Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  “It’s only half a story,” I said. “I’m looking for the other half.”

  “To stop this man Hunter from going to jail.”

  I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable at having to define my stake in this. “I think Doug Hunter’s going to jail whatever we do,” I said scrupulously. “Even if we turn up evidence that Myriam Kale was in that hotel room—in the spirit or in the flesh—there’s a better than even chance that the judge will kick it out of court. And it’s nearly certain that it was Hunter’s hand on the hammer, whoever was in the driving seat at the time.”

  “Then why is this worth crossing the Atlantic for?”

  “Because if there’s a connection between Myriam Kale and the East End gangsters my dead friend John was researching, then she’s the odd man out. And the odd man out is sometimes the best way to crack the puzzle.”

  Mallisham was staring at me thoughtfully. Perhaps he’d heard the slight hesitation in my voice when I described John Gittings as a friend. Perhaps he was wondering how much of this was made-to-measure bullshit to prize his lips and his files open. But when he spoke, it was only to summarize again.

  “You’ve got a lot of dead men—dead bad men—turning up alive again,” he said. “Or at least you got one or two, could be, and your friend was prodding a whole lot more with a stick to see if they moved. That right? But they’re all from your side of the water. Myriam would be the only woman and the only American.”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  “So it’s about your friend, and his… unfinished business.” He took off his glasses and stroked the red pinch marks on the bridge of his nose. “Would I be right in saying that finishing the business would make it more likely he’d lie down and stay down instead of distressing his nearest and dearest?”

  “Yes,” I said again. I thought about Carla and realized that I hadn’t called her before I left. I didn’t even know whether John’s violently unhappy spirit had resurfaced since the cremation. I had to admit to myself that there were other factors operating here besides altruism. One of them was that when someone tries to kill me to keep me from finishing a job, it touches a stubborn streak in me that goes fairly deep.

  “Okay.” Mallisham put his glasses on again, squinting and grimacing them into position. “I’m going to buy that. One out of two of you’s got an honest face, and these days that counts as better than average.”

  “One out of two of us?” Juliet queried blandly.

  Mallisham gave her a hard look. “You’re a long way away from being what you look to be, missy,” he said to her. “I’m not sure whether you’re dead or just something that never got born in the first place, but that body that looks so good on you—it isn’t really you, is it?”

  There was a long silence. I didn’t rush in to fill it. This was Juliet’s question, and I figured she’d field it by herself.

  “No,” she murmured at last, looking down demurely into her lap. “It’s not me. It’s not even a body.”

  “Just something you ran up for the occasion, eh?” Mallisham’s eyebrows flashed. “In a way, that makes me feel a little better. You’re, what, her kore aperigrapta? Succubus, maybe?”

  Juliet’s gaze jerked back up to meet his. She blinked. “You want to guess my lineage?” she invited with an edge to her tone. I hadn’t understood the ancient Greek, but it was clear that something Mallisham had said had hit home.

  He laughed and shook his head. “No, no. I’m not of a mind to play twenty questions with you. I used to do a little exorcism on the side in my early days, is all. That’s how I knew what you were. I gave it up a long time ago, on account of how journalism was what I really wanted to do. My daddy said God had put a sword in my hand for the smiting of the ungodly, but there’re lots of different ways of doing that.” He shook his head again, a bit ruefully this time. “Well, well. Succubus. But not hunting.”

  “No. Not hunting.”

  “Passing for human.”

  Juliet shrugged.

  “You’re the second I’ve met who’s taken that course.” He stared at Juliet with intense, unashamed curiosity. “I wonder—I hope this doesn’t give offense—I wonder if I’d have had a chance against you in a straight draw.”

  “You’re not seeing me at my best,” Juliet said with a cold smile.

  Mallisham smiled disarmingly back. “That’s hard to believe. Anyway, Myriam Kale. What was it you wanted to know, exactly?”

  I took over again. “Any gaps in the official story,” I said. “I mean, if you know of any link she had to England—any factor that might help to explain her turning up in London, alive or dead—then that would be gravy. But really we just want to get more of a handle on her as a person rather than a legend.”

  “That’s a laudable goal,” Mallisham mused. “Not all that easy, though, after forty years of disinformation. You’ve presumably read Sumner’s…well, some call it a book.”

  “Inside Myriam Kale? Yes,” I said, “I’ve read it.”

  “Then your best move would be to forget it,” Mallisham rumbled, making a sour face. “I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but that man made a career out of telling the kind of lies that would have turned Pinocchio’s nose into a goddamn national monument. To listen to him, you’d think Myriam Kale was two parts nymphomaniac to one part Mob assassin.”

  “And that’s not an accurate summary?” I hazarded.

  The bald man snorted in a mixture of amusement and indignation. “No, sir,” he said curtly, “it is not. It takes no account of what made her the way she was, and it ignores the way she killed—the reason why she killed. Paul Sumner blithely assumes that most of the murders attributed to Myriam Kale were bought and paid for purely because the men concerned were known or thought to be Mobsters. But after she was picked up by Jackie Cerone, most of the men she met were Mobsters. It’s a skewed sample.”

  “If not money,” Juliet asked, “then what?”

  Mallisham stroked the bridge of his nose again, this time leaving his glasses in situ. “Well,” he said, studying the clutter on his desk, “I’m not claiming to be an expert. It’s just that if you look at how the story starts, you come to different conclusions. Or maybe you hold off from conclusions. Are you going to take notes, Mr. Castor?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not.”

  “Or a recording?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I’d like it best if all of this stayed off the record. Use the information, by all means, but don’t use my words. And if by any chance you’ve lied to me and you belong to my own and Mr. Sumner’s journalistic profession, I’ll deny any words you put in my mouth and collaterally sue your ass into a sling.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Okay.” He settled down in his chair as if hunkering down for what he knew would be a long haul. “First off, you ought to know that Myriam Seaforth—as she was then—was almost certainly abused by her father and one or more of her brothers. I can’t prove it, but it’s the damn truth all the same. It happened to her sister, Ruth, and it happened to her. ’Course, all the Seaforth men are dead now, so there’s nobody left to give me the lie, but people around here take reputation pretty seriously. None of this is ever going to make the front page of the Picayune. Or the Sunday supplement, for that matter.”

  “How can you be so sure she was abused?” Juliet threw in. There was a stillness about her, an intensity of attention that was almost intimidating. She had this thing about battered women, a kind of razor-edged sentimentality.

  “How can I be sure?” Mallisham echoed her. “Well, let’s say I know people at the county hospital over in Sprott, and I know people in the sherriff’s office. Myriam was brought in for stitches once, in a place where she didn’t ought to have got torn, and Ruth said something at school another time about something a twelve-year-old girl doesn’t have any right to know. A lot of people got a piece of information and never tried to find out more. I’m a newsman, first and foremost. I collect those pieces, looking for stories. But so
me stories I know better than to tell.”

  “You mean,” Juliet said with dangerous calm, “that you knew these girls were being hurt and you did nothing to stop it.”

  “No,” Mallisham said, neither angry nor defensive. “I knew later on—after they were all grown up—that someone had hurt them back when they were small. Don’t be so quick to judge, missy. I wouldn’t have sat by if blowing the whistle would have done any good. But like I said, the Seaforth line’s dead now. Lucas Seaforth died thirty years back, and the brothers all perished in various accidents and drunken brawls, so Myriam’s generation is the last there ever was.”

  “Ruth never married?” I asked.

  Mallisham pursed his lips. “Nope,” he said. “She still lives out there on the farm. The only Seaforth left. And she’s seventy years old, so she’s left it a little late to think about starting a family. But when you look at the kind of marriage Myriam made, you can understand her feeling a mite chary about getting spliced herself.

  “Tucker Kale was a drunk, and a nasty drunk. There’s some people who say he bought Myriam off of Lucas Seaforth, cash down. I doubt it was that simple, but Lucas was a farmer, and Kale ran the feed store, so I’d guess there was more of commerce than of love about the whole thing. I knew the man pretty well—my house is only a half a mile from where the feed store used to be—and speaking personally, I wouldn’t have given him a kitten if my cat dropped a litter of ten. It’s certain that he beat Myriam, and he liked to show her up in front of people, too. He was the kind of polymorphous sadist who can take his recreation intellectually as well as physically.

  “So he was another brick in the wall, so to speak. But Myriam was damaged when he got her. Her own family had already given her more hurt than anyone should ever have to take.”

  He spoke with a weary finality that made me ashamed my own interest in Myriam Kale was so tangential. “How long were they married?” I asked, conscious of Juliet’s scary stillness on my left.

  “Seven years, give or take.”

  “And then he was killed in a car crash.”

  Mallisham shrugged. “If you like.”

  “If I like?”

  “Well, I told you good name was kind of an issue around here.” He got up, pushed his chair back, and went across to one of the bookcases, where he started scanning the box files with his face thrust right up close to them. He held his glasses up out of the way of his eyes as he squinted at the writing on their spines. “That’s what they said at the time. And sure enough, the man was found dead in his car, which was kind of a wreck. But it was kind of a wreck when he bought it, and when he drove around town in it. At the time I didn’t ask any questions because there didn’t seem any reason to doubt that things happened that way. But a long time later, after Myriam became such a celebrity and all, I took a look at that autopsy report myself. Got it here somewhere, I’m pretty sure.”

  He tapped one of the boxes, then another, as if touching them helped him to remember what was in them. But it was a completely different box he hauled out from the next shelf down. He brought it over to the desk and opened it up. “Now, if old Tucker got drunk and drove himself into a ditch, which is what the police said he did, then some of those injuries he took to the head require a little explaining. Looks to me like he must have backed up and taken a good few runs at that ditch until he got it right, because his head sure was dented in a lot of different places.” He held up a very old foolscap sheet, on the kind of glossy paper the earliest photocopiers used. “Yeah, here it is. You can look at it if you want, but I’d rather you didn’t take a copy. This one is traceable to me, and like I said, I’m not going on the record with any of this.”

  “Just summarize for us,” Juliet suggested.

  Mallisham nodded. “There were also the injuries to his rectum. They didn’t even get a mention when the county coroner sat and gave his verdict, but they’re all down here in black and white. Tucker Kale was anally raped after he died.”

  “Raped?” I echoed. Images of Alastair Barnard, whose dead body I’d fortunately never had to see, inconsiderately flashed before my eyes anyway, as if they had a right to be there.

  “Artificially raped,” Mallisham amended. “I wouldn’t normally be talking about this in front of a lady, but you’re… what you are, so I guess it’s nothing new to you. I guess nothing that one body can do to another body is news to you.

  “Something had been put inside him. With a lot of force. And it was something made of wood, because there was a wood splinter that they found. Handle of a hammer? Fence post? I don’t know, but I’d lay odds that whatever Myriam used to kill him, she put to this other use afterward.

  “But what clinches it for me is the burn mark on Tucker’s forehead.”

  “Myriam’s signature,” I muttered, but Mallisham waved that away.

  “I don’t mean that,” he said. “Yes, it’s part of what became her modus operandi, but I think this was the first time she’d ever killed a man. And she didn’t do it in cold blood. It wasn’t planned or practiced, I’m willing to lay long odds. It wasn’t something she had any kind of a choice about; it was something that came up from inside her and had to let itself out. ‘It was the reasoned crisis of her soul,’ as some poet on your side of the water put it.

  “So I wasn’t thinking of it as evidence that Myriam was the one who killed old Tucker Kale. I’ve known that ever since I covered this story back in the sixties—for this newspaper, where I’d started as a cub reporter seven weeks previously. But it took me a while of being out in the world and watching people at their worst to see what it was that Myriam was doing.”

  He shrugged massively. “Maybe this is fanciful,” he said. “But I think she was making a point to herself. For her own satisfaction. She’d been sexually abused by a lot of men. I think she enjoyed being on the other side of that particular transaction. The anal rape is part of that. And the burning is part of it, too. She burned him with a cigarette. She smoked a cigarette and stubbed it out on his forehead. Does that suggest anything to you?”

  I would have got it, but Juliet, to whom the rituals of sex were second nature, got it first. “The cigarette afterward,” she said, and Mallisham nodded, holding out his hands as if surrendering the entirety of his argument into her hands.

  “The cigarette afterward. Yes. It was all symbolic, in my opinion. And what it was symbolic of was sex. Bad sex. The kind where you don’t respect the other person, you just use them for what you want and then get up and walk away.”

  There was a silence as we mulled this over. Mallisham eventually broke it.

  “It seems pretty clear to me,” he observed in a brisker tone, slotting the sheet of paper back into the box and closing up the lid again, “that Luke Poulson—the man Myriam met and murdered on the interstate—was her second victim, not her first. The pattern was already established when she killed her husband. And she followed it in every kill she made thereafter.”

  “Jesus,” I said involuntarily, and then “Sorry, Juliet.” She hates it when people use that kind of language.

  “Jesus is not part of this equation, Mr. Castor.”

  “No, I suppose not. But you’re saying that Myriam Kale was driven to kill because of her background and her childhood experiences. That after she went to Chicago, she became a serial killer—like Aileen Wuornos—rather than a Mob enforcer? Or is the whole Chicago thing just part of the legend, too?”

  “No, that part is true,” Mallisham confirmed. “She did go to Chicago, and she did work as a prostitute for a couple of years. I think she killed one or two of her customers, but they’re not part of the official tally, and there’s no way of knowing now. I’m just going on Chicago coroners’ court records documenting corpses with postmortem burns.

  “But I believe Aileen Wuornos is a valid comparison. Myriam Kale wasn’t a Mobster. She was a psychotic who killed because she had to. Because her mind was so damaged from the hurt that had been heaped on her, hurting was all she knew. Ther
e isn’t a shred of evidence that Cerone ever paid her to carry out a hit. In my humble opinion, she killed hoodlums because she mixed with hoodlums. And in one or two cases, she killed people Sumner assumed were hoodlums because Kale killed them. Kind of a circular argument, but there you go. The plain fact is, she killed most of the men she slept with. Only the women she took to bed got away clean.”

  “She was bisexual?” Juliet asked.

  Mallisham looked almost comically shocked. “Good Lord, no. She was a lesbian. Even when she was married to Tucker Kale, I think, although she may not have done anything about it until after she killed him and went north. Men forced themselves on her sometimes, and she used men sometimes to get what she wanted. Sex with men was never a pleasure for her, unless she enjoyed raping them with household tools. When she chose her own partners, she chose women.

  “Now, unless there’s anything else you specifically want to ask me, I need to get back to work. I’ve got a couple of articles to type up and some ad space to sell. These days, as you may have gathered, I pretty much am the Brokenshire Picayune. What I don’t buy off the wire, I write myself, and it’s a long day.”

  I stood, and Juliet followed my lead. I held out my hand, and Mallisham took it again, gave it another of those wrist-crushing shakes. His mood was a lot less placid than before. Going over this old ground again seemed to have unsettled his mood.

  I thanked him for making the time for us, but he waved the words away brusquely. Juliet offered him a hand, too. After a moment’s hesitation, he shook his head.

  “I’d rather not,” he said. “No offense. Just natural caution.”

  I tensed momentarily, wondering how Juliet would take that, but she seemed, if anything, impressed with Mallisham’s solid common sense. She nodded. “I understand,” she purred. “If I were in your situation, I wouldn’t want one of Baphomet’s sisters to have my sweat on her hands, either.”

  Mallisham gave a double take, then nodded with a slightly rueful expression, acknowledging the insider information.