Read Dead of Night for Free Online Page B

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