Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  I thought over what she’d said. “So it’s possible,” I summed up, “that someone else was present in the room when all this was happening? It’s possible that someone else came in at the kill, as it were, took the hammer, and used it while Doug was… doing his thing.”

  Juliet looked at me for a long time before shaking her head. “No. I don’t think so.”

  “But this shadow—”

  “I told you, it’s not like a physical thing. It’s more like an accident of the terrain.”

  “I don’t get your drift, Juliet.”

  She frowned impatiently. “I’m trying to describe invisible things, Castor. Most of this is metaphor.”

  “Are you absolutely sure there was no one else here?” I persisted doggedly. “You said yourself that something blocked your… perceptions. Something got in your way, whether it was solid or not, and if we stick with the metaphor, you were seeing through a glass, darkly. Anything could have happened behind that fog.”

  “If there was someone else there, I’d sense them on some level,” said Juliet coldly.

  “And you don’t?” This was coming to the crunch. I stood facing her, held her blacker-than-black gaze without flinching. It wasn’t easy: It was like standing up in a stiff wind that sucks you in instead of blowing you backward. “You don’t sense anything else at all? Anything that makes you doubt for a fraction of a second that Coldwood’s got his hand on the right collar? Barnard and Hunter were meant to be in here alone, but that cleaner, Onugeta, heard a woman’s voice when he walked past the door. Three voices, he said: two men and a woman. Was he wrong, or was there a woman here? Is there any emotional trace in the room that you can’t explain by two men coming in here to fuck each other’s brains out?”

  Thinking about Alastair Barnard’s shattered skull, I wanted to drag those words back and scrub them clean with Dettol as soon as I’d said them, but Juliet didn’t bother delivering the hideous punch line. She didn’t say no, either.

  “There’ve been many women in this room,” she said slowly. “Many and many, and most of them were sad. Most of them resented what was done to them here, or hated the men who were doing it to them. Perhaps that’s all the shadow was—the stain left by their unhappiness.”

  My gaze broke first: I’m only human, after all. But it was Juliet who was being evasive here, and I didn’t have to say anything else. I just waited for her to fill in the blanks, staring out of the window at the King’s Cross marshaling yards while my pulse came down again.

  “There is something else,” she admitted at last. “A residue that’s very strong and very noticeable. Perhaps it is a woman. The physical scents are of the two men, but perhaps yes. A woman’s feelings. Angry, negative feelings. Disgust, and fear, and defiance—all feeding into anger.”

  “Was it here already?” I asked. “Or did it come in with Hunter and Barnard? Was it following them? Does it leave with them? Was one of them being haunted by this…residue?”

  I glanced at Juliet as I delivered the last word. She shrugged eloquently, her breasts shifting under the tantalizingly translucent fabric of her shirt. “I don’t know,” she said with visible reluctance.

  I couldn’t resist pressing my advantage. “I want to go and visit Doug Hunter in jail,” I said, “and get his take on what happened. Will you come with me?”

  Juliet looked blank. “Why?”

  “Well, have you ever met him?”

  “No.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to meet him if your testimony is going to send him down for twenty or thirty years?”

  “No.”

  I was amazed and a little exasperated. “What, you’re not the slightest bit curious?”

  “Not the slightest bit,” Juliet confirmed equably. “However, I will admit one thing. The possibility that I might have made a mistake in this does trouble me. I take my reputation very seriously.”

  “So is that a yes? You’ll come with me?”

  After a fractional pause, Juliet nodded. “Yes. Very well. Not today, though. Today I have other things to do.”

  “I’ll need to arrange it with Jan Hunter, in any case,” I said. “I’ll call you.”

  “Fine. If I’m not home, leave a message with Sue.”

  She turned and walked out of the room without another word. In a human woman, it would have seemed spectacularly abrupt, but with fiends from the pit, you have to make allowances. After all, Juliet had been living on earth only a little over a year, and you have to assume that in hell, a lot of the normal conversational rules don’t operate in quite the same way. For example, tearing someone’s head off and spitting down his or her neck probably has an entirely different meaning down there.

  I lingered in the room for a few minutes more, searching it myself with my eyes tight shut. But the susurrus of fright and cruelty was everywhere; it was like trying to echolocate in the midst of a ticker-tape parade. I gave up, let myself out, and closed the door again. The lock had an automatic catch, and Juliet had taken the key with her when she left, so that was it as far as examining the crime scene went. There was no way I could get back in.

  The desk clerk, Merrill, had his back to me as I approached the desk again. He was putting some keys back in the pigeonholes—including number 17, I noticed. I waited until he realized I was there and turned to face me.

  “Can I talk to Joseph Onugeta?” I asked. “I wanted to check a couple of details in the statement he gave.”

  “He’s not in today,” Merrill said.

  “I thought he was in every day.”

  “He called in sick.”

  “Well, is it okay if I come by and talk to him tomorrow?”

  “It’s okay with me, yes. His shift starts at six.”

  I chanced my arm. “Did a woman check in here on her own on the day of the murder?” I asked.

  He looked surprised. For a moment I thought I’d insulted his professional standards. “We cater to couples,” he said shortly.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “I know that. I was just wondering if—”

  “There wasn’t any woman in that room. I don’t care what Joseph says he heard.”

  I felt the weight of words not yet spoken. “But—” I prompted.

  Merrill stared at me in silence. “A man came in by himself,” he said at last. “I was in the back room there, and I saw him walk straight past the desk. I thought maybe he was a cabdriver and he’d come to pick someone up. But then he walked out about ten minutes later and was still by himself, so if he was a driver, he came to the wrong place.”

  “When was this?” I asked. “Before Barnard and Hunter arrived, or after?”

  “I think after,” he said. “But it must have been before we went up and opened the room, because after that, we had the police here, and they closed the place down for the whole of the rest of the day.”

  “What did this guy look like?”

  Merrill thought. “Pretty old,” he said. “That’s all I remember. I didn’t get to see him up close.”

  I threw a few more questions at him, but he wasn’t throwing very much back. He wasn’t kidding about his mind going blank. I probably could have gotten more circumstantial details out of a six-year-old. Then again, everyone’s got his own way of dealing with stress, and Merrill looked like the kind of man who stressed easy.

  I left my number and asked him to call if anything else occurred to him. To make that slightly less unlikely, I slipped him a couple of tenners. Doing that made it very clear, if he needed the confirmation, that whatever connection I had with Juliet, I sure as hell wasn’t a cop. I guessed that was probably a plus rather than a minus for a man who worked in the hinterlands of the sex industry. And I doubted there were any lands from London to silken Samarkand that were much more hinter than the Paragon Hotel.

  On the way back to Wood Green, I stopped off at Charing Cross Road and kicked around a few of the bookshops there until I found Paul Sumner’s biography of Myriam Seaforth Kale. It was out of print, so Borders and Foyl
es couldn’t help me at all. I turned up a copy at last in one of the secondhand bookshops farther down the street, past Cambridge Circus. It was an American paperback, and the badly glued interior signatures had come loose from the cover, so I got it for the knockdown price of seven pounds fifty.

  No blue van staking out the entrance to Ropey’s block. On the downside, the two lifts that hadn’t been used recently for murder attempts both seemed to have broken down in the course of the day. I slogged my way up to the fourth floor, closed the door on the world, and put some soothing music on the stereo—I think it was Rudra’s Primordial this time, described in the sleeve notes as “seminal Vedic thrash metal.” Then I lay back on the bed, cracked the book open, and immersed myself in the last death throes of the American mobs.

  Sumner wrote in a spare, almost bald style, using adjectives only when they were already clichés and therefore guaranteed not to convey any actual information. The Alabama farm where Kale—then just plain Myriam Seaforth—had been born and spent the early years of her life was “humble,” and her family’s poverty was “grinding.” She herself was “fresh-faced” and “comely.” Okay, she had a chickenpox scar over her left eye that some people thought was disfiguring, but she was still a statuesque redhead, very tall and very full-figured. Most accounts seemed to agree that she was 100 percent bombshell. She “left the family nest” at age fifteen, given in marriage (legal from fourteen in Alabama) to Tucker Kale, a well-to-do feed store owner from neighboring Ryland.

  The next seven years of her life were very sparsely documented, and Sumner got through them in a couple of pages. Tucker Kale died in a car crash when Myriam was twenty-two, and she headed north to try out a different kind of life in the big city, pausing only to say a last, fond farewell to her family.

  The big city in question was Chicago, which was almost seven hundred miles away—a long way to go even with money in your pocket and a place to stay at the other end. Myriam Kale didn’t have either of those things. She just packed a suitcase one day and jumped into the wild blue yonder, hitching all the way up Interstate 65 with no idea where she was going or what she’d do when she got there.

  Along the way, it was pretty well documented now, she met up with a man named Luke Poulson, whom Sumner described as a traveling salesman, and one of two things happened. Either, as Kale herself would later tell some of her Mob friends, Poulson tried to rape her and earned himself a short, eventful, and terminal encounter with a tire iron, or else Kale lured him to his death with an offer of sex, intending all along to kill and rob him as soon as they were out on the open road.

  Either way, she beat Poulson to death with thoroughness and enthusiasm, and she stole his car. But before she left, she heated up the cigarette lighter and used it to burn the dead man on his cheek as though she were a rancher branding a steer. Every man she killed would be burned in a similar way, usually—once she took up smoking—with the lit end of a Padre Gigli cheroot. In the last year or so before her death, she would come to be known in the Chicago underworld as the Hot Tomato. This was partly a tribute to her physical charms, but it was also a wry reference to the fact that if you picked her up, you were likely to get burned.

  Arriving in Chicago, she ditched Poulson’s car and hit the streets—literally. She worked as a hooker for a couple of years on the meat markets of South State Street, working briefly for a pimp named Lauder Capp before going solo (Capp was supposed to have sworn to cut her throat for her disloyalty). She met Jackie Cerone at the Red Feather Club and took him up to a room in a hotel probably not much different from the Paragon for a night of passion that turned into a new job opportunity.

  She knew who Cerone was. She’d seen his picture in the papers, and she made the connection. This man who was hiring her for the whole night was a big player in the Outfit, currently riding high after Sam Giancana had made his run for the border, leaving Battaglia (with Cerone as kingmaker) to pick up the pieces of the Chicago rackets.

  Kale’s relationship with Cerone was the turning point in her life, according to Sumner. She impressed him with her get-up-and-go and her entrepreneurial spirit, and after two more paying dates, he employed her in a different capacity—as the bait for a surviving Giancana lieutenant who was high up on his shit list.

  There was a photo of her from around this time, and I had the vague feeling I’d seen it before. A smeary black-and-white image taken in a crowded nightclub, it showed Kale dangling on Jackie Cerone’s arm, both of them mugging for the camera with bottles of champagne in their mitts. Kale’s mouth was open on a laugh that looked like it must have been loud and indelicate, but her eyes weren’t closed or crinkled with laugh lines; they were wide and staring. They looked to me like the eyes of a wild animal peering out at the world from behind the thickets of her own face, where she was either hiding or looking for prey. The only other figure in the picture, a blond man whose bodybuilder’s physique was encased in a double-breasted jacket that screamed “gangster,” was staring at her with a sort of covetous wonder.

  Before long, Sumner assured his readers, this real-life femme fatale was undertaking hits on her own. Jackie provided the gun and the training in how to use it. Over the next five years, Kale became something of a celebrity in Mob circles without ever coming to the attention of the police. She made at least nine hits (Sumner argued passionately for the higher and more headline-grabbing score of thirteen) and was paid sums of up to eighty thousand dollars a time. At one point, Phil Alderisio reputedly kept her on retainer.

  Meanwhile, the cigarette-burn motif had become a tabloid legend, and incorruptible police chief Art Bilek made a public commitment to bring in “the Mob killer who signs his work in this odious manner.” In 1968 he caught up with her in yet another hotel room, on the top floor of the Salisbury. The trappings this time were opulent rather than sleazy, and Kale was a guest of Tony Accardo, but neither the exclusive surroundings nor the distinguished patronage saved her when Bilek’s men surrounded the building and moved in to arrest her.

  She added another man to her score as the cops broke down the doors of the suite and burst in on her. She was stark naked, according to the papers—fresh out of the bath, manicured and smelling of Madame Rochas, she shot the first man to walk through the door, twenty-two-year-old constable Dermot Callister. Hit in the face, he died instantly. She herself was shot seven times within the next few seconds (the bullets were later removed, counted, inventoried, stolen, and sold for souvenirs), but she managed to wound three more officers before being taken alive. Her will to live must have been truly extraordinary, Sumner pointed out, because one of those bullets hit her liver, and another collapsed her left lung. It was a miracle she survived long enough to go to court; long enough to spend three years on death row; long enough to die, at last, at a time and place of the state’s choosing.

  That was the rough outline of the story, but Sumner embellished it with some fairly elaborate reconstructions of Kale’s sexual encounters with the made men of the Chicago Mob scene. I wondered what his sources were for some of the more circumstantial accounts. Maybe Kale kept a journal or something. “Dear Diary, you’ll never guess with which widely feared psychotic gang lord I had a knee-trembler in the lift at Nordstrom’s today—or what he likes to be tickled with.”

  I was only skimming, but even so, my attention was starting to wander long before I got to the end. It’s not that I’m prudish, or even morally fibrous, but pornography that’s written as a list of sexual positions and uses the word “turgid” as though it were punctuation gets old fairly quickly.

  I skipped to the end, which turned out to be an account of Myriam Kale’s last two hits—the ones she was supposed to have carried out from beyond the grave. In 1980 a guy who lived on George Street in Edinburgh was murdered in his own bathroom. Forensic evidence suggested that he’d been murdered immediately after sex, and his cheek and temple were scarred by postmortem cigarette burns.

  Ditto in 1993. Some middle-aged sales rep in Newcastle left
work on a Friday night, announcing his intention to “get laid, get wrecked, and get to bed early.” He was found the next day in the laundry room of a hotel on Callerton Lane, stuffed into one of the baskets. Again, his face had been burned, and again, there was evidence that he’d been engaging in coitus before meeting his violent death.

  Cause of death in both cases was blunt-instrument trauma, and the weapons were never recovered. Sumner offered no explanation as to why Kale should have chosen the British Isles as the site of her postmortem adventures. He just presented the facts, humbly and pruriently, for our consideration.

  For a change of pace, I dug out the bag of bits and pieces that Carla had retrieved from behind John’s desk drawer. I flipped through the pages of the A to Z again, this time with my own oversize hardcover London street guide beside me on the bed, and got slightly more out of it this time. The list of place-names—Abney Park, Eastcote Lane, St. Andrew’s Old, St. Andrew’s Gardens, Strayfield, and the rest—turned out to be a list of London cemeteries. A pretty exhaustive list, I was guessing, because it ran to more than a hundred sites. Most had either been struck through with a single line or had a large cross next to them. Whatever John had been looking for, he had exacting standards.

  At the bottom of the page, set off from the list by a couple of inches of glaringly empty space, was a single word: SMASHNA. It wasn’t crossed out, but John had circled it again and again in red ink. He’d then added three question marks in green. It was a powerful graphic statement; it just didn’t mean a damn thing to me.

  The other lists—the ones that consisted of people’s names—were even more opaque. I checked through initial letters, last letters, and a bunch of other assorted things to see whether some kind of acrostic message was hiding in there, but they were still only names. Some friends, some the opposite of friends, most strangers.