Dead Men's Boots (36 page)

Tiny townships alternated with vast, open farmland and the occasional patch of forest. There was a lot less traffic on the
roads here, so I was able to give the Cobalt her head. I was also able to positively identify the car that was following us.
I’d been nearly certain it was there when I was lane-hopping in Birmingham. Certainly someone way behind us had been zigging
when we zigged and zagging when we zagged. But the press of traffic and the need to keep my eyes on the road in an unfamiliar
car had meant that I never got a decent look at it. Now I could see that it was a big dark gray van with an ugly matte-black
bull bar, the driver and any passengers invisible behind tinted windows.

It kept pace with us as we drove south and east. It kept a long way back, but then it could afford to. There was no traffic
besides the two of us, and the turnoffs were five miles apart.

Brokenshire is a town of twenty-eight thousand, situated in a valley close to a railhead serving a now defunct copper mine.
Literally and figuratively, it’s the end of the line. Where Birmingham mixed affluence and entropy in roughly equal measure,
Brokenshire looked as though it had quietly sailed past its sell-by date without anyone caring enough to mark the occasion.
On the map, a small creek runs through it, but I saw no sign of it as we drove toward the town square past postwar houses
as small as egg boxes, many of them burnished with the variegated silver and red of half-rusted aluminum siding. I guessed
at some point in the town’s history, the creek got covered over. Probably just as well. If we’d had to drive across running
water, there would have been logistical problems for Juliet. In fact, in her current weakened state, she probably couldn’t
have done it.

We parked up in the town square, in front of a prim granite courthouse like something out of
Gone with the Wind,
and got out to look around. The scratched, dust-streaked car got some looks, and so did we. Juliet’s mojo was slowly starting
to come back, which meant that the unsubtle aura of sexual promise hung over her again like an invisible bridal gown. We ignored
the hungry stares and did a slow, ambling tour of the downtown area that took us all of half an hour.

Unsurprisingly, Myriam Kale had been turned into something of a local industry. The town’s bookshop had given its whole window
display over to books about great American gangsters, with a—presumably secondhand—copy of Paul Sumner’s out-of-print biography
as its centerpiece. It was the same edition as mine; maybe there was only ever the one. Beside it was a reproduced photo:
the photo of Kale and Jackie Cerone in the nightclub, which Sumner had included in his book. It brought home to me how small
a pool of facts and images about Kale was being recycled.

A sign in the bookshop window advertised maps of the Kale Walk, taking in the street on which her first married home still
stood, her grade school out in nearby Gantts Quarry, the old Seaforth farm where she’d grown up. There was also a museum of
local history, which turned out to be 90 percent Kale to 10 percent prizewinning pigs. No insights there, either; just the
familiar photos, the familiar truncated history.

“I think we’re ready for something harder, don’t you?” I said to Juliet.

“Do you mean hard information, Castor,” she asked mildly, scanning one of the photos with narrowed eyes, “or hard alcohol?”

“Neither.” I headed for the door. “It was sexual banter. But the nice man at the desk says the offices of the
Picayune
are on the next block. And since we’re expected…”

In fact, it was barely fifty yards to the modest two-story brownstone building that bore the
Picayune
’s masthead in German black letter type over the door. It looked like the kind of newspaper office that might have had a preteen
Mark Twain as a copyboy. The bare lobby smelled of dust and very faintly of fish. That turned out to be because they had an
office cat, lean and calico, and I flinched in spite of myself—recent memories sparking inside my head—as it uncurled itself
from a mat beside the open door that led through into the newsroom. It rubbed itself against my leg, refusing to take offense,
then looked up at Juliet and let out a long, yowling cry. Juliet mewed back, and the cat turned tail and fled.

“You talk to cats?” I asked her.

“Only when they talk to me,” she answered shortly.

She let me lead the way into the newsroom. It was a tiny space with only two desks but lots and lots of shelves and filing
cabinets. The shelves were full of box files, the desks were groaning with papers, and I was willing to bet the filing cabinets
were stuffed to bursting, too. The good news about the paperless office hadn’t penetrated as far as Brokenshire yet.

They had computers, though, and the only thing in the room that looked like a journalist was hammering away at one with a
lot of superfluous violence. He was a heavyset black guy in his shirtsleeves, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair. As he raised
his head to look at us, his face was as rucked up as a bulldog’s. “What can I do for you people?” he snapped, as if he didn’t
want to know but was working from a script he had to follow. He had much less of an accent than Hattie or the guy in the museum.
I wondered whether that was because he’d come here from someplace else and hadn’t quite blended in to the local idiolect,
or if it was a relic of a college education in another state.

“My name’s Castor,” I said, “and this is Juliet Salazar. I think Nicky Heath wrote to you and asked if it would be okay for
us to pay you a call.”

He frowned, trying to place the name. “Nicky Heath?” Then it came to him, and his face sort of unfolded, some of the seams
disappearing as his eyebrows went up and back. “Oh, wait. Dead man with a dot-co-dot-uk suffix?”

“Yeah, that’d be him.”

He got to his feet and thrust out a hand. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Gale Mallisham. Pleased to meet you. A lot of people
walk in here in the mistaken belief that their lives qualify as news. I find it’s a mistake to let such people get a head
start.”

I took the hand and shook it, and I got the usual instant telegraphic flash of information about his mood, which was calm
and only mildly curious. I got my fingers crushed, too, because he had a fierce grip.

He gestured us to sit down, realized there was only one chair on our side of the desk, and went off to steal one from the
other, empty desk. “The dead man said you were in a position to offer me a quid pro quo. He was deliberately vague about what
you were offering, though.”

“Well,” I said cautiously, “he probably told you that we’re chasing information about Myriam Kale. And yeah, we’ve got some
to trade.
Recent
information, if you take my drift. Something that might make a story.”

He wheeled the other chair back across to us, and Juliet took it with a smile and a nod. Gale Mallisham caught the smile full
in the face and didn’t stagger, so it was clear that Juliet wasn’t back to anything like full proof yet, but his eyes stayed
on her as he walked back around to his own side of the desk. Even without her lethally addictive pheromones, Juliet is beautiful
enough to make people walk into furniture and not feel the pain.

“Something that might make a story,” he repeated, swiveling his gaze back to me. “And would that be a Paul Sumner story, by
any chance?”

“Meaning?”

“Meet me halfway, Mr. Castor. I won’t be coy with you if you’re direct and honest with me.”

I sighed and nodded. “Yeah,” I admitted, “it’s that kind of story. Kale reaching out from beyond the grave to claim another
victim.”

Mallisham sat back, resting his hands on his stomach with the fingers intertwined and steepled. “We don’t cover stories of
that type,” he said. “Not as a rule, anyway. You’ve got an uphill struggle now, but I’m still listening.”

I told him in stripped-down form about the murder of Alastair Barnard, then about the events of the past few days, touching
not only on the testimony of Joseph Onugeta but also on John Gittings’s weird collection of gangster memorabilia and what
Nicky had sieved out of it. Mallisham listened in complete silence, except when he wanted a detail repeated or clarified.
About halfway through, he found a notebook and a pencil in the clutter on his desk. He looked at me for permission, waving
the pencil in the air, and I nodded, not breaking stride. After that, he scribbled notes while I talked.

When I’d finished, he set down the pencil and massaged his wrist. “Shorthand hurts more and more as I get older,” he grunted.
He looked at what he’d written, reading it over silently with his lips moving slightly as though he were reciting the words
to himself under his breath. “Quite a story,” he said when he’d finished. His tone was dry.

“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?”