Dead Men's Boots (10 page)

“We’ve been married three years now, and he’s—despite the way he looks, despite the way he was brought up—he’s the gentlest
man I ever met. Really. He’s six feet three, he works as a brickie, and he used to box, but really, he is. If he gets angry,
he turns it on himself. He never even shouts. Doug could no more kill someone than you or I could.”

I let that straight line sail right on by. It’s true that I never pointed a gun at someone and pulled the trigger, or tenderized
anyone with a claw hammer, for that matter. But I’d done things that had led to people dying, and I’d done them with my eyes
open. It was enough to give me a twinge of unease as I listened to Jan Hunter protesting her husband’s innocence on the basis
that he was always nice to her.

“Did you know that he was bi?” I asked.

Jan shook her head violently. “No. No, I didn’t. But in the last few months, I knew I wasn’t satisfying him. We were scarcely
ever together. He didn’t want to touch me, although he was still— He still seemed to love me. There was just something he
couldn’t tell me. I’d wake up in the night sometimes, and I’d hear him crying in the dark. Sometimes I’d doze off and wake
up again, and it would be hours later. But I’d still hear the same sounds. He was just crying and crying, all through the
night. Something was eating away at him. Something he couldn’t share.

“I’d started to think he had to be seeing someone else. It was the only explanation that made any sense. He was working on
a big site over in East London—they’re building one of those new super-casinos—and he was coming home later and later. Overtime,
he said, but there’s never that much overtime to go around in the winter. You can’t mix cement in the dark.

“And then before the murder, he didn’t even come home for a week. I hadn’t seen him. He hadn’t called, or…” Her voice trailed
off. She stared at me, her expression bleak. “I was waiting for bad news. Just not this kind.”

Face-to-face with her grief and her pain, I opened my mouth to tell her that I didn’t think I could help her. That I couldn’t
think of anything that would get her husband off a rap as solid as this.

She saw my expression and forestalled me. “I’ve got evidence,” she said quickly. “You have to hear this, Mr. Castor. Don’t
say no until you’ve heard me out.”

“What evidence?” I asked with huge reluctance.

Jan picked up her gin and downed it straight before answering. She grimaced as the pungent liquor went down. “All right,”
she said, her tone hardening into something belligerent and stubborn. The students at the pool table looked around: It must
have sounded as though we were having a marital tiff. “Something happened to me. About two weeks after Doug was arrested.
I was sitting at home. To be honest, I was more or less drunk, even though it was only the middle of the afternoon. I was”—she
made a sudden sharp gesture—“falling apart. I really was, just—bits and pieces. I couldn’t keep a thought in my head. There
was so much that had to be done. Not just talking to the lawyers. Bills. Letters. Doug had done all that, and now he wasn’t
there. I wasn’t coping. I wasn’t even trying to. I was just sitting there feeling sorry for myself.”

That sounded reasonable enough to me, but Jan’s face twisted in self-disgust. “Sitting there and waiting for something to
happen. As though, you know, a light was going to shine down out of the sky and a voice was going to tell me what to do. Pathetic.

“And then the phone rang. It was an American voice. He told me his name, and I didn’t hear it. I thought he was a friend of
Doug’s or someone from the site. His foreman or something. But then he said he wanted to talk to me about Doug’s case.

“ ‘Your husband didn’t do it,’ he said. ‘He’s innocent. You may even be able to prove it.’

“Well, I was sitting up straight now, but I still thought he might be, you know, some sort of crank. Like that nutcase who
made the Ripper phone calls. One of these people who gets off on being close to a juicy murder, even if it’s at second- or
thirdhand. I asked him who he was, and he told me his name again. It was Paul Sumner. Paul Sumner Jr.”

I vaguely recognized the name, but I didn’t place it until Jan went on.

“He writes books. True crime. He wrote that history of the Mob that they made into a TV series. And a biography of John Wayne
Gacy. Stuff like that. I’d never read any of it, but I sort of knew who he was. And he said he’d read about Doug’s case on
the Net. He’s got all these news feeds on his desktop that link to weird crime stories from all around the world. Because
that’s how he makes his living. And he read about Doug’s case, and it made his radar go off. He said he was waiting for something
like this to happen, so he knew what it was as soon as he heard. Do you remember Myriam Seaforth Kale? She was a lady gangster
back in the sixties. Sort of like Bonnie Parker was in the thirties.”

I gave an eyebrow shrug. Of course I’d heard of her: She was one of these bad girls like Beulah Baird who go into folklore
because of their connection with violent men, or because they do some of the things that violent men do routinely. I was nearly
certain she’d turned up in a crappy movie that Roger Corman or someone had directed.
Daughters of Blood
?
Children of Blood
?
The Blood Family Robinson
? “Chicago Mob scene,” I said. “She was Jackie Cerone’s girlfriend or something, and then he used her on a job.”

Jan was nodding vigorously. “That’s right,” she said. “That’s absolutely right. She came from somewhere a long way down in
the South. Brokenshire, Alabama. But she was already a killer before she ever got to Chicago. The first man she killed had
stopped and picked her up on the road after she left home. The story is that he tried to rape her, and she killed him with
a wheel wrench.

“Then later on, when she worked for the Mob, she only killed men. That was one of her rules. And she seemed to like humiliating
them as well as killing them. She had a sort of ritual.”

Some of the story was coming back to me in all its lurid colors. Myriam Kale: the homespun farmgirl who hitchhiked up the
interstate to Illinois and got lost in the big city, only to surface again as one of the few women ever to become a Mafia
contract killer; the real-life femme fatale who inspired a hundred sanitized movie imitations, murdering nine men before the
FBI cornered her in Chicago’s Salisbury Hotel and brought her in alive so that they could try her, condemn her, and give her
the electric chair. Or maybe it was lethal injection, I’m hazy on the details.

I had the barest beginning of an inkling of where this was going now. “Kale died in the sixties,” I said. “Over forty years
ago. On the other side of the world.” It wasn’t an absolute objection, I knew; just a place marker—something we’d have to
come back to.

But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.

“I told you that Barnard had been tortured before he died,” Jan said, using the unmentionable word this time rather than talking
around it.

“Go on.”

“When the pathology report came back, it turned out that one of his injuries was later than all the rest. Postmortem. It was
a cigarette burn. On his face, just underneath his eye. That was her trademark, Mr. Castor. She did that to all the men she
murdered. The first man, the one who picked her up, she burned with the cigarette lighter out of his car. All the rest she
burned with a cigarette. It was the last thing she did, always after they were already dead. Like… signing off on the kill.”

I tried not to meet Jan’s overintense stare. “Anything like that,” I said guardedly, “any detail that becomes associated with
a particular murderer’s style—copycat killers are going to pick up on it and use it as a matter of course.”

Jan nodded again. She’d seen that objection coming, and it didn’t faze her. “This is the third time Kale has killed since
her death,” she said. “And all three times have been here, in England, not in the States. Paul Sumner has been tracking her—that’s
why he knew what this was as soon as he read about Doug’s case. The first time was in 1980, up in Edinburgh. The second was
in 1993, in Newcastle. And now this. All three of them middle-aged men picked up on the street and taken back somewhere for
sex. All three of them tortured, murdered,
then
burned. Do copycat killers rest up for over a decade between outings, Mr. Castor?”

“I’ve never known any,” I admitted. “Maybe they’re cyclical, like locusts.”

“And there’s something else,” Jan said with the look of someone who was turning over a hole card to reveal a big fat ace.
“The cleaner at the Paragon Hotel—Joseph Onugeta—said in his statement that he walked past room seventeen sometime around
five o’clock. That’s about an hour after Doug and Barnard went in there. And he heard voices—people arguing. Two men and a
woman, he said. Definitely three voices, because one of the men had a really cut-glass BBC voice—that would have been Barnard—and
the other had a thick accent that he couldn’t understand properly.”

“Doug was—?” I interjected.

“He was from Birmingham, and he never lost it. I couldn’t understand him myself when we started going out together. It used
to really embarrass me. And then the third voice, the woman’s voice, she had an accent, too. The cleaner said ‘like on the
TV or in a cinema.’ I think that means an American accent. It was Myriam Kale, Mr. Castor. It was Myriam Seaforth Kale, and
whatever else he may have done, my husband isn’t going to prison for a murder that was done by some bloody ghost.”

I assumed that when she said “whatever else,” Jan was talking about the cottaging and the sodomy. So she’d somehow rolled
with the blow of finding out that her husband was trawling the streets of London for anonymous sex with other men. I was torn
between being impressed by her faithfulness and wondering what inconceivable, spectacular shit storm Doug would have to put
her through before she decided that their ship was on the rocks.

I didn’t say any of that. I just asked whether she’d mentioned her theory to the police. She snorted contemptuously. “Oh yes.
Of course I did. The detective in charge—Coldwood—didn’t even listen to me. He’d made up his mind already, and it didn’t matter
what I said, he wasn’t going to—”

“Coldwood?” I interrupted, making sure I hadn’t misheard.

“Yes. Coldwood. He’s a sergeant.” She read it in my face. “Do you know him or something?”

“I worked with him a few times. I used to do consulting work for the Met when business was thin.”

That seemed to knock Jan back a little. “The police use exorcists?”

I nodded. “Sometimes exorcists can get a fix on how or where someone died. Sometimes we can confirm that someone who’s missing
isn’t dead at all. It’s standard practice now, although we can’t give evidence in court. Most judges hate us like poison,
just on general principle. Most cops, too, come to that. But I always got on okay with Gary Coldwood.”

That was a slight exaggeration. Our relationship had actually gotten fairly strained when I was accused of murdering a thirteen-year-old
girl whom in fact I got to meet only after she was already dead. My association with the Met was a dead letter now, and I
hadn’t seen Coldwood in four months or more; but we’d parted on good terms, more or less, and he’d stuck his neck out for
me at least once when it would have been easier to leave me swinging in the wind. As cops went, I’d found he had a more open
mind than most.

All of this was pushing me toward a decision. If Coldwood was involved, I could at least talk it over with him, get the bigger
picture, if there was one.

“If I agree to take this on,” I told Jan, “I’ll be asking for a grand in all and at least three hundred up front. Is that
going to be a problem?”

“No,” she said, reaching for her handbag again. “I was expecting that you’d want some kind of down payment. I only brought
two hundred and fifty, but—”

“Two hundred and fifty is fine,” I said. “And it’s refundable if I change my mind.”

She froze, hand inside the bag in the process of drawing out her purse. “If you—?”

“If I look into it and it turns out there’s nothing I can do. I’ll give you the money back.”

She looked at me hard. “And what about if you talk to your old friends in Scotland Yard and decide not to rock the boat?”
she demanded.

“Victoria Street,” I said.

She was false-footed. “What?”

“The Met moved to Victoria Street. Around about the same time that Myriam Kale was shooting G-men at the Salisbury. People
just use the old name out of nostalgia.” I lifted my glass for one last swig of beer, and changed my mind when I felt how
close it now was to room temperature. “I said I knew Coldwood. That doesn’t mean we’re picking out curtains.”

She gave a grudging nod, no doubt remembering Cheryl Telemaque’s personal recommendation. Probably better if she didn’t know
how Cheryl and I had behaved back when our paths crossed. It hadn’t been exactly my high point as far as professional ethics
were concerned.

We exchanged contact details and Jan counted out the money into my hand, most of it in ten-pound notes. As I tucked it away
in yet another pocket of my always accommodating greatcoat, she gave me a searching look. “You were going to say no,” she
said. “I could see it in your face. Why did you change your mind?”

I had to think about that one. “Two reasons,” I said at last. “Coldwood’s one. On a job like this, it helps if I can at least
get some of the facts straight, and I know he’ll level with me as far as he can. And then…” I paused, wondering how best to
phrase this.

“And then?”

“Well, then there’s the hammer. I’m presuming from what you said that Doug didn’t have it on him when he was arrested?” I
asked. She shook her head, eyes a little wide. “No. And I’m willing to bet that the boys in blue have been over every square
inch of Battle Bridge Road—in fact, the whole of King’s Cross—with a fine-toothed comb. If it was there, they’d have found
it.” I stood up to leave. “So it wasn’t with Doug, and it wasn’t out on the street. Which means that somebody else took it,
presumably out of the hotel room.”