‘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 alclass="underline" 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.