by Mike Carey
‘You don’t see . . . ?’
‘The end of the torture. The hammer coming down. The moment of death. Something moves across the room. Something very big. It’s been there all the time, but it’s been standing very still. I only see it when it moves.’
‘What sort of something?’ The words sounded banal, but I had to ask because I had no referent for what she was describing. An elephant that had been disguised as a standard lamp? A battleship making an awkward right turn out of the bathroom?
‘I don’t know,’ Juliet admitted reluctantly. ‘Not something solid – not something that’s physically there. A darkness. A darkness without a body of its own. I don’t know whether they brought it in with them or whether it was waiting for them. But it doesn’t seem to do anything to interrupt what’s happening. It hovers for a few minutes, almost filling the room. I can see through it, but it’s a little like seeing through thick fog. The two men are still there. They’re still on the bed, moving together, with Hunter on top. Then they separate, come together again.
‘It gets even darker. Even harder to see. When the shadow passes, Hunter is gone. Barnard is lying there –’ she pointed ‘– on the floor, now, not on the bed. There’s nothing left of his head but a bloody smear.’
‘And the hammer?’
‘There.’ She pointed again, to a place just under the window. A small cluster of old bloodstains marked the spot she was indicating, although it was some distance away from the bed in the opposite direction to the one in which Barnard had crawled in his last pathetic attempt to escape from this brutal, arbitrary death.
Silence fell between us. Juliet glanced from bed to window to door, measuring distances and angles with the abstract curiosity of a professional.
‘What happens to the hammer after that?’ I pursued. ‘Can you carry on watching it?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s the intensity of the emotions here that lets me see into the past. With Barnard dead and Hunter gone, that intensity fades very quickly. Fades to black, you could say.’
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 comes in at the kill, as it were, takes the hammer and uses it while Doug is . . . 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 suddenly, 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 backwards. ‘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 punchline. 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 marshalling yar karshinds 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 just 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 tantalisingly translucent fabric of her shirt. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, 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 only been living on Earth for 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 their neck probably has an entirely different meaning down there.
I lingered in the room for a few minutes more, searching it myself now 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, because he was putting some keys back in the pigeon-holes – including number seventeen, I noticed. I waited until he realised I was there and turned to face me.
‘Can I talk to Joseph Onugeta?’ I asked. ‘I just 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.
Merrill looked surprised: for a moment I thoug
ht 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 for a moment or two in silence. ‘A man came in by himself,’ he admitted at last. ‘I was in the back room there, and I saw him walk straight past the desk. I thought maybe he was a cab driver and he’d come to pick someone up. But then he walked out again about ten minutes later and he 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 for a moment. ‘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 anything very much back. He wasn’t kidding about his mind going blank: I could probably have got more circumstantial detail out of a six-year-old. Then again, everyone’s got their own way of dealing with stress, and Merrill looked like the kind of man who stressed easy.
I left him 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. On the other hand, 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.
Before I went 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 Foyle’s couldn’t help me at all: I turned a copy up at last in one of the second-hand bookshops further down the street, past Cambridge Circus. It was an American paperback and the badly glued pages had come loose from the cover, so I got it for the knock-down 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 eighth 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, opened up the disintegrating paperback 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 had spent the early years of her life was ‘humble’ and her family’s poverty was ‘grinding’. She herself, though, was ‘fresh-faced’ and ‘comely’. Okay, she had a chickenpox scar over her left eye which 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 a hundred-per-cent-proof bombshell. She ‘left the family nest’ at age fifteen, given in marriage (legal from fourteen in Alabama) to Tucker Kale, a well-to-do feedstore owner from neighbouring 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 of 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, who Sumner described as a travelling 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 tyre 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 stole his car. But before she left, she heated up the dashboard 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 them – with the lit end of a Padre Gigli cheroot. She would come to be known in the Chicago underworld, in the last year or so before her death, 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 Kale 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 is supposed to have sworn to cut her throat for her disloyalty). Then 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 which 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 pay 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 that 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 in 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.
The cigarette-burn motif, meanwhile, 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 the doors of the suite down 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, in the face, killing him 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 still managed to wound three more officers before being taken alive. And 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 Sumner told, but he embellished it along the way 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 was punctuation gets old fairly quickly.
I skipped to the last chapter, which turned out to be an account of Myriam Kale’s last two hits – the ones she was meant 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 post-mortem cigarette burns.