he needed to do with it himself. Detroit city was big enough to fess up to the demons from its past, but
it also needed to move on. Confrontation was no longer the way forward, whatever people like Donna Ferrari might think. Organisations
like Martha Bell’s were where the future lay: tackling gang problems
by talking to those involved, treating addiction as a medical rather than a criminal matter. But Gerald also knew that for
all the fine rhetoric around these new ways of addressing urban issues, people like Ferrari still represented what was the
national orthodoxy. The ‘War on Drugs’, just as surely as Zeke Goins’ hatred for Grant T. Miller, continued unabated.