Dead of Night by Barbara Nadel Read Free Book Online

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,
     whenhe 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 problemsby 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.

Chapter 5

    Martha thought that he had forgotten about the Turkish policeman. But Zeke Goins didn’t forget a thing – not permanently.
     This was especially so when it came to the subject of Elvis.
    ‘Martha, I’m going out,’ he said once he’d washed the dishes from breakfast.
    It was no longer snowing, but the ground was very icy and Martha was concerned. She turned the stereo down, even though it
     was playing one of her favourite songs, ‘Dancing in the Street’ by her namesake Martha Reeves. ‘You could fall and break your
     leg,’ she said. ‘Neither you nor me can afford that. Where you want to go anyway?’
    ‘Down to the river,’ he said.
    Martha frowned. ‘What you wanna go down there for?’
    He shrugged. She was used to him being contrary and odd, but to go out into the thick snow for no apparent reason was