Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [90]
“So what do you think about the murders?” I asked.
“There are so many questions I just can’t get my head around,” he replied. “You know the old cliché about how there’s no such thing as the perfect crime? Well, these five murders are perfect! For now, at least. The officer handling this case before you, he and I talked about it a lot. Every single person we tagged as a suspect proved where they were and what they were doing at the times of the murders. We couldn’t find any sort of connection between the murder victims and the suspects we took in. We weren’t able to turn up a shred of concrete evidence.”
“Was there any abstract evidence?”
Faruk was trying to understand what I was getting at, but I knew he wouldn’t be able to.
“I mean, did you encounter anything that seemed beyond reason?”
“Yeah, five bodies,” he said, chuckling.
My cell phone started ringing. I looked at the number and handed the phone to Faruk. “Will you take it? It’s the police department.”
Faruk grabbed the telephone and answered. A few seconds later he hung up. “The chief wants to see you at 3 o’clock,” he said.
There were five of us in the room: the police chief, the vice chief, director of Istanbul intelligence, Faruk, and me. I’d turned in a written report just two days before, but they wanted to have a face-to-face. In my report I’d written that we didn’t have nearly enough intelligence, and that the only thing the victims seemed to have in common was that they were all over fifty years old and they were all corporate executives. But this was stuff they already knew. In other words, they weren’t satisfied.
“You’ve made no progress,” the police chief scolded me.
The fresh-faced kid from intelligence was quick to put forth his self-defense. “The files we sent in were as thorough as could be; we didn’t leave out a single detail.”
The finger-pointing hardly befitted such a high-level meeting. For a moment, I wondered how they would react if I told them what Haldun had told me the previous evening. I had no choice but to insist that the investigation up until then had been inadequate.
“Either we haven’t gathered enough evidence or we’ve got a serial killer on our hands who knows how to carry out the perfect crime,” I said.
Then, whether to provoke me or to intimidate me, I’m not sure, the wise guy from intelligence chimed in: “So tell us, which building do you think is next?”
I didn’t even have to think about it. “Kanyon,” I said confidently.
“How can you be so sure?” the police chief asked.
“It’s just a hunch,” I said. “Someone’s getting back at the capitalists.”
I went to my father’s that evening for dinner. I hadn’t been able to sit down and have a real conversation with him, my stepmother, and my stepsister since I’d arrived in Istanbul.
At first we mostly talked about the past, about the good parts; they didn’t bring up how withdrawn I’d been as a child. My father had never wanted me to go to Ankara.
I still felt like a stranger when I was with them.
We had left our places at the dinner table and settled in the sofas in the sitting room. My stepsister moved to the kitchen to make coffee.
My father wore a contented smile on his face. I sensed what he was thinking, but I had other things that I wanted to talk about.
“Do you remember Haldun, Dad?” I asked.
“Haldun from the old neighborhood?”
I shook my head yes.
“Of course I do. How could I forget him? He was a good kid, may he rest in peace. I’m surprised you remember him, you were so young.”
I asked the next question not out of surprise, but out of fear.
“When did he die?” My voice was quivering.
“They arrested him after the coup. It was 1982, I think. He died during interrogation. They said it was suicide. Who were we to question the military? They buried him next to lhan. They were such good kids, the both of them. It’s a shame.”
“lhan?”
“You know, lhan, he used to live on the other side of the brook. You don’t remember him? He was the only blonde in the neighborhood, curly hair, the kid was like an angel. He died before Haldun did. They