Free Dead of Night by Barbara Nadel Page B

Ford. But hehadn’t. Like a fool, he had only ever taken what was offered. He’d been too frightened to go for any more. A whipped Jew from
     Europe! Grant T. turned his nose up at the thought of his father, and shook the ice from off his counterpane. Snow from the
     hole in the ceiling had dripped down on to the bed. It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last. The house was falling
     in on him, folding up like a picture in a pop-up book. Eventually it would entomb him and he’d become like an Edgar Allan
     Poe character, a premature burial.
    He swung his thin white legs over the side of the bed and slid his feet into his damp, slimy slippers. Everything was rotting,
     and that included him. He’d been left to rot. One day, he’d just stopped, and everybody else had waved him goodbye as they
     headed blithely off into the future. He didn’t know why – or rather he did, but he just wouldn’t see it. That was far more
     dangerous than some disintegrating old roof. He put on the robe that had acted as an extra blanket on his bed and forced his
     curved spine to straighten. Stiff he undoubtedly was, but considering how he lived, he was very well for his age. There weren’t
     many men of eighty-five who could survive in an unheated barn of a house with holes all over it. That was something to be
     proud of.
    Grant T. picked his false teeth out of the glass beside his bed and put them into his mouth. If only his teeth had been like
     his hair! That, long and grey and thick as a horse’s tail, hung down to the middle of his back. Like Samson, he felt that
     his strength was in that hair, and also in common with the Biblical character he hated the thought of having it cut – even
     if it did make him look a little girlie. He knew he was a man; that was all that really mattered.
    But then suddenly the peace of Grant T. Miller’s morning regime was broken. Unusually, there were voices outside. He didn’t
     like that at all.
    Neither İkmen nor Süleyman was shocked by what they saw. That a man lived in a house that was falling down around him was
     notsomething out of the ordinary. New migrants into İstanbul often ended up squatting in semi-derelict houses. But for an apparently
     wealthy person to do such a thing was strange.
    ‘If this man did kill that old Melungeon’s son, then maybe he punishes himself by living here,’ Süleyman said as he shivered
     on the pavement.
    ‘Maybe,’ İkmen said. The taxi-driver hadn’t wanted to bring them to Brush Park, much less to the house of Grant T. Miller.
     He’d suggested some apparently pretty island somewhere, but İkmen had been adamant. If the place was indeed crawling with
     junkies and crackheads, they would, he told the man, deal with it. As it was, Brush Park was eerily silent. İkmen looked up
     at the house in front of them and frowned. At one end, what looked like the remnants of an old balcony melted into the snow
     that covered the extensive garden. On the other side, what seemed to have been a tower had collapsed. The roof of the tower,
     a pointed cone of tiles, lay in front of the house like a casually discarded hat. All around, other houses languished in similar
     states of disrepair and neglect. In some cases, whole blocks had disappeared completely, the houses bulldozed, replaced by
     empty, litter-strewn lots. It was, İkmen felt, almost as if the district had been bombed. He went up to the front gate that
     hung limply between two almost uprooted posts and stared.
    ‘This city was almost another place when the man who owns this house worked in the car industry,’ he said. ‘When I was a child,
     you know, Detroit was the absolute centre of the car world. Can you remember when the dolmuşes 1 were all old American cars?’
    In spite of the cold, Süleyman smiled. ‘Just,’ he said. ‘Mainly Chevrolets, weren’t they?’
    ‘Many of them, yes,’ İkmen said. ‘Emissaries from the Motor City.’ He laughed, and it was at this moment